#digital cartographer

[emptyforlater]

Ennasim, Tunisia

[coffeehousecarnations]

Another color challenge

(Tap for better quality)

[dynamoe]

The Cartographer of Mêlée Island

(the reason I drew that Monkey Island map, posted previously.)

x-posted to Instagram

The original LucasArts Monkey Island game came out when I was a kid and so fundamentally influenced my sense of humor and drawing style (those tiny one-pixel black eyes burrowing into your soul) that I felt I should draw something to show my appreciation.

I finished Return to Monkey Island, the long-awaited newest sequel, a month ago (but mixed feelings about it) so I did a portrait of my favorite character from the original game series.

Tried to design a compromise between all the different incarnations of cartographer Wally B. Feed — Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, The Curse of Monkey Island, the redesigned Monkey Island 2 Special Edition (yuck), and this year's Return to Monkey Island.

... in a composition inspired by the heroic portraiture of the late 18th century (e.g. George Romney, Charles Wilson Peale and son), where the learned gentleman of leisure (British) or earnest craftsperson (American) is always depicted momentarily distracted in their work, surrounded by the symbolic trappings of their life, looking into the middle distance contemplating... something... Primarily using these two painting as models for reference—

The Young Cricketer (1768) by Francis Cotes

John Adams (1783) by John Singleton Copley

Those epic skies. The jaunty contraposto hip-tilt. A random drape in the background.

...but nothing tops the perfection of the original character design:

Other than the buckles on his shoes, there is nothing pirate-y about Wally's outfit. Monocles weren't even widely used until the Victorian/Edwardian era... 100+ years later than the "Golden Age of Piracy." As much as the series maintains a *scrupulous* dedication to being historically inaccurate, I hewed closer to ambiguously 1760-1790 colonial/pirate-y costume aesthetic, but without doing any actual research. Aiming for the sweet spot: Less Disneyland More Colonial-Williamsburg-on-a-bad-day. ( We stan a craftsman's apron connecting to a waistcoat button.)

Monkey Island map, before being warped in the portrait

How did I do?

[spellarena]

One of the dwarven miners vanishes, and you’re tasked with investigating this mysterious disappearance.

Near Blackwoode is a silver mine operated by dwarves. The foreman asks you to investigate the sudden disappearance of one of his workers. The mine is small; there’s only one chamber where six dwarves sleep and a room for supplies.

Off to the left, the dwarves have already begun making the space homier for themselves by making a space to put up a statue of their King and carving out another room for storing the more valuable items they’ve brought here from their settlement. In the future this place will become another dwarven complex of tunnels, or so the foreman hopes.

Off to the right is a huge natural cave with plentiful nodes of silver that the dwarves are mining. Some fluorescent mushrooms grow down the middle, lighting the area. Upon further investigation, you come near the pond in the southern corner of the cave. The water bubbles; when you turn around, a tentacle of goo extends from the surface and tries to pull one of you into the water. The pond is actually a giant slime! Get ready to fight – you’ve found what ate the missing dwarf!

Get this map on our Patreon!

Adventure Hooks

Upon investigating the dwarven silver mine, you find that a slime is pretending to be a pond of water and has already eaten one of the miners. It’s time to get rid of this monster so that the dwarves can continue to work in peace.

In your travels you stumble upon a dwarven silver mine. It seems the dwarves have begun developing the space into a proper settlement. Yet all the supplies now lie abandoned; where have the workers gone? Upon investigating the main cave, you find out there’s a giant slime living inside. That creature must have eaten the dwarves. What a sad way to die.

The dwarven silver mine near Blackwoode is looking for workers. Since you want to take a break from adventuring for a while, you decide to apply as miners. Maybe the change of pace won’t be so bad?

[ashmcgivern]

It’s A Great Day To Die!

Gresh’am, Son of Grellak, House Kurita - A Hobgoblin that was rejected by his tribe for insubordination, refusing to harm non combatants/women/children in a scuffle. He was hot on the trail of a giant magically altered wolf that had killed one of his escort clients with the Fighters Guild, and considered it a matter of personal honor to see to it’s demise. We eventually learned that it was commissioned by Finneas Hammerlock and created by Maximilian Goron Del the Fourth, and to Gresh’am’s honor, the party dealt with all three. He was accepted back to his tribe a hero.

Gresh’am would refer to the party to others as “my warband,” which eventually led to them being affectionately called “The Agaran Warband” despite their general lack of actual participation in war/killing, and the fact that not everyone stayed in Agaras post-campaign. The implication that they had become a small family unit during their short adventure was enough for the name to stick.

The Agaran Warband Master Post

[mjhartwork]

meet my new oc, Chitan!

[cat-noelle]

hair or water? that is the question

[rsarts]

Jeebus this almost took me the whole month but. Here's all of my gay little characters! plus a version with their names and labels. check them out on my toyhouse for more lore and stuff c:

[arkenforge]

How to build a touchscreen TTRPG table, and use Arkenforge with it.

Hey folks! Recently we put out this video (also shown below) showing off our new touch screen features, and it’s safe to say it was quite popular! In this article we’ll be giving you instructions on how you can build your own version of this setup at home. Product links in this article are affiliate links.

TLDR Links:

Touch overlays for TV-s or Monitors:

32-inch IR Overlay

42-inch IR Overlay

55-inch IR Overlay

Touch software:

MT Touch Client: https://arkenforge.com/mt-touch-client/

VTT:

The Master’s Toolkit

Map Display

The first thing we’ll need to organise is a way for your players to see the map. There’s three main ways to go about this, depending on your budget and available space. We’ll start with the cheapest/least space required and go up from there.

Horizontal-Mounted TV

The easiest way to get a digital setup up and running is to take an existing TV and lay it flat on your table. If your TV doesn’t have a flat back or you want something a little sturdier, you can design a mount that screws into the back of it to keep it flat. The image above shows one that we’ve designed for use at conventions and our home games.

Projector

Image source: http://projection-mapping.org/dungeons-dragons-projection-mapping/ If you’ve got a sturdy roof and don’t mind doing some wiring, a roof-mounted projector may be for you. This allows for any surface to be used for your play area. Minis with overhanging elements may cause shadows on the map, but arguably that just adds to the immersion.

Integrated Digital Table

This is the big one; a TV built directly into a table! These can range from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands depending on the features and craftsmanship. The sky is the limit with this setup, as you can add speakers, lighting, or even cup holders! Depending on your touch screen solution, the TV will either be flush with the table, or slightly recessed. If you aren’t confident to chop up a table yourself, contact your local carpenter, or one of the many companies creating ready-made digital tables.

Now that our players are able to see the map, our next step is to make it interactive!

Touch Screen Options

The most important part of this build is the thing that will actually be detecting your minis. There’s two main types of touch screens you’ll want to consider: capacitive and infrared. The touch technology you use will determine if there’s anything else you’ll need to get your setup up and running.

Infrared Overlays

Image source: https://crystal-display.com/products/ir-touch/

IR Overlays work by firing out infrared light in a grid pattern and registering a touch point where the grid is broken. They’re cheap, relatively accurate, and they can detect any object that you put in the middle of them. We personally like these because it can detect any mini right out of the box. There are a solid list of cons though, depending on how you like to run your sessions.

Because the detection is done from the frame inwards, objects that the IR beam can’t hit won’t be detected. This can be noticed when clumping minis together, or if some unfortunate positioning leaves a mini in a dead zone. As the frame detects everything that enters it, dice rolls or accidental droppage can cause unintended reveals. This is something we will address with future versions of the Master’s Toolkit. An IR Overlay also doesn’t play nice with 3D terrain, so you may want to opt for a different solution if you enjoy busting out the Dwarven Forge dungeons. Finally, if you play somewhere with large amounts of IR light, your touch screen may have detection issues.

You can purchase IR overlays in various sizes to fit your screen. We’ve selected a few below for common screen sizes: 32-inch IR Overlay 42-inch IR Overlay 55-inch IR Overlay

Capacitive Touch Screen

Image source: https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/technology-our-lives/touchscreen

These screens are the ones we find in nearly every device today. They detect touch input by sensing when an electrically conductive material is applied to them. This is usually your finger or a stylus. There is no risk of blocking your minis, as the source of detection is the screen itself. There’s also no risk of interference from other light sources, meaning they can be used in all conditions.

While capacitive screens solve a lot of the issues that IR touch screens can face, there is extra cost and work involved in preparing your minis for detection. The main downside of these devices is that standard mini bases are made of plastic, and therefore are not conductive. You’ll need to find custom bases with a capacitive material, usually involving copper or aluminium. Aluminium foil can often work in a pinch, but results can be iffy. As a general rule of thumb, if it works on your smartphone, it’ll work on your screen. As capacitive touch screens put you in charge of what does and doesn’t get detected, you can safely use 3D terrain on these screens.

Capacitive screens can be purchased both as a full unit, or as a film that you can place on your existing TV. You can find one such film below:

Capacitive touch screen film

If you aren’t too big on the DIY side of things, you can increase your budget a bit and go for an already integrated capacitive touch screen:

40-inch capacitive touch screen

Once your screen has been organised, the next thing you’ll need is the software to run it!

Software

At this moment in time, there’s two pieces of software you’ll need to get your touch screen up and running. Our first version of this feature requires two devices, one of which must be running Windows. There’s no spec requirements for this second device. It just needs to be able to connect to WiFi. As time goes on, we’ll be working to get the second device to a much cheaper price point and more convenient size.

The Master’s Toolkit

This is the most important part of your setup! Right now the Toolkit interprets all touch points as vision to reveal. In the future we’ll be performing some software wizardry to allow selective touch reveal, touch dead-zones, and a bunch of other fun features.

In the first release of this feature, we’ve got some simple options available. For a full overview, check out our sister article that explains how to use and configure the MT Touch Client: https://arkenforge.com/mt-touch-client/

MT Touch Client software

Those of you on Windows may have noticed a new option in your Launcher – MT Touch Client. This software runs on a Windows device connected to your touch screen. Some of you may be wondering: “Why do I need a second device + software to use the touch screen? Can’t I just plug it into my main computer” That’s a pretty valid question. The primary reason is that touch input steals control of the mouse. This stops the Toolkit from being useable once minis are in play, and can lead to a lot of unintended UI selection. Another fun fact is that Windows clears ALL touch points if it detects a point for more than 60 seconds. This is counterproductive when dealing with minis that are often on the board for hours at a time.

For this reason, we created the MT Touch Client software to send touch information to the Toolkit over the local network. The only thing you need to do is run the software. It’ll automatically connect to the Toolkit and handle everything from there. One other benefit of having an external app is that the Toolkit can remain platform independent, so whether you’re running on PC, Mac, or Wine, you don’t need to worry about drivers or compatibility issues. For a full overview of the MT Touch Client, view our sister article here: https://arkenforge.com/mt-touch-client/

Integrating other devices with the Toolkit fog of war

For those who want to perform your own fun fog of war integration, the Toolkit receives fog data via OSC. Port 7001, Address “/FogOfWarPosition”. Data will need to be in the string format “[touch point]|[x position]|[y position]”, where [touch point] is an integer from 0 – 99, [x/y position] is a decimal value from 0 – 1 representing the screen position, and ‘|’ is the separator character.

Enjoy your new setup!

You’ve now got everything you need to get a touch screen setup up and running! If this feels like a bit too much work, we’ll be looking to release a kit that contains everything you need in the future. Be sure to stay on the lookout for that!

If you don’t have the Master’s Toolkit yet, try it free for 28 days at https://arkenforge.com/trial

See you in the next one!

[rsrandomthings]

new oc hell yeah (extracted from that painting i did)

[ripplesplash-arts]

Dear Cartographer...

[emptyforlater]

De Frene Market Garden, England

[dduane]

PSA: Mapmaking / cartographic brushes for Photoshop

I just want to point people at these (which are beautifully made and organized!) from @kmalexander.

I'm working in a different idiom of mapmaking at the moment—more USGS-modeled than anything else, as my ultimate goal is constructing a whole alternate-Earth planet that'll look good viewed from space—but these would be fabulous for other things. And they're CC0-licensed, and free!

If you're at all into digital mapmaking, particularly for imagery meant to go with fantasy or historical works, you should have a look at these.

[cultivating-saplings]

In honour of 4/13x15 I'm posting (a very slightly edited version of) the paper I wrote on the Unofficial Homestuck Collection for one of my classes last term. The language/tone is a bit more academic than what I would usually put up on here, but it's exam season so... 

Don’t Turn Your Back on the Body:

The Resurrection of Homestuck After the Death of Flash

Digital media is, broadly speaking, very difficult to preserve. The rapid pace of technological development means that obsolescence and decay present a consistent threat to the availability of natively digital works. Most computers produced in 2023 no longer have built in CD drives, and I feel fairly confident in asserting that none are being produced with floppy disk readers outside of hobbyist spaces. Issues with the accessibility of physically stored digital media can be mitigated (at least for now) by the use of external readers, but the preservation of fully digital media, born and hosted in its entirety on the Internet, is a different beast entirely.

This is, in part, an issue of pure volume; no one organization could ever hope to archive the vast amounts of stuff that the Internet is constantly producing, let alone organize it into a resource that could be used effectively. Like Borges’ cartographers who created “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,” to fully archive the Internet would be to replicate it in its entirety. Thus scope becomes a central question of fully digital archiving. 

The Internet Archive, which also operates the Wayback Machine, answers that question with a resounding and all-encompassing ‘yes’ — their stated goal is to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,” but even this comes with caveats. The organization freely permits members of the public to upload files to the archive and save pages on the Wayback Machine, but the work carried out by its official volunteers is more curated, and prioritizes webpages which have been identified as particularly important.

The Internet Archive is very effective within its own space, yes, but it has its limits. When the piece of work you are trying to archive is composed of not just static text and images, but longform animations and complex browser-based games, where do you put it? What do you do when the software necessary to access these elements of the work has been taken offline? And what happens if the people who were supposed to safeguard it fail to do so?

These were the issues that the fans of Homestuck faced in 2020 as the impending deactivation of Flash loomed on the horizon.

But first, before I properly explain what the Unofficial Homestuck Collection really is and why it is so effective as a digital archive, let me tell you about Homestuck. 

Frustrated with the poorly implemented official preservation of the comic, and with a lot of free time on his hands, one fan began the Unofficial Homestuck Collection as a personal project during lockdown, during the “depths of 2020.” As the project changed hands and more fans became involved over the following years, its true scope came into focus: the Collection would preserve not only Homestuck itself, in its entirety and with its Flash-dependent pages intact, but also as much of its contextual material as possible, thus making it a prime example of the effectiveness of fan-driven digital archiving and preservation. Because the people who created the Collection are long standing fans of Homestuck, they know which pieces of peripheral material will provide the context the comic demands. The Collection preserves Homestuck as a text in a way that would be impossible in an analogue format, creating an archive both of the work and of the experience of reading it in a serialized format.

Andrew Hussie began* Homestuck on April 13th of 2009, and published it serially on mspaintadventures.com, his personal website at the time, until its conclusion on April 13th, 2016. Prior to beginning Homestuck, Hussie had been publishing short webcomics and pieces of fiction for several years on his older website, Team Special Olympics, since 2004, which had gained him a small but very loyal following. This following was centered mostly around the forum attached to the TSO website, which hosted the first of Hussie’s ‘MS Paint Adventures,’ Jailbreak, in September of 2006. Jailbreak was a short comic which Hussie produced as a collaborative writing game on these forums, in the style of early text adventures.

Beginning with the prompt, “You wake up locked in a deserted jail cell, completely alone. There is nothing at all in your cell, useful or otherwise,” Hussie then wrote the rest of the comic according to the first comment posted after every page. This, perhaps predictably, resulted in a barely coherent mess of a story.

Following the conclusion of Jailbreak after a short 134 pages, Hussie would produce two more comics prior to beginning Homestuck: the unfinished Bard Quest (June-July 2007) and Problem Sleuth (March 2008-April 2009), which was his longest work so far at the time of its conclusion. Problem Sleuth in particular represented a substantial increase in production quality and general coherency over Jailbreak, as Hussie gained experience using the MSPA forums as tools for collaborative storytelling, reigning in the meandering narrative by allowing himself to be more selective about which forum responses he followed.

Hussie would continue this more controlled style of forum collaboration throughout the first three Acts of Homestuck, which followed a much more focused story than any of his prior work, thanks to his decision to use reader input only in specific parts of the comic. In the introduction to the print edition of the first Act, Hussie described his own role during the production of these first Acts as “dungeon master, a game engine responding to input, and an improv comic all in one.” During the process of writing Act 4, Hussie stopped taking prompts from readers entirely, and would construct the rest of the comic ostensibly as its sole author.

‘Okay,’ you might now be thinking, ‘you’ve given me the context, but what the hell is Homestuck? And what’s it about?’ Well, to wildly oversimplify a very complex piece of media, Homestuck is a webcomic about four young online friends who play a video game that causes the end of their universe and grants them the power to create a new one as they see fit. It is a story about growing up and realizing you’ve been forever changed by your experiences, a story about leaving behind the life you knew and constructing a new one. It is also a story about time travel and paradoxes, genetics and cloning, a large number of aliens, a possibly larger number of puppets (at least one of which is sentient), and an unfortunate amount of clowns. 

This story slowly unfolds over the course of 8126 pages, 817,929 words, and 166 animated panels, 95 of which contained some degree of interactivity and all of which total over four hours in length. Most of the comic’s pages consist of a main image, usually a short looping gif, accompanied by a text description or dialogue, which is almost always written in the format and style of online chat-logs between characters. As mentioned previously, however, these simpler gif-and-description pages are interspersed with longer videos, animated in Flash and soundtracked by one of Hussie’s several collaborators.

The first of these animated panels was uploaded a few weeks into Homestuck’s publication — an animated opening title-card for the comic, scored ominously with sounds of howling wind and windchimes. This first Flash panel was relatively simple, but the next would introduce a bespoke soundtrack (“Harlequin” by Mark Hadley), and the third would include simple interactivity. These soundtracked animations and interactive segments increased in scope and complexity over the course of the comic’s run; the final animated page in the comic, “[S] Collide,” comes in at nearly twenty minutes in length, and some of the larger interactive segments can take upwards of two hours to fully explore. 

While some of the later interactive pages were developed in an engine based on HTML5, most of Homestuck would be built using Adobe Flash, and would depend on the program for basic functionality. This would prove disastrous for the comic’s long term preservation. Flash was very popular, and had become ubiquitous by the early 2010s, but it had security issues which were easy to exploit, its range was fairly limited in terms of what kinds of animations it could produce, and, as its most fatal flaw, it couldn’t run on mobile. Thus with the expanding use of smartphones and tablets, Flash became less and less practical as a tool for web developers, and Adobe began slowly preparing to kill it. On December 31st, 2020, Adobe sent Flash off to the farm where it could frolic and play in the digital sunshine, leaving many online communities facing a crisis. How do you preserve a text when its foundations have crumbled?

With Homestuck using Flash in such an integral way, the issue of preservation was an important one. After the finale, Hussie would post some short post-credits stories to Snapchat from October 2016 to August 2017, as well as a longer epilogue in April 2019, before stepping away from any formal involvement with the comic in 2020. In 2018, Hussie had given the distribution rights for Homestuck to VIZ Media, which primarily handled the English-language publication of several manga series, and had left the rights to the IP and the freedom to produce new work to former collaborators. Thus it was VIZ who took on the task of officially preserving Homestuck against the death of Flash.

To say their efforts were unsatisfactory would, I think, be paying them too great a compliment. The complex and highly detailed Flash animations were replaced with embedded YouTube links to low-quality screen-captures of the originals. The hours-long walkaround games were not translated at all, replaced with ‘choose your own adventure’ style pages of text and links. The official version of Homestuck as it currently exists fails to capture a lot of what made the comic work, because it removes a lot of the gamified elements of the comic that are so integral to its storytelling.

There are many snapshots of the website from before the walkaround games were taken down on the Wayback Machine, but the Flash emulator that archive.org uses is very inconsistent, frequently becoming stuck on looping loading screens or failing to process assets correctly. While the dubious preservation of the long Flash animations is a real issue on its own, the lack of any attempt to replicate the format of these longform games represents the loss of something essential to the comic. Homestuck is, throughout the whole of its story, intertwined with the visual and cultural language of video games. The loss of the complex interactivity of these panels fundamentally changes how the reader is permitted to engage with them and, by extension, with Homestuck’s narrative as a whole. The official version of Homestuck that exists online is no longer complete. 

This incredibly poor preservation was the impetus behind the creation of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. In its most basic form, the Collection is simply a preserved and restored version of Homestuck, intact and in high quality, accessible through a downloadable client, rather than online — reducing the Collection down to this basic description does it a disservice. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection includes not just Homestuck, but all of Hussie’s prior work: Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth are in there, but so are the full contents of his first website, Team Special Olympics, alongside archived versions of his now-deleted accounts on various social media platforms, and copies of threads from the MSPA forums that he would later reference in the main comic. The Collection also includes material that Hussie released alongside Homestuck, like the in-fiction blog of one of the main characters, various short comics written by guest authors, and a full episode of an in-universe childrens’ cartoon.

These peripheral materials are interesting and provide context for some of the more obscure references throughout Homestuck, but many of them were not produced until well into the comic’s run, and assume an audience that is caught up with the most recent update, making them dangerously full of spoilers for the unaware new reader. This issue is solved by the appropriately named ‘new reader mode.’ One of a variety of useful accessibility tools included in the Collection, the new reader mode tracks which page a user has reached, and implements a universal spoiler cloak over the whole program, hiding all materials that were released after their most recent page’s publication. This tool is what transforms the Unofficial Homestuck Collection from an archive of a text, into an archive of an experience.

De Kosnik argues that fan-driven archiving serves as a way for fans to mediate their own temporal experience of a text, describing websites hosting fanworks as mechanisms which “maintain the possibility of individuals joining fandoms… long after a media text has ceased to air.” While De Kosnik’s focus is on archives of fanworks and their function in ongoing fan spaces, I would argue that this framework, which centers the impact of serialization on the dynamics of fan communities, fits extremely well when applied to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. Homestuck was published serially over the course of seven years, accompanied by blog posts, side comics, music, and other pieces of peripheral media that were released in tandem with the comic itself.

Updates were highly anticipated events, and fan communities were structured around them — one user on Tumblr found an unlisted part of the MSPA forums where Hussie posted new pages before they were published, and this “MSPA Prophet” became a fixture of the fandom for their ability to predict when the next update would come. The event that was an update (or upd8, after the typing style of a popular character) was a central aspect of the experience of reading Homestuck during its publication, and it is one that is very difficult to recover now that the comic exists as a static, completed work. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, through its new reader mode, functions as a solution to that absence. It does more than safeguard the reader against unwanted spoilers: it temporarily transforms Homestuck back into an incomplete text. 

Homestuck makes use of the assumed preexisting knowledge of the reader, and their “intuitive familiarity” with various types of digital media and culture, especially ones which are inherently participatory. The story’s use of narrative motifs and referential easter-eggs allows Homestuck to function, in Hussie’s own words, as “both a story and a puzzle,” but that “There [are] a range of ways to interface with it[…] Failing to grasp everything shouldn’t preclude basic enjoyment, nor is it a symptom of failure by either the reader or the story.” In the most frequent example of repeated symbology in Homestuck, Hussie peppers the text with references to the number ‘413,’ simplified from April 13th, the day the comic began.

The story follows four friends who are all thirteen years old, many of the songs on the comic’s soundtrack are exactly four minutes and thirteen seconds long, and the timestamps on chat-logs show that characters frequently begin important conversations at precisely 4:13, to name just a few of the number’s appearances. The combination of puzzle and story in Homestuck extends beyond these kinds of motifs, however, and into the way Hussie employs referential humour.

Some of these references are fairly easy to catch; in Act 4, one of the main characters is gifted the Warhammer of Zillyhoo — a brightly coloured weapon which originally appeared in Problem Sleuth. Others, however, are much more obscure. The older brother of another main character runs a business creating bizarre, semi-ironic puppet pornography. Most of the audience read this as an absurdist joke about the internet’s love for offputting porn; the subset of fans who had been following Hussie for several years, or those who looked into Hussie’s early activity on the MSPA forums, however, would find themselves with new understanding of a long-running joke. This element of the experience of reading Homestuck is something that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection not only preserves, but makes readily accessible to the comic’s readers in a way that would not have been possible during the comic’s publication.

On a purely theoretical basis, I would argue that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection is valuable not just in the context of contemporary fan activity, but as a potentially valuable resource for future research. Homestuck is a foundational piece of the current cultural landscape, its influences permeating both digital and analog media in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways.

Undertale, titan of online culture that it is, was created by Toby Fox, who was the composer behind a large amount of the music in Homestuck and was, during the game’s production, living in Andrew Hussie’s basement. Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb tetralogy, began her writing career as a prominent figure in the Homestuck fandom on Tumblr and Archive of Our Own. Although the reach of her original work has thoroughly outgrown her fandom roots, Muir includes sly references to Homestuck in several places in her books. Hell, one of the animators working on Bluey, a cartoon aimed at very young children, included references to Homestuck in the backgrounds of episodes they worked on, as easter-eggs for the benefit of parents in the know. All of this is to say that Homestuck has its hooks deep within the culture of the Internet, and its impacts will, I think, be felt for a long time yet.

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is certainly not immune to digital decay or link rot, but it is resistant to them, since it is hosted on a large and well established website (GitHub), and, once downloaded, can be accessed without an internet connection, and shared freely. For the hypothetical future researcher, the Collection contains resources to mitigate the frustration of trying to hunt down pieces of contextual or peripheral material by packaging them with the text itself — it functions like a sourcebook. 

Bibliography

Bamboshu, and GiovanH. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection. 2020. https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/ 

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10248.001.0001.

Glaser, Tim. “Homestuck as a Game: A Webcomic between Playful Participation, Digital Technostalgia, and Irritating Inventory Systems.” In Comics and Videogames. Edited by Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noel Thon. 96–112. Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003035466-8.

Hussie, Andrew. Homestuck. MS Paint Adventures, 2009-2016. https://homestuck.com. 

Nakhaie, FS. “Reproduce and Adapt: Homestuck in Print and Digital (Re)Incarnations.” Convergence, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221141961.

Read MS Paint Adventures. “Statistics.” Last modified April 7, 2018. http://readmspa.org/stats/.

Veale, Kevin. “‘Friendship Isn’t an Emotion Fucknuts’: Manipulating Affective Materiality to Shape the Experience of Homestuck’s Story.” Convergence 25, no. 5-6 (2019): 1027–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517714954. 

[spellarena]

Venture to the Flying Lands of Halulil in search of an ingredient for a love potion!

You always thought of yourself as adventurers with your feet firmly planted on the ground, but one day you find yourselves having to board an airship. You ascend far into the sky until you arrive at what is known as the Flying Lands of Halulil. Navigating between the small airborne islands is difficult, but you must journey deep into the heart of this close-knit archipelago.

Betty, a chipper halfling researcher from the Magic Academy in the capital, has asked you to find the fabled Pond of Sharea in Halulil. “The water doesn’t look any different from that of a normal pond, but it has indisputable magical properties. If mixed with some special ingredients it can be brewed into a love potion. I just so happen to have those ingredients on hand and tobe in need of creating such a mixture.” Betty looked at you with pleading eyes. “You will go to the Halulil Archipelag, and fetch a vial of this water for me, won’t you? I will reward you handsomely.” At the promise of riches, your interest in the quest grew.

So here you are now, in the Flying Lands, searching for the Pond of Sharea. You look at the various flying islands, trying to spot your destination, until you finally find a small island with a single pond in the middle surrounded by trees. You disembark from the ship and collect a small dose of the miraculous water in the vial provided to you by Betty. The liquid really doesn’t look like anything special – just normal water. Still, you’re not about to test if Betty is right or not about the magical properties. This is the water she wanted, and you will return the vial to her.

Suddenly a flying serpent appears, soaring between the islands. You won’t be able to outrun the beast on your airship, so your only option is to fight! Hopefully your magic and arrows will be able to pierce the creature’s iridescent scales!

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Adventure Hooks

Betty, a halfling researcher, wants to make a love potion. She needs the water from the Pond of Sharea in the Halulil Archipelago to brew the concoction. For the promise of gold, you travel to the flying lands on an airship and get a vial of the fabled water. Just then you are attacked by a flying serpent.

Gurk, a half-orc engineer, has teamed up with Durk, a half-orc researcher. They want to find the truth behind why the Archipelago of Halulil is airborne. Nobody has figured out thus far how the islands stay suspended in the sky, and Gurk and Durk hope to receive a magical research prize from the Magic Academy in the capital for their efforts. They have asked you, a group of adventurers, to escort them in case any arcane monsters decide to take an interest in them.

The Flying Lands of Halulil are plagued by a flying serpent who has been preying on the lives of passersby, making the voyage between islands dangerous. The King of Halulil, Omergo the Second, has tasked you with getting rid of the menace. You take an airship to the Archipelago. It doesn’t take you long to run into the monster. Will you be able to defeat the dangerous creature?

[pinkpastelcalesti]

LANDSCAPING LOVE || Bakugou Katsuki x Reader || Chapter I.

SUMMARY -> Tired of bouncing back and forth between the U.S. and Japan after graduating college, you’ve finally secured the career of your dreams: You’re Japan’s first heroics cartographer, a title bestowed upon you due to your quirk and specialty, that creates geographic maps for hero agencies across the country. While your work is highly respected and sought after, you’re known for a more niche reason among your coworkers at the Dynamight Agency: the food you make is fucking amazing. When Dynamight himself inevitably gets word that you’re coming for his cooking title on his own turf, chaos ensues and you find yourself competing against your boss for not only best chef, but also to win over his heart.

CONTENT/WARNINGS -> Pro hero AU, agency reader, reader with a quirk, fem/AFAB reader, reader is originally from America, reader is bilingual (English and Japanese), strangers (more like coworkers that don’t get a chance to speak much) to friends to lovers, fluff & chaos, minimal angst, suggestive humor.

LENGTH -> 7.9K

MASTERLIST

Running late for your first agency project presentation was not on your bingo card this year.

Because of nerves and the constant fear that you were going to tumble over your words during your presentation, you pulled a semi-all nighter and stayed up until 3 a.m. rehearsing your slides and your speech for the Dynamight Agency’s meeting on your current geographic project.

You’ve been working for the company for 7 months now, and this project is the first large-scale assignment you’d been given since you started. You’ve worked on smaller, personal projects for Dynamight and other pro heroes, but this project was your pride and joy, seeing as it was requested by Dynamight himself.

Your quirk, landscape, allows for you to create an entire mental map, in very graphic detail, of the area around you within five miles. This includes the visualization and relative scale of buildings, sidewalks, roads, and alleyways. Your quirk works when you place your bare hands on the ground, which sort of sucks because the city’s grounds weren’t exactly the cleanest. In order for you to utilize your quirk correctly, you grew up practicing cartography of all sorts. One could say your quirk opened up doors to many different career paths, such as engineering or urban planning, but you had decided early on that the best way you would be able to help people is by utilizing your maps for heroes.

Heroes use maps for everything, and you were going to profit off of that no matter what. Your quirk could expand past the five mile radius if you kept bouncing around to different areas, drew their maps from your memory, and combined all maps to create one whole map of a specific city or town. During your time in undergrad, you majored in and graduated (Summa cum laude, may you add) with a degree in geography, your main focus of research being urban cartography. Heroics cartography didn’t exist, so you figured the next best thing would be urban areas.

Your undergraduate research consisted of said urban cartography, and because of your academic standing, you were offered a study-abroad program for geographers that was located in Tokyo, which you took without a second’s hesitation. You always dreamed that you’d be helping U.S. heroes, however, during your time in Tokyo, you fell in love with the entirety of Japan and the vast landscapes you got to visit and draw. Your research professor oversaw your projects, which consisted of city maps, data collection, and utilizing GIS software to create digital maps that could be used for multiple different areas, whether that be infrastructure planning, evacuation routes, or heroics, your main focus.

Your current job as a heroics cartographer is a first in Japan. While it’s not that well-known that you’re the first person to ever have such a title, the pro heroes around you seem to understand its importance. Your job at Dynamight’s Agency allows you to create maps for Dynamight and his sidekicks to use for patrol routes, monitoring high crime areas across the city, and visualizing the areas where property damage occurs most. Not only do you work for Dynamight, but your skills have been requested and used by other pros across the city, including but not limited to Deku, Shouto, and Red Riot.

You really got into this career out of sheer luck and fate. While you were drawing up maps for the city during your third year of undergrad, pro hero Red Riot had reached out to you after he accidentally destroyed one of your maps at the post office in Musutafu during a fight with a villain. He’d picked up the broken display and noticed your name in the corner and contacted you through your professor. Initially pissed off because you’d just finished that map literally a week and a half prior to its destruction, you gave him grace and told him you’d be in touch with the post office to create a new one.

He ended up paying you back for the damage, and upon realizing how detailed your maps were, inquired about your skills in cartography. It was quite jarring, sitting in Red Riot’s agency at the ripe age of 20, sweat dripping down your back through your blouse as one of the top heroes in the nation asked if you’d be able to draw up a map of a large electrical facility for him to use for an upcoming mission. He’d apparently been trying to find an up-to-date map of the interior, but had no luck. Within a week, you were being driven in a fancy company car to the facility so you could use your quirk and recreate the building’s interior infrastructure.

After you’d created the map for him, Red Riot, or Eijiro, as you now get to call him, had asked that you look into working for the pros after you graduated. He was under the impression that you were actually a Japanese university student, so you had to break the news that you actually worked in the U.S. Upon realizing, Eijiro explained that he would be more than happy to get you in contact with plenty of heroes that could use your work and give you a job abroad for almost double the pay you’d be receiving if you stayed in America.

Turns out that keeping in contact with a top hero in Japan that destroyed weeks of your work within 3 minutes of a fight was a good idea after all. Eijiro was the one who ultimately hooked you up with a job under the roof of Dynamight’s agency. Once you’d graduated, you decided that you’d work in the U.S. for a little while longer to build up your experience and resume before you decided to go abroad.

You ended up staying in America for two more years after graduation, traveling across the country and working with urban geographers in cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. During this time, you were given full travel privileges to fly to Japan and help Red Riot and his pro hero allies develop brand new patrol map routes across different cities. You loved this part of your job most, and after finishing up your second year post-grad, decided to make it official and asked Eijiro if the job position was still on the table.

He would go on to give you one of the prettiest smiles you’d ever seen and excitedly tell you that yes, it was always available to you. Being friends with Eijiro meant not only a once-in-a-lifetime career connection, but it also meant realizing your potential early on.

You absolutely adore the work you do for Dynamight and his peers and wouldn’t trade it for the world. However, if you don’t hurry the hell up and get to your building in the next 7 minutes, your dream job might as well go poof. Dynamight absolutely hates when people are late, and you’ve had the pleasure of watching him blow up on company execs for showing up 15 minutes late and “wasting his fuckin’ time.”

Working for a man like Bakugou Katsuki was definitely a wakeup call the first two months you were at his agency. Turns out that while he approved your position that would inevitably change the way cartography was viewed in the modern world of heroes, Bakugou didn’t exactly care to look into what you specialized in, or so you thought. You really hadn’t had a chance to actually speak with him aside from filling him and his manager in on upcoming projects and maps you were in the process of making. After 7 months of working for the agency, you’d spoken to your boss a whopping four times, all lasting under three minutes.

This presentation you were about to give is the first one where Dynamight would be present, and fuck if you weren’t about to shit your pants from not only nerves, but fear that you might not get in the door on time for its start.

Racing past the front desk and haphazardly greeting the security guards before flashing your badge to be let through the agency gates blocking visitors from reaching the elevators, you managed to press the button for the remaining elevator on the ground floor that was being sent up.

You probably looked like an absolute atrocity in front of your fellow coworkers, with windswept hair and panting in the virtually silent elevator, save for the whirring of the machine as it took you up to the fourteenth floor of the building.

As soon as the doors of the elevator opened, you booked it down the hall to the meeting room, with 43 seconds to spare before the clock hit 9 a.m. sharp. “So sorry I’m running late! I was supposed to be here setting up earlier but some big stupid bitch tried hijacking the bus I was going to take-” you began in a rush, placing your bag and coat on your chair in the large room with a round table full of your team members and other coworkers from the analytics department.

Your team member Carl, one of only three others in the cartography department at the agency, hit your foot from under the table while calling out your name. “You’re speaking in English, we have no clue what you’re saying,” he whispered, with you quickly muttering out an apology. “Shit— sorry about that— slips my mind to switch back and forth sometimes. Apologies for not being here sooner,” you bowed to the ten workers in the room, suddenly realizing Dynamight himself nor his manager had shown up yet. Thank god, you let out a small breath of relief.

“Is Dynamight going to be in soon or should I begin without him?” You asked as your other team member Kanako grabbed your computer out of your bag and plugged it into the projector while you began pulling out your speaker notes.

“Said he’d be in soon, had to catch up with Red Riot about an ongoing police chase outside the city,” your last team member Naomi spoke out loud. Naomi was your resident work bff, and was also the one that regularly reached out to Dynamight for you to inquire about starting new projects or letting him know of recent updates. She honestly didn’t even like having to email her own boss that much, but she was more than happy to run into his manager and talk about the highs and lows of cartography if it meant staring at the poor man like he was on the lunch menu.

“Well that at least gives us some time to set it up. Sorry you all had to wait on me to get here to pull up the slides.” You felt guilty that your team had to sit in awkward silence with a department that rarely ever interacted with your own for probably a solid 20 minutes, but at least you got to the room before Dynamight so you didn’t risk a verbal ass beating in front of everyone.

As soon as you’d finished laying out the hand-drawn maps of your project out on the round table, Dynamight himself opened the large oak door and walked into the meeting room, glancing at you for a split second before sitting in the chair that was opposite of you, towards the back of the room and for him to be able to see everyone clearly. His manager trailed in behind him, scolding him for not slowing down and hearing his run down of how the meeting would go. Dynamight only waved his hand in the air at his manager before casting his sharp gaze back to you.

You felt a twinge of anxiety race up your body. You really hadn’t been expecting him to come to this meeting until Naomi filled you in two weeks ago that he wanted to attend. Guess it meant he actually did pay attention to what he hired you and your team for. Regardless, you bowed to him and began speaking, not waiting for him to tell you to start, as he wasn’t one that gave directions to grown adults.

“Thank you for joining us today, Dynamight. The project that my team and I have been working on recently is one you formally requested for us to start three months ago,” you clicked the presentation remote that flipped to the next screen on your slideshow. “As you requested, the cartography department created digital and physical choropleth maps of the districts within Musutafu and their relative crime rates within the past year.” You pointed towards the round desk. “The top map is the same as the map you see on our slideshow,” you spoke in a quick, easy-to-understand manner and glanced at everyone’s faces to gauge their reactions throughout your presentation speech.

The maps that Dynamight had asked for were so that he would be able to see if his patrol routes needed to be changed in order to monitor areas of Musutafu that were still unresponsive to patrols by heroes in terms of crime decreasing. If there was one thing your boss prided himself on, it was his patrol routes and his ability to cut crime and villain attack rates in his designated areas in half. However, recently there was an uptick in petty crime rates, and in order for him to not get shit on by the public for a “lack of appropriate response,” he put in a formal request for your department to create maps relating to recent data changes in crime rates across the city.

You and your team were more than happy to fulfill this request, as it meant working with real, recent data and meant you got to visit neighboring hero agencies and compare their patrol route crime rates with Dynamight’s. Any excuse to get out of your department’s office on the fifth floor was a godsend because your back really couldn’t handle anymore work days where you were hunched over the large workbench mapping out the city for hours at a time.

As you continued on with your presentation, you periodically glanced towards Dynamight to check his facial expressions for any annoyance or confusion at your maps. Seeing none, you internally LETS FUCKING GOOOO’d because you knew it meant at the very least that if he was understanding the maps, everyone else most likely could too.

Once you reached the last slide, you made a small noise of dissatisfaction. “When we took a look at certain districts, we did notice that the victims of the crimes committed were young women who regularly walked home by themselves later at night. They seemed to be around their early 20s to their late 30s.” Naomi nodded at you, a silent way of saying to continue on.

“I’m sure that you don’t like when many do this, and forgive me if I’m stepping out of bounds,” you began, feeling your hands sweat. “But please do take this information seriously. I know you’re a hardworking hero, so I trust your skills. But I sincerely hope the next time I check the data that the rates will have fallen. People deserve to walk home without fearing for their lives.”

Dynamight’s eyes seemed to bore into your skin, wanting to bark a clipped response back, but he managed to nod silently. You didn’t want to outright mention you yourself were scared of the trend in crime since you fit the statistic, often walking home by yourself late after all-day shifts, but it seems like he’d caught on by the look on your face.

You wrapped up the presentation and answered a couple different questions that the analytics department had about the data collection and resources you used. After your coworkers began packing their bags to leave, you noticed that Dynamight had gotten up out of his chair and walked over to you, who currently stood beside your bag, closing all the tabs you had open that were starting to overheat your little computer.

Glancing up, you nearly choked on your spit at the proximity between the two of you. He was in his winter hero suit, with the black turtleneck beneath his chest piece being pulled tight against his arms, making his muscles pop out unnecessarily in your face, but you definitely were not complaining. Bim..g… muscles… you thought, trying not to stare too long.

“Y-Yes, Dynamight sir?” You managed to sputter out, all too aware of your team members looking at the two of you now. Dynamight managed to grunt in acknowledgement before speaking. “Wanted to ask if you could make one of your fuckin’ maps for Deku. The shithead keeps begging me to ask, he wants one to hang up in his office of his patrol routes.”

Your eyes widened in surprise. Of course you would make him one, but you didn’t expect for Dynamight to ask you directly. Typically he forced his manager Atsuno to write out emails of requests he had. You managed to nod eagerly to him. “Yeah, no problem. I can email him later and ask about details. Thanks for letting me know.”

Dynamight only grunted once more before turning on his heel and leaving the room, leaving Atsuno to give chase to his boss as he bowed quickly at you and gave his appreciation for your presentation before leaving the room himself.

The only ones left in the room now were your teammates, and all it took was one glance between the four of you before you all let out a holler in excitement. “We did it! You did incredible up there girl,” Naomi slung her arm around you as you pulled her in for a hug. “I was shitting bricks the whole time, I don’t think I realized how intense Dynamight’s stare can be.”

Kanako and Carl high fived you as you all made your way to the elevator to take back down to your department. “Our first big project presentation and we didn’t get screamed at for a minuscule error? I think we deserve to celebrate tonight,” Carl wiggled his eyebrows towards you and Kanako, with Naomi agreeing excitedly.

“Bar or at someone’s place? Should we drink? Oh we’re totally drinking.” You couldn’t help but smile at your coworkers beside you. You were so grateful to have them beside you while you’d adjusted to the agency life the past couple months. All three of them had come from a specialized area in the analytics department that related to gathering information data on the public, which included things like crime rates and damage assessments.

When your job had been approved, Atsuno told you that you’d be working in a new department in your own section within the agency with some people taken from the analytics department, taking you off guard. You’d surely thought you’d be thrown into analytics too, seeing how geography and cartography could squeeze into it somehow.

Meeting your team for the first time, you were more than grateful to have them work with you as you’d expected to be alone in your department for a while. You helped walk them through the basics of cartography and digital mapmaking using current software, quickly realizing the talent each one had for different areas. While you were technically the head of your department, you felt like everyone pulled their weight equally and deserved to be held on the same level.

“We can go out or I can make us something,” you spoke out loud as the elevator dinged open. “I know you guys have been bugging me about cooking since I bring my own lunches everyday.” Naomi cheered beside you, agreeing as Carl and Kanako hummed in thought. “I’ll pitch in for ingredients if Carl and Naomi buy the alcohol,” Kanako said, casting a glance to her coworkers that were chanting, American food! American food! Over and over again to one another.

All in agreement, you quickly got off on the fifth floor and entered your department room. Located towards the right hand corner in the back of the large office floor, the department itself wasn’t noticeable to the general eye unless you went looking. You each had respective offices lining a small back hallway, with the room at the very end of it being your workshop that expanded into a large open-area space containing desktops, workbenches, and cartography supplies strewn around the place. Atsuno had been kind enough to order a custom nameplate to go above the awning of you and your team’s hall, with Heroics Cartography Department written out in beautiful gold lettering, contrasting nicely against the cool grey paint of the wall.

“Let’s lock in on the rest of the requests and orders today so we can leave at a decent time,” you said, closing the door to the workshop as everyone spoke in agreement. Carl called out your name as you were booting up the desktops to pull up emails from your clients. “We doing hard liquor shit tonight or going with something like wine? Need to pair it well with whatever you’re making.”

You hummed in thought. “We could definitely do cocktails. I was thinking about making gumbo since it’s still cold outside.” You grabbed your phone that was situated in your bag and opened up the Notes app to create your grocery store list. Luckily Japan kept up with their spices and typically had an American section in larger stores where you could grab some of the spice mixes needed for your food.

“Make it spicy as fuck girl, I wanna feel tears pouring out of my eyes to your incredible cooking,” Naomi said, sending you a dreamy look. “If I make it too spicy, Carl’s gonna shit his pants. We all know this man can’t handle spice to save his life.”

“Hey! Will not,” Carl scoffed in surprise. “I just got dunked on by my ancestors because they thought it was funny to give me no spice tolerance in a country that literally eats spicy food in almost every meal.” Kanako managed a laugh at that, sending Carl a sympathetic glance before speaking to you. “If it’s not too much trouble, you could always split it into one pot being spicy and one pot being milder.”

“Fair point, but y’all better eat every morsel of my food. Southern cooking isn’t for the weak,” you mentioned as you scrolled through your finished grocery list, checking for any missing items. Naomi sent you a questioning look before asking you, “you’re from the south U.S. right? Isn’t that like hella country?” You sighed as you nodded. “Yeah, but I lived in the city, not necessarily rural. Didn’t stop me from cooking all types of recipes though.”

“Well wherever you were, you managed to become a pretty kick ass chef on your own. Your lunch always looks god tier.” Kanako said as Carl and Naomi nodded in agreement. You felt your face heat up in embarrassment at the compliment. “Living on your own in college will make you think of some wild new recipes in the name of using up all your groceries to not waste food.”

“That’s for sure, I lived off 20 different cup ramen recipes I created myself with random items from the dining halls I could snag before I got caught.” Carl muttered out loud while he pulled different sized calipers from his desk drawer to begin sketching up a project for Chargebolt.

“Food is food, for real,” you nodded in solidarity. There’s been one too many times where you felt too lazy to make full meals during school, which meant being stuck with random microwave food you kept for low energy days in your apartment kitchen. “Can’t wait to get shitfaced and discuss the existential dread of fucking up on expensive mapping paper,” you mused. Being an absolute geek over geography and cartography, you’ve caught yourself in too many drunken rambles about work-related topics when out with college friends after finals and papers were finished up for the semester.

“Let’s do our best so we can enjoy our Friday into the weekend!” Naomi pumped her fist in the air as she spoke, all of you cheering in agreement.

ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-

Later that night, after you all managed to finish up your progress for the day and headed out to grab your respective supplies for your celebration, you found yourself humming to a random 2010s playlist that Kanako had thrown on randomly while you cooked in the kitchen of your apartment. You lived not too far from the agency, a 25 minute walk or an 8 minute bus ride, in a nice neighborhood adorned with townhomes along the street, away from the major roads but still comfortably accessible. The salary you had now had blessed you with the opportunity to live in a nicer place, but you still opted for a more homey feel rather than all the modern bullshit that people were raving for. You really hated the idea of solid white walls and no color in your living space.

Your apartment was on the smaller side but it was just you who lived there. Naomi actually lived in the townhome across the street on the second floor. You both had found out early in your job at the agency, walking home at the same time and going from that awkward “going the same way, sorry” to “oh word you live here?” It meant that you had regular girls nights together and grew close, the friendship between the two of you falling into place naturally. Kanako and Carl were actually roommates in a flat that was a 10 minute train ride away. It truly was fate that all of you managed to not only work well, but vibe with each other outside the office too.

As you finished plating your dishes in bowls, you could hear the conversation flowing between your team in your living room. A couple drinks had already been thrown back and you were more than aware that drinking before you had food in your system was probably a bad idea, but you were about to eat anyways so fuck it. You were already two Moscow mules deep by the time you’d finished up the gumbo.

“Food’s ready!” You called out from the kitchen, the open floor plan making it easy for you to get the attention of everyone else sitting on the couch watching Love is Blind. That show was a debatable one, but you enjoyed watching Carl’s bewildered expressions at the absolutely heinous jokes Kanako would throw out about the men and women of the show and some of their horrible personalities.

“Girl get in here and tell me whether or not you think Gigi needs to up and leave ugly ass Damian,” Naomi said, helping you grab two of the four plates you were bringing out to the coffee table. “I can tell you right now that she does, she’s way too good for someone that looks like a chad version of Ed Sheeran.”

Kanako busted out laughing at your remark, agreeing at the resemblance. As you ate, everyone poured endless compliments into your food, making your chest swell with pride in your hobby. You absolutely loved to cook, and it helped you get through the more rough parts of life when you were struggling to keep up with the demands of school and research. Cooking was your safe space and you made sure you perfected staple recipes from home so you could share them with others, like you were doing now.

Kanako threw back another shot as she chased it with a can of Dr. Pepper before speaking your name. “You do know that your cooking could rival Dynamight’s, right?” You paused mid chew, throwing up an eyebrow at her to continue. You didn’t strike your boss as a cooking connoisseur, but you yourself didn’t look like one either, so you kept an open mind.

“He brings food to the potlucks we have during holidays sometimes. When I tell you that man can damn well cook, believe me,” she slurred slightly, the alcohol already hitting her. Naomi nodded in agreement. “Trust us when we say his cooking is top tier. He’d never admit it, but he likes cooking for others if it means feeding into his ego.” Naomi said, letting out a huff of laughter.

“I tried his signature mapo tofu once and it was so good but I literally had to call in sick the next day because I could not handle the spice he puts in his recipes,” Carl’s forehead thudded against the wood of the coffee table as he grimaced at the memory. “If he ever found out I nearly passed out on the toilet from what he called ‘baby shit spicy’, I think he’d fire me.” You barked out a laugh at that, imagining Dynamight drilling it into your teammate about not appreciating his food and getting sick from it.

Your team had been working with the Dynamight Agency for almost 2 years before you’d joined. It was always jarring to hear the stories of Dynamight from them. Your initial reactions to him early on were anything but pleasant, and still sometimes lean on the side of moderate annoyance. He sounded like a total dick at the beginning, but had apparently mellowed out after high school. You heard he’d bullied the hell out of the current number 1 hero during his time in middle school and a little bit of high school, which had made you livid.

You grabbed the handle of Tito’s sitting in front of you all and poured it into your glass before cracking open a new can of ginger beer and pouring it into the glass as well. You could feel the warmth of the alcohol spreading through you, loosening up your tongue the more you drank.

Retrospectively, you really shouldn’t have said the next thing that you did if it meant saving your ass in the workplace that following Monday.

“I could definitely kick Bakugou’s ass if we had a cook off, I mean I’m basically a god tier hobby chef at this point,” you muttered, missing the expressions of your coworkers, specifically the smirk Naomi had on her face. “You think so?” Carl nudged your leg with his own, casting you a tipsy glance. “Fuck yeah I could, I don’t think you realize how hard some southern cooking can be. If I can keep making the recipes without screwing them up, I’m pretty much a god in the kitchen.”

Naomi snickered as Kanako sighed out. “Don’t let Dynamight hear you say that. He gets competitive fast, especially when it comes to food. He was known in high school as the chef of his dorm, didn’t trust others to cook as well as he could.” You definitely could see that, as he struck you as the type to call his friends’ cooking skills trash compared to his own. You hadn’t had the chance to try anything by him yet but could assume it was pretty good if your coworkers spoke of it so highly.

“He can bring it on, I’m not scared of his ass, I bet he couldn’t cook a Cajun recipe if he tried,” Your mouth was moving before you had a chance to realize the words you were saying. “Yeah yeah, big talk for a girl that stuttered after taking one look at her boss’ biceps.” You nearly choked on your drink as Naomi absolutely obliterated you with one sentence. Damn, I really thought I was slick with the look. You sighed as Kanako simply whistled in your direction.

“Don’t tell me you’re falling for him already? His good looks are hard to miss,” she said as she handed you a napkin to wipe your mouth with. Muttering out a thanks, you tried to save yourself some embarrassment. “Oh please, if I wanted to torture myself by falling for a narcissist, I’d go for Shindou instead.” You shuddered at the thought of working for someone like him, suddenly grateful at the fact that you were working for Dynamight instead.

“Don’t deny yourself. I bet you probably had a Dynamight wall in your dorm room at some point.” Carl was an absolute menace when he got tipsy, clearly not skipping out on poking fun at you. You groaned at his comment, shaking your head. “Nah, it was a Deku wall, actually.” You weren’t lying if you thought about it, you did have a lot of respect for the hero as you’d learned more about him during your study abroad. He came from a humble background, what was there not to like about someone as sweet as the number 1?

“You always struck me as the type of person to go for someone batshit crazy though. I bet you’d probably like it if Dynamight was mean to you.” Kanako sent you a look that made you shiver. “How dare you accuse me of such nonsense,” you tutted, sipping on your drink before muttering a small, “I probably would.” Naomi slapped her hand on the table, yelling out, “I heard that you freak!”

You couldn’t help but laugh as your team members switched the topic to their picks for hottest heroes, with Carl sighing dreamily as he named Red Riot his number one choice, Uravity being a close second. During the chaos of the conversation, you forgot all about your quip towards Dynamight’s cooking.

You really should have remembered, because remembering would mean you could have prepared yourself more for your conversation with him later.

ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-

After the eventful weekend and nursing a massive hangover from the sheer amount of vodka you managed to drink together, your team trudged their way into the workplace again and began the process of uploading and creating new maps on ArcGIS to send over for clients’ approval. You were all lucky you got weekends off when there wasn’t a high demand of requests for maps and geographic data.

You were midway through a rough sketch of Deku’s patrol route, taking a small break to grab a water bottle from the vending machine on the second floor when you heard the first whispers.

“— she definitely wouldn’t,” a man from the finance department whispered to his coworker who was shaking his head enthusiastically. You recognized the guy who was speaking as Leo, a coworker you’d met early on that helped you budget out what was needed in terms of supplies in your current workspace. He often chatted with Naomi, who regularly contacted him to put in new orders of pencils and ink for the maps you all drew by hand. “I think she could. She’s from the west, they tend to take home cooking pretty seriously over there. No doubt she could beat him.” The other coworker beside Leo spoke. Now that caught your attention. It sounded like they were talking about you, but you couldn’t be sure. You didn’t know how many other people were in the agency that were also from the west, they could be talking about anybody, right?

As soon as they saw you, Leo nudged his coworker to shut up before waving at you with an uneasy smile. “What are y’all talking about over here? Something about cooking?” You said, walking over and greeting both of them. Leo nodded, slightly caught off guard. “Yeah, we— uh, we were talking about a cooking show we both watch! One of the chefs is from the west and she’s competing with other chefs to win a national title.” You raised an eyebrow at him, not really buying it but not really caring too much to think that hard about it. “Well remember that westerners can be pretty goated at cooking all kinds of food. She’s probably got a chance,” you shrugged before excusing yourself, waving at them as you walked back to the elevator once you purchased your water bottle.

You continued to flutter in and out of your workspace throughout the day, stopping for lunch and eating in your office with Naomi before returning back to work. However, you weren’t stupid; there were way more eyes on you today than you’d ever experienced, even more than when you first joined. You knew Naomi was sort of a gossip guru in the office, but you’d assumed she was probably flexing your cooking to anyone that crossed her path during the day.

You didn’t mind it, but the attention on you was definitely kind of concerning, especially because people kept whispering about something to do with an upcoming agency event that would include food. You figured you could probably whip up some good appetizers to bring to it, whenever it was.

As you were finishing up your sketches and scaling them correctly with the notes on your computer, Atsuno hurriedly burst through the door of the workshop, looking slightly disheveled. Your coworkers all glanced up at him at the same time before he coughed awkwardly and straightened his posture.

“New request sent in? Surely it’s not that important for you to have to run in here for,” You asked him as you wiped your hands on a towel to get rid of the ink stains along your palms. You definitely couldn’t risk messing up the paper now that you were this far along. He sighed heavily before shaking his head. “No, I uh— I had to come in here and ask that you go meet with Dynamight before you get off work. He wants to check in on the progress with Deku’s patrol route map.” You raised an eyebrow. Couldn’t he just shoot us an email? you wondered before nodding, asking if he was in his office. Atsuno nodded, offering to walk with you there, filling you in on the progress that’s about to be made with the maps your team had created relating back to crime rates along the districts in the city.

You missed the slightly concerned glance Naomi cast your way as you exited the shop.

After taking the elevator up to Dynamight’s office located on the 10th floor, you stepped off the lift and looked around the interior. You rarely ever came to this floor since it was mainly Dynamight’s office, the rest of the floor filled with smaller offices that were for his sidekicks, Atsuno, and his other head managers from different departments.

Turning right out of the elevator, Atsuno walked you to Dynamight’s office, adjacent from his own. Upon knocking, a gruff “come in” came from the other side of the door. Dynamight’s office was fucking nice.

It was as large as your own workshop, if not larger, and contained Dynamight’s desk, shelves full of memorabilia and other items, a couch in the center of the room, and what seemed to be an en-suite bathroom. His office overlooked the rest of the city, large window panes lining the wall his back was turned to. Along the rest of the non-windowed walls were frames of photos that contained Dynamight in his younger years, from when he was in high school to now. He was still in his mid 20s, but the photos along the wall told an interesting story of his life the past few years as he climbed the hero ranks.

Turning towards him, Atsuno cleared his throat before bowing to you and leaving, citing that he had to go sit in on a phone call with a sports clothing brand that was looking to sponsor Dynamight. He sure did clear out of here fast. You figured he was probably just busy, as all Mondays are.

Dynamight was staring into your soul again as you turned back to him and awkwardly shifted your weight onto your other foot. You began the conversation with, “you wanted to check in on Deku’s request, right?”

“Yeah. Nerd’s looking forward to it and won’t shut the hell up every time he calls me. Enjoys your work a fuckin’ ton,” he spoke, his gravelly voice sending a pleasurable hum through your body. If he wasn’t a hero, he could definitely be an ASMR YouTuber, you mused.

You gave him a small smile. “I’m surprised he’s heard of me. My work isn’t exactly groundbreaking,” you began to fiddle with your work jacket’s zipper. It was cold as shit in your office, so you had Leo sneak in an order for your team to have matching work jackets by Carhartt since they were durable and warm. “Yeah, well get used to the recognition. Your job is a first for the country. Constantly gettin’ questions about why I hired you.” You felt a small spark of annoyance work through your system. “Not sure you mean that in a good or bad way.” You huffed, walking towards his desk and sitting across from him in one of the plush seats. He eyed you with mild curiosity before explaining.

“Not a bad thing. People just don’t understand why yer work’s so important.” You nodded in acknowledgement. He wasn’t wrong. Cartographers are uncommon in the modern world now that technology has dominated the industry. You remember the times in college where people would always ask why you got into your field. You had to explain that cartography wasn’t just hand drawing maps; it related back to software and digital images too.

“I get to create anything I want on a map. My quirk’s a weird one, but it helps a lot of different people, so I’m not complaining.” You eyed the pack of pink sparkly sticky notes and glitter pens sitting next to Dynamight’s keyboard. Pinky probably brought him her new stationary set that launched recently, you thought to yourself with amusement.

“Speakin’ of, been wantin’ to ask you a question.” Dynamight caught you eying his stationary and scratched his neck in what you could assume to be embarrassment. “Shoot,” you replied, noting that the sun was finally beginning to set later in the day now that the winter solstice happened a month ago.

“Why didn’t you become like— a fuckin’ underground hero or some shit? Your quirk isn’t that niche. Could use it for raids n’ infiltrating places.” You didn’t know whether or not to take his commentary as a compliment or not, but you figured that if he was questioning your avoidance of the hero career path, it meant he noticed something in you that you didn’t.

“It wasn’t for me. My quirk is exhausting. Five miles sounds like a pretty small radius, but when I’m visualizing the area, everything is visualized. Buildings, roads, you name it. Drawing it from memory takes a lot out of me,” you spoke. “I take a while to draw and digitize my maps. It wouldn’t be easy to keep up with the hustle of hero work, let alone working within a time crunch.”

Dynamight hummed in acknowledgement. You really didn’t expect to be conversing with him about your life choices, but it was a nice break, and it meant you got to learn more about him, even if he was asking about your life.

“You still chose to work with heroes though.” You let out a small laugh. “I guess you’re right,” you began, meeting his stare. He was really pretty now that you were looking closer at him. “I figured if I couldn’t handle the stress of real hero work, that working behind the scenes is the next best thing. My maps are almost always accurate and to scale; I pride myself on it. Means that heroes can rely on the information for a multitude of things.”

He nodded, seemingly hesitating before speaking again. “Know we ain’t had a chance to talk much since y’started working here. Red begged me to put you in my agency because he figured you’d be easier to reach here and your name would get recognized if it was associated with my office.” You hadn’t really thought of that before, but he was right. Red Riot’s office was packed as it was, and you figured everyone else’s was too. It was a lucky shot that you got placed with Dynamight, since he was still looking for workers to fill in his office due to it being newer than most.

“I really appreciate Eijiro being able to start my career off like this. I never would have imagined moving across the country to start my dream job so soon, if at all,” you said, casting your gaze to the pictures on Dynamight’s shelves behind his desk. “First name basis, huh?” the hero smirked as you let out a small noise of shock. “Y-Yeah, we kept in contact a lot and he would regularly help me gain clients in different cities. Told me that we were friends and to stop addressing him by his hero name every time we talked.”

“That’s Eiji for you.” A pregnant pause followed before your boss let out a groan of frustration. “I’m not— I fuckin’ hate small talk like this. Don’t know how people do it,” Dynamight said finally, pinching the bridge of his nose before speaking again. “Couldn’t figure out how to speak to you without sounding like a dick ‘cause I didn’t do it sooner. Atsuno was grilling me about not even having a functional conversation with you yet, even though I’m the one that hired you.”

You let out a laugh at that. You had been a little mad at him for not even properly greeting you since you began your work for the agency, but you assumed that being the number 2 hero in Japan was busy as shit. “I get it, you’re a top hero. I’m sure you’re busy enough as it is, can’t blame you for not being able to talk to a cartographer of all people,” you shrugged as you spoke, Dynamight leaning back in his office chair and giving you a small nod.

“Yeah. Sorry for steering the convo elsewhere. How’s Deku’s shitty map comin’ along?” He asked as you began going through the details of your progress.

After you explained the gist of it, he grunted in response before standing up. He’s tall as fuck, you realized as you hurriedly stood up as well, assuming your talk was over with. Dynamight walked you to his office door before stopping once you turned around to thank him again. “Thanks for uh— earlier. When you were complimenting my work. It means a lot, truly.”

“Don’t let it inflate yer shitty ego. Can’t handle another person that gets a big head after someone compliments them,” he spat. You could tell he wasn’t used to being given a sincere thanks very often. “Hey. One more thing.”

You raised an eyebrow at him as his face turned blank for a moment before he sighed and his signature scowl returned. You should have known the conversation you were having earlier was too good to be true.

“You would not be able to win against me in a fuckin’ cook off. My cooking probably beats yours by a shit ton. Watch your mouth next time you run around all bark and no bite.” You nearly fainted on the spot as your body ran as cold as ice. What the fuck. What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? You repeated in your head, eyes going wider than dish plates as Dynamight’s glare sent another chill down your spine.

“Shit.” Is all that came out of your mouth after he all but pushed you by your back out the door and closed it in your face.

It’s official, you think as you trudge your way to the elevator, the beginning of a migraine creeping into your skull. You were going to kill Naomi.