#every gripe i had about the original is just. gone | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

antisocialxconstruct · 1 month

Text

okay hi hello happy Saturday. We are doing this. If it seems familiar, the first scene is one I posted here a million years ago but it's been revised quite a bit for the new setting and everything. And also just to be better.

word count: 5,600

Ghost City

Chapter One

Somewhere in the club, Maksim suspected, there was someone who wanted him dead. He knew why, in broad strokes at least. But he wasn’t planning to oblige.

“Beer here tastes like warm piss,” Chronic griped, voice raised enough to ensure her complaint would be heard over the persistent clamor of mindless dance music being pumped through the warehouse. The thunk of her empty glass hitting the table between them was less lucky.

Maksim snorted and idly twirled a cigarette through his fingers before settling it between his lips. He tucked it into the corner of his mouth to mutter “that’s why I told you not to order it,” as he flicked open the heavy lighter in his other hand. He didn’t have to make the same allowances for the noise pollution, he knew the military-grade surveillance gear in Chronic’s skull was picking up every word he said, and likely a half dozen other conversations in their immediate vicinity. He lit up with a languid lack of urgency, exhaled a thin stream of smoke that caught the alternating pink and turquoise of the LEDs overhead, and let his gaze wander as he scratched idly at his temple, where one of the rows of short keratinous horns that cluttered his forehead disappeared into the chin-length black curls that were currently gelled neatly into place. The stocky woman across from him leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest, and he arched an expectant eyebrow at her.

“Figured that was just ‘cause you’re teetotal and you don’t like fun,” she said with a shrug.

“Eh, сука.” Maksim plucked the cigarette from his mouth after another drag and met her eye with a thin smile. No humor. “Guess you’re an expert now.” The barely-veiled hostility didn’t earn him much of a reaction, but then he wasn’t expecting it to. He was paying Chronic for her eyes, not for pleasant company, which was the only reason he had let the usual mask of performed affability slip completely. This new persona was a bit of an experiment of its own, an extra layer of distant arrogance just to really emphasize his lack of interest in making friends. Still, he couldn’t afford to be too overtly mean. He did need Chronic’s eyes.

Without moving her head, her gaze slipped over his shoulder and behind him, the minute twitches of her pupils the only sign that she was scanning the crowd as she idly responded, “dunno about that… I can’t figure why a guy like you’d come to a place like this.”

Maksim flicked a bit of ash onto the dingy little ashtray on the table. “A nightclub?”

“I mean Chicago.”

A short span of silence, between them at least, as the bone-rattling treble climbed to a crescendo and hung there for a beat, then another. Maksim resisted the temptation to use that lull in the music to comment on her lack of originality. Chronic had never actually accused him of anything, but the words spy and mafia had been swimming around in her head vividly enough that Maksim had never had to do more than skim her surface thoughts to pick them up. She clocked him as ex-military within an hour of meeting him, and between that, his accent, and the fairly conspicuous modifications to his hands and left eye, she drew her own conclusions. There was perhaps a small degree of irony in the fact that, if his life had gone differently at a couple of key points, he almost certainly would have been serving as a covert agent for the Russian state right now. On the other hand, if he’d been a little smarter he would have gotten out of the country faster and managed to dodge the draft entirely. None of that seemed worth explaining to Chronic to dispel any of her suspicions, not when her cooperation came with a straightforward price tag.

At last the bass dropped with an intensity that vibrated uncomfortably through Maksim’s nerves, and with the fresh cover of noise pollution all he ultimately said was, “still on me?”

“Mm,” Chronic refocused on him. “Sure as.”

A low frustrated sound escaped from the back of his throat to be swallowed up by the ever-present electronic beat. Another drag, then he tipped his head back against the booth, breathed smoke up toward the industrial rafters high above and let his eyes flutter closed. He shouldn’t be doing this. He had invested a lot of money into making it materially harder to do this, and he was going to invest more into making it worse. And yet there was that pesky trouble with old habits… “Describe them to me,” he said, and then tentatively, with the lightest touch he could manage, he extended his consciousness out through their immediate surroundings, like running an open hand over wood and hoping to catch a splinter, scanning for any hint of attention or interest angled toward their booth. He picked up a few right away, but they didn’t register as anything other than earnest curiosity, passersby stealing surprised glances when the undulating lights caught on his horns just so. In 2098 it was no less common to meet a variant than it was a natural redhead, but that didn’t always stop people from staring, especially at a mutation as conspicuous as his.

“Big guy,” Chronic was saying, “but like… ‘no gene-tech’ big. Milled around for a while but now he’s sitting at the bar.” Maksim refined his search perimeter, found the little blip of someone side-eyeing them with more intent from halfway across the room. He raked mental fingers through flashes of awareness and fleeting short term memories as Chronic continued. “Leather coat, camo pants-”

“Stop.” The bartender just thanked him for a tip. A couple of people on the dance floor were eyeing him appreciatively from the back. “Brown hair, jack on his left temple, drinking something green… acting like he thinks he’s the star of an action movie?”

Chronic laughed, a sharp bark of a sound that punched through the club’s ambiance. “That’s the one.”

“ID?”

“None to speak of.”

He shouldn’t be doing this. He started to dig, prying experimentally at the edges of the man’s thoughts, trying to pull away the outer layers to get a deeper look. Who are you? Who sent you? Memories and personal knowledge were always harder to read than surface thoughts, but he was just beginning to glimpse discernible shapes-

All at once his perception snapped back into place like a split rubber band and he pitched forward with a hiss and a muttered curse, pressing his palms to the sides of his head. It did nothing much to soothe the kind of directionless, brain-deep pain that had overtaken him. When after a few uncomfortable seconds he dared to open his eyes again, the strobing lights were almost too much to handle. He stubbornly blinked his vision back into focus anyway, and met the gaze of Chronic watching him impassively from across the table, one arm now slung over the back of the booth.

“So what’s the plan, boss?” she asked, wholly unmoved by the display.

“You can’t even get a name?” He didn’t mean for it to sound quite as sharp as it did, but he also didn’t take it back.

Chronic shrugged, pursed her lips. “Could you?” Maksim answered with a withering glare. “Whoever put that shadow on you wanted to stay clean as all hell. Either they went out of their way to find someone untraceable or they sunk some real money into making him untraceable.”

Maksim chewed on his mounting frustration for another moment as he took a last long drag on the cigarette, then stubbed out the remains and rose to his feet. “So no one would miss him.” Chronic’s eyebrows shot up toward her hairline but he was already stepping away from the table before she could make any further comment.

At the very least, the door slamming shut on his mental prying crystalized his focus, woken up his reflexes and centered him inside his own skull in a way no stimulant ever did. A twinge ran down the length of his left arm, the reparative fiber optic mesh knitted into his muscles protesting against the adrenaline-charged tension he was now carrying in his shoulders. He winced and shook it out as he weaved his way through the undulating crowd of clubbers with minimal effort, the carbon-fiber claws in his fingertips extending and retracting with half-conscious anticipation. As he neared the bar he reached up to check the manhunter in its holster at the small of his back, under his coat and out of sight, but as soon as he caught a glimpse of the man tailing him it was like a switch flipped–his demeanor rolled over into the one reserved for dealing with marks, a casual and open saunter and an easy smile. It would have been faster and easier to shoot him from the cover of the crowd and be done with it, and it wasn’t as if this act would trick the man into thinking Maksim was someone else. Not if he was even fleetingly competent. But Maksim had mulled over the situation long enough to decide there might be information to be extracted here, if he could play the game right.

“You look lost, cowboy,” he remarked as he slid up alongside the man, and now he did need to raise his voice just a touch, though the bar was at least a little quieter than the dance floor. His target turned and looked up from his stool, and Maksim took some satisfaction in tracking the array of emotions that flashed across his face in that instant before he set his jaw and straightened his back slightly. Getting ready to play along.

“Not really my scene,” he responded, his voice a hard-edged baritone to perfectly match the rugged-big-screen-hero image he was projecting outward. “Just waiting here to meet someone. You need something?”

Maksim leaned back, braced both hands against the bartop behind him, maintaining his height advantage over his shadow. “Honestly I just wanted to talk.”

Another almost imperceptible hesitation from his counterpart. “Maybe we could move that somewhere more private.”

“I think I’m fine right here.” Maksim flashed him a smile that wasn’t quite mocking. Not openly. An amateur, he thought. Wasting time he could have spent grabbing me. If Chronic couldn’t pull anything on him it’s because he’s nobody, there’s nothing to pull. The shadow sat back slightly, one hand drifting toward the edge of his jacket, and of course Maksim knew the posture of someone going for a gun. “That’s really not necessary,” he continued, gaze flicking pointed but unconcerned from the man’s hand up to his face. “In fact, here. We can be friends.” He pushed one hand away from the counter, drew his own pistol, and set it down on the bar. Then he settled back into his easy stance, not at all primed for a fight. His shadow didn’t seem entirely persuaded, but he didn’t escalate things any further. “How long have you been doing this?”

“Long enough.”

“Yeah?” Maksim’s smile tilted toward indulgent. “So you’ve got stories?”

Something lit up behind the other man’s eyes then, a sudden spark of inspiration. “Everyone does, right?” he began. “Actually maybe you know this one, didn’t happen to me but I heard it friend-of-a-friend style.”

“Sure,” Maksim conceded. “Best source you could ask for.”

The man inclined his head. “You get it. So I heard about this job out in NYC, maybe… a couple months back, real gruesome mess. Team of five go into this big high security warehouse to grab some holy relic, except halfway through one of them just snaps. Turns on the crew, makes mince out of a couple of them before the others can take him out, later he says demons made him do it. And the other two, the only ones who survived, they just accept that and let him walk. Can you believe that?”

As he talked Maksim had gone still, his casual slouch growing a little stiff. The smile never fell from his face, but it felt strained there now. Stale and brittle. “And what do you think should have happened?” he asked slowly.

“Y’know I’ll be honest,” the shadow said, leaning an elbow on the bar and puffing up with the apparent upper hand he had gained in their exchange. “I don’t have a lot of stake in it either way. But maybe there’s a few parties might be holding a grudge against that guy. Maybe one or two willing to spend some money to make sure he faces some consequences.”

That wasn’t good… but it could be worse. Probably. Maksim didn’t know who they had been working for, but if it was someone willing to send cleaners after him for botching the job they’d be more efficient than this, he wouldn’t have been standing there having a pleasant conversation with one of them. Lockjaw and Ziggy probably had friends, but he didn’t know them either. He had hoped none of them would be the vengeful types, but maybe he needed to reassess. Or maybe he just needed to go further west than Chicago.

The shadow shifted in his seat again, opening his mouth to add something else, and without waiting to find out what it was Maksim grabbed the back of the man’s head and shoved hard enough to bounce his face off the bartop. The collision rewarded him with the wet crunch of bone fracturing.

Someone shrieked behind him. In one smooth motion Maksim had the gun in his left hand and the claws of his right locked onto the man’s scalp, keeping him pinned face-down on the bar. He cast a mental net out around them, grabbed every spike of shock or fear he could catch and clamped down on their impulse to do anything about it, digging a little telepathic hole of Nothing To See Here around the two of them. The pain hit almost immediately, driving straight into his skull and down his spine as his vision blurred and the walls of his barrier started to crumble inward like wet sand as soon as they’d been erected. Through a daze his shadow choked out a mangled curse past bloodied lips and made a feeble effort against Maksim’s grip, only to go still again when the manhunter’s muzzle pressed up against the side of his head. Maksim really wanted nothing more than to pull the trigger and paint the counter with this man’s skull, it would certainly resolve this quickly and send a clear message to whoever sent him. But it seemed unlikely Maksim would be able to stop anyone from noticing that.

“I’m going to walk out of this club,“ he bit out through gritted teeth. A chunk of his barrier slipped and he could feel the bartender’s attention drifting their way in a tangle of confusion and concern. ”You’re not going to follow me. Not tonight and not any other night. If I ever see your face again I’ll split it in half properly. Understand?“

No more than two seconds of hesitation, then the shadow nodded–as best he could anyway, smearing blood across the counter under his cheek.

Maksim let the threat hang for another beat, then withdrew and holstered the gun. “You should have a talk with whoever hired you for this,” he said as his shadow lifted his head, cupping the gnarled mess of his nose in his hands. “They di-…” the rest of Maksim’s words died on his lips in a wave of nausea and the barrier finally crumbled. Spots danced around the corners of his vision moments before it began to tunnel, the moment stretching uncomfortably out in every direction.

The voices around him went tinny, distant and indistinct as vertigo gripped him.

He could feel the music boring into him, threatening to vibrate him apart if he stayed there any longer.

Someone grabbed at him and he twisted, shaking them off out of pure instinct, and started moving.

It was all he could do to orient himself, fix his gaze on the high doorway gaping black with the night sky beyond, and shove his way through the remaining crowd as he fought to keep his footing. People became increasingly unconcerned with his presence the further he got from the bar, until at last he crossed the threshold and the cool night air hit him all at once as he staggered to a stop to be sick on the pavement outside.

A chorus of laughs rose up from across the street as he fell back against the club’s exterior wall, and now the music was dulled to a steady thump and buzz through concrete. Someone called out “fuck yeah man party hardy” and earned themself another round of jeering laughter. Maksim grimaced but he didn’t have it in him to pinpoint the source of the comment, much less respond.

He closed his eyes. Okay. So that was a waste of time. Or he had in fact played the game wrong. But if nothing else it was a clear indication that it was time to move on.

He was unsure how long it took to collect himself, for his senses to settle back into place and the piercing in his skull to fade to a level he could ignore. In that time no one followed him out. Not his shadow, who must have heeded his warning, not any of the other patrons, whose attention he had apparently shrugged off against all odds. Not even Chronic, who seemed to have inferred that their brief and unproductive partnership was over.

Fine.

That was fine.

He pushed himself away from the wall with a concerted effort, and started the slow trek back to his apartment. He needed to make some travel plans.

–###–

Ilya Kasharin was already dead.

Figuratively, sure, in the sense that they assumed no one in Boston had really looked for them or spared them much thought at all after they disappeared. Maverick would have made sure of that.

But also literally, in the sense that four years ago they had flatlined on an operating table for a full six minutes, only to be “reassured” after the fact that this did not invalidate the terms of their contract with NervAMP.

This was the one they took some issue with.

The focused clatter of fingers on keyboard was the only sound punctuating the silence of their modest workspace, where they sat folded into a tortured pretzel in their chair. Their eyes were laser-focused onto the screen in front of them, pupils glinting unnaturally in the light any time their gaze darted back up a few lines in their code, catching a missed tag or double-checking their logic as they chided or argued with themself in distracted mumbles.

More than anything, this needed to be thorough. Their last foray into NervAMP’s systems had only been long enough to copy the basic structure of their network and prop open a backdoor, not to exfiltrate any of their data for experimenting. They could throw the worm into the playground of their virtual network as many times as they wanted to see it spread before scrubbing it back out, but at a certain point they would just have to trust that it could do what they wanted and set it free. They were getting impatient with their own iterative testing, and they imagined the worm itself growing restless as well as it unfolded across the screen in front of them, eager to fulfill its purpose.

With a sigh Ilya paused and then sat back, a final assertive jab at a couple keys the only signal the machine needed to compile the worm and inject it back into the virtual network, just to be sure their last round of tweaking hadn’t compromised the basic functionality. Their second and third monitors blinked to life, and Ilya watched intently as the rudimentary visual representation of the network–little more than a sprawling array of interconnected lines and dots–transformed from uninfected green to compromised yellow over the course of about eight minutes.

No changes there, not that they really expected any.

This next step was the one they were least eager to take, and perhaps on some level all the systematic tweaking and troubleshooting had been in an effort to push this off as long as they could reasonably justify. Unfortunately they didn’t feel like they could reasonably justify much more, so they sat forward again, nudged the deck closer in front of them, and combed their fingers through the choppy layers of their auburn hair, flipping it over their shoulder and off the back of their neck. With their other hand they drew out the thick meshjack cable that sat spooled up inside the left side compartment of their deck, then eyed the head of it for a moment, the way one might eye a particularly unappealing morsel of food they were nevertheless about to swallow whole. Then their fingers found the edge of the port nestled at the base of their skull, they locked the cable into place and flicked a switch on the face of their deck, and they had just a split second to feel the electric shudder pass through their body before their consciousness was no longer rooted there.

Ilya was familiar enough with common depictions of the Immersion Mesh in popular media over the years, even spanning as far as a century back when the internet itself was still a fledgling concept. They had only learned fairly recently that those depictions were all, essentially, completely wrong. Pouring your human perception directly into an information network was not really comparable to the things people evoked when trying to depict it, it was not an elegant heads-up display, or a virtual chatroom, it wasn’t rudimentary gridlines and geometry any more than it was an elaborate surrealist landscape. More than anything, it was impressions. The idle half-awareness of a long highway drive, the sustained mental effort of solving a puzzle, the keyed-in focus of a hunt… or the animal anxiety of being hunted. The mind was bombarded with information and then left to make free associations, impose will and desire like any other machine running a script, and while most people’s brains did end up translating this flow of data into imagery in order to make it easier to comprehend, it was a bit like dreaming–amorphous and highly individualized.

It was not an environment just anyone could thrive in, it often required either an incredible reserve of mental focus or a willingness to dissociate at will. Ilya had neither, but what they did have was a very particular goal and a deep well of spite. At first they had simply avoided the mesh as much as they possibly could, instead sharpening their skill in every facet of the process that could be done with eyes and hands and a keyboard. Tactile, satisfying. But when they continued to hit obstacles that couldn’t be cleared from the physical side of the screen, when they had finally overcome their revulsion enough to go under the knife one last time to have a meshjack installed, they did the only other thing that seemed reasonable.

They got fast.

As their mind swirled and readjusted to the change in perception, they imagined cupping the worm in their hands, and knew that it was now within a little pocket of onboard storage inside the jack, ready to be deployed alongside the array of other programs they had loaded there for intrusions. None of those should be needed to begin with, this was a route they had already mapped out specifically so they would not need to linger. Then the nothingness of the mesh fully closed up around them and within a heartbeat they were on the move–in a sense. Navigating the public expanse of the mesh was largely effortless and unremarkable, their subconscious hardly having time to settle on a clear visual translation for their marathon sprint through their previous steps, out of the familiar (relative) comfort of their own system, zig-zagging through a handful of tethered machines to disguise their trace, and finally shouldering their way inside NervAMP’s servers through an unprotected wi-fi enabled conference room light system. It was a hilariously irresponsible oversight (Ilya would make sure it was hilarious in the retelling, even if they felt sick with the discomfort now), and not the first one they had ever taken advantage of. Last time they had been trying to get out.

Once inside, they paused. Their surroundings were beginning to take on shapes and patterns, artificial daylight spread across white walls, long clean lines and tasteful chestnut accents, floor to ceiling glass panels dividing hallways from meeting rooms from offices from employee lounges without any of the rhyme or reason a physical building would demand. Ilya’s mind squirmed and protested against the visual, and they might have shuddered if they could still feel their own body. But they would need to go deeper than this. They were on the administrative level, and while meddling with NervAMP’s employee schedules and canceling their next delivery of office supplies would be amusing, it wouldn’t make the trip worthwhile.

Still. Maybe on the way out.

Ilya strove to navigate the halls with purpose–if they left too many meandering traces in the mesh, NervAMP’s MAID would be on them immediately. They had never been allowed to walk these halls alone before (they had never walked these halls, they reminded themself, and they weren’t walking them now), and there was a nagging irrational fear that someone would catch them and walk them back to Carter, sitting patiently behind his desk in one of these non-Euclidian offices waiting to waste Ilya’s time with more condescending bureaucracy. Their subconscious offered up the impression of people moving around them, bustling footsteps and clattering mailcart wheels and snatches of conversation, though it was always around a corner, across a room, behind a closed door. Ghosts of other people on the network, going about their business. Eventually Ilya began to settle into the flow of traffic, get a picture of where people were lingering and how to avoid them. As they dug deeper into the company’s directories, the architecture began to shift around them. Less glass, less tasteful accents, more thick doors and keypads.

This was worse. The memories stirred up by the upper levels were the ones that left them bitter and frustrated. These were the ones that made their skin crawl and their hands tremble–or would have, if they were still in their body, which only accentuated the distance and added an extra dimension to the discomfort. The halls they were traversing felt strange, somehow too narrow, too constricting, and yet uncomfortably spacious and empty at the same time, and they couldn’t shake the growing sensation of eyes on them. Housekeeping, they thought, sighing internally. The MAID’s attention was on them now. They picked up the pace again, focus darting back and forth as they tried to judge what felt like the best spot in this warren of half-data-half-memories to set off a bomb. Of course they weren’t going to shake the MAID that way, nothing about their behavior now could be interpreted as anything other than an intrusion, even to the most incompetently trained algorithm. So they started forcing doors, cracking passwords and spoofing credentials without much remaining concern for the fingerprints they were leaving behind. It wouldn’t matter once the worm had done its job anyway.

Then they shoved open a pair of double doors and stopped cold. They’d found the spot.

The advantage of meshjack visualizations was that they could translate innate, subconscious knowledge into something immediately comprehensible. An encrypted file became a lockbox, network traces became footprints, an intrusion countermeasure became a tripwire. In this case, Ilya’s subconscious had translated the best layer of the directory to deploy the worm into the one room they would have most liked to torch. The operating theater.

An approximation of it, at least, the surgical table standing cold and impassive at its center like some grim monument haloed by the blaring lights overhead, leaving the rest of the room draped in ambiguous shadows. Ilya took a step forward-

And froze, pain arcing through their nerves. There was a sensation of weight bearing down on them, of a crushing pressure fixing them in place and determined to grind them down into the ground.

The MAID. Locked on, running a final check before it tried to forcefully eject them from the system.

Not fast enough.

They resisted the temptation to glance behind them–MAIDs weren’t programmed to look like anything, they were invisible specters inside the network, and whatever Ilya’s own mind could supply would only serve to further disrupt their focus and make them an easier target. They had a counter-countermeasure for this, they didn’t need to panic. It would only work once, and not for long, but they only needed a few uninterrupted seconds. Probably. They turned their focus inward, called up one of those little executables inside the meshjack storage. The MAID clawed at them with greater determination, certain now that they were an interloper that needed to be removed, and they were grateful for the layers of obfuscation they had wrapped around their signal but no amount of reminding themself that this was all in their head was making it not hurt.

Then their form shuddered, flickered, and a second copy of it stepped away and moved purposefully back through the door. Ilya kept stock still, not even daring to look too closely at anything yet, but they felt the pressure of the MAID’s focus lift slightly, hesitantly, and then pull away completely as it peeled off to investigate the new intrusion.

That wouldn’t take long. The decoy wasn’t programmed to do anything but move up and down through directories in an extremely conspicuous manner, the MAID wouldn’t need more than a few moments to snuff it out. Ilya bolted into the room, fell forward and grabbed either side of the surgical table in front of them, and urged the worm into action. There was the briefest hesitation, a single microsecond just long enough for them to worry that it wouldn’t deploy right–

And then it went to work. Fissures opened up on the surface of the table under Ilya’s hands, splitting and spreading in every direction, pouring over the sides and across the floor and leaving Ilya with the impression of fractures shooting out across a pane of glass from a single impact point, of the room losing cohesion before their eyes. (Of rot.) If it could keep up that pace, they dared to imagine it could eat half the archive before anyone quarantined it. If they’d had a voice inside the mesh, they might have laughed.

Their time ran out before they fully registered what had happened. The MAID came down on them like a hurricane, likely with the same force it had brought to bear against their decoy, leaving them with the sensation of being ripped away by a vicious windstorm as everything cut to featureless white.

Then they were out of the mesh, fumbling with the cable plugged into their brainstem the second they had enough fine motor control to reach for it. Once it was out they flicked it away like a live snake, all their triumph and satisfaction of a moment ago forgotten. Sharp, ragged breaths punctuated the silence–my breaths, they assured themself, as they stared down at hands that felt clumsy, distant and out of focus in exactly the way they had dreaded. They flexed their fingers, straining to feel and notice the bend of each joint as they closed their hands into fists and then opened them again, then slouched forward to press their palms to their forehead as they drew in and then released one long, deliberate sigh. Then another. A half-conscious desire to feel contained wrapped their arms tight and close around their own torso–a mistake, they realized too late, as their fingertips found the subtly raised edges of the inlays that spread across their arms, an elegant metallic map of the contours of their musculature. They shuddered, as the sickening impulse to pick, scratch, dig flared alongside a familiar and inescapable thought.

Those aren’t your hands. Those aren’t your arms.

They abruptly let go again, stretched their arms out in front of them, groaned when one of their shoulders popped. That finally made them aware that they’d been holding their truly horrendous posture for far too long, so they unfolded themself, rose to their feet, and stretched properly, taking a sort of perverse satisfaction in the way their stiff and protesting muscles affirmed to them they were in fact here and fully present inside their own skin. Then another reminder: their stomach growled insistently. They grimaced and peered down at the clock on their terminal. Measuring time in the mesh was challenging but their access log said it had only been about twenty minutes. They must have already worked straight through dinner and into the evening when they went in, because it was coming up on 22:00 now. Too late to go out or order anything in. Too late to cook either, especially with the kind of headspace they were in, but as they wandered out of the glorified walk-in closet that had evolved into their workroom, and through the equally modest rest of their apartment, they figured they could scrounge up something.

#ghost city #maksim girard #ilya kasharin #original fiction #rom fiction #completely forgot I had a dedicated writing tag lmao #idk what else to tag this..... I don't even know how much reach I actually want it to have lmaooo #if I make it to... let's say chapter 3. then I'll make a masterpost :^)

25 notes · View notes

alwayshasacold · 1 month

Text

Right I’ve given it a bit since I finished the season so I’m not coming fresh off the binge with my thoughts. I’m not like great at phrasing and they’re not fully thought over yet but like I need to get them into words so here we go.

The short version is that while I still had fun with that season it is definitely the worst by far. Not sure if it was a necessary addition but I’ve never been solid on ending with season 3 either so won’t argue that making it was by itself a mistake. Ending was alright I guess, wasn’t good but like wasn’t horrifically bad yknow, very okay. I think that reduced ep count definitely did the season in ultimately, though we will never know now if that would’ve fixed some of the worst issues it has.

The apocalypse itself was very shitty, every other season plays into a common apocalypse trope and tbh from what we’ve seen of the death of Reggie’s world there were plenty of options to go for there to keep in trend and make it the same. Massive cgi monster you have to invent new lore to have is just boring as fuck.

Character writing wasn’t great, though the potential is there for them in most cases which is definitely at least one consequence of reduced episode count. Klaus relapse makes some sense (his powers and his addiction are always closely connected) and while I’ve seen people arguing about it being pointless if season was longer I could perhaps see it go somewhere. Luther living in the academy is very in character, he’s always been the one with the most positive connections to the place and it’s no coincidence he always tries to return there when possible. Diego not finding purpose in family life checks from his whole action hero complex, though obviously it needed more time and respect. Alison not being able to get a career off the ground or be a perfect wife or parent could’ve gone somewhere but I’d just mostly played for jokes so I’m still iffy on that one. Lila not being able to adjust to family life also checks considering she’s never had anything even resembling it, and her seeking solutions independently works from her character so far. Viktor doesn’t really have anything at first, but being able to have the time with his dad is probably the best relationship stuff we got all season and it was quite nice, though could’ve done with a bit more depth. My main gripe with his storyline is the lack of interaction really with Reggie’s wife, who’s obviously the original owner of his violin, though the showrunners not doing anything with the sound guys musical talent has been a problem since season 3 so. So we’ve got at least four decent character threads that could’ve worked, and until proven otherwise I will assume the reduced episode count is to blame for given the foundations aerosols enough.

Now onto the plain bad. They clearly had no clue what to do with five. Guy goes from wanting to retire to working for the CIA which is of course not explained. Him almost abandoning his family also doesn’t work from the guy who’s entire motivation is protecting them. And the whole romance with Lila doesn’t really make sense mostly. Five has historically turned to things like that in similar situations (Delores) but obviously he wouldn’t disrespect his family in that way which is the main issue. Same goes for Lila on the same issue. With Ben they seemed to also have no clue what they were doing, especially with consideration of the clip at the end of season 3. While I appreciate getting the reasoning behind his death, the reasoning itself isn’t the best tbh. And not giving him a proper ending is just shitty tbh, though I do appreciate his last moments are trying to help his family with the last of his ability to do so.

The lack of music this season was also very disappointing. There were very few tracks used and none really stood out beyond baby shark, which was a funny bit tbf as much as I hate the song but like the fact we got four lots of baby shark and barely more other pieces of music says it all. The choreography also fell flat - we got what, one choreographed fight scene (which I did enjoy tbf, but it’s far from the best and it being the only one is genuinely shitty) and one dance scene that didn’t fit the music? Like the music and choreography of umbrella academy is one of its most iconic features and it’s honestly the most disappointing thing about the season to me that a lot of that character that it’s always had has been lost.

Also on the lacking side was the costuming but that’s only a minor complaint, just wasn’t enough variety imo but once again probably just the reduced episode count preventing more organic costume changes.

As for other things, I loved Jean and Gene, once again they needed more time like everything else this season but they were great from what we got of them. I liked Reggie and his wife, the whole plotting of her not appreciating being revived needed more time and establishing but I like the concept and roles they played this season. The idea that people are able to figure out that the timeline has been reset is neat and I like that being used as a secondary antagonist group who want an apocalypse to fix things. This season obviously carries over prior issues the series has always had: lack of seriousness about series issues (sexual assault, drug abuse, etc) though slightly improved for making a slightly better effort at addressing klaus‘s self destructive behaviour was made if nothing else, being a bit too reliant of jokiness at times etc but nothing it’s never had issues with. The gross out vomit humour this season wasn’t great and could do with a warning also. I would’ve liked them to do more with the subway and timeline stuff, especially considering both how sick it looked and how all over the marketing it was, but it was probably another casualty of reduced run time.

I believe I’ve addressed most major thoughts I’ve had so far on the finale, though I’ll come back later if I have more. Overall, I definitely don’t think it was the best ending to the series, but I prefer it ending now while at least it’s got something left than it continue and tire itself out for good. It was a very okay six episodes that were fun enough, but I expected and hoped for more from a series I have consistently loved, and unfortunately I don’t believe this series will benefit from the boost in opinion season 3 has gotten from subsequent rewatches.

#the umbrella academy #the umbrella academy spoilers #tua season 4 #tua s4 spoilers

8 notes · View notes

randomfoggytiger · 1 year

Text

Inbox being weird again, had to repost (sorry, anon!)

What are your thoughts on IWTB? It’s now on hulu and I am like 15 minutes in to a rewatch (I’ve watched FtF a truly offensive number of times but have only seen this once, when it first came out) and am absolutely incensed already. I’m having trouble making sense of their characters, they seem so OOC to me — even with the understanding that they are (possibly both) depressed and life on the run has really jaded and hardened them. Also its so weird to me that Amanda Peet reaches out to touch Mulders cheek bc he cut himself shaving? Just bizarre behavior all around!

It is a truly bizarre movie. I've not seen it; but I have done extensive research on it, if that makes sense. I think it can be summed up by this one Tumblr post I saw (and lost, someone help me find it!) that noted Mulder requested a helicopter for himself and Scully to, essentially, walk a few street blocks to the next location. Because CC wanted a helicopter in his movie and he was going to get it, somehow, someway.

Below is a tragically long post filled with article links for more enjoyment~.

(**Note**: Will edit this post later, brb.)

TLDR: A movie/tv series worth its salt is well-written, end of story. It doesn't matter how excellent or in-character the themes or motifs or etc. are if the characters are badly written or act out-of-turn. You cannot have a god-tier theme about fighting back the Darkness and seeking for the Truth if at every opportunity the characters themselves reject the message continually in ways that make no sense, especially when they have a history of stellar characterization and well-thought-out opinions and actions. This movie is a prime example of that.

There are numerous blogs here that have already (rightfully) griped about IWTB, so I won't go into plot nonsense or whatnot. But I DO have interviews that show how roughshod the movie making process was before it even hit theatres, so....

I first heard about IWTB's flaws peripherally through this article (that trashes the Revival, highly recommend. Written by a CC fan, too, so it's not a bash-sesh against the Creator.) It spoke endearingly-ish about IWTB, believing it to be more in-character than the Revival (yup.... unfortunately.) Then I started perusing fan opinions... and everyone pretty much agreed it was awful in most parts and shippy in others.

TBH, shippy doesn't mean squat to me. Maybe it's how I'm wired, but I was drawn to The X-Files because the romance is so unspoken with very light kisses. I 100% get Chris Carter's restraint perspective; but I also get the fans' perspective, that it's gone too far to ignore or take back. An example: the movie sets up a "gasp, really??" mystery that Scully is a doctor with a life separate from Mulder, driving over to him to try to get him involved in the FBI manhunt. It's taken back almost immediately when Mulder later springs up beside her in bed, but it's those little touches that start to confuse the message. And then throw in Scully insisting Mulder join the chase while Gillian Anderson acted her completely opposite to what she was saying and you start to see the mess unravel. Then Mulder tosses aside his loyalty to Scully-- something that is KEY to his character, having formerly left his life's work for her and even left his newborn son when she told him to-- to chase the very monsters she begged him to chase but is now begging him not to. There is no reason given other than "It's who I am", which is NOT who Mulder is: he is a man willing to sacrifice who he is and what makes him tick over and over for Scully's sake. This not only breaks his character in-movie, it nullifies all his actions and choices in the original series, stripping them of their consequences and weight.

The movie, I believe, was supposed to be about Mulder and Scully scrabbling against the Darkness while also lost in confusion: they're together but Scully feels threatened by Agent Whitney, Mulder no's the case before getting wrapped up into it, Scully supports then withdraws her support (and LEAVES??), both rely on the word of a pedophile priest (a similar alliance to Luthor Lee Boggs but creepier and less redeemable... and even Boggs wasn't redeemed), and finally Scully casts aside her doubts to get back in the saddle and save Mulder. It seems a compelling story, no? ...No.

An example of the "confusion" theme of the plot: When Mulder meets up with the other agents to discuss terms (I suppose), the camera briefly pans to random people walking past him in the hallway-- one of them is the actress who played his little sister in the OG series; and the camera makes it a point for Mulder to notice that fact... but so briefly and quickly it never made an impression on him permanently, a.k.a. a seeming callback. BUT when Scully yells at him (before? after? I dunno) about always looking for his sister, this is the scene that was supposed to back her up? In which case: dude, we all saw the Samantha Agent. She did, indeed, look like Samantha; and she had NOTHING to do with this case. The only explanation Scully had for her tasteless remark was that she thought Mulder was full-on delusional or so stubborn he was projecting his own demons onto this case. Y'know... the case he didn't want and only got more involved in to SAVE LIVES. In which case, it doesn't fit with the themes of the movie at all: Mulder was right here, Scully was wrong; but the movie stated that SCULLY was right, or at least half-right, and Mulder was at least half-wrong. It's all nonsense.

The dialogue is atrocious. Absolutely appalling. Which makes sense to an extent: CC and Spotnitz had this movie written out right after the series ended as an attempt to gain back the studio's attention. No such luck; and when FOX was finally interested to make more money, the script notes were accidentally lost; so CC and Frank blitzkrieged up a final draft in just a few weeks (very not good.) This and this article breaks down how Spotnitz (in his own words) watched CC battle FOX from the sidelines for the movie, then scramble with him to complete a draft in time for filming; and it explains (but doesn't justify) the stilted dialogue, horrendous pacing issues, and disjointed theme. To summarize:

""Frank Spotnitz: ...The pressure in television is incredible because you’ve got to keep coming up with another script, another script, another script. The movie was completely different. We started work on the story in 2003, and then got derailed for four years by deal-making and the threat of a lawsuit. Then when we returned to it in 2007, we’d lost our notes.

Lost your notes?

Frank Spotnitz: We’d put them on note cards to pitch the studio, and we couldn’t locate them. At first, we were very unhappy, but it ended up being a blessing in disguise. We remembered what the case was about, but the emotional beats, the personal beats between Mulder and Scully, we had to start from scratch, and we had changed.""

Frank Spotnitz claims it was effortless to get back in their characters' heads; and, while that may be true, it was certainly not effortless to put them down on paper.

The messaging of the movie was so confusing that Mark Snow, the composer, didn't read all of it correctly (which is important for the person composing the score for each scene):

""Now the plot of I Want To Believe has characteristically remained a secret – I don’t suppose you can tell us anything about what we can expect from this film?

Well the interesting part was, when I read the script the first thing I got out of it was deep, dark complexity and I spoke to Chris Carter afterwards and he said ‘what do you think?’, I said ‘man, it’s so complex and dark and mysterious’, and he said ‘and it’s a love story with religious overtones…’ Okay! He said ‘just keep that in mind’ and you know I re-read it and I got what he meant, and then seeing the movie I certainly got what he meant. Besides the Mulder and Scully relationship there are some other very very emotional, intimate if you would, moments there that do add spiritual and religious weight to it....""

This article does well at picking apart the claims (some ludicrous) for and against the movie But, for time's sake, let's skip to the summary of the very sloppy (and downright goofy) climax of the movie:

""The biggest shortcoming may be that the case is solved by both Mulder and Scully independently and simultaneously, and thanks to coincidences on both their behalf. Mulder’s investigative skills lead him to the villain thanks to a simple visit to a local store; stem cell research for organ transplants and for curing Christian allow the two storylines to cross, but Scully having a revelation by finding the villain’s research on the internet through a non-related search draws the odds extremely. There is little actual investigation and the case is wrapped up too quickly. All those are little things — but they pile up to too much.""

Both the actors had "notes" and "questions" (read here) about their characters when they first got the script, with Gillian Anderson admitting how hard it was to find her character (post here)--

""Gillian Anderson: I had a similar experience. This feels so weird. Summertime. I didn’t have all the running around that David had to do, but I did have my own unfortunate beginning which was starting with one of the most difficult scenes for Scully in the film where it’s later on in the script and she goes through a range of emotions in confronting Billy Connolly’s character. I just had a really time for those first couple of days that that scene was. I had a really hard time just finding her, finding her voice. I think I must’ve gone through ten other characters in the process of trying to get to her when I had assumed that I would be able to show up on the first day and it would just be there. It wasn’t until I think day three when we got to work together, not just necessarily in a familiar environment which it really wasn’t, but in the environment of each other and the relationship and that it kind of felt natural and familiar and I felt like I’d landed this time."" --

but it was David Duchovny who was surprisingly the most honest to the press about his (measured) thoughts, as he's usually the most reticent. He always wanted to do a movie series, liking the scope and freedom it would give him with acting and scheduling; but he mentioned, once or twice, that he wished IWTB had been a bigger action film in the vein of FTF. Further, he admits to an interviewer about his thoughts and his (slight) dissatisfaction with Mulder's out-of-character element here:

""Since The X-Files: I Want to Believe may not have been the huge blockbuster that everyone was hoping for, we’d like to know: What is your own measure of success for the movie?

Duchovny: I guess it’s always the first time I see the movie. What’s my feeling when I come out? I always felt like the subject matter of this particular movie was limiting. It was dark, and it wasn’t going....

I’ve only seen it one time, and I was sitting in Chris’ editing room. I watched it on a little screen. I guess I missed the chance to see it on the big screen, and that’s too bad, but when I left that initial screening at Chris’ house, the film was pretty much almost done except for some special effects. I just felt like it was really strong and kind of a strangely moving piece of work. Still dark, and still, I thought, limited, but the way that the movie performed did not surprise me so much, and I think that if we do get a chance to do another one … what I always really liked about the show was that it had a dark vision, but at the heart of it being driven by Mulder was this real optimism or wonder or sense of belief, and then it would kind of open out. Most of the best shows that we did would open out into real wonder at the end, if only because you didn’t have an answer, which was the mystery of it, but the wonder.

Mulder’s quest, to me, is a very positive one. If we get a chance to do another one, I think because in this movie Mulder kept getting reinvigorated, Mulder was in a down place for much of this film; he wasn’t driving the way he drives, the way he drove everything before that. In a way, the nature of how we had to get back into the show, which was to take the guy out of his job, also deprived the movie of some optimism and wonder and enlightenment that occurs when you’ve got this unhinged guy trying to prove wonderful crazy things.""

And while DD defended IWTB's box office failings as having to compete against Batman, one of the previous articles I linked had the savvy to tackle that reason and debunk it:

""The defenders of IWTB will endlessly complain about the budget (but look at what a feast Darren Aronofsky did with $35 million: “The Fountain” (2006)), the fact that it’s low-key ‘intellectual’ and not blockbuster-like (so is “There Will Be Blood” (2007), $25 million, and countless other generally agreed upon masterpieces), the lousy promotion (but look at what good word of mouth can do with a movie few believed in in the beginning: “The Matrix” (1999), $65 million), the unforseen success of “The Dark Knight” as competition (hardly an argument) or trends in selfish cinema critics (as if a bad reception is the sole result of a conspiracy).

However what will remain in history is not the whys and hows but the what: the final product itself. And the truth is that if IWTB featured characters other than Mulder and Scully, this would be a not very memorable movie.""

Needless to say: the entire movie's a mess, and it's down to the roots. While beautiful visually and musically-- all the reviews and cast and crew had nothing to say against that-- the characters and the script and the plot were a horrible mishmash that highlighted its weaknesses and smashed down its strengths.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to ramble; and sorry if this didn't do what you needed! But you did inspire me to find all the old angry IWTB discussions/posts on Tumblr (archive hopping, heheheh) and put them all in one place. So, look forward to that sometime in the future, I suppose~!

Disclaimers: I do not like canon after S8; and that's only because they get a happy ending and, even though it has garbage canon decisions, the characters were able to save most of it and forget the rest. But I will treat IWTB as its own thing devoid of my personal opinion.

#asks #txf #IWTB #thoughts #thank you for sending an ask!#I wanted to take the time to provide scope and scale #I despiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise IWTB #because it's beautiful and pretty #and so so broken #it's really only “nice” in the shippy moments #because it's just Mulder and Scully banter #but when the plot kicks in they become weird aliens #analysis #mine #meta

37 notes · View notes

ecargmura · 8 months

Text

Pandora Hearts Volume 4 Review

And this volume is the start of the Cheshire Cat arc. It’s where one of Alice’s memories is and Break plays a part in this arc too. This arc introduces lots of world building and a very important character: Jack Vessalius. I’m just warning you: pay CLOSE attention to Jack because he is a VERY important character.

The fourteenth chapter is more of a fun one as Gilbert lost his hat and they have to win it back via arm wrestle. I don’t remember if Oscar was in the anime in that particular scene; I remember the arm wrestle part being there, however. Despite that, it was a nice comedic moment before the angst that is the Cheshire Cat arc. I also liked the reunion between Oz, Gil and Uncle Oscar. Oscar is the father Oz should’ve had. I do feel bad for Alice when she saw them hugging because she doesn’t remember if she had such warmth.

The Cheshire Cat arc is quite interesting. I actually think the Cheshire Cat is a bit of an underrated and forgotten character because of how early he showed up and then was gone. He’s very loyal to the Intention of the Abyss as he is protecting a memory that he doesn’t want Alice to retrieve. The fact that this arc actually starts so suddenly is really nice. I liked the surprise factor in which Break and Alice get caught up in Cheshire’s dimension and then Sharon had to be the one to guide Oz and Gil to where they are. Cheshire as a character is a bit of a parallel to Oz in a way. I’d like to say why but it’s major spoilers for those who haven’t read through the whole thing, so I won’t say it until we get to that part.

I do like seeing everyone in on the action here. Break shows off his capabilities despite being at a disadvantage at first. His chain is Mad Hatter. Sharon shows off her chain’s power too. I’m not sure if there was a horse in the original Alice in Wonderland story, but Equus is still cool nonetheless. Cheshire himself is pretty cool with being the first majorly dangerous foe. His dimensions are full of tricks and illusions and he’s bent on killing Alice to protect the Intention of the Abyss. Gilbert, although was a bit useless at first due to his phobia of cats, still did help out later on. The twist that Alice tore up her own memories got to me. Rereading this is pretty much masochism at this point. I am a confirmed masochist!

And this is the arc where Jack makes his debut. Oh, Jack. He’s very mysterious. He looks like an adult Oz but with a long braid. He’s here to help Alice, but cannot do much as he is only a fragment and needs Oz’s help. He’s the one trying to give Oz resolve to realize what Alice means to him.

In terms of world building, there are two opposing factions. One is Pandora, the organization Break is a part of and the other is the Baskervilles, the ones who crashed the coming of age ceremony and the protectors of a fifth door. I’d like to explain all of this but it does contain major spoilers for future events so my lips are sealed until then.

I just realized that rereading Pandora Hearts really does tie every future event together now that I think about it. I’ve been concealing everything important because some plot points shown here are revealed in the future. Man, this arc really was important. Why did I forget about it? My only gripe was that I didn’t make a “Ore no na wa JACK” joke when I posted the picture below on Twitter. He was the perfect character to use that quote on (It’s from Daily Lives of High School Boys). Anyways, if you have read this volume or know of the major spoilers, how did you feel about the story so far?

#pandora hearts #manga review #jun mochizuki #oz vessalius #alice #gilbert nightray #Vincent nightray #sharon rainsworth #Xerxes break #Cheshire Cat #Reim Lunettes #Oscar Vessalius #review

8 notes · View notes

transmascsonicthehedgehog · 8 months

Text

GOOOOOOOOD AFTERNOON TUMBLR I'M FINALLY UP AND AT 'EM (<- WAS LAYING IN BED). SEASON 3 THOUGHTS START NOW.

my biggest gripe with season 3 was the ending. you can really, really tell that this was supposed to be a much bigger series but it was literally cut in half due to corporate meddling. netflix is known for doing this so i wouldn't be shocked.

another gripe, A VERY SMALL ONE mind you is that i feel the battle on the grim dragged a bit too long but there was more than enough enjoyable moments between characters and pretty visuals to make up for this me thinks...

that being said, let's move on to my positive thoughts and get the biggest fish out of the water out of the way first;

SONIC AND SHADOW BEING SO WELL WRITTEN IT ACTUALLY FUCKING HURT. sonic realizing just how fucking deep the consequences of his actions were, sonic going back and forth between wanting to just play hero and tie/fix things up in a neat bow and slowly realizing the only true way of fixing the universe really was to accept what he had done and "give" himself up.

self sacrificial either way, but the end with him telling nine he was willing to risk dying to save the universe crumbling away into nothingness, with nothing but the purest intent of saving everybody and giving them a second chance while he, potentially, gets killed, actually made me fucking cry. sonics character arc throughout this series was probably the best i've seen in a LONG long ass time.

shadow on the other end of the coin... he was mad. justifiably mad throughout the run; sonic had destroyed everything and wasn't treating this as seriously as he should. but as the two spent more time together, he softened up. he realized just how much sonic was hurting and how he was this close to crumbling all together.

i never thought i'd get to see shadow trying to comfort sonic, reassuring him ( in his own ways of course ), protecting him from danger ( i.e s3ep1 ) and just being there for him in general. i NEVER thought we, canonically, would get a scene with shadow showing genuine worry for him.

as someone that goes absolutely fucking crazy over body language and expressions i literally fucking gasped. the way he held his breath, his arm and expression dropping, the way his eyes shrink. oh my fucking god. amplified by the fact that every time sonic would "glitch", that stoic mask would crack again.

he cares. shadow is a caring person, whether that's about sonic or not. he was created to match maria's heart and spirit and it really, really shows in certain scenes of this series, not just season 3.

THAT BEING SAID! shadow was much more closed off this season and i know why. it's because it wasn't just him and sonic anymore, they had an entire group of people with them.

i have so many thoughts about these two specifically but this is my thoughts on season 3 as a whole, so let's move on. my closing thoughts on them is that shadow had some of the best fucking writing since the 2000s here and i mean that.

THE AMYS!!!!!!!!!!! I KNEW THEY WOULD ALL COME TOGETHER AT THE END LIKE SISTERS!!!!!!!!!!!!! the way they bounced off of one another, the way they flowed together so smoothly and were receptive to each other was literally so touching. i loved every single fucking second they were on screen and i wish we could've had more, something i can say about the rouges, bigs and knuckles' 100%. to me, it felt like a part of their personalities coming together at the end despite their "original" selves being long gone by that point...

the way everybody bounced off each other whether negatively or positively was a fucking treat. i loved seeing the egg council interact with everybody, seeing them bicker amongst themselves and letting their shitty egos shine was HILARIOUS. i don't care what people say tbh dr. babble is hilarious. dr. deep and renegade knux were ESPECIALLY funny, what the hell was their beef with each other SPECIFICALLY???? HELP........

the grim big reveal scene was fucking hysterical. it was tense as hell but it was SOOOOOOOOOO fucking funny seeing sonic pound the ground and curse nine while everybody ran and panicked i DON'T CARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! speaking of which...

the tails'. oh my god. when they "died", i cried. i cried a lot watching this season actually. seeing sonics everything fall apart upon seeing them "die" made me fucking cry. he thought he lost them. i think a piece of him broke, and i don't blame him. if i saw my brother seemingly perish, i would've snapped too. i absolutely do not blame him. i got so stupidly emotional when they revealed they WERE okay.

like i said, my two gripes with the show were the ending and the battle on the grim. that was a half lie. my other gripe is that we never got to see much of rouge until the final few episodes, nor did we get much with her counterparts. yes, what we got was GOOD! but i wanted to see MORE of that. but that's not their fault, i'm blaming netflix entirely for why this felt so rushed and incomplete.

on a small note: the grims ability that was given to sonic is probably my absolute favorite out of the bunch, next to the boscage claws. it was fucking awesome and i won't hear anything else sorry. (JOKING)

now. let me talk about nine.

oh. my god. nine. where do i even begin with him.

season 3 has an opening involving sonic and tails cooperating and defeating eggman. together. then it cuts back to sonic and "tails", torn apart and distant. this tails felt as though he had nobody and for the longest time, he didn't. sonic didn't exist in new yoke. he was alone.

nobody saved him.

nine had to save and raise himself, for better or for worse. and we see this tough, apathetic, power hungry wall he puts up quickly turn to dust as the episodes go on. his pained expressions and looks of absolute fury were so painful. the brief fights between him and sonic were painful.

sonic didn't want to hurt him. i don't think nine wanted to either. but he felt as though he had no other choice.

and the moment with renegade knux beating his shield, trying to wear him down and wear him out, the look of stress and fear evident on his face coupled with sonic just watching. sonic watching and slowly realizing he didn't want this. all he could see was a horrified kid. a kid that needed to be talked through. a friend that he needed to save. i'd be lying if i said i didn't cry.

and i DEFINITELY cried when nine finally accepted sonic and hugged him.

i have. so so many thoughts. so many more thoughts that i want to put into words but i can't and it PAINS ME BUT OH MY GOD. I NEED MORE OF THIS SHOW. I NEED MORE. I NEED TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. i know this is within the game/comic canon, but please..... something. i'm so scared we're never going to get something this well written again. i love what we got, but the ending hurt me because that was... it. the fact that it ended so abruptly too felt so. unfair. i can't explain it.

is it perfect? no.

but it was great. it did its job and did it as well as they could with the limits they had. i love you sonic prime.

#note that i did NOT comment on the visuals/animation because it goes unsaid #as an animation dork i absolutely fucking loved every moment of it #sonic sez #sonic prime spoilers

10 notes · View notes

seasonal-writes · 9 months

Text

2023 Writing Round-Up

Rules: Share what you wrote this year! It can be works you posted to Ao3, Wattpad, Tumblr, or anywhere else! You can share everything you wrote or just the ones you’re most excited about. my beloved mutual @canarydarity tagged me in this. thank you for the tag, worm! this was really fun :D p.s. almost every fic in here is team rancher. and almost all of it is shipping. so i am not going to make my bias so obvious by labeling them, i will simply make not of the ONE that is not team rancher. i'm mentally unwell about them and the bias has not gone away. so just a fair warning. <3

January

"bruised / cuts" // 1,347 words "small / cuts" // 1,897 words

'jimmy and tango are in love and clumsy, usually resulting in minor injuries. these are their stories.

dUN DUN-' "19% touch starved and 91% in denial" // 2,551 words

'a short fic in which jimmy is touch-starved, and his new soulmate, tango, is the furthest thing from it.' "old heartbeats die hard" // scarian // 1,413 words

'Did you know that listening to someone’s heartbeat can have a calming effect on your own heart and breathing pattern? Grian knows this. And he knows it’s working right now, even if it’s not enough to lull him to sleep quite yet. Though, there is still relief in knowing that one is still thumping away in Scar’s chest. Its pace is still fresh and lively and steady, just how he likes it— even if he’d never say something like that out loud.' "When Fate Finds Golden Rings" (ongoing, originally published in late january) // 65,044 words as of the last current update in mid-july.

'Being a prince comes with many things. Reputation, politics..even war, if one isn't careful.

When the Kingdom of the Overworld's alliance with the Nether grows tense, there is only one way to repair it, and it lies within the hands of two princes—arranged to be married to end a fight that simmers hot between the two planes.

But when Heir-to-the-throne Tango would rather stay at odds than follow through, and the the youngest Prince Jimmy finds no way for a wedding to solve anything, how can they bite back their gripe and fulfill their responsibilities?

How do you fight a destiny that's forged in gold? (or, a Ranchers Royalty AU. Take two.)'

February

"i ain't ever liked sweets (till you sugar-coated my teeth)" // 2,556 words

'a short, fluffy, plotless valentine's day rancher duo one-shot! :D'

March - June

these few months, i worked on personal projects and was in the thick of Golden Rings updates. so, nothing too exciting!

July

"how do you talk to a star?" // 1,285 words 'jimmy is in love with tango. he does not plan on telling him.' also, the last update i did on golden rings. maybe someday i'll get back to it, akfdjs

August - December

more personal projects! i had a few new AUs i never quite debuted that i created and cultivated with friends, wrote a little for them--but they weren't really enough to post, so. and that's all for the year! i appreciate everyone who's stuck around this long, even with my inactivity the past few months. i am hoping that with the new year, there will come new motivation to get back into it. posting all my little stories and ideas have both helped me realize i really am beyond in love with writing, AND i made lots of new friends along the way. :D been a pretty cool time! no pressure tag: @hitheeprithee! let me see your words, boy. thanks for reading, as always. :) <3 till next time.

#seasonalrambles #happy new year everyone!#thanks again for the tag worm :>

9 notes · View notes

bumblingest-bee · 3 months

Note

I may not know anything about Chicago but I do love to hear people complain so please elaborate on why you don't like the current stage revival please please

in my opinion the current revival has slowly turned into a watered-down caricature of the original and gone from a biting commentary on media and the justice system to a bland tourist trap that relies on stunt casting to stay open. it's been running for far too long and is no longer fresh or interesting.

i also have a gripe with the minimalist sets and costumes, which were understandable in 1996 since it was an encores! concert transfer, but just seem boring nowadays when every musical under the sun has done some kind of minimalist staging. also, they result in losing the vaudeville aesthetic that was an integral part of the original concept of the show. chicago used to make audiences uncomfortable. now you just go see it to see the b-list celebrity of the month singing badly in a sexy costume while the ensemble looks tired.

honestly i'm sure the revival was actually great 20-something years ago when it was fresh and new and edgy and had the incredible talents of people like bebe neuwirth and ann reinking and joel grey. but now?? oh my god please somebody free the ambassador theatre from its torment

#bee posts nonsense #ask #theatre

6 notes · View notes

fostersffff · 2 years

Text

Shit-flinging over whether or not the main character of Fire Emblem Engage is too anime/corporate vtuber/whatever word xenophobes use to disparage unique Japanese styles these days aside, nearly everything else about the presentation is so far beyond every other 3D Fire Emblem it’s kind of hard to believe.

My two biggest gripes with this series as I’ve gone through it have been the vibrant colors of the GBA games slowly leaking out* and super flourishy animations going away the instant the Path of Radiance dropped. Credit where credit is due: Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses had super colorful characters, but the environments were all so bland they could have come from an asset shop, and while Shadows of Valentia tried to have more interesting combat animations and Three Houses tried... with the battalion system, nothing in either games holds a candle to shit like this:

So when the previews for Engage show a grassy mountain with teal-colored grass and bright gray stone, or a temple with stark white marble, or a castle at sunset with oranges reflecting off all the metal constructs within, and there’s a dynamic camera that actually makes use of the fact that the game is in 3D rather than just showing a basic cut-in of the character when they score a critical hit, it makes me really optimistic about this game! Also the fact that this will hopefully just have one story with maybe a handful of branching missions like older games is a huge boost; I love Three Houses but man did they have to spread themselves thin across three (technically four) distinct story paths.

*the reason the GBA games had to be so colorful was because the original GBA’s screen was awful, so if they used the more grounded natural colors like the SNES games, it would’ve been too dark to see without a good environmental lighting

#Fire Emblem #Fire Emblem Engage #FE #FEEN #Nintendo #video games

58 notes · View notes

iwrite-sinsandtragedies · 1 year

Text

@organized-chaotic-disaster I totally see what you mean 😭 (tho I haven’t played the Derek or Baxter DLCs myself). Tbh I think the main reason you can’t be poly is the fact that it would be hard to implement in an already complex game with high customization of your experience, especially since it’s written by one person— idk how they’d do that tbh. And I know GB has gone on record to say that Cove wouldn’t be down for a poly relationship, but it still sucks to not have the option. I understand why poly relationships aren’t really a thing in games— a combination of monogamy being the norm irl and the difficulty in implementing the mechanic itself —but I hope one day those barriers can be broken down so it becomes an option 😭 And sorry if any of this comes across as me coming for you or something, that’s not my intention!!! I just had some thoughts I wanted to share. Overall I definitely agree that things like this could and should be handled better, and hopefully will be with future games with dateable NPCs— I’d love to explore that myself, and I wish I could with OL.

[original post]

Mm, It's certainly not impossible to add in those features [the FH series, for example, is a single writer and they've added in poly options upon fan requests] but, I can understand not wanting to put the extra work in yeah, especially since the creator has been saying for a while now that "this is the last thing I'll do for olba" like, they seem to be really trying to move on to the next project, so I get it.

It's also why I don't expect to ever get any resolution for this😔but it still does make me very sad because I really do love this game so much, it's one of the few forms of media out there that make me feel comfortable/understood/safe with myself and the lack of a poly option really takes away from that feeling quite a bit.

My main gripe though is that there isn't any conversation at all about it. Like, that just takes away from the experience of the game.

Once you choose to date Baxter, everyone just goes 'Error 404' on you and seems to outright forget that you were basically setting up to and expected to marry Cove. That, to me, reads like a failing of writing.

Like, there should be some dialogue, y'know? Cove should be able to question your relationship, even in a round-about and self-concious/self-serving way, there should be some tension there where he has to tackle his very real feelings for you and you can possibly do the same for him but, there's just none. Like, if you flirt with him in Step 2, have that romantic tension carry over to Step 3 he shouldn't be able to just shrug off all his feelings instantly. Feelings don't work that way, bro😂It just bugs me that it's so inorganic and unable to be explored. Cove and MC have a lot of history, they should be able to talk about it in every aspect, y'know?

Also! Not ranting at you specifically, lmao! I'm just sharing my feelings. Thank you so much for replying to me, I really enjoyed reading your thoughts! It's also just nice to see that someone out there also wants the poly options like me🥺we got too much love in our wee little hearts for this single romance bs lmaooo

I lowkey wish there was a mod community for games like these😂ngl, it'd be nice to just have a mod that ignored certain flags or something so that you could at least have the romantic tension still there with Cove while you romance someone else. It doesn't fix the lack of dialogue option but it'd be better than the clear and noticable lack of what was clearly there before. At least then it'd be easier to pretend there was something to bite into lol

#iwrite replies #organized-chaotic-disaster #olba #ol:ba #our life beginnings and always #our life beginnings & always #poly #polymance #ol cove #ol baxter #cove holden #baxter ward #baxter dlc #iwrite rambles #iwrite rants

13 notes · View notes

silverskye13 · 1 year

Note

6, 8, and 29 for the ask game

6. Are there any fics from others you reread all the time?

Incarnate Inchoate -- underoriginal (unfinished)

Anything to Hear You (Say It One More Time) -- mgrnn

To Convey A Certain Brilliance -- Bee_4

Devil Town is Colder in the Summertime -- BananasofThorns

Hellfire -- Renwhit

[squints] I think that's every fic I've read more than once lol. I'm a Book Devourer so I normally just read a thing once really quickly and then promptly forget it exists. I Have Brain Like Swiss Cheese. AO3 bookmarks and digital libraries are the only reason I stay sane XD

8. What project(s) are you currently working on?

Redstone and Skulk Ch 20: ~ 1300 words, all of them from this week

Monsters Splitting Hairs Ch 28: ~ 2000 words, about 500 of them from this week

Unnamed Superhero AU with OverlordPink: No idea the word count XD less then 1000 I think

Before I Wake (original comic): Pg 27 finished, Pg 29 sketched

I keep a rotation so I don't get bored XD means overall less work on a single project gets done but! Everything gets done eventually.

29. Share a bit from a fic you’ll never post OR from a scene that was cut from an already posted fic. (If you don’t have either, just share a random fic idea you have that you don’t plan on getting to.)

Nobody asked for this but I have 5 chapters of Nailmaster's Folly [a Hollow Knight fic] I dropped, just done and languishing in my documents. I'm not going to subject you to all 5 of those chapters, but I will make you read the 2 I'm most proud of. So uh, here's a very out of context chunk from Nailmaster's Folly I guess.

Oro was halfway down the canyon when his guilt got the better of him and he stopped in his tracks. His insides were a tangled web, and no amount of grousing and grumbling to himself would soothe the knot it made. It bothered him a great deal, apparently, that Mato was scared of him.

Was Mato scared of him? No… surely not. It had been years since -- and honestly Mato was so much more capable -- sure Oro was pretty abrasive but he wasn’t--!

Oro shook his head.

Maybe he’d misread. It had been years, years he’d been in his solitude and Mato had been in his. Maybe they were both just so extremely culture-shocked and awkward that he’d read it wrong. Maybe he was just tense because of how suspicious he was, because of how stubbornly he held onto the idea that Mato must be here for some kind of… retribution? But Mato was never the type for things like revenge. He believed in accountability, yes, but not maliciously so. All of this was ridiculous.

And he’d looked so happy cheering him on while watching his fight.

Oro groaned up at the sky.

Maybe, like just about everything else in his life, the problem wasn’t Mato. Maybe the problem was him. After all, Mato had invited him to join him after his fight was over, and Oro had just gone trudging off down the canyon without a second thought. He was always so… antisocial. Maybe if he actually gave Mato a chance…

He’d been living alone for a long time.

Oro sighed. He ran a hand across his mask, then turned and looked up the direction he’d come. He couldn’t see Mato among the cliff faces above, but he knew he was there. Somewhere.

“I hate this, you know,” Oro protested out loud to a nearby boofly, “You know how much easier my life would be if this weren’t my problem?”

Of course the boofly didn’t answer. It just bobbed its head and flittered its tiny wings frantically, its big black eyes looking back at him vacantly. Frustrated, Oro smacked it away with the flat of its nail, sending it spinning further into the canyon. Then, huffing another grumble of a sigh, he turned and began walking back up towards the Colosseum.

“Mato, Mato, why is it always, always Mato,” Oro griped under his breath as he walked, “At least Sheo understood the basic concept of personal space. He knew how to leave me alone and not do stupid things like… like…! And he’s always so emotional it’s like trying to reason with a scared grub for Wyrmssakes--!”

He ushered to the air around him, as though the ambient noises of wind and hoppers and wings could grant him the validation he was looking for. Of course, none did. But the flurry of movement did attract the attention of a nearby primal aspid as it buzzed threateningly close to the canyon wall. And Oro, so lost in his grumbling, so lost in his slow progression up the paths of the cliffside, didn’t notice it’s presence until it was spitting bright orange in his direction. The flash of color was enough of a warning in his peripheral vision for him to lurch to the side in an attempt to dodge it - only for the scatter of its spray to catch him in the mask. Cursing, Oro staggered to the side, wiping furiously at the acid-like spit with his cloak. His shoulder caught against a nearby wall, and then abruptly Oro felt that wall give way behind him.

There was an instant where he realized he was going to fall. An instant where he realized there was nothing he could do about it. An instant where he resolved if he didn’t go tumbling down the side of the canyon wall and crush himself against the ground, he was going to come storming back up here and cut the wings off of every aspid he laid his eyes on. And then, Oro promptly tumbled off the ledge he’d been standing on into whatever cavity had opened up in the wall behind him.

He’d expected to fall longer than he did.

There were two, maybe three seconds where he was free-falling and it was incredibly dark, and his eyes still stung from the aspid spit. And then with a heavy oof! he landed hard on his shoulders on uneven ground, knocking the air out of his chest and leaving him wheezing rather ingloriously on the floor. When he’d managed to start breathing normally again, he felt around for his nail and once he found it, staggered to his feet. Above him, he could hear the echoing buzz of the aspid’s wings as it searched the hole he’d fallen through for any sign of him. As soon as it felt the cooler, wet air of the cavern he’d tumbled down, it turned back the way it’d come, hissing furiously.

“I hope you get eaten alive by something!” Oro shouted after it as it went, “Stupid, angry thing!”

If it heard him, it didn’t turn back to investigate.

With another frustrated sigh, Oro squinted into the gloom to survey his surroundings, finding mostly what he already knew - that it was dark in here. Some pale light filtered in from the hole he’d fallen through, casting the space immediately around him in washed out greys that very quickly faded into oppressive murk. The floor here was made of carapace and chiton, old and stoney. There was a smell of damp age about the place, like the air had been still and undisturbed for a long time, and there was a weight to it, like eyes in the dark. It felt very much like he’d stepped into someone’s grave, or just inside the toothy maw of some ancient carapace. If he weren’t so irritated, Oro might have even had the common sense to be scared here.

Instead his shell itched and his stomach turned itself in angry knots, and he thought of course of course he would fall through some damp, dark, probably beast-infested pit while walking up to find his brother. Of course this would happen to him right now. It was always Mato wasn’t it? Always the source of his chagrin, even when he wasn’t trying to be. This might as well happen.

After standing still for a few minutes listening to the sound of moisture dripping off the ceiling and the hollow echo of droplets onto the floor, Oro’s eyes managed to adjust enough to pick out another source of light in the darkness. A dim light, so distant that for a moment he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. But no it was there - a curve in the tunnel ahead giving off the subtle hue of an outline. It was hard to tell just how far away it was. His depth perception wasn’t fantastic when he was near blind from darkness and aspid spit. It was hard to stop himself from blinking every few seconds to try and clear the remaining fumes of the acid away. Not that it would help at all.

Oro cast his gaze up the direction he’d fallen. It was a long, sheer stone face to climb. He was sure he could if he gave it enough effort. But it would be hard work, and all in pitch darkness until he was near the very top. And while he could, he definitely didn’t feel like standing at the base and calling for help for however long it might take for a bug to come this direction. He had a match to get to tomorrow, after all. And pride in his belly. So, stepping carefully on the uneven footing, Oro made his way towards the light he’d seen further in the tunnel.

The sound of his own footsteps echoing in the silence itched at his nerves. He was loud and unwieldy, it seemed, and it made him paranoid that something might hear him coming, or try to ambush him. Swinging a nail in the dark was a dangerous idea. You never knew when you’d hit a wall, or perhaps even yourself, if your swing went too shallow.

When he reached the curve in the tunnel ahead he stopped, taking a moment to survey the slowly brightening light ahead of him. There was some bioluminescence here, sickly looking roots that sprouted in tangled patches from the ceiling, and reached like limp claws towards the horns of his mask. It was barely enough light to see by, and a pale shade-like purple. As Oro took a step down the lit tunnel, there was a soft hiss as the roots seemed to respond to his presence above. For a moment Oro crouched low, nail over his head, expecting the roots to reach for him. Instead he watched as they slowly shriveled and curled towards the ceiling, flattening themselves away from his touch. The light from them dimmed even further but remained.

Tch. Weird.

Oro straightened again and, eyeing the ceiling suspiciously, continued walking, trying to ignore the creeping noises of moving roots above his head as he went. When he passed by them, the roots slowly unfurled themselves and dropped back down again, a curtain of slowly brightening claws guarding his exit. It was… unsettling... claustrophobic. He didn’t like the idea of walking into something that could sense his presence.

Further down the tunnel he went, one hand on the wall as if afraid it might suddenly fall in on him, his other hand clutching tight-fisted around the hilt of his nail. It was incredibly still here, the air dead. Unlike the open hole he’d fallen into where noises attempted to echo, the sound in the tunnel ate itself up in the roots over his head, making his every movement seem muffled and abrupt. He checked his progress every handful of steps, making sure his way back hadn’t magically disappeared - and it hadn’t, though it was obscured by those twisting roots. Where in the Wyrm-cursed World was he even heading? Should he turn back? His sense of direction was tangled in the darkness somewhere, caught in the shifting roots over his head. He had no idea where this tunnel was or where it was winding.

There was a murmur… a soft sound on the edge of his hearing. Wait… what was that…?

Oro stopped walking abruptly and breath held, he listened.

There was… a noise… coming from up the tunnel. Stifled and faint. It didn’t carry well here but he could still hear it; persistent and quiet, wafting toward him like mist. First it came in bits and pieces, but as he continued forward he made it out a bit more. Humming, haunted almost. A song...?

Was there another bug down here? Maybe there was another opening somewhere then, some outward-leading tunnel he could scramble out of instead of trying to make the climb up the way he’d fallen. That would be grand. Sure, he’d be a bit lost when he got wherever he was going, but that was a problem for later.

“Teeth… and claws….”

“A mind of teeth and claws…”

Oro felt a creeping prickle of nervousness crawl its way up his shell. He didn’t like the sound of that. But he kept walking - he’d gone so far now it didn’t seem worthwhile to give up now. Besides, he was a strong bug with a great nail and enough light that, though it would be tedious, he could at least see a fight if it happened. And fight he would, if it came to it.

“Dreaming Wyrms, a bed of nails…”

“A hunger still beneath us wails…”

Just as he resolved this in his mind, the path before him yawned open into another opening. A cavern, smaller than the first he’d fallen into and tangled across the ceiling with more of those roots. Their thickness made their glow brighter, and some of them even managed to worm their way down from the ceiling and into the ground below, burrowing further into depth incomprehensible. It was probably a trick of his eyes but they seemed almost to pulse, faintly, that sick violet hue.

“A mind of teeth and claws…”

Oro noticed with a flash of horror like a lightning strike that the floor was covered in broken masks. Slashed cleanly in half. One eye broken. The ground beneath a slurry of crushed chitin and whatever moisture it was that dripped from the ceiling. It seemed nearly to be moving, breathing, churning beneath the fragile surface. A phantom of crawling legs shivered beneath Oro’s shell and he stumbled back a step away from the chamber, unable to stifle the choked noise that rose in his throat at the sight of it. In Hollownest there were many floors made of petrified chitin and old discarded masks. Resting grounds. Old battlefields. Place where once the life of the world was thick. This was fresh, moving, alive, grotesque. Wrong.

Crick. Crack.

“Oh, hello Nailmaster.”

Oro snapped his gaze up from the floor to the center of the room. Standing in a circling of broken masks was the Announcer, seemingly unperturbed by the ground on which it perched, despite the fact that Oro himself could practically hear it’s writhing. The bug’s eyes glinted pale in the dim light, and silhouetted against a background of those burrowing roots, they looked both pitifully small and sinister, like some small weaver who just lured a bug into its tangled web of a lair.

“You may enter,” it said, a smile in its voice, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Yeah,” Oro muttered, gaze sinking back to the floor, “And beasts don’t bite.”

The Announcer laughed, a thin, frail sound, like it was unused to the sensation. It turned its back to him, and Oro saw now entwined in the roots it stood near was… something. A shape he couldn’t quite make out in the dim light and the distance. Though the glowing roots were thicker here, their light was still low.

He should leave. Being here was… a bad idea. But Oro doesn’t run. Not from enemies. Not from his brother. Not from this.

Tentatively, shell still crawling with shivers and nerves, Oro took a step forward. He expected his foot to sink, for the mask to give under his weight and crack and sink into the slurry of mud and chitin below, but it didn’t. In fact, he couldn’t even feel the ground moving. Emboldened by this just barely, he took another step forward. And another. And another. Until he was standing just behind the Announcer, towering over the diminutive bug and staring down at what it stood before.

It was… an egg? A large one, nearly as tall as the Announcer, and as high as Oro’s chest. It was hard to tell it’s color when the only light to see by was tinged in the bruised blue-purple of the roots above them. But it was an egg, large and spiked and cracked in half, whatever creature born inside it long gone. Inside the remains of the shell, there was a curling of sickly roots that spiraled about themselves before burrowing into the ground, thick and twisted.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” the Announcer hummed, “Even here at the edge of the kingdom, Hollow Nest hosts its mysteries.”

“What in the Black Abyss is this place?” Oro asked abruptly, hoping the shortness of his tone sounded more angry than scared.

The Announcer shrugged, “A place of beginnings. A place of hunger.”

It tilted its head in his direction, “A place of nothing, perhaps, if that’s what you want it to be.”

“Well that’s gross and cryptic.”

“You’re doing well in the Colosseum, Nailmaster Oro,” the Announcer said, disregarding his grumbling and turning its gaze back to the massive egg, “The place seems to suit you. You have a powerful spirit, a strong sense of ambition.”

Oro squinted down at the bug and backed up a pace, “There’s a lot of strong bugs entered in the tournament.”

It hummed noncommittally in return, the sound not unlike the voice Oro had heard humming its way towards him down the tunnel, “I suppose. But strength alone doesn’t satiate the Colosseum, does it?”

It looked up at him again, those pale eyes glinting, “I always thought the Colosseum of Fools was an interesting thing. It almost seems alive sometimes. Watched after and hungry. It so loves a crowd, and it loves its Champions and legacies. God Tamer was its favorite for a long time, and it’s quite a shame the one who struck her down refused to stay. I’m sure it would have made an interesting Champion all its own.”

“It’s a Colosseum,” Oro snapped, irritated by how unnerved the conversation was making him feel, “It’s a bunch of bugs in the shell of an even bigger bug hosting a tournament for a prize. It’s not alive.”

“Of course not,” the Announcer chuckled patronizingly, its voice sickly sweet with a grin that didn’t find its way to its pale gaze, “After all, if it had its own voice, surely I wouldn’t be here.”

It turned away from him and finally moved from its spot before the rooted egg, “I do wish you luck, Nailmaster Oro. I did mean what I said about the Colosseum suiting you, sir.”

It stopped at the edge of the room where Oro could barely make out the gaping darkness of a tunnel - probably the entrance the strange bug had used to enter the place. It flashed him one last smile, this time showing those unnerving teeth, “And doesn’t Nailmaster Champion have such a glorious ring?”

Then with another of those curling, whispering laughs, the bug disappeared down the tunnel ahead of it, leaving Oro alone in the dark. With no one to watch him, Oro allowed himself a shudder.

"This whole place is just a pack of shrieking belflies isn’t it?” he snarled under his breath. A pack of shrieking belflies indeed. All pretty noises and deadly dramatics. Oro shivered one more time and then, grimacing, dropped his gaze to his feet to figure out where best to step next - only to find the ground normal.

What?

Oro glanced around the room, casting about the floor for any sign of the writhing floor, the broken masks. But… it wasn’t. It was just fossilized chitin, like the floor he’d fallen into when he’d first dropped here. It was all old stone and solid ground and--! And it was all just gone?

Hesitantly, Oro knelt and placed his hand against the floor, and waited. He didn’t know what he waited on exactly. For the floor to shift? To feel the moisture of churning mud where his eyes were clearly seeing none? But… it was just stone.

“Wyrmssakes,” Oro grumbled one more time, getting back to his feet. He cast a wary glance over to the rooted egg as if it could somehow explain his surroundings. Then, gathering up his courage, he followed down the tunnel he’d seen the Announcer disappear down. He was walking for a handful of moments before a familiar roaring caught his ears. Cheering. And then light, bright and pouring across the tunnel around him. And Oro was suddenly in the pit beneath the Colosseum, blinking dazedly at the resting forms of combatants. Behind him was a solid wall, as though the ground had opened up to spit him out and closed itself behind him.

Shell itching with nervousness, Oro climbed back out of the Colosseum and made his way home. It wasn’t until he was sharpening his nail late in the evening that he realized he’d forgotten his brother.

#fan fic ask meme #lady-eclipse3 #nailmaster's folly #god that fic really died an inglorious death #it was maybe 5 chapters away from being done #and it had i think 6 chapters finished and never posted? something like that #it just had some plot holes i was too demotivated to patch #and also i wanted Oro to be just the angriest dogshit protagonist #but i eventually got too scared to write such an unlikeable protag so i stopped XD #i should try it again someday <- probablg wont do that

7 notes · View notes

nuri148 · 1 year

Text

So... I've been a bit MIA bc this past weekend I was in my dear London for the 7th time and omg, it never gets old! There is SO much to see, and do, and discover, and revisit! And this has been the 2nd most eventful London trip ever (after the first one when we were still student-poor and the pound was super high and we crammed so much stuff in it no one believed us it'd been just 3 days.)

The excuse for this trip was concerts- We saw Billy Joel at Hyde Park on Friday and Blur at Wembley on Saturday. Both were great, my only gripe being that BJ didn't play my favourite song of his (The Downeaster Alexa), but he did play Piano Man and we had the surprise of the night when he sang Uptown girl with guest... Joe Jonas. Blur did play all their songs I like and it was endearing to see Damon Albarn being actually moved by being upstage in a full Wembley stadium.

An aside to say that, just like when we went to see U2 at the O2 arena a few years ago, I can only applaud the flawless organization of London transport around moving so many people in and out of venues. You'd think you'd have to wait forever for the tube afterwards, and that you'd travel like a canned sardine, but no, though we moved along throngs of people, we only had a bit of a queue for tapping in into the tube, but the train came right away (past 10:30pm!) and it wasn't particularly crowded. All hail TFL!

From the "typical tourist spots" in the city, my favourite is the Picadilly/Chinatown/Leicester sq./Covent Garden area, and the only that's been a constant on every trip. We returned to Greenwich (we'd gone to the Observatory in 2013) for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Maritime Museum, walked around bit the neigbourhood before it opened and, after it, we visited the Queen's House, which we didn't know existed but it was free and I never get tired of visiting palaces, because EveryGirlIsAPrincess and shit. Even me.

Did you know there is a 121 year old pedestrian tunnel under the River Thames? I found out only a few days before the trip, and of course we crossed it. The tunnel south entrance is right next to the Cutty Sark - and we emerged on the north side on a normal neighbourhood on the Isle of Dogs (no, not the Wes Anderson film. It's really called like that). Headed for Canary Wharf, and to shield from the strong midday sun, we cut through Mudchute Park and... found the farm there. THEY HAVE ALL KINDS OF ANIMALS OMG!!! I spent a good while petting and feeding the sheep and goats, god, I love goats! I could have stayed for hours if it wasn't for my poor Husband and his please-can-we-go face. It was the highlight of the trip.

We also went to Battersea Power Station, recently reconverted into a shopping centre. I knew, of course, that the former power station was an iconic building in the London skyline; it's huge and for many years provided a good chunk of the electricity to the city, not to mention its appearance in Pink Floyd's Animals album and films like Children of Men. What I didn't know was that it was also a fucking masterpiece of Industrial Art Deco. And I fucking love Art Deco. Not only that, they have made an incredible, amazing, absolutely stunning job at restoring the building to its original Art Deco glory. The butchers that turned Barcelona's former Arenas bullring into the current pastiche could learn a thing or two from them. The respect for the original building is such that one of the control rooms has been turned into a glamorous cafe, keeping all the control panels at the back; and the bar is like stepping into the 1940s, from the decor to the old furniture, to the design of the coffee cups and the delightful menus mimicking a power plant instruction boocklet. We could've stayed for ages but we had tickets for Lift 109 - a different tour that takes you to the top of one of the chimneys. The tour starts with a gallery about he plant's history and a somewhat silly videomapping with more of the same (cool lights, bad audio, couldn't understand the guy much). Then you take a lift, climb a set of stairs and take the second lift to the top of the chimney, at 109 metres high. The twist is: you don't exit the lift. The glass lift becomes the observation deck. Even with the rain, the views were spectacular, and the wow factor of emerging from inside the chimney is really something new. Price? Ridiculously expensive, but I indulged husband because he indulged me in...

My personal highlight of the trip: we went for Afternoon Tea. But not just anywhere, no. If I was going to do Afternoon Tea I was going to do it with all the glamour that I deserve, so I booked us a table at Fortnum & Mason, no less. Do I need to say I felt like a princess? Everything was just so nice and fancy! The salon is just beautiful, so luxurious but without feeling heavy. The bathrooms had individual fabric towels to dry your hands.

We could each choose which tea we wanted; Husband went for the Afternoon Blend (that's my fic's #8!) and I had the Wedding Breakfast blend, because I hadn't tried it before. It was nice, mild and balanced. They came in this nice china that you can buy on the store first floor for a lot of money.

The food was great as well. The sandwiches were excellent; my favourite was the egg one; Husband preferred the salmon one. There was also chicken, ham, and cucumber. For the scones, I was a bit weary because I'm not a cream lover and the scones I'd had so far tended to fall on the dry side. But, oh my goodness, these scones were absolutely delish, and the cream + jam (or lemon curd) passed so well to them!

The sweets were, surprisingly, the least fabulous of the lot. Maybe it's a matter of local taste vs. my own; the quality and presentation was of course top notch. It could also be that I was already pretty full. I once read an iterview where a chef said something like, dessert is a thing people order when they're not hungry anymore. So it has to be totally scrumptious and tempting and delish to fully please the guest. For me, only one of the five samples filled that criteria, the cream tartlet with a freaking pansy encased in jelly on top. Both the mousses (Earl Grey + bergamot jelly, black cherry) were delicious, but not so much as to wow me. The chocolate cup could've been number one save for the raspberry filling - I love raspberries, but fruit in chocolate is a pet peeve of mine. Finally, the rose eclair definitely ticks the decadent checkbox (anything with rose does, IMO), but it's not a flavour I'm wild about. Much like truffle, to name another fancy eat, I feel it's easy to go overboard with it.

On top pof all that, we visited the Tate Britain and the Design museum, had breakfast(s) at Pret, bought rare-colour M&M's at the Leicester Square shop, walked down Portobello Street Market, visited Holland Park and Japan House and had lots and lots of fun!

#nuri's life #london #afternoon tea #goats #clarity tea house

9 notes · View notes

graceandtheidiotsquad · 1 year

Text

You (WROEF Oc)

A/n: This was originally written as a vent piece for some stuff going on in my life right now-but I loved how it turned out at least so here it is-

The first few weeks were the worst.

That’s how Eliza remembered it, anyway. The first few weeks, when someone goes missing, were always the worst.

She still remembered every detail of that day, right down to the beaten up sneakers she’d been wearing. She remembered rushing towards the tower-carelessly letting her stupid cardboard birthday hat fly freely from her head. She wouldn’t need it-she never needed it.

Sometimes she forgot it had been her birthday. That felt so trivial now..

Had it been her fault..? Had she just-not pushed hard enough..? She still wondered about that. If she hadn’t been at the party that night-could she have talked him out of whatever he had done..? Would-would he still be here if anything had been different..?

Hell. This was hell-this felt like some sort of perfect, Inescapable hell. And that wasn’t even the worst part.

The worst part was the waiting.

During those first few days she had hope-maybe he’d change his mind, maybe he would come back. Maybe this was some big misunderstanding and he’d just needed a break..! ..But then the days turned to weeks. And the weeks turned to months.

And the months turned to almost 20 years now.

And the worst-the absolute worst-part of it was she still had hope. She still, somewhere deep inside her-hoped he was still out there, that one day he would finally come home. The other parts-though she felt guilty for even the idea of saying it-..hoped she’d hear he was dead in a ditch somewhere. It was nothing against him obviously, just-..at least she would have some kind of closure. But as it stood-..there was still nothing. Just this empty, reeling pit of the unknown that made her feel anxious, it made her feel empty.

And it wasn’t like she didn’t have friends anymore. She had her support system, she had wonderful friends and family whom she loved.

She felt so guilty for still being upset. Why should she be, she still had friends-! She still had a loving family..! It’s not like she was alone-! ..but sometimes it felt like it. It felt like a whole piece of the gang was just..gone, and never to be replaced. She wondered if the others still thought of him, or worried-or if they’d forgotten, if they just wanted to move on and for her to shut up about it and save them all the griping.

But for now-..all she could really do was wait.

Eliza Krolik..the girl who waited.

”..Hey Milly…” Eliza’s hands softly ran across the interior of the old tower. It still felt so strange coming back here-it felt empty, like a castle without a king.

“I brought you something today..! Something really cool I found-“ the artist gave a weak smile, fishing around for something in her cluttered satchel-she never really did bother to organize the many layers of art supplies and whatever trinkets she could stuff in there. Maybe she would someday, but-not today. Today was more important.

Today she’d found a heart shaped rock on the beach. ”I know, I know it’s not much but-“ she spoke to thin air-she knew there was no way in hell he’d hear her-..but it felt natural at this point. “It’s a Heart shaped rock..! How cool is that..!”

Minutes of painful silenced passed-a joke with no answer, no laughter or reply.

“..Anyway..” she sighed, her face falling a bit. “..I hope..I hope you know out there that someone misses you, Milton. All of us do..! And I know you may not believe me-but they do. In their own ways..! ..and then there’s me-“ she gave a weak, untrue smile. “..The idiot sitting in your old tower, talking to thin air like you’ll actually say something back.”

After another round of uncomfortable silence-Eliza sighed, gently setting the rock down onto the floor in front of that old door painting. It had been the last thing he ever painted-a cryptic, concerning message left behind that never got explained-and likely never would at this rate. “..I love you, Milly..” she muttered as she slowly backed away-turning to leave through the window she’d clambered in through. “..Maybe someday..”

Maybe someday. That sounded like a good summary of how she felt.

Maybe someday, he’d come home.

Maybe someday, there’d be some sort of answer-anything..

Maybe someday.

#what remains of edith finch #wroef oc #Eliza Krolik #What remains of Edith finch au #Wroef au #the unfinished swan #wroef #milton finch #milton finch wroef #Tus Milton #Spotify

15 notes · View notes

immobiliter · 1 year

Text

okay i'm safely home, so you know what that means: detailed thoughts on s4 of sex ed under the cut !!

alright so starting more generally first before i move onto individual characters, i agree with the consensus that this is the weakest season overall. it has some great individual storylines, but the really good stuff was hugely overshadowed by storylines that i did not care for whatsoever. there were way too many characters introduced for a show that nixed half of its original cast at the end of last season and that is on its final season - i did like abbi, roman & aisha, i think they were the only new characters who actually had a chance to shine, but i did not care for o whatsoever and there was waaay too much time dedicated to her rivalry with otis which went nowhere ( the teacher in the final ep during the vote who was like "this was a massive waste of time" like. such a mood lmao ). i liked molloy, he was fun and i wished we'd seen more of him, but idk it was just a weird choice to ditch half of the cast and then introduce all of these other characters in a final season and dedicate so much time to them when, ultimately, the audience cares about the characters who have already been there since the start. i also think this season they tried to address too many issues at once, meaning that it didn't have the time to really delve into most of them and give them the time they deserved - i think that's where the complaint comes from that it felt like a box ticking exercise by the end, where the writers were just ticking off a list of issues and not really giving any of it the substance or thought that had gone into previous seasons. it was just a bit of a mess as a cohesive story, imo

but moving onto the characters and starting with my darling aimee: she (and ruby) had the best arcs this season in my opinion. she was a delight as ever every time she was on screen and they continued to handle her healing arc soooo well. it was fun to see her without maeve and i will cling onto every single instance where she got to interact with other characters (like playing scabby queen with otis in the car while at the hospital, or jackson admonishing her for shopping while everyone looked for cal at the mall). as for her and isaac, i reaaaaally liked them together, they felt like one of the better pairings this season. my one real gripe is that, like a lot of the season, not enough time was dedicated to them and the two of them ending up in a relationship felt rushed. the whole point of the final episode of s3 was aimee dumping steve and figuring out some stuff on her own for the first time, and yet by the 3rd or 4th episode of s4 there were heavy romantic flags surrounding her and isaac and all of that seemed to be forgotten. i don't necessarily think this was out of character for her ( as i've said in meta before, the girl needs to do some work deconstructing her relationships with boys ), but the fact that it took until the final episode for aimee to talk to isaac about her intimacy issues... i didn't like that it came that late in the season ? when the two had their almost kiss, i thought the reason for aimee's hesitation would be a combination of the weirdness with maeve AND also her difficulties with intimacy that she had been originally struggling with while dating steve. i'm glad they DID address it eventually, but i just think with them wrapping up the show in this season, they were playing aimee & isaac's relationship development on x2 speed. i liked them together and i think eventually getting into another relationship is so key to aimee's ability to heal, but i personally would want it to be more slowburn than it actually was, which realistically wasn't possible in this season. also photographer aimee !! i was so close with fashion designer, so close. i'm counting that as a win

adam, again, no real notes, his arc was once again handled superbly and every single one of his scenes with michael hit really hard for me. i was initially very ://// when maureen and michael hooked up AGAIN but i'm so glad that the show allowed adam to react to it and that it became a catalyst for that final "i didn't like myself and therefore i made you feel small" conversation. ooooof that hit me like a freight train. my one complaint is that adam's story felt SO isolated from everything else. the fact that it was only during the funeral ep that adam actually got to share a screen with the other characters ( i'm glad that he and eric got a little bit of closure there ) made me so sad. ESPECIALLY as we see him watching that reality tv show with his mum and then see ruby watching the same show in the very next scene with her and otis. the two of them are still best friends, that is my canon. also horse girl adam was fun and i'm just so glad that we continued to see him thrive at something and figure out what he's good at.

okay moving on to my other kid, jackson. what a weird season for him. i think it became clear about halfway through that the writers just had no idea what to do with him ( again ). the fact that his arc seemed to start with him questioning whether he was queer ( in what was a very strange scene between him and otis, i need to rewatch but it was odd ) before deciding no i'm actually straight, but then took a sudden sharp left turn into his health scare plot, which y'know, is an extremely valid issue to explore, but was then resolved and took another left turn into jackson discovering who his biological father was ?? as much as it was nice to see his mums again and get some context about their relationship and how they ended up bringing up jackson together, i just wish that the writers had picked one of these three things and stuck with it. the questioning plot didn't lead to him getting back together with cal, the health scare plot was Valid but again didn't really go anywhere other than to suddenly prompt jackson to want to know more about his family tree, and then that plot also got resolved stupidly quickly. with most of the other characters, their endings were neat enough that you could fill in the gaps about where their futures might end up. with jackson there was none of that, and honestly when you pair jackson's arc up with viv's arc, there was a perfect opportunity to make romantic jackson/viv canon but they blew it. the fact that jackson says in ep 2 or 3 that he doesn't think he can be in a casual relationship with someone, there has to be feelings involved, and then viv's controlling new bf continually emphasises that she spends so much time with jackson and tells him everything...... idk it's like the writers were signalling some romantic tension for them almost unintentionally ? it would have made perfect sense as a conclusion idk. i just think jackson & viv became so sidelined and unimportant this season aside from to illustrate their respective issues (the importance of checking for lumps/health scare and controlling/coercive behaviour in a relationship) that then didn't have enough time dedicated to them

eric my beloved. i looooooved his arc this season. it felt very similar to his s1 arc, especially to begin with, but maybe this is because his s1 arc is my fave but s4 just felt like the continuation of it ? also ncuti has enough charisma to pull anything off at this point, like it got Weird about 2/3 of the way through the season when he started having visions but ncuti really put everything into his performance. it was also sooooo nice to see eric making new queer friends and developing an identity/community outside of his friendship with otis. otis was basically a dick all season and i'll talk about it but i like that the otis/eric friendship was challenged this season.

ruby was also a standout this season. i hate that her entire arc became centred around otis and the writers basically used her to further otis & maeve and create yet more unnecessary Drama, but the way that they delved into her queen bitch origin story with o and the development that she continued to go through this season... she was such a highlight i love her so very much

i think that was the best ending maeve could have gotten, given the circumstances. i was already bored of otis & maeve by the second ep so you can imagine what i was like throughout all of their subsequent scenes together and it was a Mess but i'm so glad that she went back to america at the end of the season. it's what she deserved. i kinda hate that her america arc was broken up by her mum's death and there was the whole middle part of the season with her back in moordale, i still don't really know how i feel about any of that, but her speech to molloy in the final episode about how his feedback crushed her was soo good. i love her

ooof otis. i am someone who has always liked otis, even at his most unlikeable, but i just find it hilariously ironic that it's otis who requires more therapy than the rest of the other characters combined at this point, despite the fact that he is narratively centred as the story's therapist. that boy has SO MANY issues and they were all on full display this season. ruby & eric deserved better from him, as did maeve too tbh. i'm not really sure what the story was trying to achieve with him this season other than just to make him act like as much of a dick as possible at every opportunity. i did hate that o used otis's father against him during their debate, especially considering how sensitively the show has handled otis's dynamic with his father and how much he obsesses over not becoming like his dad. idk i just. were they intending to make otis the villain this season ? it was all very weird. i'm glad he made up with eric by the end but it was still a mess. likewise, i don't think the show really knew what to do with jean either this season ? i didn't care about her sister, there was waaaay too much time dedicated to her and in a final season it just felt super unnecessary. they tried to delve into the trauma of their childhoods but idk ?? it all just fell flat and i just did not care enough for it lmao

#* / be yourself. everyone else is taken ( ooc. )#don't click on the read more if you don't wanna be spoiled !!#i think i've covered everything i wanted to say but i'm extremely sleep deprived so i will no doubt have more thoughts as i rewatch lmao

3 notes · View notes