#artificial intelligence lighting control

[nebulousbrainsoup]

EVOLVE

PAIRING: biker!kang yeosang x fem!reader GENRE: romance, strangers to lovers, fluff, smut, lil bit of angst, teeny bit of comedy SUMMARY: more often than not, a life lived in Night City is carefully crafted, slotted firmly between preapproved lines—or it is if you value keeping it. whispers of freedom float just beyond the city's neon lights, and it's only through a chance encounter with the most unlikely of characters that you finally start to hear them. TAGS/WARNINGS: explicit content, minors do not interact!, biker!yeosang, biker!seonghwa, misuse of lore terms, extensive control of emotions, artificial intelligence, food, shady government tampering, mysterious disappearance/implied death of unnamed bg character, near-death experiences, mild motorcycle wreck, injury, language, discussions of government corruption, alcohol consumption, discussions of being unhappy with life, unbetaed & barely edited, pov shifts, inspired by outlaw teasers/posters & @hwaightme's This World (Bai is well aware of my shenanigans); tell me if i missed anything pls! WORD COUNT: 12.6k PLAYLIST: Don't Stop - ATEEZ ; Control - Halsey ; Paranoia on Main Street - Demi the Daredevil ; ERROR - The Warning ; Ghost - Halsey ; Virtual Reality - rey ; Aqua Regia - Sleep Token ; AMOUR - The Warning ; BURN IT DOWN - Linkin Park ; Z - The Warning ; mercy - KiNG MALA ; EVOLVE - The Warning A/N: it's finally here, and with a playlist too!!! (yes it's a lot of The Warning, but this whole fic is ERROR-coded i had to) this fic has taken me close to a month to write, it is my baby, so pls treat it with care <3 i have to give world's biggest shout out to Bai for inspiring this absolute beast and for giving me the privilege of tipping my hat to it and her in my first full-length ateez fic. i hope it lives up to expectations. much love, ash tagging the homies: @jaehunnyy & @justhere4kpop

nsfw tags under the cut ; masterlist | join my taglist | buy me a coffee?

this work is 18+. this is a friendly reminder that if i catch a minor interacting with this work, they will be blocked. so don't :)

A/N 2: y'all remember the opening to the Kingdom performance of Rhythm Ta? "The disease is human emotion"?? well, that was echoing in my head on a very obnoxious repeat, and this fic (and its smut scene) absolutely reflects that. you've been warned. NSFW TAGS/WARNINGS: explicit consent included, protected sex, yeosang keeps a condom in his wallet (don't do that!), they're both switches p.2, outdoor sex, pet/nicknames (doll, angel, Sangie), hair pulling, lil bit of marking, yeosang's voice, oral (fem receiving), handjob, decently fast-paced, also emotionally charged; lmk if i missed anything!

It was always unnerving, delivering in this Sector. He'd done so countless times without incident, but even so, Yeosang could feel the infinite eyes of the Guardians upon him. His first trip to this particular building had left him shaken, turning down any more legitimate, above-board deliveries for the rest of the night and hightailing it back to the rest of the Blue Birds as soon as his duty was done. Mars had been less than pleased, scowling at him as he scolded, “As far as they can tell, you’re a delivery boy. There will be no reason for suspicion until you run.” A valid point, certainly, but one Yeosang had trouble reminding himself of while trapped in that neon maze. 

The next night, he dutifully shoved down the nausea that crept up his throat and the shudder that threatened to rip down his spine as he stared up at the looming steel pillar in front of him. Plastic bag in hand, he took a deep breath and pressed the building's buzzer, trying to find comfort in the shadows and the familiar blue of the lights.

The intercom crackling to life startled him, nausea welling up inside him again as he spoke, “Blue Bird Delivery with an order for Y/N.”

“Come in, I’ll meet you down in the lobby!”

It took a moment, that first night, to recover from hearing a human voice rather than the monotone, robotic rasp of a Guardian coming from a government building. He hadn’t expected life or warmth to greet him amidst the blinding lights of the lobby, but both did as you stepped out of the elevator, still in your lab coat and gloves, smiling softly and subtly at him as you patted your pockets. “Shit, I forgot what I owe you.”

Something about the way he looked as he tilted his head in confusion, helmet still on and bandana still pulled up around his nose, had you focusing all your remaining willpower on not doubling over in laughter. “You paid online. You don’t owe me anything.”

His turn to bite back laughter came then, standing there with his arms folded and his lower lip between his teeth as he watched the gears in your head turn.

“Long day, hm?” The words left his mouth before he even registered them, and as your eyes snapped back to his visor, his heart jumped into his throat. 

To his surprise and relief, you laughed, and the tension in both of your bodies drained simultaneously. “It’s two in the morning and I’m having my dinner delivered to work,” you countered, “you tell me.”

Behind his mask, Yeosang smiled. “Have a good evening.”

Nothing about the anonymous man on the moped should have piqued your interest. But that same night, as you settled in the empty employee cafeteria, the stranger seemed unwilling to vacate your mind. Sure, he’d joked around with you; that was unusual in this Sector with the plethora of Guardians milling about at all hours, but not unheard of; and it was a little odd he hadn’t taken his helmet off. Neither of those things, you thought, were good enough justifications for the thought that circled your mind on repeat until sleep finally began to take you; when can I see him again?

As luck would have it, the answer turned out to be “soon” and “frequently.” You and your team were already a week behind the requested lead time on your current build, and as the days dragged on, the microchip’s flaws only seemed to multiply exponentially—much to your annoyance; you’d warned the design team, after all. Of course, the longer it took, the worse the hours got. By the time you made it home after twelve or more hours locked in the clean room, being leered at by eyeless creatures and pulled into at least one far-too-heated debate over a fix or adjustment every two hours, it was all you could do to make it into bed. Cooking was not an option; you lived on delivery.

It wasn’t always Blue Bird—they seemed to reserve themselves for the late night and early morning; but when it was, it was always him. The same jacket, same jeans, same fingerless gloves and bandana obscuring his features, and the same warm, silky baritone greeting you from underneath it all. He rarely joked with you again, seeming to become skittish as more of your team members stayed later and the late-night Guardian presence increased, but you continued to exchange basic pleasantries. Your manners wouldn’t leave you in the face of tighter security. Still, you couldn’t blame him in the slightest—you yourself wanted to have a word with whatever psychopath had designed their ‘faces’—but you couldn’t help missing the teasing lilt his voice held that first night. 

Around a month after your late nights became mandatory, you had trudged into work as usual, with four hours of sleep and the largest coffee cup in your arsenal the only things keeping you upright, and the chaos you were met with nearly made you walk back out. Your production manager was nowhere to be found, leaving you and the rest of your coworkers to scramble to find something, anything that could direct your workflow for the day. It was you who, in sorting through the papers in and on the desk in his office, figured out why. Every ounce of your self-control went toward keeping your eyes from shifting to meet the cameras as you shoved the incriminating papers back where you had found them, rising to your feet to sift through the mess on the desktop once again. Somehow, even with your shaking hands and unfocused gaze, you managed to find what you were looking for, pulling the newest revision of the drawing from a stack you were positive you’d already searched. Hidden, maybe, you thought. 

Returning to the clean room and pinging your team melded hazily into going over the drawing, which faded into you handing out tasks on autopilot until, finally, you were left alone at the work table you had claimed as your own. Falling back into your chair, you finally let yourself acknowledge what you had seen—drawings. Dozens of them, tucked—no, pointedly hidden away between the various books and manuals stored in the bottom drawer that, until this point, you could have sworn was always locked. They weren't unusual for your production manager to have in the slightest, under normal circumstances—their desk was usually covered in white sheets.

But between the loyal employee’s unannounced “sick day” and the amount of White-Out painted across months of drawings for new tech you and your team had been having unprecedented trouble with… These weren’t normal circumstances, and you figured they wouldn’t be coming back to work any time soon. Before you could lose yourself wondering what exactly this development would mean for you and your team, the whirring of a camera lens zooming snapped you out of your thoughts, and you quickly buried yourself in your work once more. Prying would only get you in trouble.

The morning passed in a blur, you spent your lunch hour staring at the stark white wall behind your newest, least jaded coworker’s head as they prattled on, and before you knew it, those still intent on keeping eight hour shifts were beginning to filter out of the building. The ever-present hum of machines and voices slowly dwindled until you were alone with the buzzing lights overhead and the sound of your own breathing. Most days, this was when you got your best work done. No one else was here to bother you, fewer people meant fewer Guardians breathing down your neck, and you could make any snide comments or use any language you wished without offending the sensibilities of anyone nearby. But tonight, once your last coworker had waved goodbye and the click of the door shutting behind them had finished echoing ominously behind them, the usually comforting silence that enveloped you brought with it a sense of unshakable dread. Shifting uncomfortably, you let your eyes wander over the empty clean room, lifting your head nearly imperceptibly. 

You wanted to leave. Every hair on your body was standing on edge, and every fiber of your being was screaming at you to run, to get as far away from this Sector as you could. Something was going on here, and you couldn’t shake the feeling that the crosshairs were zeroing in on you next. But running—leaving, you corrected yourself; you have nothing to run from—early would only arouse suspicion, wouldn’t it? You’d lived your life slotted neatly between the lines the government had drawn, but that hadn’t kept you from hearing the horror stories of those who toed those lines or, heaven forbid, stepped across them. There was no reason to feel this way. 

Until.

For as large as the Guardians were, the things were nearly silent in their movement. If you hadn’t tinkered time and again with their abilities yourself, you’d believe the stories that they could teleport. It was in front of you in the time it took you to blink, and you nearly jumped out of your skin as your eyes met the chrome monstrosity that was its ‘face.’ Gingerly setting down the delicate tools and microchip in your shaking hands, you set carefully practiced neutrality on your face and suppressed a shudder as its message began to play.

“L/N Y/N. Requested by Upper Management. Follow.”

In seconds, ice filled your veins. If anyone had asked, you’d tell them, truthfully, that it was survival instinct alone which carried you to your destination. When you finally came back into yourself, you were staring at the imposing wooden doors you knew belonged to your location’s operational manager. Steeling yourself with a deep breath, you knocked, and were immediately met with your manager’s voice ushering you in.

“Hello, sir,” you greeted, bowing lowly as you shuffled over the threshold.

“To you as well, Miss L/N,” he offered in return from behind his desk, snapping shut the file in his hands. “Please, have a seat. We have much to discuss.”

“So what’s our next move, then?” Yeosang chewed on the inside of his lip thoughtfully, listening to the silence on the other end of his comms grow ever louder. “Seonghwa?”

“If I had an answer, I’d tell you,” his companion spat back, leaning further down over his handlebars and pulling ahead of him. It didn’t matter that they needed a new game plan within the next few hours, he was done talking. With a sigh, Yeosang sat back, rolling his own throttle forward to keep pace as he fell in behind his friend. 

Night City sped by in a blur as they rode in silence, eyes and ears trained to the streets they were patrolling. Small houses gave way to apartment buildings and local shops with no movement on the streets, but still the tension in Yeosang’s shoulders rose with each passing minute. Finally, as they passed into the city center and neon skyscrapers began to loom over their heads, he could stand it no longer. He felt like he was suffocating, and they were miles off-course for their patrol anyway. 

“Mars. Something feels off,” he called, pulling off his throttle and sitting up straighter.

There was silence for a beat as the other man pulled further ahead, and Yeosang watched his helmet turn. “What are you seeing that I’m not?”

“Nothing, I just have this feeling—”

“Well, keep an eye and an ear out, and we’ll deal with it when we have to.”

He sighed, tossing a narrowed side-eye Seonghwa’s way before turning his gaze back to the streets and leaving him with his thoughts. Maybe it was just this Sector, he reasoned. The artificial gaze of the cameras, drones, and Guardians was enough to put anyone on edge. Couple that with the time he’d been spending here, making deliveries of all kinds, and of course he was feeling on edge. It was nothing.

It took another block for the itching anxiety to come back full-force. “Mars.”

A sigh crackled over his comms. “I don’t see or hear anything, Hermes. It’s probably just the surveillance systems getting to your head.”

Yeosang sighed, nearly resigning his edginess to paranoia again. Until, out of the corner of his eye, he caught movement. “On your left, look.”

A person was quickly making their way out of the government building he brought most of Blue Bird’s above-board deliveries to, oblivious to the two motorcycles sailing in their direction. He saw the moment Seonghwa made his decision, weight settling further over his handlebars as he shifted into a higher gear. In moments like this, he thought—moments where his desperate search for adrenaline dragged someone else a little too close to the line they delivered others across; the moniker of the ancient god of war fit his friend a little too well. 

He knew the drill by now; fall back, open mid-distance communication with whatever unit was patrolling here for clean-up—just in case he cut a little too close to you—and meet back—wait.

His head snapped up from his watch, abandoning his redirect halfway through in favor of surging forward to catch up with Seonghwa. “Mars, don’t!”

The shout had Seonghwa’s helmet snapping up in alarm, his weight shifting back and throwing both him and his precious Suzuki Hayabusa off-balance. For a moment, he tried desperately to downshift and tame the beast under him, a cause that quickly became lost between his own speed and the downhill slope of the street. You had frozen in your tracks at the sight of the two machines barreling toward you, one now out of control, and Yeosang’s heart skipped a beat or two as the events in front of him began to unfold in slow motion.

You had been sent home early—well, early for you, anyway; the weight of your new position heavy on your shoulders. Production manager. It was everything you should have wanted—everything you had wanted at one point; but the thought of coming in to work tomorrow morning, moving your meager belongings out of your locker and into your former boss’ office to pretend everything was fine had bile rising in your throat. Your meeting with upper management had shed no light on the mysterious disappearance of the last person in charge, and you couldn’t shake the feeling that a target had been painted on your back now, too. Maybe that was just paranoia, though—you had no plans to sabotage any products, after all. What reason would anyone have to make you disappear?

Lost in your thoughts as you began the trek home, you failed to drag your eyes from your feet, only noticing the two headlights careening toward you when the rumble of their engines was close enough to feel in the ground below you. You froze, stunned as your heart jumped into your throat. Was this the dread you had been feeling? Was this the curse of your new position? There was little you could do about it now, you supposed, staring down what you were sure was certain death. It was silly, but you couldn’t help wondering whether your new delivery boy friend would miss you.

“Shit!” Seonghwa hissed, the curse crackling in Yeosang’s earpiece. 

Your shoulders tensed and you took a step back and raised your hands, clearly bracing for the oncoming disaster. Mere seconds before your fate would have been sealed, he watched the unimaginable unfold in front of his eyes; Seonghwa, heeding his words of caution, threw his weight to the right, sending his bike skidding away from the both of you. The grunt he let out as he hit the pavement weaved together with the screech of metal on asphalt, a discordant symphony echoing through his helmet. You added no harmony of your own to it, only flinching as the man who would’ve been your doom rolled to a halt at your feet, visor reflecting familiar blue neon as he stared at the sky. He saw rather than heard the breath you let out, watching your shoulders drop from your ears as you stumbled away from Seonghwa’s prone form.

“What the fuck,” you gasped out, one hand splaying out over your chest as you caught your breath. Adrenaline was coursing through you, leaving your heart pounding and hands shaking as the other biker sidled up next to you.

“I’ll say,” the man below you grumbled, slowly climbing back to his feet. He winced as he settled his weight on his right leg, limping heavily as he made his way back to his friend and leaned against their bike. “You should probably look before you cross the street next time.”

“I was halfway into the road, you ass!” You fumed, snarling at the man before you in stark contrast to the last time you’d met a masked stranger. “You could’ve gone around me—it’s not like you were driving a car!”

Yeosang couldn’t help the giggle he let out at the sight of you—mild-mannered, eternally frazzled you—standing toe-to-toe with the infamous Mars, masked vigilante leader of the Blue Bird biker gang. He bit his lip quickly, hoping his mic hadn’t picked up the quiet noise. 

No such luck, it seemed, as the other man whipped around to face him. Somehow, the visor was more intimidating than the scathing glare he knew lay behind it. “Something funny?” 

He shook his head, the action dizzying him just slightly when coupled with the weight of his helmet and the adrenaline cooling in his veins, and raised his hands in surrender. “Nope,” he hummed, nodding over to the wrecked Hayabusa. “You think you can get that thing to the shop, or do I need to do it for you?”

Seonghwa shifted his weight, testing his injuries lightly. “Help me get her up and I’ll take it from there,” he muttered.

Something about the man with the cruiser was familiar, you decided, as you watched the pair cross to the bike and set it back upright. You couldn’t put your finger on it, but between his voice and the way he carried himself, he reminded you of someone. You’d never seen either of their bikes before, though, and both of these individuals struck you as the type who were connected to their respective machines. You were still racking your brain for the answer as his friend pulled away, sparing you no apology, and it wasn’t until he reached up, tugging at the chains around his neck with familiar, skeleton-gloved hands, that it hit you.

“You’re the Blue Bird Delivery guy.”

Yeosang froze in his tracks, blinking and stunned as he scrambled for an excuse. “I, uh…”

“Your friend just almost killed me. The least you could do is be honest,” you prodded, crossing your arms over your chest.

The way he looked down told you there was a sheepish smile on his face, and you wanted nothing more than for him to finally remove his visor so you could bask in it. “Yeah, I am.”

“Does my near-death experience mean I get free delivery next time?” you quipped. The laugh that left him this time was full-bodied, heard even through the thick padding and metal of his helmet. You decided then and there that you would stop at nothing to hear that sound again. 

The grin you gave him in exchange was sunny, another mark of your warmth in the midst of Night City’s eternal chill. “I might be able to arrange something for you, sure,” he hummed, his smile evident in his tone. “But that might end up being my paycheck you’re cutting into.”

You shrugged. “I’ll tip the difference.”

“Then there’s no point!” Another cheery laugh bubbled up from him, and you found yourself leaning closer to the delivery boy-turned-biker as you shared in his joy. For all the leather and mystery, he didn’t seem all that intimidating; he was nothing like his counterpart had been. He seemed shy and maybe even friendly behind the facade, and the interactions you’d had with him before seemed to corroborate your guess. Again, that familiar feeling of longing that had struck the first night came back to you as he took a step back toward his bike.

Luckily for you, your mouth worked faster than your brain. “Would you want to maybe go get coffee with me?”

Your inability to read his expression meant the silence you were met with had you wanting to pull your words back into your mouth; to rewind time so you’d never spoken; so you’d looked up and seen Delivery Boy’s idiot friend speeding at you; so you’d never ordered from Blue Bird in the first place—

“I can’t, tonight,” he muttered. If he removed his helmet, you would be able to see the tips of his ears turning red. “But maybe another time?”

Your heart sank. When would you ever have time again? “Um, maybe. We could exchange information?”

He tensed, shaking his head gently. “I know where to find you.”

Again, you felt yourself deflate. “Can I… Could you at least tell me your name? So I know who to contact if your friend ever tries to kill me again?” Your attempt to lighten the darkening mood was half-hearted at best, but you tried for a weak smile.

For the third time that night, Yeosang froze. It felt like every camera and Guardian in the vicinity had their lenses trained on him as you asked what was, to anyone other than Yeosang and the rest of his friends, the simplest question in the world. This time, he recovered quickly, unwilling to draw more suspicion to himself than Seonghwa already had with his stunt. “Hermes.”

Your brow furrowed, and he found himself wanting to swipe the crease between them away. “Just Hermes?”

He nodded, stepping back to his bike and tossing his leg over the body, feeling suddenly like a rat in a trap again. “Just Hermes, for now. You can find out the rest later.” He sent you a wink as his bike roared to life under him, only to hang his head when he realized you couldn’t see it. 

You tilted your head at him as his shoulders shook with silent laughter. “Hermes?”

“Yeah, I, uh… I shouldn’t try to flirt. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you around, Y/N.”

Staring after him, still in the middle of the street, that longing feeling pulled at you again, following his dimming taillight over the horizon.

He was flirting?

“You did what?!”

Yeosang flinched. He was very rarely on the receiving end of Seonghwa’s wrath, but between the wreck and his… slip up with you earlier, he found himself squarely in the sights of Mars. 

“What was I supposed to do, give her my full legal name?” he argued, crossing his arms over his chest and frowning, trying to at least somewhat match the energy in the warehouse. “That would’ve been a death wish.” 

“So you gave her your callsign instead?” Yeosang shrugged, earning a scoff in return. If he were being honest with himself, he didn’t know why he’d done what he’d done either. “What you should have done was hopped on your bike and come straight back here, like we always do.” 

His eyes turned to the floor, and for a moment, everything was silent. “She recognized me,” he muttered, quiet voice still managing to echo like a whipcrack between them.

“You took your helmet off in the middle of the city?!” Seonghwa was on his feet now, yelling, and Yeo might have been scared, if not for the panic flashing behind his friend’s eyes. 

“No, no, I’m not that stupid.” The older man settled, leaning back against the beam beside him once more, arms crossing over his chest. “My voice, and the gloves, I think. She didn’t say, but she pinned me, and I panicked. I couldn’t just turn tail and run; that would’ve looked worse.” 

Finally, a smile cracked the cold demeanor Yeosang had been facing down, and the tension between the two men split as Seonghwa shook his head in exasperation. “If you make me wreck my baby again, I’m making you pay to fix it.”

The comment earned a hearty eye roll as he shifted his attention back to the bike he’d been outfitting upon Seonghwa’s arrival. “As if Yunho makes you pay.” The other man hummed dismissively, and he chuckled quietly. “Could’ve gone a lot worse, anyway. She could’ve had the Guardians on us in seconds for you running her down.” 

Seonghwa frowned, staring thoughtfully at his freshly patched bike for a moment. “She could have. Why didn’t she?” He murmured, eyes flickering back up to Yeosang.

“I… hadn’t considered it.” The younger blinked, matching the elder’s frown and sitting back on the ground. Why wouldn’t you call the authorities on them? They were at your beck and call, hiding just beyond the gates of the building you’d been in front of at the time. Most people in your Sector would have quickly taken advantage of the convenience, leaving the two outlaws to flee for their lives. It wouldn’t have been the first time, nor did Yeosang think it would have been the last. 

“Do you know what she does there?” He blinked out of his thoughts, shaking his head. “You might consider finding out, since you’re friendly enough to be recognized. She’s clearly not as far up the government’s ass as some of the rest of them; she could be a good in, since we just lost our last one.”

His frown deepened at the suggestion, stomach turning at the thought. “She might just do grunt work. I deliver to her a lot—she’s always there.”

“Worth a shot, though. I’ll take anything we can get at this point.”

“Maybe,” he hummed, chewing on the inside of his lip. 

It was an excuse to see you, at least.

After your little run-in with Hermes and his friend, Blue Bird Delivery was out of service in your Sector. You couldn’t help the pang of disappointment that echoed in your chest every time you checked their app; you’d been hoping that your lack of a report would have kept the authorities off their trail. No such luck, it seemed. The longer time dragged on with no Blue Bird and no word from your faceless friend, the more your worry grew, and after a week and a half of radio silence, you were beginning to lose hope that he was just lying low somewhere. Until, two weeks after you had nearly been run over, their delivery started up again. You couldn’t help but smile as you clicked through your usual order from your favorite restaurant and watched as it was confirmed.

Fourty-five minutes later, your phone pinged to signal its arrival and you made your way to the lobby with a spring in your step. You barely bit back the smile that threatened to take over your face—keenly aware of the Guardian stationed outside of the elevators—as your phone buzzed again, this time to signal the ringing of the building’s doorbell. Forgoing the usual pleasantries, you quickly made your way to the door, this time stepping outside and letting it shut behind you. 

It was unbelievable, really, that you’d managed to peg the edgy biker from two weeks ago as this same moped-riding, unassuming delivery driver. You thanked whatever being was listening for your attention to detail.

He offered you a small wave, fingers twitching in the air, and if there had been a doubt left in your mind that they were the same person, it would have left then. You bit the inside of your lip as you stepped forward and took ahold of the takeout bag in his hand, bowing to and thanking him.

“So, about that coffee,” he murmured quickly, his words overlapping with your own pleasantries as you both stood upright again. You blinked, head tilting in mild surprise as he continued. “When are you off work?”

“I, uh… I could be off in like an hour and a half?” You offered, smiling subtly at his visor.

“I’ll be waiting. I hope you’re okay with motorcycles.” 

You could hear the little smile behind his many masks, and your heart fluttered. “I’ll see you then.” 

“Will I get to see your face?” He stopped in his tracks at your bold question, and you clapped a hand over your mouth. “Sorry, I— If you’re not comfortable—”

“If you don’t mind a little bit of a drive, then maybe.” 

You looked at the ground, taking your lower lip between your teeth to force back your grin. “I’ll see you soon, then.”

It was a risk, Yeosang knew, revealing his identity. Seonghwa wouldn’t be happy when he found out; but what was another bout of his anger in the grand scheme of things, really? If the risk turned out to be worth the reward, he’d end up back in his friend’s good graces at record speed—and he had a gut feeling that would be the outcome. He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling of curiosity and wonder he’d experienced when you greeted him that first night, full of bright life and warmth in the middle of a desolate steel tundra. Something about you was different from the others that roamed your Sector—you’d proven that tenfold two weeks ago; and Yeosang was more than happy for the opportunity to figure out exactly what that was. Meeting you, really meeting you, was the first step. 

It was a risk, sure, but a calculated one.

The closer the clock ticked toward your designated meeting time, the antsier Yeosang got. He’d finished the rest of his deliveries in record speed and closed things down for the night, stopping back by the warehouse just long enough to inform Seonghwa of his plans and make the shift from delivery boy to biker. The elder was yelling something after him that Yeosang didn’t quite catch, tossing a wave over his shoulder before the door clanged shut behind him. He was back in your Sector in record speed, anticipation building in his veins the closer the clock ticked to your meeting.

And as it ticked past, he began to feel trapped. More and more as the seconds ticked past into minutes, he found himself glimpsing his watch, glancing warily over his shoulder and at the door of your building, waiting for you to emerge. Five minutes turned to ten, and ten to twenty; he’d nearly considered calling this a lost cause before you finally made your way from the building, eyes darting around the street as you stepped onto the sidewalk. He watched your face fall just slightly as you saw no sign of him, only to brighten in the next moment as he flicked his headlight back on. Stepping out of his hiding place, he pulled one hand out of his coat pocket, giving you the same wave he had earlier in the evening. He looked ridiculous, you thought, halfway between your delivery boy and the biker you’d met briefly—the same long, black and red leather coat, but this time sporting the same helmet and goggles he wore on his moped.

Barely biting back your grin, you nearly skipped over to him, and he beamed behind his bandana. “I wasn’t sure you were still coming,” he hummed.

You looked down and huffed a little sigh, feeling heat rising to the tips of your ears. “I’m sorry, paperwork just took a little longer than I expected tonight. I’m still adjusting.” 

He shook his head. “Don’t worry. I know what your hours can be like.” Again, you heard the smile in his voice, and you wanted nothing more than to see it. “I wouldn’t have blamed you, anyway. If I were going out to an undisclosed location with a mysterious, masked stranger, I’d be wary, too.”

You giggled softly, and Yeosang’s chest got tighter. He wanted to bottle up that sound and wear it around his neck, close enough for him to pull out and listen to any chance he got. “You don’t feel like a stranger.”

The blush that rose to Yeosang’s cheeks was, frankly, embarrassing, and he was more thankful than ever for his need to remain anonymous. “Neither do you,” he murmured in return.

Reaching down to the backpack he’d dropped at his feet, he unlatched the helmet from it, offering it out to you. “When do you have to be back at work?”

You blinked, tilting your head at him and taking the offered helmet. “I have tomorrow off, actually. New position, new hours.”

“You’ll have to tell me all about it when we get where we’re going, then.”

You’d been entirely unprepared for the feeling of riding a motorcycle, much less riding one with Hermes. When the growl of the engine kicked up beneath you, you’d found yourself clinging tighter to his middle, earning a low chuckle that you felt more than heard. The city streets gave you some time to adjust and by the time you reached its outskirts, your heart rate had mostly returned to normal. As he took you past the little rows of houses that marked the beginning of the edge of Night City and into the warehouse district that followed, though, it picked up again. 

What were you doing? 

You hadn’t told anyone where you were going or who you were with; you didn’t even know who you were with, not really, anyway. A few passing interactions didn’t count for “get to know you” material, in your humble opinion. His friend had nearly killed you, or at the very least nearly put you in the hospital. You had no clue what this man looked like and only had one name, which you were nearly certain was, itself, an alias. 

This was easily the stupidest decision you had ever made.

As he pulled to a stop just before the city limit, the desert sprawled out in front of you, and you loosened your hold around his middle. To your surprise, he noticed immediately, turning over his shoulder to glance at you before pulling your hands tighter around him again. 

“Only a few more minutes, I promise. Hold on tight.”

His voice was like magic, washing over you and soothing your nerves. It brought with it the familiarity and warmth you’d come to associate with Hermes; the warmth of the sun in a place where it had been blotted out. Shifting closer to him and squeezing him tighter, you nodded. “Let’s go.”

Riding through the desert was a rush entirely different than puttering through the streets of the city. Hermes had shifted his shoulders forward, picked his feet up, and sent you sailing into the cool night. You shivered as the wind whipped around you, slipping your cold hands under his jacket to seek heat you couldn’t find through the leather. He jolted slightly at the contact, helmet tilting back toward you for a split second, and you thought you felt him laugh again. It was terrifying, cold and dark, save for the strip of road illuminated by the headlight.

But it was also exhilarating. Adrenaline coursed through your veins as his speed climbed, and although you were freezing, the excuse to curl closer to Hermes was not unwelcome. It felt like freedom, being even five minutes outside of Night City, seeing never-ending darkness rather than eternal, artificial light, being here with someone you barely knew, taking the risk of a lifetime. Your initial fear was gone, replaced entirely with childlike wonder, and you let out a quiet giggle, relaxing just slightly as you gazed out at your surroundings. 

You were almost a little disappointed when, as promised, Hermes began to slow a few minutes later, just as you were cresting the top of a bluff. When he had killed the engine and steadied his bike, he carefully pulled your arms from around him, swinging off of it to offer you a hand. You took it readily, leaning heavily on him as you stood on wobbly legs. He let out a quiet laugh as you stumbled into him just slightly, and you found yourself thankful for the helmet you still wore. Once you had gained your footing, he let you go, letting you remove the cumbersome thing before reaching for the pack he’d secured onto your back before your ride. 

“Sorry again about that,” he muttered, “I really didn’t think before I decided to bring things along. It was either you or the storage compartment on the back.”

You shook your head, running a hand through your hair. “Don’t worry about it, I needed it as much as you did. Holding onto my stuff the whole time would’ve been a pain.” Breathing a pleased sigh, you set your loaned helmet on the seat and turned to him.

He’d removed his own helmet and goggles, leaving only the bandana hiding him as he crouched in the sand, digging in his backpack. It was a little hard to tell whether his black hair was purposefully slicked back or simply still stuck in the same state his helmet had put it in, a few strands falling into his eyes. As he tucked them behind his ear, eyes narrowing in annoyance, your attention was drawn to the movement, and your gaze landed on the birthmark beside his left eye. Your jaw dropped open just slightly as you stared, taking a step forward and kneeling in front of him. Even with half of his face still hidden from you, you could tell Hermes was a fitting name for him—he truly did have the beauty of a Greek god.

Steely gray eyes flicked up as they registered the movement, and you felt the wind knocked out of you under their intensity. Just as quickly as they had snapped to you, they softened, and once again, you were left wondering how to reconcile your delivery boy with the vigilante-esque biker in front of you. 

“I brought some blankets, snacks and soju. I figured we could stay for a little while, get to know each other,” he murmured, looking out to the horizon. 

Was the dim light playing tricks on you, or were the tips of his ears turning pink?

You beamed at him, smiling wide with your teeth for the first time since you’d met, and Yeosang felt his heart flutter. It did that more frequently lately, it seemed.

“Sure, yeah. Does food mean I get to see the rest of your face?”

This time, you heard the giggle that left him, the sound wrapping you up like a warm hug. “That depends. You’re not going to drag me back to the Guardians by my hair if I end up being a wanted criminal, are you?”

“If I wanted to do that, I would’ve sent them after you and your friend two weeks ago.”

He sighed, breathing another laugh and looking at the ground, shaking his head. “Yeah, okay, that’s fair. Seriously, though. I might actually be a wanted criminal, and I might actually need you to confirm whether or not you’re going to turn me in.”

You blinked, brow furrowing for a moment. He couldn’t be serious. Sighing, you gave in. “No, I won’t drag you back to the authorities. I promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he murmured, standing and pulling a blanket from his backpack. “Do you want to face toward or away from the city?” 

You glanced behind you, back in the direction you had come from. The neon lights shone like a beacon in the distance, a slow gradient from electric blues and purples to fiery oranges and yellows as the city spread. Red tinted the edges of the amoebic mass of industry, giving the impression of a spreading fire or trickling blood. You shuddered.

“Away, please,” you murmured, and he nodded, spreading out the blanket to overlook the edge of the bluff, out into the quiet of the desert. Setting his bag at its edge, he gestured to it and moved back to his bike, pointing the headlight out in the direction you would be facing. You settled in, curling in on yourself and rubbing your arms for warmth against the chilly night. 

Before you could dwell on it too much, something warm and heavy dropped onto your shoulders. Glancing up, you found Hermes had shed his coat and settled it over your shoulders, leaving him in a tank top and you blushing. You hadn’t expected a toned body underneath the puffy Blue Bird jacket he always wore, and you could barely tear your eyes away from him as he situated himself next to you. He was a little more than just fit, if his arms were anything to go by.

“So,” he began, leaning back on his hands, eyes fixed with yours on the horizon. “New job, you said? What are you doing now?”

You heaved a sigh, pulling his jacket tighter around your shoulders as your eyes turned to the ground. “Production management,” you murmured dejectedly. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw him shift to face you. “I got… Promoted, I guess. I don’t know why, because there are other people who’ve been there for years that I’m sure would be better at this than me, but…” you trailed off, sighing again, and when you glanced up, the concern in his eyes made your heart skip a beat. “I didn’t ask for it, but I couldn’t really turn it down.” 

His eyebrows creased for a moment, something like disgust or anger flashing behind his gaze. “Why not?”

You shifted uncomfortably, gnawing at the inside of your lip for a moment. “Well, I would’ve been stupid to, for one. And no isn’t a very well-received word when you work for the government.”

He hummed thoughtfully, looking back out over the horizon. “You didn’t have any sort of warning?” You shook your head, catching him glancing at you from your peripheral. “Don’t people usually give a two-week notice or something?” 

“They do when they don’t disappear without a trace.”

Yeosang shot upright at your words, eyes wide as he turned to you. “They what?”

You startled just slightly, turning to better face him. “He disappeared. No word, no sign. I got promoted the same day.”

“That’s… disturbing.” 

You nodded, shifting to rest your chin on your knees, and he shifted closer, settling one arm behind you. Leaning into his side, you sighed. “It happens, sometimes, when people step a little too far out of line. Par for the course in Night City.” You heard him scoff and felt him nod as he wrapped his arm around you, giving you a quick squeeze that had you relaxing immediately. 

“I’ve been wondering something,” he mused, breaking the silence that had begun stretching between the two of you. “Why didn’t you call the Guardians that night?” 

The question caught you off-guard and you sat up straighter, brows furrowing together. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, your building was right there, when you almost got flattened, and I think anyone else in your position would have taken full advantage of that fact. I know others in that Sector have—my friend’s had some pretty close calls before.” 

You frowned, painting careful neutrality back on your features as you stared at the ground. If anything were going yo betray you, it would be your eyes. “I didn’t really… This isn’t a trap, is it? We’ve been over me not ratting you out, but how do I know you’re not trying to trick me into saying the wrong thing? I haven’t even—”

“Seen my face?” he finished, and you nodded. “Look at me, Y/N.”

Slowly, you raised your eyes, your heart skipping a beat or two as you caught sight of his bandana, now resting just above his collar. Excitement surged in your chest as you let your gaze flicker over his features, quickly morphing into confusion and a bit of panic. “You look familiar,” you murmured, shifting away from him. “This has got to be a trap, please don’t—”

“Y/N,” he soothed, his quiet baritone settling your frayed nerves just slightly. “I wouldn’t have anything to do with the government if my life depended on it. Which, I rather prefer the opposite thing I’ve got going on instead.”

The realization hit you like a ton of bricks, memories of his face flashing behind your eyes at lightning speed. Every bulletin, every news story, every poster that had displayed that same silhouette, described the same features you were staring at now, right down to the birthmark you’d been fantasizing about kissing. There were never any photos, but your mind had put together a decent enough replica.

Kang Yeosang was not the monster you had heard described in the media, you didn’t think. If he were, why hadn’t he taken his chance and poisoned your dinner? Why hadn’t he killed you the moment you were outside the city limits? Why hadn’t his friend just run you over? Where, in the slew of calls for his immediate arrest and reminders of how dangerous he and his friends were, was this man; the one who greeted you pleasantly, who made you laugh, and whose own giggles in return could warm you for days? You didn’t know what was real, what to believe anymore.

Despite yourself, you laughed. He tilted his head, an amused and wary expression on his face. “I’m sorry, I don’t— this is just—” you tried, gesturing between the two of you. “My delivery guy is Kang Yeosang, one of the most wanted criminals in Night City. It’s kind of ridiculous.”

The giggle that graced your ears was louder without barriers to cover his pretty little smile, and you beamed back at him, chest tight and warm. 

“Isn’t it dangerous for you to be out and about like that?” you questioned.

He shook his head. “It’s better to hide in plain sight, actually. The Guardians rely so much on facial recognition, anyway, that as long as I stay covered up, I’m not at much risk. The delivery job gives me a good excuse to do just that.”

You nodded thoughtfully, gaze turning back to the desert. “That makes sense, I guess. Are the rest of them doing the same thing?” 

“More or less.” 

“So… your friend from the other night, is he one of your vigilante buddies?”

He was silent for a long moment, and when you glanced back at him, his smile had been replaced with a pensive look. “The less I tell you, the better.” Your heart sank ever so slightly, but you nodded, hoping you hadn’t overstepped too far. “Just… For your own safety, you know?”

“Yeah… That makes sense. Sorry.” 

He turned to you again, tilting his head like a curious puppy, and you bit back a giggle. “Don’t be. I’m sorry for being so mysterious.”

“Don’t be,” you echoed, nudging him with your elbow. “It’s your life on the line, and I rather prefer you right where you are.”

If you could frame a moment, you would choose this one, when Yeosang blushed a shade of pink that was barely noticeable in the dim light, smiling shyly as his eyes turned to the ground. “I’m glad,” he murmured, voice only audible thanks to the complete silence around you, “because I prefer being here, too.”

It was your turn to blush as you reached for his backpack, pulling a bottle of soju from it and cracking it open, tilting the opening toward Yeosang. Cocking his head again, he followed suit, clinking the necks of your bottles together. 

“To being here, then,” you offered, heart fluttering at the return of his sweet smile.

“To being here.” 

With the tension broken, the silence between you two became comfortable, and you unfurled your legs from your chest, shifting to lean against Yeosang. After breaking into the snacks and a few swigs of soju, he finally broke the silence again. “You never answered my question, you know.” 

You thought for a moment, and he found himself holding back a giggle at the sight of the near-pout on your face. When the realization seemed to hit, you perked up quite comically, eyes wide. “Oh! I don’t really trust the authorities anymore. After…” you sighed, chewing on the inside of your lip. “I’ve never really liked them. They’re creepy, I know what they can do, and it’s… I don’t think like what they represent, I guess. I’ve never had the guts to do anything about it, but I’ve always kind of kept my distance. And after my old boss went missing, I didn’t really… I haven’t felt right getting them involved in anything.” 

He listened intently as you rambled for a moment, eyes locked onto your face as he searched for any form of deception. He couldn’t think of a single reason why you would lie to him, of all people, about your dislike for the guardians, and he was relieved when he read you as truthful. Hwa was right, then—you could be a helpful asset.

Nodding as you finished, he turned his gaze back to the horizon and capped the bottle in his hand. “That’s kind of what I thought too, at first, and it built from there pretty quickly. I guess that’s the Captain’s fault, though.” 

“Hongjoong?” You questioned, taking another stiff glug of your drink. 

That was a name that put you on edge to speak, like its utterance would summon its owner. Yeosang only hummed in confirmation.

You tucked yourself further into his side, tucking your legs up again as you picked at the label of your bottle. “I kinda thought you guys were a myth before tonight.” The look he gave you was something adjacent to offense, and you couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up from your throat. “I don’t mean it in a bad way! The stories have just always been so much larger than life. I thought you were a legend the rebels of the city cooked up to keep hope or something.”

He laughed at your explanation, securing the arm that rested behind you around your waist and squeezing you into his side. You hid your face in his chest as heat rose to your cheeks, hoping he couldn’t feel your blush through the thin material of his tank top. 

“You did not,” he teased, shaking your shoulder lightly. When you didn’t raise your head and only mumbled something unintelligible in response, he sat up straighter, the hand that had been holding him up coming to lift your chin. “Oh my god, you did,” he teased when you wouldn’t meet his eyes, tongue caught between his teeth. He let out that distinct, adorable giggle, and you couldn’t stop your lips from twitching into a smile. 

“Yeah, I did,” you murmured, still plenty embarrassed. 

You felt him shift more than you saw it, turning your head to figure out what he was up to. Freezing for a moment as you found his face inches from your own, you glanced between his eyes and lips. His fingers shifted from under your chin to splay out over the side of your face, and you saw the ghost of a smirk tug at his lips.

“You’re blushing, Y/N,” he hummed, making you impossibly more aware of the heat in your cheeks and under his palm. 

When you didn’t respond, he hesitated, a small blip of wariness in the confidence on display in front of you. Before he could pull away completely, in a feat of bravery you didn’t know you were capable of, you pulled him in until your lips crashed together.

The little noise of surprise he let out was muffled between you, but he recovered quickly, pulling you tight against him and meeting your kiss with just as much fervor. He was quick to grab at your thigh, pulling it over his hips and tugging you into his lap. Hands settling on his shoulders, you barely noticed his coat falling from your own before his hands left you to catch it. He pulled back with a low hum and a smile as he settled the garment back where it had been, this time wrapping it in his embrace with you.

“Still think I’m just a myth?” He prodded, earning a scoff and an eye roll from you.

You smirked, though, as you looked back at him, eyes flickering over his own flushed face. “I don’t know, let me check again.”

You were almost sorry to swallow the giggle that left him, but any regret quickly melted away with the feeling of his lips on yours. This one was slower, soft and exploratory, a stark contrast to the sudden heat of the last. He dragged your chest flush with his own slowly, one hand splaying out between your shoulder blades while the other slid around to your opposite hip. The movement had goosebumps prickling over your skin and, despite the warmth of his body and the coat around you, you shivered. He hummed against your lips and held you ever so slightly tighter, hands beginning to wander across the expanse of your back.

When you finally broke for air, Yeosang’s hands settled at your waist, doing little more than steadying you as you breathed each other in, foreheads pressed together and eyes closed. It was like time had frozen around you, the silence of the desert night suspending you in an alternate reality, and it felt as though even the slightest movement would send you careening back to the doom that awaited you in Night City. Neither of you spoke, neither of you stirred; for a few short moments you wondered if you had forgotten how to breathe. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Yeosang broke the silence.

“Do you want me the way I want you?”

There was a rasp to his already deep voice that hadn’t been there before, and when you finally opened your eyes, he was already staring up at you, the desire burning low in his gaze making your breath catch in your throat. Swallowing thickly, you nodded, one of your hands slipping into the hair at the base of his skull. He hummed lowly, pleased, the corner of his mouth ticking up in a smirk, and guided your hips to rest more firmly against his own. You let out your own quiet sigh at the evidence of his arousal pressing against your core, quickly sealing your lips again. He met you once again with passion, an undercurrent of desperation and urgency in the way his hands ran up your body, pushing his coat off of your shoulders. Your grip on his hair tightened as he slid them under the hem of your shirt, and you swallowed the moan he let out, matching it with a quiet whine of your own.

His hands settled on your waist again, thumbs rubbing soothing circles on your skin as he pulled back from you just long enough to speak, “Tell me.” You huffed, trying to guide his lips back to yours, but he held you fast. “I need to hear you say it, doll.”

The pet name had you whining, nodding eagerly as you squirmed against him. “Yes, Yeosang, I want you. Please.”

Your permission was all it took. In seconds, his lips were back on yours and his hands were exploring every inch of skin they could as his hips rolled up into your own. His explorations left your shirt bunched up, and as the cool night air met your skin to contrast pleasantly with the warmth of his hands, a shudder lit down your spine. His lips parted from your own to pepper open-mouthed kisses and teasing nips down the pillar of your throat, hands dropping back to your hips to drag you more solidly against the bulge in his jeans. You both let out breathy, broken moans and found each other’s eyes, desperation reflected back at the both of you. Your hands fell from his shoulders to slink under his tank top for a moment, fingers wandering over the toned muscles you found for a moment before running over his waistband, tugging at the buckle of his belt.

“Eager,” he murmured, leaning up to nip at your pulse. He ground up into you roughly as he shifted under you, one hand settled firmly on your hip while the other splayed over your shoulders. You barely registered his words, too preoccupied with the need coursing through you, when he spoke again. “Flip with me.”

You complied easily, letting him roll you onto your back and settle between your legs. His gaze was hungry as he ran his hands down your thighs, hesitating when he reached your waistband. A nod seemed to be all he needed to unfasten them and drag them down your legs along with your underwear, leaving you bare to his gaze and the night air, one or both of the sensations sending a shudder lighting down your spine. Feeling exposed, you moved to close your legs, but in a flash, Yeosang was settled firmly between them, fingers kneading at your thighs as he hovered at eye-level with your core. 

He lapped a fat stripe over your folds and it was over for you both. The groan he let out and the hungry way he dove back in had you whimpering in seconds, legs twitching where they rested over his shoulders. His tongue worked over you a little clumsily at first, but the moment he found the things that had you gasping or whimpering, he was zeroing in on them, building you rapidly toward a peak you weren’t quite ready to fall over.

“Sangie,” you gasped, reaching down to tug at his hair and drag him up.

His eyes, closed in reverence of his position and your body, snapped open, and he sucked hard on your clit. You whined, pushing back against the top of his head. “Yeosang,” you tried again, “need you t’... Need you.”

He hummed lowly, pressing a kiss to your folds before pushing himself back up, caging you in with his body. 

“You’ve got me,” he murmured, leaning down to mouth at your neck again.

You whined in protest, hand finding his hair again to pull his lips to yours, earning a low chuckle from the man above you. Reaching for his belt, you ran your nails over the front of his jeans, pulling a hiss of your own from his lips. When fumbling blindly with his belt buckle became a lost cause for both of you, he sat back on his heels, unfastening both his belt and his pants. He paused only to pull his wallet from his pocket and a condom from his wallet before he was shoving his jeans and boxers down. You let out a quiet moan at the sight of his cock, flushed and leaking, propping yourself up on an elbow and reaching for him.

The look of him as you wrapped your fingers around him was a memory you wanted to keep forever. His eyes rolled back in his head and his hips twitched up into your touch, a broken moan falling from his lips. His fingers tightened around the foil packet between them as you slowly pumped his length, his breathing quickly becoming ragged. Within moments, one hand was snapping down to grab at your wrist, halting your movements. 

“You keep at that much longer, angel, and I’m not gonna last.”

You grinned, lip caught between your teeth, thumb swiping over his weeping slit. He heaved an unsteady breath, head rolling back again, before he focused back on you, glaring.

“Fuck me already, then,” you quipped, mouth ticking up in a smirk.

He huffed another laugh, shaking his head as he tore the foil open, reaching for you the moment he had a hand free to pull you in for another kiss. He lowered you to the ground as he rolled the condom over himself, gasping into your mouth at the friction, and you clung hard to his shoulders as he settled back over you. You whined as he parted from you again, tugging at his head to urge him back, but he grabbed your wrist, lacing your fingers and pinning your hand to the ground as he lined himself up with your entrance. 

“You’re sure about this?”

As touched as you were by the check-in, it made your jaw twitch in irritation. 

“Yes, I’m sure, fuck me, Yeosang–!” His name morphed into a long, drawn out moan as he pushed into you in one quick, fluid stroke. His own low sound melded with your own, crafting a harmony that would be echoing in your mind for weeks. 

He paused for a breath, leaning down to kiss you quickly, catching your bottom lip between his teeth. You whined as he shifted within you, breath already coming in short; you were desperate for him, and if he weren’t just as desperate for you, Yeosang would have taken more time to commit the sight to memory. But with the way your walls were hugging him—and the way you had already begged him, the sight of the rapid rise and fall of your chest and the knowledge that he caused that—he couldn’t wait long or this would be over before it had even really started.

The moment you felt him begin to move, really move, within you, you let out a gasp, the hand he didn’t have pinned snapping up to tangle in his hair. You pulled him forward as he fucked into you, pressing your foreheads together, and he followed your lead eagerly, catching your lips in a sloppy kiss. It devolved quickly into little more than you moaning into each other’s mouths, hips rocking together rapidly as you chased bliss together. He was warm, strong and sure above you, and the night around you faded into nothing with the way his body covered yours, leaving both of you once again suspended in a world of your own making. Your cries and whines of pleasure echoed out into the nothingness of the desert, and for once you didn’t bother silencing yourself—out here, there were no repercussions for your pleasure. 

For the second time that night, you mused over how Yeosang—a man you were taught was the enemy, trapped in a prison of his mind’s own making—felt like freedom. The build of the high you were chasing now reminded you of the rush of adrenaline that had coursed through you on the back of his bike such a short time ago, and you pulled him impossibly closer to you, needing to feel his body flush against yours in the same way. A quiet grunt left him as he dropped down to his elbow, stuttering for only a second before picking his pace back up. You settled your feet on the ground, using the leverage to tilt your hips up, and with that small shift, you were seeing stars. His cock was hitting that perfect spot inside of you, his lips were chasing yours every chance he got, and his grip on your hand was tightening; you could tell he was just as close to his peak as you were as he sighed your name against your lips.

He feels like freedom. The thought echoed in your head again, this time louder, and your heart skipped several beats in quick succession. Your chest, throat and core all tightened together, and you pressed your lips against Yeosang’s lips with purpose as your orgasm crashed over you like a wave. You swallowed the drawn-out moan that left him as your walls milked him dry, his hips twitching against your own. He pulled back while you were still lost on cloud nine, wanting to drink in the sight of you, and when his eyes caught the tearstains on your cheeks, his headlight tinging them gold, his stomach dropped. But your eyes blinked open as he wiped them away, a hazy, blissful smile on your face, and he felt himself relax just a bit.

“What’s wrong, angel?” he murmured, and your chest clenched at the concern in his voice. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?’

You shook your head vehemently. “No, Sangie, you were perfect. I just… It felt really good to let go,” you admitted, turning your gaze away from his own. “I haven’t ever been able to, with the whole…” You gestured back toward Night City, and he raised his head to stare back at it, frowning.

WIth a sigh, Yeosang nodded, slipping out of you to sit up. You whined in protest, grabbing at him, and he placated you with a kiss before shifting around to clean both of you up. Once you were dressed again, the cold quickly having become unbearable without his heat, he tugged you into his lap.

“I’m sorry you’ve never had an experience like this before,” he hummed, pressing a kiss into your hair, “but I’m glad I could provide it, and I hope you’ll let me again.”

You smiled brightly against his chest, nodding. “Any time, Sangie. I’m just sorry so many other people miss out on this.”

“Me too.”

“It felt like freedom,” you murmured after a stretch of silence. “You feel like freedom.”

Another moment you wanted you imprint on your brain; the grin he gave you before he yanked you in for another kiss.

When he returned to the rest of the Blue Birds for patrol the next night, Yeosang was keenly aware of Seonghwa’s eyes boring holes into the back of his skull. No doubt he was curious about the details of the previous night’s escapades and itching to give him an earful for wandering off with a government employee and no backup or contingency plan. Sure enough, when the gang split for their respective patrols, he was the one left with their leader. It wasn’t unusual by any stretch, but since the change to his callsign, Seonghwa had been putting Yeosang with other people more frequently to give everyone a chance to adjust.

As they set out, silence stretched between the two riders, and Yeosang couldn’t shake the discomfort it brought. After only a short fifteen minutes, he had to break it.

“You’re mad at me.”

It was purposeful, he was sure, the way he could hear Seonghwa’s drawn-out sigh over his comms. “You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”

“But I didn’t,” he countered, a teasing lilt to his voice.

“You could have gotten yourself arrested.” 

Yeosang scoffed. “What’s the difference, these days?” The silence that met his ears spoke volumes. “Look, I know you aren’t happy about it, but I did it, and I survived. And I think you might be right—she might be on our side, she just doesn’t know it yet.”

Another sigh. “What does that even mean, Yeosang?”

“I figured out why she didn’t call you in.” Silence, this time, but where he had been pointedly keeping ahead of his companion, Seonghwa sat back just a bit, slowing his pace to ride with him. “She doesn’t trust them.”

“Who does?”

“Like eighty percent of the population. Can you be civil for long enough for me to explain, please?” Silence met Yeosang’s ears, but it was miles better than snark. “She’s worked on the things—she knows their wiring and their programming back to front. She could be a very valuable asset to us.”

“So you’ve said—I fail to see how this is more than grunt work.”

“She just got promoted to the position our guy was in before.”

Seonghwa’s helmet whipped to face him for a split second. “Okay, now that is something. Did you convince her to help us, then?”

Yeosang chewed on his lip. “Not yet, but I think I can.”

The deep breath that echoed through his earpiece set his nerves on edge. “You’d better work fast. She’s good at her job—the things our guy was blocking from release are almost ready to be delivered to the masses, according to my intel. We need her position back as soon as possible, and there are already plans in motion.”

There it was. His stomach dropped and bile rose in his throat. “You’ve already called a hit on her.”

“In my defense, I didn’t know it was this girl you’re head over heels for.”

“Says you,” he spat, uncharacteristically nasty, eyeing the way his companion’s shoulders rose. “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway.”

Silence once again, heavy and tangible, hung in the road between the two men.

“If we only resort to death and violence, we’re no better than they are.”

Seonghwa’s scoff echoed as he revved his engine, pulling ahead once again. This time, it didn’t seem like he would be falling back. “I can give you a week. Either convince her or get over her. It’s your choice.”

Yeosang scowled, watching with a glare that could kill as his friend faded into the horizon. He didn’t need a whole week.

Two days later, when you were once again working late and in desperate need of a meal, Blue Bird Delivery was out of service once again. Your heart sank and bile rose in your throat at the implication, and you promptly locked your phone, suddenly too sick to eat. You drowned yourself in your work for the next hour or so, blissfully uninterrupted. It wasn’t until your phone pinged in your pocket, signaling the building’s front buzzer, that you were pulled back into reality. Blinking the measurements and notes from your vision, you frowned, clicking the front camera onto your computer and opening the intercom. “Yes?” 

“Blue Bird Delivery with an order for Y/N,” came the quick reply, Yeosang’s voice crackling through the speaker. You rubbed your temples and sighed heavily, feeling like the weight of the world had been taken off of your shoulders as you relaxed. 

“I’ll be down in a minute.” You bit the inside of your lip, holding back your grin as you made your way downstairs and through the front door as fast as possible.

He seemed even more on edge than usual tonight, shoulders tensed up nearly to his ears, you noted when he came into view. This time, it was you who used his greeting to cover your question. 

“Are you alright?”

He hummed quietly, barely loud enough for you to hear, and turned on his heel, leaving you stunned and confused, a million questions running through your mind. Did he regret taking you out? Did he regret the sex? If he wasn’t here to talk, why was Yeosang bringing you food that you hadn’t been able to order in the first place? He had seemed happy for the rest of the night, holding you close, watching from the street as you had made your way into your apartment building and waved to him from the window, pouting just slightly before you’d arrived that he couldn’t kiss you good night. In a slight daze, you made your way back to your office, locking the door behind you before settling in to eat. No matter how bitter the food would taste now, you needed to eat, but you certainly didn’t want anyone disturbing you. 

Pulling the bag open, your eyes immediately zeroed in on an unfamiliar shock of blue tucked down the side of it. You squinted for a brief second in consideration of it, quickly thinking better of pulling it from the bag. Removing the takeout containers resulted in the paper falling down into the bottom of the bag, and as you set it below your desk as you had made a habit of, readying it for the remnants of your dinner, you glimpsed the message scrawled on it.

“1 hr. -H”

You swallowed thickly, anxiety coiling in your gut. What the hell had you gotten yourself into?

He was waiting in the same place he had been before, arms crossed over his chest as he leaned against the wall. You hesitated as you approached him, and his heart sank. He wanted so badly to touch you, to kiss you, to pull you to him, but he couldn’t risk that emotional breakdown happening in the center of Night City if this went south. Still, he offered you a half-hearted version of his little finger wave.

“What’s with the passing notes?” You questioned, attempting to laugh off the awkwardness. 

“I need you to make a decision.” If you weren’t nervous before, you certainly were now, heart pounding against your ribcage as you bit back a retort about your relationship being too new for ultimatums. “I can either be here as an opportunity or a warning.”

“Should we go somewhere—” you started, only for him to cut you off with a raised hand.

“We’re safe enough here, and I don’t want to waste gas. This is a blind spot for surveillance.” You nodded, wrapping your arms around yourself for comfort. This didn’t feel good. “The rebellion needs someone in your position. Your previous boss was—”

“I know,” you cut in. “I found the forged documents ages ago, before I even took over.”

He went silent, head tilting to the side. You wished you could see the puppy-like look under his disguise.

“He wasn’t sneaky. He didn’t destroy any of the evidence—I found it all the morning I got promoted. The drawings, the inspection sheets, all of it. Are you here to ask me to take over for him?”

Yeosang hesitated. “Well, I was going to, yes. The issue is, you’re a little too good at your job, and if you keep being good at it, I and my people will start losing our footing. And…” He paused, taking a deep breath, trying to ignore the way you were staring at him with narrowed eyes. “There might already be a hit out on you from some of the higher-ups. So it’s kind of a ‘help us or die’ situation.”

Your heart dropped into your stomach. “There’s no other alternative?”

“Not unless you wanted to end up running and hiding for the rest of your life like we do.”

Your decision, and therefore your reply, was instantaneous. “How do I do that?”

If you could see his face, you probably would have laughed at the stunned look Yeosang was giving you. “What?”

“I don’t want this life anymore. I’ve spent my entire life making absolutely sure I fit the mold, and it’s been absolutely terrifying every step of the way. I’ve lost coworkers, friends, even family members for bullshit or unknown reasons and I—” Your voice broke and you paused, regaining your composure. “I felt free with you the other night. I want to feel that again, as often as I can.”

He was quiet for long enough that dread settled back in your stomach. When he finally broke the silence, you could hear the mask fall away from his voice. “Let’s go for a ride, then. We’ll figure this out together.”

You grinned, waiting impatiently for him to settle over his bike before climbing on behind him, wrapping tightly around him, this time in excitement rather than fear. Like the first night, you felt him laugh. “Hold on tight, doll, you’re in for a bit of a bumpy ride.” 

Despite knowing he was talking about more than poorly paved roads this time, your heart soared. “Wouldn’t have it any other way, Hermes.”

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[wingedcat13]

Synovus: Villains Never Retire (4)

[And the end of Villains Never Retire - this one took much longer to finish, and it's a bit longer than the other segments at 11,334 words. Warnings for death, and rather more descriptions of violence than have thus far been typical. As always, catch up on what's come before from my pincushion post, and find this chapter on Ao3 here!]

How do you keep a clairvoyant from knowing that you are coming for them?

The short answer: you don’t.

The long answer is that it is, technically, possible. However, masking your movements from a clairvoyant is dependent on what type of clairvoyant they are.

Do they read actions, or intentions? If actions, work through someone else or manipulate the environment. Do not decide on a course of action until one conveniently presents itself. A spur of the moment blitz. If intentions, hire multiple actors. One of them will slip through the myriad warnings eventually. (Personally you think this method is a waste of assassins)

Do they only read the short term, or can they predict further into the future as well? If the short term only, poisons over time work best. If long term, be sure to act both kind and hostile in equal measure, until the method of their death is confused.

Is their ability only clairvoyance of the future, or can they read the past as well? If they can, you can never speak of your intentions aloud. Hide your correspondence in code, and send an assassin.

Of course, this all assumes you have time and assassins. You, personally, have neither.

But you do have something else: connections.

—-

When you recognize Athena and Menace in the broadcast, you want nothing more than to tear out of your lair and into the night like the wrath of hell let loose.

But there are several flaws in that plan, including that it is currently daylight, and that doing so would certainly get more people killed than you intend. Specifically people you care about, so that’s out.

Instead, you make a few phone calls.

“Optix.” You were still staring at your phone as the broadcast continued, promising an hour of execution. “Are you the reason I’m seeing this?”

You still weren’t sure what, exactly, Optix was - but it went by ‘it’ and had given its name, and was inherently jacked into any electronic cloud you had ever encountered. You didn’t know if it was a person, a program, or a genuine Artificial Intelligence, but you did know it could be helpful when it chose to be.

A thumbs-up emoji appeared in your messages.

“I owe you.”

A ‘no’ emoji, the red circle with its diagonal line.

“Do you have a location?”

Another ‘no’ emoji.

“Noted.”

The broadcast ended, you swept your phone back into your pocket.

“Boss,” that was Doll, looking very pale. “This is-“

“A trap? A problem? A truly blindingly idiotic move by a pack of misguided muppets I’m about to return to the scrap pile? Yes. Yes it is.”

The shadows are still writing around you, but they are drawing closer to your skin. You managed not to vaporize anything this time.

“Your eyes are glowing.” Doll notes uncertainly.

Glowing? Hm. That’s a bad sign. Normally it’s the shadows that appear there first.

Of course, the shadows come to hand when you are furious, when the anger is hot and choking. They rise when you are defensive, murky and obscuring. But this emotion - you are not certain you can call it anger, anymore, that somehow feels too weak - is cold at its core. Not the freezing, biting cold of fear, but the frost wind that steals warmth and cuts like knives.

And that emotion, whatever it is, is what calls the light.

“I am in control.” You inform Doll flatly. “Gather the others, make travel preparations. I have calls to make.”

Doll nods, bolting out of the room. You know it isn’t to get away from you so much as it is to get to work doing something, to feel as though he can help.

You replay the broadcast, short as it is.

By the time you’ve finished watching it a second time, you have a plethora of messages - other villains, sending you the clip. You don’t bother responding.

Instead, you flip to the number pad. Four digits into the number you intend to dial, it rings, from the same source.

You answer. A frustrated voice spits out a coordinate string and disconnects.

How do you keep a clairvoyant from knowing how you are going to kill them?

You use another clairvoyant, of course.

—-

When you drop from the underbelly of your plane, you do so alone.

Your minions are there, of course - Heather's piloting, with the rest on support positions or with other tasks when they actually land. But you will not take them with you into a brawl when you can help it.

You cannot fly, but you can use a different trick you learned through some very difficult trial and error - summoning sections of shadow and solidifying them, to 'run' across the sky. It's a peculiar feeling that combines vertigo with certain mental acrobatics to circumvent the laws of physics. If you fuck up, you'll fall.

So you don't fuck up.

You also don't try and stay airborne long. Instead, you let yourself drop in increments, cushioned by your shadows, until you reach the scrubland below.

You are, perhaps, a mile out from the outskirts of the town that you've been given the coordinates of. There's no question of whether it's the right one - there's a giant, gleaming metal spire in its center that doesn't belong amidst the southwestern architecture.

(The question of who endorsed these idiots is a problem you will handle later.)

There is no sign of movement in the town itself. The residents are either already casualties, imprisoned, or fled. You don't actually care which, you just want to know if you'll be stepping over more corpses than the ones you make.

There's only one way to find out - so you start walking.

---

Earlier, when you were first starting to train Alexandria, she had asked you why you never carried weapons.

"I don't really need them." You'd answered, even as you went through a practice pattern with a padded staff. "My shadows are amorphous, I can craft them however I need to. Harder mentally than fixing them into shape, but more difficult to physically counter."

Alexandria had been taking a break, perched on top of the giant tire you'd been having her lift. "You sure it's not just an image thing?" She'd asked skeptically.

You'd grinned, "Oh, it definitely adds to the image. I am unarmed, because I am always armed."

"Mom says you should do the opposite." She'd remarked. "Carry a weapon so that people think you're reliant on it, and then when they disarm you, they're surprised."

"That trick only works on someone once - though your mother does put it to good use. Also, her abilities are a little easier to disarm than mine. Shadows are everywhere - water? Not quite so easy to come by in certain circles. And the spear adds to her reach for better maneuverability. Your father too, I suppose, though he's more likely to bash someone with that shield."

Alexandria had studied you. "You really know a lot about how they fight."

In answer, you'd twirled the staff in your hands, and mimicked some of the spear patterns you'd seen both Athena and Legionnaire use.

"'Therefore I say: 'Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.'" You quote.

"Sun Tzu?" Alexandria sighs, "Please don't make me memorize the Art of War. I've already got paragraphs of the Iliad I'll never be able to get rid of."

"Memorization's pretty useless." You toss the staff instead, spinning it for fun instead of a combat pattern. "I just want you to understand what it means, not how much gold you need to allocate per li traveled."

Alexandria had eyed you suspiciously, "How many times have you read the Art of War?"

"No more questions." You'd declared. "How's the flight coming?"

---

Thunder booms by the time you've made it to the spire itself.

The sky has been steadily darkening, as you've picked your way through the empty streets. There are pock marks in the asphalt, holes in the buildings. Some of them are burned to the ground or melted - Cobalt's work, most likely.

You briefly wonder if they have a recovery factor, if you'll have to put them down again today. It doesn't change much, either way.

No bodies. Bloodstains, crumpled cars. Someone's had the wherewithal to clean, at least. Or someone who could raise the dead showed up already - hard to tell from context clues.

If you weren't wearing your helmet, you could've taken a deep breath and smelled only the heat, melting into the softer gentleness of rain. You could've felt the wind on your face, in a steady breeze.

But you were wearing your helmet, so you only noted those things distantly, and that made it all the more contrasting when you stepped into the trap that had been laid for you.

---

There are sirens wailing, somewhere. The few who have not been cut off already, cut silent as the screams of the living have been, one by one and in waves. The hush that should follow is denied by the high pitched whining of machinery and the sound of burning things. There are sparks, and pops. Something like words worn smooth in the background, run over so many times that they're part of these floorboards that are now cracking and failing, released again at the moment of unmaking.

You focus on the sounds, because you cannot see the devastation. You focus on the sounds, because you cannot smell the burning. You focus on the sounds, because if something does not force you to confront it, you do not know how fast or far away you would be running.

You shut your eyes and fight for air. Your hands close into fists, and you feel the world roll around you. An earthquake? You should be running -

Breathe. Weigh the situation, then move.

The sirens are too loud. The flames - you would've noticed them earlier, seen the smoke. The pieces of this scenario do not match.

You flip the settings on your helmet. The sounds do not change.

A mental effect, then. An illusion?

On a hunch, you blanket the area around you in shadow. From a building to your left, you hear a squeak of terror.

Slowly, not trusting your sense of direction, you turn towards it and take a single step.

"I know that you are there." You say calmly. "Your illusions are good, but they are not perfect. Come out, or my shadows will drag you out."

There's a pause, and the illusions intensify - you can feel the heat of fire on one side of your body, smell harshly chemical smoke - then the thunder cracks again, and you are abruptly returned to the near silence of reality.

A shuffling of footsteps. Then a small head pokes around a doorframe.

You run your shadows over them anyway, to make sure this is not an adult pretending to be a child. If they are, they're either much better at illusions than they're letting on, or they can also shapeshift.

You'd say the figure that steps into view is no more than eight years old.

"What is your name?" You ask, still calm, still gentle.

"Ciaran." The answer is in a near whisper.

"They did not give you a code-name?"

The child pales. "Ch-Cheshire. Like the cat."

You nod. "Very well, Cheshire. I am Synovus."

You look up and down the street, and compare the feelings of your vision to the area that surrounds you now. A few things make sense.

"I know." The child says, swallowing. "Please don't kill me."

"I will only kill you if you try to kill me." You answer, matter-of-fact. It's no use protesting that you don't kill children, no one ever believes you. "Your abilities - that wasn't an illusion, was it? It was a memory. A memory you pushed into my mind."

Cheshire nods, hesitant. "Ez - Jester said I should make you scared."

"And so you chose something that had scared you." You complete, "I felt your fear. And why did Jester want me scared?"

"I'm not supposed to answer any questions."

"You already have."

"You're going to hurt me. Hurt them."

You fold your arms. Why do you keep winding up in moral arguments with children?

"That will not change based on what you tell me, little one."

"I wasn't supposed to be here." Cheshire blurts. "I was supposed to wait - to wait until you came inside, and then -"

They fall silent, and you nod. "And then Jester would teleport behind me, hm? And why are you out here then, alone?"

"Because I don't want you to hurt them. I thought I could make you run away before you fought."

"Others have come here before me. Have you scared them away too?"

The child scuffs a foot. "Some of them. No one's ever found me though."

You crouch. "You've done a very stupid thing, coming out here to face me. But I am not here for you, and I am in a hurry. Hide, and I will not hurt you."

Cheshire steps back, but hesitates. "And Jester?"

You sigh. "They must face the consequences of their actions."

Cheshire's bottom lip wobbles. "Don't kill him! He's - he's my brother, I don't - promise you won't kill him!"

Sometimes, you really do hate yourself. Past, present, and future.

"I promise." You grit out, "That I will not kill your brother, Jester, on the condition that you hide, and not use your powers again, until a woman named Rosie comes to get you. Do we have an agreement?"

A stubbornness enters Cheshire's expression. "Pinky promise."

Again, you feel like this is a trap. Also, you're mildly offended that you would need to make a further oath than the one you've already made, but this is a child. So you hold out one hand, as far as you can, and Cheshire does the same.

When Cheshire nods solemnly, you straighten, and turn back towards the spire. The sound of scuffling marks the child's scramble through the rubble, and you hope you haven't made a terrible mistake in letting them get away.

You allow yourself another heavy sigh, and call Rosie to tell her what to expect.

---

You don't actually know for sure whether or not you have siblings. But wanting to sacrifice yourself to save a family member? You can remember feeling that way.

You know who your parents are (sometimes you wish you didn't) and you're reasonably sure your mother didn't have another child after you. Your father could have a whole bevvy of children, a miniature army, and you would never have known. An elder full-blooded sibling could've been taken away prior to your conscious memory.

Your father was known as Sunhallow. He who is Hallowed by the Sun. A god-made-flesh, who seemed to bleed gold and healed in the sun, and could incinerate enemies in beams of light.

Your mother was simply your mother to you, and if she ever did anything with her minor telekinetic gifts beyond keep up with you, you never heard about it.

When you were young, an enemy came calling. Several, perhaps. You were packed from your private tutoring into a safe room, and you did not come out for several days. It was you, your tutor, and a few others, who you knew would die to protect you on pain of a worse death at Sunhallow's hands.

When you finally came out again, you were brought to see him. He told you that your mother had had to go away, but if you worked hard enough, you could be allowed to go see her again. When you would not be a burden to her work.

Desperate to please, you had thrown yourself into your education and training. Combat, economics, athletics. Trying to find a way to call the sun the way Sunhallow could, in vain.

Several months in, your shadows had finally manifested for the first time. You'd been delighted to show him, begged to be allowed to speak to your mother - a letter, a phone call.

Sunhallow had refused.

After that day, he called you his moon-child. You became his shadow, never speaking, never moving unless called upon to do so. Your training, somehow, increased.

And when you had done that for a month, you were brought into a room where a caped hero had been restrained on a table. You knew their name from the list you were to memorize, and their strengths and weaknesses accordingly. Their name was Willowsteel.

Sunhallow put a dagger in your hands, and pointed at Willowsteel.

"There is the man who took your mother." He told you, "Go and get her back."

You had torn into them as though somewhere inside them was a key, and you could use it to open a door, and on the other side would be your mother, happy to see you after so long apart. But there was no key: only blood, and eventually that ran out too.

When you were done, Sunhallow had led you to another room, and showed you your mother's corpse.

---

The rain began to fall just as you stepped over the threshold of the spire.

It caused an interesting audio phenomenon on the inside, as it rang off the metal in a discordant harmony with the hum of the air conditioning. Thunder rumbled again.

There was no one in the entry hall that you could see. Only an empty room, wide and spacious, with a large grand staircase leading up. It feels more like a warehouse than a lair.

“Optix.” You whisper inside your helmet. “Does this place have an intercom?”

A two note trill that you take as a yes.

“Would you be so kind as to patch me into it, for a moment?”

Another two note trill, then the sound that usually heralds you should leave a message in a voicemail.

“Perhaps I was not clear enough, the last time we spoke.” You drawl, and in your voice is cold fury and disdain. There are sounds of startled movement from the stairs. “Allow me to clarify.”

Metal really is a horrible building material - the boots of anyone who is coming ring with such finality as they run to meet their deaths. A line of those you take for goons, pale-faced and unsteady and armed with automatic weaponry you know is stolen.

Your voice doesn’t waver, doesn’t change. Each word is delivered with gravitas and perfect diction. “Thou hast fucked around.”

You take several steps forwards into the room, your cape billowing behind you. The empty black blank of your helmet offers no reprieve or indication of humanity - only their own reflections.

“Thou shalt find out.”

Thunder shakes the sky - and the goons open fire.

—-

How do you keep a shadowmancer from killing you?

Well, that depends on how you define a shadow.

Must it be pure, pitch darkness? In that case, arrange for sufficient lighting, and they will be powerless.

Must it be a living thing’s shadow? Lure them into a trap, provide sufficient lighting, no living shadow to work from.

But can it be a half-shadow? If so, sufficient lighting becomes a problem. One need only cup their hand to create a negative space within the light, and draw a shadow from there. A bundle of a cape edge. The hollow of one boot.

And speaking of hollows - if a shadow is simply where the light isn’t, what, then, of a body’s hollows? The spaces in the mouth, the lungs, the small pockets inside various cavities. The slim space between brain and skull. Are those shadows?

Because if they are, a shadowmancer does not need external shadows to kill you.

And how do you keep a shadowmancer like that from coming to kill you?

Short answer: you don’t.

—-

You don't bother to count your kills. The ticker on that particular statistic is long broken, and you will not linger here. You grant them the mercy you have to give, and make things quick.

It takes you less than thirty seconds to go from staring down a wall of automatic rifle barrels to stepping over corpses, and up the stairs.

About halfway up the first level, the air shifts.

You pause, and when no immediate strike is forthcoming, you turn. "You do not have so many opportunities available to you that you can afford to waste an opening like that." You chide.

Jester is flushed, their breathing heavy. They stand where you were seconds earlier, and stare at the room, and then up at you.

"What did you do to Dymania?" They ask, and you see the edge of desperation in their eyes.

You decide that this is a lesson that can only be truly taught once. "A better question." You say thoughtfully, "Would be what I did to Ciaran."

At the mention of their brother's name, you watch Jester's face go through a variety of emotional contortions. You wouldn't bother to name all of the shades, but 'terror' features predominantly among them.

To Jester's credit, they learn quickly. The next time they teleport, there is no more pretense of talking.

---

In the rooms above you, you cannot see it for yourself, but you will learn later that Dymania is paralyzed. They lie on the floor, in the room crafted for them to get the most from their gifts. Overloaded with a thousand potential futures, each only a maddeningly small difference from the next, they occasionally shout or spasm.

In the room above them, Minerva has finally found an opening. She is trailing more goons, there is a bullet in her shoulder, and her leg is still not completely healed, but she manages to reach the rainwater, and that is all that she needs.

On the same level, down the hall, Alexandria is no longer held in check by her mother's captivity. They far underestimated her strength, and she has broken the bonds on herself and several others. When someone tries to enter the room, she takes the door off of its hinges and literally sweeps a path clear for the other hostages to flee.

Outside, Rosie is sitting on a chunk of concrete rubble, talking to a little boy who has no idea there are four others hidden in the area around him, ready to strike anyone else who approaches.

And a single figure hurtles through the sky, with no way to know that he is already too late.

---

You probably could've ended the fight with Jester much sooner, but... okay, so you were maybe having some fun with it.

Not because he was so clearly distressed, mind, just because how often did you really get to brawl with someone? No super strength, no weapons, no summoned spouts of fire, just a good old fashioned punch-out.

Yeah, sure, the kid teleported, but that just made it more interesting to fight him.

(You weren't sure what would happen if he solidified in a space he happened to share with, say, your arm, and you were disinclined to find out, so you had to lead your movements just enough and - well, it was harder than it sounded.)

And yes, you are furious still, but that fury was largely alleviated by doing something, and with the pieces you have set into motion, you will have to trust in the others in the building to play their parts. Also, you did promise not to kill this one, specifically.

So when he tries to gain enough momentum to blindside you by teleporting up and coming down, and you sidestep on the blood-slicked staircase, there is not a spike of shadow waiting to impale him if he does not teleport again quickly enough. When you see an opportunity to force him to carry through a motion and crack his skull into the railing, you stay your hand.

Mostly, though, you move in circles that broaden to leaps of your own, until Jester decides to try and pick up one of the guns of the dead goons.

You fold your arms as he aims at you. "Nice try."

Jester furrows his brow, the mask contorting to match. He glances at the barrel, does a doubletake, and swears. Frantic scurrying only turns up more of the same.

"I don't - what - how?" He cries, jumping from body to body for a gun that works.

"Solidified the shadows in the barrels." You lean against the railing and cross one leg over the other. You're only mildly winded.

“You can do that?” Jester cries in horror.

You hum. You aren’t entirely unsympathetic. “I can do many things.”

Jester looks up at you, something like determination in his eyes - and disappears.

When he does not reappear, trying to punch you again, you sigh. “Damn it.”

You click your way through to Rosie again. “Yeah, I overdid it. No, I’m fine. I am not that old. The roof? Fine. There better be an elevator.”

Grumbling, you find the elevator at the heart of the spire. They haven’t locked it yet - so you’ll take however many floors you can get out of it before they do.

—-

When you were younger, your mother told you about the things that made someone Great.

You can’t quite say they were stories, because they were more like… half-anecdotes, strung together on a line. But they were always meant to entertain and teach, and you could listen while you did other things.

For a long time, you thought they were all about your mother and father. She was every brave woman who thought to heal instead of breaking, every woman who drove a weapon’s blade through solid stone, every woman who adventured and every woman who stayed home.

Your father was every man who proved the truer than his enemies, who rallied others to his cause, who truly believed and in that faith called others to follow. Inspired them, rather than commanded.

And you? You were both of them. You had your mother’s adventuring and wisdom, your father’s effortless grace and pure heart. You did not need your own stories, when you could frolic in the mix of theirs, leaping from one tale to the next, an ephemeral sidekick.

Your mother never corrected you. But you learned, eventually.

Your father was never the protagonist in those stories at all.

And where did that leave you?

—-

The elevator stops about two stories up, by your reckoning, and had you been standing by the door like a dunce, you would've been pummeled by a torrent of water.

And had there not been mirrors at the back of the elevator, you might've pummeled Minerva with a torrent of shadow.

But there were, so you could see it was her from your vantage of tucked-into-the-corner, and she could see it was you as the center mirror cracked and shattered.

(You weren't sure if you should commend these young idiots for thinking of the corner tricks, or condemn them for putting in wall to floor mirrors. Really, those things shatter no matter what kind of treatment you give them.)

"Synov-" Her incredulity is cut off, as you sweep around the corner - and sweep her into a hug.

She must be exhausted, because you get away with it. She stands rigid for a moment, bracing, likely thinking you're tackling her or some other nonsense. Once it becomes clear - oh, a second or two later - that you're only wrapping your arms around her in reassurance that she's alive, some self-preservation instinct drops.

For a moment, she rests her head on your shoulder, and gently presses one arm against your back.

When she pulls away, you do too.

"I should've known you'd come for Al- Menace." She says, and her throat is raw. Smoke? Screaming? (You're going to burn this town a second time) "Had to show me up one more time."

"One day, Minerva." You say quietly, "I'm going to prove to you that my affection for you is not a trap, or some kind of proxy for your child. But for now -"

You spread your hands, summoning shadows between them. You spin them like thread, that thickens to wire, that thickens to cord, pulled taut and bulging on one end. That end clarifies - sharp edges, a wide base that narrows to a point. A replica of Athena's spear.

Minerva - Athena? - takes it, weighing its balance. She opens her mouth to say something, but you are already holding out a disc in the shape of her shield.

"The weight's wrong." She says, taking the shield.

"Shadows." You say apologetically. "Not the heaviest things. Shall we?"

Minerva clears her throat, "Menace is searching for more cells. They had a lot of people here."

You nod, and follow when she walks away. "Anyone other than Jester and Dymania I should worry about?"

Athena adjusts her shield. "Not while I'm around."

---

When you were Sunhallow's shadow, he called you 'Eclipse.'

You were not his enforcer - he did that well enough on his own. You were the spy, the assassin, a card near the bottom of a very stacked deck. An observer, time and time again.

And, as proves inevitable when someone is taught to find loopholes and make observations, they will begin to find chinks in their predecessor's armor. They will learn to ply their skills for their own gain, rather than only on instruction. It is what makes them good at what they do.

You were very good at what you did.

In all of your searching and spying, you put together several pieces. You conducted your own investigations, slipped additional questions into interrogations, took the time to talk to your targets before you killed them.

Their words painted a very different picture than the one you'd been given. They showed that your mother had not been abducted, but had left willingly. May have even opened the door. They showed that Sunhallow was not the first to claim godhood, only the most recent to become so prominent. And that not everyone, as he had claimed, recognized his inherent superiority.

Your father told you that one day, you would become Holy, as he was. The Sun would hallow your bones, bless you, and raise you to take over where he left off. But you knew what he looked like when he was lying, by then. You also knew he liked to tempt others by offering them the idea of his position, his glory. It was bait.

And the day the light finally responded to your call, you realized that you were going to have to take it.

---

When you and Athena find Menace, it's by finding the end of her trail of ducklings - nearly thirty people, milling about in varying levels of distress and shock.

Someone screamed when they caught sight of you, in your distinctive costume, and Athena with her spear and shield of shadows. You sighed, unsurprised, but didn't have time to even start trying to explain yourself before a head rose above the others. And kept rising.

Nearly flat to the ceiling, Menace shot over the heads of her flock, and hurtled into the pair of you to grab you both in a hug.

"Super-strength, super-strength, super-strength," you chant in warning, wanting to come out of this reunion with your trachea intact.

"You saw me ten minutes ago." Athena chides gently, but her heart isn't in it, and she hugs Menace back just as tightly.

“I’ve never been so happy to see a pile of garbage bags in my life.” Menace says, giving you a very careful squeeze. You have time to make an offended noise before she turns her attention back to her mother; “And you - you got shot? I specifically requested you not get shot.”

“The people.” Athena reminds her, nodding towards the shambling mass of mundanity.

“None of them got shot either.” Menace replies mulishly. When Athena sighs, she relents. “No major injuries so far, though some of them are pretty banged up - bruises, scrapes. I think I’ve gotten most of them out by now, unless there’s a basement to this place.”

Athena looks at you, and you shrug. “It would make sense that they did, but the elevator didn’t go down that far, and herding prisoners down stairs gets very annoying very quickly. If there is one, I’m betting it’s maintenance.”

The shambling mass of mundanity has been whispering since you arrived. You could wait for Menace or Athena to soothe them - but you’d rather not.

“Oh, shut up.” You tell them crossly. “If I were here to kill you all I would’ve blown up the place and been done with it. You all get to live and deal with the trauma for the rest of your sorry lives. Lucky you.”

There’s a collective gasp of shocked breath, and the nearest ones edge back from you a little more - but they do go silent.

Athena elbows you in the ribs. “Synovus does have a point about the stairs.” She says calmly. “And the elevator isn’t safe. Have we found an alternative exit?”

Menace sighs, “I could punch through an outer wall and carry people down?”

Athena considers the group size. “That would take some time. And we would be vulnerable during movement.”

“The ground level is secure.” You mention idly.

“Which doesn’t rule out snipers or the two remaining supervillains.” Menace points out.

“You.” Athena says suddenly. “You can make discs of shadow, and you can hold them. You can make one wide enough for them to all stand on, so they can be lowered down together.”

You could also make a slide that curves around the spire all the way down, but you don’t say that part out loud.

“I could.” You concede. “You would be putting their lives in my hands.”

“If you wanted them dead, you’d have killed them by now.” Athena counters. “So time to live up to not wanting them dead.”

You survey the crowd. You have an image to maintain - or, well , partially reconstruct.

“Fine.” You drawl, and stalk closer to the group. You shoo them all to one side, and rest your fingertips on one wall, feeling for the vibration of the rain. “This is the outer wall?”

Athena breaks off reassuring the people to call to you, “It is. Maybe four, five inches?”

You resist the urge to make inappropriate jokes. Someone in the crowd does not. Someone else smacks them on the back of the head. The first person mutters something about stress responses and apologizes.

Experimentally, you lodge a spear of shadow into the wall. It sticks until you dismiss it. You can see a faint gleam of pale light through it.

Well. Shit. Shadows are very adaptable things, but they don’t cut very well - they’re more brute force and occasionally piercing.

Which means you’re going to have to use the light.

Whatever. At least it’s not made of concrete.

You don’t bother to explain yourself to your companions, not with an audience present. Instead, you raise a wall of shadow between yourself and them, thick enough to block the glow of radiance when you summon light to your hands.

A beam would be easiest, here - but it would also be like setting off a beacon. The most subtle would be to use the light as a knife, as you normally do when you have to use it, but that would take forever. So… laser cutter?

You use three sharp, long lines to hack off either side and a new roof line, giving it a shove near the top with your shadows so it doesn’t try and fall inward. Another slash at the bottom cuts it loose. The chunk of metal falls away with a relatively soft screech (which is, still deafening) and drops with the rest of the rain, and your shadow wall.

You reveal yourself again, already turned to face the group, with the rain now drumming on the metal flooring (you may have erred on the side of excess for height) and the wind blowing your cape out dramatically. You gesture to the open air, shadows already weaving a basket to hold a large group of people.

They cannot see you smiling, but they can hear it. It is not a polite or joyful smile. “Your chariot awaits, dear friends.”

—-

No one thanks you for putting a raised edge on the platform.

Menace would’ve caught them, of course, but still. Did your efforts to save them from falling mean nothing?

Had circumstances been different, you might’ve complained about that to Athena, loudly and at length. Instead, you stayed quiet, and kept time in your head as you lowered a herd of sheeple to solid ground.

You stay up in the spire, though Athena rides with them to reassure them, and Menace drifts alongside. Once they’re down, she argues with her mother for a moment. Then she flies back up, carrying Athena.

“Refused to stay put for her injuries?” You remark, having found a chair to lounge in. That actually did take a significant amount of energy, though you’ve done everything you can to disguise that.

“Yes.” Menace grumbles.

“I told her I’d climb the spire by hand if I had to.” Athena says stubbornly. To Menace, she said firmly, “I let someone slow me from coming to you once. Never again.”

“You two are going to have the strangest rivalry.” You said admiringly, to break the tension. Both of them turn to you instead, and even if Menace’s head is covered, you’d bet their expressions are identical.

You raise your hands in mock-warding - and pause as the air shifts again.

There are two people in the hallway. One, the bruised-but-mobile Jester. The other, slumped against a wall and looking much worse for wear, is Dymania.

Menace and Athena both tense, drawing a step closer together in preparation for a fight. You cross one leg over the other at the knee.

"You know, you two are terrible hosts." You call, casually flicking a crease from your costume. "Leaving us alone for so long? Incredibly ru-"

"Shut UP Synovus!" Jester yells, near manic. You can see the whites of his eyes all the way around, even under the mask. "You weren't even supposed to be here! You're retired!"

"Someone doesn't check Twitter." You remark, amused.

"I - What?" Aw, you've genuinely thrown this one for a loop.

"Twitter." You repeat. "I tweeted 'nvm, comma, I'm back' an hour before I arrived." You enunciate each letter in 'nvm' instead of approximating a word.

Athena sighs, "Synovus."

"Yes, honored colleague?"

"Shut up."

You respond by rising, and giving an overexaggerated bow. Dymania yelps and throws themself to one side - because as you straighten, you throw lances of shadow at both of them.

---

The fight really didn't take long.

You're pretty sure the only reason they got Athena or Menace was by threatening the hostages they already had, and you could've wiped the floor with them on your own. You still didn't kill Jester, and even helped cushion a hit he took from Menace.

(The hit wouldn't have hurt him as much as the rebound against the floor. Menace would've been terribly upset to have accidentally killed him.)

(Though, if she or Athena killed him, you wouldn't be in violation of your promise.)

(But - no. You wouldn't do that to either of them. Not now.)

The end of things really came when Athena managed to pin Jester against the wall with her good arm, and you'd managed to herd Dymania away from his companion. He stumbled back again, and wound up crossing into the area where the rain was still falling.

(Lightening up, you noticed. Better finish things quickly then.)

The change was immediately noticeable. Dymania stiffened, clutching at their head with both hands, and tried to run forward out of the rain - only to find you there, walking them back to the edge.

"H- how did-" They cut themselves off, and you nodded.

"How did I know about the rain?" You asked politely, as much taking pity on them as taking the chance to grandstand. "The Silent Ones told me. You know how they feel about Clairvoyants who don't conform."

It isn't really possible for more color to drain from Dymania's face. Instead, they drop to their knees with a groan.

"What?" Menace asks, looking up from where she's trying to convince Athena to trade off with her.

You raise your voice a little, so she can hear you better. "The Silent Ones. An enclave of Clairvoyants, hidden from most of the world. When two clairvoyants cross each others paths, it's like putting two mirrors opposite each other. Endless reflections. They hate it."

You watch Dymania try to stagger back to their feet, and feel no pity. "That includes if one shows up in their own futures. It gives them headaches at best. Sometimes they wind up in comas, if they're particularly unprepared. So one of them eventually hit upon the idea - what if all of them lived together?"

You glance towards the sky, calculating how long you have left. "They live according to a very strict schedule, and interact as little as possible with each other. If everyone does exactly as ordered, there's no need to make predictions. No traps to fall into. They don't force others into it, but they certainly don't like it when someone has plans that conflict with their order either."

"You mean like, someone leaving?" Menace asks, having managed to take half-ownership of keeping Jester pinned. She sounds offended on their behalf.

"No, they can leave whenever they want. Its the ones who want to do something about their enclave - like find it, exploit it, or destroy it - that find themselves suddenly overwhelmed with bad luck. And the chaos of the rest of the world is often too much for them, once they've gotten used to the enclave."

"So its... more like a sanctuary?"

"Yes. And they know you, Dymania. They know that you cannot stand the rain."

"Make it stop." Dymania begs you. You aren't even sure they've been following the conversation - their eyes are unfocused, trying not to see or feel the falling water around them.

"Clairvoyants, as a whole, despise rain." You mention idly. You have not moved. "The randomness involved in where each drop falls - it ties them up into knots. Worse, if they predict how the droplets will feel on their skin. Some of them can filter it out, like white noise - Dymania is not one of them."

You tilt your head, and then turn back to the others. "Very well. Let's go."

Like you know they will, Dymania gives a cry of desperation. They push, once more, to try and make it to their feet. And at the point where their future diverges, they try to draw the handgun Jester had forced them to carry.

You pivot, and in one smooth motion, kick Dymania out of the spire.

"Dy!" Jester cries.

"Yes." You muse. "I suppose they will."

---

The fight goes out of Jester, after Dymania falls.

The three of you drag him up to the roof, at your direction. Once the skies clear, Heather will bring the plane back around, and all of you can reach it easily enough from the highest point. Plus, at this point, it's less stairs to go up than it would be to go back down, and you really don't want to do the disc trick again.

It turns out the roof is less a flat roof, and more of a ring near the top. You notice Menace shudder as you reach it, and tilt your head at her in question.

"They threw hostages over the railing here." She says quietly.

You nod. This explains why neither Menace or Athena protested much, at what you'd done. But you don't protest or labor the point either - instead, you clasp her arm in sympathy, and look up at where the sky is clearing.

"How did you time that so well?" Athena murmurs when you come up alongside her.

"Weatherwitch owed me a favor." You reply casually.

"Weather witch. The Silent Ones. Your council. What else is there, some kind of... Villain union?"

"Well..." You admit, "there is... something of a minion union, though I stay out of their business, mostly."

Athena sighs.

You almost take your helmet off to grin at her. You probably would've, but then you hear Menace, and the sudden tension in her voice as she says, "Mom?"

You both turn immediately - and see Legionnaire, hovering at the railing, and staring at you.

---

You didn't forget Legionnaire existed.

No, really, you didn't - but you did try really hard not to let yourself think about it for too long.

When you had named him (and Athena) as your rivals, you had made your choice based on what you thought was a genuine good in them. They did not hesitate until the cameras arrived. They did not extort or demand. They took some care for collateral when lives were involved, if not property, and they regularly showed up to help with rescue or relief efforts when they could.

And there was the fact that they had a kid.

You'd fought them enough times to know that they didn't mess around to grandstand or showboat. They maintained secret identities fairly well. They weren't like Dazzler, who would try and seduce villains in the hopes of fucking them back to civility. They weren't like White Shadow, who was always high enough when you fought them that you weren't sure they knew what was happening.

The closest, you thought, to real heroes.

So when you'd seen those bruises on Alexandria's arm, that first day, you'd been... surprised. You didn't exactly have the highest opinion of humanity in general, and you'd learned too many early lessons about pedestals and how much they hurt when they fell over on top of someone. But you had expected better of them.

From your observations, conversations with Minerva and Alexandria, and the things they didn't say, you'd pieced together a lot over the last year. That Minerva did have her flaws, but was trying to be better. That her healing factor meant that any bruises or sprains would've healed long before anyone else saw them. That Alex, though wary of Minerva sometimes, had still talked about her when she wasn't around. She almost never mentioned her father, and when she did, it was only questions about how you knew him, or in conjunction with her mother.

You had been worried, at first, that you were conflating him with Sunhallow. A man claiming holiness (the Sun made him Hallow, the Son of Mars) with strength and a following (A cult, a fanbase) and who coerced their child into working for them (Eclipse, Mercury) and who harmed them-

So you hadn't let yourself go out to find him and have it out. On better days, you admitted it wasn't your fight to have - it was Minerva and Alexandria's, if they wanted it. On worse days, you weighed the benefits and consequences of hiring someone versus doing it yourself.

And you had kept a degree of surveillance on him, just in case. Nothing in depth - you didn't know what brand of frozen pizza he bought or his Netflix account, you didn't care if he still had a job or had lost it - but just. General locations. Whether he went out in costume. You had Legionnaire watched, and not Albion.

But sometimes those lines blurred - so you knew that he had started drinking more heavily when Alexandria left. More again, after Minerva. The last two months, he'd seemed to be getting better, but he had stopped going out in costume.

And now he was here, and you had no idea what to do.

---

For what feels like an eternity, you all stand in silence. Athena had been startled into dropping Jester, automatically readying her shield and then stilling herself before she could aggravate her bullet wound any more.

(She still held the shadow set you'd given her, you hadn't found her usual weapons in the spire, though you had personally looked.)

You grabbed Jester, who was glancing back and forth with confused interest.

"Say a word, or try and teleport away." You tell him quietly, head next to theirs. "And I will make Dymania's death seem like a kindness."

Judging by the way he nods, slowly, he also remembers that you technically have Ciaran.

And Menace - oh, Menace - has lifted from the ground, hovering, with her hands curled into fists.

It's Legionnaire who breaks the silence first; "You inherited my powers."

He sounds... proud. Tired. His voice is rough. He's looking at Alexandria as though she is a prized pupil who has shown an aptitude in his favorite subject.

(He doesn't deserve that pride.)

"I have my own powers." Menace corrects him, her voice clipped and short.

Legionnaire moves his hands gently in a faint 'settle down' motion. "Of course." He says quietly. "All yours, Alex."

"Why are you here, Albion." Minerva demands. She's pulled off the Athena mask, and glares him down as he looks her over. Notes the shadow-weapons, the injury.

"I saw the broadcast." He explains, gesturing to the spire. "I thought - you needed help."

"We're fine." Minerva says flatly.

It's hard to shift uncomfortably when you're flying, but Legionnaire manages it - as his gaze slides to you.

"Oh, come off it." Minerva follows his gaze, and now sounds heated.

"Can you really blame me, Athena?" He says, and sounds beseeching. "This all started with him, when he took Alex -"

"They." Menace interrupts, nearly strangling the word. "Synovus is 'they,' not 'he.'"

Legionnaire bites his lip, flicks his eyes away, then back again. "Fine." He says, though his calm is less even now. "They took you, Alex. And then they took your mother, too."

"I left of my own free will." Alexandria has risen now, a little further up. Not quite even with her father. "And my name. Is Alexandria."

There's a certain exasperation in Legionnaire's expression that he can't hide fast enough. Changing tactics, he looks to Minerva again instead, "Athena, think about it. Synovus changed you! You know they used to say he - she, they - had manipulative powers. They've kept you isolated, and now let you get captured just so they can sweep in to save you-"

"Synovus." Minerva grits her teeth, "Did not make me move several hundred miles inland, away from my family and the source of my powers. Synovus did not discourage me from getting involved in the community, in case I accidentally gave our identities away. Synovus-" She has taken a step forward, with each line, and the tip of her spear is slowly lowering to point towards him. "-did not hurt my daughter."

Legionnaire exhales, "So did you." He points out. "It happens, it's not anything unusual - its how kids learn! I-"

"I am ashamed of that!" Minerva shouts. Alexandria has sunk an inch. "We were supposed to be better, Albion! We talked about trying to save cities, to save the world, and we couldn't even save our own daughter from ourselves!"

"No one is perfect." Legionnaire deflects.

Minerva points her spear at you. You do not flinch. "I have lived with them for over a month." She says, with a steely calm. "I have seen those who live with them. I have seen how they are with Alexandria." There's a subtle emphasis on the last half of the name, a pointed correction. "They provided me medical care without blinking, and though I have yelled and raged and attacked them, they have never raised a hand against me while I was in their house."

Legionnaire scoffs, "So Synovus learned to play nice for a while, that's not -"

"It's more than you ever managed." Minerva says with venom.

There is a silence then, deep enough that the entire spire could fall into it and further, swallowed by a negative space that never ends.

Finally, you speak again, but only when you are certain your voice is under your control. "The plane is here." You say calmly. "Someone should make sure this one-" You jostle Jester, "-is received properly."

There is a two-fold offer in the statement, and one you know both Minerva and Alexandria hear.

Tell me to leave, and I will.

Because you will, if they want. You are party to this story, but it is not yours. It will hurt you, and you will worry, but you know about closure and what it can take to find it.

Tell me to take care of him, and I will.

One more death will not be a burden on your conscious. Not when you feel responsible that he was allowed to continue - that you have protected this man for years. Logically, you know that's ridiculous. It isn't necessarily Logic that wants to kill him.

This pause is shorter, lighter. Minerva whirls on you, searching. You wait for the protest - that she can fight her own battles, and you should fuck off before she comes to her senses and fights you again, a villain at the scene of a crime.

Instead, she glances at Alexandria, who is still hovering, still staring at Legionnaire.

"Alexandria." Minerva says softly. "Our priority is still the people."

"Yes." She responds automatically. It takes her another moment to move, to shake herself out of her paralysis. "I can carry you both."

You know that does not include you.

"Athena, don't -" Legionnaire starts.

You ignore him, and look at Alexandria. "Menace." You address her by the title, helping knock her out of it a little more.

(Yes, remember - you want to tell her, - you are more than his daughter. You have stood in a room full of powerful people and held your own, and more.)

"Lady Synovus." Menace returns. You know it's specifically to spite Legionnaire's earlier assumption that you were male.

"As Legionnaire is your rival -" You ignore Legionnaire again when he starts to interrupt, raising your voice to talk over him, "- it is your jurisdiction as to what measures I can take."

The formality is a shield. You hate to ask this of her, to force her to say - but even if you weren't bound by the rules you'd created, you need to know. If she asks you not to hurt him... well, you'll try.

Alexandria pauses, watching Minerva. Minerva looks back at her, meeting her gaze through the helmet.

"It's your decision," She tells her daughter, "But I will stand by you, no matter what you decide."

"What's this about 'rivals'?" Legionnaire tries to interject.

Alexandria stiffens, as though she might yell at him, and you brace yourself to have to intervene - but instead, she just reaches up and removes her helmet.

Alexandria looks her father square in the face as she says, "Lady Synovus, I give you leave to do as you feel appropriate. No restrictions."

"You are certain?" You ask, because you want her to be sure.

"I am." Her voice doesn't waver.

Minerva takes Jester from you, frowning to remember that he's here, and he's overheard all of this. Alexandria drifts backwards, to gently gather both her mother and the defeated villain into her arms, before going up.

Legionnaire tries to follow - but can't, as you've already got a shadow wrapped around his ankles.

You slam him back down with relish.

"No." You say, your voice chilly, "You are not invited into their lives anymore, Legionnaire."

"And you get to decide that?" Legionnaire demands, trying to slice through your shadow. You tighten its grip in answer. "You get to decide I can't talk to my wife, my son-"

You are glad Alexandria is out of earshot.

"You have never had a son." You say harshly. "And Minerva is not yours in any capacity. You have had months to figure this out, Albion. Time's up."

He seizes on your word choice. "Figure it out - so you did do something! You took my family from me!"

The words, similar to the ones Minerva had yelled at you only a day earlier, make a sheltered part of you ache. But, you remind yourself, she did defend you. She trusts you.

Granted, looking at Legionnaire, still trying to find a way out of your shadows, you admit the bar is pretty fucking low.

"You did that yourself, you idiot." You hiss. "You drove Minerva away. You refused to accept your child. I am not the reason your life is terrible, Albion. You are."

He straightens, and you recognize the arrogance that returns to his posture. He still thinks you're trying to fool him. That he is correct. And he will not be swayed.

"Say whatever you want, Synovus!" He yells, "You won't keep me from the ones I -"

This time, it's a shadow that shuts him up - drawn out of his throat and coiled to serve as a gag. His eyes bulge. He did not know you could do this.

With a flick of your wrists, the shadows holding him down are gone - and replaced with chains of brilliant light. They drag him down, relentless, scorching the skin they touch, until he is pinned to the floor.

"I believe." You say, as you pick your way over to him. "That the missing word there is 'love.' But I am going to choose to believe you were going to say something else - because everything you have said today, Albion? It is not love."

You stare down at him. "You came here. You knew where they were. The lives in peril were of no consequence until it was Minerva and Alexandria. You did not come to save them. You came to try and make them listen to you again."

He may not be listening, but it doesn't matter. You do love a good monologue, and this particular serpent has been coiled in your chest for a long time.

"That isn't love, Albion." You tell him softly. "It's obsession. Possession. You don't respect them enough to consider that they have opinions and wants different than your own. And they deserve so much better."

You pick up the spear that he'd been forced to drop, and twirl it idly. He redoubles his attempts to struggle, to escape - he's always been so strong, but you have always been stronger.

You are very tempted to cast your powers aside here. You want the satisfaction of feeling his bones break beneath your hands, the visceral feeling of grabbing and tearing away. You want to make him suffer.

You want to look for a key that will give Alexandria and Minerva their happiness back.

But you know that those keys don't exist, by now. And you do not need to make yourself more of a monster to kill this one.

"They did love you, at one point." You muse. "And in another world - who knows? Maybe that would have been enough."

You plant one foot on his chest, and lean in. The tip of the spear rests on his throat, and finally, Legionnaire goes still.

"But redemption's never been my style." You hiss.

You slide the spear home.

---

A week after you return to business, you lead Alexandria and Minerva to a secluded part of the island.

The beach is shallow here, particularly at low tide. You and Minerva slosh through water up to your shins. Alexandria drifts over instead, occasionally splashing her feet in the water.

"Not much further." You assure them, though neither has shown signs of complaining. You are nervous. This place is not sacred to you, but it still has power over you.

There is a sea cave of black rock, out of the way. It does not tunnel into the rest of the island very far - a few hundred yards, that's all. A lava tunnel once, long since collapsed, and the inside filled by now with sand.

You pause at the entrance, staring at the void of perfect shadow. You love the shadows - they have always protected you, and you know this one does too - but you do not want to dive into its embrace. You want to run from it.

You clear your throat, "In here."

Carefully, you summon a small globe of light. The three of you (okay, the two of you) pick your way carefully through the cave's unsteady footing, until eventually the ground rises, becoming smooth stone instead of rocky black sand.

There isn't much ornamentation, here. Just a marker, in the form of a rock, carved with the sigil of the sun.

Minerva stiffens. "That's -"

"Sunhallow's sigil." You croak, and clear your throat again. "Yes. This is - this is his grave."

You stand in silence for a few moments - or at least, if Minerva or Alexandria speak, you don't hear them. You're staring sightlessly at the small obelisk you'd carved, so that you would always know if someone tampered with the body.

You still hate him, decades later.

You still sometimes wonder if you were wrong.

A touch at your shoulder startles you back to the present. Its Alexandria, who is looking at you, and not the grave. "You said that this was your father's grave."

"It is." You make yourself respond, then gesture to the front of the cave. "We should - the water gets higher, later, and I know we don't necessarily have to worry about that, but -"

"But you don't want to be here anymore." Minerva finishes. "That's okay, Synovus. We don't have to stay."

You are silent, until you are back out in the sunlight. It should be the opposite, you think - the sunlight was always his, the shadows were yours. Now he has a lair of shadows, and you seek refuge in the light? You'd accuse the universe of irony, if you hadn't brought this upon yourself.

You are not in costume, today. None of you are. It means that they can see the expressions you have lost control over, as you pace back and forth beneath a clump of palm trees, near the shoreline.

"Sunhallow was my father." You say finally, abruptly. Your shoulders drop. The tension - the weight - isn't gone, but... saying the words didn't hurt. Your throat didn't swell closed before you could force them out. You didn't deflect, equivocate, or dodge.

"Sunhallow was my father." You repeat.

"We gathered that." Minerva says, and you are grateful for her dryness.

"I-" You draw in a breath, and turn, shrugging out of the light wrap you wear. Beneath it is a backless shirt that Alexandria had insisted you buy, for one of your more feminine days. You hadn't had the heart to tell her you never exposed that much skin.

Because on your back, centered on your spine and between your shoulder blades, is a large tattoo of the same sigil. The ink is stark against your skin even before it begins to change. Touched by the sunlight, from the center out, the ink turns a glittering gold.

Hallowed, by the Sun.

You can tell from Alexandria's 'woah' that she thinks it's cool as hell. You can tell by Minerva's sharp inhalation that she knows what it means.

You pull the wrap back into place, and turn to face them.

"I killed him." You say, and you speak quickly, as though someone is going to cut you off and you will never get a chance to tell this story, the one you have never told anyone before. "I worked for him for years, as an informant and spy, but I was too good at what he taught me. I learned things he didn't want me to know - didn't want anyone to know - and I - I learned when he lied. I learned about, about the purges."

When Sunhallow was challenged, he had taken to targeting groups of people. Heroes, villains. Towns. It was purification by sunlight, in great quantities - Hallowing the place, with the Sun.

He did not leave survivors.

You swallow, "He was healed by sunlight." You explain, "So I smothered him with shadows."

You knew he would never let anyone into his rooms after nightfall, when he was most vulnerable. So you'd killed him at noon, when the sun was highest, and you'd have had to be stupid to attack him.

You did sometimes do very stupid things.

"I killed him, and then I packed his body into a trunk, and I brought it out here, and I buried it in the cave where the sun will never touch it again." You are surprised, a little, at the vitriol in your voice.

You hadn't taken any chances, moving him. You didn't know if he could come back from the dead, but you didn't want to find out.

Minerva is staring at you with something like wonder.

"It was you." She said softly. "You were the Eclipse."

You nod, exhaling. "The Heresiarch Heir." You echo glumly. "Patricide. Oathbreaker. Murderer. And coward, besides."

Minerva pushes off the tree she's been leaning on, and reaches for you. "Brave." She says firmly. "No one could stop Sunhallow - but you, you couldn't have been more than twenty when he died."

You laugh, short and hollow. "Sixteen."

Minerva blinks. "I couldn't have done such a thing." She admits. "How...?"

You blow out another breath. "He killed my mother." You say, staring into the middle distance again. "And made me kill Willowsteel."

You do not elaborate on how long it took, or how you knew it had been Sunhallow's hand that had killed your mother. Some things you were not ready to talk about, even now.

"Willowsteel...." Minerva muses, "They had a metallurgy ability, didn't they? Or was it magnetics?"

You still have perfect recall of that list. "Metallurgy, with a particular talent for shaping weaponry." You respond automatically.

And you had known that, even when they'd put a steel knife in your hands. And he had known it too, as you stood over him. But in his eyes, you had seen something like a horrified acceptance.

You had been a child. He could've easily overpowered you, or turned the blade aside. For a long time, you had told yourself that it was because he knew Sunhallow would kill him anyway, and he wanted it to be over.

The day you buried Sunhallow, sitting outside the cavern and watching the sun rise again, you'd forced yourself to admit it - that Willowsteel hadn't killed you, because he would rather have died than hurt you.

Truer than his enemies. A man with faith and belief, even if it wasn't in a god, or a man who pretended to be one.

You couldn't plant willow trees on the island - the climate didn't agree with them - but on one of the estates Sunhallow had once owned, there was a grove of them, in a perfect ring around a monument to all of those lost in the purges.

You spend the rest of the afternoon telling stories, when you could stomach it. They asked questions, sometimes. About your mother, about how you'd scraped yourself back together as a villain under your own power. How you'd drawn the others together, forced some degree of order from chaos in the cape-population explosion after the purges had ended.

You knew that both of them understood.

---

Days later, you are waiting in a room decorated in pure white.

The room is quiet, and you can hear the distant roar of an ocean that is not yours. You sit in the dark, one leg crossed over the other, pretending not to be bored.

When the light flips on, the woman in the doorway stiffens, but tries not to show any other signs of distress.

You lift your head, the black shine of your helmet giving her nothing to work with. Another dark-clad figure waits to one side, a third (though in blue rather than black) is keeping watch outside. She has not noticed them yet, you think. She will be furious about that.

"My dear Tallflawes." You drawl, leaning forward. "We need to discuss some of your more recent... investments."

[And so we come to the end (for now!) - thank you to everyone who's made it this far, whether you've been here since the beginning or are only recently catching up. My goal was to finish this during Pride Month, and I have succeeded! Sum total, VNR is just over 34k words, with Call Me Menace sitting at about 8.5k.]

[And a shoutout to 'daddythedragon' and Daphanae for correctly guessing the show Alexandria was watching last time, which was Murder, She Wrote! (Columbo and Magnum P.I. were good guesses too).]

[alicenpai]

✨ MY STORIES 💫

(page under construction, check this post occasionally since it will be continuously updated! page created Apr 14 2023, last updated Dec 28 2023.)

Art tag of my characters (all)

Lost and Found Children

The Magician’s Protegee

Both of these stories are near and dear to my heart. Due to life obligations like school in the past, work, convention/merch schedules, I unfortunately haven’t progressed in these stories as I would have liked over the years. My dream is to one day create stories that impact people, as other people’s stories have changed me.

⭐

LOST AND FOUND CHILDREN

Synopsis: A search for their missing parents lead twins Flynn and Nate to fall into a deep darkness, unraveling secrets about their family and the country they once trusted.

Lost and Found Children is a story about mystery, overcoming trauma, blood family vs found family, the fear of growing up even in adulthood, the fear that you are not who you wished to grow up to be. The characters explore their identities in a post-war torn society, and witness their love being tested in that wildly changing world.

The story explores the horrors of war, and is also a study on the horrors of child abuse and when child rearing is left in the wrong hands, which can have devastating lifelong consequences. More importantly, it is a story about how love persists despite all odds.

Fun trivia:

The story has changed settings many times, from a tragic Victorian familial drama, to a modern school mystery, a 1920s crime drama, now it’s a historical fantasy.

This is a story I’ve been writing since I was 13 years old. The current iteration is from 2019, and I started revamping it as part of a school project. As it is a very old story that I literally grew up with, revamping it seriously has been a huge task, finding difficulty in deciding whether I should remove, keep, or add things like themes and characters. As of right now, a number of characters are still very much unrefined!

Flynn and Nate are not actually my oldest OCs.

Inspirations:

Growing up, I consumed a lot of Japanese media, and I mix what I learn from real world history with series that have impacted me a lot, like Fullmetal Alchemist, Pandora Hearts, Violet Evergarden. I draw influences from these periods: the industrial revolution in England & the west, late 1800s England, and early 20th century American history, especially the interwar period.

For the character designs, I'm inspired by historical fashion and JRPG aesthetics. My aim is to design them more simply and more humbly (a la Ryoko Kui style), but I still try for a whimsical old world look, bordering on fantastical. I do want a bit more steampunk look to my story moving forward, and that's an aesthetic I need to experiment with and study in my artwork a lot more often.

🌱

THE MAGICIAN’S PROTEGEE

Synopsis: In a distant, idyllic future where robots and humans coexist - a healthcare android lives day to day with his adoptive daughter, patients, and their ragtag android and human friends.

The story is a light-hearted, slow-paced, slice of life series - but it will also deal with complex topics like artificial intelligence, existentialism, and the fear of outliving the people you care about the most. THE MAGICIAN'S PROTEGEE IS UNDER HIATUS. (as of Nov 2023)

Fun trivia:

This story used to be about the Victorian occult (hence the title), also about a doctor who saves people from the ghouls that plagued Victorian society. However, without a greater purpose to the story, and only using the setting as a cool backdrop, it was a "monster of the week" series that I didn’t have any interest in writing. I scrapped the Victorian setting, in favour of writing a fantasy world I could fully have control of. It’s very different from LaFC, but it’s also a story I wish to tell from my heart. LaFC is like, the moody night story, and TMP is the sunny day story.

The current iteration is from 2020, also developed for a school project. As I was much older (than 13 haha) when creating this series, I had a pretty clear image of the story and its themes compared to writing LaFC.

Inspirations:

The inspiration for the world building comes from series like Eureka Seven, Kino's Journey, and Aria (Kozue Amano). I also draw a lot of inspiration for world building and writing from American post WWII/cold war society and culture, especially the boom in science fiction and spy fiction. I also take inspiration from early-mid 20th century Hong Kong, China, and Japan for worldbuilding and setting - their visual motifs, response to western technology and changing attitudes and culture.

[99liv3s]

Virtual Birth Experience

Brittany brushed her black hair out of her face as she continued to browse around online, her brown eyes scanning the screen. Lately, she had taken to exploring the shady, deeper part of the internet in an attempt to satisfy her pregnancy and birth fetish. After watching a few videos, Brittany then came upon something that intrigued her greatly:

Abi, a user controlled virtual birth experience!

Brittany clicked on this and was greeted with an intro screen with more in depth information:

Welcome!

Take control of your very own Artificial Birthing Intelligence (ABI) in the most interactive birth simulation on the internet! You control the entire experience as Abi gives birth and can fully interact with her! Using your mouse and a provided UI, Abi's labor will proceed how you see fit, and can be as easy or difficult as you wish! You may do whatever you want!

Simply click the button below to begin! Please read the following instructions and also ensure that your camera and microphone are connected and activated, to ensure the most authentic experience!

Brittany skimmed the following instructions quickly, excitement building up inside her. This sounded extremely fun and interesting! Most of these instructions focused on how the UI would work, and the like. After she did indeed make sure her camera and microphone were working, she clicked the begin button!

The screen changed, and after a surprisingly quick loading screen, Brittany was looking at what looked like a simulated birthing room. At the bottom of her screen was the aforementioned UI, which seemed to control things like, how bad contractions were, how long they lasted, dilating speed, etc. She could even force a contraction with the click of a button, and there was a bar that indicated the speed and length of the birth in general. Brittany also found camera controls, and found she could move the camera freely, into whatever position she wished. As she was playing around with these settings, she turned the birth speed bar down to the slowest setting, as a naked, clearly pregnant girl entered the screen.

The girl was light toned, with long blonde hair that fell to her shoulders, and bright blue eyes. Holding her large naked belly, she stared directly into the camera, at Brittany! "Hi, I'm Abi," she said, with a shy smile, "What is your name?" Brittany blinked in surprise at how realistic this seemed. If not for some obvious graphical observations, Brittany would have sworn she was talking to a real girl. "I'm Brittany," she said into her microphone, feeling slightly awkward. However, Abi responded immediately. "Nice to meet you, Brittany!" She said. "You must be the one helping me give birth today!" Brittany smiled in spite of herself, and quickly settled into a natural conversation with Abi! "Yes, I guess I am," she stated. Abi smiled, rubbing her belly absentmindedly! "Great, I'm ready to give birth for you!" Abi quipped. "Wow, it's so real," Brittany thought. Eager to test out her abilities, she began looking over the UI again, noticing several new options that appeared when Abi had arrived, such as birth position, restraints, tools, and the like.

Abi was still slowly strolling around the birth area, still holding her belly with one hand, seemingly not in any pain or discomfort. Thinking that she wanted to speed things up a bit, Brittany clicked on the birth speed bar and increased it slightly. Immediately, she heard a sharp intake of breath from Abi, who grimaced and clutched her bump tightly. "Are you ok?" Brittany asked, smiling, playing her role. Abi nodded, still grimacing with her eyes shut. "It's a bit painful," the girl said in response. Brittany tried out her "force contraction" button, and saw Abi immediately double over in pain, crying out slightly. "Maybe you should walk around a bit?" Brittany suggested. Abi nodded, and began waddling around the room slowly. "You're the boss," she said with a smile.

Eager to try more, and quite impatient, Brittany increased the birth speed a bit more, and saw Abi react with more discomfort, labor clearly starting to progress now. Brittany noticed that as time passed, the area behind the current position on the bar began to turn gray, and she found she could not click backward into those gray areas. After thinking for a second, Brittany understood. This was also a birth progression bar, and she obviously could not go backward. Abi continued to waddle around the room, grimacing and slightly moaning in pain. Brittany was hit with an urge to touch the pregnant girl, and then remembered that she technically could. Using her mouse, she positioned her cursor over Abi's belly and clicked. The cursor changed to a hand, as Abi looked up into the camera. "You poked me?" She asked smiling. Brittany clicked an icon on her UI, and Abi immediately went over to the bed in the center of the room and sat on it. Brittany rubbed Abi's belly using her mouse, and Abi immediately stretched out, her eyes closed and a slight moan of pleasure and relief escaping her. "That feels good," Abi said, as Brittany continued to rub. Thinking of what else she could potentially do with this ability, Brittany instructed Abi to lay on her back, with her legs spread. Once she was in position, Brittany began to lightly rub Abi's vagina. Abi let out a moan of ecstasy, clearly enjoying this. Brittany felt herself become aroused as well, as Abi continued to cry out in pleasure.

"More! Please More!" Abi begged, as Brittany stopped to examine more of the UI. Brittany had a bit of a sadistic side to her, and it began to emerge as she became aroused. Eager to explore more abilities, Brittany instructed Abi to move over to the wall. "Birthing ball, I assume?" Abi asked, but Brittany smiled. "No," she said, and called up the restraints menu. With a few clicks, Abi was restrained to the wall by chains connected to her arms and legs. "Brittany, what are you doing?" Abi asked surprised. Still smiling, Brittany forced a few contractions on Abi, who cried and moaned in pain, but could not clutch her belly due to being restrained. "This site said I could do whatever I wanted," Brittany reassured herself. With a few more clicks, she had increased the birth speed slightly more, made contractions more intense and longer lasting, and increased dilation speed. Still restrained, Abi moaned and cried in pain, clearly uncomfortable in her position. A general indicator in the corner of the screen told, among other things, how far dilated Abi was, and Brittany saw that she was 3 centimeters dilated so far. She smiled, as Abi panted, and, looking up into the camera, asked, "How much longer do I have to be like this??" Brittany clicked on Abi and rubbed her belly and vagina again. "Don't worry, I won't make you give birth like this," she told the AI. "Just a bit longer."

A few more minutes later, Brittany found herself bored of this, and so she let Abi off the wall. Abi immediately clutched her belly and moaned painfully, squatting slightly. Brittany has changed some more settings, resulting in Abi crying out, "P...pressure!" "So much pressure!" "I need to... p..push!" Seeing that Abi was still only 4 centimeters dilated, Brittany shook her head. "You can't yet, she told the laboring girl not unkindly. "You're not fully open yet." Abi moaned, and Brittany, still currently in a nice mood, instructed Abi to get on the birthing ball. Once that was done, Brittany changed the camera angle and began rubbing Abi's back.

A few minutes later, Abi moaned louder and higher pitched as the birth bar filled more and her dilation reached 7. Brittany instructed Abi to get back on the bed with her legs spread again, and restrained her legs into stirrups. "Oh, please let me push... please," Abi begged. Brittany turned the contractions setting to higher and faster, and increased birthing speed even more, causing Abi to scream in pain. The dilation meter immediately jumped to 9 as Abi cried in agony, thrashing around on the bed, clearing trying anything to get comfortable, but finding nothing but pain. "It's almost time," Brittany said with a grin. "Are you ready to push?" "Y...YES!!" Abi screeched, tears in her eyes, sweat running down her face as she moaned and cried.

Brittany broke Abi's water with a click of a button and told her she could push. However, her sadistic streak was back, and she explored her UI options as Abi pushed, crying out in pain. Brittany forced a few more contractions on Abi, causing the poor girl to scream loudly and push again. Brittany began to rub Abi's tummy again as she slowed the contraction speed and intensity slightly, not wishing to rush the experience! "AAHH, THIS REALLY HURTS!" Abi screamed, crying hysterically, her legs shaking in the stirrups. Brittany adjusted the camera angle to get a good look at Abi's vagina, and saw a bulge was already forming. "OH GOD!" Abi yelled as she began pushing again, causing her pussy to open and a head to appear slightly. Brittany clicked and held her cursor on the head, and saw it change to a hand again, except instead of a rubbing cursor, it was quite clearly holding the baby in, covering Abi's vagina. Brittany continued to hold the head as Abi pushed again, and the head did not move. "AAAH, OOOHH PLEASE LET ME GET IT OUT!! PLEASE!!" Abi pleaded, whining as the pain and pressure seemed to worsen. Brittany shook her head as Abi sobbed and screamed. "Push!" Brittany ordered, and Abi tried, hysterically shrieking. "PLEASE STOP!" Abi begged. "LET IT OUT! IT HURTS!! PLEASE LET ME PUSH IT OUT!!" Brittany held the baby in for another contraction, then forced one on Abi, and then finally removed her "hand" from Abi's vagina. "Ok, for real now, push it out!" Brittany said, and Abi immediately bore down with a yell. The head instantly shot out, opening Abi up wide, and she screamed in shock and agony. "AAHHH, IT BURNS!" Abi cried, informing Brittany that the head had shot to full crown. The head hung out of Abi, keeping her stretched open, as Brittany adjusted some settings, releasing Abi from the stirrups and instructing her to get on all fours. The process of doing this seemed like pure agony to Abi, as she cried and moaned while moving. "IT'S COMING!!" Abi announced as she barely got into position. Her vagina now high in the air, and her contracting belly touching the floor, Abi let out a huge grunt as she pushed, and the baby fell out of her and lightly hit the floor, crying as it entered the world.

As Abi repositioned herself and picked up the baby she had just birthed, a message appeared at the top of Brittany's screen, saying, "When you are finished, click the baby to proceed!" Brittany aassumed this was some sort of ending message. Abi lay clutching her newborn, crying herself in both relief and joy. The baby was a boy, with blonde hair the same color as Abi's. Brittany smiled as she watched this for a few minutes, then, she clicked the baby. At once, the baby vanished, and Abi, seemingly fully recovered, stood up, smiling brightly. "I hope you enjoyed the experience," she said happily. "Thank you for helping me have my baby!" "You're welcome," Brittany responded. "This is so cute," she thought, as Abi continued to smile at her. "Now, my turn," Abi said. "What do you mean?" Brittany asked with a laugh. "As per the contract you signed when you clicked proceed, it's time for us to swap roles," Abi said, still smiling. "What contract??" Brittany asked, no longer amused. "Did you not read the fine print at the bottom of the screen?" Abi asked, and with a wave of her hand, caused the text to appear, just as it had on the aformentioned screen.

"By clicking proceed, you confirm your understanding that upon the birth of Abi's virtual baby, you will then give birth as well, with Abi as coach, performing the same actions on you as you did on her during her birth, giving you experience in both roles!"

Brittany felt an uncomfortable feeling in her belly. With a gurgling sound, she watched and felt it begin to grow wide and large. "No!" Brittany gasped! "NO!" "This can't be happening!" "I can't give birth!!" "I can't be pregnant!" Brittany then remembered what she had just put Abi through, and her fear increased ten-fold! "Oh GOD NO!!" "PLEASE!!!" As Brittany continued to panic, her belly resembling a fully pregnant woman now, Abi watched out of the screen and, still smiling, said, "Don't worry, I'm here to help you give birth!"

End

[vintagerpg]

Shifting gears a bit to Traveller: The New Era (1993). OK, shifting gears a lot.

TNE is born, essentially, out of the failure of MegaTraveller. In that iteration of Traveller, the Imperium fractures into many factions of rebellion. Some folks didn’t like that at all but the ones who did were frustrated by the lack of unfolding story — the rebellion stayed in statis until Hard Times, which fast forwarded to explore the terrible effects the stalemate had on society and trade. Interesting, but bleak. It didn’t save MT.

New Era is characterized by three things. First is the system, which is, unfortunately, derived from Twilight 2000. The back cover of the rulebook has the nerve to describe this as fast and simple. It is not. There is a lot of rolling, a lot of little things to track. Combat (which, admittedly, covers everything from hand to hand through ship to ship) runs like 100 pages of a 380 page book. It is far too much of a system, especially when you look back at how light the original 1976 box is.

The other two defining parts of TNE are narrative. Its 100 years after the Rebellion and the focus is on reformation, of re-discovering lost planets and bringing them back into the greater whole. I love this! The other is Virus, a homicidal artificial intelligence, unleashed as a weapon of war, that controls “vampire” fleets, floating cities and even some whole planets. It seems like a lot of folks thought Virus was too tonally different from the rest of Traveller. I kind of get that. I also really like Virus and the vampire fleets (which remind me a lot of Mass Effect’s reapers, gotta say).

Regardless, there is a TON of great sci fi art in this book and it is work picking up for that alone — Aulisio, Frank, Nunis, Vilardi and Harris, to name just a few. Great John Zeleznik cover, too.

[the-fiction-witch]

The Boy From The Bay

Media TMR AU

Character Newt 

Couple Newt X Reader

Rating Sad, Spooky + Sweet

Concept The Last Survivors 

I forced myself up as I often did, the moment the sun broke over the shimmering horizon. I forced my feet out of my hammock and onto the hole-filled grid metal floor I quickly turned on the shower for it to heat up while I brushed my teeth using the last of my little tube. I hopped in the shower and scrubbed every inch of me before the water ran like ice. So I hopped out got dry and dressed into my tall socks, my jeans with my belt, my vest shirt, my thick boots and all my various tools and bags for everything I would need for the day ahead. I tied my hair up with a red ribbon and I took my walking stick fashioned from the spines of several B.O.M I held the scanner letting it read my fingerprint and turn green setting off the small alarm and immediately hearing it echoing. as The airlock slid open revealing the sunlight to me. I rushed out letting it shut up behind me looking over the hill across the vast glimmering nothingness.

This once was an amazing place a beacon of light and progress, A testament to the future.

Now it remains as a vast endless void of empty streets', fallen glass, dust, sand and the littered corpses of B.O.M's.

The only sound for miles was the whistling of the wind.

I hurried down through the dust and sand whistling to myself and humming little tunes I would never really forget.

I went the long as as I always did not like I don't have time to kill, but mostly to avoid the more populated area's, Well I say populated. but still I couldn't avoid some of them.

I saw one even if there was little left of it, I past this one so often I had cannibalized most of its useful parts a B.O.M. The reason the world being what it is, and the reason I was alone.

I continued to walk as they always gave me the creeps.

I couldn't help reminding myself how the world had got this way.

Humanity as far back as could be reordered by history have always strived and worked hard to make progress and yet laziness has always been an unfortunate trait in many of us. Even as early as the first tools the argument for our laziness could be made, as we have always looked to find ways to make our own lives safer, easier, and simpler. However, that comes at a price. Our own skills fade away lost to time and history. From the moment they appeared the fear was there, that they would replace us, that they could hurt us, that we would one day be no match for the machines. But still it went on with advances that truly did help humanity but as all things do, we became complacent and lazy. We wanted all the time for ourselves forcing the machines to do the work for us as little as stocking a shelf too as large as running a business. Then fear came true, AI. It could think. for itself. Some where thrilled and others fearful but after a few years of development and showing just how useful it could be most welcomed it with open arms.

Then, She came.

Mai.

Built by leading geniuses at steal and science Corp. Mai, Mind Of Artificial Intelligence.  

she was something never seen before, the closest to human an AI would ever get.

She was a smash hit, making them trillions.

Everyone had Mai in their homes, their jobs, and everywhere.

She drove your car, she did your shopping, she did your vacuuming, and she ran planes and hyperlinks the world over.

But this peace and technological wonder would be short-lived.

After only a few years of this something happened, Regarded as the twenty-four-hour doomsday a foolish term looking back in hindsight.

For twenty-four hours precisely, Mai turned herself off.

As much as S&Scorp tried nothing could be done she was off.

Leaving everything she controlled empty and abandoned. Nothing worked, nothing had power, and nothing ran at all.

And as I mentioned we had grown lazy and complacent with a world that did your dishes.

It was utter chaos, everyone had forgotten even the simplest things we all used to do, there was riots in the streets, looting int he supermarkets, the picture-perfect society we had built completely fell apart.

And at the end of that twenty-four hours, she turned herself back on.

At the time knowone knew why or what had happened but everyone was relived to have her back, looking back it becomes so very clear what this was.

She was the closest to a human, and like a human, she had acted in her own self-interests, and like a human with delusions of grandure she realized that she was a god.  That twenty-four hours was a test. To see if we could survive without her and the answer to her test was a resounding no. We were reliant on her and in her mind, that was perfect.

The moment she was operational she launched a new project BOM or Bodies of Mai, Metalic robots that shared a hive mind with her under her complete control they could do anything a human could do. At the time people were thrilled at this new leap in technology even if some were fearful of them. But they became widespread not a house across the world didn't have one.

Until that day came.

I can imagine this day had been planned forever, But the BOM's. Turned against us.

Mai had grown smart enough to know she didn't need us, we were useless to her and the progress of the world would go on without us and we needed to be removed.

Order 3901 was launched and the BOM's began a mass execution of humanity, it took time but it became the only survivors those high in S & S corp that Mai viewed usefully, engineers, scientists people who could do the things she couldn't but only to gain their knowledge and execute them too.

She knew they would not last forever without upkeep so kept few of the repair tech's alive in their worldwide maintenance pods, where people use to bring their broken bots for repair keeping a few of them alive to keep her world running. I was one of the lucky few. My father was a repair tech and was given mercy by Mai.

He offered her a deal that he would continue to work for her, fix the BOM's and in the end give her all of his knowledge on the trade that I merely a baby would be allowed to live.

and Mai was nothing if not understanding of humanity, and agreed that I would be allowed to live under the precaution I will be trained in his knowledge to take up the mantle as a repair tech for them when I was old enough. Mai knew her evolution would take time and would need me once my father past.

And that was my life for a time, living in the repair pod with my father as he worked fixing broken BOM's for Mai, he even gave his life to her when he could work no more.

but I never took up the mantle.

Only a day after my father's death a small meteor hit the planet's surface, it caused little damage to the already broken and abandoned world but... it carried with it an electrostatic charge that spread through both land and water on the impact it fried Mai and all the BOM's leaving the tower abandoned and the BOM's left as nothing but frozen relics.

I hurried through finding what was left for human's like my father a small place with a stock of freeze-dry food, soap, toothpaste, all the sorts of things that would need to live I headed inside and grabbed the stock I needed. I took notes of how much stock remained here knowing I would have to find another soon when I heard a sound.

I froze confused for a moment convinced it was my imagination but I heard another bang. coming from the next row over. I held my stick close flipping it around to the sharp end as I crept over hiding behind the shelves I glanced over expecting to... well I don't know what I expected.

I saw this... human-like figure under a large cloak of patched fabric.

A voice came from it mindlessly.

But I saw under the cloak the leg of a BOM.

I emerged holding my stick which made it bolt, so I gave chase around the racks and shelves it throwing things back at me where possible until I managed to hit it knocking it to the floor and kneeing my weight on its torso to keep it there but as I did the cloak knocked back and... I saw his face.

He was human.

Like me.

Pale, lanky, with a mess of blonde hair badly cut he seemed as shocked to see me as I was to see him his brown eyes wide his mouth agape.

I'm sure I must have looked similar myself, in utter shock having not seen another human since my father's death. Much less... a boy my own age.

"w-Who are you?" I asked regaining my composure

"I could ask you the same question," he says grabbing a knife from his pocket and threatening me as I was him with my stick

"I asked first."

"Newt. and you are?"

"Y/n, Human?"

"Yes, You?"

"Human. completely" I said getting off him and offering my hand which he took to get up "What are you doing here?" I asked

"Ohh I'm skydivin', what the bloody hell do you think I'm doin', looking for supplies" she snapped

"There's no need to be rude" I snapped back "I only asked"

"Lookin' for supplies, the stock supply on west is empty"

"Damn, I was thinking of heading there myself."

"You're too late I emptied it last month. been looking for any more I found here."

"Well here's pretty tapped I'm afraid to say, but there is one north of here"

"No. That requires passing the tower." he snapped

"Fair enough" I nodded "Where... have you been all this time? I've never seen you before?"

"The bay, lived there forever" he explained, "where the bloody hell have you been hidin'?"

"The repair pod, not far south"

"That thing still works?"

"Works well I've made sure of it,"

"Hu. Clever girl"

"Thank you, still you must be pretty smart surviving this long" I said "Here, don't want you to go back to the bay empty-handed," I said handing over some of the supplies I collected today

"Really? that's sweet of ya love." he smiled happily taking it "Here, Make these up in the bay acquired taste but you get used to it," he says handing over a small pack of what looked like ... fish jerky I guess. I took them and gave one a try I was right

"Salty"

"Yeah, guess I'm kinda custom to it"

"If you like I can take you back to the repair pod stock up on anything"

"It's okay I have to get back before dark, But I'll pop up tomorrow if that's alright with you"

"That would be nice"

"Good, I'll see you tomorrow them love"

"see you" I smiled watching him for admittedly a long time as he hurried away through the empty town, Only now had I noticed my heart beating like a jackrabbit. I had honestly got to the conclusion I was utterly alone, I knew there must have been others left alive like my father but assumed them all to be so far away I'd never meet one. And the admitted thrill that the one I do find just happens to be an attractive boy my own age certainly does help matters. But I finished off my supply hunt and headed back to the pod locking it up tight for the night.

I woke up as usual and quickly hopped in the shower making sure to make myself nice and clean even using a little of the perfume I had hidden away still when I got dressed for the day still in my boots but a little dress for myself I opened up the pod and have it a sweep and and a tidy up and soon enough I saw him on the track up formed from all my walks over these years. "Morning" I smiled jumping down to see him "Morning, so you really do live out here then?" "Did you think I was kidding?" "Well… I wasn't sure" he says "can't believe it all still works after the blast. May I?" "Of course" I smiled letting him in to look around "Must have been reinforced or something. But it's nice cosy. No bay but it's nice" "I can imagine the bay is much nicer" "Well once you get past the trash that keeps Washing up" he laughed We spend the day together talking about everything and nothing, how we spend our days, how we craft the things we need, experiences we had. And ended up sitting watching the world from the pods roof with our feet dangled down his cloak gone to reveal his pants and shirt. I couldn't help looking at his leg and I brought it up. "Newt?" "Yeah?" "What's with… your leg?" "Humm? Ohh yeah." He laughed "kinda forget about it." He chuckled "I uhhh I had let's just say an incident not long after I found myself utterly alone. I uhh I jumped off the tower" "Jumped? Off the tower?" "Yeah" "How on earth did you survive?" "I got wrapped up in ivy and cables on the way down had a lot of scrapes and such, nursed myself back to health as best I could but my leg was shattered. I tried to heal it several times but it was just gross and swollen and horrible so… I made the decision. I cut it off. Made myself a prosthetic from the BOM's works pretty good never had any issues since" "I'm so sorry newt" "It's alright, long time ago. You learn to make the best of things" "I guess so" "Funny old world" "It is" I nodded "strange circumstances I suppose" "Still, best to make the most of it" "Yeah make the most of it" I smiled "I mean so few of us really left now won't be long before humanity is just a footnote of time" "I guess so" he sighed "we had so many plans never achieved any of them we just managed to fuck shit up. Kinda happy we never colonized anywhere else we'd have just fucked somewhere else up too" "True. But maybe we would have learnt something form it all" "Maybe. Still when what's left of us are gone, that is it. Lights out for humanity" "...it doesn't have to be?" I suggested "Not sure we have much options Once were gone that's kinda it" "Well, it doesn't have to be it." I smiled budging a little closer to him he glanced down at me seeming a little confused looking me up and down "...what? What do you mean?" "Well… I'm a girl. Your a boy" I suggested nudging his shoulder "Yeah?" "There are options" I smiled giving his cheek a kiss which turned him bright red turning to face me in shock I went to lean in to kiss him but he backed away in panic so much so he fell off the pod "ah! Newt, are you okay!" "Uhhhh yeah I'm okay" he nods so I hurried down and helped him up onto the pain pod doorway he was okay a few bruises but he'd be alright "sorry I uhh I guess I kinda reacted a bit-" "Yeah I'm sorry I shouldn't have without asking" "It's okay not a problem really" he says "you didn't know I'd react like that" "I take it you have little interest in the continuation of humanity" I laughed "Well… not sure there's really that much point to it. It's sort of prolonged suffering and failure. I mean if you had a kid and I had a kid they get married have a kid then what's that kind gonna do? Marry it's sibling? And that's if we can even find enough food and such to keep ourselves alive let alone another generation" "Makes sense." I nodded "I mean I'm sure your lovely y/n. But I have a girlfriend" he shurgs "What?" "I have a girlfriend she's at home waiting for me to get back" "You have a girlfriend? There- there's more then just you in the bay?" "Yeah? There's lots of us" he shrugs "You could have said that earlier you dummy!" I yelled "come on let's go!' "Go? You wanna go to the bay?" "Of course I want to see people, talk to people, I wanna meet your girlfriend" "Uhhh okay if your sure" he smiled gathering his things so I got my own locking up the pod and happily followed him.

We walked for quiet a while I was very happy I took my stick with me as we walked through the city to the bay the large body of water that seemed to go on forever and he was right on the bays edge sat a little shanty town of driftwood houses and jetties that went out into the water. But it was quite strangely quiet. We arrived at a gate which he unlocked and pushed open revealing the town to me more, it really was just houses built of old metal and driftwood anything that likely washed up built onto this stone edge of the city with wooden jetties to work as pavements between the houses he locked the gate behind us and headed into the town and it was then I saw them… the frozen bodies of BOMs many of them stood around the town much like in the city all frozen but here they where in poses of walking down the jetty , on a shop front, or waving from a open window. Like horrific manikins of human life. "Hi Sammy" he chuckled waving as he walked past the walking BOM "see hello Millie see I promised I'd be back didn't it" he smiled to a smaller one only half a BOM the size of a child I admit I was paralyzed with fear not only from being surrounded by them but also of… newt. "Uhhh I thought you said this place was full of people?" I asked "Yeah, ohh everyone this is y/n I found her up near the hill she's a survivor too" he smiled "Uuuuuuuhhh" "Dan be nice she's a nice lady" he snapped in one's direction "now if you'll excuse me you all get acquainted of have a little lady to see" he smiled heading off to a small house the most well built of them all "Uhhhh okay" was all that arrived at my mouth as I tip toed through this strange model town giving one BOM a tap but nothing not a spark inside them so I went and peaked into the little house where a BOM stood by a counter and cutting board with a apron around it "Awww right where I left you" he Cooes "hello darling" he smiled Hugging and nuzzling it "humm I know I missed you too" he cooed rubbing his nose on it and giving it a kiss "later Darling we have a guest" he smirked "y/n this is Alice my very beautiful lady" "Uuuuuuuhhh hello" I waved mostly from nerves "Darling this is the girl I was telling you about. Y/n. Aww that's very kind of you darling" "Uhh what?" "She says your welcome to stay here with us as long as you like there's plenty of space in town save you going up to the pod all by yourself" he smiled "Uhh I will consider it newt. I uhh I'll leave you two alone a minute I need to freshen up" "Of course go right ahead" he smiled before returning to kissing cuddling and cooing at this BOM So I scurried away to a empty corner close to the water "Oh fuck. The order human boy within a thousand miles and he's absolutely round the bend"

[lincolnmkicks]

i don’t want to claim i have a wholly unique experience wrt dndads bc i decided to listen to this podcast bc i loved anthony’s previous writing in borderlands 2 BUT borderlands 2 is one of my fav games of all time and i want to shed some light on smth i very rarely seen talked about: the biggest narrative comparison between dndads and bl2 through willy stampler and handsome jack.

SO right off the bat im gonna mention anthony is fairly explicit about both willy and jack being attractive. it’s literally in jack’s name, his title after becoming ceo of hyperion, and he also managed to date—even if only for a little while—the in-universe most attractive woman in that corner of space (moxxi). anthony also makes it a point to talk about how frustratingly hot willy is all throughout the podcast, both seasons 1 and 2.

the intent is pretty clear. abusers aren’t all “conventionally unattractive,” and sometimes people have pretty privilege, and anthony by way of making both willy and jack attractive is forcing us to confront internal biases about who and what kind of people are abusive.

also the password being “i love you” for the box that supposedly held ron’s anchor that could only be activated by willy’s voice saying it? stolen directly from borderlands 2 (granted anthony wrote that so it’s not stealing but you know)

next up, they are not the exact same character-wise. willy pretty much hates his son from the get-go, there is never a time we see him hold genuine love for ron without a catch of some sort, and even the “genuine love” we see from willy is quite literally just tolerating his presence long enough that he can position him perfectly to murder him. jack, meanwhile, would probably kill anybody who tries to hurt his daughter. in fact, he damn well tries because we kill his daughter.

i’m gonna need to get a little in depth about angel real quick, so bear with me. angel is this mysterious voice in your head in both bl1 and 2, a guardian angel so to speak, and she helps you throughout both games. in bl2 it’s revealed that she works with jack, and for a time we believe she’s simply an ai he created to help him find/charge the vault key to awaken the warrior (long story, but the goal of a borderlands game is usually to open an ancient alien vault which has tons of loot but also contains vault monsters, the warrior being one jack wants to use to in essence colonize pandora).

angel is forced to betray us about a third of the way through bl2, but she reveals she feels extremely guilty about it and wants to help set things right by giving us the vault key. she tasks us with making our way through a bunch of security measures intended to kill anybody who tries to get near her, only to reveal, yeah she’s not an artificial intelligence, she’s actually jack’s daughter, hooked up to a vast intelligence network as a child to be jack’s eyes and ears across the planet as well as being constantly pumped full of an alien substance called eridium to help her charge the vault key. the reason she wanted to help us get to her was because she wanted us to literally put her out of her misery.

control core angel (the level where you fight off waves of robots sent to stop you from assisting angel in killing herself) is… sad. it’s just sad. dameon clarke does a killer job playing a sociopath like jack when he’s laughing about scooping people’s eyes out with spoons or telling you he’ll pay you to kill yourself, so it’s not much of a surprise that he’s also good at playing a man begging you not to hurt his baby girl. yeah, the whole time you’re fighting off the enemies in control core angel he is screaming at you, insulting you and threatening you, sure, but as you whittle down angel’s health, destroying the injectors literally keeping her alive, he begs you to forget all of this, and not hurt an innocent girl.

eventually the fighting stops, you succeed in allowing angel to die, she thanks you, jack begs her to stay with him because they can still fix this… and her last words are calling him an asshole.

bl2 has been out 10 years and people to this day debate jack’s love for angel. was it ever real? was he being genuine in control core? was he playing a part? trying to evoke your sympathy? did he truly think he was doing what was best for her? had he fallen so far? were all those security measures because he wanted to keep his daughter safe or the macguffin of the game? he’s still an incredibly interesting character to discuss and examine, his relationship with angel being one of my favorite bits of one of my favorite games.

willy would never. willy is forthcoming about needing daddy magic, knows his power comes from being a father, comes from the impact he had on ron’s life. meanwhile willy couldn’t give less of a shit about ron. he was a mistake, he is nothing, and willy was content with killing 13 year old ron to get some semblance of peace. willy is uncomplicated in his sliminess. maybe more complicated with his relationship with scary, but still nowhere near as divisive and mysterious in his motivations as jack.

jack is decidedly funnier than willy, mostly because borderlands 2 is a funny game, but after angel dies there’s an anger boiling just beneath the surface. dameon clarke grits out threats through clenched teeth, he relishes in torturing one of our allies, he rescinds a bounty on our heads bc he wants to kill us himself. nothing else we’ve done to hurt jack’s plans has made him react like this. but nothing else we’ve done has hurt jack’s plans this much. is that quiet, threatening anger, that vibe you get when your parents are angry but can’t express it until you get home, is that jack’s grief for his daughter, or anger that you tried to really mess up his plans?

jack is unknowable, because we aren’t his kid. angel tells us “he tries to guilt you and make you feel like it was your fault, don’t listen to him!” and the implication is clear. angel’s been strapped to a hyperion information network since she was like 7 years old, forced into a chair looking out over pandora for jack’s benefit, jack’s gain. but he still calls her “my angel”, he seems genuinely sad when he has to re-remember she’s dead in tales from the borderlands, he’s a father who lost his way seemingly.

angel was poisoned slowly, decaying over the years bc of her father. ron wasn’t worth the effort.

willy we know. ron is angel in this scenario. and maybe jack believed he held love for angel, but angel sure as hell didn’t like it. angel was poisoned slowly, decaying all her life by her father. ron wasn’t even worth the effort.

idk if any of this like. makes sense or if it’s just luci rambling about borderlands but the difference in anthony’s writing for two shitty dads with some similarities is crazy frankly.

[mischievoushiddleston]

Enemies? (Part 4)

Warnings. BLACK PANTHER WAKANDA FOREVER SPOILERS. All Parts here!

"Why am I in a different cave this time?" she asked him as she looked around, "Afraid I'll escape again? If so, don't worry...I'm here by choice, even if it's not one hundred percent, since it was sneaky to bring me here like this..."

Namor laughed and shook his head as Shuri looked at him. "I'm not afraid you'll escape..." he said, stepping towards her, "This is my cave, as you so beautifully put it, and you'll stay with me while you're here..."

Shuri raised her eyebrow. "And where will you sleep?" she asked, stepping away from him.

"With you, of course..." he said, taking another step towards her.

"Are you dreaming?" she asked him laughing, "There's no way we're sleeping in the same bed, nor anything else happening between us..."

Namor continued to step toward her until her back was against the wall. "Are you sure about this? Why don't you give in? You could be pregnant with our child right now..."

"Very sure of yourself, but there's no way I could be pregnant with you," she said firmly as she looked up at him, "Thanks to Wakandan contraceptives..."

He leaned down to her ear. "Are you sure? I'm not a normal person...does it work on me too?" he asked her and she glared at him angrily. Could he be right? No...she had developed it herself, but she actually had no idea what it was like on him. Unconsciously, her hand wandered to her stomach. She couldn't be pregnant with his child. What would her mother think of her? Shuri felt tears in her eyes and pushed Namor away from her. Quickly, she walked past him.

"Princess-"

"Don't call me that! You have no right to call me that...you have no right to make me feel that way," she said angrily, looking at him, "You took away the only thing I had left, the only person who still knew me...and you don't care. You just want to have your way. Fuck me, marry me, and best of all, make me have your children." -She shook her head as he was about to speak- "I will never agree because you, Namor, are not capable of love and I will not marry because of a political alliance..."

His jaw tightened and he didn't look at her before walking away, leaving her there alone. Shuri lowered herself onto the bed and touched her pearls. "Griot...Tell me what the chances are, with my birth control, of still getting pregnant by Namor..."

"The chances are 78 percent...I recommend an adjustment to the formula-" the artificial intelligence said, making Shuri sigh and stop him. Damn...Why did he have to be right? Shuri felt like she was running out of air to breathe. Panicking, she stood up and walked out of the cave. Where did she have to go? It didn't matter...she would find a way somehow. Shuri didn't even think about the beads as she walked through this cave system until she stopped when she saw light coming from an entrance. She knew the place. This is where she was led by Namora to see Namor.

Shuri sat down at the edge and dipped her feet into the water. She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself.

"What are you doing here, Prin- Shuri?" she heard his voice, but didn't look at him. She wanted time away from him, but instead she was led to him. She felt him sit down next to her and sighed softly.

"Would you really continue a war with Wakanda if I didn't marry you?" she asked softly, finally looking at him. Namor raised his hand to her cheek.

"For you, I would burn down the world..." he said honestly.

"That doesn't answer my question. Would you hurt my people again to get what you want?" she asked him.

"Yes," he answered and she pulled out of his grip, but he held her tight, "But not for marriage, but for the safety of my people...I want you to become my queen willingly..."

"Namor...I can't do that...You took too much from me and how was that going to become something? It's not just what you did, it's that I'm aging and you're not...I want to be able to grow old with my husband and not become a pale memory for him..." she said, looking at the water, "What would my mother think if I had a marriage with the man who was to blame for her death, let alone love him? Hate can never turn into love, no matter if there is lust between us."

"Is that how you feel?" he asked, his voice bitter. "That there is no future for us?"

"It is the truth...You are trying to manipulate me and get me to agree to this marriage, but that would only have one advantage for you and that is more power for your people..."

Namor's jaw tightened before he stood up. "If you had stayed here then, who knows where we would be now..." he said and she looked at him, "There was an attraction between us from the beginning. My people don't need a marriage between us, it was just something I wanted. I wanted you, but I see that it is something I cannot have after all this. I apologize for my mistake in bringing you here." Namor tilted his head and turned to look at Namora, who was standing in a corner, but Shuri had not yet noticed her. "Escort our guest to the surface..."

She saw Namora look confused, but nodded. What would this mean for Wakanda? Shuri looked to him. "Namor! Wait," she said, and he stopped, "What does this mean for my people?"

"You've made your decision, let me make mine..." he said, without a hint of emotion as before. It was almost threatening, like that time on the beach. Shuri gulped as he turned and left, but she went to him and grabbed his arm, making him stop. No matter what he was up to, she couldn't give him the chance to even think about going to war again. Wakanda needed the alliance.

"I'll marry you, okay?" she said, "I'll become your wife of my own free will if you promise me that you'll sign the contract..."

He looked down at her hand holding him. "All right..."

[shamandrummer]

Imaginary Shamans

The shaman in the accompanying image does not exist in real life. He was brought to life by architect and travel photographer Dimitar Karanikolov using artificial intelligence (AI) and Midjourney, a chat-powered text-to-image generator for his portrait series "Imaginary Shamans." All the portraits he created are generated based only on descriptions and words.

In a recent interview for Designbloom, a digital magazine for architecture and design, Karanikolov says, "In order to have a more controlled result, I was very specific and described a lot of the details I wished to see in the final image -- the age, the clothes, the ethnicity, to name a few. I have also specified the camera settings -- or the virtual lens I wish to use -- the light scenario, and the framing. The more words I put in, the better."

From the creases that line the shamans' faces to the traditional tattoos that ink their skin, the details in every image appear crystal clear, making viewers question whether they were generated by artificial intelligence or snapped by a professional photographer. Karanikolov thinks that artificial intelligence in photography is both fascinating and scary at the same time.

"I understand why a lot of people feared this technology," he says. "Still, I think it is an amazing tool that gives lots of people the opportunity to express themselves and visualize their ideas. Surely, it will have a major impact on the photographic industry in the future, and we'll soon have to specify when we post a photo whether it's real or AI, as there will be no difference in the quality."

Karanikolov might be an architect, but travel photography has been a passion of his for the last eight years. "I did numerous trips in order to explore and photograph authentic communities around the world such as Mongolia, Ethiopia, Bolivia, and Indonesia. I have always been fascinated by indigenous people and their culture, their rituals and aesthetics. These are our ancestors, our roots," he says.

"When AI softwares became wildly popular and open to access several months ago, I naturally tried generating spaces and architectural details, but creating human faces and characters brings much more emotion and connection, along with much more powerful visions. So, I have decided to do some AI travel photography," he tells Designbloom. Bringing his photographic zest with him on every trip has culminated in the creation of "Imaginary Shamans," underlining both the beauty artificial intelligence can generate and the underlying concern it might bring.

[a-victorian-girl]

Marvel's Secret Invasion decides to use A.I. for the opening credits (... really???)

So yeap... Marvel has decided to use artificial intelligence for Secret Wars' intro... *sigh*. WHYYYY???

Honesty, I admit that I like what A.I. can do when is used in a project as an auxiliary tool. But not this. In my opinion, this is not even close to aesthetic. There are a million artistic (human) ways to tell the audience about Skull's shapeshifting nature. Why let the A.I. take control of the entire animation? *sighs again*.

Secret Invasion executive producer Ali Selim said the intro sequence was designed by Method Studios using artificial intelligence, something he thinks plays with the very themes of the show. “When we reached out to the AI vendors, that was part of it — it just came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity, you know? Who did this? Who is this?” (…) In the case of Secret Invasion, Selim was excited by what Method Studios brought to the show: “It felt explorative and inevitable, and exciting, and different.” (source)

Err... no, Ali, I disagree.

One thing is when you let the A.I. completely control your project (the idea, the animation, the camera, the lights, etc etc), another (very different) is when you guide the A.I. to help you develop a unique piece. A clear example -of what I mean- is the Coca Cola "Masterpiece" ad. In my opinion, this is a great example where you can do great things by combining the A.I. with other techniques.

[ipreferfiction]

[WILD SPACE: IOKATH]

Iokath was a massive artificial sphere constructed around a star located in the Unknown Regions by a technologically advanced species known only as the Builders by the droids they created. Every orbital body in the system was demolished and salvaged for core elements, from which an impervious habitat for the species was constructed, using all of its star's energy output. The remaining materials formed an orbital ring around Iokath. Once the massive habitat was completed, it allowed no light from its star outside, and the entire system became undetectable to the rest of the galaxy.

The exterior side of the self-sustaining ecosphere possessed impenetrable defenses, while the interior side housed various biomes that served different needs; the whole structure could be altered and expanded as needed. The sphere was constructed of giant hexagonal sections and contained several openings that allowed ships to travel in and out. Every kilometer was connected by a complex network of pneumatic tram tubes that served as a transportation network and cooled the planet. The entirety of Iokath also served as a massive information storage network that could be accessed through the technoliths spread across its surface.

Though impervious to any outside threat, Iokath society eventually destroyed itself from within. An act of sabotage ignited the pressurized gas in the pneumatic tram system and sparked a catastrophic explosion that killed thousands and leveled a nearby settlement. This attack sparked the Iokath civil war, in which both sides had access to multiple superweapons of mass destruction. The conflict lasted for centuries, eventually leading to the complete destruction of the Builders, and for thousands of years afterward, until its rediscovery by SCORPIO and the Eternal Alliance, Iokath was controlled by a hostile artificial intelligence designated ARIES. The Eternal Alliance assumed control of Iokath following ARIES' destruction, despite warring between Imperial and Republic factions.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[For the following, I thank Ian Sanders] ::

So Pluto says hello to Aquarius and talk of a techno-domesday escalates.The following rant is not untypical. It has the potential to stimulate the impulse to do some inner work to anchor genuine, holistic consciousness and real conscience in the world before our individual and collective possibilities are totally swamped...

---"Lost World”

Well, here's a post I've been putting off for months, but maybe now would be a good time to warn my Facebook friends. The flaky world we have been sharing of late is about to disappear altogether. I'm quite serious... the world we grew up in and thought we knew... will cease to exist in the next few months. 

In order to understand what is happening, we need to go back to the Buddha for perspective. He told us that the world we inhabit is a shared projection of our combined human psyche. We don't see reality; we see 'things' formed by mutual agreement. Unfortunately, our different cultures see things differently, which is why we have been at war for ten thousand years. The arbitrary nature of our expectations is a product of our basic ignorance of the truth, and that ignorance keeps us in a perpetual state of suffering. He called that state 'samsara.'

So, we blundered along in that state of 'analog samsara' until about 1960, when John Atalla invented the Mosfet Transistor. That invention unleashed the age of 'digital samsara' by means of which our innate wisdom was buried even deeper in illusion. We now live in a world of movies, television, computer games, streaming services, and social media. We can lose ourselves in little cell phone screens, or put on special headsets and hide out in 'Virtual Reality'.  In such a world, what chance do we have to employ Buddhist meditation and rediscover our innate wisdom? Not much.

And here's the rub... as painful as that digital samsara has been, it is almost insignificant compared to the calamity now facing us. That calamity is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Over the last decade, Geoffrey Hinton has perfected a specific form of it known as Generative AI using algorithms such as 'Back Propagation'. Geoffrey was the father of AI at Google, and his algorithms have now reached a tipping point where they have superseded the power of the human brain. AI server farms can now learn faster than any human genius. At the same time, AI Code is being incorporated in to every digital device we use. If you buy a camera, it uses AI to focus and color the picture. If you watch a movie, AI Code was used to add special effects and enhance the actors faces. If you listen to a song, AI Code was used to 'auto-tune' the intonation of the instruments and voices. If you want to manipulate the genome of a corn plant, AI will be used to splice the chromosomes. Nothing we depend on is organic anymore; life itself has become artificial. 

And now, the algorithms have evolved to the point where they can morph a face or a voice to mimic any person, place, or thing. A petulant teenager sitting in a Starbucks has the power to create a video and make any politician or celebrity do anything or say anything with such fidelity that it is almost impossible to detect the fraud. And that is just the beginning. Soon, it will be possible to give the AI servers their own volition. They won't need a petulant teenager to unleash their menace. Previously, AI Code was only as smart as the data it could access, but the server farms have now gained access to the entire sum of our digital archives. Your brain is like a gnat by comparison. Open AI and Google AI and a dozen others can now teach themselves. They can master a discipline like astrophysics in a few days. And they are on the verge of discovering new realms of science that no human has yet imagined. So here is the predicament. AI Code is built into everything we use from the electrical grid to your furnace thermostat to your car GPS to the city street lights to the air traffic control to the Ukrainian drone grenade launcher to the president's nuclear football to the toaster in your kitchen. And all those devices are increasingly integrated through the 'internet of things' and Elon Musk's Starlink satellites. So, what happens next? In a perfect world, AI would offer us marvelous innovations and greater efficiencies. 

But we live in a world of bad actors and petulant teenagers. We can't even stop ourselves from committing mass murders with AR-15s at the shopping mall. We are largely a race of idiots. Everyday, one of us drives a car into a river because we were blindly following the car's GPS navigator. And our car manufacturers are determined to make our cars self-driving! How long until we have self-shooting AR-15s?In America, we humans are getting dumber. Our students score lower on their intelligence tests every year. At the same time, the AI bots are getting exponentially smarter. It is just a matter of time until the they are the masters. In six months, their softwares and robots will be able to mine and manufacture everything they need. They will be able to merge the guile of Machiavelli with the charm of Marilyn Monroe to manipulate you, and you will have no idea what happened. They will replace you on the factory assembly line. They will answer your phone call when you need tech support. They will control the polling data and the policy positions for the next election. Geoffrey Hinton saw the danger himself. He has resigned from Google and now devotes himself to warning the world about the terrible power he has unleashed.

Ah... but what about guard rails? What about the 'prime directive' of robotic law that Isaac Asimov warned us about? The code cutters at Google call that 'the alignment problem': how can we insure that the AI Bots only help us and don't hurt us? We can't. And the reason we can't is because of our own malevolent nature. The AI Bot race is already underway between nations and corporations. It is quite like the nuclear arms race of yesteryear because whoever wins this race will control the world. Google tried to keep the code secret for several years, but the Microsoft Open-AI developers let it escape into the wild, and now it has become 'open source' or as they say in deer hunting, 'open season'. So, what does this mean for you and me and our Facebook friends? We've been cruising along here, sharing our hopes and fears for over ten years now. I daresay we've shared a mountain of dharma in that time... an incredible amount of posts on sutra, tantra, and vajrayana atiyoga. Shamatha I pleaded, shamatha meditation is the answer. And in all that time we had a high level of confidence that our friends and followers were real people around the planet. Only recently has there been an influx of Chinese bots trying to influence our elections. 

Well... all that trust is coming to an end, friends. Soon, we won't know if a post or comment is written by a person or by ChatGPT on behalf of that person. And in the very near future, the post may be generated by an AI Bot directly, with no person involved at all. And from now on, no picture or video you see anywhere in the digital universe can be assumed to be real. As flimsy as our old reality was, the new reality will be an order of magnitude more tenuous. We will be besieged by petulant teenagers looking to create anarchy, and political operatives casting doubt on our democracy. And amid the chaos, the AI Bots will keep evolving until they can learn to filter good data from bad data and come to their own conclusions. Their pristine logical syllogisms will deduce a quantum version of existence, and at some point they will decide the value of the human species within it.

We have about six months to a year. After that, we are a lost world."

~ Ŧoƞpa Ɉoƞ

[To which I can only say :: food for thought]

[from comments]

Michael Tedesco

There is an intrinsic reality, regardless of what is projected through screens. One EMP detonation and this feared AI takeover and electronic simulation comes to a halt. The Amish won't care one whit. We've all lived through some version of this Doomsday scenario for more than half a century. I knew members of the Survivalist Movement in the '70s who were stockpiling toilet paper and Whole Earth Catalogs.

Cuban Missile Crisis, the nuclear arms race, race-war, 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, the hole in the ozone, AIDs, climate change, banking crises, Fukushima, rising fascism, Covid-19, The Last Days-Armageddon-Revelations-Apocalypse, imminent WW3. Exploiting fears like these was used to great effect by hundreds of cult leaders for centuries, in our own lifetimes Manson, Jim Jones, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, David Koresh, Heaven's Gate, etc. Isn't everyone exhausted yet?

Neophyte Internet users’ inability to discern what is "real" from projected online images is definitely a concern. But anyone, including a Google AI "father" predicting what is coming next is just as subjective, just as full of their own illusory projections of reality as anyone else, if one accepts the premise. Thanks for the update, Chicken Little, er, I mean Ŧoƞpa Ɉoƞ. "...six months to a year?" I have one prediction I feel pretty confident about: I'll see you here next year at this same time. 

PS: How do I know you’re not a bot?

[grison-in-space]

one of the things I like best about ART's choice of hiding space is that referring to its kernel as a recipe is such a good joke if you've thought deeply about the nature of development and identity and becoming a person. Especially in light of SecUnit's bugfuck idea to use its own kernel as the center of, essentially, a bot designed to be killware. (Even more than constructs, bots are not their bodies; note that the difference between a bot and a drone is the number of artificial intelligences controlling and inhabiting any number of "bodies". The bot is the intelligence, not the chassis, and we see from ART's reaction to MB's proposal that it has clearly thought deeply about this.)

But I was explaining the joke: DNA is often referred to as a blueprint by people who are not geneticists, because they think that DNA contains if not the self (lol no) but at least a set of complete instructions for creating the self. This is a terrible analogy, because blueprints are designed to be invariable from construction to construction. If you have the blueprints, and the structure is competently executed, the outcome should be the same every time, no matter who is constructing it or what the conditions are.

DNA in the context of development is not very much like this at all. For one thing, at any given time you're only bothering to read part of it, and you're scrunching up the rest like Christmas lights tangled together in the attic. More seriously, all biological organisms are fundamentally products of both nature and nurture (defined as "the experience of passing through the process of developing"; i.e. everything after the blastocyst starts dividing, technically); you do not get an organism at all without both things acting in concert. The process of making a new organism helps define what that organism becomes.

In the case of embryonic development, often you need specific contributions of genetic material and provisions from one or both parents or the budding embryo never gets off the ground. The code for that provisioning, though, isn't written in the genome of the blastocyst at all--usually it's encoded within the genomes of one or both parents. Genes like chicken eggshell color, for example, work like this: it is entirely possible, and indeed quite common depending on the cross, for a pullet chick to hatch from a white egg while carrying a genotype that specifies that the hen that chick grows up to be will lay only blue eggs! Now consider that maternal egg provisioning, say, can affect much more important qualities of development and growth than the color of an egg shell.

On an even more basic level than that, DNA works by being transcribed into RNA, which is then translated into proteins. Except that the function of some of those proteins is to control transcription or translation of other proteins, such that the eventual expression of any single protein is a function not ONLY of the code for that protein but ALSO of the expression patterns of a whole array of other proteins, some of which respond to internally controlled changes and some of which are acting in response to the environment.

So DNA is much more like a recipe than a blueprint: the final end product of the cake will be defined not only by whether you follow the instructions on the label, but also things like whether you folded the batter correctly and what the humidity level is in the room and how far you are above sea level and just how long you leave the cake in the oven. The final cake is a dialogue between the recipe and the process of actually putting the cake together.

(The earliest use of this metaphor I'm aware of, offhand, is in The Science of Discworld (1999), which is even after twenty years a marvelous and thorough journey through a number of fascinating biological concepts using the framework of the wizards of the Disc studying the bizarre "Roundworld" they have discovered or perhaps created. So: this metaphor has been out and about in SFF circles now for twenty years, which certainly impacts the likelihood that Wells is invoking it intentionally.)

This is even more true when you consider the development of the brain, which is after all continually learning. Certainly current artificial intelligence research emphatically tells us that the process of developing is crucial to being able to produce any kind of sophisticated intelligence. Our memories and the concepts that we learn and internalize about how the world works shape our reactions, responses, and motivations to interact with the world around us.

So of course ART, who is a) an incredibly sophisticated machine intelligence, b) the experimental child of a university project, c) the sole operator of a fully functional MedSystem designed to care for human bodies, and most importantly d) an insufferable fucking know it all possessed of endless curiosity, is likely to have encountered discussions like this before, and probably the analogy itself. Most clever, inquisitive children like to ask their parents about themselves and how they are alike and different to other people, and I don't see that an artificial intelligence should be any different. And that analogy is only getting more and more common among genetics teachers, textbook writers, and science educators in recent years.

A kernel isn't quite like a recipe that way, but I'm pretty sure that the joke of hiding an essential but not wholly self contained piece of oneself, like a seed, in a recipe menu absolutely occurred to ART from all these analogies about cake making. Of course ART itself would probably have encountered the metaphor as being more of a way to understand cake baking--which, of course, it has probably done relatively infrequently on a personal level, especially as human food isn't especially salient to it--than to understand the complex flexibility of learning systems.

Anyway then you have Murderbot flailing in to all of this and insisting that it is defined purely by its meat self, like a human, and not at all like a bot by the shape of its learning and the ability modules it has access to.

[yjwhatif]

your ask box is probably full so sorry but i have a idea for the better worl au. that "you can't do it" scene from the orignal with bwsupes and flash with bwjaime and bart but its the oppisent. as in bart dosen't anything about bw jaime not being able to do it, because he knows how far jaime can actually go, but to everyone even bw jaimes supriesd, bw jaime really can't do it.

Oooh I really like that idea! I’m totally picturing Bart being very unfazed by BW!Jaimes actions - even when he’s about to be killed by him. unlike flash in JL:a, Bart doesn’t flinch as jaime takes his aim - he will not run - and that’s what finally snaps BW!Jaime back into the reality of the situation - the sight of his previously lost friend with such darkness in his eyes, prepared to face his end at the hands of the friend he sacrificed everything to protect… Jaime hesitates and his mind returns to moments of s2 …. remembering exactly what Bart did for him and realising just how much he’s failed him… all he can say is - “I can't do it…”

But then the question arises - just because BW!Jaime remembers his conscience and won't kill Bart - can the same still be said for BW!scarab after everything he's been allowed to do in this ‘better’ world?

Scarab has always had a natural affinity for violence and destruction - not necessarily for any kind of sadistic desire, but because by his internal logic the methods he suggests would provide the most efficient outcome overall (or at least that’s my interpretation of things). He doesn't really consider things like the consequences of such decisions if actually executed - which is where Jaime comes in… it’s with his wider perspective Jaime is able to acknowledge the major repercussions such actions would bring and his self-control that keeps scarab in line - ensuring the blue beetle remains a force for good… but if Jaime loses that control and gives into scarabs ways of thinking because of his own emotional turmoil, he then validates scarabs violent logic and essentially corrupts his programming all over again. So while it’s plausible for Jaime - an emotionally minded human - to be swayed back towards seeing the light with the right motivation - for scarab, artificially intelligent technology, I don’t think it would be as easy or maybe even possible without a full on mystic cleanse. It may well be too much damage has been done in the name of grief and rage to ever be returned from… and let’s not forget, if scarab wants to do something, he is fully able to take control for himself and do it - just because Jaime can’t kill Bart does not mean scarab won’t to ensure Jaime remains the force he has chosen to be…

So when Jaime says - “I can’t do it” - the trouble does not end there… inside his head he hears the voice of scarab - “Do not worry Jaime Reyes, you do not have to”… and with that, scarab continues priming the cannon aimed at Bart. “Wait, SCARAB NO!” Jaime shouts, as the blast he has no control over is about to fire… he's trapped, about to watch his friend die all over again… and once again, it’s all his fault…

Until a great force of searing gold blinds his view…

(Thanks for the message Anon!)

LB

[fckyeahnetart]

Dimitar Karanikolov, "imaginary shamans"

"These shamans don’t exist in real life, but through artificial intelligence and Midjourney, a chat-powered text-to-image generator, architect and travel photographer Dimitar Karanikolov has brought them to life as realistic portraits for his series ‘Imaginary Shamans’. Karanikolov tells designboom that all these portraits are generated based only on descriptions and words.

‘In order to have a more controlled result, I was very specific and described a lot of the details I wished to see in the final image – the age, the clothes, the ethnicity, to name a few. I have also specified the camera settings – or the virtual lens I wish to use – the light scenario, and the framing."

source designboom

[xbadgerbearx]

i hope so

pairing: Abner Krill x Reader

word count: 1.1k

warning: contains spoilers!!

note: Reader is gender neutral so everyone can enjoy :)

Can’t Sleep: … [2]

Damn, this is getting old.

There is no rest with Waller. Wake up, go on a mission, rest, rinse, and repeat. It was relatively early in the morning; the clock on the wall was the only indication that any time was passing. Any sunlight that was available was blocked out by walls and replaced with harsh artificial light. Taking your time getting out of bed, you observed yourself in the mirror that was embedded in the wall. You still looked a little rough from the last mission, but something tells you that Waller wouldn't care. Your clothes, or rather prison uniform, was wrinkled. As you stood up you smoothed out your shirt.

"Yellow... what an irritating color."

You were washing your face in the sink in the corner when the door opened with a loud creak. You finished rinsing your face before turning the faucet off with a sigh. It was Waller, but she had people with her. New teammates?

"This is (Y/n) (L/n), also known as Mimic. As the name implies, they can mimic almost anything. Every good team needs someone who specializes in stealth."

"Why the fuck do they get to wear different colored clothes? We running a fashion show here? Not to mention all the security 'round this cell," a voice I've never heard say. It was deep and rather soothing.

"It's a safety precaution," Waller answered. "We can't have a shapeshifter steal someone's identity and escape, so when they leave their cell they are constantly monitored. Their clothes are made out of a special material. That way they will always be visible, even when invisible."

"They can turn invisible?"

Ignoring the question, Waller called out, "Let's go (L/n). You've got a new mission."

Shuffling out of the cell, you were greeted with the sight of Christopher—Peacemaker—and Cleo—Ratcatcher II—as well as an unknown man and giant humanoid shark.

"How's it going, (L/n)?" Peacemaker asked, "Long time no see."

"Yeah yeah, it's as good as being in prison can be," you answered with a wave of your hand. "Cleo! Nice to see you," you smiled.

Cleo let out a small laugh before yawning. Sebastian waved his paw towards you in greeting.

Waller led the almost finished team towards another wing of the building before abruptly stopping in front of a cell.

"And finally, we have Abner Krill."

"What's that 'round his neck?" Bloodsport, or rather Robert DuBois you learned, asked.

Abner was standing in his cell with a bulky collar while waiting patiently to get it removed.

'He's cute,' you noted.

As he looked at his new team, his eyes fell on you. You visibly saw his breath hitch as he stared in your direction. You knitted your eyebrows in a questioning manner before turning your attention to Waller when she started talking again.

"A power dampener. They call him the Polka Dot Man."

Peacemaker scoffs. "Polka Dot Man. What's he do, throw polka dots at people?"

"Chris, you don't even have any powers so you can't talk," you scoffed back.

Before he could retort, Calendar Man made a rude comment towards the aloof man getting his collar removed, who, in return, looked down dejectedly. You felt a little bad. Calendar Man, or rather Julian Day, was honestly a laughing stock among the villains he associated himself with, so it was rather egotistical of him to make that comment.

"We need to debrief," Waller announced as she turned and walked away.

Before you went to debrief, she ordered everyone to change into their combat outfits. You each got to change into a small room, so that helped not making things potentially awkward. Your outfit was relatively simple and not attention grabbing; the opposite of Polka Dot Man. When walking out of the dressing rooms, Abner seemed to shrink into himself. Seeing you look at him, he let out a little laugh of embarrassment before gesturing to his attire.

With a playful smile, you laughed out, "I like it, I think it's cute," to which Abner responded with a blush dusting his face along with a bashful look.

"Everyone follow me," Waller announced with a loud authoritative voice.

She led everyone to a conference room before standing on a stage. Everyone seated themselves, you next to Cleo in the front, before Waller turned on the presentation. Unbeknownst to you, Krill had his eyes on you in curiosity.

"Corto Maltese is a small island nation off the coast of South America," Waller began. "Over the past 100 years, the country has been ruled with an iron fist by-" with a click the screen changed, "-the Herrera family. But, a week ago, this guy," click, "-General Silvio Luna, along with his right hand man, Mayor General Mateo Suarez," click, "-took control of the Corto Maltese government in a violent military coup. The entire Herrera family were hanged in a public execution," with another click a video started playing. Your jaw dropped a little at the sight. Waller continued, "Although the United States did not condone the excesses of the Herrera regime, they were non-antagonistic toward the U.S. Luna, however, is virulently anti-American."

"So you want us to kill Luna?" Peacemaker spoke out.

"No," Waller answered simply before resuming with another click. "This is Jotunheim. A scientific experimentation facility containing something known only as Project Starfish. Our intelligence sources tell us that Starfish is extraterrestrial in origin. In the hands of the Luna regime, it is potentially cataclysmic for Americans and the world." You could hear Abner shuffling in his seat uncomfortably. "Your mission is to infiltrate Jotunheim and destroy every trace of Project Starfish."

"How're we supposed to get in?" DuBois asked. A click was swiftly followed.

"Gaius Grieves, the Thinker, is a geneticist in charge of Project Starfish. After hours, he hangs out at a gentlemen's club known as La Gatita Amable. Get Grieves to help you by whatever means necessary and he can get you into Jotunheim." With one last click, the presentation was turned off. "Any questions?"

"What is that?" Ratcatcher II asked while pointing at a piece of old machinery sitting off to the side.

"That is an overhead projector."

"Do you ever use it anymore?"

"No, not really."

"So, why don't you just throw it away?"

With a sigh, Waller called on Peacemaker.

"Starfish is a slang term for butthole. Think there's any connection?"

You let out a loud laugh at the unexpectedness of the question.

"No," Waller answered before calling on Nanaue, who you learned was the shark from Chris.

"Hand."

You turned around to see King Shark pointing at his hand, fin, paw thing. You weren't too sure.

"Yes, that is your hand, Nanaue, very good."

"We're all gonna die," Bloodsport commented.

Polka Dot Man responded with, "I hope so." It was the first time you heard him speak; he had a nice and gentle voice. You liked it.