#buildings must be lumpier...

[alliebirdseed]

Daybreak

Took a break from aggressive sticky note sorting to finish one more of these. I thought I'd do this with really strong night-time lighting, but it's not the right vibe for this sleepy place! I need to soften up the building silhouettes overall, but these past couple studies have made a good start.

[katliveblogs]

Now that he’d advanced closer, however, he could see out past the hole.  They’d dug into a gently sloping hill, so they’d have the benefit of high ground and so that enemy fire would have a harder time reaching them, and now he could look over, out, and down to the distance.  The coast.  Undrinkable salt water.

Two ships.  Titanic boats, ungainly in size, loaded down with weapons.  They’d cut deep enough into the beach that it would take a monumental strength to free them.

Strength, perhaps, that was provided by the lashing, boneless limbs at the back of each boat.  These ships were partially alive.

Oh dang, tentacle-ships. I wouldn’t think giant tentacles are a particularly effective way of generating propulsion, but maybe they have hooks or something for grabbing the sea-bed and pulling the ship loose? Also the combination of living ships and tentacles obviously means I have to reference the sea monster pirates from Berserk.

The fronts of the boats moved, yawning open like great metal-plated jaws.  From each emerged beasts that must have taken the entire hold.  Larger than buildings, taller than the hills that the trenches had been cut into.  They were blunt-featured, thick-skinned, with eyes far too small for their great frames.  They walked on all fours, not dissimilar to hippos or rhinos in general frame, but had lumpier heads, and chests that were both taller and deeper, possessed of a massive capacity.

Far from being Noah’s ark, this.  There were only two beasts to each ark; the one that pushed the boat and the one that was birthed.

Ok so probably not Briggs’ superweapon, I don’t think massive quadrupeds would be the sort of thing you’d keep far underground, and there’s two of them.

One beast roared, and it was a nasal, mooing bray that was just as pronounced and vast as the arrival of the boats had been.  It made the air shake with the sound, made heartbeats skip with each heavy footfall.

Its fellow beast picked up the cry.

In answer, the machine guns started again.  The time between bursts was shorter, and both the cracks and the bullets had different sounds to them.

No longer directed at Mauer’s regiment.

The expanded chests probably mean the sound isn’t just a natural consequence of being a very large animal, but something weaponized. Most likely tailored both to shake things apart and to be maximally debilitating to humans.

Which is super cool, even if it’s another blatant war crime for the list.

[love-takes-work]

Steven Universe Graphic Novel Too Cool for School (2016) - Outline & Review

We finally have a full-length graphic novel for Steven Universe and it's just lovely! It was so much fun to go to school with Steven, and in this longer format, the authors were able to take their time with it and make it feel almost like it could be an episode of the show.

There are things they could have done better, but overall the enjoyment overshadows the disappointments. The characters we know and love were almost always right on with their characterization, and though the background characters new to the story here were pretty one-dimensional (and sometimes caricaturish), I could deal with it getting to see Steven in a new setting. Some of us had wondered about his school situation, since they never do explicitly state in the show that Steven's been educated at all, and this clears that up if it can be considered canon. The art is cute, with the characters' body language feeling appropriate despite the slight lean off the show model (the characters look sort of lumpier and sketchier), and as always the backgrounds are lovely to look at. 

And while I don't quite think the comic will stand on its own for readers who don't watch the show, I think it's fantastic to have a volume like this for those of us who love little in-between snacks. This book contains two full-color stories: The main story is "Too Cool for School," and then there's a little side story at the end called "Yard Sale." I'll examine "Too Cool for School" first and outline what I liked, what I didn't like, and what I thought was notable. What I liked: 1. Steven is so dang melodramatic about no one wanting to entertain him in the beginning. He talks just like this in the show too, infusing everything with drama when he's overwhelmed. It's so Steven. 2. Connie brings Steven to school for show and tell and quickly makes a mess of explaining what Gems are. Her awkwardness was precious. I have personally tried to explain what Gems are to people who ask me about the show and it kinda sometimes goes a little bit like this. And he's so excited and eager to tell the other kids about being a half-Gem and enthusiastically admits he has no idea what exactly he is. He's just cute.

3. Steven starts obsessing over whether the Gems might have seen dinosaurs and it's really nice how the dialogue sounds like what real kids sometimes say. 4. When Connie and Steven get sent to the principal's office, you can just see the weight of Connie's parents' expectations pressing down on her shoulders as she wails about her permanent record. It's very true to her character.

5. Connie's resentment of Steven getting her in trouble evaporates relatively quickly when she sees him all wide-eyed about cafeteria lunch, and it's so perfect that she just can't stay mad at him. It reminds me a bit of their actual dynamic on the show during the episode "Fusion Cuisine." 6. When Connie set out to explain lunch cliques to Steven, I was expecting the sort of trite jocks/nerds/slackers dynamic, but they came up with some pretty unusual groups for the lunchroom. They have social media stars hanging out together, along with some board game enthusiasts, an anti-clique clique, and the Junior Safety Patrol. I figured they'd be portrayed as NERDS but Connie super respects them and isn't dismayed that Steven picks them to sit with (and of course he would; he'd love to be with people who appreciate protecting others!). I'm glad she wasn't like "no Steven they're unpopular," though she's even less popular so it works out. I like their design--I'm not sure what gender a couple of them are being portrayed as (which is nice ambiguity), though I'm sad they don't seem to have names.

7. I just love that Steven's chattering about school during his Gem mission. That's one thing I've always loved about the show: Steven is thrilled to talk about Gem stuff with everyday people, but he's also just as excited about mundane stuff that's new to him. 8. Pearl's comment about how Steven enjoys pummeling children his own age in dodgeball has the Pearl Tone exactly right. The way she humors him has a particular flavor and this nailed it.

9. The bickering between the Gems regarding whether Steven should go to school is just classic. Pearl is in her typical frame of mind--that only Gem education is important and he's already learning what's necessary--while Garnet is firmly on Team Trust Steven, insisting that if he wants to do it then it must be what he needs. And what Garnet says goes, so there. Perf. 10. The very mundane issue of getting a phone call through to contact the Gems when a snail monster started attacking the school was pretty entertaining. 11. I love when Pearl goes full Gem Dork on the principal when she's bragging about how cool her race is. It's accurate to TV Pearl--she loves telling everyone how great Gems are.

12. Steven wants to be called "marsh periwinkle" after a cute snail species. Connie objects but he seems adamant that he deserves this adorable name. YOU BET YOU DESERVE IT STEVEN. YOU ARE A MARSH PERIWINKLE FOR SURE. 13. I think it's cute that Connie feels so honored at being accepted onto the Junior Safety Patrol, and she's happy that some people like her and know her name, but then she finds attention at school overwhelming when everyone's treating her like a hero and happily reclaims her lunch nook in the library. Too many stories like hers have the introvert being saaaaad because she doesn't have friiieeends and then everything is solved when everyone suddenly loves her. But Connie ISN'T happy with that and never wanted it. Respect for introverts is rarely seen in plots like this and I loved seeing Connie withdrawing from the social attention and not being spun as a loser for doing so. What I didn't like: 1. The front cover depicts Steven looking out the classroom window at the Temple. Nothing I've seen in the show suggests a school with that view would be possible, considering where the Temple is. 2. Connie's catching the bus at a stop that is apparently close enough to Steven's house that he happened to run into her. Connie doesn't live in Beach City, so I don't know why she's catching the bus there. She claims her dad's car is busted and that's why she's riding the bus, but then she even continues to ride the bus the following year. Not sure this was actually thought out. 3. I don't like how nobody wanted to hang out with Steven at the beginning but they didn't seem to have a reason. Amethyst literally said she was too bored to do anything and Pearl appeared to be ever so busy with . . . calisthenics? At least Garnet disappeared into her room and she could have been doing something important, but she didn't say what. I wouldn't mind if they volunteered a reason they couldn't pay attention to him right then, but this almost felt mean, and weird. 4. The teacher and the principal talk really cartoonishly (not in a good way); they say stuffy adult things and sometimes speak in ways that sound like a kid wrote what they think grown-ups sound like; they're unreasonable and use unnecessarily complex words in very awkward ways ("None of you are from space! That is highly improbable."). 

I also have a pet peeve about "adult who doesn't believe in fantastical story takes care to mock magic children who are telling the truth" tropes, especially if they immediately flip into starry-eyed awe when the proof arrives. The principal especially has some circular, repetitive, tortured-sounding scolding, particularly at the end (e.g., "With accidents of this magnitude disciplinary action is our only course of action"). The background kids are sometimes stuck in a sort of cruel hivemind too. Throwing erasers and paperballs at the new kid because he told a weird story about being a superhero seems exaggerated. 5. When Connie and Steven get called into the principal's office, Steven's dad is summoned but you never see the Maheswaran parents. Don't know why that is. I like that Greg points out that he didn't even know Steven was going to school, though. 6. I'm confused about why the second snail monster appeared. When they hunted down the first one, they found its Gem and bubbled it. Then the Gems said it was fine for Steven to take a snail shell from the site, only to find it turning up as a monster later. In other situations, mother monsters sometimes leave behind parasites after they've been defeated, but those parasites don't have Gems. This one did, so it must have been an identical second monster that the Gems didn't know was still there? I don't really understand how that happened. 7. The principal refers to Pearl as the "legal guardian" of Steven. Which she is not in any way. She's an alien from space with no legal standing of her own. 8. I think the principal deciding not to expel Connie because she got a good exam score is bizarre and nonsensical reasoning. It doesn't seem connected to the principal's reasoning about her endangering students by leading them to fight the snail. 9. Pearl protests the concept of "giving a ship a gender" when Steven's teacher talks about the mothership. She seems completely baffled by this, even though Gems don't have actual genders and THEY do this too. (They have called Gem monsters "mothers" if they spawn clones, and they called Rose Quartz Steven's mother even though she is technically not a woman.) I usually like when the Gems are confused about Earth stuff but this doesn't seem like it should confuse Pearl. 10. I fundamentally do not understand the ending of this story. Connie was almost expelled (and nonsensically saved through her exam score), and she was scolded and her friend kicked off the property. And yet when she returns to school in the fall (and has the same teacher), everyone is wearing glasses like hers to celebrate "Connie Day" and she's praised for "saving the school" (even though the building literally fell down) and Steven is also honored by the principal even as his expulsion is upheld. It just felt like a very strange and nonsensical way to end the story. Notable: 1. The Gems are wearing their latest outfits in this comic! Amethyst has her black stars on her knees. BUT! In the frame when they warp away from fighting the snail monster, Garnet's colors have reverted to her first outfit. Just that one frame. Weird. 2. Pearl is oddly not drawn with blue eyes in "Too Cool for School." Her eyes are actually pretty important to her aesthetic, so it was weird to see her with black filled-in eyes in the first story. She has her blue eyes again in the short! (And in the first story, Sour Cream's blue eyes are filled in blue, so I'm not sure why Pearl's aren't.) 3. In a summer shot of the Cool Kids, Sour Cream is wearing his Pants Become Shorts in shorts mode. Nice callback. And Sadie's maybe flirting with a boy in the Big Donut, and Lars looks jealous! 4. There were unfortunately tons of language errors, punctuation glitches, and misspellings--which is a shame because this is a professional publication but it made me feel a little like I was reading a fan creation online. My list: * Connie asks Steven why he's up so early with no question mark. * The teacher says she'll send Steven to the "principals office," no apostrophe. * Connie misspells her own last name in her talk bubble while discussing her future. * Greg asks about signing something and doesn't get a question mark. * Steven's handwritten sign misspells mustard as "mustart" and leaves a word out of "the fizz some lemon lime soda," which is odd for a kid who aced the final exam at the end. * The coach asks the students to "gather round" with no ending punctuation in his talk bubble. * Pearl refers to "chilren" in one talk bubble instead of "children." * Steven asks about show and tell with a period instead of a question mark. * The principal uses the word "unfortunetly." * The principal utters this inexcusable sentence: "There are an order to things Miss Maheswaran that we must obey." * The principal misspells "receive" as "recieve" in one talk bubble. * And she uses the word "undoutably," spelled like that. * Pearl's dialogue has "?!" at the end of a comment that wasn't in any way a question. * Pearl uses the word "spacefairing." The word is actually "spacefaring." * Pearl talks about Gems having "trancended" rigid structures instead of "transcended." * And she uses the wrong its while talking about Steven's space family. * The principal leaves an article out of this sentence: "Steven is never ever ever come to this school again." * Connie manages to spell the Latin name of littoraria irrorata correctly, but then her talk bubble uses the word "reffered" instead of "referred." * Connie asks a question about what makes Steven think he deserves a cute nickname but she leaves off the question mark.

And then there was the second story (which I may like even more than the main story!): the short "Yard Sale," in which Vidalia has a yard sale and Steven buys something special for each of the Gems, but then he lacks money for an old game system he wants to try. After some failed attempts to barter with Vidalia, they promise her babysitting for Onion, and Steven feels this is terrible because nothing is worth that. Stuff I loved: Amethyst has no idea why anyone would want to sell their stuff because she is a huge hoarder and I love her wanting to buy a purple guitar because it has two "thingies." I CAN'T EVEN DEAL WITH GARNET WANTING THE MOM SQUAD SWEATER. IT IS THE CUTEST THING IN THE WORLD.

The mention of Vidalia knowing Amethyst well enough to know she does NOT want anything in that room was hilarious. And we have Pearl offering car repair and Garnet offering to break the car first. Garnet is just an incredibly special kind of funny and I just love it.

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

[hungrywhovianjedi]

It Hurts To See You and Him book two: I’ll Fight It for You: chapter 4

New Dark One, Killian Jones, finds himself in a frighteningly familiar situation, as he struggles against the aftermath of protecting his love. Emma Swan and the hero gang is left in shock after the sudden disappearance of the Pirate, and now must figure out how to get wherever the Dagger has taken Killian, before the darkness can swallow him whole.

Read where it all began: : Prologue, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6chapter 7 Epilogue

IHTSYH Also on: FFN

The rest of this story:Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

I’ll Fight It for You also on: FFN

The spinoff: The prologue, Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4

If I Never Leave also on: FFN

Tagging a few who showed interest: @andiirivera @teamhook @nerdywitchstudentl9 @unlikelycheesecakeenthusiastp6 @revanmeetra87 @the-corsair-and-her-quill 

Killian came around the tree, and found it odd that Merida was still curled under her cloak. She still hadn’t stirred. He had been scavenging them some food, and he thought for sure he would have found her awake, and fretting the way she had the day before. Something was off, he moved to the prone figure, and he noted she was lumpier than she should be, and hi heart dropped, he reached out to the robe, and found that it covered a pile of sticks and stones, and Merida was gone.

“No.” He whispered. “no, no, no, no. This isn’t happening.”

“I told you, this would happen. If you had heard you last night, you would have run too. She’s just doing what you would have done.” Emma said in a bored tone. “All of this could have been avoided you know. If you had only just killed her, when you had the chance.”

“Where is she?” Killian pondered.

Emma chuckled. “She’s doing, what I’ve been trying to get you to do, since you woke up, babe. She’s taking care of herself first.” She exuded boredom, where she rested against a tree. “So now, Merida, is going to whisper to that wisp, and it will all be over for you. Well, unless you do, what we both know needs to done.”

“I won’t hurt an innocent girl!” Killian boomed. “I promised. I promised I would be a better man. Better men don’t kill people, who get in their way.”

“That’s why they always say” Emma told him evenly. “Nice guys, finish last.”

He was spiraling, he knew this Emma wasn’t real, he couldn’t listen to her. He needed to find Merida, maybe he could talk to her, get her to help him, maybe she could ask the wisp to help him find Merlin, it couldn’t be that hard. He needed to get to the hill of stones. He needed to get there before Merida. He knew how he would do it, he would simply have to talk to this visage of Emma, one last time.

“What does the hill of stones look like?” he asked her, blue eyes meeting with the cold calculating stare of the woman before him.

She smiled, an almost truly genuine smile. “I knew you would eventually listen to me. Unfortunately, you said you wouldn’t use dark magic.” She pouted for effect.

“Tell me!” Killian demanded.

Emma smirked. “I wouldn’t want to make you turn to darkness, now would I?”

He felt his irritation grow. “What does, the bloody hill look like?”

She let out a long laugh. “Well, if you insist.”

~~I’ll Fight It for You~~

When Emma removed the cuff, Zelena sighed in relief, but then pouted, as Emma secured the new cuff into place.

“How am I supposed to bring you to your pirate, if I can’t use magic, dear?” She raised an eyebrow at her. “For a savior, you’re not that great at saving.”

Emma gave her a sweet smile, and placed the wand in her hand, as well as the drawing of Milah, he kept in his cabin aboard the Jolly. “Well, if you really asked nicely, I could tell you all about your new cuff. It has a few upgrades.”

The witch raised an eyebrow, as Emma continued. “It’s simple. This cuff, can only be removed by me, or someone that I have given permission to, and I can turn your magic on and off, when convenient.” Emma explained, then a warm tingle went up Zelena’s arm, and she watched as glowing veins appeared going up her arm, before they disappeared. “and that? That is my security system, even if you remove the cuff, it goes nowhere. You will still be a squib. So, I wouldn’t even bother.” Emma informed her.

“A squib?”

Emma smirked. “You’ve never read Harry Potter, have you?”

Zelena shook her head.

“It means, you can’t use your magic.”

“So, you have basically put a magical shock collar on me, like some common dog?”

Emma shrugged. “I also gave you a chance to do some good, which is why when we get back here, you won’t be locked back up in your padded cell. So? We had a deal. I haven’t activated it yet, so you can still use magic, so, take us to Killian.” Emma instructed.

Zelena clenched her jaw, but nodded, and as Emma watched, she began to circle the drawing with the wand, magic building in a glow at the tip, and when it glowed brighter than a lightbulb, she flung it outwards, so that it hovered over Granny’s. “Right then, there we are, that twister, will take you to your pirate.” She told them, “My part is done.”

Emma shook her head. “Actually, no. You need to bring us back too. It won’t be that easy, sweetheart.” Emma told her, as she waved a hand over Zelena’s cuff, and it glowed. “But, I won’t risk you betraying us. No magic”

Zelena scowled, but was ignored, as Emma led the way to Granny’s diner, and towards Killian.

~~I’ll Fight It for You~~

Killian was running up the hill, when the wisp flew away, it was over, he was too late. Merida had beat him there. “No!” He cried. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done?”

Merida spun, with her bow raised. “Aye, I do! Stay back!” Killian began to circle. “I don’t know what kind of witch you are, but don’t come any closer.”

Killian tried to step closer. “Please.”

“I don’t know, what you are, or what sort of voices you’ve got in your wee head, but I heard everything!” She cried, and Killian saw fear in her eyes.

“What’s she saying? I think the accent’s a bit much. I can’t understand a word she’s saying, can you?” Emma asked with a smirk.

He ignored her, knowing talking to the imaginary woman wouldn’t help. “Please, you don’t understand, I don’t know how much you heard, but you misunderstood me!” he pleaded. “I mean you, no harm.”

“Is that why you were talking of ‘claiming the wisp’ for yerself, or how about ‘you want me to betray Merida’ I think that sounds a bit like I understood perfectly, don’t ye?” She demanded. “I don’t need your lies. I need the wisp, for my brothers, so turn around and go!”

Killian didn’t back down, there was still hope. Emma sighed behind him. “She’s baiting you.”

“Now get out of here.” Merida warned.

“there once was a Scottish princess, that lost her heart. You know the start of this one. Take her heart.” Emma giggled.

“I’m warning you witch!” Merida’s bow began to shake.

“What are you waiting for, Hook? Come on, dark one, you know what to do!” Emma goaded. “crush her heart!” she told him.

He felt the darkness snaking up inside of him, the desire to make the girl pay for double crossing him, growing. He felt his anger bubble up, for the first time since he became the dark one, he felt the desire to be a dark one. He wanted to listen to the image of Emma, he felt the desire to rip out her heart, and make her pay. Then Milah flashed behind his eyes, falling dead, as her heart slipped through Rumpelstiltskin’s fingers and he felt a resounding guilt, that fought to beat back the waves of darkness. Killian closed his eyes against the war that waged within.

~~I’ll Fight It for You~~

Emma closed the door of the diner, as Granny bustled about the back room, securing anything that wasn’t already bolted down. Zelena sat in the corner of the diner, scowling at the fact she was being forced along.

“Alright everybody, it’s coming. If you haven’t already, find something to hold onto.” Emma warned.

Regina looked up from where she stood by the bar, “How do we even know this will take us to Hook?” She demanded. “What if Zelena cast in to send us to Oz or something?”

Emma glanced at Zelena. “I have a failsafe.” She told them. “This portal isn’t going anywhere that it’s not supposed to.”

The door suddenly swung open and three of the dwarves rushed in, led by, surprise, surprise, Grumpy. “Twister!” the grouchy man cried, despite the fact that anyone he would be informing was well within speaking distance.

“Leroy!” Snow snapped, as she tried to sooth Emma’s brother, and Emma rolled her eyes.

“Relax, we summoned it.” She told him. “It’s all under control.”

“You summoned it?” Leroy demanded. “Why would you summon it?”

The savior sighed. “Because It’s taking us to Killian.”

“Yes, so get out, Dwarves. Adults only.” Regina snapped.

“No!” Leroy shouted, even as the other dwarves looked dejectedly towards the door.

“No?” Happy asked, seemingly unhappy about the decision.

“We’re staying!” Leroy shouted.

“We are?” Happy asked again.

Leroy looked at Snow, then back at Emma. “We’ve been on the sidelines too long, sister. Missed too many adventures.” Leroy explained. “Now it’s embarrassing! How do you think it feels to be asked how the adventure was, and you gotta say that ‘nobody asked you to go along, that you weren’t needed’? We’re not turning our back again.” Leroy told them. “Not even in the face of certain death.”

Emma was more than a little confused, she could understand not wanting to be left behind, but the Dwarves didn’t even like Killian the last she checked, then it hit her, her mom was Snow White, of course where she went, at least three of the dwarves would follow, so when her mom gave a soft thank you to the dwarves, even as Happy asked if Leroy truly meant certain death, they weren’t coming for Killian. They were coming for Snow White.

Without warning, it was like an earthquake hit, and Emma scrambled to grab hold of the bar, as she watched her parents form a protective arch over her brother, and they felt the diner release its hold on the ground, and she couldn’t help the smile that formed. They were on their way to save her pirate.

               ~~I’ll Fight It for You~~

The war waged on in his head, he couldn’t take her heart! She hadn’t done anything wrong! ‘She stood in your way, when you had salvation in your grasp’ his subconscious told him.

“Do it Killian. Time is wasting, every moment you dawdle here, is a moment, not spent looking for Merlin!” The visage of Emma goaded.

The voice of the dark one that could have been hardened his resolve, and he looked away from Merida. “I won’t kill her.” He gasped, trying to block out the voice of the dark Emma.

“You got that right.” Merida said, and that was the only warning he got, before an arrow was flying at his chest. Reflexively he caught it. Holding it level with where it was about to strike, just above his heart. He looked at the arrow in shock, not only because he caught it, but Merida fired upon him, without even the slightest bit of provocation! He had just told her, he wouldn’t hurt her, and this is how he’s repaid?  He glares at Merida, and he sees the color drain from her face, and for a moment he relishes in it, before he comes back to himself, as she ducks behind trees.

“Use your anger.” Emma goaded. “Feel the power of the dark side.” He knew it was a reference, but he didn’t have the present mind to know from what, only that it was something his Emma had quoted once. He wouldn’t give the specter the satisfaction of listening to her, even in his rage.

“I can talk to her.” He whispered, and Merida must have heard.

“I don’t want to talk, to a madman!” she called out to him, before Merida swung out, and fired another arrow. He caught it as effortlessly as the last.

“You need to find Merlin, Dark One.” Emma warned, as he caught another arrow. “You need the wisp.” Another arrow. “Kill her.” She ordered. Merida fired again. “Kill her, Killian! Kill her!” Emma demanded, as the arrows came faster, and Merida’s shots became more frantic, and desperate. Emma’s goading became more insistent, until he actually began to feel the urge in his chest, to tear out her heart. Surely a quiver of arrows later had earned it. He imagined Milah, then chased her out of his mind. Merida wasn’t Milah. Milah hadn’t deserved it. Merida was practically begging for it.

“Enough!” He shouted, and Merida froze. He raised a hand, and she was pulled to him. “I warned you.” He bit out. “Not to test me. I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

“But now you are?” Merida’s voice quivered with real fear, but Killian didn’t care, as he plunged his hand into her chest, feeling the thrum of her heart as he clutched it in his hand, and he pulled, feeling a sickening snap, as it came loose, and he held her still beating heart in his hand. The magical organ glowing in his grasp.

“So pretty.” Emma said softly, in his ear. “Crush it to dust.”

He began to clench his fingers around the heart, and Merida began to gasp.

“Killian!” Emma cried, and he thought for a moment she was shocked by his actions, how was that possible? She was the one who told him to do it! “Killian, please! Don’t do this!”

In an instant he loosened his grasp on the heart.

“What are you doing?” Emma demanded, right in his ear, closer than the other call had been, he looked up, and there, in red leather and all, stood his Emma, without a hint of darkness to her.

“Killian, stop. Don’t do this.” She said gently. “You don’t want to do this.”

“Stay back, lassie!” Merida choked out, “He’ll kill you!”

“No.” Emma stated simply. “No, he’d never hurt me, no matter what darkness is in him. He won’t hurt you either.” She walked towards him, hand raised in a gentle show of support. “I know you don’t want to hurt her, Killian.”

“How?” He asked, and he wasn’t sure what question he asked. Did he ask how she got there? How she knew he wouldn’t hurt her? How he wasn’t supposed to hurt Merida?

Emma seemed to understand, “It doesn’t matter, when has anything stopped me before? I’ll always find you, no matter what. Now, put the heart down.”

“You don’t understand.” He started. “Merlin. I need to find Merlin, the wisp is the only way.” He told her.

“That’s right, she has the wisp, kill her, and it’s yours.” The visage said from over his shoulder.

“This is the only way.” He said in a broken whisper, knowing that in doing this, he was destroying all of the work he had done to better himself for Emma. “It’s the only way to stop the darkness, to stop it from hurting you.” He said, eyes on Emma, and he saw her heart break for him. “She has to die.”

“No Killian!” Emma pleaded. “We’ll find another way, together. Just like we always do. I know you don’t want to go back to who you were before.” She had tears in her eyes, and he felt them spring into his own.

“You don’t understand, what’s at stake. If I don’t find Merlin, the darkness will consume all of you. The dark one destroys everything near it.”

“Killian, please. Listen to me.” Emma began again, and he felt the warm touch of her on his shoulder, and he felt a peace in the contact, that he hadn’t felt since he woke here.

“Look at the Crocodile, luv. Look at what he’s done to those he loves.” He meets her eyes, and he see’s pain in the emerald depths. “I can’t do that to you.” He squeezed the heart again. “She has to die.” He whispered again.

“Listen to yourself, Killian. That isn’t you. That’s the darkness, fight back! I know you can, because I’ve seen you do it before! I know you! I trust you. I love you.” Emma begged, and suddenly it seemed like the fog lifted. What was he doing? He made a pact so many years ago, no matter how he may kill, he would never do it like this. The cowards way, this truly wasn’t him, this was the demon on his shoulder in black leather.

He looked at the heart in his hand, disgusted with himself. He closed his eyes, chasing away the last doubtful thoughts, then he looked up at Merida, the fear in her eyes growing, with undertones of pain. He knew what it felt like to have your heart ripped from his body, how it felt to have it crushed in someone’s hands, what was he thinking? He truly was a monster if he put her through this. She had every right to try and kill him, he would have done it too. After another second, he thrust the heart back into its place in Merida’s chest, and he felt like the tethers that were holding him together, snapped, and he stumbled back, needing to get away, but a gentle hand on his wrist stopped him, before Emma. His Emma pulled him to her, and he folded into her arms, like she was the only real thing left in his world, and it was very possible she was.

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Lemmings 2: The Tribes

When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings, they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final product more playable. They finally ended up with just eight skills, the perfect number to neatly line up as buttons along the bottom of the screen. In the process of this ruthless culling, Lemmings became a classic study in doing more with less in game design: those eight skills, combined in all sorts of unexpected ways, were enough to take the player through 120 ever-more-challenging levels in the first Lemmings, then 100 more in the admittedly less satisfying pseudo-sequel/expansion pack Oh No! More Lemmings.

Yet when the time came to make the first full-fledged sequel, DMA resurrected some of their discarded skills. And then they added many, many more of them: Lemmings 2: The Tribes wound up with no less than 52 skills in all. For this reason not least, it’s often given short shrift by critics, who compare its baggy maximalism unfavorably with the first game’s elegant minimalism. To my mind, though, Lemmings 2 is almost a Platonic ideal of a sequel, building upon the genius of the original game in a way that’s truly challenging and gratifying to veterans. Granted, it isn’t the place you should start; by all means, begin with the classic original. When you’ve made it through those 120 levels, however, you’ll find 120 more here that are just as perplexing, frustrating, and delightful — and with even more variety to boot, courtesy of all those new skills.

The DMA Design that made Lemmings 2 was a changed entity in some ways. The company had grown in the wake of the first game’s enormous worldwide success, such that they had been forced to move out of their cozy digs above a baby store in the modest downtown of Dundee, Scotland, and into a more anonymous office in a business park on the outskirts of town. The core group that had created the first Lemmings — designer, programmer, and DMA founder David Jones; artists and level designers Mike Dailly and Gary Timmons; programmer and level designer Russell Kay — all remained on the job, but they were now joined by an additional troupe of talented newcomers.

Lemmings 2 also reflects changing times inside the games industry in ways that go beyond the size of its development team. Instead of 120 unrelated levels, there’s now a modicum of story holding things together. A lengthy introductory movie — which, in another telling sign of the times, fills more disk space than the game itself and required almost as many people to make — tells how the lemmings were separated into twelve tribes, all isolated from one another, at some point in the distant past. Now, the island (continent?) on which they live is facing an encroaching Darkness which will end all life there. Your task is to reunite the tribes, by guiding each of them through ten levels to reach the center of the island. Once all of the tribes have gathered there, they can reassemble a magical talisman, of which each tribe conveniently has one piece, and use it to summon a flying ark that will whisk them all to safety.

It’s not exactly an air-tight plot, but no matter; you’ll forget about it anyway as soon as the actual game begins. What’s really important important are the other advantages of having twelve discrete progressions of ten levels instead of a single linear progression of 120. You can, you see, jump around among all these tribes at will. As David Jones said at the time of the game’s release, “We want to get away from ‘you complete a level or you don’t.’” When you get frustrated banging your head against a single stubborn level — and, this being a Lemmings game, you will get frustrated — you can just go work on another one for a while.

Rather than relying largely on the same set of graphics over the course of its levels, as the original does, each tribe in Lemmings 2 has its own audiovisual theme: there are beach-bum lemmings, Medieval lemmings, spooky lemmings, circus lemmings, alpine lemmings, astronaut lemmings, etc. In a tribute to the place where the game was born, there are even Scottish Highland lemmings (although Dundee is actually found in the less culturally distinctive — or culturally clichéd — Lowlands). And there’s even a “classic” tribe that reuses the original graphics; pulling it up feels a bit like coming home from an around-the-world tour.

Teaching Old Lemmings New Tricks

In this Beach level, a lemming uses the “kayak” skill to cross a body of water.

In this Medieval level, one lemming has become an “attractor”: a minstrel who entrances all the lemmings around him with his music, keeping them from marching onward. Meanwhile one of his colleagues is blazing a trail in front for the rest to eventually follow.

In this Shadow level, the lemming in front has become a “Fencer.” This allows him to dig out a path in front of himself at a slight upward angle. (Most of the skills in the game that at first seem bewilderingly esoteric actually do have fairly simple effects.)

In this Circus level, one lemming has become a “rock climber”: a sort of super-powered version of an ordinary climber, who can climb even a canted wall like this one.

In this Polar level, a lemming has become a “roper,” making a handy tightrope up and over the tree blocking the path.

In this Space level, we’ve made a “SuperLem” who flies in the direction of the mouse cursor.

Other pieces of plumbing help to make Lemmings 2 feel like a real, holistic game rather than a mere series of puzzles. The first game, as you may recall, gives you an arbitrary number of lemmings which begin each level and an arbitrary subset of them which must survive it; this latter number thus marks the difference between success and failure. In the sequel, though, each tribe starts its first level with 60 lemmings, who are carried over through all of the levels that follow. Any lemmings lost on one level, in other words, don’t come back in the succeeding ones. It’s possible to limp to the final finish line with just one solitary survivor remaining — and, indeed, you quite probably will do exactly this with a few of the tribes the first time through. But it’s also possible to finish all but a few of the levels without killing any lemmings at all. At the end of each level and then again at the end of each tribe’s collection of levels, you’re awarded a bronze, silver, or gold star based on your performance. To wind up with gold at the end, you usually need to have kept every single one of the little fellows alive through all ten levels. There’s a certain thematic advantage in this: people often note how the hyper-cute original Lemmings is really one of the most violent videogames ever, requiring you to kill thousands and thousands of the cuties over its course. This objection no longer applies to Lemmings 2. But more importantly, it sets up an obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist loop. First you’ll just want to get through the levels — but then all those bronze and silver performances lurking in your past will start to grate, and pretty soon you’ll be trying to figure out how to do each level just that little bit more efficiently. The ultimate Lemmings 2 achievement, needless to say, is to collect gold stars across the board.

This tiered approach to success and failure might be seen as evidence of a kinder design sensibility, but in most other respects just the opposite is true; Lemmings 2 has the definite feel of a game for the hardcore. The first Lemmings does a remarkably good job of teaching you how to play it interactively over the course of its first twenty levels or so, introducing you one by one to each of its skills along with its potential uses and limitations. There’s nothing remotely comparable in Lemmings 2; it just throws you in at the deep end. While there is a gradual progression in difficulty within each tribe’s levels, the game as a whole is a lumpier affair, especially in the beginning. Each level gives you access to between one and eight of the 52 available skills, whilst evincing no interest whatsoever in showing you how to use any of them. There is some degree of thematic grouping when it comes to the skills: the Highland lemmings like to toss cabers; the beach lemmings are fond of swimming, kayaking, and surfing; the alpine lemmings often need to ski or skate. Nevertheless, the sheer number of new skills you’re expected to learn on the fly is intimidating even for a veteran of the first game. The closest Lemmings 2 comes to its predecessor’s training levels are a few free-form sandbox environments where you can choose your own palette of skills and have at it. But even here, your education can be a challenging one, coming down as it still does to trial and error.

Your first hours with the game can be particularly intimidating; as soon as you’ve learned how one group of skills works well enough to finish one level, you’re confronted with a whole new palette of them on the next level. Even I, a huge fan of the first game, bounced off the second one quite a few times before I buckled down, started figuring out the skills, and, some time thereafter, started having fun.

Luckily, once you have put in the time to learn how the skills work, Lemmings 2 becomes very fun indeed, — every bit as rewarding as the first game, possibly even more so. Certainly its level design is every bit as good — better in fact, relying more on logic and less on dodgy edge cases in the game engine than do the infamously difficult final levels of the first Lemmings. Even the spiky difficulty curve isn’t all bad; it can be oddly soothing to start on a new tribe’s relatively straightforward early levels after being taxed to the upmost on another tribe’s last level. If the first Lemmings is mountain climbing as people imagine it to be — a single relentless, ever-steeper ascent to a dizzying peak — the second Lemmings has more in common with the reality of the sport: a set of more or less difficult stages separated by more or less comfortable base camps. While it’s at least as daunting in the end, it does offer more ebbs and flows along the way.

One might say, then, that Lemmings 2 is designed around a rather literal interpretation of the concept of a sequel. That is to say, it assumes that you’ve played its predecessor before you get to it, and are now ready for its added complexity. That’s bracing for anyone who fulfills that criterion. But in 1993, the year of Lemmings 2‘s release, its design philosophy had more negative than positive consequences for its own commercial arc and for that of the franchise to which it belonged.

The fact is that Lemmings 2‘s attitude toward its sequel status was out of joint with the way sequels had generally come to function by 1993. In a fast-changing industry that was fast attracting new players, the ideal sequel, at least in the eyes of most industry executives, was a game equally welcoming to both neophytes and veterans. Audiovisual standards were changing so rapidly that a game that was just a couple of years old could already look painfully dated. What new player with a shiny new computer wanted to play some ugly old thing just to earn a right to play the latest and greatest?

That said, Lemmings 2 actually didn’t look all that much better than its predecessor either, flashy opening movie aside. Part of this was down to DMA Design still using the 1985-vintage Commodore Amiga, which was still very popular as a gaming computer in Britain and other European countries, as their primary development platform, then porting the game to MS-DOS and various other more modern platforms. Staying loyal to the Amiga meant working within some fairly harsh restrictions, such as that of having no more than 32 colors on the screen at once, not to mention making the whole game compact enough to run entirely off floppy disk; hard drives, much less CD-ROM drives, were still not common among European Amiga owners. Shortly before the release of Lemmings 2, David Jones confessed to being “a little worried” about whether people would be willing to look beyond the unimpressive graphics and appreciate the innovations of the game itself. As it happened, he was right to be worried.

By the time Jones made that comment, Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings had already sold in the millions across a bewildering range of platforms, from modern mainstream computers like the Apple Macintosh and Wintel machines to antique 8-bit computers like the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum, from handheld systems like the Nintendo Game Boy and Atari Lynx to living-room game consoles like the Sega Master System and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Lemmings 2, being a much more complex game under the hood as well as on the surface, wasn’t quite so amenable to being ported to just about any gadget with a CPU, even as its more off-putting initial character and its lack of new audiovisual flash did it no favors either. It was still widely ported and still became a solid success by any reasonable standard, mind you, but likely sold in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. All indications are that the first game and its semi-expansion pack continued to sell more copies than the second even after the latter’s release.

In the aftermath of this muted reception, the bloom slowly fell off the Lemmings rose, not only for the general public but also for DMA Design themselves. The franchise’s true jump-the-shark moment ironically came as part of an attempt to re-jigger the creatures to become media superstars beyond the realm of games. The Children’s Television Workshop, the creator of Sesame Street among other properties, was interested in moving the franchise onto television screens. In the course of these negotiations, they asked DMA to give the lemmings more differentiated personalities in the next game, to turn them from anonymous marchers, each just a few pixels across, into something more akin to individualized cartoon characters. Soon the next game was being envisioned as the first of a linked series of no less than four of them, each one detailing the further adventures of three of the tribes after their escape from the island at the end of Lemmings 2, each one ripe for trans-media adaptation by the Children’s Television Workshop. But the first game of this new generation, called The Lemmings Chronicles, just didn’t work. The attempt to cartoonify the franchise was cloying and clumsy, and the gameplay fell to pieces; unlike Lemmings 2, Lemmings Chronicles eminently deserves its underwhelming critical reputation. DMA insiders like Mike Dailly have since admitted that its was developed more out of obligation than enthusiasm: “We were all ready to move on.” When it performed even worse than its predecessor, the Children’s Television Workshop dropped out; all of its compromises had been for nothing.

Released just a year after Lemmings 2, Lemmings Chronicles marked the last game in the six-game contract that DMA Design had signed with their publisher Psygnosis what seemed like an eternity ago — in late 1987 to be more specific, when David Jones had first come to Psygnosis with his rather generic outer-space shoot-em-up Menace, giving no sign that he was capable of something as ingenious as Lemmings. Now, having well and truly demonstrated their ingenuity, DMA had little interest in re-upping; they were even willing to leave behind all of their intellectual property, which the contract Jones had signed gave to Psygnosis in perpetuity. In fact, they were more than ready to leave behind the cute-and-cuddly cartoon aesthetic of Lemmings and return to more laddish forms of gaming. The eventual result of that desire would be a second, more long-lasting worldwide phenomenon, known as Grand Theft Auto.

Meanwhile Sony, who had acquired Psygnosis in 1993, continued off and on to test the waters with new iterations of the franchise, but all of those attempts evinced the same vague sense of ennui that had doomed Lemmings Chronicles; none became hits. The last Lemmings game that wasn’t a remake appeared in 2006.

It’s interesting to ask whether DMA Design and Psygnosis could have managed the franchise better, thereby turning it into a permanent rather than a momentary icon of gaming, perhaps even one on a par with the likes of Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog; they certainly had the sales to compete head-to-head with those other videogame icons for a few years there in the early 1990s. The obvious objection is that Mario and Sonic were individualized characters, while DMA’s lemmings were little more than a handful of tropes moving in literal lockstep. Still, more has been done with less in the annals of media history. If everyone had approached Lemmings Chronicles with more enthusiasm and a modicum more writing and branding talent, maybe the story would have turned out differently.

Many speculate today that the franchise must inevitably see another revival at some point, what with 21st-century pop culture’s tendency to mine not just the A-list properties of the past, but increasingly its B- and C-listers as well, in the name of one generation’s nostalgia and another’s insatiable appetite for kitsch. Something tells me as well that we haven’t seen the last of Lemmings, but, as of this writing anyway, the revival still hasn’t arrived.

As matters currently stand, then, the brief-lived but frenzied craze for Lemmings has gone down in history, alongside contemporaries like Tetris and The Incredible Machine, as one more precursor of the casual revolution in gaming that was still to come, with its very different demographics and aesthetics. But in addition to that, it gave us two games that are brilliant in their own right, that remain as vexing but oh-so-rewarding as they were in their heyday. Long may they march on.

One other surviving tribute to Dundee’s second most successful gaming franchise is this little monument at the entrance to the city’s Seabraes Park, erected by local artist Alyson Conway in 2013. Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto… not bad for a city of only 150,000 souls.

(Sources: the book Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene; Compute! of January 1992; Amiga Format of May 1993 and the special 1992 annual; Retro Gamer 39; The One of November 1993; Computer Gaming World of July 1993.

Lemmings 2 has never gotten a digital re-release. I therefore make it available for download here, packaged to be as easy as possible to get running under DOSBox on your modern computer.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/lemmings-2-the-tribes/

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Fast Asleep Pillow

The necessity of Sleeping Pillow for your good night's sleep

No one has gone to bed thinking of receiving a stiff neck or exhausted body in the morning. Nonetheless, occasionally, you get neck pain or physique arch at waking up inside the morning. Have you ever thought how important a pillow for the high quality of one's sleep? Sleeping around the correct kind of pillow delivers you a comfy sleep that tends to make you refreshed in the morning. With time, the standard pillow gets worn out, can not supply ample assistance, prone to fungus and germs. So your Fast Asleep Pillow should be replaced in every single twelve months.

Neck Pain Pillow

After you sleep in your sides, the principle help is your neck. For that, you will need a firmer and a thicker pillow. The thick material of multi-foam constructed pillow prevents the neck from finding hurt delivering a right neck and head alignment.

Rapid Asleep Pillow

Rapidly Asleep Pillow gives softer and firmer pillows of all shapes and sizes which can be comfy for everybody. You can find several brands, cope with the pillows and also other sleeping supplies to cater to the need in the customers.

Sleeping pillow

Sleeping pillows play an important role inside your sleeping routine. You need to get yourself a better quality pillow to get a sound and restful sleep.

Positive aspects of applying a better quality pillow

Choosing a pillow is equally significant as selecting a mattress. Here, the positive aspects of pillows of very good good quality and material are discussed below.

Hygienic

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Fantastic for spine alignment

Folks affected by back pain or neck discomfort should use a great pillow for spinal alignment. Poor spinal alignment causes many troubles inside your body. A firm pillow of foam supplies you vital assistance, minimizing tossing and discomfort. Your muscles might be relaxed adjusting to your sleeping position and offer you spinal help for the body.

Give a fantastic sleeping position

Occasionally persons knowledge body discomfort or neck pain in the morning as a result of sleeping position. An awkward sleeping position leads to body pain, sleeping having a softer and improved pillow can stop your head and neck move in awkward directions.

Sturdy

Commonly sleeping pillows really should be replaced in frequent intervals, but normal cotton pillows get old immediately after employing few days. Instead, you must get a pillow made up of synthetic material, does not get flat early or do not create any lump. Those will supply you the identical comfort for fairly a long period with out reducing the good quality.

Availability of distinct shape

People of distinct age groups have varied demands. Availability of options assists them to pick the proper sort of pillow. For instance, kids want little size pillows; adults need pillows of diverse shape and sizes and people struggling with physique pain have to have softer pillows.

Contemplating the significance of great high-quality pillows, persons should switch for the proper kind of pillow greatest suited for their sleep routine. Pillows straight effect your solace and well being.