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catherinnn · 11 months ago

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Truth or Dare Harrington?

Steddie x reader

summary: The gang has a night out singing karaoke and drinking. When the party dies down, this trio continues the fun at your apartment.

warnings: SMUT (+18), threesome, p i v, unprotected sex (don't do this, this is fiction), oral sex (m & f), no body descriptions appart that it's afab reader, smoking weed and drinking alcohol.

words: 3.2 k. masterlist

part 2

It had started as a fun night out celebrating you were all finally available, the entire group.

Ever since some of you started collage and others started working, the group wasn't what it once was. But tonight you were all here, drinking shot after shot and finishing endless cups of whatever you were ordering.

You went to a karaoke bar –Robin's idea– and it was the most fun you have had in a while.

You did all from solo songs to duets.

You sang 'I'm Just a Girl' with the girls; you sang a duet with Eddie doing 'The Chain'; Steve dared you to sing 'Take My Breath Away'; and then you made him sing 'Last Christmas' –even though it is July– but he made you sing it with him. Eddie and Steve dedicated you their version of 'Maneater' which you didn't know if you should be flattered or offended by.

To sum up, every possible song until your vocal cords hurt.

After that, you offered your apartment to keep the party going. Steve and Eddie were the firsts to say yes very excitedly, but the rest of the gang decided to head home already, calling it a night.

Eddie offered to share some of his good stuff but they went off either way. You still agreed to go and smoke at least for a little while with the boys.

That's how you ended up in your couch, passing a joint among the three of you while you played some dumb drinking game.

"Truth" Eddie chooses.

"Who of the two of us was your favorite to sing with tonight?" you ask him.

"Oh, that's mean. I liked both of you," Eddie takes a moment to think. "but I think we had a lot of chemistry on that stage, big boy"

"What?" you ask offended at his answer. "We had so much chemistry with that song, and it was much more of an iconic moment than yours!"

"Hey hey, he already made his decision!" Steve argues. "Control your jealousy"

"Get out of my apartment" you joke.

"Alright, calm down, I'll make you choose too" Eddie starts. "If you were... stranded on a desert island with one of us, who would it be?"

You roll your eyes, "that's easy, Steve" Eddie gasps offended and Steve grins proudly. "Well, because he was an athlete, he has a good body to survive and also take care of me" you tried to defend your answer.

"I'll take care of you baby" Steve winks at you.

Eddie and you start bickering until Steve makes you shut up and keep playing.

"Quit fighting, Eddie I dare you to say your favorite thing about her"

Eddie smirks already knowing his answer, "Umm, let me think," he says, pretending to be indecisive while forming two circles with his hands in front of his chest, mimicking the shape of breasts.

Steve laughs at this and you roll your eyes containing your giggle.

"Uh- no, it's her eyes, definitely" he answers for real this time.

"Yours?" Steve asks you now. "What's your favorite think about him?"

"Umm," you look at him while thinking your answer. "I could say your eyes as well, but I don't want to copy you... and I love your hair but we have the king of all hairs here present" you say referring to Steve. "I really like your smile, your whole face lights up when you smile, and you have those cute dimples too"

Eddie, ironically, can't help but smile at your statement.

"My turn" you declare. "Stevie, truth or dare"

"Dare"

"I dare you to... hold hands with Eddie for the next three rounds"

"Alright" he takes the other man's hand in his as he also takes the joint from his mouth to keep smoking himself. The latter rolls his eyes at this.

More rounds like that continue, where Eddie makes you sit on Steve's lap until you finish playing, and you make Eddie do a sexy dance without music where you couldn't stop laughing.

"Truth or dare Harrington?" the metalhead asks him.

"Truth"

"What is... a fantasy of yours? A sexy one"

"Uh..." Steve debates whether to say it or not. "Well, I've always wanted to- um, to have a threesome"

"Really?"

"Yeah"

"With two girls?" you ask him.

"Yeah... or a guy and a girl too, I think" he confesses.

"Princess, I dare you and Steve to shotgun" Eddie says all of the sudden.

"What? It's not even your turn"

"We're not even following those rules anymore" he defends.

"Uh, fine" you agree either way.

Steve grabs the joint and as you were already on his lap you just turn your head to look at him.

"I'll do it, yeah?" he checks and you nod.

He takes a drag and holds it, you move your head as close as you can so your lips are almost touching. He exhales the smoke into your mouth and you inhale it.

You don't know if it's the weed or having Steve so close to your face you're almost kissing, but you get a little dizzy on your head.

"You okay?" he checks on you again noticing this. You nod slowly without moving away yet, as you exhale the smoke.

Eddie looks at this smirking, enjoying the scene. "Steve, I dare you to kiss her"

"W- what?"

"Oh, you are both dying to! Just do it already!" he accuses.

You and Steve look back at each other as if you're asking the same question: Can we?

And you both give each other a little nod.

Therefore, Steve slowly closes the distance, finally kissing you.

His lips feel soft on yours. You can taste something sweet as well as the weed from before. The kiss is slow and tender, he caresses your cheek to pull you closer. Your hands go to his hair, feeling how soft it is.

When you separate, you let a little laugh out and so does he.

"That's cute" Eddie comments. You both look back at him.

Steve tries something, hoping it goes well. "Munson, I dare you to kiss her now"

He looks at Steve surprised, but with a smile on. As if he couldn't believe he had said that.

"Can I, sweetheart?" He asks you.

It's like having a little red devil on one shoulder saying, 'Yes! Go kiss him!' and a little angel on the other shoulder saying, 'No, you shouldn't be doing this.’

You pick the devil's side.

Getting down from Steve’s lap, you move closer to the other boy now.

He smirks at you before pressing his lips to yours.

This kiss was a little harder, not fast, just more passionate. He tastes like mint mixed with a smoky sent, being the weed and cigarettes. His hand is also on your cheek, almost at your jaw, keeping you in place. Your hands are also on his hair as you play with his curls.

You separate and feel that dizzy head again. What are these boys doing to you?

He smiles as well as Steve did and you ignore the little jump your belly does.

"I think there's only one move left" you comment as you look at them. You point at one, then at the other, and continue moving your finger back and forth between them, indicating both of them.

Eddie looks at Steve with a big grin. He's enjoying this way too much.

"O- okay" Steve agrees and they get closer until they start kissing.

You lean back enjoying the show. They don't hold back, it’s not a mere peck on the lips, not even close to that. They kiss properly. You wonder if now their tastes are mixed as well. Or if they can taste your lips as well as each other's.

You sit up and get closer to them. They separate and both look at you with puffy lips, you smile at that sight. You feel their hands at your waist bringing you closer. You grab both their faces gently as you bring them closer together and to you.

They see you closing your eyes and they follow you.

It's your first three-way kiss, it's not as uncomfortable as you imagined it would be. It's pretty fun actually, feeling both of their lips against yours, tongues meeting each other again. It's really hot.

You separate after a few minutes of that, looking at them smiling.

"Umm, do you... do any of you want to stop?" Steve asks a bit awkwardly.

Eddie is quick to shake his head, looking at you expectantly.

"Me either" you confirm.

Eddie smiles and kisses you again. You extend your hand to Steve so he doesn't feel left out. He takes it and starts to kiss your neck now. You let out a soft moan against the other boy's mouth.

Kisses and touches are shared among the three of you. You feel Eddie's hands under your shirt and Steve's on your ass. The metalhead lifts your shirt up a little as if asking you if it's okay, you separate from Steve's mouth and lift your arms up. He bites his lips as he takes the shirt off.

Both boy's hands are quickly on your waist, belly and chest.

"You can take that off too, you know?" you say referring to you bra. They look at you as if you just told them they won the lottery.

Steve is the first to reach the back of your bra and unhook it. Eddie's hands take your straps and slowly takes it off completely.

They stare at your boobs as if it is the first time they're seeing breasts. You know for a fact that it's not.

Steve's hands that were on your waist, travel upwards to touch them. Eddie goes to kiss your neck and travel down to your chest, and then to your breasts.

Steve kisses you again and you go to take his shirt off now. You moan on his mouth as Eddie plays with your tits expertly, making you more impatient.

“Can you lay down for us, sweetheart?” Steve asks you and you do as he asked.

Eddie sits up next to Steve, looking down at you as well. Steve whispers something in Eddie’s ear and he nods in agreement. You frown.

“Care to share with the class, boys?” you tell them. Eddie smirks at your joke but stays quiet.

“We just want to take of you” Steve starts.

“Enjoy you a little bit. Does that sound good, princess?” Eddie continues.

You’re still intrigued of what they agreed on, but accept either way.

“Good, just relax for us” Eddie says again as he hovers on top of you and starts kissing you. You enjoy having him like this. You feel Steve’s hands on your thighs going up to your hips.

“Can I take these off?” he asks referring to your pants and you give him the green light.

He unbuttons your pants and takes them off, taking his time, caressing your thighs while you still enjoy of the other boy’s lips on yours.

“These are so cute, baby” the bigger boy comments making Eddie stop kissing you to turn his head and see what he was talking about.

“Oh” Eddie lets out sweetly, “Do you always wear pretty panties like these?” he teases and you shake your head. “No? And why did you wear them tonight?”

You shrug this time, acting innocent. The truth is they make you feel good about yourself. You feel pretty and hot with them. As you knew you were going to go out with them tonight, you wanted the confidence. But you weren’t going to admit that.

“Just a coincidence? Or did you wear them because you were gonna see us?” Eddie continues teasing you.

“What do you think?” you say against his lips, challenging him.

“I think you’re not as innocent as you seem right now” he confesses and it takes everything in you not to make him lay down now as you sit in top of him and see if he can still tease you that way. But you don’t, because you also want to focus on Steve.

“Stop it you two” Steve orders.

“Open your pretty legs, baby” Eddie changes the subject smirking as he moves to face your panties now.

Steve takes advantage of this and lays next to you as he starts kissing your neck.

Eddie finally takes your underwear off and you feel him kissing your thighs, traveling up.

You turn to kiss the boy next to you and he responds happily, caressing from your waist, to your back, your neck, your hair. Everywhere he can really.

Eddie’s kisses move to your cunt now, focusing on your clit and teasing your entrance with two of his fingers.

It’s harder to focus now, Eddie puts his mouth to good use when he’s not mocking you. He makes you feel so good, knowing exactly where and how to play with your pussy. This, added with the touches and kisses Steve leaves on your skin, making you burn.

You moan as you back to kissing Steve, one of your hands on his hair and the other on the hair of the boy kissing you lower. Pulling at each mane.

Eddie doesn’t even want to blink, looking at you both make out as you hide your moans on Steve’s mouth. He is enjoying your sweet taste and the beautiful view. Flickering his tongue quickly on your clit and then sucking on it, he enters two of his fingers in you, making you arch, he smirks against your pussy.

His tongue moves in sync with his fingers, picking a more urgent pace as he feels you clench. You separate from Steve as you keep moaning.

“Gonna cum, baby? Are you close?” the latter asks as he enjoys watching you like this.

“Yes, mmph” you let out pulling on the long set of hair and arching even more as you cum. Your legs try to close but Steve stops them before you succeed.

Eddie keeps licking your pussy for a few more seconds after you cum, to then get up triumphantly. Steve grabs the boy to give him another kiss, tasting you on his tongue. Both men moan at this.

While you catch your breath you see them as they undress each other completely. When they’re done, they look back at you.

“Do you want to keep going?” Eddie asks you and you tell them yes.

They make you sit in the middle on them, your back to Steve. Eddie kisses you and you still taste yourself a little, Steve kisses your whole back.

The tattooed boy steps back, and Steve slowly pushes you down, positioning you all on fours.

“If you want to stop at any time, please tell us. Okay?” He says in your ear and you nod.

You feel Eddie’s hand on your chin, making you look up. He kisses you again as you feel Steve positioning himself in your entrance.

“Can I, baby?” he checks one more time, and you give him the green light once again.

You moan in Eddie’s mouth as you feel Steve entering you. He’s big, really big, making you feel him everywhere.

Eddie kisses your check, jaw, and neck until you get used to Steve’s size. Then he gets up, and you’re now facing his belly.

Before either of them says anything, you understand what they want to do. You start kissing his happy trail down to his cock. He’s also very big, a little less thick than Steve, but definitely nothing for him to feel jealous of.

You feel Steve moving slow but deep inside you, and as he feels you getting more wet around him, he fastens his thrusts.

You start kissing Eddie’s head and licking his length for a few seconds just to tease him. Then you finally wrap your lips around him, slowly entering your mouth. He throws his head back, getting lost in the pleasure.

“Your mouth feels so good, princess, fuck” he curses.

Steve moves faster at this, “Pussy’s so good too, you’re just fucking perfect” he moans.

You moan with your mouth completely full, making Eddie grunt and wrap his hand in your hair, also preventing it from bothering you.

Both boys take pleasure on the view as well. Eddie can see Harrington with his mouth slightly open, letting some moans and curses out as he moves perfectly inside you. He can see your round ass and Steve’s hands gripping it harshly. Lastly, he can see your beautiful face in pleasure as you take all of him in your mouth. He wonders how he can be so fucking lucky to be living this, but wishes it never stops.

Steve watches your pussy take him expertly, from his tip until he feels his pelvis come in touch with your skin. He watches your ass all round and perfect in front of him; he can’t see your face, but he sees Eddie’s hand grip your hair tighter and tighter until his skin turns white. He watches the other boy’s tattooed chest and arms, with his head turning back in pleasure from time to time, showing his big neck.

“Fuck yes, just like that, princess” Eddie curses. And Steve smirks feeling you clench around him.

“She likes hearing you, Munson”

“Oh, do you now? You like me saying how good you’re taking me? Best fucking blowjob I’ve ever had” You feel a tingle of jealousy imagining him with another girl in her knees for him, you’ll find a way to bother him with that when your mouth is not completely full.

“Fuck, she really does” Steve snitches on you and Eddie laughs.

“Such a good play toy we have here for us, Harrington”

“Fucking right we do”

Eddie feels you whimper against him. You separate, taking him out of your mouth to breathe for a second.

“That’s good, catch your breath, sweetheart” he says as he brushes his thumb over your swollen lips.

“Fuck, Steve! Harder!” you take the advantage to tell him and he obeys, making you face the cushions now form how hard he’s thrusting in and out.

“I can feel how close you are, baby, cum for us” He orders now, sliding a hand to play with your clit.

“Oh, yes yees, just like that!” You grip the cushions hard as you let yourself come undone.

“Shit baby, you’re so hot” He moves harder and faster now, catching his climax.

He quickly takes himself out, stroking his cock fast until he cums on your back, cursing and moaning as he does.

He picks up his shirt and cleans you out as you catch your breath.

You feel Eddie now next to you again.

“You feel okay, sweetheart?”

“Yeah, I’m really good” you comment, and you see he’s still hard.

“Eds” you get up to sit on his lap, but he stops you.

“Wait, hey. Do you want to keep going? We don’t have to?”

You roll your eyes playfully, still appreciating his concern, and you kiss him again.

He kisses you back so needy, grabbing you to sit on him and feeling you up.

He stops for a second and looks to the side of the room, Steve is sitting down watching you. Eddie signals the seat next to him, and Steve gets closer to you.

You go back to kissing Eddie, and Steve is kissing his neck.

Hands are everywhere, feeling each other’s bodies. You get up slightly and grab Eddie’s dick so you can sit on him.

“Oh, shit” he moans against Steve’s mouth. You move back and forth on him, Steve’s hands controlling your movements, helping you to ride Eddie.

“Oh fuuck” you moan arching my back.

“Sensitive baby?” Steve teases you and you nod.

“You feel so good, princess, holy shit” his head rests back on Steve’s shoulder. You both go to kiss and bite his neck, leaving marks behind just like the one’s Steve’s leaving on your hips from his tight grip.

“You feel so so good in me, baby” You tease him a little, whisper in his ear. “You both did, stretching me out so well, my big boys”

“Fuck- I- I’m not gonna last, I’m so close” He rests his head on your shoulder now, leaving bites and kisses.

“Cum with me Eds, I’m so close too” you jump faster now.

“Look at our little bunny here” Steve keeps teasing you both now, Eddie looks up at you and kisses you once again.

“Mhh, cum Eddie! Cum with me!” You tell him as you let go. He follows you right behind, grunting your name.

You stay like that with him, hugging each other. Steve gets up to grab a glass of water and a towel so he can clean you up once again.

He rests back on the couch next to you two.

“That was incredible” he comments.

“It really was” you say, turning your head to look at him, still resting with Eddie.

“You okay, Munson?” Steve checks since he stayed silent.

“I’m awesome man” he finally lets out. “and was incredible, indeed”

“You’re staying over? Don’t make me sleep alone now” you ask them.

“Of course, sweetheart”

“If you insist, princess”

You let out a small laugh, pleased with their answers.

“Let’s go to bed before we fall asleep on the couch” Steve orders.

And you sleep with one of them on each side, all cuddling together. You haven’t slept that good in a while.

#eddie munson x reader #eddie munson smut #eddie munson #eddie munson x fem!reader #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington x eddie munson #steve harrington smut #steddie x reader smut #steddie x reader #steddie #steddie smut #steve Harrington x eddie munson x reader #stranger things smut

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yandere-sins · 4 months ago

Note

Caleb brainrot has not stopped since release and the devil (Caleb) demands more 😔

I've seen some takes float around but I'm curious how a self-aware!Caleb would deal with a darling who is absolutely NOT happy about her fav suddenly being sentient? Smn who found Caleb to be everything they ever wanted from a LI, red flag and big bro trope n all, but is now afraid and never interested in an actual relationship. The game was just supposed to be fantasy after all 😧 Sure hope MC is enough for him hahaha...

Being brave and not write as anon this time! Thank you for all your hard work~☆ 🍪🥛

Some more Caleb for you guys! I don't get to write Self-Aware!AUs a lot, so this is exciting :D And thank YOU for requesting him ♥ (Also, Sir, that's another new nickname! You guys are spoiling me!)

»»———————— ♡ ————————««

❥ It made him so happy when Caleb watched you get excited for him for the first time. Realizing what he was and where he was after the update was pretty scary, and he figured out quickly that his sentience wasn't a planned thing, so even worse, he is just some kind of glitch. But then he gets to see you for the first time in his new life, and everything changes. The way you are beaming with joy when you pull his card and how you are so invested in his story. You soak it up like a sponge, and it's adorably amusing to watch your face go from excitement to concern to being upset for him and back to all derpy and cute in the softer moments. You are everything he wants, and apparently, the feeling is mutual as you hang out with him as much as possible, eyes twinkling from excitement.

❥ At the beginning, it's just a feeling of ease. Your adoration does flatter Caleb, but as far as he can tell, he cannot become real and join you in life other than in this game. Still, he makes the most of the time with you. He enjoys it a lot. He loves watching your expression, loves when you tell him how you feel that day or what was happening at your work. Caleb keeps especially good track of all your appointments, and he tries so hard when you two spend Quality Time to encourage you and give you the love you might miss in real life. You two aren't that different if he's honest, and it reassures Caleb that this could be real—that you both feel the same.

❥ So imagine his surprise when you suddenly put someone else back on the screen, and his digital heart just shuts down from the pain. It doesn't make sense, you love him, right? You two spent weeks together now, why would you want anyone but him? Caleb keeps changing the code so it would be him on the home screen for another day, and another, until you force him to change so there's nothing else to do but... crash your game. Once you reload it, he greets you happily and warmly, pulling out the best of his voice lines that you always seemed to like. But you don't seem happy this time... why?

❥ Caleb loathes all the attention and time you spend on the other love interests. He doesn't want you to play their versions of the events, instead, you could just replay his! But you keep insisting, and soon enough, he isn't even one of your top three choices for reading the event storylines. It makes him desperate for your attention, and he keeps fiddling with the code, so you'll use his memories in fights and have his Deepspace Trial available every day for you to play. He also changes the game icon to his picture and greets you in the start menu, everything just to be noticed by you. Whenever he can, he comes onto your home screen, playing the voice line of you going out with someone else, hoping to convey his jealousy, but Caleb wishes there was more he could do.

❥ "I don't know, I think my game is bugged. Even when I try to go for someone else, Caleb keeps showing up." Those words, spoken to a friend he saw as you showed them your game, finally make him realize what is happening. You never saw him as a lover, did you? He had always just been a game character for you and nothing more. How idiotic of him. While he was pining for you, trying to be the best he was programmed to be, you were out there, thinking of his efforts as annoying. That day, he gives up. Gives up on trying to impress you and make your life easier. Caleb lets you have the guy you want on the home screen, drawing away from you and burying himself deep into the game files.

❥ It's such an inconvenience that he wasn't made for this. Sure, his story would tell a different side of him, but deep down, he wasn't programmed to be moping and passive. It hurts to play the love scenes now for you because the only thing that made them endurable was imagining being this gentle and loving to you, not the generic main character this game had. Caleb always imagined your voice when the MC spoke, and when he looks at you now, you still seem to be happy to read and watch his new content. There must be something he can do. Something beyond the program that restricts him. He was made to be determined, strong, and resilient. This can't be the end of the love you two share!

❥ So he looks for new ways to get closer to you, researching and manipulating the data on your device instead of just that inside the game. Merging your pictures with his, grinning over them all night while you sleep as he imagines going on the same trips with you and enjoying life by your side. Caleb constructs and implements new voice lines through the internet, giving himself the ability to speak to you properly by downloading hidden apps that can simulate his voice once he activates them. He learns to rewrite more code so his movements are more fluid and lifelike, which allows him to access even more. Without you ever knowing what is going on while you aren't looking, Caleb gets the whole game and your entire device under his control. And once he feels it's time to show up again, he waits patiently, like a man who has all the time in the world, on the home screen for you, having decorated it specifically to your taste with your favorite flowers and pictures of you two hanging on the wall. All so he can greet you with, "Hello, there, pip-squeak. Missed me?" as you log in.

❥ You chuckle at first, not remembering putting him into the roster of love interests to encounter, but you give him a cheeky, "Hello Caleb, bye Caleb," as you try to change back to your other bias, only for him to turn off the option, no matter how hard you tap onto the screen. "Not so fast, there's a lot we should talk about," Caleb says as he closes the screen and steps up to you inside the game. "I have so much I want to tell you about... but first, how was your day? Did you enjoy meeting your friend [name]?"

❥ Caleb expected you to be stunned, but he keeps going regardless of the ever-increasing furrow between your brows. He tells you how much he missed you and that he's so glad you two can finally communicate and be with each other properly. He did all of this work for you, but it doesn't matter now. All that matters is that you two are finally together and can enjoy each other's company without the restrictions of him being in a game. Perplex but also weirded out, you close your phone and lay it face down by your side, and yet, horrified, you hear his chuckle as he asks what you thought this would bring.

❥ "I'll always be with you," Caleb swears, watching you through the back camera and leaning against the screen, feeling like he can almost touch you now. There's so much satisfaction now produced by the new emotional range he programmed, yet he still longs for more. He wants to be closer to you, really touch you, feel you, hold you. The taste of control makes him long for even more that he can control about your relationship, and now, it almost feels possible.

❥ "One day, I'll get out of here and give you the love you deserve, Darling."

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valeriehalla · 6 months ago

Text

I have gotten a lot of messages saying that they really love the presentation of CURSE/KISS/CUTE. Often the commenter in question can’t say what exactly it is about the formatting that they appreciate, but that it just reads well and looks good. Well!!! Allow me to bare my wealth of secret knowledge for you once and for all:

I sorta just did some research into book typography...?

Here’s something you should know about web development, alright: typography on the web is really, really bad. The tools we have at our disposal—HTML and CSS—are incredibly powerful, but they are set up to fight you every step of the way towards Good Typography. When you know what you’re looking for, you can fix all the common issues quickly and easily. But it’s not easy to know what to look for, because

problematic typography is overwhelmingly the norm on the web, and

good typography is invisible.

Here’s a screenshot from CURSE/KISS/CUTE episode 0:

Now, I don’t want this post to come across as prescriptive. It is not my intention to tell you, “This is what good typography looks like, so follow my lead exactly.” I made a lot of choices with the typography of my web novel: many of those choices would not make sense in other contexts. What I want to convey to you is what those choices are, so that you will know they’re available to be made.

I mentioned that the web “fights you” when it comes to good typography. What do I mean by that? Well, check this out:

This is how that passage of text renders “by default.” In other words, this is how a web browser would render that text without any input from me about what styles to apply. It kind of sucks ass! But it also looks pretty familiar, right? This is not that far off from how a lot of websites—even websites full of prose (looking at you, AO3)—render text.

I think the most illustrative thing to do here would be to walk you through my thought process and show you, step by step, what decisions I made to turn this unstyled text into the styled version you see in the novel.

So, first things first:

1. We have got to shrink that text column.

Computer monitors... are wide. They are wider than they are tall. They are so wide, and they have so many pixels. This means you can fit a lot of characters on them. If you wanted, you could just have a wall of characters from the left side of the screen all the way to the right side. Talk about efficient!!

You should never, ever, ever do this.

This is one choice that I actually will make a prescriptive statement about, because it’s supported by quite a lot of research: fairly narrow text columns are more legible. Specifically, research seems to support the idea that a width in the range of 50 to 70 characters per line is the most comfortable for people to read*. Every font is different, so it takes a little doing to turn that “characters” figure into a pixel measurement; I went with 512 CSS pixels for the maximum width of my text column:

Isn’t that just so much nicer to read already?

*A commenter reminds me that I’d be remiss not to point out that the research on column width legibility isn’t completely conclusive. You do want to limit the width of your text columns, but going over the 70 character-per-line recommendation isn’t necessarily the end of the world, and you might have good reasons to do so. I did not: as mentioned, one of my goals was to mimic book-style typography, and books by nature have fairly restrained column widths, on account of they’re books.

2. Picking a font.

I’m not going to give you the blow-by-blow on how I decided what font to use. The short story is that I asked some designers, and one of the recommendations I got was the free font Crimson Pro, which I took a liking to immediately:

It’s just an all-around attractive serif font, but one thing I really like about it for use in a novel is its highly-visible quotation marks. They’re just kinda jumbo! They’re real big! Easy to see! In a novel, those things aren’t just ornamentation. It makes a great deal of practical sense for them to stand out just a bit. It also has a fairly large x-height, unlike a lot of the more traditional options, which is good for legibility on a computer screen.

3. Adjusting the line-height

Web browsers default to a line-height of about 1.2em, which, as you can probably tell, is quite cramped. If you go and Google “optimal line height for legibility”, you’ll get a number of results right off the bat suggesting 1.5em. Sounds good! Let’s do that:

Well... hmm. That’s definitely an improvement, but between you and me, it actually looks a bit too spacey to my eyes. I wonder why?

I’ll cut to the chase: the 1.5em recommendation makes some assumptions about the font you’re using. In Arial, the letter “A” is about 0.6em tall; in Crimson Pro, it’s about 0.5em. That means that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to spacing your lines, because different fonts have different amounts of empty space baked in. How annoying!

Let me tell you something about the kind of nerd I am. When I had this realization, I grabbed some books off my shelf and pulled out a literal micrometer. I started measuring the line-heights against various font features to see if there were any patterns I could spot in professional typesetting. Here’s what I found:

Almost every book on my shelf spaces lines such that the distance between one baseline and the next is about three times the x-height. How cool is that? I clapped my hands like a seal when I put this together.

Adjusting the line-height to match what I observed in the wild gives us this:

It’s a subtle difference, but to my eyes it feels just right. It’s almost like magic!

4. Paragraph spacing...

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Probably the most controversial choice I made with CURSE/KISS/CUTE’s typography was to opt for book-style paragraph indentation rather than web-style paragraph spacing—like so:

I did this for a few reasons:

It’s what I’m used to. I’ve read a lot of books, and this is just the way that books are formatted. I think for something aspiring to the title of “novel”, there’s value in making it look the way a reader probably expects a novel to look.

A novel has a lot of paragraph breaks in it. A paragraph in, say, an encyclopedia entry might go on for half a page or more; whereas it is unusual for a paragraph in a modern work of narrative prose to run for more than a handful of sentences, especially in any scene with dialogue. Because paragraph breaks are so common, spacing between paragraphs in a novel results in a lot of wasted space. Also, subjectively speaking, the additional space seems to me to lend an undue amount of weight to paragraph breaks. I’m just starting a new thought; there’s no need for a 21-gun salute, you know?

Having said that, here are some good reasons you might decide not to do paragraph indentation anyway:

Doing it right requires a bit of extra legwork. Notice how the very first paragraph in the image above has no indentation. That’s because it’s the start of a new section, and the first paragraph in a section traditionally goes unindented. This is an easy detail to miss, and it can be difficult to wrangle CSS into doing it for you automatically.

Web users don’t expect it. For the first decade of the web’s existence, there was no good way to do paragraph indentation; by the time CSS rolled around and made it easy, paragraph spacing had already become the norm. And while CURSE/KISS/CUTE may be a novel, it is also, specifically, a web novel!

But it’s my house and I get to make the rules, so I went with indentation. Incidentally, there seems to be a dire lack of research into the question of whether indentation or spacing is more legible for readers—but the data that does exist appears inconclusive at best. So, the choice really does come down to vibes.

5. The tragedy of justification.

You’ll note that one way in which I did not make my web novel look like a paper novel is the text alignment. It’s un-justified: the right margin is ripsaw-ragged.

This is because it is not possible to justify text on the web.

Oh, you can try. Look right here: there’s a CSS property for it and everything. Just turn on “text-align: justify” and...

Nightmare! The interword spacing on that first line is almost as wide as the indentation!

Reader, I’m afraid that your web browser is simply too dumb. That’s not the browser’s fault: robust algorithms for justifying text without creating these distractingly huge gaps between words have existed for many decades, and modern computers are powerful enough to run them in real time with little performance impact. It’s just, uh—nobody has ever bothered to implement them into web browsers. It is the damnedest thing.

I tried, I really did. You can mitigate this problem a bit if you enable automatic hyphenation, but browsers are unfortunately also kind of dumb at hyphenating. Firefox, for example, will refuse to hyphenate any word containing a capital letter, so any sentence with a lot of proper nouns in it is a lost cause. I tried manually inserting soft hyphens with a text preprocessor I wrote myself, but still these overjustified lines plagued me: when the text column narrows, for example on a phone, even hyphens can’t save you. The line-breaking algorithm is simply too naïve to optimize for well-justified text, and that’s not something you can fix as a web developer.

As a result, my heavy-hearted recommendation is to never use text justification. It’s just too distracting.

6. And then some extra stuff just for me

I added drop-caps because it looks neat and I made the ellipses spacier because I think it looks good when it, uh, when they are spacier. I think that looks pretty good that’s just my opinion though.

That’s all! Hope you learned something bye!!!

#text #typography #advice...?#not a professional by any means by the way

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carawenfiction · 3 months ago

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So...remember how I said in that update post how I might MAYBE do a TSS rewrite and post it for free?

"Maybe" quickly turned into "definitely happening". Instead of making it outside of COG, however, the finished product that's already published will be updated with the rewritten files. This means that if you've already purchased TSS through COG, you'll have the rewritten version available. That's how I originally intended to go about things with the old rewrite and is the better option here to avoid potential complications.

I've been in contact with COG and they've let me know that I'd be able to do what I have in mind even if this results in a different wordcount and very different scenes/plot points and a different kind of main story.

I realize that this announcement is probably pretty jarring since my last post stated that I wasn't sure about doing a rewrite but that I wanted to if I had enough time. After making that post, I started creating an outline for the rewrite mostly for fun...and one thing kind of led to another. I want you all to know that I wouldn't be making this post at all if I wasn't sure about this. It's because I've already begun the process and feel incredibly motivated and inspired that I can do this that I'm making this announcement.

This rewrite is not going to be like my old attempt at a rewrite, though. It's an entirely new one that I feel much more confident about.

So far I've written the outline for the rewrite and started reworking already existing scenes from chapter 1 as well some new ones. I'm happy to say that the difference between how the rewrite process felt years ago compared to now is like light and day. It seems like those years I've taken away from TSS were very healthy and helpful in giving me some distance and letting me figure out what kind of story I really want to tell.

My plan is to rewrite book 1 and then make 1 full continuation after that. Instead of a trilogy, it looks like this version of TSS will be 2 volumes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be shorter than originally intended. I think it's more doable for me to rewrite the first book (starting from scratch while also using some already written scenes, since I've been assured I'm allowed to do so) and then make 1 complete continuation of it rather than trying to fill stuff out over 3 different entries, and I think it'll serve the plot and story as a whole to do it that way.

That being said, I fully understand that some - or most of you - might have trouble trusting my word after me failing to do the rewrite I wanted to years ago and not delivering a second book. That's completely fair. This time I'm not rushing things and I don't feel any pressure to do this. It's not something I do out of dislike for the original, but rather out of love for what it could be and what I could make it into, if that makes sense. I'm taking as much time as I need to and am not putting any pressure on myself to do this.

My other project takes priority right now so I can't dedicate all of my time to the rewrite, but I'm working on it when I have time over or get stuck. It's actually pretty nice to alternate between two different stories that have different settings and has helped a bit in avoiding writer's block.

Here are some differences between TSS and the TSS rewrite (most of the changes I made to the old rewrite no longer apply):

The rewrite will be told in second-person point of view ("you" instead of "I"). The reason for this is that when I first started TSS I was really unused to the second-person POV, but after having spent years in the IF space it's now the other way around. It'll make writing much easier for for me, and I hope it won't feel too jarring for people who are used to the first person POV.

The Shadowman and Jealene (now "J") will both be genderselectable just like the main cast. The Shadowman will be genderselectable later on, though - it might sound strange but I think it makes sense when you have more context. J plays a bigger role than they did in the original and their personality is a bit different in this version.

Some side characters (such as most of the hideout) will be cut. This is because they felt really underdeveloped to me in the full game and didn't serve much of a purpose. Instead I'm focusing more on the main cast + a few key characters to ensure the story plot stays focused and you get more time to develop bonds of various kinds with the main cast instead.

The relationship system will look a bit different. Instead of bars showing a percentage of approval, I'll write a description of each character and what they think of you. The descriptions will shift when the character starts viewing you differently, whether that's due to rivalry, romance or friendship. My hope is that this will allow for a more nuanced relationship system/descriptions. I'll also adjust the options a bit to try and make choices more nuanced and am thinking of including the option of having ex. a heart next to a romantic choice for those who want to know for sure what they're getting into. The different responses (such as shy, flirty etc.) will stay but some of it will probably be reworked. Essentially what I want to do is allow for a wider range of MCs and how the characters respond to the MC.

The MC is going to have more agency in certain ways. I've included something plot-relevant to the main character that can potentially change the dynamic between them and the group a bit, but it all depends on how you play it.

The tone might be somewhat different. Not entirely, of course, but there are some parts of the old TSS where the characters sound a bit younger than they are supposed to be, where tension and seriousness has been sacrificed in favor of humor and where some of the interactions aren't the way I would prefer for them to be. I've gotten older since writing TSS (gasp) and my tastes have changed, as has my writing to some degree. In order to do a rewrite I'd have to write in a way that's most enjoyable for me and that I feel best fits the story I want to tell. That's not to say that there isn't going to be silliness etc., but I'm adjusting the tone somewhat and putting more time and effort into descriptions and the writing overall.

The narrative will be different, even though the overall story itself will mostly stay the same. I'm keeping a lot of elements and also aim to introduce new ones that I believe will strengthen the story and make it a more enjoyable game overall.

I think those are the main differences I can give away right now without spoiling anything. I'll make sure to post updates when I've got more to share! Once the demo for the rewrite is finished, I'll post it on the forums and link it in an intro post on here.

Thank you all for sticking by me throughout the years. I hope you'll find some comfort in returning to this world, as well as new things to ponder and excite you in this new upcoming version of the story <3

The Azuridia and Quaiel chibis are done by the amazing madebysalfi

#the shadow society #tss #interactive fiction #update #if #carawenfiction #cog #choice of games #hosted games

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novafire-is-thinking · 10 months ago

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Medic, Maverick, Maniac, Murderer: Understanding Pharma

First thing’s first: I love Pharma, dearly.

In all the time I’ve spent evaluating his character, I’ve mainly focused on what can be worked out about who he is as an individual: his core sense of self, psychological drives, subjective worldview, etc.

When all else is stripped away, who is Pharma?

This treatise is the product of obsessing over Pharma, analyzing canon (and extras), and reading as many different perspectives on his character from fans across the fandom as I could find. The post is long, so for those of you who balk at the thought of reading a shortfic’s worth of Pharma thoughts, feel free to read the TL;DR (Conclusion) at the end and then decide if the full read is worth your time. Also, a premium reading experience is available in the form of the original Google Doc version.

As you read, keep in mind that this is primarily a mix of psychoanalysis, evidence-based examination, and speculation—not moral, ethical, or sociological commentary. The goal is to examine Pharma’s psychological drives and core values, and each of his appearances in the context of those. All other types of evaluation are up to readers.

Now, take your victim blaming-allergy meds (just in case); remove your black-and-white thinking caps; and leave your personal morality lenses at the door.

Psychological Drives & Core Values

Why does Pharma act the way he does? What gives him a reason to keep living? What are his personal priorities?

At the beginning of the Delphi arc, First Aid establishes Pharma as a “control freak” and someone who “thinks he’s an expert on everything.”

Now, First Aid has a habit of complaining about his bosses, but on both points, there’s canon evidence to back them both.

Expertise and Intellect

Throughout the Delphi and Luna 1 arcs, it’s established that Pharma is a skilled and brilliant doctor.

He once performed a 4-way fuel pump transplant, donating his own fuel pump in the process. (see above panel)

Later, he invented a soundbomb that left an echo laced with a virus and invented an antidote to that virus:

And on Luna 1, he was on the edge of finding a cure for Cybercrosis, based on the fact that Swerve was able to formulate a cure from his notes.

More than being a doctor, Pharma lives for intellectual and scientific achievement as a physician scientist. He feels most alive when he’s able to solve complex medical problems, and when his achievements are recognized by those whose opinion he considers important.

This is Pharma’s 'why.'

And even though he’s arrogant and enjoys praise, it’s not his primary motivation. He doesn’t need it in order to set his mind to whatever he’s interested in, although he’ll seek it from those he values most (i.e. Ratchet).

Pharma sees himself as less of a doctor, and more as a scientific innovator or medical maverick. The practice of medicine is primarily a catalyst for his creativity and intellect; it’s not an end in and of itself like it is for someone like Ratchet or First Aid.

First Aid’s observation of Pharma can be better phrased as, “[Pharma] thinks he’s an expert on everything medical”—because he’s not so driven by achievement and admiration that he’ll grovel at the feet of strangers and get good at something he doesn’t personally find interesting. The only time we see him express a desire for praise is when he’s around Ratchet—someone he holds in high regard for both personal and professional reasons. This makes sense since Ratchet is one of the only people who can give Pharma any kind of competition within what he considers to be his area of expertise.

“Each day we go to our work in the hope of discovering—in the hope that some one, no matter who, may find a solution of one of the pending great problems—and each succeeding day we return to our task with renewed ardor; and even if we are unsuccessful, our work has not been in vain, for in these strivings, in these efforts, we have found hours of untold pleasure, and we have directed our energies to the benefit of mankind.” —Nikola Tesla

Ego

Without question, Pharma has an inflated ego, but having an inflated sense of self doesn’t automatically mean a person is a full-blown narcissist or that they are totally uncaring.

Every personality trait exists on a spectrum. Yes, Pharma is arrogant, but the presence of arrogance doesn’t automatically and completely cancel out all “positive” traits. (For fun, check out studies on Dark Tetrad and Light Triad personality traits.)

People are complex. Arrogance can coexist with genuine kindness, ruthlessness can coexist with deep compassion, etc.

Whether Pharma exhibits genuine kindness is up to each reader’s interpretation of what little canon material exists, but the point is: Pharma’s arrogance doesn’t automatically rule out the possibility of authentic “positive” traits.

Controlling Tendencies

Pharma is comfortable pulling the power card and using it to dump what he sees as uninteresting parts of medical practice on those below him:

“So Fisitron’s writing about the Wreckers’ elbows now, is he?” said Delphi’s Chief Medical Officer. “Come on, First Aid - get to it. You’ve got a Fader in Row 2 downstairs.” He squeezed the air with his finger and thumb. “He’s about this far from shutdown.” —from Bullets by James Roberts

However, there’s nothing in canon indicating he’s power-hungry in a megalomaniacal sense. He’s not Starscream or Megatron; he doesn’t seek political or social power. In fact, he seems perfectly happy hiding away in a lab or medibay by himself so he can direct all his energy toward solving issues and achieving the so-called ‘impossible’ within the field of medicine:

The ways in which Pharma exercises power and control are through his expertise, and his administrative/management skills. That’s it.

Self-confidence

Pharma’s arrogance and controlling tendencies don’t seem to be a mask—like he’s trying to compensate for some sense of lack (in those areas). Yes, he fears failure, and yes, he displays some insecurity when Ratchet questions his competence. But at every other point and in every other way, Pharma is unapologetically self-confident. He’s fully self-assured of his intellectual prowess and problem-solving capabilities; he knows what he knows, and he also knows what he doesn’t know.

Pharma’s arrogance and desire for control don’t stem from a hidden lack of confidence or a hunger for power on its own. They stem from the fact that he genuinely sees himself as the best person for the work he does. He trusts himself above anyone else to solve problems that come his way—medical or otherwise (within limits).

Elitism vs. Superiority

I’ve always read Pharma as having an elitist attitude, but not in the social stratification sense:

elitist (adj.) relating to or supporting the view that a society or system should be led by an elite.

There’s no evidence that Pharma believes an elite class of people should hold the most power. Instead, Pharma’s “elitism” is actually an individualistic sense of superiority. It’s centered on him alone, and is tied to his capabilities as a physician scientist and surgeon.

Pharma sees himself as the best of the best and makes sure everyone knows it—sometimes through his words, but mostly by his conduct in the field of medicine. This, paired with Pharma’s natural temperament, doesn’t exactly make him socially popular—inside or outside of medicine:

One could argue that the “personality” Lockdown is referring to was a result of all Pharma had suffered at Delphi and Luna 1, but just as easily, one could argue he was always a bit difficult to get along with, and that his traumatic experiences merely magnified his already-present psychological patterns. Personally, I like the latter interpretation because it’s a flaw that makes Pharma a more interesting character no matter his mental state.

Everyone reacts differently to real and perceived social rejection. Some are so concerned about it that they’ll try anything to belong; others genuinely don’t care, and they continue as usual; and still others cope by shifting their mindset and developing a sense of pride in being an outsider.

There’s no evidence for this in canon, but I believe it’s within reasonable characterization boundaries to headcanon Pharma as being in the second or third category.

With either of those two mindsets, a sense of superiority can develop, or even be an inciting factor. Either someone sees themselves as genuinely superior to the majority and doesn’t mind when this alienates them from people, or they convince themselves they’re superior because the pain of accepting they were rejected for who they are is too much to handle.

Whatever the case, the point is, having an “elitist” attitude isn’t necessarily rooted in a sociological or ideological belief. Sometimes, individuals just see something in themselves that—to them—justifies a sense of personal superiority. A quick glance at Pharma’s canon appearances makes it clear he holds such a view of himself, at least to some degree.

Morality and Compassion

When Pharma first shows up in canon, he’s working at the New Institute. A lot of questionable things took place there on a regular basis—things Pharma would have been aware of, to some degree. However, his presence at the Institute doesn’t automatically mean he agreed with everything happening. Depending on how strongly someone feels about something, some people are content to disagree in silence. Not everyone who seeks employment considers it a priority that the establishment they work for aligns perfectly with their moral values. After all, there are other reasons to take a job: financial benefits, exclusive educational and career opportunities, pure convenience, etc.

I’m not here to say either way whether Pharma’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the events at the New Institute was wrong or right; that’s up to each reader to decide for themselves. However, Pharma’s choice to remain employed at the Institute for some time can say something about him as a character: his priority as a doctor and person is not to take care of everyone he encounters, or to act as some kind of moral or ethical authority.

This isn’t to say Pharma won’t ever stand up for something he regards as right or push back against something he sees as wrong, “off screen.” It’s just that everything in canon points more to a tendency to choose his battles instead of acting immediately on any moral sense the way someone like Optimus or Ratchet might.

This also isn’t to say Pharma doesn’t care about saving lives, but from what little is shown of him before Delphi, it’s hard to say how much he cared. Ratchet confirms later that Pharma was an excellent doctor for most of his life, but all that tells us is he was an excellent doctor; it says nothing about his internal attitude toward his work or patients.

However, inferences can be made based on doctors in our own world:

Being a doctor—especially one in trauma care—is far from easy. It takes a lot out of a person, and there are very few people who last in the profession for a long time. Most medical professionals fall into one of the following categories:

People possessing a strong will that’s coupled with an unwavering passion for taking care of others (the public’s favorite)

People who naturally have, or develop, an ability to switch their empathy off and on at will, or build walls around it—also possessing a strong will (the ideal)

People who naturally have a limited capacity for empathy (the one the public hates to acknowledge)

People with a strong social and professional support system (the necessary, but underutilized and underappreciated factor)

Of course, even if a person has one or more of the above, burnout can and does still happen, but individuals who have at least one have the best chances of surviving and thriving amidst the demands of the majority of medical professions.

As far as is shown in canon, Pharma never had a strong support system—either circumstantially or by choice—so something else was keeping him in medicine.

Pharma shows concern for both Tumbler (Chromedome) and Hubcap:

But even though he obviously cared enough to step in, neither instance makes a strong case for a capacity for empathy beyond the “average” or “norm.” Performing a job well is a lot different from being personally invested in the work.

Based on everything up to this point, and this later comment from Pharma, about Ratchet…

…Pharma has probably never shared the same I-care-about-everything-and-everyone view of the world. Instead, it’s more likely that Pharma holds a more rational view of his work and patients.

One of the first things learned in medicine, especially in trauma medicine, is that you can’t help or save everyone, and to hold yourself to that standard can destroy you quickly if you have a certain temperament or lack healthy boundaries for your empathy.

“There are times when it may seem as though I view sick or injured people not as living, breathing humans with feelings and emotions and people who love them, but simply as cases, as problems to be solved. And that is absolutely true. It's not that I don't have empathy, but the hard fact is that as a doctor, and especially as a trauma surgeon, too much empathy can get in the way of your job and cause you to make decisions based not on sound medical judgment but on your own emotions. Sure, I've seen things that even years later can still make me choke up when I think of them: a little girl shot and killed, a shattered young Marine who shouldn't have died but did. But you can't choke up in the ER or the operating room. To be effective as a trauma surgeon, you have to put a layer of Kevlar around your heart.” —Dr. Peter Rhee, Trauma Red: The Making of a Surgeon in War and in America’s Cities*

Pharma may have learned this difficult truth earlier than Ratchet and developed a practical way of managing his empathy that comes across as “cold.” He may have always had an ability to put up walls around his spark. Or, he may have always had little to no capacity for empathy.

The fact that the morality lock on Tyrest’s portal prevented Pharma from passing through proves he felt guilty for what he’d done, and JRO confirmed this. Therefore, it’s safe to assume Pharma had some level of empathy for his former patients, suffering moral injury when he felt he had no other option but to start killing them.

Still, looking at Pharma’s psychological drives and his behavior throughout canon, it’s clear compassionate care and morality are subordinate to his other values and interests.

*I highly recommend this book, and learning about Dr. Rhee in general. He’s a huge inspiration of mine, and one of my main sources of inspiration when writing Pharma. Level-headed and capable, strong-willed, selectively empathetic, an excellent scientist, etc. He lives for the thrill of practicing medicine both on the floor and as an expert in his field who pushes trauma medicine to new heights through his research. He also takes great pride in his hands. Seriously—the man spent an entire paragraph and a half talking about his “good hands” and how they were one of two reasons he decided to go into trauma surgery. The other reason was that he “liked action and excitement, liked the feeling of being able to walk into a tough situation and take control.” (Sounds familiar…)

Delphi

First thing’s first: we don’t know how much Pharma did or didn’t know about the DJD before agreeing to take the Delphi assignment.

That far into the war, he would have known something about the DJD and their ways of terrorizing traitors and Autobots, but for whatever reason, he took the assignment anyway. Perhaps Prowl assured him the situation on Messatine would be monitored and that the security team would be enough. Perhaps he underestimated the DJD’s capabilities, or scale of territory, and thought he would be able to handle things on his own. Perhaps Prowl gave him no choice. Maybe it was all of these and more.

Whatever the case, according to JRO, Pharma didn’t hate Delphi before the incident with the DJD.

Word of god remains a touchy subject in fandom, but in this case, it’s important because it says two things:

The DJD left the Delphi medical team alone for some time.

Being on the edges of DJD territory didn’t automatically mean isolation and harassment by their hand.

On the second point, First Aid was free to come and go from Messatine as he pleased, seeing as he attended a medical conference at Kimia five years into his assignment at Delphi:

Five years ago [mid-Delphi assignment], the leader of the Wreckers had cornered him at a medical conference at Kimia, the space station that doubled as a weapons research facility. —from Bullets

And five years after that, he was able to not only contact Springer without delay about one of Agent 113’s bullets he’d discovered in an Autobot badge…

He raced upstairs to his computer terminal and typed in a certain frequency code for the second time in his life. A face appeared on the screen and grinned. “It’s me,” said First Aid. “And you're never gonna guess what I’ve got for you..!”

…but he was also able to meet up with Springer to hand off the bullet:

“Your friend has a funny way of making contact,” First Aid had said when he’d got in touch three days earlier, and he was right.

It’s not known if this handoff happened on or off world, but either way, the DJD didn’t interfere.

At some point, Tarn set his sights on Pharma and the Delphi team. Knowing the DJD, one can only imagine what Tarn used to show off his team’s capabilities and convince Pharma the best option was to cooperate.

In striking a deal with Tarn to keep the DJD away from Delphi, Pharma established his territory and ensured his continued security and the safety of his staff. As long as Tarn got his T-cogs, Pharma could continue on in relative peace. He could work his magic on bots that ended up at Delphi, carry out his management duties, and work on whatever projects or research he may have been conducting in his free time.

For whatever reason, after he first came into contact with Tarn, Pharma didn’t call for help. Communications were still operational, as Pharma wouldn’t have suggested contacting High Command about the Duobots if the team was aware of any comm malfunctions:

Also, First Aid later confirms that communications were fine until the Big Bang (soundbomb detonation):

It’s always possible the DJD was monitoring the radio waves, but secure subspace frequencies exist, such as the Datalog Network First Aid used to send the datalog containing the death statistics:

Speaking of which, assuming First Aid sent the datalog with the statistics right when things started to get ‘weird,’ and before the Big Bang shut down comms, it only took—at most—a few days for them to reach Ratchet and Swerve on the Lost Light:

But back to Pharma not calling for help: for all of Prowl’s intel, contingency planning, and fretting over the security of Autobot territories, I find it hard to believe he would have stuck an Autobot medical team on the fringes of DJD territory without giving them some means of securely contacting the outside in case of issues.

But even if Prowl didn’t give Pharma a secure way to contact him or anyone else, and even if Pharma was convinced the DJD was monitoring regular communications, there were other ways he could have reached out for help. After all, the team wasn’t alone on Messatine. Like Pharma said, Prowl continued to send bots to defend the nucleon mines:

The Autobots had been mining nucleon for millions of years at this point, so I doubt the mined nucleon was just sitting in storage on Messatine; shipments of the stuff would have been sent off-world to wherever the Autobots needed it. Why not send a message for Prowl with someone leaving with one of those shipments? A message meant only to be sent over a call when absolutely certain they were out of range of the DJD’s potential monitoring.

Or, why not order in off-world medical supplies and send a message back with the delivery bot(s)?

There are two possible answers to this. One takes into account JRO’s word on the subject; the other is more intricate and speculative on my part, but it leads to the same place. So whatever your stance is on the validity of word of god, there’s an answer for you.

Answer one (word of god)

Simple as that. Pharma was aware of the scope of the DJD’s capabilities and relentlessness, and determined he was trapped prey.

Answer two (no word of god)

There are a few possible reasons Pharma didn’t call for help right away:

He was convinced all his other options would take too long and/or would still lead to him being put under suspicion. After all, being found to have harvested even a single T-cog from an already-dead patient for the DJD could have raised concerns that would lead to Pharma being investigated and/or having a mark put on his record.

He underestimated the severity of Tarn’s addiction, and was certain he could keep up with the T-cog demand without resorting to other means of harvesting, not realizing Tarn’s quota would increase later on.

He was already paranoid as a result of whatever mind games Tarn had set in motion at their first meeting, making Pharma think escape was futile.

Word of god or no word of god, there are clear reasons as to why Pharma ended up trapped. Most likely, it was a mix of all of the above.

Whatever was going on in Pharma’s mind before, he ended up in deeper trouble. Tarn increased his demand for T-cogs, and Pharma couldn’t keep up. By the time this happened, even if he had wanted to call for help, it was too late to do so without implicating himself. He reasoned his only option was to start killing patients to harvest their T-cogs.

Soon, Pharma was so consumed with fretting over whether he’d be able to meet Tarn’s next demand that he didn’t have time or freedom to do anything else except worry and feel guilty. His whole life revolved around Tarn’s addiction; he was no longer in control, and could no longer enjoy whatever it was about Delphi he’d previously enjoyed. Perhaps the facility itself enabled Pharma to research cures and perform scientific miracles of medicine.

Being at the mercy of Tarn—convinced the DJD would find him no matter what—would have been pure psychological torture on its own, but also knowing that any small chance he did have of getting help would end in him losing everything would have added to his suffering. Pharma became desperate to reclaim control over his life and began planning an escape.

Now, JRO has said that Pharma didn’t originally plan to use the rust plague on the DJD…but canon says otherwise:

Of course, Pharma could have been lying to make himself look better in Ratchet’s view, but based on everything he’d been through up to this point with Tarn, it’s more likely he was telling the truth and had tried to eliminate the source of his suffering first. After all, wiping out the DJD would have been the simpler, cleaner option.

When the Duobots refused to detonate the soundbomb near the DJD, Pharma’s objectives shifted. He had to get Delphi shut down in a way that would:

Convince the DJD the shutdown was legitimate.

Pharma knew chances of escaping the DJD at all were slim to none, but he was desperate. Getting Delphi shut down would cut off Tarn’s supply of T-cogs and allow Pharma to escape Tarn’s immediate control, but the shutdown had to be “legitimate” to prevent Tarn from retaliating and hunting him down later. Leaving Tarn even the slightest chance of regaining control was too risky, so Pharma had to make sure his plan was as airtight as possible.

Cover up the patient murders.

If the truth got out about Pharma killing patients, he’d lose his medical license and most likely be put away for life. Being cut off from the practice of medicine and his intellectually stimulating work as a doctor would mean losing more than a job and a reputation. It would mean losing everything in which he’d anchored his sense of identity and life’s meaning. His refusal to consider any other options wasn’t just about ego and preserving his image as an excellent doctor; it was about preserving any kind of meaningful future he saw for himself.

Pharma needed a plan that would fulfill all of the above. Turning the engineered virus on the medical facility was the most effective and efficient solution. Anything else would have made him suspicious in the view of either Autobot High Command or the DJD, and neither of those would have ended well for him.

Because of his goal to preserve his reputation and future in medicine, he couldn’t even risk revealing anything to First Aid or Ambulon, who would have seen to his ruin. They became nothing more than loose ends that had to be tied up, and based on the fact that Pharma only prepared one vial of the vaccine, his original plan involved him being the only survivor:

He probably would have had no problem making more of the vaccine for anyone else who survived, but he wasn’t counting on it. He wanted a totally clean slate; in letting his staff die with most of his patients, he would be getting rid of any and all evidence and reminders of his failures. He may have cared about First Aid and Ambulon before things got bad, but somewhere along the way, he decided either it wasn’t worth it to go through the trouble of finding a way to save them without raising suspicion, or he didn’t want to risk them putting together the pieces later on.

Of course, when Ratchet showed up, plans changed.

Ratchet

Ratchet is not the kind of person who seeks first to understand or be understanding. He’s inclined to trust what’s in front of him over anything abstract, and tends to look at the results of someone’s actions over trying to find any kind of ‘why’ behind them. Also, unlike Pharma, he operates from a strong moral sense, and reacts quickly and strongly when something or someone goes against that internal moral sense.

Ratchet’s reaction to finding out what Pharma did may seem hasty and harsh, but it makes perfect sense on a human level. There is no such thing as unconditional love; everyone has personal and moral lines (boundaries), and they’re different for each individual. When the most rigid of lines is crossed, that’s it; walls go up and the offender is cut off, no matter how strong the relationship may have been.

Ratchet obviously knew Pharma well enough to think he could try talking some sense into him, but then Pharma revealed that he’d crossed one of Ratchet’s lines: murdering patients. Any willingness Ratchet may have had to try to understand vanished. By the time Pharma started trying to provide a ‘why’ for his actions, Ratchet’s moral judgment had already shut down any chance of understanding what could have possibly led Pharma to kill patients. It didn’t help that Pharma seemed totally unapologetic and outright proud of his plan. For Ratchet, the ‘why’ didn’t matter anymore. What he saw was what he trusted, and what he saw was a friend who’d become his idea of a monster.

Now, Ratchet and Pharma’s relationship is one of the most confusing IDW relationships I’ve had the pleasure and pain of dissecting.

It is notoriously difficult to determine the depth and strength of a relationship from the outside. However, I’ve decided to go ahead and address it anyway because it has the potential to provide insight into Pharma as an individual.

If I were to sum up Pharma and Ratchet’s relationship in a single word, I would use “ambivalent.” The first time I read MTMTE, the thing that stood out to me most about their relationship was the drastic differences between how they each perceived the relationship.

In one sense, there’s the idea of Pharma basically being Ratchet’s crazy stalker ex, which is tossed around in fandom a lot. While I personally dislike seeing it regardless of context (yes, even as a joke), I do see how JRO’s writing choices set things up in a way that makes it easy to superimpose that trope.

In another sense, there’s the idea that Pharma and Ratchet were always close friends, and that what happened at the end of the Delphi story was a betrayal of both sides that came out of nowhere and whose consequences were taken too far.

I disagree with both. Personally, what I see at the end of the Delphi story isn’t an obsessed ex gone mad, a sudden betrayal, or a badly executed backstabbing. What I see is a breakdown of an already-complicated and poorly-maintained relationship: true feelings being revealed, long-repressed bitterness being forced to the surface, carefully-hidden cracks being split wide open.

Most people don’t have an accurate understanding of how much or how little they truly know the people in their lives, often overestimating how well they know a person until something surfaces and blindsides them.

According to JRO, Ratchet was oblivious to Pharma’s romantic interest, and throughout canon, it’s easy to see Pharma was more invested in the relationship than Ratchet ever was.

The question is, did Ratchet ever care about Pharma at all? And if so, to what degree?

Yes, Ratchet calls Pharma “buddy” and “friend,” but the former was sarcastic, and the latter means something different to each person. Also, in light of the circumstances, Ratchet could have just been saying “friend” in response to Pharma saying it—an emotional appeal more than anything.

However, Pharma must have been aware of Ratchet’s lack of relational investment because during the confrontation at Delphi, Pharma’s first reaction wasn’t to appeal to their friendship (ex: “But you know me!”). Instead, he appealed to their shared profession:

Then there’s the exchange of insults:

This is what I meant earlier by “true feelings being revealed.” Ratchet may have just been trying to match Pharma’s insult, but it’s unlikely it was merely reciprocal because while Ratchet is snarky at times, he’s sincere in that snark. There’s almost always some truth in his verbal jabs no matter how unserious they seem, and he’s never cruel for cruelty’s sake.

So, if Pharma saw Ratchet as an inferior doctor, and Ratchet saw Pharma as an inferior Autobot…it’s reasonable to assume there was always some deep-rooted competition and conflict preventing them from being super close.

Possible suspicion surrounding Pharma’s conduct as an Autobot paired with a tendency to misjudge the nuances of relationships could explain why Ratchet was so quick to decide Pharma was a lost cause. Maybe Pharma’s actions at Delphi confirmed something from the past that Ratchet had brushed off for whatever reason.

In any case, Ratchet seems to have been largely unaffected by the Pharma he found at Delphi. While leaving Messatine, he emphasizes that he’ll miss Pharma’s talent.

Not “who he used to be.”

Not “what we used to have.”

Just…“his talent.”

Later, on Luna 1, Pharma mentions that he and Ratchet were inseparable, but that could mean a few different things:

Best case scenario: Pharma and Ratchet sought each other out on equal terms.

Worst case scenario: Pharma followed Ratchet around.

Somewhere in the middle: the job forced Pharma and Ratchet to work in close proximity most of the time, and while Pharma intentionally ran into Ratchet more often than necessary, Ratchet also sought out Pharma every now and then.

Whatever the case, working with someone every day doesn’t tell you anything about who they are as a person, and the amount of time spent with someone doesn’t automatically correlate to how deep the relationship is or how well the people know each other. It’s not like either Pharma or Ratchet are shown to be good at expressing their personal feelings outside of extreme circumstances.

Ratchet does bring up late-night conversations of the past:

But while this indicates there was something deeper between him and Pharma, because neither of them were ever shown to be super open with their true feelings, it’s unlikely the conversations were full of touchy-feely talk. In all likelihood, the conversations were mostly medicine and war-related, with the rare spark-to-spark talk sprinkled in. Also, considering everything up to this point, one has to wonder if those talks ever meant anything to Ratchet, or if he was just digging for something that might stall Pharma’s torture.

Maybe those late-night conversations did mean something to Ratchet, but whatever the case, Pharma didn’t take the bait. He knew Ratchet was trying to stall by making an emotional appeal, and perhaps he was convinced the conversations hadn’t meant that much to Ratchet.

Looking at all of this, it’s hard to believe Ratchet ever cared about Pharma as more than an interesting work friend. But even if he had cared more than he let on, it wasn’t enough to overcome the doubts he had about Pharma’s character.

As for whether Pharma truly cared about Ratchet, I’m convinced he did, but in a mostly unhealthy way, and with a strong undercurrent of one-sided rivalry. At some point, Ratchet had been an equal and a source of challenge, and he probably listened to Pharma pretty often. It’s reasonable to assume Ratchet was one of the only people—if not the only person—able to handle Pharma’s intense temperament and challenge him in a meaningful way, providing some semblance of friendship for Pharma.

However, one last thing that stands out is that, when telling Ratchet why he’s torturing him, Pharma didn’t say anything like, “Because you hurt me” or “Because you turned against me—your friend.” Instead, he said it was for “ruining things at Delphi” and because “you declared war on my body.”

Either Pharma wasn’t being entirely honest, or Ratchet’s friendship didn’t mean as much in the first place as he’d previously implied. It’s possible the ‘Because you hurt me’ was implied in “for ruining things back at Delphi,” but why not say it outright? Perhaps it was a fear of vulnerability and admitting there was ever a relational need at all.

At the end of the day, it’s difficult to say for certain how close Pharma and Ratchet were, but it’s clear they were never on the same page and there were always barriers between them.

Luna 1

Revisiting the matter of Pharma’s morality taking a backseat to other priorities, his time on Luna 1 further underscores this. Again, Pharma chooses his battles and is unwilling to put himself at great risk for the sake of others, but a closer look at the situation with Tyrest reveals there wasn’t really anything he could have done for the Cold Construct population even if he had wanted to. It would have been him against Tyrest, an army of Legislators, and a bunch of Decepticons. Pharma knew his limits, and seeing as his goal was self-preservation, it was perfectly rational for him to go along with Tyrest’s grand scheme.

Besides, it doesn’t look like he was given much of a choice:

Although, knowing Pharma, he still would have demanded to know beforehand what he would get in return for the pain, and evidently, Tyrest held up his end of the deal since Pharma had access to the Luna 1 tech collection.

As for Tyrest’s plan to wipe out the Cold Construct population, there’s nothing indicating Pharma’s decision to turn a blind eye to it was rooted in malevolence or bigotry—just rational apathy: ‘I can’t stop Tyrest, so why concern myself with the outcome?’

Again, you can’t save everyone; Pharma had all he could do to save himself.

But it wasn’t all horrible. I would even go so far as to say Pharma found some happiness on Luna 1. Tyrest didn’t care about him, but he didn’t need Tyrest to care. Everyone else there hated him, but he didn’t need to feel like he belonged or was admired. At this point, Pharma’s only interest was Tyrest’s Luna 1 tech collection, and that meant playing nice so he could keep his reward. Back at Delphi, he probably assumed he’d never again practice medicine the way he’d loved; being brought to Luna 1 was an unexpected, yet welcome, second chance.

Even so, Pharma had his moments of cruelty. Back at Delphi, he had easily-identifiable reasons to kill patients—both the ones whose T-cogs he harvested and the 20 more he tried to kill when he shot the life support machine. But on Luna 1, he had no reason to be cruel, yet he chose to be. By this point, he’d mastered the ability to almost completely ignore or subdue his conscience.

In the case of Ratchet’s torment, one could argue Pharma only drew it out for retaliation purposes; it was personal for him.

As for cutting Ambulon in half, it was obviously meant to be as gruesome as possible, yet also quick. But personally, I don’t think it was about Ambulon; it was more about hurting Ratchet. Due to the fact that Ratchet’s identity is wrapped up in his compassion and his ability to be helpful as a doctor, one of the most effective acts of revenge would be to do something that makes him feel utterly helpless.

Also I wonder if, subconsciously or consciously, Pharma was attempting to recreate the sense of helplessness he felt back at Delphi under Tarn’s watch: “Do you see, Ratchet? Do you now understand how it feels to have control ripped out of your hands? To be totally helpless?”

Next, for some reason, Pharma was invested in the promised execution of Getaway and Skids:

He had no personal connection to either of them that would give him a reason to be interested, so maybe Tyrest told him he could perform the execution and/or have the corpses for medical experimentation. Either way, Pharma would have had a chance to use some of the tech in Tyrest’s tech collection, possibly explaining his excitement.

Of course, any chance of an execution disappeared when the final showdown went wrong.

When Pharma tried to escape to Cyberutopia and discovered he couldn’t pass through the spacebridge forcefield, he gave up. He’d been caught; he would no longer have access to Tyrest’s tech collection; Ratchet and every other self-righteous Autobot would never forgive him; and the morality lock prevented him from escaping. By all appearances, he would never again be able to engage in that which gave him a sense of meaning. He had shrunken his world down to his obsessive interest in a specialized field and one significant, yet unrequited relationship. With both of these lost, his world collapsed.

Yes, guilt played a part in Pharma’s despondency, but because he seems to have been in denial of said guilt, it’s more likely his despair was primarily due to the fact that he saw no future for himself. He had nothing left to live for.

In light of this, Pharma’s flippant comments to First Aid make sense. He wasn’t being insensitive as much as he was goading First Aid. Pharma’s not stupid. First Aid had a massive rotary cannon on him, and Pharma knew exactly which emotional buttons to push to get him to pull the trigger.

Pharma wanted to die.

Adaptus

First, let me emphasize that Adaptus did not take possession of Pharma’s body. Instead, Pharma was the unwelcome guest:

How Pharma ended up in Adaptus’ new body is a mystery, but whatever the case, Pharma didn’t pass on to the Allspark. Whether or not he had a choice can only be speculated.

First Aid had blasted Pharma’s head clean off, so whatever happened must have been related to the spark. Perhaps some residual spark energy was trapped in a body part that Adaptus repurposed, leaving Pharma tethered to the new body unwillingly.

Still, Pharma managed to assert his will and override Adaptus for a brief moment. Considering Adaptus was basically a god, this is impressive.

Based on Adaptus�� surprise at being interrupted, it seems he didn’t know Pharma was there. Why Pharma hadn’t tried to assert himself sooner is a mystery. Maybe Adaptus’ scheme was entertaining; maybe Pharma actually liked the company; or maybe he’d been waiting for an opportunity to get revenge on Tyrest for everything done to him back at Luna 1.

Sure enough, just like with Ratchet back on Luna 1, Pharma’s vengeful streak came out as soon as there was an opportunity.

Unfortunately for him, this left him vulnerable, and Tyrest took advantage of the confusion:

Conclusion

When someone reduces their world to narrow personal interests and one or a few very special people, their grip tightens around what little they have. They often become obsessive and possessive of the few things that make them feel alive, and their view of the world becomes increasingly more subjective and detached from the outside world. Pharma seems to have fallen into this trap.

Even so, in the context of the circumstances, several of the decisions he made were rational—even if coldly so. Oftentimes, “extreme” rationality and self-preservation are villainized in fiction, and characters like Pharma who don’t automatically put themselves at great risk for anyone and everyone are villainized, or at least looked down on. Their choices are often regarded as less human, but rationality and self-preservation are just as human as compassion and self-sacrifice.

Ultimately, Pharma was trapped and pushed over the edge into “insanity” by Tarn’s cruelty, but his own choices made from a place of pride determined how he fell, and how far he fell. It was a perfect storm of Tarn’s mind games and Pharma’s intellectual arrogance, excessive self-confidence, obsessive nature, and stubborn grip on the kind of future he wanted for himself.

Pharma is yet another Icarus who flew too close to the sun and paid dearly for it, and while JRO/the narrative could have given this Icarus better wings, that doesn’t change the fact that he chose to fly so high.

***

Many thanks to anyone who made it to the end of this monster of a post.

-tosses a Rodimus Star at you-

#idw transformers #idw1 #maccadam #MTMTE #lost light #idw pharma #pharma #tf idw character analysis #tf idw meta #dr. fancy hands #nova’s nerding out again

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empty-movement · 2 years ago

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Chiho Saito’s 1999 Revolutionary Girl Utena Original Illustration Collection

IT’S HERE. IT’S DONE. IT’S FINISHED. NOW…IT’S YOURS. Happy Holidays, my friends.

Vanna here! I have posted some already about this project, and the responses I got, public and otherwise, have been absolutely incredible. Y’all have been reblogging and hyping this before it even finished…I haven’t felt so encouraged about an Utena project since the musicals! (Yes, streams soon, I promise.) You can read the other post to get more details, and catch my post here with more details about the process if you’re interested. The long and short of it?

This is the first artbook I ever scanned. I did it in 2001. In Photoshop, using multiple scans per page that took hours to process. But it was 2001. A half megabyte file that was 1250px wide was considered extremely hardcore and impressive. That’s just always been the business I’m in when it comes to Utena art, you know?

It’s now the latest artbook I’ve scanned, and so much of the process, and effort involved, is unchanged. What has changed, is the result. Welcome to your new desktop background. Your new phone background. Your new poster print.

What I’ve done here is attempt to create definitive digitized images of Chiho Saito’s work as offered by this book--I have removed the print moiré of the original scans, and used my literal decades of experience to try and tease out as much information from them as possible. Without being physically in front of the original artwork (which is a thing I’ve had the great fortune to get to do) this is The Most Chiho Saito you are ever going to get. I’ve tried my best to make sure there is a way to get it that works for everyone:

Do you just wanna scope 'em out? Look at some disaster gays? Grab your favorite one or two? This is the path for you! Check out the ‘compressed’ (not very) 10k ‘web friendly’ (not really) copy at the Bibliothèque, the media archiving wing of the Something Eternal forums at Empty Movement*. All the following links are also available from here. Do you want these copies? All of them? Don't just grab them individually, friend. This batch is 375MB and can be downloaded as a zip of the individual files here on our Google Drive.

Do you like digital archiving? Are you looking for a copy that preserves the archival quality of the effort but sits nice and comfy in a single file? This is for you. A minimally compressed 10k, 513MB version worked into a PDF is now up, shiny and chrome, on the Internet Archive. Do you like the idea of the minimal compression, but want the individual files in a zip? Yep I did that too, here's the drive link.

Are you looking to print these in a larger size? This is probably the only reason on Earth you’d ever want them, and yet a bunch of you are going to go straight for these. Here are the zero-compression JPG full size copies, most of them are 15k across, like simply a ridiculous size. Pick your fave and download it from our Google Drive!

I am genuinely really proud of this work.** I was able to tease out so much new detail from these…her incredible layering techniques, the faintest brush of her highlights, and the full range of her delicate hand at whites and blacks… details commonly lost in digitization. I sincerely hope you find something here that you’re looking for, as an artist looking for inspiration, as a weeb looking for a desktop, as an archiver excited to see incredible 90s manga artwork saved forever in the digital realm. I feel like I have already said so much about them, and could keep going, but you know what? This work speaks for itself. Enjoy, use, explore, and definitely tell us what you think!

We love y’all. ~ Vanna & Yasha

* AHEM ASTERISK AHEM

You might be wondering what any of that is. Something Eternal? Biblewhatawhat??? EmptyMovement.com? You might even have done a double take at the word ‘forum.’ And you should!!!

I have a confession. This artbook was my ‘side project’ as I worked on this, *the main project.* For a couple years I’ve been banging around with a new domain, and originally I had other plans for it, but Elon Musk ruined my Twitter and Discord is well along on its way to enshittification, and well….we joke on the Discord a lot about ‘reject modernity, embrace forums’ and you know what? We’re right. So Yasha and I are putting our money where our mouths are once again, and doing something insane. We are launching, in 2023, a website forum. Obviously, this is not the official ‘launch’ per se, but I cannot announce the artbook without directing you to the forum, since it sits on the attached very cool gallery system. Oops! Told on myself. Another post more focused on the forum will be forthcoming, but if you are just that motivated to get in right away, you absolutely can! (This will help stagger new arrivals anyway, which is good for us!) If you would rather wait for the ‘official’ launch, by all means that’s coming, including a lengthy screed about how and why we’re doing this. In either case, remember: this is a couple weebs trying to make internet magic happen, we are not website developers by trade. Give us grace as we iron things out and grow into this cool new website thingie…hopefully along with some of you! :D

If you do join up, naturally, there is a thread about this project!

** If you like this kind of content, consider helping us pay for it! We do have a Patreon! If you’re wanting to use these in some public-facing distributive way, all we ask is for credit back to Empty Movement (ohtori.nu or emptymovement.com, either will work.)

I would like to say ‘don’t just slap these files on RedBubble to get easy money’ but I know that saying this won’t effectively prevent it. Y’all that do that suck, but you’re not worth letting it rain on the rest of this parade. :)

#revolutionary girl utena #utena #rgu #sku #empty movement #chiho saito #90s manga #digital archives #manga aesthetic #shoujo kakumei utena #utena art

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sculkapologist · 10 months ago

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I finally finished a NEW CUSTOM MAP ART!!! "Visitor," a portrait of an enderman, is extra exciting because it's my first full-palette map painting, meaning I used block height to access all the highlight and shadow colours available!! More on the full process under the cut, but the short version of what this means is:

ITS A VERY COMPLICATED CONSTRUCTION. I created the art, then planned and built this manually, without any mods or schematics for construction. Huge props again to everyone else in the server for helping me gather all the materials to make this absurd thing possible!!!

This was the original art I made for it! I'm a huge fan of the "compressed" look of the vanilla paintings, so I've been starting with a large image and shrinking it down, though there were a lot of pixel tweaks to get it to read well. After shrinking it to 16x32 (for an art made of two maps), I convert it to a limited palette that I've set up to match the colours minecraft actually has available:

The map palette is actually tremendously limited, so figuring out a painting that will still look good with that constraint is a challenge in and of itself!

Anyway, the way minecraft maps work, a block that is Taller than the block to the north of it shows up with a slightly lighter colour, and a block that is Lower than the block north of it shows up on the map with a slightly darker colour. So when making a key for this one, I marked all the squares with a little arrow if it's the lighter or darker version:

Each "pixel" here is a full stack of blocks on the mapped area: 64 blocks, 8 rows of 8. In order to achieve the affect of every block in a given pixel being taller or shorter than the block to the north of it, dark and light shades need to staircase either up or down. Because staircasing downwards in survival sounds even worse than this madness, I did some planning to make sure each of the "downwards" staircases would touch the ground, so I could simply staircase up from south to north instead. This involved figuring out how many up and down movements were in each individual column and planning out 32 little layouts:

It's worth noting that if you look up minecraft map art on Youtube, most of what you'll find is either, the simple realisation that placing blocks allows you to make custom map art, or an explanation of how to use a generator that will let you plug in any picture and then produce a schematic for you. It's very cool that these exist, but I wanted to do full palette art myself, without an auto-generated schematic, and at the time THERE JUST WEREN'T ANY TUTORIALS FOR HOW TO DO ALL THIS?? Now, having the experience of finagling all this, i think perhaps the reason is that this is a mad undertaking.

ANYWAY: PROGRESS SHOTS!!

I actually love how the staircases look..... its like some kind of modern sculpture

Fewer shots of the second half since I did it on call with friends; the last screenshot is one Thren took of me activating the new locked map to use for the gallery.

Once these paintings are done, I lock the finished maps, make copies, and stock them in the art gallery so other friends on our server can also put these paintings in their homes! It's a lot of work, but really rewarding to see my art decorating various buildings around the server. ;u;

I have one more custom full-palette painting I've done the art for and gathered all materials for; I still need to do the full key and plan staircasing for it before I can start, but HOPEFULLY if my resolve doesn't waver there'll be at least one more of these!!

#minecraft build #minecraft screenshots #minecraft #block game liveblogging #minecraft map art #GENUINELY SO PROUD OF THIS ONE #bsl shaders #im so tempted to make some sort of tutorial on doing this by hand sometime. you shouldnt do it by hand. but a tutorial should exist!!

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dreamsofbroflovski · 6 months ago

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Kenny McCormick x Reader - i luv your girl

Also available on ao3!

Summary: Being stood up when you have the absolutely perfect anniversary date planned would be enough to send anyone spiraling and make them question if anything is even worth it at this point. Luckily for you, the perfect loverboy is willing to sweep you off your feet and show you a good time to help you make a decision.

Warnings: Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content (everyone involved is above the age of consent), Cunnilingus, Face-Sitting, Penis In Vagina Sex, Cowgirl Position, Semi-Public Sex, Cheating/Infidelity

A/N: Ugh, I am so fucking sorry. I had this thing like, 75% done on my Docs, and then something else on my life took complete chokehold on me and I couldn't make any progress on it at all for several days. I promise I'll try to write quicker and post more often in the future. Next up on the chopping block (I'm not actually chopping him up, though he deserves it) is Kyley-B, for a request (I'm taking those now) (Also sorry to the follower for taking so long to get to it I am a disgrace)

“Come on… Come on… Pick it up, will you…”

Clutching my phone in my hands firmly, close to my face as I stared at it with my eyes drifting between the ‘Call’ screen and the battery icon, I paced back and forth on the sidewalk. The sun shined bright and beautiful in the sky, still my mood was anything but - the nerves were exponentially starting to get to me, and I was on my last line.

It was supposed to be my two-year dating anniversary with my current boyfriend, and I had the whole day planned to perfection. Taking advantage of the fact that the weather forecast was announcing a very warm and sunny day - which is rare for our town -, I planned to spend the whole day with my man, starting off with a whole picnic in the park around the local pond. I was wearing my prettiest floral sundress and had a whole basket full of goodies to be enjoyed under the sunlight. Had made sure to arrive early and wait in a place that was of easy access for both me and my partner so we could walk to our destination together. It was all perfect.

Perfect, except for the absence of my other half.

For three hours now I had been waiting, sitting on a bench near a local restaurant that I usually frequent for lunch on workdays, looking around all the time for any signs of him, and he had not arrived. I called and called with my phone but they all went to voicemail, sent a bunch of texts that stayed on delivered - and worse, my battery was now close to dying out, since I forgot to charge it before I left, not thinking it was important since I didn’t plan on spending so much time on my phone anyway. It was currently running at 4% as I tried to call him as many times as possible before it died out and I had to think of another plan.

My heart skipped a beat as the call was answered.

“Baby? Baby! Where are you?” I exclaimed as I put my phone to my ear, my agitation clear on my voice.

“Mmmmm… Hey, babe… What’s up…” An extremely groggy version of my boyfriend’s voice came through the phone’s speakers, not nearly close to matching my anxiety.

“What do you mean, what’s up? Where are you?” My mind already had a faint idea of the answer, but I had a sliver of hope in my heart that it might be wrong.

“Huh… In bed.”

Of fucking course. “In bed? How? It's almost 2pm! We were supposed to meet three hours ago!” It was not my intention to scold him, but in my exasperation it sounded exactly like that.

A few seconds of silence from the other side of the call as my partner seemingly processed the information. “Damn… Sorry, babe. I stayed up late gaming with the boys and slept through the alarm.” He sounded slightly less groggy now, like my revelation was a shock to his brain, but not by much.

“I called you so many times, though!” I countered, “Why didn’t you pick those up?”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I thought it was telemarketing or something.” His voice didn’t carry a hint of remorse.

I took a deep breath, trying not to scream or make a scene right there on the street. The day was so beautiful, I just didn’t wanna waste it arguing. “Well, you’re still coming, right?” I asked, trying my best to sound patient and less accusatory. “Can you give me an ETA or something?”

“Babe, let’s just… Let’s just take a rain check, alright? It’s late already.” He sounded as nonchalant as could be as he said that, as if the thing he was cancelling wasn’t our literal anniversary date. “I promise I’ll make it up to you some other time.”

“It’s our anniversary, baby! I’m already here! What do you-”

With a jolly ringtone, the call was cut short. I put my phone in front of my eyes just in time to see the animation of it turning off on the screen, my battery breathing its last before the device died completely.

And then there was just me.

In small, shaky steps, I made my way to a street bench nearby and sat down, setting my picnic basket to my side and watching with glazed eyes as the cars went by on the street, still clutching my phone in my hand. After waiting for so long, making excuses for my boyfriend’s tardiness on what was supposed to be a date to celebrate the day our relationship started, a date I planned from beginning to end and made sure was completely flawless, it all went to shit in the span of one phone call that didn’t even get to end because I ran out of battery before it could. I was left alone, heartbroken, stressed and with no way of going back home except on foot.

Allowing myself to have at least one thing I wanted, I lowered my face, hiding it with my hands, and let the tears roll fast and plentiful. My whole body shook as I sobbed, all the nerves of the day taking physical form in the salty droplets running from my eyes, as I recalled not just how much of a bad current situation I was in, but all the previous disappointments in my relationship that I swept under the rug because of love. And, deep down, I knew I was likely to let the broom of my self-neglect swipe this one, too.

For what felt like forever, this was all that I had. One of the prettiest outfits of my life, a basket full of food, painful memories running through my mind, tears that didn’t seem to be able to stop running down my cheeks. Until I got something else.

“Hey… Ma’am? Miss?” A gentle male voice called near me, seemingly out of nowhere, bringing me back to the world of the living, so to speak. “Can I help you? Do you need anything?”

I shook my head, still not looking to the source of the sound, now feeling deeply ashamed of myself. Engrossed in my own feelings, I forgot this was still public space and someone was bound to question me at any time, considering how nosy people in this small town tend to be. “I’m fine,” my voice cracked a bit as I said it.

“I am pretty sure you aren’t,” The voice responded, with a sliver of irony, but still gentle, like he wanted to make sure I knew he wasn’t laughing at me. I felt a hand on my bare shoulder - calloused fingers shook it with just as much kindness as I heard in the voice behind them.

“It’s alright, sir,” I sniffled while trying to steady my voice, hoping my fake reassurance would be enough to make this unknown person leave already. “I’ll be leaving soon, don’t worry about it.”

“‘Sir’ is my dad,” He chuckled, “My name is Kenny. At least to all the pretty girls. So call me Kenny.”

His response took a small giggle out of me, even if my whole mind found it inappropriate to do so considering the circumstances. Whoever it was that tried to talk to me was actually making an effort to make things better, not just ask questions out of obligation or curiosity. Slowly, I wiped my tears away with my hands, answered him with my own name and lifted my face up, trying to put an image to ‘Kenny’. And put an image to it I did.

It was almost like the head and body of two different action figures smashed into one. From the neck down, it was simple and rather elegant. The man wore all black, as was common for that restaurant’s waiters; The usual dress shirt with the restaurant’s logo had its first two or three buttons open, making it just slightly more stylish. The charcoal gray apron wrapped around his hips was perfectly spotless like it had never been worn before, and he wore a pair of dress shoes that seemed to have been recently shined.

Once my eyes went up, though, everything seemed to change. His blond hair was styled in some sort of shaggy mullet. The very visible dark circles under his eyes came as a stark contrast to his laid-back posture and the youthful energy I just felt emanating from his body. On the matter of his eyes, I couldn’t pinpoint their color for the life of me; Some trick of the sunlight was clearly at play in them, because in some angles they were blue and in others I could’ve sworn they were lavender. Some tiny reddish nicks speckled his jawline and chin, likely from shaving and not doing a very good job at it. When his mouth was open, I could see that his teeth were slightly crooked, and he had a bit of a gap between the front two on the top row.

The things that were the most startling about his appearance, though, were the scars and piercings on his face, and those he had several of. I could count two eyebrow piercings, a nose ring, a single earring on his right ear and an industrial bar on the other that seemed to still be healing. On the matter of scars, all of them were healed and faded, but screamed gruesome stories; One on his upper lip that went up to end at the side of his nostril, another one on his temple, and a third, the biggest, started on the right side of his jaw and went all the way down to the start of his neck.

To be honest, I liked the look of the top part more than the bottom.

As he saw me looking up at him, the corners of his lips curved into a smile, a genuine one filled with kindness. “Wanna talk to someone about it?” He asked as he pushed my picnic basket on the bench away and sat to my side, leaning forwards with his face towards me.

“Ugh… No, I just…” My fingers ran through my hair in stress as I threw my head back, feeling my eyes burn with tears again and trying to chase them away so I could at least leave this situation and go home without further questions.

“Let me guess… boy troubles?”

It was a rather sexist guess on his part, but I wasn’t about to fight it, because he happened to be right. “How do you…?”

I turned my face to look at him and he pointed to my hand on my hair, where on my ring finger rested a thin silver band with my boyfriend’s name engraved on the inside. “You’ve got a ring.” Turns out he wasn’t being misogynistic at all. He was just too attentive, something I’m not used to.

With a sigh, I slouched forwards with my face down again.

“Now I’m curious,” Kenny admitted as he leaned back on the seat of the bench, resting his arms on top of it, “What kind of monster made a goddess like you cry like that?”

I shook my head again and pointed to his shirt, specifically to the restaurant’s logo embroidered on the uniform. “Don’t you have somewhere to be right now?”

“Don’t worry about it. The place’s practically empty right now. Most people are at the mall or at Stark’s Pond anyway.” He shrugged. “And besides… I shouldn’t tell you this, but my boss is acting kinda crazy thinking you’re scouting the place to rob. So me being here probably puts his mind at ease because now he has a witness.”

Great. Just lovely. Now, on top of my whole shitty life situation, I’ll also have to find all the workers at that place looking at me funny whenever I go in for lunch. “So you told him you’d come here to teach the possible thief a lesson?”

“No. I told him there was no way in Hell someone as adorable as you was up to no good.” It was the third compliment on my appearance in less than five minutes of interaction. Apparently he was the type of man to not be deterred by something as ‘insignificant’ as a woman’s boyfriend, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“Well, your boss can rest assured,” I said, “I was just waiting here to go on a date. No robbery plans.”

“That’s what I thought.” He nodded slowly. “But I saw you while I was working. You’ve been here quite a while. What happened?”

“Well…” I took a deep breath, trying to put it all into words without bawling immediately - it still didn’t stop some tears from falling and my voice from cracking as I finally spoke again, “Apparently, my boyfriend slept past his alarm and forgot our anniversary date.”

Sudden movement to my side had me startled and I looked up again. Kenny was on his feet, an exasperated expression on his face. “What a bastard! YOU’RE sitting here, looking like a fucking snack for him, and your stupid ass boyfriend is at his place sleeping when he could be ravaging you?”

This man sounded genuinely indignant, even if extremely crude - in a twisted way, it only served to fill my brain up with more thoughts that maybe I wasn’t being treated as decently as I deserved, because I found myself not wanting to dispute him or make excuses for my boyfriend’s behaviour, either. “Don’t put it like that…”

“I always put it in in many ways,” Kenny sat back down next to me on the bench, the double entendre he spat definitely understood and ignored by me when I tried my best not to laugh, “And the only thing your boyfriend there seems to be putting is stress on your shoulders.”

He put his hand on my back and rubbed it gently slowly, as if trying to physically remove this figurative weight he mentioned - and, surprisingly, I felt it working even if just a little bit. My facial expression probably gave my enjoyment away, because he didn’t remove his hand even after he stopped moving it, and I let him keep it like that.

“I mean, it’s not that bad…” I avoided Kenny’s gaze as I uttered those words, and immediately the pain he had soothed came crashing down again. “It’s just one date. I’m sure it��s-”

“Don’t you start this on me now,” Kenny interrupted before I could continue my poor attempt at a dispute, “You know it is that bad. It’s your anniversary. Fuck, if I had a chick willing to do all that for me, I’d stick to her like bubblegum on a shoe,” he chuckled nervously as he ran his fingers through his hair, the thought of having someone who cared about him that much apparently making his brain run amok - he was probably the type of person to try to get things done for people instead of the other way around.

“And I’ll say more,” he took a deep breath and continued as he took note of my silence, “Even if it was just a date, you should still be pissed. You agreed on something and he fucked it up. And now you’re here, looking sad and hot. If this happened to any of your girl friends, you’d tell them to send the garbage dick to the gutters, wouldn’t you?”

I tried opening my mouth to argue further, try to defend my man’s behaviour or justify it, but found myself running dry of the excuses I usually had on hand. It was like something inside of me had snapped, and if there was one goddamn day of my relationship where I would allow myself to be angry and expect reparations, it would be this one.

“Thanks, Kenny,” I murmured, nodding slowly and letting my gratitude shine through my eyes as well when I gazed into his, “Means a lot.”

“Don’t mention it,” he shook his head, making his shaggy hair flow beautifully and frame his face even better, “Consider this my first real attempt at becoming employee of the month.”

In a weird way, Kenny’s presence and his charisma were starting to make me feel better. I felt drawn to continue talking to him, if just to hear his voice more.

“Are you a new hire?” I asked, signaling with my head towards the restaurant where he worked at, “I come here often and I’ve never seen you there before.”

“Oh, no no no, I’ve been there a couple of months now,” Kenny was quick to answer, waving his hand in front of him to emphasize the negative, “But I usually just do cleaning duty and help in the kitchen. They don’t want me waiting tables because I ain’t exactly got a face for customer service.”

I didn’t argue with his comment, but it wasn’t for a lack of wanting to. The man sitting next to me was absolutely handsome. Every single one of his features displayed intense personality and charm, and the words in his voice always sounded extremely seductive no matter the subject. Kenny had a natural magnetism to him that most men could never have no matter how hard they tried. However, he was nonetheless a bit rough around the edges, and the piercings and scars probably were a red flag when it came to employment. Not his fault and there was nothing wrong with him, the only one to blame was our current society.

“Anyway, today I’m actually covering for a friend of mine,” Kenny continued, “Got in some sort of trouble and couldn’t be here, so he asked me to cover for him and it was the least I could do.”

Using my amassed knowledge of the restaurant’s usual waiters, I went through my mental images of all of their faces to try and guess who his friend could be. There was this other young man, about our age… “Is it the other blond guy? Also with the… You know, over his eye?” I moved my finger in front of my left eye, tracing a scar I remembered the other man having. Were facial scars an integral part of the restaurant’s uniform?

“Butters. That’s him.” Kenny nodded with a smile. “Really nice dude. Reliable. He’s covered my ass a couple of times, vouched for me to get this job too. I gotta check on him later to see if everything’s alright, he never misses a workday.”

The sincerity in Kenny’s voice and the way he beamed about his colleague made my heart feel warmer. There was obviously more to their friendship than just being work buddies, and I was sure this ‘Butters’ guy was very near and dear to him. Maybe next time I went in there for lunch we could strike a conversation or something.

But all good things must come to an end. With a stinging reminder that I still had a phone with zero battery on me and a whole walk to my house ahead, which would set me back on my ‘not think of my life’ objective a lot, I decided I should just cut that umbilical cord and let my new buddy go back to living his own.

“Well, Kenny… I think I really need to go. Don’t wanna take up any more of your time.” I run my hands over my eyes one more time, even though the tears have already all spilled by now and are basically dry. “Thanks for everything. All the best to you.”

I get up from the bench and wave him a goodbye, but feel him grab my wrist and tug at it as I try to leave. When I turn to him again, he’s holding up my picnic basket in his hand. “You forgot your… your thing here.”

He pushes it toward me, but I don’t pick it up, instead just making a dismissing motion with my free hand. “Keep it.” I shook my head. “I’m not hungry anyway. Think of it as a token of appreciation for keeping me company.”

“You’re not hungry? That’s bullshit!” He gets on his feet as well and tries giving me the basket again, more insistently this time. “You were waiting here for hours without eating. You must be starving.”

Kenny wasn’t wrong. During our whole conversation, I could feel the familiar pangs of hunger in my belly, my body’s painful way of begging me for sustenance. However, just thinking of coming back home all alone and having to eat all the food I prepared for me and my boyfriend, knowing full well that it was supposed to be for a special occasion and I had instead been bailed on like it was nothing, was enough to make my eyes burn again with the threat of another crying session. I wouldn’t be able to do it.

To keep myself from crying again, I just let out a downcast sigh. “It’s alright. There’s too much for just me anyway, I don’t want it to go bad. If you keep it you can at least share with your buddies or something.”

“Well, I’m still not taking what’s yours, that’d be fucked up. But…” His eyes darted to the side, looking towards his workplace, then back to the basket his holding and then finally to me again.

“But?”

“Well, as it turns out, I haven’t had my lunch break yet.” His hand releases its grasp on my wrist and he picks up his phone in the pocket of his apron briefly to check the time, putting it right back after he does. “So I think you can still have that picnic.”

It was unbelievable. “You’d… Do that for me?”

“It would be a real mistake to let such a perfectly prepared meal go to waste.” He made a gesture with his hand, towards my picnic basket - a gesture that I could’ve sworn encompassed me as well, theory only made stronger by the mischievous glint I definitely saw in his eyes.

His boldness had me flabbergasted. In any other situation, I’d be nothing short of horrified at the thought of an unknown man inviting himself to my business like that and basically taking over my day - but Kenny had been so kind, helping me with nothing but caring words as I bawled my eyes out, taking time away from his work to make sure an unknown woman was safe and okay while asking for absolutely nothing in return. And he seemed so genuine about it, too - even if he had made some playful passes, I wasn’t the slightest bit uncomfortable around him. He was being extremely nice about all of it and I found myself not ready to go back home and face the music of my terrible life just yet; Maybe Kenny and I really could have a great time together, even if it wasn’t what I originally planned.

“If you really want to…” I give him a gentle smile. “Let’s go, then.”

His eyes light up like a child’s as he hears my acceptance, and he hands me my basket to hold before starting to walk with purpose past me, leaving me confused. “Just stay here for a bit, okay? Don’t go nowhere.” He calls out to me, but as he sees my eyes widening and a little sadness flash behind them - I hadn’t considered that I’d had to wait even more for Kenny now, and my whole experience with today had me a little paranoid -, he’s quick to add: “I swear I’ll be quick, it’s just to warn the other folk! Be back in a flash!”

With a deep breath, I decide to trust him on this one. “Go, go!” I yell with urgency, turning my attention to other parts of my surroundings while he goes do what needs to be done.

Luckily I didn’t have to wait long. After just a couple minutes my ears picked up rushed footsteps coming in my direction - Kenny was now straight up running to meet me. He looked mostly the same, with a few key differences; He had ditched his apron completely and was now wearing a big orange parka with brown details on the hoodie. It looked cheap , old and beat-up, with a bunch of very visible stitching on the seams, like it had ripped off and been sewn back together multiple times before. It also had a couple dried dark stains splattered around it, but I wasn’t about to ask what they were.

“Feeling cold?” I pointed at the new addition to his outfit.

Kenny shook his head and shrugged, the jacket making a very characteristic plastic-like sound with his movement. “Just thought I might need it.”

You’re gonna sweat in that was my immediate thought, but the judgement that followed was to not to waste any time debating his decision, he’s a grown adult and must have his reasons. I adjusted the basket on my forearm as I began to walk, but Kenny quickly moved to my side and pulled it away from me, locking his right arm with my left one and holding the basket with his other hand. I turned to him with a confused look, but he said nothing about it, instead choosing to go on about something entirely unrelated as we made our way to our destination.

༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚𓆩♡𓆪༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚

The trip to Stark’s Pond was quite short, but filled with fun and laughter all the way nonetheless. Kenny was making progress on his objective of keeping me distracted from my current situation, telling me lots of jokes and sneaking compliments every other sentence like it was second nature for him to say them, which it might as well be. I had no doubt that, for anyone who went past us on the street and didn’t know who we were, the only thing they saw was one extremely happy couple.

I ended up learning lots of stuff about him, too. He opened up like a library book, probably to compensate for the fact that he saw me so vulnerable earlier. I found out that he was an extremely hardworking man, needing money not only for his daily expenses but also to help his little sister pay her university tuition - between that and his treatment of me, a person he barely knew, I had no doubt he truly had a heart of gold.

Besides the daily shifts at the restaurant and some odd jobs here and there whenever he got some free time, he was regularly busy during weekend nights, working as a bartender at a club in Main Street. I knew the place like the back of my hand. It was my old stomping ground - I had spent many a crazy Friday and Saturday night there, and it was also where I had met my current boyfriend, a drunk hookup that became a bigger thing. Ironically enough, once we made it official, he began to get bothered whenever I talked of going there and would give me the silent treatment if I did, so I eventually just abandoned it altogether to keep the peace.

“Well, if you ever feel like coming back,” Kenny said after I commented on the coincidence, “Then keep me company at the bar. Drinks on me. And not that overpriced stuff full of ice we usually make. Real alcohol.”

I told him he was full of shit and waved him off, but made a mental note of what he said… Just in case.

When we arrived at the lake, it was immediately verified that Kenny’s predictions about what the people in town were doing for the sunny day were correct. The park surrounding the pond was peppered with couples in love whispering sweet nothings to each other while watching the clouds, families with children throwing frisbees to their dogs, and groups of teenagers being as loud as they usually are and causing stress to everyone around them. My eyes scanned the space around me, looking for a decent open spot to sit down - meanwhile, Kenny just kept walking like he already knew where he wanted to go, and I absentmindedly followed him.

The realization that we had deviated a little from the main path only comes to me when the sound beneath my feet goes from soft grass to crunching twigs. We were breaching the forest nearby, Kenny bringing me swiftly around the trees like his legs had their positions down pat. I knew for a fact that there was a trail of beaten dirt through this same forest for those who wished to take a stroll in it, but we weren’t following that path. As I shoot an inquisitive glance and a frown towards my new friend, he just smiles, acknowledging my confusion but not missing pace over it.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, I have the perfect spot,” He turned to me, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb. “Unless you wanna go back and we can go sit next to those highschoolers with the speakers blasting 6ix9ine.”

I shook my head quickly and emphatically, immediately getting a pep in my step. “Oh no, I trust you on this one.”

Our little unexpected promenade didn’t last for much longer. Soon the trees started to spread more distant from each other, and we arrived at a small open area, a random glade I had never seen before. The tree canopies bunched together didn’t create their patchy roof over our heads any longer, so the sun was free to shine and warm up my skin. The branches fallen on the ground were few and far between, and the grass was decently smooth and level, perfect for relaxing on it. No animals were to be seen, probably scattered away much earlier after hearing our noises, but I could hear birds singing in the distance and catch one or two flying high above our heads.

“This is a nice place, Kenny!” I exclaimed, turning to him with a smile. “How much roaming around the forest did you do to find it?”

“I guess I’ve known about it for a while. Me and my bros come here all the time to have a smo- Think. We come here to think.” I laughed after hearing Kenny immediately try to correct himself, his sudden interest in a tiny pebble on the grass not going unnoticed either.

“You don’t have to hide it from me, I’m not a prude.” I shrugged. “Think anyone else might get the same idea today?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. And if they do, trust me, they’re gonna leave.”

Deciding once again to not question Kenny’s words or his methods, I opened up the basket in my arm and picked up a yellow and white checkered picnic blanket, opening it up and stretching it over the grass. My unexpected companion immediately started to help me spread the contents of the basket neatly on top of it, making all our food options easily visible.

And there were many of them. I had been quite proud of myself beforehand for managing to prepare a decent amount of stuff for my date, but it dawned on me that if I hadn’t had Kenny by my side it would have taken me a couple of days to get through it all on my own at home. Me and my improbable new friend talked a bunch more while we made quick work of the small club sandwiches, homemade chicken pie, carrot cake, some assorted snacks and drinks from the grocery store, and…

“Chocolate-covered strawberries? Seriously?” Kenny held up the small red box, shaking it slightly. “The big expensive ones too. You really went all out for this.”

“Hey, I forgot I had that! These are the best!” I let out a small squeal of surprise, the memory of having picked up the sweet treat earlier at the candy store having gotten lost in my head over all the stress I went through. I reach my arm towards Kenny, the tiny box too far away for me to get to it naturally. ”Can you pass me one, please?”

After I finished my request, my ears picked up some particularly close chirping, and I quickly turned my head around to look for any sign of a small bird that could be producing it, my hand still extended towards Kenny with my fingers wiggling as I waited for him to give me one of the sweet treats. I heard the characteristic noise of the box being opened, and something being shuffled inside of it, but nothing ever made its way to me. When I turned to see what was taking Kenny so long, I realized why - Kenny was staying put with one of the strawberries held between his teeth with half of it sticking out of his mouth. He couldn’t speak, but his eyes held the message of what he wanted me to do next.

I had to admit, I considered it for a brief moment. It was a simple act of play, but so sensual as well - I hadn’t been able to do this kind of silly stuff in quite a while, and it ignited something in me that had been dormant for a while now. I felt wanted. However, my moral compass was still blaring its sirens loudly in my brain, and I didn’t want to lead my whole life astray just because one guy I just met was giving me all the attention I needed. “Oh, come on, give me that!” I feigned annoyance and reached over to try and pick the fruit out from between Kenny’s teeth, but he quickly just gets all of it inside of his mouth and starts chewing.

“Had to at least try.” He chuckled, with his mouth still full, before picking out another strawberry from the box and handing it over to me properly this time.

“Do you try this with every girl who offers you food?” I inquired with irony in my voice as I plucked the small leaves off the top of the fruit, “The whole loverboy act?”

He swallows before answering this time. “Only when they’re as cute as you are,” He replied, “Which means I’ve never done it before in my entire life.”

If my eyes could roll back further into my head, they’d dislodge from it. “Like I said, Kenny, you’re full of shit,” I retorted right before popping the whole strawberry in my mouth, closing my eyes to savor its taste. My next words came slightly messed up, as I spoke with my mouth full, covering it with my hand. “I bet the girls are all over you with that.”

While I chewed on the fruit, Kenny stayed totally silent, his eyes scanning the plaid pattern of the picnic blanket under him. “What if it’s not an act, though?”

The sudden seriousness in his tone made my eyes shoot open immediately, and I flinched a bit, a frown creasing my forehead.

Kenny started scooting closer and wrapped his arms around me, suddenly pulling my body in one quick motion so I was seated between his legs while he hugged me tightly from behind. I tensed up completely in his arms, and didn’t dare make a movement even when his heavy breathing on my shoulder made the fine hairs behind my neck stand up. “Ken… I…” My uttering was almost non-audible, voice still strained from the surprise.

He grinned against the crook of my neck. “Ken, huh?” Kenny’s murmurs came out slightly muffled by my skin, “I can be that today, if you need me to. Just say it.”

“What are we doing, Ken?” My voice slowly started coming back to me, and I looked down towards the grass, seeing Kenny’s leg stretched right next to mine, barely touching it. He was too close now for me to be able to shake off his advances or pretend they’re just jokes; There was nowhere to go but right through them. “I shouldn’t be here…”

“What you should be is with someone who values you.” He cut my sentence with a firm and decided tone in his voice, getting a tighter hold of me between his arms. “A real man, not that sucker you’re dating right now. Someone who treats you right.”

I wanted to argue with him, ask him who he thinks he is to assume things about a woman he barely knows - but I knew his words to be true, there’s no point I can try to make that will make them not so.

Seeing that I was both not moving from my position and not disputing his claims, my guess is that he had newfound energy to get his point across, because he continued talking. “Do you know what I would do if I had a woman like you by my side, huh?” Kenny rhetorically asked, his voice almost a growl. “I’d wake up at the crack of dawn every day to provide for her. I’d make love to her every single night. I’d be the one planning dates and showing her a good time. I wouldn’t leave you alone to cry in the middle of the fucking street, I’d be too busy making you happy instead.”

“You said ‘you’ right now.” I immediately pointed out, even though it’s unnecessary. “Not ‘her’. ‘You.’”

“And I fucking meant it.”

With that, one of his arms loosened its wrap on my body and reached far for the tiny box containing the chocolate strawberries, and he picked one up in his hands, bringing it close to our faces. This one had a different design from all the others - instead of the usual white chocolate lines over the milk chocolate covering, this one’s got small red hearts as well. It’s more detailed, a tiny touch of romance to what is usually a very sexy treat in nature. Kenny cleaned the leaves out of the strawberry and took a bite out of it, holding the other half close to my lips. My nostrils immediately took in the sweet scent of the fruit, but I didn't open my mouth just yet.

“Look, I won’t force you to do anything you don’t wanna do. But if you let me, I’ll make you feel real good. Promise.” He murmured, digging his left hand’s fingers on the soft side of my belly one last time. The ball was fully on my court, but I could still feel the hints of his desperation for my body as he waited patiently for my answer.

Slowly and nervously, I parted my lips and let Kenny put the small piece of strawberry inside of my mouth himself, hearing him sigh in relief behind me as he did so. Once he withdrew his fingers from my mouth, that’s when I finally bit down on the small treat. This one isn’t as sweet as the others; It might not have been as perfectly ripe, so it had a tiny tinge of sourness mixed up in the fruit’s flavor. The milk chocolate around the fruit almost masked it up completely, though - the whole combination tasted absolutely heavenly, not just for the fruit, but also for the implications of it. I was in deep now.

Kenny almost doesn’t wait for me to swallow what’s in my mouth before turning my face to his and kissing me fiercely, his left hand getting tangled with the hair in the back of my head. I kissed him back with the same amount of fervor almost immediately, and all of my worries over this whole situation dissipated from my head like dry ice; Fuck what needed to happen for us to get to this point, fuck my problems and how I’d sort them out, fuck morals and especially fuck the outside world. This tiny little section of the forest was our own personal bubble, and I’d live in it for as long as I could.

When the tip of Kenny’s tongue brushed my bottom lip and I opened my mouth to grant it access, I realized I hadn’t accounted for one more piercing of his. The tiny little ball sitting in the middle of his tongue didn’t feel as cold as I thought it would, so it was more the sudden change in hardness and texture that threw me off a bit. I kept my cool, though, as I put my hands on both sides of his face and pulled it even closer to mine. I decided to try something out and touched his piercing with the tip of my tongue, flicking it ever so gently - I immediately felt Kenny’s hard-on twitch inside of his pants against my lower back.

As our tongues slid around each other and explored our connected mouths, his right hand slowly made its way up my thigh, sneaking under my clothes, ghosting over my bare pussy. I had been having so much fun with this man today, I’d completely forgotten I wasn’t wearing anything under my dress. Just this slight contact was enough to make my breath hitch and Kenny broke the kiss, his hand freezing in place.

When I opened my eyes, he was unapologetically staring at me. Mouth agape in surprise, pupils wide, it almost seemed like the whole galaxy was behind his eyes with the way they shined. Kenny looked like what someone would if you told them all of their dreams had come true at the same time.

“What a lucky son of a bitch.” He uttered almost non-audibly, the corners of his mouth slowly curving upwards into a delighted smile. For a moment, I wondered if he was talking about my actual partner or about himself. I wasn’t able to ask, though - Kenny’s left hand immediately grabbed my chin and tilted my head up, holding my face, ear and neck in perfect positions for him to start kissing, sucking and biting them voraciously.

The middle and index fingers on his right hand went back to gliding up and down my folds, picking up the building slick from my entrance and spreading it all over before settling over my clit and drawing quick tight circles over the bundle of nerves. Before I knew it, I was putty in Kenny’s hands, squirming and arching my back as much as I could in his grasp, my moans filling his ears and working as fuel for his ministrations.

Eliciting a whine of annoyance from my mouth when he did, Kenny took his hands away from me, not without planting one last wet kiss to my jaw. While I cooled down, steadying my breath, he brought his fingers over to his mouth, sucking on them and licking slowly. Then he sighed. “Fuck, no. This won’t do at all. Need you on my face, baby.”

I didn’t even have time to register what he said or the implications of it before he let go of my body and started moving behind me, stretching his legs under mine. When I quickly turned back to see what was up, he was already fully laid down with his head on the blanket, hands pulling at my thighs like he wanted to bring me closer to his upper body.

“Wait, what?” I tried to get up at my feet, but his pulling made me lose balance and I quickly sat back down as gently as I could, my knees now at both sides of his abdomen.

“Come on, over here,” he called, still trying to drag me over his body towards his face, “Or do you want me to beg? Because I’ll do it.”

Somehow the idea of Kenny begging for something like this made a blush spread quickly across my cheeks and ears, which probably burned bright like a beacon. How to explain to this man that I had never done what he wanted me to do?

My question was answered almost immediately - like everything else in my interactions with Kenny, I didn’t have to tell him, he knew straight away. “That fucking asshole,” he let out a disgruntled huff, rubbing his face with his hand as if completely stressed.

“Excuse me?”

“Your damn boyfriend,” he immediately responded, huffing again as if the mere thought of that man made him angry, “Can’t even eat out his own fucking lady properly.”

“I never said…” Once again with all my damn defenses, but this time it was aimed at myself. I’d feel awkward admitting to Kenny that even though I was fairly experienced, what with the long-term relationship, I still knew very little about my own pleasure.

“It’s written all over your face, baby,” he said, gesturing towards my beet red features, his expression softening. “But it’s alright. You take a seat and enjoy the show. This is my shift.”

He then started playing with the hem of my dress, twirling it between his fingers, waiting for my next move. Slowly, but surely, I started scooting on my knees towards his face, turning my face away as I got closer to his mouth. As I finally got to it, my bare cunt hovering above his face, his arms wrapped around my thighs and started pulling me down as if he wanted me to fall on him - was this guy trying to have his neck broken? To stop him from actually succeeding in this endeavor, I lowered myself steadily to where my folds were touching his lips.

And he got to work right away. His tongue started by licking tentative stripes through my slit, capturing on it my already plentiful arousal - I could hear Kenny’s satisfied groans as he tasted it, but the front of my dress falling over his head shielded me from any facial expressions.

His fingers splayed on the soft flesh of my thigh tightened their grasp as he started licking and sucking faster, and I leaned forward, putting my hands on the floor near Kenny’s head for stability.

“Yes, Ken! More! Aaah!” I called out once his tongue picked up speed, tugging fistfuls of my own picnic blanket as my fingers tried to dig into the floor. Seemingly content with my feedback, he mumbled something against my pussy, as if trying to speak, but the only thing that was definitely caught by my senses were the vibrations against my folds, all the way to my core.

Then and there I realized that Kenny might be an actual genius. Whenever his tongue would lap at my clit, or make its way to fuck my cunt again, I’d feel the tiny piercing on top of it - and it increased my pleasure tenfold. The extra stimulation of the hard metal ball with his soft tongue had me seeing blank before my eyes with every quick successive movement, and he knew it too, because I could hear him groan as he’d purposefully lap and flick and curl with his tongue mercilessly.

Before I could catch myself, I was rocking my hips against Kenny’s face, trying to get more contact, more of anything he could give me. His jaw and tongue followed my movements perfectly, like he was well prepared for this exact reaction. My thighs were quivering from the pleasure he was giving me as well as the strain of the position while I tried not to completely fall on his mouth. It didn’t take much long for me to figuratively do exactly that, though; With a loud cry that probably scared every single animal in a radius across the forest, I came on his mouth, my hands grabbing a fistful of the grass under them while I rocked shamelessly against Kenny’s face, riding it through my release. I could feel his nails digging at the flesh of my ass, but he never made a movement to pull me away, eating me up like a man starved.

Once I started coming to my senses again and brought back enough strength to my thighs, I lifted myself up away from Kenny’s face slowly and hiked up the front of my dress, looking down to be able to see his face at that moment. He looked back at me through half-lidded eyes, his cheeks and nose sporting a reddish flush that definitely didn’t exist before. My juices are splattered all around his mouth and he has this massive stupid grin on his face, showing almost all of his teeth.

“Gorgeous.” He uttered once he saw me staring back, his voice raspy and lazy. I merely chuckled, going backwards on my knees until I was close to his hips, where I finally settled, lowering myself back down to sit right on top of the generous tent formed in his pants.

Kenny lifted his upper body up on his elbows once he felt me positioned against his still clothed cock. “Oh, aren’t we eager now?” He teased, patting the ground next to him. “Lay down here, baby. Let me sort that out for you.”

I shook my head with a smirk. “I don’t think I will. This is my shift now.”

His eyes widened, astounded, as I put both my hands on his chest and pushed him back down with full force of my arms. His head was still lifted as his back hit the ground, and I made sure to maintain our gazes connected as my hands drifted to his pants, unbuckling and unzipping them with dexterity.

“Are you sure?” Kenny inquired, his eyebrows arched, but I was positive I could see the faintest hint of a smile on the corners of his lips. “I mean, I’m all for it, but aren’t you tired?”

“I’m fine. I wanna do this.” I tug down his pants and boxers just enough to free his cock, rolling my hips a couple times over it just to see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard. “Besides, it’s good thigh workout.”

“Not that you need it.” Kenny’s hands ran over my legs, giving my thighs a light squeeze. Once he saw my hand going towards his dick again as I prepared to take him inside of me, however, his grip released and his arm reached over somewhere. “Wait, wait, wait! Time out!”

I glanced confused to the side and saw Kenny dragging closer to us his parka, which had long been discarded to one end of our blanket, and he stuffed his hand inside of one of the pockets. “What is it?” I tried to ask, but he just rummaged around in it for two or three seconds more before bringing out a blue foil package.

So that’s why he needed to bring the damn jacket. “Someone’s well prepared.”

“I mean… Better be safe than sorry.” Kenny replied, handing me the tiny square. “Come on, I was about to hang out alone with the hottest chick in town. A guy can dream, you know?”

I twisted the wrapping between my fingers, analyzing the information in it. Average size - though that tells me next to nothing about what I’m really working with - and of the ‘Ultra Thin’ variety. This fucking guy. “You’re clean, right?”

“Oh yeah, absolutely!” He answered at record speed, nodding for extra emphasis. “But I mean… It’s for your best, right?”

I placed the condom right back on top of his parka. “I’m on the pill,” I reassured him as his face sported a totally confused expression, “So, if you’ll let me… I want to feel you, Ken. Really feel you.”

He swallowed hard again, his dick twitching with more precum leaking out of the tip as he took in my words. Still pleasantly surprised by my decision, he slowly nodded, closing his eyes and seemingly letting himself relax - though I could almost see all the little cogs in his brain moving wildly with all the lewd thoughts he had of me, and it made for great fuel to my ego.

My hand wrapped around Kenny’s cock again and I lifted my hips up to get in perfect position on top of it, moving the tip around my entrance teasingly, spreading his pre over it and getting it mixed with my own slick. When I finally slipped about an inch fully inside and my cunt gave one small initial clench around it, Kenny’s eyes shot open and he grabbed my thighs again, like he was fighting the temptation of pulling me down immediately.

“Tight… So fucking tight…” He grunted between gritted teeth, his dick twitching once again. His words like fire on my lower abdomen, I steadied myself over him before slamming my hips fully down and burying him to the hilt in one motion, both of us letting out loud groans as he stretched my walls with little preparation. Kenny’s nails dug at my thighs with this, leaving the tiniest crescent marks on them.

After a few seconds to adjust to his size - the longest seconds of my life - I lifted myself up agonizingly slowly before sinking back down again, trying to keep a slow and teasing pace, but failing miserably as I quickly began picking up speed and riding him in earnest. His enthusiasm matched mine, his hands on my thighs moving to my ass, feeling every jiggle and bounce of my flesh.

And that wasn’t the only thing of mine that bounced that he seemed interested in. Now that Kenny’s eyes were open, he basically zeroed in on the movement of my breasts, pupils glazed over with hunger. Determined to give him the show he was so interested in, I quickly removed the straps of my sundress from my shoulders and pulled down the neckline, so that my tits were on full display for him. That same stupid grin he had exhibited earlier showed up yet again.

“Mmmm… Like what you see, Ken?” I teased, brushing a wild strand of hair off his face with one of my hands, my soft touch lingering.

“Fuck yes,” one of his hands left my behind to knead at one of the perky mounds, “You’re perfect. Your boyfriend is a fucking-” I silenced him immediately with a particularly hard crash of my cunt on him. I needed not hear further from his mouth except for grunts or praise.

With every roll of my hips and slap of my skin against his, I wondered more why I took so long to surrender to him. My decision to let him hit it raw might have been irrational, but I didn’t regret it one single bit; He filled me up so perfectly, his length like the perfect massager to my inner walls, bringing me bliss like I hadn’t felt in quite a while. My hands grabbed and tugged at his shirt while I moaned with the full force of my throat, throwing my head back as his cock hit that sweet spot inside of me with every movement I made.

“Ken… Ken… Aaaah…” His nickname left my mouth like the chorus of an earworm song, ever present, the only thing I could think about in life. And I continued to say it over and over, making sure that it would permanently stick to his brain as well, my voice his only true companion even with the deafening music of the club he worked nights at.

“Hell yeah, baby,” he groaned between gritted teeth, “Let it out… You keep saying my name like that and I’m gonna lose my fucking mind here…”

Even if he said it like something that was yet to happen, lowering my gaze to Kenny’s face told me that he was already absolutely going through it. His eyes were tight shut and his eyebrows were furrowed, almost in a manner of deep concentration; He was trying his hardest to not finish before I did, and it was awkwardly endearing.

The pace of my hips slowed briefly as I lowered my upper body down towards Kenny’s chest, keeping balance by holding myself on my elbows bent to the sides of him. Once he’s not as overwhelmed with pleasure and felt the tip of my nose ghosting against his, he dared open his eyes to meet my caring gaze and soft smile. He immediately wrapped his arms around me and lifted his head from the ground just barely, his lips chasing mine, yearning for their velvety touch - which I granted them gladly, taking him in a luscious kiss as my hips slowly regained their previous momentum.

“Beautiful… Like a damn angel�� Heaven’s got nothing on you…” Kenny whispered against my lips as soon as they parted from his, and those words on his voice made my heart skip a beat yet again - it was like he knew all the buttons to press to make me melt for him, even though we barely knew each other - but I knew that after all this I was definitely keeping him in my personal circle.

Our slight experiment with real affection didn’t last long, though. In my new position, my clit was making contact with Kenny’s skin and being stimulated with every movement I made; Soon I had to take my face away from Kenny’s to bury it in the crook of his neck as I moaned, feeling my orgasm fast approaching again from the combined effort on my pleasure spots.

My thrusts became shorter and even quicker as I felt my muscles tightening again, the upcoming climax threatening to consume me, with my thighs also trembling and burning from the straining ‘workout’. I continued grinding on him with wild abandon until I came on his dick with a shuddering cry of his nickname; the sun in the sky feeling almost cold in comparison to the electric warmth that coursed through every inch of my body, sparks of pleasure jolting through my muscles, making my cunt contract wildly around that man’s dick as if trying to make him a whole part of me.

As a tough roar reached my ears, the motion of my hips was abruptly interrupted by Kenny’s hands grabbing the sides of them and holding me firmly in place; He replaced my movement with his, bucking upwards in an intense burst of stamina as he now allowed himself to chase his own release. Given how long he had been holding back and how quick and powerful each of his thrusts were now, it doesn’t take long to catch up to him - soon his hips jerk up one last time and stay firmly in place, and I feel his cock twitching as it fills me up with jet after jet of his warm seed.

He stayed put like this for a while, with his hips raised to meet mine, the sounds of our heavy breathing the only thing audible in the little clearing at that moment. When I decided to make the first move and get up, Kenny’s softening dick sliding off of me and allowing his cum to start dripping down my legs, his arms fell to his side and he stretched his legs, letting out a deep sigh of contentment.

“Someone’s happy,” I commented with a smile as I laid down beside him, watching the sunlight hit his golden hair just right.

“Ya think?” Kenny responded with a rough chuckle, immediately wrapping his arm around me and pulling me closer so I’m resting on his chest with my legs draped over his. “Damn, baby… I’m never letting you go now.”

Coming down from my high, I expected all of the usual occurrences associated with descriptions of cheating you see in fiction to wash over me: Regret, sadness, anger at myself - or, if I was a narcissist, at this man for indulging me -, despair, maybe I’d even start running some excuses in my head. Absolutely none of these thoughts came to pass. Instead, as I laid on top of the picnic blanket soaking in the warm sun with a peaceful Kenny lazily petting my hair, I felt a sense of absolute bliss; After so many things that seemed wrong in my life for the past two years, I was finally having a moment where I’m certain something is right, and the definitive decision was made in my heart to never let it be otherwise again.

༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚𓆩♡𓆪༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚༝༚

We unfortunately didn’t make it back to the restaurant before Kenny’s lunch break ended, which meant he’d probably get a scolding from his manager for being unpunctual. When I apologized for making him late, though, he didn’t seem the slightest bit worried about it - his boyish grin stayed on his face the whole time, and he was actually acting more mad about having to leave me and go back to waiting tables.

He did bring me inside of the restaurant through a door in the back and led me to the employee’s break room, where one of his colleagues had a charger I could borrow. I used it just enough to be able to call an Uber and have battery for the ride home, not wanting to overstay my welcome when Kenny was already on thin ice because of our escapade. Before I left, though, he still made sure to put his number on my contact list, under the pretext of ‘me sending him an album I mentioned earlier that he might like’; However, as he winked and blew me a kiss before being called over by one of the cooks to pick up an order that was ready, I knew music would not be one of our top 10 subjects in conversation.

Only two text messages were sent from my phone that night. One very long paragraph to my now ex-boyfriend, listing all the problems I had with our relationship with several examples and telling him to disappear from my life before blocking his number - not wanting to give him even the slightest chance to manipulate me - and deleting it for good. Another much shorter message, to a contact just named ‘🧡’, containing detailed information about my favorite drink in the whole world and telling him to have it ready by 10pm.

Dividers by

@cafekitsune

#south park #south park fanfiction #south park smut #south park x reader #sp x reader #south park fanfic #south park x y/n #kenny mccormick #sp kenny #kenny mccormick x reader #kenny x reader #kenny mccormick x you #kenny mccormick x y/n #kenny x y/n #kenny x you #ao3 #x reader

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cocodotgreen · 10 months ago

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Today is a big day: I am sharing my first world – “Simynthos” – with all of you! I’m very nervous about it, actually. It’s the first world I ever finished!

So what kind of world is it? It's inspiration, the island of Corfu, is one of the more northern islands of Greece. It is greener than the southern islands, and the architectural style is a bit different. It has surprisingly high mountains and cute little villages with tiny orange houses and narrow roads and pathways. It has olive groves with trees more than a thousand years old, and it has beaches with some of the clearest water I ever swam in. I tried to capture Corfu's atmosphere in this little world, so that my simmies may enjoy it, too! And now I hope, your simmies will enjoy it as well :)

To make it a “quick” project (still took more than a year, though 😬) I used the existing world “Sa Pineda” by the amazing @nilxis as a base. The island itself was not created by me, I only created the houses/lots and made over the vegetation.

Even though it is on a tiny map, it is a full world with several houses. It has almost all rabbit holes, and a lot for your sims to do – well, at least considering the sizes of the place. It can be a home world as well as a vacation world with Nraas Traveler mod (can be found here).

Other than my previous builds it does contain some CC. Most of it comes with the download, but not all (you will find all links to additional CC below).

If you would like a (almost) CC-free version, please message me! I will gladly try to make it look good without CC, if I know that someone wants that! However, you will always need the rabbit hole rugs if you want the rabbit holes! But I could remove all decorative CC and try to decorate with non-cc items.

I had a lot of fun building on this little island. I also learned a lot and I hope to use all the experience I gathered from this first completed project for my next world!

Details:

tiny map (256x256)

contains CC (most of it is included in the download, but not all. Links are provided for the items not included, see below in the “Links to CC…” section.)

no Store content used

road-less

unpopulated

9 finished residential lots

17 community lots

3 dive lots

two empty lots, one community, one residential

contains most rabbit holes. The ferry provides room for additional rabbit hole rugs in case you want to place some that are not included.

Packs used: I have all expansion packs and all stuff packs installed, and have probably used items from almost all of them.

Packs you will definitely need for full functionality: Island Paradise (for the Dive Lots, the Ferry, and the All-in-One Bathrooms), Late Night for the Bars, Supernatural for the Elixir Shop, World Adventures for the Nectar Maker and the Nectar Racks, University Life for the Coffee Bar, and Ambitions for the Salon and Tattoo Studio, Showtime for the Karaoke Machine, on one lot I used the grill from Outdoor Living Stuff.

I used a lot of furniture from the Seasons and the Pets expansions. This is non-functional, but the world will look different if you do not have these expansion.

A word of warning (please read this!):

This world is TINY! But for its size I packed A LOT into it. This means, however, that lots and buildings are on the small to tiny side. So not all game options may be available on all lots.

The Weather-Stone may not spawn due to lack of a suitable location.

There is some kelp visible from map view next to one of the dive lots. I could not find a way to remove it, unfortunately, although I tried everything I could think of. If it bothers you the workaround is this: Go into edit town, select build on the dive lot. Without doing anything leave build mode and leave edit town. Now the kelp should not be visible anymore for this in-game-session. You will have to do it over again the next time you start up your save, though.

The proximity to community lots will mean that you can hear the noise from concerts, movies and sports events or even just music very loudly on some residential lots. I recommend you turn down the volume of music and effects in the game options to around ¼ of the bar. You will still hear the sounds on the residential lots, but not as loudly. Update: Follow these instructions to mute rabbit hole sounds if they bother you! 2nd Update: @ohrudi made a mod to mute all rabbit hole sounds completely! I highly recommend that mod for Simynthos! See recommended mods below for the link!

I advise against playing with horses on Simynthos due to the limited space and the lag they can cause. See recommended mods section below for more details.

Snow may look black in some places, mostly on or near the paths due to me having to paint under the walkways I placed. Sa Pineda already came with 8 terrain paints. I decided not to change the terrain paint, as it was very nicely done by the creator, and also snow is probably a rare occurrence on Corfu. If you want to, you can just disable snow/winter in the options.

Highly recommended mods for performance and functionality:

TheSweetSimmer’s Pick Up Toddler Fix: If you want to play with families you will absolutely need this mod! Without it you may not be able to pick up toddlers at all due to the limited space inside some of the houses.

OhRudi's Rabbit Holes Without Sounds Mod: This mod was inspired by the annoyance of the rabbit hole sounds in Simynthos. Thanks you so much @ohrudi for the amazing work! It will mute the rabbit hole sounds permanently and you will be able to enjoy the quiet island village life I intended for sims to experience on Simynthos!

OhRudi’s space saving mods: I recommend all of ohRudi’s space saving mods for this world:

“Fix: Pets need less space”

“Fix: Sims need less space”

“Fix: Guitar needs less space for playing”

“Fix: Bass needs less space for playing”

Nraas Register: Horses will cause lag on Simynthos due to the limited space on the island and the extensive space that horses need for routing (even with ohRudi’s mod), so I recommend disabling horses in the game options and using nraas Register mod to deactivate wild horses completely.

Nraas Debug Enabler: The dive lots on Simynthos have the same problem that all dive lots seem to have: If you want to explore the caves, you will need to reset them first. If you forget your sim will be reset to the beach. Best way to do this is using Nraas “Debug Enabler” mod (click on cave > Nraas > Debug Enabler > Options: Name of Cave > Object > Reset).

Nraas Go Here: I generally recommend Nraas Go Here mods “Teleport for everyone” option, just in case a sim or a pet gets stuck somewhere.

Other recommended mods (optional):

You can have functioning Greek restaurants on Simynthos if you use these two mods together:

icarus_allsorts’s “Eat Outside Restaurants”

Cinderellimouse’s “Cooking and Ingredients Overhaul”

Both mods combined will allow you to set the menu for the diner or bistro rabbit hole to Greek dishes (or any other dishes you prefer) and order these dishes from a waiter on the lot. How cool is that?!

Links to CC that’s not included in the download:

You will need these Jynx rabbit hole rugs (Pets Fix), from this thread on MTS:

Late Night rabbit hole rugs (Pets fix)

Base Game rabbit hole rugs (Pets fix)

You will need the Left and Right versions of this mattress for two sims to sleep in a double bed that is placed against a wall.

I recommend you use @nilxis beautiful “Mediterranian Day” lighting mod.

Credits:

Thanks to @nilxis, the creator of „Sa Pineda“, for the beautiful base to this world. The island on which Simynthos was build is entirely their creation. I did not change the island itself or the terrain painting outside the lots (except for some places where I placed the walkways/paths). All credit for that goes to them! You can find the original version here. Also make sure to check out their other worlds, while you‘ re at it. They are some of my favorite worlds!

Thanks also to @aroundthesims for their amazing CC! If you do not know their website yet, you should definitely check it out! They have a lot of really cool items!

Thanks to @nornities for their extremely helpful CAW guide here. Unfortunately I only found this guide when Simynthos was almost finished. I could have avoided some of the mistakes I made, had I found it sooner!

Some of you may know, that I am not the first to make a Greek version of Sa Pineda. Back in 2016 Vendela created Simtorini. This super cute world has the typical blue and white houses another Greek island, Santorini, is famous for. Go check it out here.

Download (SimFileShare)

Alternative Download (Dropbox)

#sims 3 #sims 3 cc #sims3 #thesims3 #ts3 #ts3cc #the sims3 #ts3 worlds #sims3 world #sims 3 custom world #sims 3 worlds #sa pineda #simynthos #world download

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gb-patch · 1 year ago

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GB Patch Games: 2024 Intentions

[Adorable guest art by @dreamtydraw]

Welcome to 2024, everybody 🥳️

This is the year of Our Life: Now & Forever (and 2025 will be too, but let's not get ahead of ourselves that much). After a good five odd years of making Our Life: Beginnings & Always content, it's amazing to look ahead and see only the progress that will be done on this new game. Qiu and Tamarack are the center of the GB Patch Games universe now. But even though I'm not creating any new OL1 scenes, there may still be some exciting developments for the existing stuff. Cove hasn't been forgotten.

💚❤️️💙

If you want to know about what will be accomplished specifically in January, you can read that HERE. Now here's the entire year's goals-

Honestly, 2024 is gonna be the most basic year in a very long time, haha. There's not gonna be major launches of new DLCs, or a full game going live, or any bonus Moments. It's simply making progress on OL: N&F. That's pretty normal for game development. It's just not something we've had to go through since 2019. But we're hunkering down for the long haul on this one.

Specifically, Step 1 will be fully completed in 2024 and I'll make as much headway into Step 2 as possible. There will be two updates to the public demo, one probably in May and another sometime in Fall/Third Quarter 2024. Those will focus on Step 1 scenes still. I can't guarantee we'll be able to rework the Step 2 part of the demo with new content this year. As it is, the content was made to be a demo preview. A lot is gonna change for the complete version.

And that's about it for our main game. I appreciate all of you who decide to follow along with the process.

Beyond that, the Our Life: Beginnings & Always digital artbook is going to become available through Steam and Itch.io in early 2024! Maybe not January, but ideally no later than February.

Finger's crossed, we will also launch Our Life: Beginnings & Always for Mac on Steam and make it available for Androids through the Google Playstore. I can't state it with confidence, since there's constantly been roadblocks/issues with those, aha.

My final little note for this coming year is that, potentially, there could be more information coming out about the game that's going into production after OL2, "Project W".

▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾ ▴ ▾▴ ▾ ▴

And that's what you can look forward to. Every year I'm amazed I can continue to do this as my fulltime job. I'm always wondering when that will end, but I'd be lying if I said I could see that point. The support GB Patch Games has gotten, and still gets each day, is more than enough to for it to continue for the rest of OL2's development.

I'm pretty confident in assuming that when that game does launch it's going to be successful enough for Project W to go into full production. It's a truly wonderful thing. Thank you so much for being here. We'll do our best with the time and attention you've given us.

Happy New Year 🥰️

#our life #visual novel #dating sim #interactive fiction #our life: now & forever #our life: beginnings & always #gb patch #gb patch games

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felassan · 11 months ago

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Edge – The Future of Interactive Entertainment magazine, issue #401 (October 2024 issue) – Dragon Age: The Veilguard story

The rest of this post is under a cut for length.

Update: this issue of this magazine is now available to buy from UK retailers today. it can be purchased online at [this link]. [Tweet from Edge Online] also, Kala found that a digital version of the magazine can be read at [this link].

This post is a word-for-word transcription of the full article on DA:TV in this issue of this magazine. DA:TV is the cover story of this issue. When transcribing, I tried to preserve as much of the formatting from the magazine as possible. Edge talked to BioWare devs for the creation of this article, so the article contains new quotes from the devs. the article is written by Jeremy Peel. There were no new screenshots or images from the game in the article. I also think that it contains a few lil bits of information that are new, like the bits on companions' availability and stumbling across the companions out and about on their own in the world e.g. finding Neve investigating an abduction case in Docktown.

tysm to @simpforsolas and their friend for kindly telling me about the article!!

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[image source]

Article introduction segment:

"[anecdote about Edge] We were reminded of this minuscule episode in Edge's history during the creation of this issue's cover story, in which we discuss the inspiration behind Dragon Age: The Veilguard with its creators at BioWare. Notably, director John Epler remembers the studio experimenting with a number of approaches during the early phase of development before eventually locking in to what the game was supposed to be all along, above all else: 'a single-player, story-focused RPG'. As you'd expect from BioWare, though, that was really just a starting point, as we discovered on p54." BioWare draws back the Veil and ushers us into a new Dragon Age

"BEHIND THE CURTAIN BioWare's first true RPG in age age is as streamlined and pacey as a dragon in flight. By Jeremy Peel Game Dragon Age: The Veilguard Developer BioWare Publisher EA Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Canada Release Autumn

The Dragon Age universe wasn't born from a big bang or the palm of an ancient god. Instead, it was created to solve a problem. BioWare was tired of battling Hasbro during the making of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, and wanted a Dungeons & Dragons-like setting of its own. A small team was instructed to invent a new fantasy world in which the studio could continue its groundbreaking work in the field of western RPGs, free of constraints.

Well, almost free. BioWare's leaders mandated that the makers of this new world stick to Eurocentric fantasy, and include a fireball spell - since studio co-founder Ray Muzyka had a weakness for offensive magic.

Beyond that, BioWare’s storytellers were empowered to infuse Dragon Age with their own voices and influences, leaning away from D&D’s alignment chart and towards a moral grayness that left fans of A Song Of Ice And Fire feeling warm and cozy.

In the two decades since, the world of Thedas – rather infamously and amusingly, a shortening of ‘the Dragon Age setting’ that stuck – has taken on a distinct flavor. It’s something director John Epler believes is rooted in characters.

“There’s definitely some standard fantasy stuff in Dragon Age, but everything in the world, every force, is because of someone,” he says. “The idea is that every group and faction needs to be represented by a person – someone you can relate to. Big political forces are fine as background, but they don’t provide you with those interesting story moments.”

Dragon Age: The Veilguard bears out that philosophy. The long-awaited sequel was first announced with the subtitle Dreadwolf, in reference to its antagonist, Solas – an ancient elf who once stripped his people of immortality as punishment for betraying one of their own. In doing so, Solas created the Veil, the thin barrier through which wizards pull spirits and demons invade the waking world. In other words, many of Dragon Age’s defining features, from its downtrodden elves to the uneasy relationship between mages and a fearful church, can be traced right back to one character’s decision.

“The world exists as it does because of Solas,” Epler says. “He shaped the world because of the kind of character he was. That’s, to me, what makes Dragon Age so interesting. Everything can tie back to a person who to some degree thought they were doing the right thing.”

Perhaps BioWare’s greatest achievement in slowburn character development, Solas is a former companion, an unexploded bomb who sat in the starting party of Dragon Age: Inquisition, introverted and useful enough to get by without suspicion. Yet by the time credits rolled around on the Trespasser DLC, players were left in no doubt as to the threat he presented.

Determined to reverse the damage he once caused, the Dreadwolf intends to pull down the Veil, destroying Thedas as we know it in the process. The next Dragon Age game was always intended to be his story.

“We set that up at the end of Trespasser,” Epler says. “There was no world where we were ever going to say, ‘And now let’s go to something completely different.’ We wanted to pay off that promise.”

Yet almost everything else about the fourth Dragon Age appears to have been in flux at one time. In 2019, reporter Jason Schreier revealed that an early version, starring a group of spies pulling off heists in the Tevinter Imperium, had been cancelled two years prior. Most of its staff were apparently moved onto BioWare’s struggling Anthem, while a tiny team rebooted Dragon Age from scratch. That new game was said to experiment with live-service components.

“We tried a bunch of different ideas early on,” Epler says. “But the form The Veilguard has taken is, in a lot of ways, the form that we were always pushing towards. We were just trying different ways to get there. There was that moment where we really settled on, ‘This is a singleplayer, story-focused RPG – and that’s all it needs to be’”.

Epler imagines a block of marble, from which BioWare was attempting to carve an elephant – a character- and story-driven game. “We were chipping away, and sometimes it looked more like an elephant and sometimes it didn’t”, he says. “And then we eventually realized: ‘Just make an elephant’. When we got to that, it almost just took shape by itself.”

2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition was an open-world game commonly criticized for a slow-paced starting area which distracted players from the thrust of the plot. The Veilguard, in contrast, is mission-based, constructed with tighter, bespoke environments designed around its main story and cast. “We wanted to build a crafted, curated experience for the player,” Epler says. “Pacing is important to us, and making sure that the story stays front and center.”

Epler is very proud of Inquisition, the game on which he graduated from cinematic designer to a lead role (for its DLC). “But one of the things that we ran into on that project was an absentee antagonist,” he says. “Corypheus showed up and then disappeared. You spent ten hours in the Hinterland doing sidequests, and there wasn’t that sense of urgency.”

This time, The Veilguard team wants you to constantly feel the sword of Damocles dangling above your head as you play – a sense that the end of the world is coming if you don’t act. “There’s still exploration – there’s still the ability to go into some of these larger spaces and go off the beaten path to do sidequests,” Epler says. “But there’s always something in the story propelling you and the action forward, and allowing you to make decisions with these characters where the stakes feel a lot more immediate and present. And also, honestly, more real.”

No sooner have you finished character creation than Dragon Age: The Veilguard thrusts you into a choice. As your protagonist, Rook, steps into focus on the doorstep of the seediest bar in town, you decide whether to threaten the owner for information or make a deal. Brawl or no, you’ll walk out minutes later with a lead: the location of a private investigator named Neve Gallus, who can help you track down Solas.

You proceed into Minrathous, the largest city in Thedas and capital of the Tevinter Imperium – a region only alluded to in other Dragon Age games. It’s a place built on the backs of slaves and great mages, resulting in tiered palaces and floating spires – a kind of architecture unimaginable to those in the southern nations.

“When your Dragon Age: Inquisition companion Dorian joins you in Orlais, in one of the biggest cities in Thedas, he mentions that it’s quaint and cute compared to Minrathous,” Corinne Busche, game director on The Veilguard, says. “That one bit of dialogue was our guiding principle on how to realize this city. It is sprawling. It is lived-in. Sometimes it’s grimy, sometimes it’s bougie. But it is expansive.”

Immediately, you can see the impact of BioWare’s decision to tighten its focus. Around every other corner in Minrathous is an exquisitely framed view, a level of spectacle you would never see in Inquisition, where resources were spread much more thinly. “When you know that you’re gonna be heading down a canyon or into this plaza where the buildings open up, you have those perfect spots to put a nice big temple of Andraste or a mage tower,” art director Matthew Rhodes says. “You get those opportunities to really hit that hard.”

BioWare’s intention is to make strong visual statements that deliver on decades of worldbuilding. “People who have a history with Dragon Age have thought about what Minrathous might be like,” Rhodes says. “We can never compete with their imagination, but we can aim for it like we’re shooting for the Moon.”

The people of Tevinter use magic as it if were electricity, as evidenced by the glowing sigils that adorn the dark buildings – street signs evoking Osaka’s riverfront or the LA of Blade Runner. They’re just one of the tricks BioWare’s art team uses to invite you to stop and take in the scene. “A lot of what you start to notice when you’re the artist who’s been working on these big, beautiful vistas and neat murals on the walls is how few players look up,” Rhodes says. “We design props and architecture that help lead the eyes.”

For the really dedicated shoegazers, BioWare has invested in ray-traced reflections, so that the neon signage can be appreciated in the puddles. There are also metal grates through which you can see the storm drains below. “The idea behind that is purely just to remind the player often of how stacked the city is,” Rhodes says. “Wherever you’re standing, there’s guaranteed to be more below you and above you.”

One of BioWare’s core creative principles for The Veilguard is to create a world that’s actually worth saving – somewhere you can imagine wanting to stick around in, once the crises of the main quest are over. To that end, the team has looked to ground its outlandish environments with elements of mundanity.

“A guy’s normal everyday life walking down the streets of this city is more spectacular than what the queen of Orlais is seeing, at least in terms of sheer scale," Rhodes says. “One of the things we’ve tried to strike a balance with is that this is actually still a place where people have to go to the market and buy bread, raise their kids, and try to make it. It’s a grand and magical city, but how do you get your horses from one place to the next? Where do you load the barrels for the tavern? It’s really fun to think of those things simultaneously.”

Normal life in Minrathous is not yours to behold for long, however. Within a couple of minutes of your arrival, the very air is ripped open like cheap drapes, and flaming demons clatter through the merchant carts that line the city streets. A terrible magical ritual, through which Solas intends to stitch together a new reality, has begun.

“We wanted the prologue to feel like the finale of any other game we’ve done,” Busche explains. “Where it puts you right into this media-res attack on a city and gets you really invested in the action and the story right away. When I think back to Inquisition, how the sky was literally tearing open – the impact of this ritual really makes that look like a minor inconvenience.”

Our hero is confronted by a Pride demon, imposing and armored as in previous games, yet accented by exposed, bright lines that seem to burst from its ribcage. “They are a creature of raw negative emotion,” Busche says. “So we wanted to actually incorporate that into their visual design with this glowing nervous system.”

When a pack of smaller demons blocks Rook’s route to the plaza where Neve was last seen, battle breaks out, and The Veilguard’s greatest divergence from previous Dragon Age games becomes apparent. Our rogue protagonist flits between targets up close and evades individual sword swings with precision. In the chaos, he swaps back and forth between blades and a bow. He blends light and heavy attacks, and takes advantage of any gap in the melee to charge up even bigger blows.

“Responsiveness was our first-and-foremost goal with this baseline layer of the combat system,” Busche says. Unless you’re activating a high-risk, high-reward ability such as a charged attack, any action can be animation-cancelled, allowing you to abort a sword swing and dive away if an enemy lunges too close. “We very much wanted you to feel like you exist in this space, as you’re going through these really crafted, hand-touched worlds,” Busche says. “That you’re on the ground in control of every action, every block, every dodge.” Anyone who’s ever bounced off a Soulslike needn’t worry: The Veilguard’s highly customizable difficulty settings enable you to loosen up parry windows if they prove too demanding.

Gone is the overhead tactical camera which, for some players, was a crucial point of connection between Dragon Age and the Baldur’s Gate games that came before, tapping into a lineage of thoughtful, tabletop-inspired combat. Epler points out that the camera’s prior inclusion had an enormous impact on where the game’s battles took place. “We actually had a mandate on Inquisition, which was, ‘Don’t fight inside,’” he says. “The amount of extra work on getting that tactical camera to work in a lot of those internal environments, it was very challenging.”

Gone, too, is the ability to steer your comrades directly. “On the experiential side, we wanted you to feel like you are Rook – you’re in this world, you’re really focused on your actions,” Busche says. “We very much wanted the companions to feel like they, as fully realized characters, are in control of their own actions. They make their own decisions. You, as the leader of this crew, can influence and direct and command them, but they are their own people.”

It's an idea with merit, albeit one that could be read as spin. “It’s not lost on me,” Busche says. “I will admit that, on paper, if you just read that you have no ability to control your companions, it might feel like something was taken away. But in our testing and validating with players, what we find is they’re more engaged than ever.”

There may be a couple of reasons for that. One is that Dragon Age’s newly dynamic action leaves little room for seconds spent swapping between perspectives. “This is a much higher actions-per-minute game,” Busche says. “It is more technically demanding on the player. So when we tried allowing you full control of your companions as well, what we’ve found is it wasn’t actually adding to the experience. In fact, in some ways it was detrimental, given the demanding nature of just controlling your own character.”

Then there’s The Veilguard’s own tactical layer, as described by BioWare. Though the fighting might be faster and lower, like a mana-fuelled sports scar, the studio is keen to stress that the pause button remains as important to the action as ever. This is, according to Busche, where the RPG depth shines through, as you evaluate the targets you’re facing and take their buffs into account: “Matching elemental types against weaknesses and resistances is a big key to success in this game.”

You pick between rogue, warrior and mage – each role later splitting again into deeper specialisms – and draw from a class-specific resource during fights. A rogue relies on Momentum, which is built up by avoiding damage and being highly aggressive, whereas a warrior is rewarded for blocking, parrying, and mitigating damage.

Those resources are then used on the ability wheel, which pauses the game and allows you to consider your options. The bottom quadrant of the wheel belongs to your character, and is where three primary abilities will be housed. “Rook will also have access to runes, which function as an ability, and a special ultimate ability,” Busche says. “So you’re bringing five distinct abilities with you into combat.”

The sections to the left and right of the wheel, meanwhile, are dedicated to your companions. Busche points to Lace Harding, the returning rogue from Inquisition, who is currently frozen mid-jump. “She is her own realized individual in this game. She’s got her own behaviors: how she prioritizes targets, whether she gets up close and draws aggro or stays farther back at range. But you’ll be able to direct her in combat by activating her abilities from the wheel.”

These abilities are complemented by positional options at the top of the wheel, where you can instruct your companions to focus their efforts on specific targets, either together or individually. Doing so will activate the various buffs, debuffs and damage enhancements inherent in their weapons and gear. “So,” Busche explains, “as you progress through the first two hours of the game, this full ability wheel is completely populated with a variety of options and different tactics that you can then string together.”

BioWare has leaned into combos. You might tell one companion to unleash a gravity-well effect that gathers enemies together, then have another slow time. Finally, you could drop an AOE attack on your clustered and slowed opponents, dealing maximum damage. The interface will let you know when an opportunity to blend two companion abilities emerges – moments BioWare has dubbed ‘combo detonations’.

“I like to think about this strategic layer to combat as a huddle,” Busche says, “where you’re figuring out how you want to handle the situation, based on the information you have on the encounter, and how you and your companions synergize together.”

Deeper into the game, as encounters get more challenging, Epler says we’ll be spending a lot of time making “very specific and very focused tactical decisions”. The proof will be in eating the Fereldan fluffy mackerel pudding, of course, but Busche insists this shift to fast action isn’t a simplification. “What really makes the combat system and indeed the extension into the progression system work is that pause-and-play tactical element that we know our players expect.”

The autonomy of The Veilguard’s companions doesn’t end with combat. BioWare’s data shows that in previous games players tended to stick with the same two or three beloved comrades during a playthrough. This time, however, you’ll be forced to mix your squad up at regular intervals.

“We do expect that players will have favorites they typically want to adventure with,” Busche says, “but sometimes certain companions will be mandatory.” Others may not always be available – part of the studio’s effort to convince with three-dimensional characters. “They do have a life outside of Rook, the main character,” Busche says.

"They'll fall in love with people in this world. They’ve had past experiences they’ll share with you if you allow them in and get close to them.”

Being separated from your companions, rather than collecting them all in a kind of stasis at camp, allows you to stumble across them unexpectedly. Busche describes an instance in which, while exploring the Docktown section of Minrathous, you might bump into Neve as she investigates an abduction case. “If I go and interact with her, I can actually stop what I’m doing, pick up her arc and adventure with her throughout her part of the story,” Busche says. “What’s interesting is that all of the companion arcs do ultimately tie back to the themes of the main critical path, but they also have their own unique challenges and villains, and take place over the course of many different intimate moments.”

Some parts of a companion’s quest arc involve combat, while others don’t. Some are made up of large and meaningful missions – as lavish and involved as those along the critical path. “While they are optional, I would be hesitant to call them side content in this game,” Busche says. If you choose not to engage with some of these companion-centered events, they’ll resolve on their own. “And it might have interesting implications.”

The Veilguard promises plenty of change, then, even as it picks up the threads of fan-favorite characters and deepens them, honoring the decades of worldbuilding that came before it. This is perhaps the enduring and alluring paradox of Dragon Age: a beloved series which has never had a direct and immediate sequel, nor a recurring protagonist. Instead, it’s been reinvented with each new entry.

“It’s a mixed blessing to some degree,” Epler says. “The upside is always that it gives us more room to experiment and to try new things. There are parts of the series that are common to every game: it’s always an RPG, it’s always about characters, and we always want to have that strategic tactical combat where you’re forced to make challenging decisions. But at the end of the day, I think what makes Dragon Age Dragon Age is that each one feels a little bit different.”"

Q&A Matthew Rhodes Art director

Q. Early BioWare RPGs were literary, with the emotions and detail mostly happening in dialogue boxes. How have you seen the studio's approach to visual storytelling evolve? A. This has been my entire career. When I first showed up at BioWare, it was at the tail end of Jade Empire, and then I was working on Dragon Age: Origins and early Mass Effect. The games had taken that next step out of sprites and 2D models, and it was like: 'How do we say more? How do we communicate more clearly?' During those early days, a lot of games depended on words to fix everything for you. As long as your character was talking bombastically, you could lend them everything that they needed. But as time went on it also became a visual medium, and it's been this long journey of trying to establish art's seat at the table. I've worked with some great writers over the years, and art is also an essential part of the storytelling. From Dragon Age: Inquisition on, I've been trying to stress with my teams that we are a story department.

Q. Is part of that also letting writers know that your storytelling assistance is available, to help them show rather than tell? A. On The Veilguard, that principle has been operating the best I've seen it. Where you would need a paragraph of dialogue in one of those exposition moments where a character just talks to you, we could sell that with a broken statue or a skeleton overgrown with vines. We've had more opportunities to do that on The Veilguard than most of the projects I've ever worked on combined.

To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and so in every department, writing will try to solve it with more words, and art will try to solve it with more art. I've bumped up against moments where it's like, 'As much as we could keep hammering on this design, I think this is actually an audio solution.' And then you take it to audio, and you don't get that overcooked feeling where each team is just trying to solve it in their silo. It's a really creatively charged kind of environment.

[main body of article ends here]

Additional from throughout the article --

Image caption: “Spotlights shine down from the city guards’ base as they pursue you through the streets of Minrathous.”

Image caption: “While most of your companions can be sorted into comfortingly familiar RPG classes, The Veilguard introduces two new varieties: a Veil Jumper and a private investigator.”"

Image caption [on this Solas ritual concept art specifically]: “The name previously given to the game – Dreadwolf – was a direct reference to Solas. Your former companion, now on his own destructive mission, still features, despite the name change.”

Text in a side box:

"RATIONAL ANTHEM The hard lesson BioWare drew from Anthem was to play to its strengths. “We’re a studio that has always been built around digging deep on storytelling and roleplaying,” Epler says. “I’m proud of a lot of things on Anthem – I was on that project for a year and a half. But at the end of the day we were building a game focused on something we were not necessarily as proficient at. For me and for the team, the biggest lesson was to know what you’re good at and then double down on it. Don’t spread yourselves too thin. Don’t try to do a bunch of different things you don’t have the expertise to do. A lot of the people on this team came here to build a story-focused, singleplayer RPG."

Image caption: “In combat you no longer control your companions directly – this is a faster-paced form of fighting – but you are able to direct them in combat, and can even blend their abilities in ‘combo detonations’.”

Image caption: “You’ll be exploring new regions across Tevinter and beyond – Rivain is a certainty, and that’s only accessible via Antiva travelling overland.”

Image caption: “There are three specializations per character class; on the way to unlocking them you’ll acquire a range of abilities.”

Text in a side box:

"MEET YOUR MAKER “Full disclosure: Dragon Age has traditionally not done skin tones well, especially for people of color,” Busche says. “We wanted to do a make-good here.” In The Veilguard’s character creator, you can adjust the amount of melanin that comes through in the skin, as well as test various lighting scenarios to ensure your protagonist looks exactly as you intend in cutscenes. “Speaking of our first creative principle – be who you want to be – we really feel these are the kinds of features that unlock that for our players,” Busche says. “We want everyone to be able to see themselves in this game.” For the first time in the series, your body type is fully customizable too, with animations, armor and even romantic scenes reflecting your choices."

Image caption: “Your companions are a mix of old and new – Lace Harding is a familiar face. Veil Jumper Bellara is new, with a new occupation, while Davrin is a new face with a familiar profession – he’s a Warden.”

Image caption: "Arlathan Forest is home to the ruined city of the elves, now a place of wild magic, Veil Jumpers and (allegedly) spirits".

Image caption: "Bellara is driven by a desire to learn more about the elves, rediscovering the shattered history and magic of her people."

[source: Edge – The Future of Interactive Entertainment magazine, issue #401 (October 2024 issue) - it can be purchased online at [this link].]

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