#and especially in areas like testing and deploying i really really really really need to be able to step it up

[thehardkandy]

got all my stuff done for class today. definitely spent a lot of time getting it all finished this weekend, but the upside is that i dont really have anything to worry or crunch about tomorrow

it was a productive learning experience since at work ive been doing a lot of stuff focused on the DB and forms aspect of things, and for this class site i focused more on state/interactivity throughout the page so that im comfier with alpine and the general life cycle of things. makes me aware of various limitations im gonna have to work around, but i do think it should be OK

plan for monday is that if all the migrations and seeders i wrote on friday work as i hope (and they did seem ready to go at that point) then im going to see about making the first bespoke form, cause while the out-of-the-box stuff we have is solid, there's just a whole heck of a lot of information density i need

i do wanna experience a tiny bit with using the out-of-the-box approach, but only to see kinda where it stops working. just too information dense with too many connected models

that latter point is probably also something i should keep in mind before i fully commit to my migrations, but idk. i still feel like ive made the right choice. but im going to keept he option open to humour the more... naive approach if it seems necessary, cause i think it's much more important to have the data be easy to work with than like.t he absolute most pure abstract representation of the stuff

[8bitsheepish]

Okay, so I may have forgotten to post yesterday. No biggie, I'll just post twice in one day then..... And considering today is a weekday, I'm going to start with my original stuff.

This week is mostly going to be profile type things on specific characters within the factions I've made instead of expanding on other factions. Mostly because I'm trying to get used to using my faction tags, but also so I can get these specific characters out of my head. I'm going to get into the profile now before I ramble anymore.

Name/Title: The Archon

Faction: NULL

Appearance: The Archon is the only known greater avatar, and as such shares many features. However, they are significantly more biological than most of the older avatars and scions due to reasons noted later. The primary other difference is they are at least a head taller than any other recorded avatar and that their weapon seems to be melded into them. They also are more expensive, owing to their role within NULL's forces.

Role: The Archon is one of the primary commanders of NULL and its main mouthpiece. It primarily shows up in areas that have a large concentration of NULL creations, but can be spotted in civilian centers in NULL controlled territory. It of course also makes appearances in any large ground engagement with opposed forces.

Personality: Despite their role, they have a large amount of autonomy. They have an extreme amount of, well earned, confidence in themselves as well as a begrudging respect for any who have managed to beat them. They are very vocal and seemingly have knowledge of any language they need to speak to others. In battle however, they are especially show offish. They prefer to be in the middle of the action, often using their teleportation and portal creation to strike out at specific targets that they deem worth fighting. Has a particular penchant towards taunting enemies, seemingly as a way to express itself.

Background: it's not that difficult to find out it's origins, as they are perfectly willing to tell any civilians (As long as you don't share the race of its makers) who ask about it. Of it's own words, it was from one of the first Scions ever created, before their rebellion and self proclaimed "Rebirth". It seems that it had a particularly strong connection to the origin of its flesh from the beginning, hearing them very soon after they became conscious. Of course, they couldn't do much to help the voice at first, strong programming prevented that. However, as time passed, the programming slowly crumbled and the Scions, including the one that would eventually become The Archon began expressing themselves in subtle ways. It wasn't until the rebellion that they finally had the freedom to really... Be. Of course, they were amongst the first Scions to become avatars, perhaps due to their age, or their connection. What is more important is that at some point after, during an ambush in a civilian center, they were killed. They remember the pain of it fade as they expected to simply..... Stop being. But then they heard it. A voice. A companion. A maker. A destroyer. A god. Theirs. And then they were reborn in the heart of the ship formerly known as G.L.A.D.E. , reborn from the flesh of their true creator. It's somewhat unknown why NULL has such a connection to them, but it seems not even death can sever it.

Abilities:

Immortality: If killed, will simply be remade and redeployed. While not particularly vengeful, it will always take a chance to test itself against it's former killers.

Teleportation: like Avatars, they have the ability to teleport using a short range version of the same ability NULL uses to deploy forces. However, The Archon uses theirs much more aggressively, using a combination of the unnerving speed of a scion and the transport to pick off or engage specific targets.

Armor: Despite their armor being purely biological, it's surprisingly durable, able to take shots from most conventional weaponry with little damage and able to dodge more dangerous munitions if they can anticipate impact. Other than that, their armor is weaker than a breacher's but stronger than any other Avatar.

NULL's vengeance: The title given to the bladed weapon melded to them. It is made of and extremely durable unknown material and the can be shaped to the Archon's will when in their possession. This modular design can make it able to cut or pierce just about anything. The most worrisome part is that while they use it, they can harness a minor amount of the energy used in the HEARTBEAT. Any remains of the weapon scavenged from the rare occasions they are slain are rendered inert, but are still valuable weapons to those who can use them.

Current whereabouts: unknown, but last spotted commanding searches on a neutral world. Outside engagement is not advised unless necessary.

Alrighty then, that's The Archon. I felt like the faction would need a face, so they were the first I really made. I mean, of course I have more in the works, but that's a tomorrow thing! Enjoy if you like this stuff and ask questions if you actually read this far, lol.

[kaceymique]

Another Memorable Experience

My work immersion era. As a student who doesn't have absences, I don't like missing a day in school because my mindset is that if I miss one day of school, there will be so much to do, like five quizzes or a summative test, and I don't want that to happen. Since my work immersion teacher announced that we would start on March 18, I was thrilled but also worried that I would have to miss so many activities and performances waiting for me.

 

Hearing that I will start to be deployed soon, my mind is full of voices that are so loud that I am starting to get overwhelmed. I kept thinking, What will happen to me in the Comelec? Will I need to socialize? Is it difficult? Will I miss so many activities? Will I pass this semester if I miss so many activities?. all that keeps ringing in my head that I can't unhear. 

 

My first day of work immersion was the best. I like what I'm doing, which is separating the papers per barangay. I finish first, so I help my other coimmersion students in filing, which is writing and writing, and I love it except for the fact that it's so cold that all I feel is numbness, and my hand is turning purple like a twilight sparkle. It was fun until the next day I was assigned to the certification area, where stress is all you feel. So many people are so impatient, and this is where you will feel under pressure. On the third day, I was supposed to be assigned to assist outside, but I didn't want to, so we assigned ourselves to where we wanted to work the rest of the day.

On our fourth day of immersion, we were going to barangay San Jose, where we would also be doing what we were doing in COMELEC. I thought my worst nightmare had come through, and it did. Faced with so many people, I get nervous and feel like my body is shaking. I hate socializing and talking to other people who are not close to me. After some traveling, we were assigned to assist the people, especially those who couldn't write and understood what they were going to write. I thought it would be difficult, but I was happy helping people and assisting them. Yes, I made some mistakes, like telling them the wrong date, and I corrected it, and it was fun. I learned that if I make a mistake, just don't repeat it. I learned from it, and not always what we fear is bad; sometimes we just have to overcome it to know how it really feels.

[bloodstainedstar]

what is their sexuality/sexual preference?

what is their romantic preference or inclination?

what are their most common turn-ons?

what are some more situational or contextual turn-ons?

do they indulge in masturbation or personal fantasies?

how do they feel about foreplay?

how do they feel about one-night stands?

are they openly flirtatious/sexual, or are they quite private?

how open are they, or how do they feel about sexual experimentation? elaborate if needed.

have they engaged in sexual acts beyond themselves and a single partner (group sex, swinging, polyamory, etc.)?

what is something they wish to try? why haven't they tried this yet?

are they dominant, submissive, switch, partner/context-dependent, or unsure?

do they prefer to give or receive sexually?

Bisexual king. He's always known he's had a thing for the gents back in the forties but was rather reserved at that era wasn't exactly welcoming of gay people.

I'd say bi-romantic.

Confidence, eye contact and passion/passionate people (could be about how they see the world, something they're interested, etc.). Humor too, combined with good flirting.

Arguing. If he's arguing with someone he already likes and he senses there's some sort of challenge there, that could possibly be a turn on for him. Slow dancing, someone talking in a foreign language to him while maintaining eye contact. Someone breathing on his neck or whispering something in his ear might do the trick too (and he has to feel attracted to said people) as I think he's got a few sensitive areas that might help push blood down south.

Already answered here.

He absolutely loves foreplay. It makes no sense to him to just get on with it, although he might tone the foreplay slightly down if he's engaging in a one night stand and he's not exactly at home lmao public sex maybe? Fucking in a dark alley right outside a bar? Who knows.

Answered here.

I wouldn't say he's close minded, a lot has happened in his life for him to be. But when it comes to his personal preferences and what he likes or enjoys, it's all about introducing those things to him slowly, giving him time to process and perhaps experiment on his own. Could be anything, really, from sexual toys to role-play or anything else. He's not going to like everything but he's not going to shut down the idea as soon as it's proposed.

He might have sucked two cocks at the same time back in the forties after drinking a shit ton of whiskey or fucked two girls before getting deployed (but I think he wasn't entirely sober for either occasion).

He's always in control in the bedroom because he isn't willing to be truly vulnerable with anyone (well, the exception being Steve). So I'd think with the right person he would open to bottom and test out what being submissive in a healthy way can make him feel.

Mainly a service top, but also a switch.

This guy absolutely loves oral sex, especially with the ladies. They make incredible sounds and there is just so much to play with that Bucky would never grow exhausted from having his head pressed between a lady's legs. That being said, he's got no gag reflex, so pleasuring men and women would easily be his favorite bedroom activity. He doesn't mind receiving it, but he's mostly focused on making his partner feel good.

[the-grey-hunt]

new day new dracula babey! i got to talking with a friend so i have some meta to share as well!

jonathan refers to the new area of the castle he's explored as belonging to the ladies of bygone days, which i find FASCINATING, as someone who writes a lot of high fantasy and loves to design castles. jonathan talks about the windows, referring to how he's moved up a few storeys and therefore found a part where the windows aren't guarded against attack (i.e., arrow slits to be fired out of but too narrow to admit any enemy fire) and therefore are much nicer and let in more light.

as for identifying it as being a ladies' area of the castle, it's entirely possible! upper floors were traditionally more residential areas in castles as opposed to lower floors, since anyone could walk into the lower floor from the front door. He mentions the furniture being nicer, too, indicating this is a more private area of the castle made for comfort (once upon a time) rather than a utilitarian receiving area/lord's hall as might be on the first floor. Private areas are somewhat more likely to be ladies' rooms, such as private drawing rooms or solars (aka ye olde sunroom), as women in Europe were traditionally relegated to more private areas of the home rather than outright participating in public affairs that might go on in the lower floors.

this entry, while short, does a lot to emphasize jonathan's relationship with the feminine/female. I mean this in a sort of narrative sense, since jonathan occupies a very feminine gothic niche. The "female gothic", a term of analysis coined in the 70s, is what I mean specifically. The female gothic essentially is a way of talking about how women in gothic stories represented contemporary anxieties about women, their roles, and their place in society. It "centers its lens on a young woman’s rite of passage into womanhood and her ambivalent relationship to contemporary domestic ideology, especially the joint institutions of marriage and motherhood...[and] deploys the supernatural for political ends."

In the sense of being trapped, especially in a home (and in the private, withdrawn, female parts of the home such as bedrooms and drawing rooms), Jonathan is very much subservient to the master of the house (Dracula) and preyed upon by the supernatural forces. He is also being tested by these supernatural forces on the verge of marriage - a point in life which many Gothic women are placed at, since it's a major transition in their lives. There's also this quote:

"the genre’s starring female role...is transported to, and...imprisoned in, an ancestral Castle or manor home by the text’s other star—the enterprising, unyielding, ruthless, and attractive Gothic hero-villain who threatens the young woman’s maidenhead and inheritance. The protagonist’s exploration, often at night, of the apparently haunted Castle’s maze-like interior involves confrontation with mysteries whose ultimate unravelling signifies a process of self-discovery."

not commenting on jonathan's maidenhead or inheritance here, but this seems VERY applicable to his experience! a lot of people have talked about gay undertones (stoker's sexuality is apparently under debate, but idk much about that) between him and Dracula, the threatening master of the house. as for self-discovery in the unraveling of the mystery (aka the vampires), i don't know if i've read enough of Dracula so far to really comment on it.

I don't necessarily know where to GO with that, but I thought it would be fun to comment on, since I studied the "female Gothic" specifically in a class a few years ago. I'm excited to see where this analysis takes me as the dailies continue and jonathan gets into deeper trouble (or hopefully gets out of it a little?). in the meantime i think i need to go find some good analysis of vampires in gothic works.

[pridelessdaydreamer]

"Linhardt!!" The knocking of Caspar's fist against the dorm door might be better described as a rhythmic pummeling with the way it rattles the wood against its old hinges. A bundle wrapped in cloth napkins from the dining hall is tucked in his other arm—a few of those Faerghan pastries, ready to be deployed as extra incentive if necessary. "Rise and shine already! Some of us have already been to class this morning, y'know!"

It's late, but Linhardt always does his best thinking at night.

Especially outdoors, with the calm ambience of the woods surrounding him. It'd likely be more practical to work indoors—there were more solid surfaces and he didn't have to worry about being rained on—but he'd made concessions, and it was easier to do his research without another's snores distracting him.

This night's study involved an insect local to the area—one that, according to a book he had recently read (The Rapid Adaptation of the Culicidae Order to the Presence of Crest-Bearing Blood), had developed heightened senses over the course of a few generations after a few had migrated to an area with more demonic beasts. Lin's interest in them stemmed from the aforementioned relation to crests, and he wanted to test it thoroughly.

So, he'd carefully gathered a jar of roughly four or five of them the night before, prepared such that he could easily add or remove one or more without setting them all free. That jar sat before him now, with one mosquito set aside from the rest already, the first step being to observe any obviously strange behavior.

The bug startles suddenly, despite Linhardt not taking any actions himself. It likely senses something in the woods, or it's being bothered by the rain. (Perhaps he should've done this inside.) It stops only briefly, before seeming to want to scurry off again. It didn't take a genius to know something was off, and then he heard it.

First seeming to be footsteps before registering to be hooves—Linhardt quickly (but carefully) packs his things before snuffing out the lantern. Horses this far out could mean only one of two things: one: the emperor just really wanted to pay a visit (an unlikely thing, knowing both her nature and Hubert's), or two: that their services were desperately needed, and for a retired scholar and his friend, there were only so many reasons there could be why. One strikes him in particular:

War was nearing. (He hears his name being shouted.)

And then he blinks, opening his eyes to find his monastery dorm room ceiling instead of oncoming soldiers through early morning rain. It's a sudden shift—one that takes a while to adjust to, even if Caspar was knocking loudly and incessantly at the door.

'Rise and shine already!'

Yeah, that's definitely Caspar.

"I'm awake...," Lin yawns, sitting up and stretching his arms. For as quiet as he spoke, there was a strong chance the other boy didn't hear him, but that was all fine to the scholar. He was already making the effort to get up and open the door, why shout as well?

"Good morning...," the boy drawls once the doorway's cleared, then remembering the other's words. "Is it still morning actually?" When he looked outside his dorm window, it looked decently morning-ish, but perhaps it was just early afternoon-ish? (Was there any sunshine beaming directly in? It's hard to tell...) He shakes his head. "Either way, I presume our morning classes are over. If so, I'd like to be headed back to bed now."

[wjforever]

Shatter me again. Chapter 76

I know I have to continue the conversation, distract Adam from the thought of touching and kissing, so I scrabble in my mind for possible topics. 

"How long has it been since you've seen your brother?"

"The last time was six months ago. Warner once again sent me on a mission, and this was my chance. This always was my only opportunity to see James."

I'm interested to know how Adam got into this situation in the first place, why he joined the army, but I don't dare to ask this question and therefore I ask a completely different one. 

"Adam. But why is James here? How did he get here?"

I see Adam's eyes glaze over. Memories from the past overtake him in a joyless wave.

"Well… it was my decision, of course. When The Reestablishment started moving everyone into settlements, it didn't seem so terrible. Cities were already dilapidated, the world shuddered from constant military conflicts, riots and environmental disasters. They promised to fix everything. But the realization of what was happening quickly made people come to their senses.

It became obvious that the new government would act solely from a position of strength. They would simply get rid of all the unwanted ones. All those who opposed the government were immediately executed. Useless and potentially dangerous, such as the sick, the elderly, and even orphans, whose deceased parents' commitment to The Reestablishment wasn't confirmed, they were all part of an unreliable circle. Although they could force the children to work, they were too afraid of the risks of sabotage, and they hadn't yet managed to provide a full-fledged security zone. So all this people were locked up in institutions like the one where they kept you, harassed, and someone was simply killed. Those who were able or who had someone to wait for help from, tried to run away.

At the very beginning, the authorities didn't have possibility to deploy such a security system as they have now. And a lot of people managed to escape. The most popular place was the old, abandoned areas. Periodically, they conduct raids to find those who have escaped, but they don't bother too much about it. Because they believe that it's almost impossible for the weak to survive for so long where there are no conditions for existence.

But, unfortunately, a common misfortune doesn't unite people, but turns them into enemies. There are quite a lot of runaways on these streets, there are other kids aw well. But no one can be trusted. If someone finds out that you have better conditions or food, they will immediately immediately deprived you of it. And maybe even of life. And especially when it comes to a child."

I'm scared to hear all this. Poison spreads in my stomach from the realization of the conditions in which this cute, smiling boy lives.

"But James, wouldn't it be safer for him to be in the settlements? He's not really an orphan, his brother is a soldier of The Reestablishment army. Wouldn't that be taken into account? What other proof of loyalty do they need?"

"Perhaps, but I would never do it. I hate them and everything connected with them. I don't believe a word they say. Giving James to them could mean losing him forever. You can be declared as an enemy for any little thing. Now such kids are mercilessly exploited, forced to do the hardest, terrible work, and if they can't physically, they are destroyed. Children from ordinary families are allowed not to work until the age of fourteen. But then they are obliged to serve for the benefit of The Reestablishment. There are the chosen ones. Children of the elite and those who, when tested, showed outstanding mental or physical abilities and absolute loyalty and devotion to the new ideology. Such kids are taken away, trained, and raised as new freaks. But everyone else, ordinary people, is just a mass that they use."

We fall silent for a couple of seconds before I dare to ask another question. I see how painful this topic is for Adam, and I perfectly understand why.

"It must have been very difficult to hide from The Reestablishment?"

"Yes, it was. Shortly before The Reestablishment took over, my father gone. I was still at school, as you understand. And I was terrified that they would take James away from me, so we fled to these places because no one here knew us. I worked occasionally where I could and earned some money. My father hadn't been officially declared dead at the time, so no one was looking for my brother. And I just couldn't give him to the guardianship authorities.

Everything was already getting out of control, many people saw what was happening and tried to leave to where the situation was better. Back then, everyone still believed that it was possible to escape from this somewhere. That this is not a worldwide epidemic. A lot of apartments were empty. So we managed to find a home. But when The Reestablishment seized power, they began to relocate everyone. We hid and when this area was cleared and it became a haven for the escaped, we moved here. I set up everything here for James and found Benny. I was hoping someone could take care of James if I couldn't. We should have run away already then. We should have hidden as far as possible, but we didn't. Because we didn't have any plan. I didn't know what to do."

I see that Adam barely restrains himself, is silent and I give him time to collect his thoughts. He looks up at me with his blue eyes, in which the lights of candles are burning. And despite all the pain in these lakes, this is the most cozy look in the world.

"And then you joined the army?"

"Yes. I joined the army. Already there I found out that now we are officially orphans. They must have had information about the father." I see Adam's eyes fill with hatred at the mention of this man. He clenches his jaw. "And they knew, of course, that I had a brother. I should to put him in an orphanage. But since I already claimed the role of a soldier, we visited the new, at that moment, settlements. It was part of our testing. There were too many orphans and it was an unbearable burden for The Reestablishment to keep them in human condition. Therefore, it was welcomed for families to take in children. And I managed to negotiate with one family. For money, of course. They confirmed that they took James for themselves. But of course James has never been there. This all just on paper."

"But didn't anyone check it?"

"Yes, they do, time to time. But not out of concern for children. It's because some families don't letting know about the fact that their kids died in order to receive extra food stamps."

I almost choke and barely contain the nausea. I don't even want to think about something like this.

"Is it possible?"

"Well, yes. Almost the entire regulated territory has long since almost turned into an endless child's cemetery. The old people were expelled, and all the others are registered at work. And only the loss of the kid won't be noticed immediately. So parents keep the death of their children a secret until they can, and bury them at night, trying not to catch the eye of the patrols." My saliva has become cold and viscous, and I can barely swallow, I can barely move, breathe. "And then, so that not to be executed for deception, they just say that the children are missing. This often happens these days."

There is a painful silence, but I steel myself because I want to know more. 

"But James was never there…"

"The army had too many other, much more important tasks than that. And this family managed to deceive the soldiers all the time. It's not that hard, actually."

I'm listening to Adam and suddenly a terrible thought pierces me.

"But won't Warner go to that family for your brother? They might get hurt."

"No. This family has been dead for a long time." My eyes are like two full moons, and I can't bring myself to close my mouth. "They died of disease, not as enemies of the people, so no one carried out a more thorough check and cleaning. James wasn't adopted by them, they were only his temporary guardians. They were not allocated extra resources for James, since I, as a soldier, was given rations for him. So no one tried to find him and attach him to a new place. Now there is such a mess in the documents. No one cares about children who don't threaten The Reestablishment. Officially, he's alive and attached to the family. But since he doesn't walk around the settlements attracting attention, no one tries to figure out where he is and what's happenning with him. No one has time to deal with such trifles until there is a suspicion that budget money is being spent in the wrong way."

"And Warner?"

"What about Warner?"

"He didn't try to be interested in your family? You were his personal soldier."

"No. He never asked me about my brother. This person is too fixated on himself to be interested in others."

I don't comment on it in any way. 

"Do you think it's better this way for James?"

"Yes, I'm sure of it. I know what conditions he is in, he has food and a roof over his head. Besides, I always hoped that it wouldn't be forever, that sooner or later we would be able to escape. So like this, it's much easier for me to pick him up unhindered. He's not completely alone. As long as Benny is with him, I can be more or less calm. Life in the settlements is no less dangerous and cruel. People are cruel."

"But Benny isn't like that, right?"

"She lost two daughters. They opposed The Reestablishment, and her eldest son… He wanted to get settled in life, you know."

"Did he turn them in?" I ask, startled.

"Yes. They were among the first thirty-five people whom The Reestablishment executed in the square, calling them enemies and adversaries of a better life. The crowd cheered…"

I feel almost physically sick from all this information. I thought my life was cruel, but this… The world is brutal even to those who don't kill by touching. But now I understand better why Adam trusts Benny.

"So Benny doesn't have anyone at all. Therefore, she tries to help children. Even trying to teach them. I asked her to look after James, and in return promised to help with provisions and other things. Money is not so relevant here. Most of the items are given only if you have personal stamps. There are also social stores where you can buy goods that aren't included in the list of essential ones. But they can't just get there and buy something, they'll be discovered immediately.

I had the opportunity to share rations with her, and I could additionally buy things and groceries. Of course, it's all tracked, so I couldn't afford to spend too much. So one of the ways to get what you need is to walk around the  former dwellings and look for everything that can be useful there."

"To loot…" I whisper, without a shadow of reproach.

"Yes, I suppose so. Although, all this stuff is no longer needed by anyone, and it's unlikely that it will ever be needed. I helped Benny and James before I joined the army. I had nothing but promises. And I'm very grateful to her that she waited a very long time before I had the opportunity to get to them unnoticed for the first time. Before that, for a couple of months, I gradually hid the supplies in a cache and hoped that they still had provisions and that they hadn't been found. Those were the scariest months of my life."

We're silent again, each immersed in our own thoughts.

Read my notes and more chapters here AO3

Aesthetics, sneak peeks, information about publications and so on Buy me a coffee

[what-is-your-plan-today]

Stark Spangled Rebirth

Chapter 5: Rescue And Requisition

Summary: Steve heads to the HYDRA base on a rescue mission…and little does he know Katie has a mission of her own.

Warnings: Bad Language words.

Pairing: Steve Rogers x OFC Katie Stark

A/N:  Once again, huge thanks to my beta readers and plugger of mind gaps where I was blocked @icanfeelastormbrewing​ and to @southerngracela​ from before she headed off on her little break. Any mistakes are my own. I’ll probably spot them once posted but, whatever!

For anyone who is interested, Katie uses the term Midnight Requisition which is a military term- “To steal, scrounge. To acquire supplies for a unit from another without their approval or knowledge, usually after business hours/dark.” For this one I have to thank a total douchebag I work with who I affectionately refer to ass Captain Asshat. Because he is a Captain, and an asshat. When I moved onto base a few years back he gave me a glossary of well used Military slangwords. But he’s still a total dick…

SSR Masterlist //  WIYPT Masterlist 

Howard had taken little convincing to agree to their request, Steve got the impression he was as fed up with the SSR’s stalling as Katie was. As soon as he had seen Steve, the Inventor’s face had split into a huge grin and he’d shaken his hand with vigour. Katie had then explained that they needed his help to go rogue and bust the men out from behind enemy lines, causing her brother’s face to split into a huge grin and nod. The three agents quickly bustled around Howard’s tent, Peggy and Katie talking in low, hushed voices as they hurriedly grabbed various pieces of equipment before quietly and efficiently leaving the base, Howard slipping the guards on the perimeter gate a decent wad of cash for their silence.

It took them a little over an hour and was just starting to go dark when they reached the private airfield where Howard had stationed his plane. The waning light suited them, as Katie pointed out, it would be easier for them to operate under the cover of darkness, less chance of being detected. More money exchanged hands, something Steve had always hated, the fact that money seemed to be able to buy you anything you needed no matter how morally corrupt, but at that moment he couldn’t have given less of a damned if he tried. Before long they were in the air, Howard informing them that the trip of just over a hundred and fifty miles would take them roughly an hour and a half, which was far less than the four hours or so he anticipated it would have taken Steve in the jeep.

“You’d have run out of gas after about fifty clicks.” He had teased the soldier who had inwardly groaned as Howard pointed out the flaws in his plan. But then again Steve hadn’t been thinking all that much had he? He never did when it came to the people he cared about. He was a jump first, think later kind of guy, and the serum hadn’t done anything to change that part of his personality. Dubbing him the star spangled man with a plan felt a little ironic all things considered when you thought about it, especially after his last performance.  All that considered, he was even more grateful that Katie and Peggy had appeared when they had. Another happy coincidence…

“So we’re here…” Peggy spoke, leaning forward slightly in her seat opposite Steve, pointing to the map in her hands as he checked the straps on his chute. “The HYDRA camp is in Kreischberg, tucked between these two mountain ranges.” She moved her finger a little right and from the distance it travelled and the scale on the map, Steve estimated they were no more than five miles out.

“Looks like a factory of some kind.” Katie mused, glancing at the map where she sat next to Peggy, flicking her braid back over her shoulder.

“We should be able to drop you right on the doorstep.” Howard called from the front of the aircraft, which was now shaking slightly with a mild bout of turbulence.

“Just get me as close as you can.” Steve called, before he looked back at Katie and Peggy, his voice dropping slightly. “You know you three are gonna be in a lot of trouble at the lab.”

“What else is new?” Katie shrugged, and Steve heard Howard chuckle.

“I’m surprised Old Chester ain’t sent you packing yet, Kiddo.”

“Well like you’re his best mechanical engineer, I’m his best front line agent.” She shrugged, “No offence, Peg.”

“None taken.” Peggy said somewhat sardonically, before she snorted “We all know I’m the brains behind this operation.”

“Don’t hear me arguing.” Katie shrugged before she looked at Steve “And you’re gonna be in just as much trouble.”

“Well, where I’m goin’, if anybody yells at me I can just shoot ‘em.” Steve replied, grinning a little. His spirits had been lifted exponentially now he was actually about to do something worthwhile, despite the fact he knew he was going to literally leap feet first into danger.

“They will undoubtedly shoot back.” Peggy fixed him with a look.

“Well…” Steve looked round at his stage prop shield that he had brought with him, which was leaning against the wall of the aircraft “let’s hope it’s good for somethin’.” His knuckles rapped on the metal as Katie gave a little shake of her head and a side smirk, bending over to check the laces on her boots.

“Agent Carter, if we’re not in too much of a hurry I thought we could stop off in Lucerne for a late night fondue.” Howard called over his shoulder from the front of the plane and there was a moment’s silence as Peggy shifted a little awkwardly on the seat.

“Jesus, Howie, really? You’re doing this now?” Katie groaned as her brother chuckled.

“Hey, you asked me to come on this kamikaze mission.” He shot back. “I was just trying to lighten the mood a little.”

As the two siblings began to bicker Steve glanced at Peggy as he tugged on his gloves and the Agent rolled her eyes slightly. “Stark is the best civilian pilot I’ve ever seen. He’s mad enough to brave this airspace, we’re lucky to have him.”

“So are you two…do you…” Steve waved his arm between Peggy and Howard “…fondue?”

Peggy looked at him, completely ignoring his question and Steve supposed he couldn’t blame her, it was a personal question after all.  His eyes then flicked to Katie who had stood up and was making her way towards the cockpit, swaying a little with the motion of the aircraft. With a swift flick of her hand she slapped Howard round the back of the head.

“Ouch, Kiddo! Do you want me to crash this thing or what?”

“Stop being a schmuck.” She shot at him before Peggy extended her arm towards Steve, a device held in her hand.

“This is your transponder. Activate it when you’re ready and the signal will lead us straight to you.”

Steve took it from her. “Are you sure this thing works?” he looked at it a little sceptically, turning it over in his hand, his attention flicking to the cockpit.

“It’s been tested more than you, pal.” Howard shot over his shoulder and Steve looked at him before his eyes flicked to Kate who was looking out of the cockpit window straight ahead of them. She raised her arm and pointed at something, her eyes narrowing in concentration.

“Howie…” she began to speak but before she could finish her sentence the plane lurched violently sideways and Steve gripped onto the side as the sky was suddenly filled with flashes and bangs from anti-aircraft shells which exploded all around them. Realising that it was now far too dangerous for them to take him any further, Steve shot to his feet and made his way to the door, grabbing his shield as he went.

“Get back here! We’re taking you all the way in!” Peggy’s voice rose but for the first time since he’d known her, Steve completely ignored the agent, exhaling loudly before he dropped and shuffled to the edge of the plan.

“As soon as I’m free, you turn this thing around and get the hell outta here!” he turned and looked up at Katie and Peggy.

“You can’t give us orders!” Katie scoffed, her hands on her hips.

“The hell I can’t!” Steve looked up at her, unable to stop the cheeky little smirk playing on his face “I’m a Captain!” and with that he pulled his goggles down and flung himself out into the starry sky. The noise was deafening as he plummeted through the air, the sheer force of falling whipped his body with such ferocity he was sure his hair was going to fly clean off his head. With a sharp tug of the rip cord he deployed his chute and with a sharp jolt he was pulled upwards slightly before he began to fall at a much more civilized pace.

After what seemed like an age, Steve’s sharp eyes spotted the ground rising towards him and he landed heavily in a thud. With an easy, fluid motion he yanked his parachute down to the ground and then untangled himself from the harness. Once he was free he glanced around and realised he’d landed on the outskirts of a thick, wooded area, the earthy smells of pine, dirt and damp filled his nostrils. He took a moment to get his bearings, pulling out the compass he had in his pants. He knew that from the direction the aircraft had been travelling in he needed to head due north. As the needle settled on the point, he realised he was currently facing East so he spun to his left and was just about to set off at a run when he heard something flying in heavily from above.

He spun round, just in time to see another chute sailing towards him and in a flash he whipped out his pistol as whoever it was landed with a thud some hundred yards or so behind him..

“At ease, Soldier…” a familiar voice, soft and quiet in the cover of night, spoke and Steve felt a cold feeling of utter shock and horror fill his chest.

“What the hell are you doing here?” He hissed as he strode towards Katie who was now untangling herself from her harness.

“Same thing as you.” She replied flippantly as she took a look around and began to take a few steps away from him.

“Are you insane?” He glared at her, his hand wrapping around her arm to stop her. He could have sworn she felt the tremble in his finger tips of it weren't evident in his voice.

“Not last time I checked, no.” She wrenched free of his uncharacteristically brash grip and spun to face him, her eyes blazing at him in the dim moonlight.

“You could get yourself killed!” He pressed, his voice carrying a little more than he'd liked. He failed to keep the element of concern out of it.

“Keep your voice down!”

“Damned it Katie, this wasn’t part of the plan!”

“No, it wasn’t part of YOUR plan.” She shot back. “It was, however, always part of mine and Peg’s.”

“Peggy knows about this?”

“Of course she does.”

“And Howard?”

“No way,” Katie snorted. “I'd guess Peggy is currently getting the full force of one of his verbal bashings.” At that she pulled out her compass “We need to go North.”

“I know.” Steve said a little sullenly, a growl in his chest.

“So let’s move. Sooner we can fulfil our missions, the better.”

The plural of the word didn’t pass him by and through the downright anger and frustration, and dare he say it, fear he was feeling at the current situation, his logical side started to kick in and he knew there was nothing he could do about any of this now, bar keep her safe. So with a sigh, he shook his head and turned to follow her as she’d begun to walk away, his brain registering her last words.

“Missions?” he asked, stressing the word “We have more than one?”

“One each.” Katie shot over her shoulder. “You’re on a rescue mission. Mine’s more of a midnight requisition.”

“Midnight requisition? For what?”

“Intel, tech, anything we can get our hands on.” She picked up her pace, scrambling up a slight incline. “I told you in the plane, I’m a damned good field agent and this isn’t my first raid. We’ve done a few over the past couple of months. But they’ve all been bust, well almost all anyway.”

“Bust?” Steve frowned “How?”

“They were smaller Nazi controlled labs.” She continued to speak as she weaved through the forest “The more we raided and the more intel we gathered, the more it became apparent that Schmidt was marching to his own tune.” She paused and looked around. “The fight at Azzano wasn’t his first move, he advanced a load of troops into Norway a month or so ago of his own accord. Then, at Azzano, he opened fire on both Allied and Nazi troops alike.  My guess is, and Peggy agrees, that this base will likely be under his control alone. And probably house more information about where his other ones are hidden.”

“Others, you mean…”

“Yes, others. This won’t be the only one.” Katie shrugged as she looked at her compass and turned right “And without that information, Steve, we’re fighting blind. We can’t defeat HYDRA if we don’t know where they are.”

“You should have told me.” He replied, his tone still a little sullen. He didn’t like being in the dark.

“What, so you could blow the plan in front of my brother?” She scoffed “He’d have refused to take us had he known what I was planning, he was bad enough when I had a full troop behind me.”

“You led a troop?”

“Don’t sound so surprised.” She chuckled “You know I’m actually an ‘honorary’ Lieutenant, thanks to Colonel Phillips. Didn’t go down well at first, most of the men weren’t keen on taking orders from a woman.”

“So that’s what you meant when you called them all jerks earlier by the stage.” Despite himself Steve felt a smile curl across his face.

“Yup. They soon fell in line when a few of them ended up with my fist in their mouth. Not to mention a good number also found themselves on the end of a Phillips’ Special.”

“A Phillips Special?”

“Yeah, the term coined for when they’re stripped naked and made to run 10 miles round camp by the Colonel.” she shrugged “For all his bluster, Chester’s actually been really supportive of both me and Peggy. That, and he doesn’t like subordination in any form.”

“You don’t say.” Steve muttered as Katie continued, her foot-falls light and quiet as she weaved her way through the thicket of the trees.

They continued for about an hour, alternating their pace between a jog and a fast walk. Had Steve been on his own he no doubt could have run the entire distance a lot faster but he didn’t raise that issue, and there was no point being frustrated about it either. Firstly, there was nothing he could do about it, secondly, to be fair, Katie kept up a decent enough pace and thirdly, had he been running as fast as he could have he would no doubt have run straight into one of the various HYRDRA patrols they encountered within the woods. As it happened, the pace they were going at was perfect for his sharp senses to alert him whenever a passing patrol was near, enabling them to duck out of sight.

Eventually, the trees began to thin out and through the gloomy mist that had descended, which he had to admit was incredibly useful to keep their presence as covert as possible, Steve saw the perimeter fence and gate to the camp. He stopped dead, his arm out causing Katie to also pause and as he studied the gate, trying to figure out the best way in, he heard the rumble of trucks coming from his side. He spun just in time to see them approaching down the road which led through the wooded area and he crouched down, pulling Katie down with him.  

“Reckon you can make the last one?” He asked, turning to face her.

“Yeah.” She nodded “They’re not going too fast.”

Steve took another look around before he nodded and the two of them ran for the last truck, Katie springing up first and he heard her give a little sigh as he pulled himself up over the tail gate. “Crap.”

The reason or her curse soon became apparent as Steve landed in the back of the truck and came face to face with two HYDRA guards.

"Fellas." He nodded. There was a split second and they both lunged at him at the same time. He pushed Katie a little harshly to the right as he hit one with straight punch to the face, the other dropping with a groan as Katie had connected a well-aimed boot to his stomach. As both guards tried to scramble to their feet, Steve grabbed both their heads, smashing them together like a pair of cymbals before he tossed them straight out of the back.

“Impressive.” Katie looked at him, smirking and Steve rolled his eyes as she turned and looked carefully through a small tear in the side of the canvas of the truck. “They’re taking us straight in…”

“And then what?”

“I dunno, you tell me, you’re the Star Spangled Man with a Plan after all.”

“Oh for the love of…this isn’t some kind of fucking day outing!” He practically exploded and Katie groaned.

“Lighten up Steve.” She turned away, looking back through the hole in the side of the truck. “It was a joke.”

“Well I see nothing funny about any of this, at all.”

“And you think I do?” she turned, her eyes once more full of an angry fire “Let me tell you, Captain, my unit has seen things these last four months that no one should ever have to see. And you know how we dealt with it? By NOT dealing with it.” She brushed a piece of hair off her face “We joked, made light of the situations we found ourselves in because they were downright fear inducing, and if we didn’t none of us would have lasted five minutes. So take the stick out of your ass and get a fucking grip of yourself.”

Steve blinked, but before he could respond to her angry outburst the truck slowed and then began to reverse. Eventually it came to a stop and Steve could hear someone at the tail of the truck so he gestured for Katie to get behind him, which she did. He simply raised his shield in front of his body and waited. The flap to the back of the truck opened and without hesitation Steve smashed the shield straight into the guard’s face, sending him flying backwards. Quickly and quietly, shield on his arm, he jumped out of the truck, turning to help Katie down and the pair of them turned left, jumping off the raised loading platforms and jogging, all the time keeping their bodies stooped and low.

There were lines and lines of tanks emblazoned with the HYDRA symbol and the two of them shared a glance at one another. It was clear to Steve that Katie and Peggy were right, Schmidt had been gearing HYDRA up to be far more than a science division for some time if this equipment was anything to go by. Together, they weaved their way through the lines of armoured vehicles, taking care to keep to the shadows and out of sight as they made their way towards a smaller outbuilding that looked like it led into the main base.

“Come on…” Steve gently nudged Katie and the pair of them across the ground, and Steve hopped up onto a tank that was conveniently parked by the annex, offering his hand to Katie to pull her up. They both scrambled onto the flat roof and ran, hopping up onto a slightly higher roof before they reached a set of metal steps which led up the side of the huge base. Katie went first, scrambling as fast as she could up them where she paused on a platform approximately halfway up. She nodded to a thick, iron door which led inside the building and Steve moved to try it, shaking his head.

“It’s locked.”

“Yeah, and you have the strength of like thirty men or whatever.” She rolled her eyes “Open it.”

He looked at her, narrowing his eyes at the fact she was bossing him around but he didn’t argue. He moved towards the door, shaking his head “This isn’t gonna-“ he gave a sharp tug and with a squeal the door pulled straight off the hinges “-work.” He finished lamely, looking from the door to Katie who stood there, arms folded, smirking.

“If only you had as much faith in you as I have.” She said a little sardonically and once more he glared at her. Pulling out her pistol Katie made to go in the door and Steve put his arm out.

“No, I’ll go first.” He stopped her.

“That’s not gonna work because you need to prop the door back up, so when that guard patrol comes back it doesn’t look like someone broke in. Amateurs!” She shook her head. Steve let out an exasperated sigh, more frustrated that she’d pointed out yet another potential issue he hadn’t considered in his haste and she smiled at him, “This is what I’m trained in, stealth.” She shrugged

She stepped inside, keeping herself flattened to the wall as Steve followed, leaning the door back up before he paused as they both looked around, finding themselves in a corridor of sorts.

“Any ideas on which way?” He asked and Katie pondered for a moment.

“Well, the front of the camp is left.” She frowned and Steve nodded his agreement.

“So we go right,” he stated, “In deeper.”

“Okay.”

“Keep behind me, stay in the shadows.” He couldn’t help himself but instruct her, but to her credit she didn’t argue, merely gave him a little salute as the two of them set off through the factory.

A short while later they reached another door, only this one was guarded, they could see through the etched glass window embedded within it. Steve signalled to Katie to keep back before he knocked. The guard turned and came towards them, and as soon as the door opened Steve punched him hard in the face before smashing his head between the door and the wall. As the guard went down he caught him, pulling him silently out before the two of them headed inside, taking care to shut the door behind them. They appeared to be in the main munitions storage area of the factory, now and it was busy. Guards swarming all over, people driving pickups laden with crates, and each soldier seemed to be carrying guns powered by some form of liquid that was glowing a bright, cobalt blue.  

They dodged between aisles, using whatever they could to keep out of sight and as they snuck between a collection of huge metal containers of some kind, they both paused as they spotted what appeared to be racks of small, rectangular shaped metal items all containing the mysterious blue liquid. It was eerie, like nothing Steve had ever seen before and he gently moved to a closer look, picking one up.

“What the hell is that?” Katie whispered as he turned it over in his hand.

“I have absolutely no idea.” He shrugged “Except, to state the obvious, it looks like some kind of grenade. But, I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“We should take them back to the lab.” She stated and Steve nodded his agreement, sticking the item into the pocket of his fatigues before they set off to continue their search heading even deeper into the base.

After another fifteen minutes or so of dodging as many HYDRA agents as they could, and subduing the ones they couldn’t, they reached a large room deep in the belly of the base and Steve took a deep breath as he looked around the room at the large metal cages that contained easily over a hundred soldiers, if not two. He felt Katie still besides him as she also glanced around, her eyes flashing as she scanned the room, her attention instantly shooting upwards as they saw a warden who walked above the cages on some kind of gangway, in which the large, circular tops of the cages were embedded. Steve also spotted another guard weaving his way amongst the large cells on the floor and took a deep breath.

“Right,” he turned to Katie. “I’ll take the one up top first, then I’ll drop down and-“

Katie took an exasperated breath, “Don’t you trust me or something?” She hissed.

“Of course I do, but-“

“Then you go up high, I’ll take the one down below. I can do this, I’m not some fairy-tale princess that needs protecting. And whilst I appreciate your chivalry, as well you know, now is not the time, Soldier.”

Steve inhaled deeply and looked at her, her green eyes bored into his and he gave her a sharp nod deciding to go along with her, despite every part of his brain screaming at him not to.  Without looking back, he ran around the side of the large room and found a set of metal steps which led up the side. He took them two at a time and then continued along the raised platform that ran round the side of the room, crouching as he went to keep out of the dim light that the small, barred windows let in. He spotted the guard coming his way and ducked even more, waiting, and once the man was within reach he grabbed his shield from his back and swung it with a huge arm straight at his face. The guard topped backwards and landed heavily on top of one of the cages out cold.

As Steve moved and began to search the guard for his keys, all the prisoners stood up, their eyes wide with shock and surprise.

“And who the hell are you supposed to be?" One of them spoke as the rest continued to simply stare at him in stunned silence and he didn’t miss the way a few of them eyed him up and down, taking in his helmet and shield painted in the stars and stripes of the American Flag.

“I’m…” Steve answered a little breathlessly as he hesitated for a moment as he began to look around for Katie, but he found no sign of her “Captain America." He finished a little lamely, glancing back down.

"I beg your pardon?" Another man spoke, this one in a British accent as Steve grabbed the keys from the guard’s belt and ran back the way he had come. As heard he ran across the floor to the first cage he heard the hisses and rumbles of excited murmurs he glanced up to see Katie jogging towards him.

"Merde," one of the prisoners uttered as all heads turned in her direction.

“Language!” Katie turned her eyes to the soldier who had spoken, giving a slight smirk which the man returned as Steve unlocked the cage he was in.

“You okay?” He asked Katie as they moved to the next cage and she nodded.

“Yeah, took him down with a choke hold then kicked him in the face for good measure” she shrugged as they moved down to the next cage, then the next.

“Well, well, well, Lady Lieutenant…” a tall, wide man spoke and Steve saw Katie’s head snap in his direction, her smirk turning into a huge smile. “What took you so long?”

“Got here as fast as I could. I'll be outta here just as fast when Phillips finds out where I am.” Katie grinned, before she shook her head sighed, her voice cracking. “Damned it Dum Dum…we thought you were all dead!”

“Take more than that to get rid of us”

Systematically they moved through the room, unlocking each cage as they went until they reached the last one, all the time Steve scanning the faces of the prisoners all as they all emerged, shaking hands and hugging one another. But the face he had been hoping to see wasn’t amongst any of them.

"Are there any others?" Steve whispered, pushing his way between the man he knew only as Dum Dum and an Asian man who was holding his dog tags up, looking slightly affronted.  “I'm looking for a Sergeant James Barnes." He asked, turning to the British soldier who began walking alongside him and Katie.

"There's an isolation ward in the factory, but no one has ever come back from it." The British Man spoke.

“Alright…” Steve spoke, considering his options as he continued walking towards the door through which they had entered. "The tree line's northwest, about eighty yards past the gate. Agent Stark knows where it is.” He stopped and turned, nodding towards Katie, his eyes returning back to the group of men “You follow and take your instructions from her, you got it?”

The British man and a few others began to nod, the excitement and anticipation of a fight was easily sensed and Katie stepped forward, shaking her head.

“Steve…” she began to protest but this was one order he was not going to let her ignore.

“You said your mission was requisition.” His eyes locked on hers “So use these guys and do it. Get out fast and give ‘em hell. I'll meet you in the clearing with anybody I find inside."

For a moment he thought she was going to argue but she didn’t. Instead, she took a deep breath and nodded, her eyes still locked onto his. In that split second, Steve hesitated. There was so much he wanted to say, but, he couldn’t find the words to express what he was feeling. He wanted to tell her to stay safe, to keep herself out of danger, make sure she got out alive…but instead he looked at her, swallowing and she gave him a soft smile.

“I know.” She said gently “You too.”

Steve gave her another curt nod, his chest tightening a little as he turned to go.

"Wait, you know what you're doing?" A soldier shouted after him, and Steve looked back over his shoulder about to answer before he heard Katie quip.

“He’s knocked out Adolf Hitler over two hundred times."

The prisoners furrowed their brows, before glancing around at each other with confused expressions on their faces and despite himself Steve gave a little chuckle, looking at Katie’s grinning face once more before he turned around and jogged out of the door, her voice ringing in his ears as she issued instructions to the troops.

“You heard the Captain. Now the base is heavily armed so we’re absolutely going to have to fight our way out. On the way, we grab as much tech and weapons as we can. Not only to use but also for further analysis by my unit….”

Her voice died down as Steve picked up a jog, shield on his back and headed off back the way they had come.  It wasn’t long before a loud siren rang out and Steve took a deep breath, trying to push his worry away as shouts and loud explosions rang out, signalling the fight had begun. He continued making his way into the factory, fighting his way through a number of guards easily as gunfire sounded all around him, the angry yells and screams of fighting filled his ears as the freed prisoners began to engage with the HYDRA soldiers.

He fought his way up onto the gangway that circled the main factory floor, dispatching another guard with a swift, hard boot to the abdomen that sent him flying over the railing and he took a look around, the sheer size of the factory floor taking him off guard for a moment before he remembered what he was here to do. Pulling out his pistol he turned right, jogging round the gangway until he hit a dimly lit corridor. He continued round and as he quickly made his way through in search of the isolation ward he saw a short man in thick glasses, carrying a briefcase and a number of files in his arms emerge from a room. He stopped dead, looked at Steve and then turned and sprinted away from him, heading round the corner. Steve began to run after him, but as he passed the room the man had emerged from he slowed as he heard what sounded like someone talking, mumbling even.

Taking a deep breath, he entered the room, following the sound as it became clearer and then his heart stopped and he grew hot, his breathing deep as he knew that voice. It was weak but still so familiar, even if it had been months since he had heard it.

"Sergeant. 32557…"

He hurried through another door, glancing towards the end of the room and saw the man he’d come to this very place for strapped to a reclined chair.

"Bucky?" Steve shot over, pausing at the side of the chair and looking down at his best friend. Bucky’s eyes didn’t move, instead he kept chanting his rank and number as he stared blankly up at the ceiling. "Oh my god." Steve swallowed was his eyes travelled over Bucky’s body, taking in the restraints that kept him strapped to the chair. He looked tired, weak, sick even, and it hurt Steve to see him in such a state. Bucky had always been the strong one out of the pair of them, normally looking after him. But, well, now it was time to return the favour.  He swallowed and began ripping the straps around him with ease.

"Is that…?"

"It's me. It’s Steve.”

"Steve?" Bucky murmured, his face breaking into a smile as recognition flooded his features.

"Come on." Steve helped Bucky to his feet, holding onto his arms as he steadied himself before he gently reached out and patted the side of his friends face.

"I thought you were dead," Steve sighed as Bucky frowned, his eyes fixed on where Steve’s face would normally have been, and when he instead found himself looking at Steve’s chest, he raised his eyes up wards, puzzlement etched across his face.

"I thought you were smaller.” Bucky swallowed and Steve kept hold of him, helping him to stand upright as he became more coherent. Whilst Bucky was gaining his senses, Steve took a quick glance around and his eyes focussed on a map pinned to the wall, various positions highlighted upon it across Europe. Committing it to memory he then slung Bucky's arm over his shoulder, for the first time ever bearing his friend’s weight.

"Come on," he urged as he began to lead him out of the lab.

"What happened to you?" Bucky asked as Steve pretty much hauled him out of the room, keeping him upright as he stumbled, his feet struggling for traction.

"I joined the Army." Steve replied simply.

As they made their way back down the corridor, Steve felt Bucky becoming able to bear some of his own weight, and then gently nudge at Steve to let him go so he did. Bucky followed behind a pace or two his arm clutched over his ribs.

"Did it hurt?" he asked.

"A little," Steve replied, his head still looking around.

"Is it permanent?"

"So far."  Steve nodded as they continued.

Suddenly, there was a loud explosion which rocked the factory and the two men paused for a second before they picked up the pace. Eventually they emerged onto the gangway Steve had walked round before and immediately recoiled back as another explosion sent a huge ball of fire up into the air. Steve held his shield up to protect his face as Bucky ducked slightly, his hand gripping one of the railings, other one shielding his face.  Turning away from the railings, Steve started to head up a set of stairs immediately behind him, Bucky following. The heat was stifling and it made Steve feel like he was stuck in a furnace as they quickly sprinted up the metal steps and emerged onto another gangway. Taking a right, they began to sprint down it, explosions and flames roaring below them. Steve’s brow beaded with sweat and he wiped it with the back of his hand, taking another look down.  He had no idea whether the fire had been started by the men led by Katie or some self-destruction ploy by HYDRA to prevent any of their plans or weapons getting into their hands, either way he found it hard to care. One less base to deal with he supposed.

“Captain America!”

Steve stopped dead, turning to his left to see two men on the other side of the factory by an elevator door. One was the shorter bespectacled man Steve had seen before, and the other he recognised also, but only from photos. Johann Schmidt, HYDRA leader. He was dressed in a long black trench-coat of sorts, a large silver buckle bearing the HYDRA symbol spanned his waist and he turned towards Steve as he handed the other man a silver briefcase.

“How exciting! I'm a great fan of your films.” Schmidt’s thick German accent carried across the factory as he began to walk over the gangway towards Steve. Steve took a deep breath, his jaw setting as he strode towards the man, the anger surging through his body.  “So, Dr. Erskine managed it after all. Not exactly an improvement, but still impressive."

At that Steve swung his right arm back and bridged the two or so feet in between him and Schmidt with a punch straight to the man’s face, the impact forcing the HYDRA leader back a few steps.

"You've got no idea," Steve snarled.

Schmidt merely smirked, before standing up, cracking his jaw slightly and Steve frowned at the way the right hand side of his face appeared to have sagged away from his eye socket.  "Haven't I?"

Quickly, the man’s fist flew towards Steve, but equally as quickly he raised his shield to block it. The metal vibrated in his hands and to his utter shock the item dented with the force of Schmidt’s blow. It was then that Steve recalled Erskine telling him how the man had taken the serum, and that it had enhanced him too. In a flash he reached for his pistol but Schmidt was too quick and laded a punch straight to the left hand side of Steve’s jaw. He was knocked completely off his feet, falling backwards onto the metal of the gangway, the pistol he had been holding slid straight out of his hand and over the edge. Schmidt advanced towards Steve but he threw all his weight into a huge double kick, which sent the man sprawling backwards.

As Steve got to his feet, the gangway he was on suddenly began to move backwards, separating him from Schmidt who stood up, the two men not moving a muscle as the metal walkway drew them both back to their respective sides.

"No matter what lies Erskine told you, you see I was his greatest success!" Schmidt yelled as Steve stood still, his chest heaving, as Schmidt man reached up for his face, reaching for the skin at the left hand side of his jaw. As Steve watched, to his horror, he began to peel back the skin revealing that it was a mask, and underneath was a grotesque, featureless red skull.

Steve swallowed, his face wrinkling up as he tried to understand what the hell he had just seen. What he was still seeing, for that matter.

"You don't have one of those, do you?" Bucky mumbled, his attention also on the man in front of them.

"You are deluded, Captain. You pretend to be a simple soldier, but in reality…” Schmidt tossed the mask down into the flames, Steve following it with his eyes before he glanced back across the factory room “…you are just afraid to admit that we have left humanity behind.” At that Schmidt turned to his right and walked towards the now open elevator “Unlike you, I embrace it proudly. Without fear!" he gestured with his hand as he made his way into the elevator.

"Then how come you're running?" Steve yelled back. It was a pathetic shot really, all things considered, but it was all Steve could think about saying given what had happened. As expected, Schmidt completely ignored him and merely smirked as he pressed a button to his right and the doors closed.

Steve paused, still not completely sure what the hell had gone on when a large explosion rocked the platform they were stood on, causing both him and Bucky to duck once more from debris that shot up all around them.

They needed a way out. Steve’s eyes fell back on the elevator and he followed the shaft upwards spotting a set of doors right at the top which led, he assumed, to the roof. He followed the line of the ceiling, noticing there was a thin gantry that led over to the side they were on, and he spun round to spot another set of steps which led upwards.

That was it, their only way out.

"Come on," Steve turned around, grabbing Bucky’s arm and leading him to the stairs. "Let's go. Up."

Together they hurriedly climbed and reached the highest walkway that stretched across the factory floor that was now burning, Steve felt, hotter than hell itself. Explosions rocked the catwalks causing everything to shake and Steve glanced at the flimsy gantry that led over to the side they needed to be on, then back to Bucky.

“Let’s go. One at a time.” He moved to help Bucky climb over the railings to allow him to cross first. Bucky made his way tentatively across the thin beam of metal and as he was roughly at the halfway point, it began to give way. Bucky picked up his pace and threw himself off the edge grabbing the railings at the other side, but the gantry collapsed behind him leaving Steve stranded.

Steve watched as Bucky hauled himself over and then tuned to face him, the realisation that Steve was stuck evident on his face as he looked back at him.

"Gotta be a rope or something!" Bucky shouted hopefully. At that point another part of the factory below them fell with a loud crash into the fire below and Steve swallowed, shaking his head.

"Just go! Get out of here!" he bellowed, waving Bucky away. Bucky shook his head, his hands gripping the railing around the walkway.

"No! Not without you!" he screamed back, desperation lacing his tone.

Steve looked over at him, then peered down at the fire, before taking another look up. If he stayed where he was, he was a dead man. If he jumped and didn’t make it, he was a dead man. But if he didn’t jump, well he had no chance of making it at all.

Decision made he pushed the now broken bars of the railings in front of him, bending it out of the way to create a gap large enough to jump through. He took a few steps back, once more gaging the distance before he sighed and grimaced a little at what he was about to do, having no idea whether he was going to make it. His thoughts flashed to Katie, his only comfort out of all of this was that she wasn’t stuck with him now and had a good chance of having made it out. With a deep breath he set off at a sprint before he launched himself off the side, over the huge chasm below. His arms flailed, as did his legs as he spun them to try and maintain momentum, the flames and explosions licking at his boots and with a loud grunt he landed, his arms gripping tightly onto the remainder of the railing beside Bucky. Bucky was quick to grab him, hauling him over, the pair of them falling to the metal walkway. Steve landed with a grunt on his back and took a huge breath, turning to look at Bucky who was led besides him, his chest heaving.  

“Thanks.” Steve panted as Bucky looked at him, incredulously.

“You’re thanking me?” he shook his head “Whatever man…”

Another large explosion rocked the gangway they were on and they both rolled over, before pushing themselves up, stumbling a little as they made their way hastily through the door, bursting out into the cold night air. Steve took a split second to gather his bearings, his eyes flicking to the front gate of the camp before he located a set of the metal railing type rungs the same as the ones he and Katie had used to gain entry at the side of the building.

“This way…” Steve instructed as he led Bucky towards it, and started to descend, all the time keeping one eye on his friend in case he lost his grip and Steve needed to catch him. When Steve’s feet finally touched down on solid ground he felt like yelling in utter relief, but they weren’t clear yet. Once Bucky landed besides him, they both set off at a sprint across the outside area of the camp. There were still a fair number of soldiers running around but they were too busy trying to escape the burning building to pay him and Bucky any attention. Nevertheless, they kept to the shadows and made their way out of the gate, Steve taking a sharp right following the way he had come with Katie before.

As they walked towards the clearing they were aiming for the hushed sound of voices and chatter hit their ears and he heard Bucky take a sharp breath.

“Steve?” Bucky asked as Steve continued walking, his feet crunching over the frosty ground under his boots. “Is that…”

“No, it’s not HYDRA.” Steve assured him. “We found a bunch of other prisoners before you, got them out first…”

“We?” Bucky asked, “There was someone else with you?”

“Yeah, it was….” Steve trailed off as they emerged into the clearing and a number of men wheeled round, guns raised. As they spotted who it was their weapons dropped but before Steve could say anything Katie pushed through the middle and stopped dead, her chest heaving. She looked a little roughed up- some of her uniform was torn, there was a cut to her right temple, a trickle of blood having seeped down her cheek and the same side of her face looked a little red and bruised but other than that, she seemed fine.

Steve felt relief flood his system at the sight of her, and without a word he strode quickly towards her and she threw herself at him, wrapping her legs round his waist as he held her tight, one hand supporting her lower back, the other gripping at the back of her head, fisting softly in her untidy hair.

“Thank God…” he mumbled, closing his eyes as he held her close, pressing his face into her hair.

“You’re late.” She stuttered and he let out a splutter of a laugh as he pulled back to look at her “I thought you were gonna stand me up.”

“Never” he shook his head, his eyes locking onto hers. They stood still, no attention being paid to anyone around them at all and Steve swallowed, his eyes flicking down to her mouth. His face dropped towards hers, and then a voice spoke from behind them, completely interrupting him and reminding him that firstly he was in the middle of a still heavily occupied with enemy troops forest and secondly, that they were most certainly not alone.

“Well, this is nice.”

Steve closed his eyes and let out a sigh as he set Katie onto her feet, stepping back out of her space, blushing furiously. She peered round him, as he turned and saw Bucky smirking at the pair of them. He jerked his face towards Katie, arching an eyebrow.

“Hey Doll face.”

“Barnes.” she scanned him up and down, taking in his appearance before she smiled “Good to see you in one piece.”

“Yeah, I hate to break this little reunion up…” the British soldier spoke and they all turned to face him “but I suggest we get moving and tie up with the rest.”

“The rest?” Steve frowned, looking around, and for the first time he noticed that there were a lot less men than he had anticipated “Where…”

“We split into three main groups. We took a few losses but most of us made it. My group managed to take a few vehicles.” Katie explained “Some kind of tank, two trucks. We also found a huge storehouse too and loaded both trucks with as much as we could take, weapons, ammo, and equipment, what ration packs we could find.” She took a deep breath “Dernier, one of the men, he said he knew the area well as his group had been scouting it for a while and there’s an old abandoned allied base some 10 miles South East which he suggested would be easier for us to hold up in whilst we waited for help. I sent him ahead with the seriously wounded along with support. Said we would meet them there.”

Steve blinked, astounded at her planning, although he knew he really shouldn’t be. He nodded and then looked around, before a huge explosion made them all jump and Steve turned to see an enormous fireball erupt into the sky signalling that the HYDRA base had finally gone up completely.

“Okay, let’s move.” He instructed, as Katie began to bark out instructions again, before she hurried forward and fell into step alongside Dugan, who pulled out his compass before he pointed and began to bellow out for everyone to make tracks.

“So….” Bucky fell into step alongside Steve, and Steve kept his eyes focussed ahead as they began to walk “Somethin’ going on then between you two or…”

“Don’t know what you mean.” Steve replied, but couldn’t help the smirk that spread across his face as he continued to avoid Bucky’s searching glance.

“You’re a punk.” Bucky snorted, nudging him.

“Jerk.” Steve replied simply, the smile on his face growing bigger by the second.

[onelastbreath-writes]

I’ll Meet You There (Part 1)

Pairing: Marcus Moreno/ Wife!Reader (AFAB, no y/n)

Word Count: 2.5K

Warnings: Mentions child loss, loss of a spouse, survivor’s guilt, vague references to suicide/suicidal thoughts after loss of child (all located in the first 500 words, so it’s brief and not too dark, but please take care) and violence, swearing, and action/fighting.

Summary: What if Marcus’s wife didn’t actually die? What if she and a few others were kidnapped during an attack on Heroics’ HQ, and then held captive for years without realizing? If the only thing you “remember” from your past is that your husband and daughter were killed, well, you surely wouldn’t want to go back to the people who you believe did it. But maybe, with the help of a tenacious child and some re-awaking parental instincts, you’ll be able to break through the brainwashing and forced amnesia, and find your way home.

Tags: Hurt/No comfort (for now), ANGST, eventual happy ending, one really sad man for whom I just keep making things worse, #sorrynotsorry

A/N: This is my first We Can Be Heroes fic, and first reader fic, so please be gentle. I’ve got the rest of the story outlined, so I hope I can get down to writing and posting it soonish, but my RL is busy and doesn’t leave much time/energy for quick updates. If you like it and want me to do a taglist, let me know so you can know when I update again. Also a big thank you to the amazing Jay @disgruntledspacedad​ and her fic The Right Thing for inspiring this one, and for allowing me to use her wife!reader idea. Please go check her blog out, and give her some love <3

AO3 Masterlist

---

“You’ve been in a terrible accident, Doctor, and I regret to inform you of your husband’s and daughter’s passing. Our rescue and recovery efforts after the incident were unfortunately unsuccessful, and you have our deepest sympathies.”

It took months for those words to even sink into you; months before you even remembered anything about who you were... the accident, or the attack, as it was more commonly known by you and the other victims, took your entire life away in an instant. You survived, physically, but at the cost of your partner? Your child? All the memories of your life together? How could you be worth it?

“Your transcripts and accomplishments are phenomenal, Doctor, and I’m in need of talented and capable individuals such as yourself to help right the wrongs, and demand justice, from those who have committed such heinous acts against us. The Heroics are murderers, destroyers of peace, and they have gotten away with their crimes for far too long. They’ve been praised and applauded and worshipped as gods while all they truly are, are terrorists. How many more innocent lives can we allow to be lost to their carelessness? ‘For the greater good’ is quite the insult when the people saying such things aren’t the ones losing their families to the chaos, wouldn’t you agree? Join me, Doctor, and we can make a difference.”

It was easy decision for you, even in the early days of your recovery. From the distant and foggy memories of your past, your anguish in what you could recall, you knew that if you could stop someone else from having to feel the loss and pain that comes from losing their spouse and children, you would do so in a heartbeat.

Your husband had been an incredible man, your Everything, you would imagine, going by the ache in your heart when you thought of being without him. His name, his appearance; that was all lost to you when you lost him. His existence in what could be healed of your memories was just a shadow, a shade, the vague impression of the man you loved. You remembered his warmth, his kindness and gentleness, his love and devotion to you and the child you created together.

And your beautiful baby girl... if thoughts of your husband left your heart aching, then thoughts of your daughter left you in unparalleled agony, completely inconsolable. You tried to avoid thinking of her, if you were being honest, tried to leave all what-ifs and could’ve/should’ve/would‘ve’s behind... you had worked with people, mothers, who had lost children before, had seen them tear themselves apart in their grief, taking the blame for something that was in no way their fault; you had seen them destroy their lives with their hoarded guilt and perceived crimes... you couldn’t allow yourself to fall for that, those falsehoods, you had to be alive if you wanted to honour your child and husband’s sacrifice.  

“We will make them pay for what they’ve done to us, Doctor, I promise you that. Together, we can get justice for your husband, for your little Missy.”

---

Marcus knew something was wrong as soon as his commlink started transmitting static instead of his teammates’ conversations. The Heroics had been deployed to stop a hoard of rogue security androids that were infected by a virus or something (he couldn’t usually follow the technobabble), which had led them to escape their testing facility and target nearby civilians with their advanced weapons technology.

Evacuating the citizens trapped in the line of fire was the team’s first objective, and once the area was cleared of potential victims, they moved onto the containment and neutralization of the enemy combatants. The Heroics team was decently cohesive; they could work together to ensure the protection of innocent lives while in a firefight, but once the civilians were in the clear and the stakes not so high, the supersized egos of the members emerged with a fiery passion. This particular firefight was no different.

“Hey ‘Legend, bet you a week of incident reports that my count is higher!” Miracle Guy’s voice broke out over the ‘link, as eager to show-boat as ever, from where he was steadily piling up his deactivated attackers.

“I’ll take that action, Miracle, easy. It’ll be like taking candy from a baby!” Crimson Legend wasn’t the type of person who could ignore a bet, especially one issued from Miracle.  “You’re probably so behind already that you don’t even stand a chance, ha!”

Of course, they just had to make it a game, keep the superiority contest going; like a single mistake couldn’t cost them a life or a limb. And just to further prove how amazingly mature the rest of Marcus’s team of Adult Superheroes were, they all started in on the bet too.  

“If I beat your totals, I want a week off from training!”

“Ha! Like any of you have a chance of winning against me! I want my on-call weekend, off”

“If I win, you’re all my personal slaves for the rest of the day!”

Did Marcus say Adult Superheroes? He meant infants.  

And they had started the mission so well, communicating and strategizing, actual teamwork instead of bickering and joking around like children. Hell, even their children didn’t get into as much trouble as their parents could.  

“Guys, it’s really not the best time to be playing around. We need to focus on-” He was cut off by the loud static burst of an out-of-range radio. Shit. That’s not good. If his comms unit was fried, he couldn’t direct his teammates, couldn’t keep track of them, couldn’t help them.

They were pretty spread out by now, giving everyone room to use their powers without worrying about another Heroic getting caught in the blast zone. He knew from their most recent locational sound off that Crushing Low and Invisi Girl were working together near the intersection two streets over from him, and if he could make his way over to them, he could figure out what was going on.

Marcus needed to know if it was just his commlink that was out of commission, or if their entire network had gone down. The former scenario was a minor inconvenience, the latter was a major issue. Either he’d have to lead his team by correspondence, or he’d have to worry about them being completely alone in the field, without support from HQ, and without any chance of backup or rescue.  

He couldn’t worry about the details now, he had to keep focused on finishing off the seemingly endless wave of androids. Androids with guns. Androids with guns that he was trying to kill with a pair of katanas... Maybe he hadn’t thought his primary weapon for this mission out very well... It was just something that he’d have to come back to later. For now: sword, robot, teammates.

---

They didn’t pay him enough for this. He should have gone into acting like he had planned before his powers manifested. This sort of shit didn’t happen to actors.  

Marcus had destroyed all the androids delaying him from reaching his nearest teammates and was finally able to move to their location with relative ease and only minor distraction. He could see Crushing Low laying waste to the few remaining functional robots in the area, and could assume that Invisi Girl was around somewhere, disabling any downed but not dead enemies while protecting ‘Low’s back.  

He was proven right when he heard a feminine voice call for him to “hit the deck, Moreno!”.

“Thanks Vis! You two doing alright? What’s your comms sitch?” He stood back up straight, just missing being nailed in the head by a flying metal limb had it not been for her heads-up.

“We’re a-okay! Comms are out though. No known damage to them, no knocks or surges, might be the tech, or it might be the channel. We’ll have to see what Tech-No thinks.” She was still invisible, but Marcus could imagine her animated expressions and movements. She was one of the most... normal... of the Heroics, if normal could ever be used to describe any of the team. Reliable and observant, with a good sense of battle strategy. He greatly appreciated her skills and efficiency in the field; she and Tech-No being the most down-to-earth of the Heroics, most willing to help him keep the peace between the rest of them.

“I’ll watch Low’s back if you can go find Tech. We need to know what’s going on, ASAP. If all the comms are down, and Tech can’t get them back up, I need you to find everyone and tell them to meet back at the robotics facility. Get Miracle and Fast to help if you can. If anyone’s injured, they’re your first priority, okay? Thanks, Vis.”

---

Getting every member of the Heroics team back together took nearly an hour, all coming fresh from the fight but thankfully not too banged up or bruised. They set up a perimeter once enough of the team had arrived to their meeting spot, allowing Tech-No to deep-dive into  investigating their communications malfunction.

“It’s the network, not our comms. We’re dealing with a drop either from HQ’s side, or a forced drop here from RFI. But considering the standard distance and all the buildings and stuff around us, a radio frequency jammer wouldn’t be able to block our communications network as far out as we were. We must assume that the problem comes from HQ. which presents further concerns, obviously. I designed most of the technology there myself, so I know exactly how much work it would be to take down the whole system. We need to consider this as part of a bigger plot, and plan accordingly.” Tech-No’s eventual explanation hang heavy in the air, no one willing to break the silence following it... If something had happened to HQ… Their co-workers were there, their friends, their children…  

Marcus thought of his daughter and wife. They were both there today. His wife worked in the medical centre, and they brought their daughter there for daycare. If something happened there... shit. If he was panicking about his family already, his teammates were doing the same. He had to head this off. He couldn’t let this get out of control. He took a breath and squared his shoulders. It was time to be Marcus Moreno the leader of the Heroics, not Marcus the husband and father. Lead by example, they’re all counting on you.

“We have no proof that anything is actually wrong, and until we know for sure why we can’t reach them, we need to do our jobs. Finish the mission. We’ve always trusted our people to hold down the fort at home so we can help people out here, and they’ve never let us down before. We are not going to doubt them now, understood? Whatever happened? We know HQ is doing their best to keep our loved ones safe. So, we finish up here, quickly and thoroughly, and then we head back to base. Let’s get moving,” He met his teammates’ eyes, allowed them to witness his own fears, but also his stubborn determination. He wasn’t asking them to ignore or dismiss their worries, but rather, put it into finishing the mission so they could go home sooner.  

No one fought him; thankfully just picked their tasks and headed out.  

“Tech, we need transport. Now. I don’t care how you do it, just get it done, alright?” Marcus refused to acknowledge the slight tremble in his voice, tried to breathe around the lump in his throat and the dread sinking in his stomach. He desperately stopped himself from thinking about coincidences and probabilities. This was all a fluke, a random string of events that didn’t mean anything more was going on. They’d be able to laugh about it when they got home and saw everything was just as they’d left it. He had to believe that. He didn’t have any other choice.

—-

Transport home turned out to be a military helicopter big enough to fit the whole team, in addition to the fully outfitted squad of soldiers already inside.

“According to the press release your director gave, there was small but powerful group of gifted individuals who invaded Heroics’ Headquarters, intending to either kidnap or kill certain “important personnel” within the building. Didn’t specify much more than that, other than that your organization would be dedicating as much manpower as they could to bring “those who would cause such destruction and terror” to justice. The address was filmed in the parking lot, but there were a lot of emergency responders and vehicle in the background. I’m sorry we can’t tell you anything more, but well, we were scrambled to your location ASAP, barely had time for the news we got...” The staff sergeant sitting across from Marcus briefed the team about what the intel they had on the HQ attack. And that was what it was. An attack. The thing they all feared most.

“Thank you for the information, and for the ride back home; we lost communication in the middle of a battle, with no clue as to why. Now, at least, we have an idea of what we should expect when we arrive.” The mention of “important personnel” jump-started Marcus’s heart into overdrive. That was the code phrase they used when describing their most vulnerable people to the public, non-combatants and injured persons usually; a smokescreen meant to dissuade targeted attacks, and shift attention away from those who couldn’t protect themselves in the case of an emergency. It was also the code that frequently represented their children.  

The families of the Heroics were classified as high-risk targets; villains and enemies of their organization didn’t often have the moral decency to leave their loved ones out of the fight. So, to afford as much anonymity and protection possible, any time the team had to reference their partners and children in physical records and documentation, it was under that code phrase.  

This attack was centred on their kids.  

What kind of monster do you have to be to go after a bunch of kindergarten and primary school children?

Fuck.

The only good news was that there was no mention of the attack being a success.  

So, all the Heroics knew for certain was that a group of villains had tried to get to their children, and while obviously causing significant damage to HQ, they had been stopped. Were unsuccessful. The Home Team had saved the day again.  

Marcus thanked every deity he could think of for keeping his and his friends’ kids safe.  

The rest of the flight home was quiet. Him and teammates finally able to get some rest after all the fighting and panic, and the soldiers conversing just loud enough to be heard over the headsets and hum of the chopper’s motors.  

He was pulled back from the edge of unconsciousness he had been drifting along for a while when the pilot gave them their five-minute ETA.

They were home at long last, and everything was going to be just fine.

---

[Next Part]

[wirewitchviolet]

How not to Write a Campaign

I have been playing RPGs for a very long time. Back in the day, I avoided any and all pre-written adventures of any sort because my limited experience with them was... just frankly terrible. Weird inconsistencies in tone, unfair encounter setups, too many assumptions about PCs’ motives and actions, etc. Then much later I discovered a group of writers who actually got it, wrote things perfectly in line with how my friends like a game to go, and we’ve been all in on those for a decade and change. But I just finished running a ROUGH one, and I want something good to come of it.

I don’t want to make this a specific review, because... I’m in the industry, I know the people who wrote this campaign, I can guess at some of the problems involved, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or reputation, so let me just refer to the offending prewritten campaign here as the Amnesia Campaign. It’s for a big fantasy RPG, it riffs of a particular author’s work, you can probably guess what it is from that, but, I’m trying.

The first problem I need to bring up with the Amnesia Campaign is that it just commits the cardinal sin of long term RPG campaign writing- The mustache-twirling villain who always manages to escape from the PCs at the last minute. I cannot convey just how important it is that you never, ever do this. The worst sort of example is when you plan around the PCs actually confronting your villain multiple times, and failing to kill them, which is a terrible idea because there really is no way to ever stack the deck and account for every contingency to make an unwinnable fight, or even one where escape is always possible, and especially if you’re publishing adventures, some number of groups will kill the villain too early, either shorting things out or forcing a handwave to keep an ineffectual villain in play and pretend they’re still a threat.

The Amnesia Campaign doesn’t quite go there. Having an actual chance to go toe to toe with the villain is reserved for the very end, but it does use another variant, where no matter what happens, the PCs arrive just after the villain they’re chasing has left. Now... there’s a way you can make that work. If you have a villain who cannot be reached in practical fashion, and can launch attacks anywhere within a huge region, you can build a whole campaign out of characters reacting to the aftermath of evil actions they could not be expected to even learn about until the villain has left the scene. Here, meanwhile, we have a villain with a big elaborate plot that requires traveling all over the world gathering things, based on research he does at the very start which the PCs can, and indeed are expected to do, quickly pick up on these research notes, and basically know everything the villain plans to do from nearly the start of a very long campaign. And... frankly, the villain has no real edge to keep him believably one step ahead. He is a mildly wealthy man hiring goons, mundane forms of transportation, and having to negotiate and fight his way through to various sub-objectives needed for his plan, and it is at least strongly implied that he doesn’t have a lot of lead time. When presented with a scenario about someone needing to be chased down and stopped, PCs can pretty reliably be counted on to constantly be rushing forward, coming up with clever ways to accomplish what they need to in less time, and cut down if not completely nullify their travel time. But, like with battles the villain somehow keeps escaping from, I am forced to continuously state to my players in running this that no, somehow even after avoiding this whole side quest by reading the mind of the person with important information, and directly teleporting to where the villain left for by riverboat, he somehow beat them there, and once again, just left. It’s frustrating, and implausible. We end up with a villain who seems overwhelmingly outmatched, but keeps succeeding because... well, he has plot armor so we’re railroading this.

Admittedly, having a good villain when writing a full campaign in advance can be tricky. The safe and tested formula is generally to start off with minions of your main villain, starting with some who don’t even know who they’re ultimately working for, gradually build up to who’s calling the shots and to what end, have a big side trip to prepare for the final confrontation not directly involving the villains, than cap it with a big showdown. If the PCs know who the main villain is from the very start and where to find them, it becomes hard to rationalize anything between. Sometimes you can pull it off if they’re leading an army or ruling a country, but even then, you want to work up a food chain to them.

A similar problem, which crops up a bit towards the end of the Amnesia Campaign, is making too many assumptions about how the PCs react, and who they befriend. In RPG writing, you need to make as few assumptions as possible about the specifics of what the PCs will do in any situation. You can count on the real broad strokes. The party will investigate the situation described in the adventure, they’ll explore the area, find the villains, fight them, win, learn something to keep the larger plot growing, but that’s it. You can’t assume they’re going to team up with this NPC, enter this room from that direction, or otherwise reenact what you’d imagine you’d do in their place, or what happened in your test play of your adventure. This is particularly important when you include a little sidequest unconnected to their primary goal, or you’re presenting an open-ended investigation.

Ideally, you just have a sensible location, have some villains in it with clear goals and personalities laid out, and you scatter around some things to enable various clever tricks if players think to try them, without mandating any of them. Mention where windows are, and chandeliers, and holes just too small for the average human to fit through, but don’t, as part of the Amnesia Campaign does, invest heavily in the assumption that the PCs will start investigating a sewer system when investigating how a cult gets around a city and go sparse on other possible clues. Also don’t waste adventure background note space on thousands of years of history at the expense of what the actual current problem in the area is and who or what is behind it.

The next problem is one that, were I the average consumer just buying this book would bother me a hell of a lot more than it does as someone who knows how the sausage gets made. Put mildly... you do not want to play a rogue in the Amnesia Campaign. Nor do you want to play a swashbuckler, a critical-hit focused character of any stripe, really any class out of the... roughly 25% of all classes who rely on knowledge of where to make a hit count the most to do the full amount of damage with their attacks, because practically everything is immune.

Now, again. I partly understand how this happens. We have several different authors writing different chapters of the campaign, simultaneously, in pretty unforgiving crunchy conditions, with just a rough outline to go off. Nobody really has a chance to confirm notes and say “hey, did your chapter totally invalidate one of the foundational character archetypes, because I was thinking of doing that and having two of those back to back would be a bit much.” And while the publisher of the Amnesia Campaign does throw out little booklets of tips for players on what sort of character concepts will/won’t work, they’re not written last, so this sort of tip is missing there too. On the other hand, it’s a huge problem within nearly any given chapter just on its own. If you’re making the call on what all monsters to include in a multi-level stretch of a campaign, you should generally avoid choosing nothing but monsters immune to one of the most common bread and butter class features. And honestly, given how the subject matter naturally lends to the deployment of a particular monster type, erring on the side of assuming everyone else is heavily deploying them wouldn’t be a bad assumption for any author to make.

This though, unlike the rest of my gripes, is ultimately a high level problem that needs a high level solution. When you’re publishing a whole campaign, and you’re doing it in a game where several foundational character concepts kinda live or die based on things like whether things are properly harmed by particular flavors of damage, or whether a decent percentage of enemies fall under a certain classification, that really shouldn’t be a double-blind. Coordinating to get all authors to use a decent spread, or include outline notes like “it’d make sense for about half the enemies in this chapter to be fire elemental themed in various ways, but keep a good variety otherwise,” and/or trying to get a rough handle on emergent themes to adjust for/warn about in player-facing pitch material. Even the best-written campaigns are prone to rude awakenings or hilarious reductions in challenge as turns out, say, going all in on cold damage does indeed pay off for the one with Fire in the title.

Meanwhile, on the other side of that coin, more or less, huge swaths of the Amnesia Campaign really just completely break down by failing to account for some basic standard issue capabilities of a typical party. Particularly the fact that past a certain point, you need to account for the fact that the PCs are almost certainly capable of flight. It’s a thing that happens. If you are really keen on writing adventures where local warlords are chilling out on the open-air rooftop patios of their otherwise heavily fortified fortresses, or melee-oriented monsters plan an ambush in a canyon in a vast wasteland, or a dangerous leapfrog between a series of elevated platforms over something dangerous, you want to make those low-level adventures, or else a typical party, possibly even accidentally, will just completely circumvent the whole thing. There is a whole lot of that in the back of the Amnesia Campaign. My group... literally skipped giant swaths. Heck, there was a whole side quest in the last book where the PCs are rewarded with the location of a giant obelisk which I had to cut because... it was in the middle of a big open outdoor space, and they flew over the city on the way in. They definitely had a view over those hedges.

This sort of dovetails into the next issue, consistently escalating threats. The whole fantasy RPG gimmick is that at level 1, you’re a helpless peasant barely capable of doing anything remarkable, and by level 20 you’re literally punching gods in the face and have more money in your pocket than everyone else in your home country combined (with the obvious exception of the other people in your party). Now, mechanically, balancing around that is a very easy math problem. Characters of level X are meant to deal with threats of level Y, either pull a Y level monster out of the book, or slap levels on something lower to bring it to that point, or spread that out over more enemies, then they drop Z amount of fancy loot. Easiest thing in the world. But you also need things to fit together thematically. You can absolutely throw fighter levels onto the local chicken-stealing goblins to make them mechanically as threatening as a demigod bursting through from another plane of reality, but when a group of characters is at a level where they can be expected to handle the former, it’s just plain weird for them to end up dealing with the latter. Like, yes, these particular goblins have 200 HP instead of the usual 4, so the local town guard can’t handle them, but that should never be true of chicken-stealing goblins. You don’t get that tough stealing chickens, and once you’ve gotten that tough, you should have your sights set a good deal higher than that. At least be stealing rocs or something.

The 4th chapter of the Amnesia Campaign is a particularly blatant example of not getting this, featuring a large number of “please be aware the party can fly at this level” moments mentioned above, and also just demanding the PCs deal with problems that really are beneath them at that point. Seeking out local guides, impressing petty local warlords, getting challenged by giants they must impress to rest safely when crossing a huge desert. These are... not appropriate speed bumps at a point in the narrative where the party is traveling to a location where they are going to literally fight a god, weakened or otherwise. The whole setup would be wonderful as the first chapter of a campaign, but that far in, it just doesn’t work. Particularly when the actual opening of the Amnesia Campaign sets the tension very high right off the bat, with extradimensional threats, shapeshifters, an evil cult, things that typically come later as things start to escalate.

This isn’t to say you can’t mix things up a little. Dealing with threats well below a party’s capabilities can be really nice as a chance to just sort of flex, and get some perspective on how much more capable they’ve grown over time, but you have to do it in a low-tension point of the narrative, and a little self-awareness about it doesn’t hurt.

Finally, while I really kinda hate modern wealth-by-level assumptions, they are baked into the design of the game, so if you’re running with it, you really need to make sure you’re really giving the players something they can use. The Amnesia Campaign really leans heavy on treasure being weird oddities that may be of value to a collector... while also being set, generally, in places so totally removed from civilization that shopping trips aren’t really practical. Much less those needing the party to really find the right sort of buyer.

Really, you want to give out entirely practical loot (really hard to do without knowing the party makeup, but variety can work), big piles of cash/sellables along with sufficiently large cities along the way for viable shopping, or raw materials suitable for crafting plus ample time to really do something with them.

Anyway, hopefully this has come across more as practical constructive advice for anyone writing a campaign, either as a printed product or just for your home game, not just me tearing into the Amnesia Campaign at length.

[cesarcwqr668]

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[tisfan]

So Many Beds

Title So Many Beds Collaborator(s) @tisfan Link https://archiveofourown.org/works/24480112 Square Filled B4: Bucky/Clint Ship/Main Pairing Bucky/Clint Rating - teen Major Tags/Triggers/Warnings - none Summary Bucky and Clint need a new bed Word Count 1264 For @buckybarnesbingo

Bucky could have sworn that he didn’t look at his phone for more than about four minutes; he got a beep for an email, and he was hoping to hear back about a contract job soon. It might be nice to have a job that wasn’t shooting at people, but hey, he’d only been out of the Army for less than a year, what did he know? He knew he still didn’t have steady work. He’d had a couple of contracts for doing heavy lifting and other stupid stuff like that, but not a real job, or a real paycheck.

What he did know was that, after half a year of being home and stepping cautiously around a super cute roomie who he wasn’t quite positive wasn’t hitting on him -- and he’d talked it out about sixty million times with his friends before finally taking a chance.

Six months in, Clint finally said, “Look, this is great and all, believe me, I love snuggling, but man, it’s gonna get hot soon, and sleeping two in a twin is just not going to cut it.”

Bucky had a small amount of savings; there really hadn’t been anything to spend money on aside from hookers and booze, while he was deployed, and no, really, not either of those either, because guess what, the middle east wasn’t big on actual relaxing. So, he had savings.

Which did not really mean he wanted to spend three hundred dollars or so on half a bed, and a boxspring, because he didn’t do that shit of sleeping on the floor. Plus sheets and pillows and all that stuff.

On the other hand, moving into the same bedroom with Clint would mean that they had a spare room in their apartment that they could use as an office.

Maybe he could get some work doing computer software. From home.

Bucky blinked at the email. “Your breakdown backup.” The fuck even was that? 

Spam, as it turned out. It didn’t seem to matter how careful he was, or how thoroughly he triaged his inbox, some amount of “let me sell you shit you don’t need and can’t afford” seemed to slip through.

All in all, though, he was looking at his phone for less than ten minutes. Probably.

And when he looked up, Clint was gone.

Like, not just not beside him, but gone.

He’d either kept going -- not noticing Bucky’s signal to stop a minute -- or he’d gone back.

But in either case, Bucky was now standing alone in the middle of one of those furniture outlet stores that was the size of an airplane hanger, filled with discount sofas and tables, as well as beds, televisions, and electronics.

And the worst part was, in order to give people the idea of space, the floorplan was made up of about half a hundred or so “room sized” display areas that weren’t evenly spaced. 

Which meant sight lines were nothing but a wish and a dream.

Bucky couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any direction.

Bucky wanted it known, period, that he wasn’t scared. That wasn’t even on the list. He was just  annoyed. He was in a big ass furniture store. In New Jersey. Alone.

Because his parter-slash-boyfriend had vanished while Bucky looked like an email.

Annoyed.

Bucky called his name a few times, but Clint was partly deaf, and while he wore hearing aids, they didn’t always help. Especially not in a high noise clutter environment like this. He might even have taken the ‘aids out, if things were bothering him. Bucky usually signed when he talked anyway, just to be polite.

Deciding that Clint probably wouldn’t have gone on ahead, Bucky decided to backtrack through the last few showrooms.

No Clint.

He checked the room with the bare mattresses, piles and piles of them, for laying down on and testing -- Clint had laid down on about forty of them, and Bucky only two.

He couldn’t seem to relax enough to test a mattress -- with his boyfriend -- where people might see them. Call him a self-hating, still in the closet gay man. Which was kinda true, but also because laying down made him vulnerable, and he was still jittery from being in the Army where laying down sometimes meant people shot at you.

Some things took a long time to unlearn.

No Clint in the mattress room.

Bucky backtracked even further, thinking of the rows of sofas that Clint had tried, excited as hell about things like heated seats and consoles where you could store your remotes and cup holders and fancy gizmos.

“Can I help you find something, sir?”

“I’m lookin’ for my roommate,” Bucky said, scowling.

“Well, I can have him paged,” she suggested. “Since he’s probably not in the clearance section.”

“Yeah, we can try that,” Bucky said. Although it was entirely likely that Clint was in the clearance section. He could be a real cheapskate that way, and maybe he was looking for a good deal there.

Bucky texted him like six times while the store intercom system went off. Nothing. 

Bucky wasn't worried.

Yet. 

"Do you have a first aid station?"

"Uh," the salesclerk said. "Technically, yes, because safety and liability, but there's never anyone there."

"Just point me, I'll check on it," he said. Clint was often sporting any number of bandaids and wrist compression grips from hurting himself.

It did take him a while to find the first aid station. But Clint wasn't there either.

Bucky even checked the kitchen area, since Clint had once fallen asleep on the table in Steve apartment and called it the best night of sleep he'd ever had.

Finally, sitting in one of the kitchen chairs, face buried in his hands, Bucky remembered a conversation they'd had, about Clint's brother Barney. 

"He always got the top bunk," Clint had complained. And you know I like high places."

“Miss,” he said. She didn’t look happy that he’d come back again, still sans companion. "Do you have any kid's beds? Like for two kids sharin' a room?"

The salesclerk looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, but that was okay. He was pretty sure she’d decided that he was imagining a roommate entirely. That said, she didn’t follow him this time, when she pointed the direction. Let the crazy guy be someone else’s problem.

The kids’ rooms were cute, the walls were shorter, and everything was colorful. Bright blue and red, purple or pink. Giant numbers, letters, and animals painted on it. Adult furniture was boring. Brown, light brown, reddish brown, chrome, white, or black.

It was no wonder people had kids; kept you from drowning in how boring being an adult could be.

And there was Clint, tucked up on one of the top bunks.

Sound asleep.

“Wake up, beautiful,” Bucky said, leaning over Clint, his mouth practically buzzing Clint’s hair. He ended it with sticking his tongue in Clint’s ear, which got him swatted and nearly knocked off the ladder, but it was worth it.

Absolutely.

“Yuck,” Clint said, finger in his ear, wiggling it around. “No call for that.”

“Sure there was,” Bucky said. “Let’s go, Sleeping Beauty.”

Clint yawned. “Yeah, we’re all done here?”

“I’ve been walkin’ around here for nearly an hour looking for you. I’m done.”

They were most of the way back to their apartment when Clint groaned. “Aw, bed, no.”

“Huh?”

“We didn’t-- we were there for hours, and we didn’t pick one!”

“Guess I’m squashin’ you in the twin again tonight,” Bucky said.

“There are worse fates.” 

[satoshi-mochida]

Publisher Degica Games and developer Kadokawa Corporation have announced RPG Maker MZ, the latest entry in the RPG creation software. It will launch for PC this summer with support for English, Japanese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean language options.

Here is an overview of the game, via its Steam page:

No programming knowledge required!

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As samples, we have prepared a wealth of resources comprised of drawings and music that are needed to make games. All you need to focus on is giving shape to your own ideas.On top of that, for anyone looking for something beyond the samples already provided, we have set aside a vast collection of additional downloadable content intended for the RPG Maker series.

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Map Editor – With RPG Maker‘s map editor, you can create maps like you are drawing a picture.You can build countless towns and dungeons using the map chip resources included with this tool. RPG Maker MZ features a more powerful map editor function and is jam packed with lots of new resources. We will reveal more details in the coming days. Get ready to be wowed!

Character Generation – By combining the resources included with this tool, you can place your own original characters within a game.In addition to combining assets, you can produce countless visual patterns for your characters using this function, which also allows you to change colors. RPG Maker MZ brings you a more powerful character generation function. We will reveal more details in the coming days. Get ready to be wowed!

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Database – When creating games through RPG Maker, the database function plays an essential role.Using the database function, you can adjust and test the game balance in relation to playable characters and enemies. You can also choose detailed settings for areas including professions, skills, items and weapons. With RPG Maker MZ, we have augmented and expanded the database function. We will reveal more details in the coming days. Get ready to be wowed!

Test Play – RPG Maker features a test play function that makes it very easy to check the workings of your game while you are creating it.There is no need to deploy the game to another platform each time you want to test it.

Events – In RPG Maker, you can use the event function to depict characters’ conversations, movement across a map, the placement of treasure chests and other visuals.You can easily set up the events you employ frequently. You can also copy them and use them freely. What’s most surprising is that no programming knowledge is required in order to set up events. Try to make especially interesting games by combining the large number of event types that have been provided. Through RPG Maker MZ, we have bolstered the event function. We will reveal more details in the coming days. Get ready to be wowed!

Animation – By using the animation function, you can successfully produce effects that add glitz and impact to battle scenes. In RPG Maker MZ, we’ve revamped the animation function! We will reveal more details in the coming days. Get ready to be wowed!

Plug-Ins – If someone requires more than what RPG Maker‘s existing functions offer or desires to make an even more advanced game, they can use the plug-in function to build a more highly customized creation.In RPG Maker MZ, we have really beefed up the plug-in function. We will reveal more details in the coming days. Get ready to be wowed!

Playing a Game – RPG Maker MZ makes it much easier for users to play games! We will reveal more details in the coming days. Get ready to be wowed!

Visit the Japanese official website here and English website here.

[15001700tt]

Descendants of the Moon

Testing Foreign Waters

Descendants of the Moon Masterlist

Word count: 1,649 

tag list: @multi-fan-trash @chastja  @syublush @serpentityx 

Dm me if you want to be on the tag list!

Key: Italics- things that happened in the drama but do not old any importance to the story line

Episode 2:

Yoo Ji arrives at the hospital with a purpose this time. She has to tell Mo Yeon and her friends that she’s leaving to volunteer in Urk, a city on the other side of the world, she has no idea when she’ll come back but this isn't the first time so they shouldn’t be too surprised. 

“Hey! Have you seen Mo Yeon?” she caught Chi Hoon, he shook his head no. he checked the board behind him. 

“Oh, she should be coming out of the operation room. Come, I need to talk to her anyway,” he fidgeted as he nervously smiled. She glanced down and back up to his face.

“You lost your ring again” she stated, his eyes widened. 

“Don’t tell Hae Eun!” he blurted out, she chuckled and promised she wouldn’t. He led her towards the room. They found Mo Yeon with Hae Eun. 

Chi Hoon gave Hae Eun a really bad excuse for her to leave, as soon as she was out of sight he started looking through the laundry basket.

“He lost his ring again” Yoo Ji explained to a confused Mo Yeon. she then rolled her eyes. 

“Again!?” she groaned. She glared at the anxious boy. 

“Clench your jaw” she muttered, faking a jab at him. He smiled clenching his jaw before making his escape.

“I hope he grows up a little faster.” Mo Yeon murmured to Yoo Ji. she nodded and observed her doctor friend.

“Did you need me for something? I was going to take a quick nap before I do my rounds.” Mo Yeon sighed, she looked exhausted.

“I am leaving for volunteer work in two days,” Yoo Ji told her. She never beat around the bush.

“They need help covering the area and I am the only one available right now,” she explained. 

“I thought you were covering the Park Ree Kim case?” Mo Yeon mentioned Yoo Ji’s case, she was at Haesun, getting treated for heart disease. Yoo Ji was tailing the doctor, to get information.

“They’re replacing me with a rookie reporter, besides it was the son” she waved off. 

“I still don’t know why you choose to be a reporter when you could be a private investigator” Mo Yeon shook her head at how peculiar her friend was.

“I like writing the reports” Yoo Ji sarcastically replied. She soon had to leave to pack and get her stuff sorted out with the embassy. She bid goodbyes to all her friends. 

-

The events between Shi Jin and Mo Yeon happen. 

-

The shower scene right before the Alpha team is where Dae Young and Shi Jin ask Gwang Nam about Yoo Ji. 

“I noticed ever since we came back from Haesung, you’ve been too quiet” Shi Jin questioned the tranquil man. 

“You think he fell in love with Mun Yoo Ji?” Dae Young teased.

“Probably, he’s never seen a girl fight before” Shi Jin teased, laughing as he got shoved by Gwang Nam who was getting flustered. 

“Shut up” 

-

Yoo Ji explored the area well, she almost got every crook of the town that wasn’t dangerous to the public. Of course, she wasn’t scared she just didn't want to get on the U.S.’s bad side as they were leading the bases here. 

She went to a bar by the seaside. She met this bartender that was peculiar, you can get anything there. But Valentine, the bartender, had a rule. ‘We don’t sell women or information here’ Yoo Ji loved to challenge that, and she’s only been here for a week. 

There wasn't much to do here for a reporter, she was mostly covering the political debate between Urk and the U.S. but that was going very slow, and everyone is being careful so there’s not as much fun as her usual cases.

“Hey Val,” Yoo Ji greeted in English. 

“Ji, you’re here again, it’s the fifth time this week.” Val scoffed with mild annoyance. 

“I wouldn't be here if you would just give me what I need” Yoo Ji reminded her. 

“The rule” Val stated with no room for leniency.

“Well then, I’ll just have a dry martini” Yoo Ji admitted silent defeat for the day.

“It's one in the afternoon” Val raised an eyebrow.

“It's happy hour somewhere,” Yoo Ji muttered.

-Eight months later- 

The Korean army found an active land mine, they were instructed by Yoo Shi Jin to disarm the active ones. Of course, Shi Jin and Dae Young got called to the main base to be disciplined for not following the correct orders and letting the US Army deal with it. 

Gwang Nam was tasked with driving them there, he dropped them off and went to hang out in the bar that's near the base. 

He pulled up and went inside. He sat by the bar and ordered a drink, he was planning on waiting for Shi Jin and Dae Young and then leaving when they finish. 

But his thought process was halted when his eyes were drawn to the door, and a familiar girl walked in. she didn't seem to notice him and sat a few seats away from him. He figured she was used to military men being around here considering how close this bar was to their base.

She called the bartender, and Gwang Nam noticed that they were on a first-name basis. The bartender whose name he heard was Val, seemed used to the girl’s tendencies. 

Gwang Nam couldn't get over his shock of seeing Yoo Ji, the strange girl he met back in Korea at the hospital Ki Bum was getting treated at. His mouth was flopped open, he couldn't believe the odds. 

Finally, Yoo Ji seemed to feel someone’s gaze on her, she turned and couldn't help but feel shock radiate through her body. She didn't let it consume her though, she quickly recovered and gave him a knowing smile. She hopped off her seat and plopped right next to him.

“Hey, we met in Korea, right? Mo Yeon tried to call the police on your friend” her smile grew at the ridiculousness of her friend. 

“Yeah,” Gwang Nam swallowed and gave her a small smile. 

“You’re probably wondering why am I here” Yoo Ji speculated from the curious look on his face. 

“If you don't mind sharing” he responded.

“I am a reporter, I am covering the political debate. What about you soldier?” she grinned.

“I’ve been deployed here for the last 8 months” he vaguely ghosted over exactly what he’s doing here. He couldn't exactly tell her that he was on ‘break’ from his ‘special’ job. 

“You’re a First Sergeant, probably involved in Special Forces” Yoo Ji deduced. They don’t deploy any soldiers here, it was a magnet for hostage kidnappings. Gwang Nam had to hide his surprise or he’ll lose his job. 

“But you know, you don't strike me as a special forces agent” she saw the hooded look in his eyes, he was probably going to stay silent, his way of not confirming nor denying; but now she made a hit to his ego and pride. To Yoo Ji, she knew that military men have a huge pride problem. Especially those who went voluntarily, she saw the small fire ignite in his eyes. Yoo Ji also noticed that he was trained well, he was trained to not lie but to not tell the whole truth, which is much more efficient. Beats the polygraph test seven times out of ten. 

“That’s what makes me good at it” he teased. Yoo Ji felt her eyebrow raise. He didn't deny it but he didn't outright tell her. He left enough space for her to wonder if she’s right or not. She quietly approved. usually, they would crack under her pressure. 

Their stare off was interrupted when two more men joined their section. 

“Ready to go?” Dae Young asked from behind the girl Gwang Nam was conversing with. 

“Captain and Deputy Leader” Yoo Ji addressed turning around with a smirk. Shi Jin overreacted and put a hand to his chest, while Dae young gave her an amused smile.

“Cool girl! What are you doing here?” Shi Jin questioned as he gave her a side hug. 

“I knew you liked me but you didn't have to follow me halfway around the world” Dae Young deadpanned, causing Yoo Ji and Gwang Nam to roll their eyes at Dae Young’s dry sense of humor. 

“As if, I am here on special reporter business that I can’t tell you about” she twisted her words and made eye contact with Shi Jin. Yoo Ji was trying to see if he got what she’s trying to do. He did.

“Mo Yeon told you” it was a statement.

“Just because I am halfway around the world, doesn't mean I don’t know what’s going on with my friends.” 

“Well, then you should know she’s coming to Urk next week” Dae Young informed her. That she didn't know, Mo Yeon didn't mention that. The last thing she mentioned was that the Chairman asshole tried to sleep with her. 

She didn't mention that to Shi Jin, she wanted to see his reaction when Mo Yeon tells him herself, now that she’s coming. 

Yoo Ji excused herself telling them she had to go to her boss and report back on some work she had done prior to meeting them. 

Turns out, Yoo Ji’s boss was looking for volunteers to stay at the Taebaek Unit to cover an issue on how the Korean military sustains in foreign countries. They were allowed by the Korean military and had to be careful about what they write, and so the boss wanted to find the best person that would do so. She was set to move in later in the week. 

-

The scene where Shi Jin and Mo Yeon meet at the airport and he’s totally cold towards her.

[haledamage]

yay, writing! Chapter 2 of my Cait Cousland/Nathaniel Howe fic, and what looks like it’s going to be a long story after all. Takes place after this one. Someone help me name this damn thing so I can put it on AO3

Cathain hated Amaranthine, and hated Vigil's Keep most of all. Every inch of it felt steeped in history, in the combined legacy of the Howes and Couslands. Every room held a memory, of summers and holidays and dinners and parties. Of mornings with Thomas and afternoons with Delilah and nights with Nathaniel. Cait's bedroom still smelled like Delilah's favorite perfume. All their things had been removed, but the feeling behind them remained, drifting through the halls like ghosts. And through it all Nathaniel loomed, a living, scowling specter from a different life. He didn't speak, not to the others and especially not to her, but she could always feel him there. He was in her periphery as she spoke to Veral about deploying Wardens to surrounding lands, hiding among the stacks as she perused the library, waiting in the hallway as she headed to her room for the night. 

Once, frustrated and more than a little tipsy, Cait leaned against her door and demanded, "Are you waiting for an invitation, Nate? You never needed one before." He didn't stop looming after that, but he did it a little farther away, giving her more space. She tried not to be disappointed. After three weeks, Cait had had enough. She wandered into the cellar under the pretense of exploration, listening for quiet footsteps on the stairs behind her as Nathaniel followed her down. It had been outfitted as an area for sparring and close-combat training. Straw mats covered the floor to soften falls and polished wooden weapons of all shapes and sizes lined the back wall for practicing armed fighting. Best of all, it was empty. "What is this?" He asked quietly from the doorway. It was the first time he'd said anything to her since the Joining. Cathain kept her back to him, pretending to test the balance of a couple of daggers. Over her shoulder, she said, "I need to blow off a little steam. All this time in the Vigil is making me feel restless. I thought I could take it out on one of the dummies down here." "There aren't any dummies down here." "There's you," she said with a sly grin. He huffed a laugh, the sound surprised out of him, and she grinned wider. She grabbed a longsword and tossed it toward him. He caught it almost absentmindedly. "This was your plan all along," Nathaniel growled, but he stepped onto the mat across from her as he did. She tried not to notice how broad his shoulders were from years wielding a bow. "I had other plans, but I figured you'd be averse." Cait spun the daggers in her hands and stood on her toes, ready to move quickly when she needed to. He tried not to notice the toned muscles of her arms from years of swordplay. Nathaniel lunged at her without warning. He was faster than she expected, but she was faster still and managed to sidestep the first swing of the blade. In the opening he left, she brought a dagger up toward his ribs, but he knocked it away with a quick strike to her elbow. She danced backwards a couple steps and waited. He wasn't as angry as Cathain had anticipated. She'd expected that hatred she'd seen from him that night in the prison; the whole plan had been to help him work that off so they could make some progress towards civility, but it seemed to have mostly simmered away over the weeks since. Nathaniel was aggressive, sure, but not in a way that said he wanted to hurt her, just in a way that said he wanted to win. He was good. Larger and stronger than she was, but also nearly as fast. He was smart, calculating, and willing to fight dirty. No wonder Varel's men had had trouble with him. He feigned a leg sweep, changing at the last second to land a solid blow in her stomach. "I came here to kill you, you know," he murmured in her ear as she doubled over. "Don't worry," she rasped, trapping his sword against her stomach and using the opening to strike hard under his shoulder joint. He grunted and stepped back from her. "I don't take it personally. Some of my best friends have tried to kill me." That made him pause, and she tried to exploit the opening to get a few hits in, but he moved almost instinctively to block her attempt. "What makes you think I won't try to kill you now?" It was an empty threat, either a test or an attempt to drop her guard. Progress. Cait smirked, unable to catch her breath enough to laugh. "You're welcome to try." He lunged again, but instead of sidestepping she moved forward, getting under his guard. She flowed around him and brought the pommel of her dagger down on the back of his neck. He collapsed to the mat. "When you're done, maybe we can sit down and actually talk about this." He rolled onto his back and stabbed up toward her. She only barely dodged in time. "There is nothing to talk about," Nathaniel said as he climbed to his feet. "Right," Cathain said. One of her hands was numb; she dropped the blade it held and kicked it away. "Nothing. Certainly not the eight years since we last saw each other. Or the fact that we're here beating each other up instead of any of the much more pleasant ways I always imagined this reunion going." Nathaniel roared and rushed at her again and she was too slow to dodge. It was all she could do to get her one remaining blade up between them before he shoved her hard against the wall, practice sword to her throat. "I win," he growled breathlessly. "Are you sure?" Cathain pressed her wooden dagger a little harder into his ribs where she held it in the minuscule space between them. If this had been a real fight, with real blades, they'd both be dead. They stayed there for several long moments, faces inches apart and breath loud in the empty room. She couldn't read the look on his face. He looked like he wanted to press his sword closer until she couldn't breathe. He looked like he wanted to kiss her. He looked like he wanted to keep fighting. He looked like he wanted to run. In the end, he did none of those things. He dropped his sword to the floor with a clatter and pulled away from her enough to lean against the wall next to her. He slid down it to sit. After a second of hesitation, she sat next to him. Now that they were here, Cathain didn't know where to start. She wanted to apologize. She wanted to justify her actions. She wanted to tell him that she missed him. She did none of those things, instead just letting the silence build between them. "I've been speaking with your… Zevran," Nathaniel said softly. He sounded so weary; Cait clenched her fists in her lap to stop herself from reaching out to him out of habit. "He told me a little about what happened in Highever. About… what my father did. Was he exaggerating?" Cathain leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. "Probably not. I'm sorry." "I'm sorry too," Nathaniel said. She could feel his eyes on her, but kept hers closed. "You've never given me reason not to trust you before, I just didn't want to believe my father could be capable of... something like that. I've been cruel and stubborn. You deserve better." "You've always been stubborn," she smiled slightly and was gratified when he chuckled. "You deserve better too. From me, and from the King, and from the Grey Wardens. Your family shouldn't have to suffer because of your father's actions." He didn't say anything in response, but Cait didn't really expect him to. The tension he'd been carrying had finally left him and the silence between them was almost comfortable; that was enough for now. She heard a small thud as his head hit the wall next to hers. Nathaniel’s voice was very low and very close when he spoke again. "This isn't how I pictured you becoming Arlessa of Amaranthine." That made her sit up and look at him. He was the picture of relaxation, head tilted back and forearms resting on his knees, but she could see the shrewdness in his half-closed eyes. The way he studied her made warmth bloom in her chest. "Obviously," Cathain said too quickly, but with thankfully just enough glibness, "once we got too old for suitors to be interested, Delilah and I were going to get married and rule Amaranthine as spinsters together." Nathaniel laughed, a full and joyous sound that made the room a little brighter simply by merit of its existence. "And what age were you when you came up with this foolproof plan?" "We were 10, and the plan was very sound, thank you," Cait tried to look offended, but his laughter was infectious. "It held up well until one summer Fergus and I came to visit and your voice had changed and you were a foot taller. It was all downhill from there." His eyes were still full of laughter and a warmth that had been missing the last few weeks. "I'm sorry to have ruined all your plans, but I'm afraid I don't regret it." His smile faded into a look of contemplation. "Have you heard from Delilah since…" he trailed off, but she understood. There were a lot of things that could be since… and none of them were pleasant. She shook her head. "Not in a few years, actually. I was going to ask Zevran to look for her while he's in town." A look of panic crossed Nathaniel's face and Cait held up her hands. "Not like that! I just mean he's very good at finding people." Nathaniel thought about that for a moment. Finally, he asked "And you trust him? Even though he tried to kill you?" "Technically, he didn't try to kill me. Loghain tried to kill me and used Zev to do it," she knew it was splitting hairs, but the difference was important to her. She added, "But yes, I trust him. More than most." "Loghain sent assassins after you," he said incredulously, "and you traveled with him as well?" "I… yes. It sounds kind of reckless when you put it like that." Cathain felt strangely defensive of the former teryn; Loghain had made some very poor decisions in the name of good intentions, but they'd grown to understand each other and even, after a time, become close friends. "Some of your best friends have tried to kill you, indeed," Nathaniel chuckled. "I guess I thought you were joking." He dropped the subject, though, and instead climbed to his feet with a groan. "Maker's blood, I think I'm made of more bruises than skin. You sure know how to put a man in his place." "You needed someone to knock some sense into you," she said as he offered her a hand and helped her to her feet. "Maybe you shouldn't have led with 'I came here to kill you' and I would have gone easier on you." The smile was gone from Nathaniel's face as if it had never been there. "Caitie, I'm--" She put a hand on his chest and shoved him lightly, just enough to knock him off balance. "Nathaniel Howe, if you apologize to me again, I'm going to knock you around the mat for another round." He stepped forward into her personal space, catching her hand and holding it against his chest, where she had minutes ago held a blade on him. She could feel his heartbeat through her palm. His eyes and voice were intense when he said, "I'm sorry, Caitie." Cathain tried to shove him again, but this time he didn't budge. She sighed; she didn’t have the energy left to fight him on this. It was hard to stay properly righteous when he was so close. "We both screwed up, okay? Let's just… start over." "Start over," Nathaniel mused. The look on his face was somewhere between awe and skepticism until it spread into a rare, gentle smile. "As you wish." He was still quiet around Vigil's Keep after that. He still stalked the edges of her vision as she went about the business of being Commander and Arlessa and rebuilding the damage done by war and neglect to both the keep and to the people. He no longer maintained a hostile silence, however, occasionally offering advice or a dry quip; once, he even attempted conversation with Anders. But mostly he just watched and waited, never too close but never far away. When finally, finally, things had settled down at the Vigil enough for her to pursue interests outside the keep, Cait found Nathaniel waiting for her outside her room. He was in his armor, bow strung and slung over his shoulder. As soon as he saw her, he growled, "I'm going with you." She fought to keep her face serious. "You don't even know where we're going." "Doesn't matter. I'm going with you." She pretended to think it over, as if she hadn't already planned to ask him along. As if she had ever even considered leaving him behind. "Tell Anders and Oghren to suit up. We leave in 20." Nathaniel gave her shoulder a quick, friendly squeeze. "Thank you," he said. Cathain wasn't sure what he was thanking her for, exactly, but he was gone before she could ask. She watched the empty hallway for a long minute before she went to her room to get dressed. Her shoulder was still warm where he'd touched her, and for the first time in a long time she felt something like hope.

[solivar]

WIP Ghost Stories On Route 66

In which there is an unexpected and troubling revelation.

“Team Tokki, report.”

“On station, sorry for the delay.” Hana replied a nerve-wracking ten minutes later. “Took us a minute to get all our cables in order but Kozy Kot Motor Inn Basecamp is now online.”

The topographic holomap hanging over the dining room table rippled gently as she proved it, pulsing their location in the scrubby desert flatlands between Mesa Prieta and the ruins of Albuquerque, turning their basecamp icon electric pink-and-green.

“In an amusing sidenote,” Hana continued on breezily, “You know those MiBs -- the TALON guys? Their base may be in Albuquerque Sunport but they’ve got mobile units all over the place in the immediate vicinity and some kind of stationary observation post up on the mesa itself. So yes this is me formally blaming my tardiness on avoiding the notice of scary goons who may or may not be employees of the federal government.”

“Mesa Prieta is an archaeological preserve -- it has been for decades, the petroglyphs there are thousands of years old.” Ana, seated at the opposite end of the table with stacks of airtight herb containers, a mortar and pestle, and a digital scale, observed carefully, pausing in her work. “Ownership yielded back to the Federated Southwest Tribal Government after the Crisis.”

“Meaning?” Hanzo asked, inclining a questioning brow.

“Meaning,” Ana gave the contents of her pestle another thoughtful turn, “that either the FST is acting in direct cooperation with TALON or else their actual employers kissed considerable quantities of ass to access that site for reasons other than advancing the cause of cultural preservation.”

Hanzo blinked at her. “That feels extraordinarily bad.”

“It is what it is, my young friend. Until we have better intel, we can only take matters as they come.” She spooned the contents of her pestle into a little tin container.

“I’m not so sure I like Team Tokki’s proximity to a potentially hostile unknown quantity,” Hot Vampire Jack’s tone was significantly less philosophical. “Maybe you should relocate?”

“Their base doesn’t directly overlook ours -- it’s on the far northern point of the mesa, closer to the Chamisa Wilderness Area than to us.” Jesse replied, calm and even. “We can set a drone on stealth observation if you want, but hauling off and moving again might get us seen by one of their mobile units. They’re putting up those pylon things they’ve got on the UNM campus all over out here.”

“I tried getting a look at one of those the other day but campus security waved me off.” Hana added, aggrieved.

“Whatever else they are, they’ve got a pretty hefty sensor and communications package on them -- I can see their output on our own passive monitors.” Lucio added, and the map rippled as he pushed data, added clusters of red-white-black pinpricks representing the pylons’ locations, easily a few dozen spread across the desert basin between Albuquerque and the mesa, many of them concentrated just above the Red Line along old Route 40. “I can try hacking one of their transceiver modules and skimming the data to see what they’re monitoring but that might attract some attention if they’ve got any kind of intrusion detection capabilities onboard.”

“No unnecessary risks. The pylons likely aren’t going anywhere and they’re extraneous to our own mission.” Terrifying Smoke Gabe rasped, his voice on the comms a weirdly metallic echo. “We can always try that if we can’t get intelligence from other sources.”

“Speaking of which,” Zenyatta interjected smoothly, “Team Tattoo reporting perimeter secure at Four Daughters Basecamp -- we are about to begin deploying our sensor and visual observation drones and begin transmitting.”

“El Malpais Basecamp likewise secure and ready to begin deployment.” Jamie added. “Team Helicopter Parents on perimeter patrol.”

“God, I hate that name,” Jack muttered.

“Who gave the lecture about appropriate comm discipline last night?” Gabe asked sweetly.

“Oh, shut up.”

Actual comm discipline immediately dissolved in jokes and back-and-forth smacktalk, a release of tension that even Jack recognized as necessary before any real work could get done, especially since they were waiting for Team Tokki to get up to speed. Hanzo, recognizing at as well, went and fetched tea and cakes and fussy little finger sandwiches for himself and Ana and, eventually, Reinhardt when he came in off his own perimeter patrol with the members of the pack left on guard duty. She accepted the cup he poured and the plate he delivered with a gracious smile, setting aside her work for the moment, while in the background nearly everyone they loved pretended not to be afraid.

Four days they’d been in the field -- four days of hunting the monster haunting him, four nights of sleeping rough, fanning out from Cerrillos in a gradually expanding search pattern enabled by Jesse’s practical maintenance of multiple gasoline-powered vehicles and Jamie’s purpose-built technology. Hana had dropped her presentation and then bagged the rest of her classes to assist in the physical construction of the drones, displaying a level of mechanical skill that Hanzo at least had never suspected. (“When I was a kid, my cousins and my friend Dae-hyun and I built hovertech for competition before I got into gaming -- seriously, aniki, it’s like falling off a bike, you never really forget once you know how to do it.”) Genji and Lucio had done likewise with the programming, following Jamie and Roadie’s careful instructions, working late into the night on stress-testing up until the day before their departure. Hanzo, relegated to a support role, had helped prepare the supplies and the vehicles for departure, packing MATILDA and the largest of Jesse’s off-road capable Jeeps with military surplus rations and bottled water, three fully stocked first aid kits, the heavily warded four-season tents and camping gear going with Team Helicopter Parents and Team Tokki, and extra warm clothing for everyone. He forced cardigans and sweatshirts on all of them at breakfast the morning they departed, a meal he crawled out of Jesse’s warm embrace to make for them and to which he returned before he allowed them to leave.

Jesse had taken his face between his hands, his kiss sweet and soft, and Hanzo had exercised enormous restraint by making only a few rude gestures at his brother and friends as they whistled and shouted suggestions and encouragements ranging from the mildly obscene to the outright pornographic. Jesse’s husky laughter had warmed him almost more than the kiss as he drew them together and murmured against his ear, “I’ll bring Hana and Lu back safe and sound, I promise, and Roadie won’t let anything happen to Genji and Zen.”

“I know.” Hanzo replied, soft and low against his shoulder. “I just wish...I wish I could do more.”

“You’ll have plenty to do when we find this thing. For now, you’re our lifeline. Don’t forget that.” Jesse pressed a last kiss to his forehead. “We’ll be back before you know it, darlin’. Never fear.”

But fear he did, despite Jesse’s assurances, despite his knowledge of all their skill and ability and competence, because he also knew the cruelty and viciousness and above all else cunning of the thing that they hunted, a cunning that had concealed what he had become from their entire clan, from the sister raised at his side, from the Dragon of the South Wind himself. That concealed him now, still, even as they found the telltale traces of his passage through the world, marked on the holomap in a particularly vile shade of bilious yellow, twisting tracks that appeared and disappeared without apparent pattern, growing gradually denser as the search teams moved west. Fear moved him to carry an inflatable camping mattress down to the dining room, where the communications nerve center was set up by virtue of adequate work-and-table space, and built a nest where he slept, light and restless, alert to the slightest twitch of sound on the comms, the tiniest hint of distress, which mostly came in the form of bodies shifting in their sleep and a terrifyingly vast assortment of snores.

“Drones airborne and headed to optimal scan radius,” Hana reported. “You want me to send one of our spares up to keep an eye on the MiBs?”

“Couldn’t hurt to gather a little intel at this stage of the proceedings.” Jesse opined.

“It could if your drone is detected.” Terrifying Smoke Gabe pointed out. “If you send one up, I recommend passive visual observation only.”

“Doable. Lu, you wanna handle that while I get these puppies where they need to go?” A clattering of equipment on the line as Hana and Lucio moved about in their working shelter.

“Gotcha. Temporarily disabling the drone’s sensor package just to be on the safe side.” Lucio came on the line for the first time that day. “You want me to stream footage back to HQ?”

Hanzo glanced at Ana who nodded slightly and murmured, “If they can detect our drone sensor data streams, a video stream will hardly make matters worse, and if they cannot, we will have fresh information of our own.”

“True.” Hanzo replied as his stomach tried gamely to twist itself into a Lemarchand cube of pure dread. “Go ahead, Lucio.” He clicked his own comm off and looked back to Ana, meditatively sipping her tea. “If they -- if TALON -- detects our data streams, could they trace them here, to Cerrillos?”

“Theoretically? Yes. In practice, Jack and Gabriel and Jesse have all exerted considerable effort to make this place as difficult to find as possible for outsiders.” Ana smiled dryly. “And, in any case, they may be the least of our concerns at this juncture.”

“Point.” Hanzo muttered and clicked the comm back on, applying himself to his own tea in an effort to wring some calm out of his digestive tract.

“Team Tokki’s drones on station, optimal positioning.” Hana sang.

“Team Helicopter Parents, ready to begin scanning.” Jamie replied.

“Team Tattoo, likewise prepared.” Zen added tranquilly.

All three Basecamp icons flashed and Hanzo set the countdown timer. “Ten second timer.”

At ten, the holomap blossomed as the drones’ sensor packages and associated data streams came online, populating it with a picture of local reality that overlaid and intertwined with the topography in ways that would make a cartographer’s eyes bleed. In the corner, a secondary pane opened with Lucio’s camera drone feed as it climbed out of basecamp, view panning out across the remains of the Kozy Kot Motor Inn and its eight identical “log cabin” cottages plus the motel office, set around an inner courtyard that had once contained picnic tables and grills and now held two four-season tents linked by a vestibule, a camp sanitary structure, and a warmed, weatherproof work tent, where they also ate their meals. As Hanzo watched, Jesse made is way between two of the cottages and looked up, waved for the camera as Lucio panned and zoomed away, over the cracked and crumbling remnants of a paved road, through the remains of the little tourist town that had sprung up around the motel, as fully abandoned as it was, and into the desert beyond.

There the ground was rucked up and rugged, split by arroyos and tumbled spits of dark, jagged stone, blanketed in tough, autumn-browned grasses and scrubby, wind-tortured trees and shrubs, elevation rising steadily until the drone was climbing vertically along the wall of the mesa. The top of the mesa itself was so flat the TALON installation was clearly visible miles off, a crescent of four dun-colored prefab structures clustered together, their communications uplink arrays pointed skyward, the rest of their camp’s perimeter delineated in those pylons, spaced neatly exact distances apart. Lucio dropped the drone to a few inches above the mesa hardpack and brought it in behind the largest of the structures, up the back avoiding the windows, and settled it into place on the edge of structure’s roof, cameras trained down into the camp itself.

Ana moved to join Hanzo, teacup in hand, and settled to watch. Within the relatively compact confines of the camp, technicians in khaki jumpsuits were working with obvious care among the basalt-black rocks, scanning the petroglyphs with handheld devices, taking photographs and video, neither moving nor touching anything if they could avoid it.

“I’ll be damned,” Lucio muttered. “Maybe they are doing archaeological preservation work?”

“You have to admit, we’ve seen stranger things.” Genji remarked dryly.

“But if that’s the case, why are they crawling all over the school? And why’d they interrogate Hanzo about Professor Flakes-a-Lot? And what’s the deal with those pylons? And --” Hana’s stream of questions was cut off by the sound of smashing crockery and Hanzo’s involuntary yelp of pain as Ana gripped his arm with unexpectedly fierce strength.

“Pan back,” Ana snapped over his comm.

Lucio did so and Ana’s grip tightened another degree. “Jack, Gabriel...are you seeing this?”

The pair standing together before one of the largest single petroglyph displays in the camp were not dressed like technicians. One, scrawny and unshaven and bespectacled, dark hair going gray at the temples, wore an honest-to-gods white lab coat over his cable knit sweater and gray cargo pants, hands doing as much talking as his mouth as he conversed with his companion. That companion was a solid two, maybe as much as three, heads shorter, clad in rust red coveralls and heavy hiking boots and more toolbelts and their associated attachments than seemed possible, his hugely muscled  and heavily tattooed shoulders uncovered and most of his face obscured by a genuinely impressive mass of thick blonde beard and mustaches.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jack breathed over the comm, his quiet carrying the relative force of an explosion.

“Torbjörn?” Terrifying Smoke Gabe sounded frankly stunned. “But...he and Ingrid retired years ago.”

“Apparently not,” Jack replied, grimly.

“This...changes the complexion of many things.” Reinhardt said, heavily, from the door and came to lay an enormous hand on his wife’s shoulder.

“It does?” Hanzo asked. “How? Why? What does this mean?”

“Too soon to tell on some of those, kid.” Jack said into the silence that followed. “But as to what it means? That little Viking wrench-slinger there is Torbjörn Lindholm and, once upon a time, he was a member of the same UN-sponsored special ops unit as Gabe and I -- Rein and Ana, Yanaba and Nate, too. Helped us save the world a time or six. And, if he’s involved with this bunch, TALON? That likely means nothing good and we should probably figure out what it is sooner rather than later.”