#an exploding shell station

[short-honey-badger]

This isn't over 3

Pairings! Shanks x Female Reader , Figarland Shamrock x Female Reader

Part 1 -> HERE Part 2 -> HERE

Masterlist for Shamrock and Shanks-> HERE

The days with Shanks pass in peace. You have all the freedom in the world on his ship, and his crew welcomes you with open arms and strong drinks. You get blistering drunk for the first time in your life with them, singing raunchy sea shanties at the top of your lungs and dancing with Bonk Punch and Limejuice. Shanks watched on with a lovestruck look, his burgundy eyes soft and full of affection. It's been weeks since he had stolen you away from his twin, and he still couldn't bring himself to regret it.

Was there a tiny kernel of guilt deep in his chest for stealing you away? There absolutely was, but Shanks knew that you weren't meant to be holed up in the big house, surrounded by people who only meant to use you for your name and your station. He had saved you from that, and now you were as free as the albatross that led them to land.

But he also knew his brother and knew that Shamrock had cared for you in his own, weird, roundabout way. His twin had come to him more than once, confused and annoyed about these feelings he had for you, and Shanks had helped where he could, telling his big brother that the best way to your heart was to be kind and let her know that he was interested. Shanks hadn't meant for his brother to go and speak to their gods-forsaken father about it.

There was only one person that Shamrock listened to, and that was Saint Figarland Garling, and that man had taken his eldest son’s chance with you and ground it into the floor with his boot. So, after seeing the tentative relationship you shared with Shamrock literally blow up after his brother continued to berate and scold you, Shanks had had enough.

At first, he only meant to step in to be someone you could talk to that you could rely on when his twin became too overbearing. But then he realized just how sweet and funny you could be when you weren't ducking your head trying to be the perfect betrothed for Shamrock. Eventually, you had stolen his heart, and Shanks knew that he couldn't leave you in Mariejois to become a shell of who you are.

With a quiet sigh, Shanks shifts on the bed, rolling so that he can face you, his lips pulling into a small smile at the sight of you curled up beside him. You are beautiful even in your sleep, your brow smoothed out, and your face relaxed in rest. He leans over you, lips brushing against your brow, and you shift at the touch, a soft sound of protest leaving you. He grins when you crack your eyes open.

“Mornin’ sweetheart,” He rumbles, voice rough from just waking up. You smile, eyes bleary and reach for him, arms coming up to curl around his neck and pull him down for a sweet kiss. He happily meets your lips, eyes sliding closed as he falls into you, his weight a delightful pressure that pushes you into the mattress.

He shifts, pulling his knees up so that he can balance on them, one leg sliding over your hips to bracket you between his thighs. His hand wonders, nails dragging along your exposed waist and sneaking up and under the baggy shirt you wear. You sigh into the kiss when he cups your breast, his thumb flicking across your nipple before Shanks gently pinches the bud between thumb and forefinger, rolling it between his fingertips and making you whine against his mouth.

Only for the moment to be broken by the sound of cannon fire.

The Red Force jerks as it is struck in the bow, wood exploding and splinters raining down around the crew outside. Shanks jerks up and away from you, eyes going wide as he falls to the side and out of the bed, jerking his pants on as quickly as he can and foregoing any other clothes as he books it out the door of his cabin.

Terror grips your heart when another volley strikes the ship, sending it careening dangerously to the side. You follow your lover's lead, ripping the sheets off of you and dressing as quickly as you can before running after him. Once outside, your heart gets stuck in your throat when you see just who had attacked the ship.

There, a couple of hundred feet away, is a ship that could only have come from Mariejois. A massive galleon, at least three rows of cannons on each side, and forward chain shots mounted on the front. If you squint hard enough, you can see a figure standing at the front of the bow, just behind the figurehead, with long red hair whipping in the harsh winds.

“Brace for impact!” Benn snarls and then you are grabbed around the waist and pulled against the first mate's side when the last volley sings its way toward the Red Force, smashing into the port side and blowing chunks of wood into the ocean.

Your heart pounds in fear and guilt, knowing that Shanks and his crew were being attacked because of you. Shamrock had sworn to find you, and it seems like he had made good on his promise to do so. You rip yourself from Benn and sprint towards where you can see Shanks at the helm, a look of annoyance etched deep in his face.

“You should be down below, sweetheart. It's not safe up here for you,” Shanks snaps the moment he sees you. He had hoped that you would have stayed inside his cabin. Shanks grits his teeth, his haki lashing in rage. He can't believe his brother would fire upon them like this.

“Man, the cannons! Get us turned around, Snake!” He orders, and his crew jumps to action, men climbing the rigging and stuffing cannonballs into cannons. You cling to the railing when half the sails snap shut, the Red Force turning on a dime to present the starboard side towards the ship from Mariejois. Your teeth rattle in your skull when cannons fly from the ship, sailing through the hair and striking the other vessel with dangerous precision.

The ships begin to circle one another, cannons and chain shots flying slamming into each other. However, the longer the battle rages, the more damage the Red Force begins to take. The galleon that Shamrock captains are much larger than the fast frigate that his twin has, and for every volley of cannon fire the Red Force throws their way, Shamrock sends three times as many right back.

“Shanks, Shanks, you know why he is here,” you yell over the sounds of battle. You stumble your way over to him, feet aching from stepping on splinters and broken wood. You grab him by the arm to steady yourself and get his attention.

Shanks pulls away just so that he can curl his arm around your waist and hold you closer. He knows exactly why his twin is here, but like hell would he be giving you up without a fight.

“I know it, baby. Don't you worry though. He isn't taking you anywhere,” Shanks swears, but jerks in shock when you push at his chest, your voice a desperate plea.

“Shanks, your ship is seconds away from sinking! I know that you and your crew are strong, but so is your brother. I don't want any of you to get hurt!”

He rounds on you, his eyes wide and manic, hand grabbing you by the shoulder, “What are you saying then? I should just let him have you?”

You grasp his wrist, chest aching with fear and grief for a love you'd only just gotten to know. Tears well up, and as much as you don't want to do this, it was the best way to keep Shanks and his crew safe.

“Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying,” you cry. You want to throw yourself at him, want Shanks to hold you close, and tell you that you didn't have to do this, but you can't.

“Please, Shanks.”

The redhead stares down at this brave, brave woman who has stolen his heart and swears loudly. He knows that you are right. His ship has taken on more water than it has in decades, making it list to the side and shake ominously with every strike it takes. Shanks steps forward, hand curling into your hair and pulling you in for a passionate kiss, one that you would remember for the rest of your life.

“I promise, love. I promise that I will save you,” Shanks swears against your lips, and you whine and kiss him back, wanting with everything in your being for his promise to be true, “Nothing will ever keep me from you.”

When he pulls away, you take him by the cheeks, meeting his eyes with your own teary ones, “I love you.”

With that, you tear yourself away, fearing that if you hear him say it back, you will end up staying right by his side. You run to one of the rowboats and throw yourself into one, cutting the rope with a jagged piece of metal that slices into your palms when you grasp it. You brace yourself as you fall, the boat hitting the water hard enough that you have to catch yourself anyway.

You can hear Shanks shouting your name, but your ears are ringing too much and stuffed with terror that you can't make out anything he says. With shaky arms, you begin to row toward Shamrock, the air growing still and silent within seconds. Curious, you look up to see that the Red Force is waving the white flag and has turned around, the wind catching the mainsail and hurting the frigate further and further away from you.

You stop rowing, knowing that Shamrock would be here soon enough to scoop you out of the ocean. It is too soon that the galleon reaches you, the massive ship sliding up to your rowboat. You refuse to move from where you sit, and seconds later, a pair of tall, black boots land in front of you.

Shamrock's chest feels thick in heady victory. It had taken a bit, but he had finally caught up with his brother. He crouches down, gloved hands snapping out to cup your cheeks and pull your face up to look at him. He takes in your expression, your eyes full of terror that make arousal burn hot in his stomach. Adrenaline running high, he bends and presses his lips to yours, drinking in the gasp you make and taking his chance to push his tongue past your lips.

The kiss is harsh and sloppy, a far cry from the one that you had shared with Shanks, but you don't fight against it. You have accepted what you've done, and it is time to face the consequences of your actions.

To your surprise, the kiss changes, his lips turning into a gentle caress and his tongue curious instead of demanding. Still, you do not kiss back, but it doesn't seem to matter to Shamrock. He sighs as he pulls away, his brow resting against your own as he opens his eyes to meet your own glassy ones.

“I have been waiting weeks to do that,” Shamrock murmurs, and his hold on you turns possessive, fingers curling around your jaw as he holds you closer, pressing his face against your own, his nose sliding across yours, “And now you are here, and I can have you whenever I desire.”

@mfreedomstuff @sanjisleggy @nocturnalrorobin @mit-suri @forever-a-night-owl @sordidmusings

[sounds-in-the-fog]

Can you imagine the sheer amount of software issues mechs would have?

Wanna use that cool old weapon from the big war? Sorry, we don't do backwards compatibility in the space age.

Oh, I'm afraid this targeting system doesn't have a version for the OS your frame is running.

Without proper drivers those legs act like hands. And the space station hosting the website with drivers got blown up years ago.

Subscription based navigation systems.

Some poor mechanic trying to watch a video on space YouTube while shells are exploding in the background, just to find out which out of the thousand data ports he need to add to the firewall exceptions for the control systems to work (adding the wrong port bricks the frame).

"Your password is incorrect. The mecha will be locked for 20 minutes to protect your personal data"

[milykins]

Hello my dear! ✨️

I was curious if you might be able to write a little something fun/fluffy with Mikey for this prompt:

"Sorry, you're just my type."

I'd love to see what you could come up with for this. Thank you!

🫂💖

Finally ready to post! I hope this doesn't disappoint. I had fun putting my own nerdy spin on this ask and putting it in my AU where they already live among humans just worked really well for this prompt. Thank you for it!

TW: None, set in an AU where they live in the city and have jobs/own businesses. Aged up, adult turtles

Special thanks to @sophiacloud28 for beta reading!

Just My Type

Mikey was kind of a big deal. He was the first of his brothers to go ‘public’ once they had made the decision to reveal themselves. Predictably, Leo had advised him to go about it carefully. Raph followed suit, and Donnie especially. Both were planning to take careful baby steps and advised Mikey to do the same.

Funny that they expected him to listen, did they even know him? Unsurprisingly, he went hard, very much putting himself out there. To him, the choice was easy. If they were to live among the humans, he needed to show them that they meant no harm. The incident at the police station was a painful reminder of how bad things could go and he was willing to do whatever it took to prevent that. Mikey was steadfastly dedicated to shifting humanity’s perspective from ‘monsters’ to ‘heroes’.

To his delight, the expressed reception was largely positive. He was very pleased that his efforts had paid off. Perhaps a little too well. Mikey ended up with a huge fanbase in a matter of months. His popularity exploded across social media and he even appeared on a few talk shows.

Opening his comic book store was huge. People camped outside with lineups around the block for the grand opening. The rush of customers and fans was so intense that Mikey actually had to call his brothers in for assistance. Raph had been more than happy to act as a bouncer for his little brother.

He was quickly becoming very familiar with the term ‘be careful what you wish for’. Our hero in orange was there. The constant fans demanding pictures, autographs, even trying to steal his mask… (he’d lost four so far) had been grating on him a little. He’d been wondering if his brothers were right in telling him he should’ve approached humanity more carefully. Leo certainly had no problem pointing it out. ‘You asked for this, Mikey. What did you expect?’

He couldn’t say. He’d just wanted what they all wanted. Acceptance. Now, it looked like he’d bitten of more than he could chew.

Then you came along.

He’d been watching the day you nervously approached the door. Carefully, you placed your hand on the door handle before abruptly drawing it back like it had been burned. Turning on your heel you left fast, caught up in your own mortification. Stifling a soft chuckle, Mikey went back to his work.

You proceeded to do this twice more over the coming days much to his growing amusement. He couldn’t help but be intrigued and was patiently waiting for the day you summoned enough courage to actually enter the store.

Obviously, you were a huge fan. He was flattered of course but he could tell something was different about you. Typically, his fans had no fear in approaching him and most had even less shame in throwing themselves at him. He found your hesitancy and careful approach to be endearing and a refreshing change.

His heart soared the day you finally summoned your courage and asked to be a part of his weekly one-shot D&D afternoon gaming sessions. Of course it was a resounding yes from him. He was perhaps a bit too enthusiastic as he was more than happy to include you.

It was a wonderful thing to see you blossom during the session. To see your confidence grow as you slowly came out of your own proverbial shell. You’d played before, he could tell. The adorable accent you put on as you fell into the role of playing your character nearly dropped him on the back of his shell. It was so cute. He delighted in the fact that you did not need much help in calculating your rolls either. He was really trying to tamp it down but he was already smitten. Soft, sweet, pretty and shy, but hiding this confident player underneath. You were just his type.

As the session came to a close, he felt a surge of pride upon being thanked by you. A wholly grateful smile on your face. Humbly accepting the praise, he secretly hoped this wasn’t the last he’d see of you. To his relief you shyly approached him after the game, not to ask for a picture or an autograph but to ask if he knew of any D&D groups accepting new members. Hope bloomed within him as he explained that actually there was one. His heart fluttered in his chest as he watched the excitement in your eyes grow. It was a done deal. You were invited to join his very exclusive, only reserved for family and close friends… D&D group.

Those sessions were the most enjoyable he’d ever had the pleasure of dming. Seeing you attend his games became the highlight of his week. You and he soon struck up a solid friendship and for once in his life, Mikey was trying his hardest not to come on too strong. He didn’t want to screw this up by any means. He wanted you to call the shots and was secretly hoping that you liked him as much as he liked you.

Oh, he was in deep. He began noticing the subtle nuances in your behaviour, little things unique only to you. How your cheeks flushed pink when something embarrassing happened or when he’d teased you in-game. Your expression of pure satisfaction and excitement as you rolled a perfect nat20 and your contradictory one of utter disappointment and dramatic woe when you rolled a nat1. He found himself craving these moments, just to see how you’ll react. Truthfully, he’d fudged at least one roll just so you’d have a success instead of a failure. He needed to see the look of pure joy on your face. He wanted to be the cause of that joy.

One day, he couldn’t help it. He had to ask you out. Saying he was nervous was an understatement. You’d think having such a huge fanbase would’ve prepared him for this but alas no. He was still a shy, stuttering mess when he’d quietly suggested dinner and a walk after.

At your soft, surprised yes, he nearly cheered with an overly enthusiastic fist pump. Instead, he tugged you in for a tentative hug and quietly told you how happy that would make him. He had to really hold back from kissing you as your faces grew close. Shyly, you pulled away first to tell him you’ll see him there. He watched you turn with a small wave and a tiny excited smile. You were so adorable it hurt.

The date itself seemed to be a success. He wanted you to be wined and dined, wanted you to feel special, like a princess. He tried to be an absolute gentleman while putting his best romantic foot forward. To his delight, you seemed to be having a wonderful time. If your wide smiles and soft bouts of laughter were any indication. By the time he was carefully holding your hand while walking with you through Central Park he’d thought he'd made it. Reading your body language and how you had glanced up to his face a few times while your cheeks flushed so prettily. He took the cue and leaned in for that once-in-a-lifetime first kiss. It was going to be perfect.

It was… until you pulled away at the last second. Mikey felt as though his heart had dropped into his stomach. Concern laced his features as he searched your face to find out where he’d gone wrong. Then you started talking, your voice stuttering and unsure.

“I’m sorry… I just… I didn’t think you really liked me like that…”

His heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vice. “You… you don’t feel the same way… do you?” There was no hiding his disappointment this time. He watched your eyes widen as you struggled to pick your next words carefully.

Your tone changes then as you shake your head and then nod, stammering a bit. “Wait, wait, wait! No, I do! I do like you, Mikey… I just didn’t think you’d go for me, I’m nothing special… not like those fangirls of yours. Aren’t they more your type?”

This was the answer he’d least been expecting to hear. He’d been sure you were going to let him down easy… that your heart belonged to another… more human guy. Not a mutated turtle guy.

“Not my… you think that they…” His mind was absolutely blown. This gorgeous, sweet woman thought that she wasn’t good enough for him? That was it, he was in love.

“Sweetheart… sorry to disappoint you, you’re just my type. Exactly my type. You’re the only woman I want to be with. The one that knows the real me.” He gave you a truthful and tender smile as he carefully tucked an errant curl behind your ear.

This time, when he moved in for that kiss, there was no hesitation on your part. He wanted you to feel the joy and tenderness he poured into it, right down to your toes.

A tightening of your grip and a deepening of the kiss was all he needed to know that you did feel it. He’d found what most people had been searching for their entire lives. A deep connection you both shared in the depths of your souls. To heck with ‘types’ he just wanted you.

Until the next ask!

Taglist:

@danceingfae @thelaundrybitch @iridescentflamingo @redsrooftopprincess @ninnosaurus

@the-cauldron-witch @thepinkpanther83 @avery73 @adebauchedsloth @sophiacloud28

@definitely-canon @scholastic-dragon @truffle-reblogs @fyreball66 @yorshie

Please ask if you'd like to be added!

[vexwerewolf]

In Golden Flame v1.03

Major Changes

 BEAT 22: The Hall of Mirrors now has two extra pages added in which it is possible to hold a conversation with CAUSTIC.

Added section in Running the Campaign: The Team (p. 61) regarding team backstories, including six new alternate backstories.

In keeping with major lore changes made to Act 2 (work still in progress), all references to the diasporan Kingdom Aniline have been retroactively removed. House Aniline is now a minor house of the House of Smoke.

Mechanical

COMBAT: A Face to a Name - the coolant pipe junctions are now in a line, and rupture in sequence. They can now also be intentionally triggered by characters shooting them.

COMBAT: Shoo the Vultures - removed Sentinel from 4-player lineup.

COMBAT: Silence the Guns - removed Rapid Response from Archer.

COMBAT: Silence the Guns - Bombard moved to 4-player lineup from 5-player lineup. Added High-Impact Shells.

COMBAT: Silence the Guns - Assault moved to 5-player lineup from 4-player lineup.

COMBAT: Silence the Guns - reactors can now explode.

COMBAT: Break the Line - added Assault Launcher to Lobber.

The Cult Influence clock did not specify how many ticks it should have. This has been rectified to 8.

Statistical

Corrected orbit distance of Impact Plaza from 357,000 km to 187,000 km. Some intern accidentally parked the station at the L4 LaGrange of the wrong moon, and has consequently been shoved out of an airlock.

Formatting

Reflowed parts of Running the Campaign: The Team (p. 61).

Reflowed combats to remove "The Battlefield" and "The Fight" section headers, ironically allowing more space for information about the battlefields and the fights.

Writing and Lore

A number of corrections in typography, spelling, grammar and formatting that, due to the fact that I started doing it way before I started making this changelog, will have to go unenumerated.

Decreased instances of the word "fuck" in Act 1 from 82 to 67, meaning I officially give 18.29% less of a fuck.

All references to "RA" by Valentinian children changed to "YMIR," to better reflect their dad's weird obsession.

Added more detail about outlander culture to ENCOUNTER: Ghost Town.

Added the worst line in the history of writing to COMBAT: Bad Star.

[the-ace-with-spades]

I know I wrote a firefighter!Bradley AU but what about an every aviator is a firefighter AU??

(I'm sorry, thinking of applying for an on-call FF role now that I'm moving near a fire station and it got me...)

Bradley as a legacy firefighter - Goose died on the job in a freak accident when he and Mav were barely starting, then Mav stuck and had a friendly rivalry with Ice around going up the ranks/getting experience in their firehouse (who first gets the engineer, lieutenant, who gets the extra high rescue training, etc), up until Ice went into the chief roles and Mav moved to captain a heavy rescue squad...

Bradley had been rejected from the local fire academy twice (because of Mav pulling the strings... Not that Ice was aware at the time, only found out when Bradley found out and exploded on them...), certified in a different fire department and after all came back when he had already been a lieutenant at that department.

All the WSOs are double-certified or AEMT/paramedics. Natasha is doing something badass as well, maybe helicopter rescue or maybe aerial firefighting in general?? Bob is definitely a specialist medic (in kinda like the Rapid Response Unit or Motorcycle Unit in the UK...)

When Bradley comes back, he is recruited as potential captain for the fire house Mav and Ice spent over twenty years in and where his dad's face and helmet is in the hall of the fallen. Mav conveniently accepts a promotion people have been trying to push him into for the past 5 or so years, becoming a battalion chief that has the office at that station and directly overlooks the station's captains... And does absolutely everything so Bradley is not deemed suitable because he doesn't want him to be a firefighter at all...

Enter Jake Seresin, the new recruit that screams trouble. He's entered the academy a few months before, at the age of thirty and after doing some other job (maybe ex-military? ex-cop?? ex-farmer?? Idk) and instantly has beef with Bradley, the legacy fire captain and firefighter since nineteen, Jake being the overconfident know-it-all...

Cue some dangerous situation happening because of Jake's overconfidence/recklessness and Bradley risking it all (and breaking protocol and getting himself in trouble) to save his ass.

And you know, Jake is still his annoying, mouthy self, but there's some respect there now. And maybe he overhears Mav chewing Bradley out (and maybe he hears a bit too much as well, finding the secret of Bradley's triple legacy).

And since then Jake kinda starts to listen and maybe Bradley is a bit soft and maybe because he sees himself from almost fifteen years ago in Jake or maybe because he's a little fond of him (or you know, attracted to him...), he starts getting him some off the job, extra one on one training.

And maybe Jake develops a bit of a crush on his (almost) captain as the time goes. Maybe he brings out Bradley out of his shell as well, gets him to relax and stop thinking about pleasing Mav and Ice's expectations. Maybe it integrates Bradley better with the team, maybe they listen to him better, etc.

Cue once again something happening - Jake's apartment burns down (to be cliché...) and Bradley is doing overtime in another station and is the one responding. There's no dramatic rescue or anything (Jake's already evacuated most of the building) but Jake has no place to stay and his whole family is in Texas so Bradley offers he can stay on his couch.

Obviously he does not end up on the couch but in the bedroom. You know, with Bradley, wearing Bradley's clothes (all his stuff burnt down...), in Bradley's bed...

(Jake's gotta have some firefighting backstory as well btw - maybe his dad was a firefighter as well but he never got to meet him, maybe he was a safe haven baby brought to a firehouse?? He just doesn't admit it until he and Bradley are already almost-kinda a thing)

(Also, Bradley calls Jake some variation of Texas, Cowboy, etc as nick name because I know fire guys would be dead set on mocking Jake being from the south and having an accent)

There'd also be some kind of big event/mass casualty/etc that makes Mav drive out with the responding team and he and Bradley end up going into action together and getting their beef settled...

[kamogryadeshi]

‼️At least one person killed, 12 injured in Russian shelling of Donetsk region

Police recorded 2,762 enemy strikes on the front line and residential sector in the past 24 hours.

14 settlements were under fire: the cities of Bilytske, Dobropillya, Druzhkivka, Kostyantynivka, Kramatorsk, Lyman, Pokrovsk, Siversk, Sloviansk, the village of Novodonetske, Hannivka, Illinivka, Komar, Stepanivka.

50 civilian objects were destroyed, including 17 residential buildings.

Russians hit Kostyantynivka with six drones - killed a civilian, wounded three more people. 1 apartment building and 2 private houses, a gas station, and a civilian car were damaged.

The Russians attacked Bilozerske with drones – they hit a five-story building. 2 residents were injured – a woman and her 16-year-old son, they have burns and carbon monoxide poisoning. A rescue operation is underway at the scene.

The enemy sent 13 drones to Slovyansk – there is one wounded person, 1 apartment building and 8 private houses, a production facility, and a car were damaged.

Two wounded people – in Pokrovsk, a private house was damaged. Two more people were injured in Hannivka, where drones damaged an enterprise and a non-residential building.

One person was injured in Siversk as a result of a guided air bomb exploding, a private house was damaged. There is one wounded person in the village of Komar.

In Kramatorsk, drone strikes damaged an enterprise, non-residential buildings, and 4 civilian cars. In Druzhkivka, UAVs damaged an administrative building, non-residential premises, and transport. In Lyman, 2 private houses and 2 outbuildings were damaged.

In Myrnograd, the Russian occupiers dropped a guided aerial bomb, damaging 3 apartment buildings and 5 private houses, and a religious building. In Bilytske, drones attacked an educational institution, and in Dobropillya, a private household.

[poisonheartfrog]

Somewhere in Long Beach, J-Kwon and Bad Bunny are in half of a Toyota Supra by an exploded Shell gas station, and I think that's beautiful

[magnoliasforyourmedic]

Bastogne Mayhem with Batallion Medic Al Mampre

Al Mampre had been one of Easy Company’s medics from the very beginning in Camp Toccoa. He developed a cyst shortly before D-Day that had to be surgically removed, rendering him unable to drop into D-Day with Easy Company and the rest of the 101st Airborne. He jumped into Holland with Easy Company, newly promoted to Battalion Medic. 

"Once in Bastogne, Mampre saw MPs directing traffic through the town’s center as artillery shells rained down. Mampre arrived at an Army barracks where Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the acting division commander, had set up headquarters. Mampre was assigned to the regimental aid station located across from McAuliffe and began receiving wounded."

...

"Mampre experienced the same kind of luck when an artillery shell landed in front of him outside his makeshift hospital. It hit the ground and broke apart without exploding. Mampre simply looked at it and thought, “That’s a really big shell.” Yet the incident had little effect on him. “I never thought I could have been killed,” he later said. Mampre was often impressed with the medical staff as well as the paratroopers around him. Captain “Shifty” Feiler, the dentist who often had to pay for drinks back in Toccoa, treated 1,000 wounded and frostbitten men by himself, the most in the regiment. “Winters wouldn’t go near him,” Mampre recalled. Feiler had tried to repair Winters’ teeth and ended up making them worse."

...

"When the Germans bombed or shelled the barracks, Mampre and his comrades fled to the basement. During one shelling, Mampre gave his blanket and a chocolate D-bar to a man in his underwear sitting next to him. When it got light out, Mampre realized the man was a German. “Hey!” he shouted upstairs, “There’s a kraut down here!” Mampre took back his blanket. In another instance, Mampre joked with a 17-year-old English-speaking German prisoner about exchanging uniforms. Mampre would be sent back to the United States as a prisoner, he explained to the kid, and the German could return home by following the American Army into Germany. The young man thought about the offer, and then said, “Ah, the hell with you. I want to go the United States. You go to Germany.”"

[weirdmarioenemies]

Name: Barrel Bomb

Debut: Mario Kart Tour

I gotta be honest, all this time I thought this thing was just called Obstacle. That was much funnier to me. Is it ok if I start this post over and you all pretend its official name is Obstacle? Thank you so much.

Name: Obstacle

Debut: Mario Kart Tour

Yep. That sure is an Obstacle if I've ever seen one! They really named this thing Obstacle. I can't say I disagree! It has a bright red Bowser face, and best of all, its metal rims have spikes like the spiked bands Bowser wears. This barrel isn't just designed that way, it's wearing accessories! It's wearing spiked bands, and technically, it has a face, so I think Obstacle counts as a member of the Koopa Troop. It hangs out with them, and one day, hopes to maybe even drive a kart of its own...!

Obstacle is like the evil version of the DK Barrel. Donkey Kong? Now that guy is my funny friend. If one of HIS barrels is in the way, it's probably not too intrusive, and might even have goodies inside! It might also have him inside! Remember the recent confirmation that Kongs are not apes? That makes it more likely that wooden barrels are their eggs, and they are full of albumin. Be careful breaking them... you might be in for a Wet Surprise! Don't act like it's weird, Yoshi's whole brand is eggs and we let that happen!

Don't even think about crashing into Obstacle. You'll be obstructed if you do! Maybe you'd think "This obstacle is a bad guy and I should kill it by running it over with my car" (and you would have a point because this barrel is clearly the moral scum of the earth, quite frankly), but impact with Obstacle will cause you to Explode. It will also explode if it from afar with something such as a shell, which is utilized in some challenges to defeat large groups of Goombas. You might think Obstacle was just trying to hang out with the Goombas, but remember what an utterly reprehensible villain Obstacle is. I bet it stationed itself there on purpose, so that it could sacrifice itself to destroy its supposed friends. Irredeemable!

My favorite thing about Obstacle is that they are Bowser-branded at all, here in this game where Bowser and his cronies are playable. A Bowser face to communicate "Bad! Stay away!" when you could easily be playing as Bowser. It makes sense from a game design standpoint, but it's still silly! Obstacle will make no exception for its boss. Maybe the Koopa Kingdom is the most notable exporter of obstacles in the Mushroom World, and Bowser provides the Obstacles like BaNaNa Boy provides the bananas! He should have given them a better name, though. "Obstacle"? That's so vague!

[drunkenskunk]

Four Hours

Hour 1:

Shit was fucked, and everyone knew it.

Alarm klaxons loudly blared from every single loudspeaker in every single corridor... but Scarlet could barely hear it over the rest of the chaos. Panicked shouts and desperately barked orders, as well as the cracks and booms of distant gunfire and explosions, echoed through the station. She tried to block out the noise, focusing only on her task: get all this ammo to a cut off militia unit on the other side of the hab ring before they were overrun.

It all started when a passing blinkvoid disabled the local Omninet, effectively cutting off Hell's Gate from most external communication. And then, the very instant they were isolated from everyone else in the system, the station went into red alert: an unidentified hostile warship had appeared out of nowhere, and started immediately launching boarding torpedoes. It was a perfectly timed attack that caught everyone in the station with their pants down, and it was only through sheer luck – and a few spare coldcores acting as decoys in an empty hangar – that the Strategic Response Team managed to even get inside their mechs in the first place, much less push back the initial assault.

Once the first fight was over and they got a single moment to catch their breath, that's when the team found out exactly how fucked up the shit was. And the answer: comprehensively. Because it wasn't just any warship attacking them. It was The Tachyon: the ship from a (possible?) nightmare future that had contained the cascading NHP god of the local apocalypse cult. Scarlet was sure she and the rest of the team had seen that stupid ship explode in orbit of Chameleon months ago when all this madness started, but...

Then again, Andros Capella died on that fucking ship, and he came back because that future NHP could apparently just DO that, just like it brought back Ignatius Aurum after that asshole got murked, and time travel was also involved somehow, so who the fuck knows anymore! All this shit was melting Scarlet's brain, and it was pissing her off.

What she did know was that the Hell Hounds – having seemingly been absorbed by The Faith of The One – were now intent on boarding the station, and the militia was offering a well practiced rebuttal: “Hippity-Hoppity, Get Off My Property.” Now, that? That, she could wrap her head around.

So that's why Scarlet – still wearing her interface jacksuit underneath a set of heavy combat armor, loaded down with guns and ammo for resupply, and still juiced on the combat stims in her system from the fight less than half an hour earlier – was running at full speed towards the sounds of gunfire and explosions off in the distance.

“Heads up grunts! I'm inbound on your position with resupply!” Scarlet said into her helmet comm, with no idea if anyone from the militia was even still alive and on the frequency to receive her. Up ahead, the sounds of violence seemed to be petering out, and that was either a good sign, or exceptionally bad. She tried her damnedest to pour on more speed (which wasn't easy considering how heavy all this fucking ammo was) and every heavy footfall shook the deck plating under her and sent a violent shock up her spine.

She rounded a corner and the makeshift command post and barricades beyond the bulkheads finally come into view, and she was momentarily gripped with panic at the number of bodies and spent shell casings she saw littering the floor. Was she already too late? But then the moment passed and she let out a sigh of relief: it looked like nearly everyone here was still alive, just hunkering down behind cover. She'd worked with Zinfandel the last few months to make sure the militia had prepared for this exact scenario with dozens of “all hands, repel boarders” drills, and it was clearly paying off.

“Was that the last of them?” Scarlet heard someone ask from somewhere up ahead. A pair of milita troopers were taking cover behind a flash-printed chest high wall, and one of them quickly peeked over the edge before ducking back down again.

“I dunno,” he said. “Probably not for long. I don't think we can hold against another assault like that...”

“Good news, fellas!” Scarlet yelled, grabbing the attention of everyone still alive. “I got beans, bullets, and bandaids! Load up!” She unbuckled the ratchet across her chest, undoing the makeshift harness made out of tie-down straps holding the giant metal crate to her back. The 4-foot cube loaded to the brim with ammunition, weapons, grenades, and directional mines dropped down unceremoniously with a colossal thud.

“Scarlet? Issat you?” one of the militia she recognized – a kid by the name of Flavor Profile – asked from where he was taking cover behind a nearby pillar. He peered out from beneath his helmet and adjusted the grip on his shotgun. “Christ the Buddha, you're a godsend! I think I'm down to my last two shells.”

“Where in the hells did y'even get all this?” another one of the militia, Spud Wrench, asked while she peered into the giant box of munitions. “We had to beg, borrow, and steal just to set up this chokepoint!”

“Called in a favor,” Scarlet said with a shrug. “Couple of smugglers I know, offered to 'share' some of their inventory. Now, I'd ask for a status update, but shit's kinda obvious,” Scarlet unslung the bullpup carbine off her shoulder and into her hands. “Anyone too wounded to fight, there's a med station that got set up, 'bout two sectors spinward. Everyone else, pull back, regroup, and reload. When the next wave hits, I'll hold them here and buy you some time.”

“What, by yourself?” Flavor asked incredulously. Before he could get an answer, however:

“CONTACT!” came a yell from up ahead, followed swiftly by the bark of gunfire. Without another word, Scarlet was in motion, leaping over the barricade. Violence was no longer imminent, it was here, and it was as if a switch in her head flipped. A sharp electric tingle buzzed in the back of her brain, like the rush of dopamine she always got from fighting in Big Red.

Several armored figures hove into view, their haphazard combat gear painted in faded Hell Hound colors unevenly obscured by iconography of The Faith. The heads-up display on her helmet lit them up like beacons, and with efficient, almost mechanical precision: POP! POP! POP! Scarlet squeezed off three bursts and dropped them before any of them could even get a shot off. She didn't bother to stop, intent on countering the charge of these zealots with one of her own.

Just as she got to the bend in the corridor, she heard the unmistakable sound of a small revving engine. She skidded to a halt just as an arm swinging a rusty chainsaw blade appeared, passing through the spot she would've been. A wild-eyed cultist appeared, carried by his own momentum, and swung the blade again. Scarlet was so high on stims it was like she was watching him moving in slow motion, and it was clear he was aiming to chop her head off. She ducked, and the chainsaw missed her helmet by inches. She let go of the carbine's foregrip, shoved the barrel up under his chin, and pulled the trigger.

There was no time to stop. Scarlet grabbed the dead man by his chestplate, and held the lump of meat ahead of her as she pressed forward, rounding the corner. Seconds later, she heard the bark of automatic fire, followed swiftly by the sound of several wet impacts against the dead man's back. Scarlet hunkered down behind her makeshift cover, tucked the carbine in close, and continued forward, bullets either ricocheting off the corridor all around her or hitting the dead man.

As soon as she felt she was close enough, she shoved up against the body she was carrying with all her might, and threw it forward; it crashed into one of the cultists, sending them tumbling. In one fluid motion, she tossed the carbine into her left hand, reached down for the pistol on her hip with her now free right, and leveled the carbine at one of the cultists trying to duck behind cover. She fired off a quick burst, quickly aimed her pistol at another, and pulled the trigger.

For a split second, it felt like she was back in her mech; she'd been making a habit lately of firing the Leviathan mounted on Big Red's shoulder in one direction to swiss-cheese an opponent, while shooting the assault rifle in another direction at a completely different target.

“So,” Scarlet stood over the man trying to pick himself up off the floor, and very deliberately leveled her carbine at his face. “You gonna come quietly, or am I gonna have to clean you off my boots?”

“My death won't matter,” the cultist said, while trying to be subtle about reaching for his discarded weapon and failing miserably. “Feather will burn this corrupt and cruel universe to cinders and start anew. Let the final verse be written, so the page m-AUGH!” He yelped as Scarlet stomped on his hand before he could reach the rifle.

“You talk too much,” was all she said before smacking him in the head with the butt of her carbine. Scarlet quickly scanned the corridor for more targets, but it seemed the current assault was over, if only for a moment. She flipped the unconscious man onto his front, reached into one her pouches for some zip ties, and began binding his hands; it was a longshot, but maybe Shelly and Zinfandel could get some decent intel out of a prisoner who didn't know when to shut the fuck up.

When he woke up, that is.

- - -

Hour 2:

Things were still bad, but... far as Scarlet was concerned, they could be worse.

The militia platoon defending this particular section of the station had done wonders with all those supplies. On top of refortifying their position, nearly every maintenance corridor surrounding them had been booby trapped. A few enterprising cultists had already tried to flank their position by cubbying, and ended up getting turned into greasy smears. That dissuaded the rest, funneling the cultists into a heavily defended killbox, and right into all of their bullets. Over and over and over again.

Scarlet had no fucking idea how there were so many of these lunatic apocalypse cultists, or where they were even all coming from, since there seemed to be no end to them in sight. They weren't going to get anywhere if they kept on the defensive and just waited to be overrun; no, they had to push forward, and find some way to kick these idiots off personally.

So, Scarlet did the most sensible thing she could think of: she asked for volunteers, and put together a strike team. With any luck, that would give the rest who'd opted to stay behind time to further dig in, and maybe reestablish communication with the rest of the station. There were a total of five of them in this op, with Scarlet taking point, and things started off well. Enemy resistance had started to peter out the further they got from the militia checkpoint... so maybe the Hell Hounds had finally run out of reinforcements?

And then it all went to shit. Again.

She wasn't sure who fired first, but as soon as they reached the atrium where the boarding torpedo had landed, the bullets started flying. Scarlet and the rest knew the terrain better, but there were far more of the cultists, and they just kept coming, heedless of their own safety. It was like a fucking clown car! How could so many fit in that one fucking torpedo?!

An extremely loud shriek drowned out everything else, muffling the explosions and gunfire all around, and it made Scarlet's blood run cold. It was a sound that made her feel like every single nerve ending around every port and connection that would normally have plugged her into her mech had suddenly pulled taut: the whine of a set of miniaturized IPS-N ramjet engines spooling up.

The corridors in this section of the station were too narrow and had ceilings too low for most mechs, which is why Scarlet had felt confident to be boots on the ground instead of in a cockpit for this op... but most mechs wasn't all mechs, and they had now run into the worst case scenario.

“FALL BACK!” Scarlet yelled, already on the move and trying her best to disguise the rising panic in her voice. “NOW! WE'VE GOTTA GO NOW!”

A blur of burnt red and dull gold metal emerged from the darkened torpedo entrance in a motion almost too fast to see. It was so fast, in fact, that two of the cultists weren't able to get out of the way in time, and the half sized mech plowed straight through them as if they weren't there, aerosolizing them in an instant. The unmistakable silhouette of an IPS-N Caliban emerged through the rapidly expanding clouds of blood that had been it's allies a second before.

Scarlet and the others were already running, and she just hoped they would all be fast enough to escape, but what the fuck could they even do? This is the exact situation the Caliban is designed for! If she could get to Big Red it might level things out, but... even if her mech wasn't on the other side of the station, that big fucker couldn't fit in these corridors!

“Machete!” Scarlet yelled at one of the squad as they all rounded a corner. “Get that bulkhead sealed!” She pulled a grenade off her kit, and tossed it like a baseball straight at the charging mech which seemed to fill the entire corridor. The grenade exploded with a pop, and a cloud of dirty black smoke appeared at the mech's head-height for a fraction of a second.

The Caliban didn't even notice. And then, the mech raised its left arm, a pair of shotgun barrels glinting in the fluorescent light.

“FUCK!” She dove for cover behind the bend just as she heard a titanic boom, like an angry god slamming a car door. All the color was washed out by the intensity of the muzzle flash. An immense cloud of flechette darts, ball bearings, and superheated magnesium strips filled the corridor they had just barely managed to escape. The metal walls, floor, and ceiling all got torn up or melted, and nearly every electronic panel and light fixture simultaneously exploded.

“BULKHEAD!” Scarlet yelled again through the tinnitus. She fought the urge to keep running as she watched Machete reach for the lever to activate the emergency seal. All the stims in her system made every motion feel painfully, agonizingly slow, until they finally grabbed the lever and yanked it down.

The Caliban appeared around the corner, mere feet away. Even through the tinnitus, she could hear that distinctive, terrifying whine of the ramjets spooling up again. Scarlet realized in that moment that there was no way out... so if this is how it was gonna be, she was going out fighting, even if she knew it was pointless. She raised her carbine, thumbed the safety to full auto, and just unloaded. A second passed, and half a dozen bullets impacted against the Caliban's armored chassis amid a hail of sparks, every shot bouncing off harmlessly.

Just before the mech started to move, the heavy metal bulkhead slammed down hard, sealing the corridor and trapping the mech on the other side of several inches of heavily reinforced metal. Steam and smoke spilled out of the barrel of her carbine, and Scarlet let out the breath she was holding...

There was a loud ringing BANG against the bulkhead. And then another. And then another. It was the sound of heavy metal fists punching the solid slab of metal separating the Caliban from its prey...

“That's not gonna hold it,” Scarlet said through ragged breaths, slowly backing away, and motioning for the others to do the same. “We've gotta get out of here... find some way to stop it.”

How any of them were going to do that, Scarlet honestly had no fucking idea...

- - -

Hour 3:

Scarlet leaned against a bulkhead back at the checkpoint. She was starting to feel sluggish, and checked the auto-injector mounted on her armor: one stim left, and all the rest were empty. Fuck. She hit the magazine catch on her carbine, and checked her remaining ammo: 10 shots left. Fuck.

“How we doin'?” Scarlet asked, already knowing the answer.

“I mean, we're not dead?” Machete shrugged, ignoring the blood trickling down her temple.

“What about comms? We still cut off?” Scarlet peered around her cover. Nobody coming yet. That was good, at least.

“Yeah, for the most part...” Machete nodded. “Short range works, but we can't reach anybody further out than, like... 4 sectors? I think? I dunno if they've got a jammer, or there's some kinda paracausal shit goin' on, or what. We've got some runners, but... takes way too much time.”

“What about that Caliban? Anybody have eyes on it?”

“We got Spud working with a couple other sigdivers, trying to keep it busy. Opening and closing bulkheads to direct it away from us, keep it going' in circles, tryin' to get it lost... but, I mean... I guess we're lucky those cult fuckers seem to be just as scared of it as we are, y'know?”

Scarlet furrowed her brow inside her helmet, trying to weigh her options. They weren't going to get far if they couldn't deal with that damn mech. If Agarin was here in his Caliban, That Which Poets and Artists have Eternally Sought: The Power to Move, this wouldn't be a problem. Not only would he would wipe the floor with that amateur pilot, he'd personally turn every one of these cultists into chunky salsa without breaking a sweat. But... hell, even if comms weren't down right now, the rest of the SRT was in the same boat as her: dealing with too many crises all over the besieged station, all at once, and with not enough time to fix everything...

And then, an idea crossed her mind.

“Hang on... do we have any thermite charges left?” Scarlet asked. Machete did a double take, staring at her as Scarlet left cover to head deeper into the checkpoint.

“We have thermite?” she shook it off. “Wait, where are you goin'?”

“Got an idea. Gonna find Spud, see if we can funnel that Caliban closer to the station skin...”

- - -

Hour 4:

This was either a brilliant idea, or it was the single dumbest thing Scarlet had ever come up with.

“Scarlet, you set up yet?” a crackling voice said through her helmet comm. Scarlet surveyed the corridor one last time before replying. Hopefully the thermite charges were disguised well enough that whoever was piloting that monster wouldn't notice...

“As I'll ever be, Spud,” Scarlet adjusted her grip on the SMAW resting on her shoulder. “That Caliban getting close?”

“He's taking the bait,” Spud replied, amid a hail of static. “Be ready, he'll be on you any second. I'll seal him in as soon as you give the word.”

She could hear heavy footfalls, thudding in the distance and getting closer.

Well. It's now or never. She raised up the SMAW, aiming it at the far end of the corridor, finger resting just above the trigger...

The Caliban rounded a corner, filling the hallway with its (relatively) immense bulk, and it came to a stop as soon as it noticed Scarlet. The hallway behind the mech was lit up by bright blue flame, as the shrieking whine of the ramjets spooling up began once more.

“Backblast clear, I guess...” she muttered, squeezing the trigger. The end of the tube exploded in flame and smoke, and even inside the armor she could feel the concussive force of the rocket engine buffeting her. It screamed down the hallway for half a second, directly at the mech, before it impacted dead center with its chestplate. The deck beneath her feet shook as the end of the hallway was consumed in a fireball, briefly enveloping and obscuring the Caliban.

She knew that wouldn't stop it, but it wasn't supposed to. Scarlet tossed the empty SMAW aside as quick as she could, reached over for the already primed bulkhead controls on the wall next to her with her left hand, and pulled the detonator off with her right. The fire and smoke at the end of the hall was violently pushed away as the Caliban charged down the corridor, ramjet engines screaming; Scarlet slammed down the lever as soon as she saw it emerge, and hoped against hope that she was fast enough...

THUD. The bulkhead slammed shut, and she could just barely hear the Caliban screech to a halt on the other side.

“Now!” Scarlet said into her comm. “Seal it now!” Without waiting for a response, she hit the button on the detonator. The corridor shook once again, and there were a series of muffled thuds from the other side of the bulkhead as the carefully placed thermite charges detonated... and then, every sound beyond the sealed metal came to a swift stop.

After all, sound can't propagate in a vacuum.

“Holy shit... I, uh... I think you got him!” Spud's voice crackled, the channel still flush with static. “Let me see if I can link into one of the external cameras... oh yeah! Yeah, you spaced the fucker!”

Scarlet sighed heavily, and stood there for a minute or two. A part of her wanted to let the tension that had kept her in a vice grip evaporate, but... it didn't. It couldn't. She couldn't let it. The Gate was still in danger. Her friends were still in danger. Her home was still in danger. There was no time to rest. There was no time to stop.

Not yet.

[awriternamedart]

"Sampo?!"

His head shot up the moment he stepped back down. He whipped around, eyes searching through the crowd for that bellowing yell— for that familiar face. Sampo could barely keep himself upright, the crowd parting right in front of him as people were pushed aside, startled gasps erupting before he crashed through the break.

All Sampo could do was watch as stars exploded, brilliant and bright. Gepard froze for the briefest of seconds as their eyes met, but he looked so.. colorful. Vibrant blues, pale hair, rosy cheeks— and that smile. That damned smile that let his teeth peek through, that made the corners of his eyes crinkle.

And then he yelped as Gepard crashed forward with heavy footsteps, before his world became a blur.

"Sampo!!"

"WoAH-?!"

Gepard swept Sampo up in his arms, something that could only be described as pure joy taking Sampo aback. It was rare enough to see Gepard smile so freely— it was even rarer to hear such laughter from him.

But he found himself discarding it, his crooked grin quickly sliding into spot on his face as Gepard spun him around, around, bubbling laughter beginning to build up and escape in cackles as his feet fumbled hitting the ground again. He stumbled a little, but he really didn't care— there wasn't the danger of falling, not here. Not in this safety that held him so tightly, so impossibly gently.

As he caught his balance, the shine refused to die away, leaving the world in such a bright film of color. Sampo hadn't even noticed how dull it had become until vibrant blue looked at him with such warmth. His eyes slipped closed on instinct, surprising even himself until the realization hit him, still smiling against chapped lips pressed on him. It took him a few shell shocked moments and the fact that Gepard was pulling away before fingers looped through the beltloops on Gepard's pants and his other hand curled into blond hair to hold him tight.

He got a laugh against his lips for it, but it tasted like pure euphoria. Especially when Gepard's hand slipped under his thigh and the other rested against the small of his back, Sampo dipped slightly backwards as the metal of their rings pressed against the other from how tightly they held on.

"What an eager welcome~!" Sampo teased the moment they could breathe again, forehead pressed against Gepard's. He could feel that familiar deep laughter under his fingertips, the feeling making him smile and grin all over again. "Missed me much, Captain?"

"Of course." Plainly spoken as ever. Gepard held no regards for fancy words, slowly lifting Sampo so he could stand properly on his own two feet. "I always do."

"Such a way with words, Gep. Enough to make a grown man blush!" Sampo snickered, his own hand slipping down Gepard's back to find his hand, letting warm calloused skin press against his own weathered hand. They easily twined together, as if they had never been parted in the first place. "What's for dinner, then?"

"I haven't gotten groceries yet. I was going to ask what you wanted when you got back."

The glint of gold rings reflected against the train station floor as gentle laughter and conversation began to float around them. It shone as brightly as comfort did, that familiar scent of home following them out.

-

Home Again - awriternamedart

idk their just husbands or something rolls my eyes

[sandersstudies]

“Do you have a car?” “Yeah, in the attic.”

“Bad Bunny, on top of the Shell gas station, is thrown by the force of the explosion into the seat next to J-Kwon.”

“Dogs in the car, blast through the wall, it explodes, they’re alive, it was a hologram, they go out the back door never to be seen again.”

BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN YOUR BRAIN IS INCREDIBLE

[collu2iion2]

pesterlog dialog for deez guyz + alt colors n closeup under cut

CA: (oh my cod kar are you seain wwhat im seain) CG: (THAT TACKY MALL COPS RUN OF THE MILL- NO MORE LIKE RUN OVER BY A THOUSAND HOOFBEASTS SIMULTANEOUSLY EXPERIENCING THEIR CHUTES CONVULSE AND VACATE THE EVER SO FRAGRANT CONTENTS OF THEIR EXCREMENT TUNNELS. LIKE THEY ALL STOPPED THEIR STAMPEDE FOR A SNACK BREAK OF GAS STATION SUSHI AND THE SIGHT OF THAT BASTARD SHOCKED THE WEAKEST MOST DELICATE OF THEM ALL TO LET IT LOOSE SUBSEQUENTLY TRIGGERING THE ENTIRE HERD TO EXPLODE IN A RIVVER OF-OH FUCK) CG: (DOES IT LOOK LIKE HES COMING THIS WAY OR-) CG: OH MY GOD HE JUST SHOVED THAT POOR WRIGGLER OUT OF THE WAY AND HES LOOKING STRAIGHT AT ME LIKE I OWE HIM MONEY HE MUST DESPERATELY NEED CG: OH FUCK. OH GOD HE LOOKS LIKE HE COULD TAKE EQUIUS ON. OK, OK, OK, THIS IS FINE THIS IS LIGHT WORK! JUST GOTTA COME UP WITH A PLAN REAL FUCKING QUICK CG: ... CG: GOG WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO US?!? I MEAN SEALIOUSLY WE CAN'T BE THE ONLY ASSHOLES WHO GOSSIP ABOAT THE LOCAL MULTIPLEXCRETIA FROM TIME TO TIME

CG: UGHHHHHH I REALLY DONT WANNA GET KICKED OUT OF THIS ONE, THEYVE GOT THE BEST GRUBBLE TEA!!! SHIT I'D ASK YOUR ADVICE BUT I KNOW YOU'RE JUST GONNA SAY WE MURDER THE POOR BASTARD- OH FUCK HE'S JOGGING NOW. JUST GREAT. I DON'T THINK I'VE EVER SEEN ONE OF THEM DO THAT CA: oh cmon kar put a little faith in me CA: although to be quite frank i dont think no body wwould miss paul blart ovver here like somebody needs to put him out of his misery for the dowwnright pathetic example hes settin for this fine establishment CA: oh fin dont evven start ill just threaten him a little and wwith that fuckin wwriggler toy excuse for a wweapon im sure hell back off before you can snap your gripin little clawws CG: ALRIGHT BUT DONT YOU EVEN FUCKING THINK OF PULLING THE CROSSHAIRS OUT AS "JUST A THREAT." THIS IS GONNA BE A VOCAL THING ONLY, AND SPEAKING OF EXPATIATING, WE MIGHT EVEN GET OUT OF THIS UNBANNED AND WITHOUT BLOOD ON OUR HANDS IF YOU JUST DONT. SO JUST TO BE CRYSTAL FUCKING CLEAR, I NEED YOU TO JUST SIT THERE LOOKING PRETTY AND SHUTTING YOUR TRAP LIKE YOU'RE BEING EXPLOITED FOR ENTERTAINMENT BY MR.FEAST IN EXCHANGE FOR A MILLION FUCKING BUCKS OKAY? YOU WOULD ABSOLUTELY KILL AT THAT KIND OF THING IF YOU TRIED, YOUR NONVERBAL BITCHFEST COMMUNICATION ALONE WOULD RACK IN BILLIONS OF VIEWS SO LETS JUST PRETEND!! OKAY?? THIS IS JUST THE FUN MAKE BELEIVE TIME PART OF OUR DATE. CG: WE CAN GO TO THAT STUPID SALAD PLACE YOU LIKE SO MUCH IF YOU JUST TRUST ME TO HANDLE THIS LIKE THE COMPETENT ORATOR I AM AND WAS ALWAYS HATCHED TO BE CG: I MEAN I DONT DISAGREE THAT SOMEONE SHOULD TAKE THIS GUY DOWN A PEG BUT I DONT MEAN THAT LITERALLY SO "WWATCH YOURSHELF" OR I SWEAR TO GOD- CG: OH WHY HELLO MR MALL COP- I MEAN OFFICER!! WE WERE JUST HARMLESSLY PATRONIZING THIS- CA: listen here you ovvergrowwn frat trash wwhy dont you haul you and your little school girl baton in the other direction and do your fuckin job for a change instead of eavvsdroppin like the no life havvin filth wwallowwing pig loser scum you undoubtedly are or i promise ill make it so you wwont havve a chance in shell at employment anywwhere EVVER again CG: OF FUCKING COURSE

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Wim K.Steffen. Nijmegen, Netherlands. 1957

+

Breathing

I love to feel as if, I’m just another body, a breather along with the others: blackbirds taking sips of air, garter snakes lapping it up with their split tongues, and all those plants that open and close and throw up streamers of oxygen: maybe that cottonwood that tilts across the creekbed is the very one that just sucked up carbon dioxide and let me breathe, maybe I should hang a card around it, Thank you for the next two minutes of my life, maybe some of the air I just swallowed used to be inside the hot larynx of a fox, or the bill of an ash-throated flycatcher, maybe it just coursed past the scales of a lizard—a blue-belly— as he wrapped himself around his mate, maybe he took an extra breath and let it out and that’s the one I got. Maybe all of us are standing side by side on the earth our chests moving up and down, every single one of us, opening a window, loosening a belt, unzipping a pair of pants to let our bellies swell, while in the pond a water beetle clips a bubble of air to its shell and comes back up for another. You want sanitary? Go to some other planet: I’m breathing the same air as the drunk Southerner, the one who rolls cigarettes with stained yellow thumbs on the bench in the train station, I’m breathing the same air as the Siamese twins at the circus, their heads talking to each other, quarreling about what they want to do with their one pair of hands and their one heart. Tires have run over this air, it’s passed right over the stiff hair of jackrabbits and roadkill, drifted through clouds of algae and cumulus, passed through jetprops, blades of helicopters, through spiderlings that balloon over the Tetons, through sudden masses of smoke and sulfur, the bleared Buick filled with smoke from the Lucky Strikes my mother lit, one after another. Though, as a child, I tried my best not to breathe, I wanted to take only the faintest sips, just enough to keep the sponges inside, all the lung sacs, rising and falling. I have never noticed it enough, this colorless stuff I can’t see, circulated by fans, pumped into tires, sullenly exploding into bubbles of marsh gas, while the man on the gurney drags it in and out of his lungs until it leaves his corpse and floats past doorknobs and gets trapped in an ice cube, dropped into a glass. After all, we’re just hanging out here in our sneakers or hooves or talons, gripping a branch, or thudding against the sidewalk: as I hold onto my lover and both of us breathe in the smell of wire screens on the windows and the odor of buckeye. This isn’t to say I haven’t had trouble breathing, I have: sometimes I have to pull the car over and roll down the window, and take in air, I have to remember I’m an animal, I have to breathe with the other breathers, even the stars breathe, even the soil, even the sun is breathing up there, all that helium and oxygen, all those gases blowing and shredding into the solar wind.

[Ellery Akers]

[audible301]

“There is an exploded Shell gas station. JKwon and Bad Bunny are nowhere to be seen.”

What the hell is this show?

[ariadnelives]

Dokkaebi Fire - A Short Story

Author's Note: The bulk of this story takes place during the events of "Force Majeure," directly between chapters 8 and 9, during the crew's time in hiding in Xiagu. It is not intended to be read in sequence. If you'd like to catch up on the series so far, you can do so on ao3 or tumblr.

“Cookie?” Pilar called into the flat as she entered, not waiting to be let in. “It's me today. Ariadne's making final preparations for her surgery tomorrow, but she'll be by as soon as she's back on her feet.”

Aoibheann sat on the armchair in the living room, pointed at the television which appeared to be carrying a local news broadcast from one of Saturn's other moons. She had a blanket draped over her lap, and she watched the news broadcast idly, taking in none of it.

“Remember, starting tomorrow, Ariadne won't remember anything beyond the six-month point in our stay here, and we have to keep it that way, so, be careful what you say around her.” Pilar laughed without joy.

Aoibheann did not.

“You know,” Pilar tacked on, “I'm a complete liar. You could dime out the whole plan and I'm pretty sure me and Ari would absolutely leap for joy as long as it meant you were talking again.”

Aoibheann glanced over at Pilar wistfully, dark circles under her eyes, but said nothing. These little responses indicated their old friend could still hear them in there, that they could get through to her, even if she couldn't muster the strength to respond. She'd barely spoken since they lost the station. She was usually a tightly-wound powder keg, full of fire and passion, and she had to direct it towards her purpose or else she’d explode. Now, it was like all that fire inside her had gone out, and all that was left of her was an exhausted shell of a woman.

She seemed able to move around on her own, but rarely found the motivation to do so. She had grown somewhat thin and gaunt, as she only ate when fed, so every day, Pilar or Ariadne or one of her apprentices would stop by to see her and make sure she ate. Sasha had been spreading herself far too thin on Ariadne's project, but still found time to check in on her and monitor her physical health. Her apprentices had removed all sharp objects, belts, and shoelaces from the premises, but Pilar thought that was overkill. She had known Aoibheann long enough to know she would never physically harm herself. Still, it didn't make it easy to watch her torture herself like this.

Pilar sat next to her, and gently took her hand.

“I hate having to feed you this stuff, Cookie,” she said, opening up a small gray package she'd brought with her. “Replicated MREs. No wonder Baltimore and Beam went to a convenience store twice a week when they were in the army.”

Aoibheann looked with disdain at the lump of meat before her, served with a mush that could only be described as “prepared grain.” She hated eating it as much as Pilar hated serving it to her.

In their small hidden town of Xiagu, all of the food came out of the replicators. Xiagu had a surplus of energy, with its passive solar collection and years of nobody to use the stored power, so nobody was worried about the expenditure of creating food and water from reserves.

Back on the station, they had only managed to earmark power for replicator use two years previously. Like most spacecraft, all of the water fixtures were powered by replicators, generating as much water as needed from a stored bank of energy, which was in turn refilled by a device in the drains which converted waste-water into energy. The food replicator could make prepared meals, but crew members would only be allowed to use it if they could make up the energy cost. This happened pretty naturally, as everybody had to use the bathroom regularly and could credit this to their account, and had the handy benefit of encouraging people to clean up after themselves-- every time you emptied your trash into the energy-reclamation chute, you added replicator energy to your canteen account.

However, back home, most people didn't bother to use the replicators, because truly, Cookie's food was better fresh than anything they could produce, and she loved making it. Here in Xiagu, however, the replicators had nothing but military-grade “Meals Ready to Eat” and raw ingredients programmed into them. When the town was alive, there had been gardens to produce the vegetables, and people to tend them, harvest them, and cook them in the many small restaurants. Now, all that was left was replicators.

Cookie's star apprentice, Yellow, had been put in charge of the replicators while Cookie was indisposed, and had very few requests for anything other than the prepared MREs since they'd been there. Everyone on the crew was required to learn to cook, from Cookie, and nobody particularly felt up to trying to fill her shoes. Everyone had pretty much accepted meals of nondescript lumps of meat, vegetables, and starches on the firm belief that any day now, Cookie would be back on her feet, doing what she loved.

Yellow was the one in charge of food distribution, and had desperately been asking Ariadne to authorize them to reopen Cookie's kitchen, with her at the helm, until Cookie was well enough to resume her post. It's what Cookie would want, she insisted, but Ariadne was taking Cookie's condition unusually poorly, and had refused to allow the kitchen to operate without Cookie present. Yellow was frustrated, but understood. Nobody would feel right about having communal meals like before without Cookie.

Pilar carefully cut up the packaged meal and fed bites to Cookie, who halfheartedly complied with each bite. She offered her a cup of tea, which Cookie held for warmth but wouldn't drink without prompting.

“Look, Aoibheann...” Pilar said, “I know you're not well. I know this has been harder on you than anyone.”

Cookie met her gaze.

“But I don't...” Pilar began, and choked. “I don't think Ariadne will go through with this with you in this condition. She cares about you too much. You know what you mean to her. To me. She's not going to put herself at risk until she knows you're okay.”

Aoibheann looked downcast.

“She needs you,” Pilar whispered. “I need you. Please come back to us.”

****

Aoibheann's mind drifted back to when she’d met Ariadne and Pilar, thirteen years previously. She had been living on the streets for two years and had only passing contact with Pilar. She had been homeless since the Hanguk-Éire massacre, when Susan Weaver’s bombs had incinerated her family’s house and restaurant, left her and her mother destitute, and claimed her father’s life. Her mother had turned to drugs to cope with the loss, and ultimately found herself bleeding out in the gutter after an altercation with a pusher who she couldn’t pay for her latest fix.

She had distrusted the new girl at first. In her experience, another new person living under the overpass was another person who might get to the good scraps before her. She didn’t need any more competition. There was, however, a certain unspoken respect between her and the Aguilar girls. They were the only kids living on the streets of that particular block, and they had to look out for one another. They didn’t talk much, but they had struck up an arrangement. Pilar needed to go foraging to keep Sasha fed, and knowing that she would have to dig through trash bins and steal from loosely-guarded shops to make this happen, she felt it was too dangerous to bring her nine-year-old sister along with her.

So, she struck up an arrangement with Aoibheann: if she kept Sasha safe while she went out on runs, Pilar would try and steal a little extra food so Aoibheann could eat as well. Pilar and Sasha had been squatting in an abandoned house on a nearby side-street, and Aoibheann could crash there in exchange for keeping an eye on Sasha. It was shelter, and food, and it was a better deal than she was getting anywhere else. Under normal circumstances, Aoibheann would’ve developed a mighty crush on Pilar, but crushes were the sorts of things normal girls got to have. Aoibheann needed to focus on staying alive.

The new girl had been Racquel when they met. She had been raving about how the world was going to end, a secret conspiracy to reign atomic hellfire onto the bio-domes. It was the standard fare of the doomsaying lunatic, so nobody paid her much mind, but she’d named Ramos and Ramos specifically in her raving, and that caught Pilar’s attention. Nobody hated the Ramoses like Pilar, although Aoibheann didn’t yet know why.

So, Pilar and Racquel started going out on runs together. Suddenly, they were bringing back more than enough food, not only for the four of them, but they even got to share it with the others under the bridge. One day, they came home clean, wearing fresh clothes, and carrying a bundle of new clothes under their arm. They told her that Racquel’s name was Ariadne now, and that they would be needing her help a lot more often. They’d found some sort of mentor, who would “get them out of here,” but they’d need to spend hours, even days, with her at a time.

Aoibheann wasn’t a fool. She knew that if they succeeded in getting out of here, that she would be left behind. She couldn’t, however, risk being thrown out on the street. She’d watch Sasha and crash on the floor of this abandoned townhouse as long as they’d let her.

Sasha seemed like such a little kid then, although Aoibheann knew on a logical level that she was only three years older.

“If you could be anything in the world when you grow up,” Sasha had asked her one day, while the other girls had been away at their mysterious mentor’s for a few days, “what would you be?”

“I’m just trying to grow up,” Aoibheann said, “if I can make it that far, I’ll see what I can get.”

Sasha scrunched her nose. “You’re not playing the game right.”

“I’m being realistic,” Aoibheann said.

Sasha breezed past this. “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up.”

Aoibheann considered pointing out that Sasha had a third-grade education and no money, but thought better of it, and instead just sighed. “Well, it’d be a crying shame if you starved to death before then,” she said. “Let’s see what your sister left us.”

Aoibheann looked at the handful of scraps Pilar had left on the table. Pilar had stolen them an entire rotisserie chicken, which Aoibheann had admonished her for-- the abandoned house did not have a working refrigerator, she pointed out, so she’d have to use the meats straightaway or they would quickly spoil and attract flies-- and several cans of diced white potatoes, which Pilar figured would keep Sasha’s stomach full, but Aoibheann pointed out had very little nutritional value. This was, of course, in addition to the six chocolate bars Pilar had, being thirteen years old, been sure to nab on her little excursion.

Aoibheann had nothing in the way of seasonings, except for a variety of salt and pepper packets she’d taken from a loosely-supervised outdoor seating area at a nearby restaurant, as well as, on one extremely lucky day, three sets of cheap silverware and a bottle of hot sauce.

She did, however, have access to a small metal trash can with a lid, water from a neighbor’s hose spigot-- Aoibheann felt bad about this, because water was so tightly regulated on Mars and the owner would surely be steeply charged for the waste, but this was a low priority compared to their survival-- and an old gas stove that the new girl had rigged up to illegally supply them with heat.

Aoibheann had cut the meat off the bones of the rotisserie chicken and plopped the bones into the cold water with all the fat and gristle, and opened up a few of the salt packets into the mixture. She put it on the stove and let it heat up to a boil, then turned down the gas and watched as the mixture turned a translucent yellow. She eventually fished out the bones with her knife, and dumped all the potatoes, and the meat from the chicken, into the broth.

After it had stewed for a while, Aoibheann took a taste. It was thin, watery, and somewhat bland, but it would do for the time being. Using the now-empty potato cans, she scooped out two servings of soup and handed one to Sasha.

“Now, we just have to keep it just hot enough,” Aoibheann said, “and it won’t go bad. We’ll be able to eat this until your sister gets back.”

Sasha took a taste. “It’s…” she had been taught, if she had nothing nice to say, to say nothing at all, so she didn’t finish her sentence. Aoibheann had spent enough time with her to know what she meant.

“It’s a tick bland like this,” Aoibheann shrugged, passing her the hot sauce. “Give it a dash of this, it’ll be a sight better.”

Sasha complied, tasted it, and her face made it clear that while it was in fact a sight better, it still wasn’t quite tasty.

“My mom used to make potatoes with a cheesy sauce,” Sasha said sadly. “They were really spicy. Pilar’s favorite food.”

“My dad was more of a cabbage man,” Aoibheann said. “My mom handled the meats, him the veggies. Hanguk-Éire cuisine is… all about things coming together in the pot.”

Sasha added a little more hot sauce to her soup.

“I wanted to be a cook,” Aoibheann said. “Like my folks, before, all this. My dad was a cook. His dad was a cook. His dad was a cook. And so on and so on, all the way back to our homelands.”

“You could still be a cook,” Sasha said, eyeing her soup. “...someday.”

“Well, we’ll have to get your sister to scrounge us up some quality ingredients, then, won’t we?” Aoibheann said.

The two of them finished their soup, and Aoibheann noted that it was getting late, and insisted that Sasha go to bed. Sasha refused without a story, and Aoibheann tossed back a “tough titties” which was met with an infuriatingly irresistible pout.

“FINE,” Aoibheann groaned, and improvised a story.

“Once upon a time, there was a kingdom,” Aoibheann began. This was how all her stories began, they all took place in this kingdom. “The kingdom, you see, had been through every horror you could put a kingdom through. It had been invaded. It had been burned. It had been taken over and torn in half and put back together again more times than you could count. Every evil overlord you could name had taken the place over, at one time or another. So the people in the kingdom, they were always sad, and they started to wonder, would they ever be free? And then, one day, they found out, there was another kingdom, just like them, halfway round the world, and they decided to join forces. But then, after a few decades of unity and prosperity, the entire world fell into darkness, and the people of the two kingdoms had to run. They ran far away, and found a new promised land in the desert, and built a home there.”

“Then, one day, in the new kingdom, there was a little girl who lived in a little house with her ma’ and her da’, and she loved her life. The dark creature from the old world, it caught up with them. It took her da’, and burned down her house, and she and her mother had to go out into the woods.”

Sasha looked scared. “The woods?”

“Aye,” Aoibheann said, “and her mother dear didn’t last long. There were these flares of Dokkaebi Fire, the goblin lights, and mother dear thought surely she could follow them to safety… Pretty soon, the little girl was all on her own.”

“I don’t like this story,” Sasha said, trying not to betray how frightened she was.

Aoibheann sighed. “Neither do I. But see, the story has a happy ending.”

“Happy?” Sasha asked.

“Happy enough,” Aoibheann replied, “for now. See, the little girl knew not to follow the goblin lights. She ran into the dark, and there she found… a brave, dashing adventurer. A gorgeous girl, noble and good, who’d been lost in the woods herself.”

Sasha’s eyes brightened at this. “Did she have a sword?”

“A little one, aye,” Aoibheann laughed. “And she was on a quest, to find a way out of the woods. But the problem was, she had to look after a sweet, wee little baby, and couldn’t leave it long enough to make any real progress. So the little girl, she’d faced all the darkness in the world. She could handle a wee little baby! She agreed to take care of the baby while the adventurer looked for a way to save herself and the little one.”

“Did she find a way out?”

“Someday she will,” Aoibheann said, “but all she found so far was… a sorceress.”

“This story has everything,” Sasha said.

“The sorceress was as beautiful as the adventurer, and sharp as a tack, but she was untrained. Powerful magic, but she didn’t know how to use it.” Aoibheann explained, “so, together, they managed to track down the Baba Yaga, a wise but crafty old witch, who could teach the sorceress and adventurer how to find the way.”

“And the little girl?” Sasha asked.

Aoibheann thought about this. “The little girl gets to spend time with the sorceress, and the adventurer, and that sweet wee little baby,” she said, “and she appreciates the time she has with them. Someday, they’ll find their way out, and she’ll still be in the woods, but she’ll always be glad to have met them. The end.”

Sasha crinkled her nose. “That’s a bad ending,” Sasha said bluntly. “The little girl should just leave the woods with them. Then find the creature that took her house, and kill it.”

“And how’s she gonna do that?” Aoibheann laughed.

“The adventurer and the sorceress will help her!” Sasha said. “Maybe the Baby Yaga can tell her some spells!”

“Baba Yaga,” Aoibheann corrected. “Okay, so say she does. Say she tells the adventurer and the sorceress everything that happened, and they go slay the evil creature. What happens next?”

Sasha thought about this. “Maybe they fight another creature,” she said. “An octopus?”

“Why are they fighting an octopus?” Aoibheann asked, still chuckling.

“It’s guarding a treasure,” Sasha said as though it were the most obvious thing in the universe. “You have heard a story before, right?”

“Fair enough,” Aoibheann said. “And then, say, they beat all the creatures. What then?”

“Happily ever after,” Sasha said triumphantly.

“Well, you’re a sight more deft at this than I am,” Aoibheann said. “Let’s get you to sleep, I’ll do better next time.”

Aoibheann swaddled Sasha in the dirty, tattered blanket that they’d found a few weeks earlier, sat out in the hallway, and began to cry.

In the present day, Aoibheann thought back to her sobbing in the hallway. At the time, she was convinced that Ariadne and Pilar would surely abandon her when they finished training with Blue. When they started building their first spacecraft in an alley under the bridge, she’d defended it from thieves and scrappers at knifepoint, even thinking that they would use it to leave her behind. When, against all odds, Ariadne had built a spaceworthy craft, she was stunned into silence when they invited her along.

“Don’t be dumb,” Pilar had said, extending a hand to her “of course we’re taking you with us. We started this crew to keep Sasha fed. How are we gonna do that without a cook?”

And so, Cookie had been born. As the goblin lights lit the way to ruin, Pilar’s hand pulled her onto the right path.

****

Now, Pilar’s hand was busy cutting up bites of nondescript meat and placing them into Aoibheann’s mouth.

“Do you remember… back in our street urchin days,” Pilar asked, “Me and Ariadne would come home from Blue’s, put Sasha to bed, and then you, me, and her would stay up late gossiping. We’d show you all the cool stuff Blue had taught us in our lessons, and you’d take the ingredients we’d stolen for you-- better ones, after you started giving me lists-- and you’d teach us how to cook like you.”

Aoibheann almost smiled, and Pilar saw it.

“Alright, you’re right,” Pilar said, cutting her another bite and placing it in her mouth. “Nobody can cook like you. Don’t let it go to your head. But you taught us to cook better than most people.”

Aoibheann accepted another bite wordlessly.

“You know, Ariadne used to use Blue’s tricks to fix up that abandoned house, Alan’s house, and I used to show you all the martial arts tricks, and you’d be rapt with attention,” Pilar said. “When me and Ari started dating, we had a friendly debate about it. See, I thought you had a crush on her, and she thought you had a crush on me. Joke’s on us, turns out you were more than capable of having both.”

Aoibheann came close to smiling again.

“Funny, that’s a fond memory now. Back then, it was the worst year of our life,” Pilar said. “Wonder what we’ll remember fondly from now, when we’re older.”

Aoibheann’s fractional smile faded away. She couldn’t imagine anything worth cherishing from this time. But then, she couldn’t back then, either.

“And we don’t have to talk about…” Pilar cut herself off. “I mean, the… what we’ve had together… The unspoken closeness between the three of us. Rare as it might be that we’ve acted on it, it’s still special to me. To us.The problem has never been that we don’t feel about you, the way you feel about us. If you wanted... what’s between the three of us... to be more, it’d be yours in a heartbeat.”

Aoibheann looked down at her lap.

“We’ve always loved you, Cookie,” she explained. “And don’t get twisted up on the definitions. Every sense of the word. Whatever you’re thinking I surely can’t mean… I mean it. I don’t know what’s going on in your head. I just hate to think that… I mean… we’re going into the most dangerous time we’ve ever faced. If something happens, to me or to Ari… I just want to know you know what you mean to us. To me.”

Pilar gave her another bite, and Aoibheann didn’t fight her on it.

“Do you remember our wedding?” Pilar asked, and laughed. “Of course you do. Hard to forget something like that. Do you remember how angry you were that we wouldn’t let you cook us a grand feast?”

There was a spark in her eyes that demonstrated that she had not, in fact, entirely let this go.

“We stole the supplies for hamburgers from a local grocery store, and made Beam cook them,” Pilar said. “We actually almost got caught, pulled over for speeding on the way home. Ariadne told the cop her name was Ariadne Baltimore. Small town, local cops, everybody knew their parents, they figured they’d just miscounted the sisters, and let her go. Idiots.”

Pilar sighed.

“You weren’t allowed to cook because Ariadne needed you by her side,” she explained. “You were her maid of honor for a reason, Cookie. Our crew, our marriage, our family… where would we be without you? Would we even be us?”

Pilar offered Aoibheann another bite, and she didn’t take it. Pilar looked concerned. She hadn’t eaten nearly enough to be satisfied yet.

“What is it?” Pilar asked.

Aoibheann opened her mouth, thought hard, her eyes darting back and forth as though she was trying to make sense of something she couldn’t put words to.

“Aoibheann, are you… are you alright?” Pilar asked. “Should I get Sasha?”

Aoibheann shook her head vigorously. She had been lost in her depression for months, wondering if she was really better off waking up in the morning, but suddenly, the floodgates had come open, and she couldn’t wait one more second to let out what had been eating at her and destroying her soul ever since they’d lost the station.

Her voice was dry and raspy. She had not spoken more than two consecutive words in weeks, and her body vehemently protested the sudden change in this policy.

“Was it my fault?” She asked, thinking back to a conversation she'd had with their tormentor years ago. “Did I do this to us?”

****

“Excellent work today, everyone,” Cookie’s voice boomed through the kitchen. “The festivities went off without a hitch. This is an anniversary our captain won’t soon forget.”

“Thank you, Chef,” her crew echoed back.

“Dismissed,” she said to the assembled kitchen staff, and then quietly approached one of the greener pirates who’d recently started the galley rotation that was mandatory for the whole crew. “Libby, a word?”

Cookie ushered Libby into a small room at the back, which she used for prep when she was working on more intimate, personal projects. This was the room where she prepared birthday meals for Spacebreather, Ariadne, and Sasha. This was the table on which she’d painstakingly crafted Ariadne and Pilar’s wedding cake. The small walk-in freezer was the one where she’d had a brief, clumsy tryst with Blue on a rare visit to the station, after Cookie had enraged her by challenging her to a contest to see who could make a better mole negro oaxaqueño sauce, and then winning it.

Libby had been invited into the inner sanctum, and the look on Cookie’s face made it absolutely clear that it was not an honor.She was in deep trouble. Worse still, there was a salt shaker on the table in front of her.

“Do you think this is funny, lass?” Cookie asked. “Is this a fun game to you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chef,” Libby said, actually looking somewhat convincing.

“The cap of the salt shaker was unscrewed. One shake, and dinner would’ve been ruined.” Cookie said. “It was your responsibility to set the table in the captain’s quarters.”

Libby got immediately defensive. “Anybody could’ve done that,” she said, “I didn’t do it, it’s totally unfair that you--”

“Anybody could’ve,” Cookie said. “But I gave you a responsibility. You were responsible for the Captain’s table. You signed off on a table with an unscrewed salt shaker on it. That makes you responsible for the salt shaker, whether you placed it there or not.”

“How is that fair?” Libby replied indignantly.

“Lass, why do you think Ariadne requires all crew to complete a rotation in my kitchen before they’re cleared for field service?” Cookie asked.

“She needs someone to cook for her?” Libby asked derisively.

Cookie sneered. She did not care for Libby, and never had. The girl seemed to attract drama. How, she wondered, could someone with so few friends be so perpetually in the middle of a falling out with a group of them? “And why do you think my standards are so meticulous?” Cookie asked.

Libby declined to answer, because she knew her honest answer would get her in trouble, but her face betrayed what she wanted to say: “Because you’re a huge bitch?”

Cookie answered her own rhetorical questions. “The skills you need to be successful in here, will be invaluable to you out there. You didn’t go over your loadout with a fine-toothed comb. You didn’t take the responsibilities you were trusted with seriously. You allowed your crewmates to operate with faulty equipment, that, had I not intervened, would’ve caused the mission objective to fail.”

“To be clear,” Libby said, “the ‘mission’ was serving them dinner.”

“IN HERE IT’S DINNER,” Cookie bellowed, her eyes full of all the rage and fire that she kept tamped down in her heart every second of every day, and slammed her fists on the table, knocking down the salt shaker. The chrome lid clattered off, and salt spilled onto the teak countertop. Cookie wordlessly grabbed a pinch of it and tossed it over her left shoulder. “In here, you fail in your duties and it means dinner isn’t very good that night. Out there, you fail in your duties and your sisters in arms die. That’s why Ariadne makes you work with me before you’re allowed to work for her. You can’t be trusted to handle the stakes out there if your team, and your commanding officer, can’t even trust you to do your job correctly when the stakes are only whether tonight’s chicken will be a little dry. Is that crystal clear?”

Libby looked as though she was about to protest, or accuse Cookie of being melodramatic, but Cookie cut her off. “Think very carefully about what you say next,” she said, “and if you’re lost as to what answer I’m looking for...” She pointed at the band that she kept tied around her head, so that even if one of her brilliant red hairs slipped out of its tight bun, it would still not fall into her face. It was white, and said, in bold black text, “YES CHEF.”

Libby grumbled. “Yes, chef,” she said. “next time, I’ll check the table settings more carefully.”

“Glad to hear it,” Cookie said. “But I think it’s important that you know… I know you put the shaker on the table.”

“What?!” Libby snapped.

“If the Captain, or her first mate, were to be poisoned, I would need to be able to verify who’d done the deed.” Cookie said. “Every step of my meal preparation is accounted for. There is a record of every action taken in this kitchen, cupboard-to-table. If something goes wrong with a meal, within seconds I will be able to identify the point of failure and exactly who was responsible for preventing it. Of course, it helps to have a private video feed into the captain’s quarters.”

Cookie tossed her communications device onto the table, and hit play. It projected a small, but surprisingly clear, hologram of Libby setting the table, smirking as though struck with an idea, and unscrewing the cap of the salt shaker.

“You have… a security camera… in their quarters?!” Libby asked.

“I’m the only person in the system they trust with it,” Cookie said. “I trust them with my life, and they trust me with theirs. Now, I gave you a chance to confess to your little prank, and you decided to lie, to pass the buck onto someone else. I’m afraid I can’t let that slide. I’ll have to fail you for this rotation. Come back at the start of the next one and you can reapply.”

“What?!” Libby snapped again. “I’m two days away from finishing! I have to start my galley rotation over again just because you caught me playing a harmless prank on your little pervy peep-show?”

“Call it pervy if you like,” Cookie said dismissively. “The nature of my relationship with the captain and her first mate is enthusiastically sanctioned and is, frankly, none of your concern. The behavior you showed in here, would’ve only spoiled Captain Ariadne’s dinner. If you showed the same level of carelessness and irreverence out there, it might’ve gotten someone killed. ‘Harmless’ indeed. You’re not responsible enough for field work until you can prove you can handle kitchen duty.”

“This is bullshit,” Libby said, gathering up her things to storm out of the room. “Like it even matters whether that bitch’s little dinner is ruined.”

Cookie slammed her fists on the counter again.

“Captain Ariadne is the greatest woman who ever lived,” Cookie growled, “and if I hear you speak of her like that in my presence again, you’ll lose a hell of a lot more than your galley rotation.”

Libby moved to storm out, but Cookie rushed the door and held it shut.

“Now, you listen to me, you little twerp,” Cookie said, jabbing a finger into Libby’s chest, shaking with anger. “That woman pulled me out of the gutter-- pulled all of us out of the gutter. There is nothing more important than the work she does, and we are the beating heart that allows her to do it. So if you want to be a part of this crew, you’ll show her some goddamned respect and start taking your work fucking seriously.”

Libby looked furious.

“What do I want to hear?” Cookie asked pointedly.

Pilar was astonished. “You think… because you were hard on the Nameless in her galley rotation… that she went totally off the rails, tried to kill us, and drove us out of our home?”

“Yes, chef,” Libby grumbled after a beat, and Cookie allowed her to pass.

****

“She tried to say we were like a cult,” Cookie said weakly. “That we were just minions blindly following Ariadne’s orders. That we turned against anybody who didn’t fall in line.”

“Is any of that true?” Pilar asked rhetorically. “Does the crew actually act like that?”

Cookie let the tears come. “I do,” she said. “What if she… how do I know she isn’t holding my devotion, my zeal, against the entire crew?”

“You… blindly follow Ariadne’s orders?” Pilar asked, entirely rhetorically. “That’s a surprise, I thought you really believed in our mission.”

Cookie was taken aback. “I do!’

Pilar smiled. “There’s some of that fire,” she said. “I’ve missed it. Aoibheann… when is the last time Ariadne actually gave you an order?”

Cookie had to think about this, but came up short.

“Exactly,” Pilar said. “This is what’s been eating you, all this time?”

Aoibheann looked afraid to reply, so she just asked what she’d wanted to ask, ever since they were driven out of their home.

“Do you forgive me?” She asked. “Does she… does she forgive me?”

Pilar looked Aoibheann square in the eyes. “Cookie, you’ve never needed our forgiveness. An insane terrorist attacked our home. There’s nothing you could’ve done to prevent that.”

This was not what Aoibheann wanted to hear.

Pilar sighed. “Of course we forgive you, Aoibheann,” she said in a voice that sounded entirely earnest, but using words that betrayed how sarcastic she was being: “for not allowing someone who turned out to be a sexual predator and an actual serial killer tamper with our food and ruin our anniversary. We forgive you for being the most devoted friend we’ve ever had. Because someone else mistreated us, it must’ve been wrong that you treated us right. We will always forgive you for loving us, Aoibheann. You will never lose our forgiveness for that.”

Aoibheann was struck speechless again.

“Don’t go quiet on me,” Pilar said affectionately, “I just got you to talk again! I’ve missed your voice.”

“I appreciate your taking care of me,” Cookie admitted, “while I’ve been… not myself.”

Pilar gently put her hand on Aoibheann’s, and gave it a squeeze, and then told her the most reassuring truth she had.

“The Nameless is a user,” she said. “She wants a bunch of people who act like puppets and put her well-being first. Ariadne spends every second of every day encouraging her crew to think and act for themselves, and to put each other’s well-being above all else. That’s why she thinks Ariadne’s a tyrant. Not because you defended her honor after a sociopath tried to ruin her anniversary and then called her a bitch.”

Aoibheann felt as though she’d just received absolution for something that had been dragging her through the muck for months. How could she not believe Pilar, of all people? She began to cry openly.

“Hey, hey,” Pilar said, “it’s okay! I got you.”

“I’ve let the crew down,” she said, “had them eating this flavorless mush for however many months. I’ll be back at a stove first thing in the morning, don’t you worry--”

Pilar laughed. “Aoibheann… Cookie, I’m glad you’re back but… don’t push yourself too hard, okay? Let your apprentices handle it for a bit. Besides, you haven’t walked by yourself in a pretty long time. It’ll take a bit before you’re seaworthy again, let alone fit to run a kitchen.”

Aoibheann looked downcast. “Well, I’ve spent enough time sitting around like a lump being no good to anybody,” she said indignantly.

“You’re plenty good to us,” Pilar said flatly, “just by being here. We love you, Cookie. You don’t need to… justify your existence by being a devoted servant.”

Aoibheann was uncomfortable with this sentiment, and it showed on her face. This was, after all, how she showed her affection for Ariadne and Pilar. How could she show them her love and devotion without being able to cook for them?

“I don’t know how to…” Cookie began. “Please… Please, just… tell me what to do.”

Pilar sighed. She knew Cookie was far too devoted to her duties to go completely without orders. “She and I will be back in a few hours, for dinner. Let her hear your voice. Tell her you love her, and wish her luck on her procedure. If you have the strength, give her a hug. And, most importantly, just… please, be okay. Be kind to yourself and take all the time you need to get back on your feet. We’ve only got the one Cookie, so take care of her for us, okay?”

Cookie smiled, and squeezed Pilar’s hand back with what little strength she could muster.

Pilar picked up the now-empty tray that the MRE had been on. “Now that you’re back, do I have your permission to start up the kitchens? Let your apprentices do some real cooking?”

Cookie nodded her head.

“Then I guess this is truly an event worth of celebration: you’ve had your last Meal-Ready-To-Eat,” Pilar laughed. “I’ll see you tonight, Cookie. I want to put some meat back on your bones, so I’ll be cooking, and I expect you to be looking over my shoulder and barking orders at me the whole time.”

Cookie looked at her and smiled, and Pilar’s heart melted. It had been a long time since anyone had seen that.

****

Cookie’s apprentices stood in a straight line at the back of the Hotpot Spot, an abandoned restaurant that Sweettalk had identified as her childhood favorite. Cookie, wearing the chef’s coat she’d fled the station in, freshly laundered, and her trademark “YES CHEF” headband, limped into the restaurant, supported by a cane that Sweettalk had fished out of her childhood home, and said had belonged to her grandfather.

Cookie was still not back to full strength, but her apprentices could see the fire they’d come to fear and love had returned to her eyes.

“As you may have noticed,” Cookie announced, the natural loudness of her voice undiminished by her time indisposed, “I have been… unwell, of late. As such, I am unable to resume my duties at this time.”

Her staff turned to her chief apprentice, Yellow, for guidance. Yellow remained silent, so the rest of them did as well.

“It’s alright, kids,” she said, stamping the cane on the ground loudly. “You don’t have to pretend. I’m not my old self yet. It’s fine. I wouldn’t feel right resuming my post here anyhow. This isn’t my kitchen. I’ve called you all here because you are the apprentices most equipped to run a kitchen of your own.”

Yellow nodded in assent.

“As such, I have a new directive for each of you, until such time as we’ve retrieved my kitchen, and I’m back to my usual vim and vigor, each of you is to select one of the defunct restaurants in this town, take your pick of the remaining staff and any available volunteers, and you will run your kitchens to the standard I have taught you.”

Cookie sighed.

“I know what you all think,” she said. “I know what you’ve said to me, in the past. You think your best is only a pale imitation of my cooking. But I need you all to know that… isn’t true.”

“Chef?” Yellow asked.

“I was the fourth person on this crew, lass,” Cookie said. “The first person to join, after the founding members. At the beginning, we had one mission: Keep Sasha Fed. There is nothing I value more highly than that mission. I live for it, and if I’m blessed with the chance, I will happily die for it. We may have expanded the definition of ‘Sasha’ to include everyone we love, but this mission is and will always be my life’s labor. Food doesn’t just sustain us. It is love, in physical form. The Captain and the First Mate have been very gracious to me, in the time we’ve known each other, by allowing me to show them my love and devotion in the way I’m able to offer. Over the last nine months, they have shown me the devotion was not one-sided, and given me the love I was able to accept. So your mission is, as it always has been: get in the kitchen, and show your love to the crew. Fill their bowls with it, in the way only you can, with or without me. And when your cup is empty…”

Cookie choked up a bit, and did a halfway decent job masking it.

“...When your cup is empty, allow those who love you to fill it back up, until you’re ready to pour from it again.”

After a long, uncomfortable beat, her crew shouted back “Yes, Chef!”

“I have been derelict in my duties,” Cookie said. “I let you go this many months without loving one another properly, because you wouldn’t do it without me.”

“Chef, permission to speak freely?” One of her younger apprentices, a quiet young boy who specialized in pastries, piped up.

“Granted,” Cookie said.

“You never ordered us not to run the kitchens without you. In fact, before…” He paused carefully, then opted to leave it unsaid, “before, you always taught us how to take the lead for the rest of the crew, when you had to cook for the Captain’s table. We wouldn’t run the kitchens without your say-so because…”

“It’s okay, lad, no need to be scared of the likes of me,” she reassured him.

“We were ordered not to,” he told her. “The Captain was very clear: ‘There’s no crew without Cookie.’”

Cookie leaned on her cane and looked a bit sad.

“She couldn’t handle it, Chef,” Yellow explained. “Knowing somebody else was doing your work, while you were suffering the way you were.”

Now Cookie could feel her heart melt. “She said that, did she?”

The young baker boy winced. “She said that there’s nothing more important than the work you do, and that everything the crew does, is just so you can do it,” he said. “She said… well, she said she was derelict in her duty to you, and that she couldn’t replace you until she’d made it right. Until you’d forgiven her for letting you down.”

Cookie laughed. “We’ve known each other a long time, indeed,” she said. “The captain is a sentimental one, I’m afraid. She blames herself for all this. For my condition. Don’t tell her I said this, but she’s still more Catholic than she’d like to admit.”

Everyone’s eyes flared at this. Of course none of them would tell her she’d said that, as they all valued keeping their heads attached to their necks too much. Cookie was one of the only people in the system who could get away with saying something like that in front of Ariadne.

“She could never let me down if she tried,” Cookie said, “and even if she did, I will always forgive her. That you can repeat to her. Now, that’s enough prattling on from an old fool. You all have restaurants to open. To work!”

“Yes, Chef!” Her apprentices all shouted, and broke formation to claim their restaurants.

“And remember,” she shouted after them. “If you talk to the Captain, this was her idea!”

She had, in fact, passed her forgiveness along to Ariadne the previous day, before her surgery, and assured her that she didn’t need forgiveness, the same way Pilar had done to her. After her procedure, Ariadne wouldn’t remember Cookie giving her consent to reopen the kitchens, but she was delighted that when she came out of it, she seemingly remembered, on some level, that she had been absolved of all wrongdoing.

She was relieved when, during the fight Alicia staged with her, Ariadne had suggested they put her apprentices to work in the kitchens. Despite being set back several months, she was done punishing herself, and letting everyone else punish themselves with her. It was a do-over many were not fortunate enough to get, and after all she’d lost, Aoibheann was not one to turn her nose up at a second chance.

****

Months later, when all this was over and Sasha’s medicine and a lot of good eating had restored her muscles into mostly proper working order-- she still felt uneasy at times, and preferred to keep the cane on hand, just in case-- they were repatriated to their home, the Nameless had been defeated, and the station had erupted into a celebratory frenzy. Yellow and the kitchen staff had burned the candle at both ends to supply enough party snacks to keep anyone from drowning in all the wine. Two former crew members, Baltimore and Beam, had returned to the station to join in the celebrations. Sweettalk and Sasha had, believing themselves slick, pulled Ghostrunner and her new girlfriend Vigil back to their quarters. Alicia had brought Blue back to the station and, in the haze of wine, loudly announced her intention to start a relationship with her, before disappearing back to her own quarters. Cookie and Blue had, despite their past rivalry, a deep, abiding respect for one another, and Blue was one of the few people who was authorized to do as she pleased in the kitchen. Cookie knew firsthand that after Blue’s enthusiastic and athletic lovemaking, she would likely need something to eat, and a bit more wine, so she’d set a bottle of red and a bowl of fresh mozzarella in conspicuous locations in the hopes that she would find them. Cookie was, uncharacteristically, not in the kitchen that night.

If she had learned anything from the past year, it was that she had to sometimes set the weight of the world down, and allow the people she loved to take care of her as much as she took care of them. So, as had become tradition, once per month, she would retire to the Captain’s quarters instead of her own, and allow her friends to show them how much they loved her. Pilar spent the day marinating meats, just the way Cookie had taught her, and Ariadne had built a heating element into her personal dining table so that Pilar could cook them some of Cookie’s favorite foods.

They would then retire to the bedroom for a night of passion-- Ariadne always had some new device she’d built and wanted to show off. Being married to Spacebreather, she was in the unfortunate position of being a bit of a pillow princess, but not on pillow principle, and so never had anyone else to use it on, and Cookie was the only person other than Ariadne who Spacebreather was willing to touch. They would spend this time laughing, and experimenting, and making sure not an inch of her, or the captain, went unkissed, and then they would fall asleep in each other’s arms, all the while gossiping and reminiscing the way they had back on Mars.

Sometimes, on these nights, Cookie would think back to what Spacebreather said to her, during her episode, about how if she ever wanted something more between them, she could have it.

The thing was, she didn’t want something more. She treasured these nights they had together, but as far as she was concerned, nothing had changed about what they were to her. They were her best friends, and they were her calling in life. She would, to the best of her ability, serve their mission with almost religious zeal. Even unto her death, she would prioritize keeping her loved ones happy and healthy. She had already loved them, more, she believed, than she could ever love anyone else, even when they had started an exclusive relationship with one another, and she was just a heartbroken teenager pining after them both. How could she want something more, when she couldn’t even imagine something better than what she already had?

The first time the three of them had ever fallen into bed together, years after Ariadne and Pilar had made it clear they were soulmates, they had been a ball of teenage hormones, propelled by a raunchy party game that had gotten a bit out of hand. Aoibheann had awoken mortified and furious at herself for daring to succumb to her own desires like this. Her whole life, whenever she’d allowed herself to love something, it was taken away, and that only when she accepted that something was beyond her grasp, would she stand a chance of being lucky enough to attain it. She was sure that by admitting to her wants, and acting on them, she had ruined everything. Except, Ariadne and Pilar noticed her embarrassment and simply chose to behave as though nothing had changed. It had happened only occasionally in the past, and each time, Ariadne and Pilar would wait for Cookie to bring it up. Otherwise, it was completely unspoken.

The one crucial difference was, now, Aoibheann “Cookie” Gyeong, once the saddest girl on Mars, had finally accepted that it was okay to want, and to act on those wants, that this was not following the goblin lights to her death as her mother had. She, who loved her life so much that she shut down for the better part of a year when she feared it had changed irreparably, spent most of her time refusing to acknowledge what she loved about it. She did her job, showed her love, and asked for nothing in return except for the ability to keep doing it.

“You know,” Ariadne said, running her fingers through Aoibheann’s long, smooth, bright red hair, as a sleeping Pilar cradled them both in her arms, “we don’t do any of this for you. We do it because we like doing it. It’s fun for us.”

Cookie laughed. “Oh, I hadn’t noticed,” she quipped.

Ariadne smiled, and told her something she’d waited years to be sure Cookie would be ready to hear. “Thank you,” she said, “for being my friend. For loving me. For making what we do worth it.”

Aoibheann shot a smile right back. “I could say the same to you.”