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jobean12-blog · 5 years

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CAN YOU PLEASE MAKE THAT “and the was one very small bed” POST THAT YOU REBLOGGED A BEEFY BUCKY FIC PLEASE PLEASE PLEASEEE

Hungry Eyes (and one very small bed)

Pairings: Beefy Bucky x reader

Word Count: 2,892

Summary: You and Bucky have been ‘eyeing’ each other for a while and when you finally get some alone time together on a mission things take a turn and all it took was one really small bed.

Author’s Note: I had reblogged this wonderful post that my beautiful friend @randomfandompenguin tagged me in with the ‘one bed’ meme and a picture of our favorite Beefy Bucky...and when I got his request I couldn’t resist! Hope you like it and thank you! :)

Warnings: fluff, very tiny angst, and lots and lots of SMUT (sitting on Bucky’s face because that is the dream...) 18+ eyes only please

You felt it every moment you were around each other. Team dinners, missions, game nights, any time you were in the same room you felt his eyes on you. Those beautiful blue eyes that held so much in their dept, you couldn’t look away.

It’s morning and you’re speaking with Steve during breakfast and you feel the weight of his stare. It was comfortable, like a warmth you felt in your soul but laced with a burning heat you couldn’t ignore. You glance up and meet his eyes, a sparkle of something you can’t quite place but somehow you know it, because you feel it too.

You knew you couldn’t hide what was there when you looked into his eyes, it was written all over you, like someone scribbled the words of your heart across your skin. Your skin, that was set aflame with every thought of him, every brush of skin, every smile.

You wanted to believe it was the same for him, that the same electricity ran through his veins at the very sight of you but acting on these feelings was proving to be a whole different story.

He set your soul on fire and you were so afraid of being burned you never said a word to him.

You’re in your room reading when you get the text from Steve, meeting stat in the conference room, so you throw on your slippers and head over.

You’re surprised to find that Bucky is the only other person there besides Steve as he greets you with a warm smile. You sit in the chair next to him and look up at Steve, eyebrow raised, “what’s going on, Cap,” you ask, your voice smooth despite the butterflies in your stomach.

Steven explains that you and Bucky have been chosen for an undercover mission that requires you to take out a powerful Hydra agent in a very quiet way. He briefs you on everything, answering all your questions until all three of you are satisfied.

This isn’t the first time you and Bucky will be on a mission together but it’s the first time it will be just the two of you. “This will be easy for us, y/n,” Bucky says as you walk out of the conference room, “we can pull this off no problem.” Your heart swell at his confidence, hoping that maybe there is more meaning to his words, “you’re right, piece of cake, Buck, I’m looking forward to it,” you say with a smile before heading back to your room for the night.

You can’t sleep, spending the whole night going over different scenarios in your head about how this will pan out, this is the most alone time you two have had since you met. You desperately want to run to Bucky’s room and tell him how you feel, now afraid that you’ll somehow screw up the mission because your feelings will get in the way. You finally fall asleep, his eyes the last thing you remember, your dreams filled with the feeling of his hands on your body and a never-ending ache between your legs.

You sleep late the next morning, happy to have been able to rest and take the afternoon to prepare for leaving for the mission at night. Bucky stops by to check on you and you can’t help but notice he seems fidgety, perhaps he is feeling nervous too? “Hey, doll, you almost ready? Need me to help with anything?” he asks, the use of the pet name causing your body to instantly heat up, “no thanks, Bucky, all set,” you manage to croak out with a smile.

You have to travel to a small town in upstate NY where the target owns a very large piece of land, take him down, then head in the opposite direction to a safe point Steve gave you and lay low until you get the signal.

Naturally, everything goes off without a hitch, the two of you in sync, reading each other so well you even surprise Steve at how quickly you complete your task. You hop into the and speed off to the safe point, adrenaline coursing through you both and you can’t stop your hands as they seem to find Bucky’s arm, shoulder or leg as you talk through the mission.

You finally turn down a winding dirt road and at the end find a small log cabin set back behind some tall evergreens, “honey, we’re home,” Bucky jokes, eyes sparkling but you notice he has a death grip on the steering wheel. “It looks cute, let’s go, I’m dying for a shower!” you say, energy still high as you jump out of the car.

You enter the house, splitting up to check for anything suspicious and return satisfied it’s safe, so you lock everything down. “I’m gonna grab that shower now, I won’t be too long, so you still have some hot water,” you tell him, giggling as you grab your bag and head to the bathroom. You feel his eyes on you and you want to turn around but decide to take a more teasing approach and put a bit more sway in your hips, pretending to drop something from your bag and bending down to retrieve it before opening the door to the bathroom. You swear you hear this breath hitch at your actions, and it gives you some renewed courage.

You leave the bathroom in nothing but a towel, hair damp and draped over your shoulder while you search for Bucky. It doesn’t take you long considering the cabin is small and you find him in the bedroom, searching through his bag, “hey y/n, are there any towels here, I…” he trails off as he looks up, eyes darkening at your appearance.

“There’s only one towel, Buck,” you say, motioning to yourself, “I forgot mine too.” You stare at each other for what feels like an eternity, your body shivering under his gaze and you make yourself look away before you drop the towel and launch yourself at him. That’s when you notice there’s only one bed too...”I uh, I’ll be right back, just gonna change and hang this so it’s at least a little drier for you,” you mumble, turning on your heel and making a beeline back to the bathroom.

You emerge just a few minutes later, wearing your pajamas, the soft fuzzy shirt falling off your shoulder and the sleep shorts just a little shorter than what you would usually wear, “it’s all yours and hopefully the towel isn’t too wet,” you say as Bucky’s eyes trail from your face all the way down your body. He audibly swallows before answering, “thanks doll, be right out,” and stalks toward the bathroom.

You decide to take out your book and sit on the bed to read, trying to look as relaxed as possible. Your plan was working as you got deeper into the story and almost forgot Bucky would be out of the shower soon. “Thanks for leaving me some hot water, that felt good,” Bucky says as he enters the room and you look up, eyes wide and mouth hanging open as you take in the sight before you. Bucky’s hair is still slightly wet and tucked behind his ears, his light beard casting the perfect shadow on his jaw and his bare chest on display, “forgot my tee shirt,” he says, smirking as he walks toward his bag on the bed, rummaging through it for what feels like forever.

He pulls it on and you watch, licking your lips as his sweatpants dip dangerously low on his hips with the lift of his arms, “no problem, Buck, cold showers are the worst,” you reply, trying to keep your tone light. He smiles, moving over to the other side of the bed and asking, “reading anything good?”

You start to tell him about your book as he sits on the bed, inching closer with each passing word and you can feel your face heating up. He must notice the redness in your cheeks because he quickly pulls back saying, “don’t worry, I’m going to sleep on the floor, you take the bed,” as he starts to get up.

You grab his hand, effectively stopping him in his tracks, “no, I don’t want you sleeping on the floor, it’s fine, you can share the bed with me,” you say, voice nothing more than a whisper as you try and hold his gaze. “Are you sure, doll, I’m gonna take up a lot of space, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady, “this bed is really small.” “I’m sure, Buck, just get in,” you reply quickly, before you lose your nerve.

His face lights up as he grabs his own book before settling down on the other side of the bed, “thanks, I appreciate it,” he adds, relaxing and opening the book. You two read in comfortable silence for a few minutes but every so often Bucky shifts his body causing his thigh to brush yours or his shoulder to bump you, and you can feel your body heat rising. You clear your throat and take a sip of your water, trying to focus on the words on the page but you keep reading the same sentence over and over, hyperaware of Bucky so close, his smell permeating the small space and invading your senses.

Out of the corner of your eye you notice Bucky close his book with a deep breath and just as you turn your head to look his way he does the same and you end up with your faces inches apart, his warm breath fanning over your cheek. “Are you ok, doll?” he asks, eyes roaming your face and landing on your lips, “anything I can do?” he adds, eyes dark as he slowly brings his mouth closer, his hand creeping up to brush against your jaw.

You close your eyes and inhale, unable to restrain yourself any longer, whispering, “kiss me, Bucky, please.” His lips are soft and warm as they tentatively move over yours, the hand on your cheek snaking behind your neck as he gently grips it and pulls you closer.

The feeling of finally kissing him is euphoric as you moan into his mouth and it spurs him into action as he grabs your waist and lifts you into his lap, hands now roaming your body as his kiss becomes more dominant.

He pulls away for a split second, cradling your face in his hands, “I’ve wanted this for so long, baby girl, but you tell me to stop if it’s not what you want,” he says, eyes searching yours for any sign of apprehension. “I want you, Bucky, I have since the beginning, please,” you tell him, smoothing your hands over his chest and shoulders while rocking your hips, feeling his hardness between your legs.

He lets out a growl, smashing his lips to yours once again and with renewed vigor, his inhibitions gone as he pulls at your clothing, wanting to get his hands on you. He gets your shirt off, his hands exploring your naked skin with worship, “more beautiful than my dreams, doll, and believe me, I’ve thought about how soft your skin would feel many times,” he tells you, smirking as he takes in your flushed face and swollen lips.

Your hands finger the hem of his shirt, lightly brushing the sensitive skin above his pants and you feel his abs tighten, “I’m glad to hear it because I can’t remember the last night I went to bed without you on my mind, what I wanted you to do to me,” you whisper in his ear, slowly dragging his shirt up.

He moves forward and removes his shirt, loving how your breath once again catches at the sight of his naked chest. You can’t stop your hands as they delicately touch every inch of him, the feel of his hard muscles causing your pussy to clench around nothing, and you push down on him looking for some friction.

He grabs your hips to still your movements, eyes boring into yours as he says, “I want you to sit on my face, baby, let me taste you.” You feel a new wave of wetness between your legs at his words, moving off his lap, “take your shorts off for me baby, let me see you,” he says, licking his lips as you slowly peel them down your legs.

You’re in nothing but your bra and panties as you crawl back onto the bed, squeezing his thick thighs as you move up his body, rubbing against his erection before sitting on his chest. His hands knead your ass cheeks, thumbs hooking into your panties and tugging as he helps you out of them, “so wet for me, baby, can’t wait to get my mouth on your pussy.” He positions you over his face, his hot breath on your core making you moan with want as you carefully lower yourself onto his mouth.

The first stroke of his tongue has your hands flying to his hair, grasping the soft locks between your fingers and grinding down, your hips moving of their own accord as you feel him push between your dripping folds.

His grip on your ass is bruising as he licks and sucks your clit, savoring every moment as you ride his face and come undone. You don’t last long, his tongue expertly working you over until you’re clutching the headboard and screaming his name as you come all over his face.

He holds you steady as you come down from your orgasm, chest heaving with every breath and legs shaky, kissing your inner thighs as he gently lays you on the bed and rolls on top of you.

Bucky showers you in soft kisses, loving how supple your body feels beneath his and you relish in the feel of the weight of his large body, “that was amazing, Bucky, so much better than my dreams,” you murmur, still feeling the effects of his tongue and add, “I can’t wait to have your cock inside me.”

He pushes his hips into yours, lips finding your neck as he trails kisses down to your shoulders and chest, freeing your breasts from your bra and sucking each nipple into his mouth. You arch into him, hands hooking into the waistband of his pants and pulling down, needing to feel him skin on skin, “please, Bucky, take these off,” you request softly, melting under him.

He sits up to remove his pants, sliding up your body as his hands find your breasts once again, lightly massaging the soft tissue and he says, “I can’t wait to be inside this pussy, baby,” before gradually gliding into you, every inch of him stretching you perfectly.

He bottoms out with a grunt and you hook your heels around his waist, rolling your hips up and into him, silently begging him to move. He pulls back out slowly, lips connecting with yours as he then thrusts back in. His pace is deliberate at first, the slow drag of his cock rubbing your clit and making you cry out for more, “Bucky, please, fuck me harder.”

His continues to move tantalizingly slow until and it isn’t until finally rake your nails down his back, clenching your walls around him that he loses control, bringing his hips up and snapping back as he drives you into the mattress.

Every hard thrust of his cock has the coil in your stomach tightening further, the sound of the headboard hitting against the wall mixing with your moans. You bring his head up from the crook of your neck to look into his eyes, the same eyes that have followed you all this time, the restrained heat you saw now intense and uninhibited.

“Bucky, I’m gonna…oh, fuck,” you cry out as your vision blurs and you soak his cock, each spasm of your walls bringing him closer to his finish. A few more pumps and you feel his cock pulse inside you, his cum painting your walls as his orgasm rips through him.

He slumps on top of you while still holding most of his weight up and you run your fingers down his back and squeeze his ass, giggling as he squirms above you. He slowly pulls out and rolls over, pulling you onto his chest, one hand around your waist and the other carded through your hair.

“I never thought I would be so thankful for one small bed,” Bucky says, laughing into your hair, “but it finally gave me the nerve to make a move,” he adds, smile infectious. “Me too, and let’s be honest, you barely fit in this bed by yourself so it’s a lot easier if I’m on top of you or under you,” you say, your tone suggestive, pressing your body closer to his. “Mmmm this is true,” he drawls, skillfully pulling you up until you’re completely on top of him and can feel his half hard cock between your legs. You whimper as he rolls his hips, bringing his lips to your ear and whispering, “now I want you to ride my cock, baby, fuck me until you come all over it.”

@annavega333 @abovethesmokestacks @beckzorz @buckysbrat @book-dragon-13 @cametobuyplums @cchellacat @collinsstanharbour @chuuulip @eurynome827 @hiddles-rose @jewels2876 @jewelofwinter @kilyfan @lollypop-lam @loricameback @littledarlinhavefaithinme @lancetuckershairgel @marvelgirl7 @marvelous-meggi @marvelandotherfandomimagines @nerdypinupcrystal @stuck-y-together @spacemansam @southernbell91 @sebastiansloserclub @that-damn-girl

#bucky x reader #bucky x reader smut #bucky barnes x reader smut #bucky barnes smut #beefy bucky smut #beefy bucky x reader smut #beefy bucky x reader #beefy bucky x reader fluff #bucky barnes fluff #bucky x reader fluff #bucky barnes #beefy bucky #sebastian stan #there's only one bed #beefy bucky fluff

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fanfic-reading-challenge · 4 years

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How’s it coming along, all? :)

Hey everyone!!!

I hope everyone’s been enjoying their challenge so far! We’re 6 weeks in and I thought I’d do a little check-in, totally informal and absolutely voluntary, to see how everyone is doing, check if there’s anything that needs clarifying, or if there are any other questions... stuff like that. :)

I thought it would also be a great time to share a little bit about what we’ve been up to! Favourite fic we’ve read or are currently reading, what book we’ve read or plan to read IF we’re doing said Hard Mode task, how many fics we’ve read, unique authors, different fandoms, if we’ve read a fandom crossover fic and what type... how many words total we’ve read and, if we’re feeling really geeky, how much that averages out to per fic? per chapter? What ship or fandom have we read the most of? Rating? Favourite trope so far, if our data even bears that question out? Have you discovered any new fandoms or ships—new to you, that is? Is there a fic or a fandom or ship you haven’t read in more than 10 years, and somehow, someway, found your way back to? Is there a deep quote you’ve come across? Written by the author or quoted by them from someone else? (Totally valid too, with accreditation!) Have you changed your view on something huge because of a fic you read? Have you found a new favourite ship? Or, like me, have you just added another warship to your giant ship armada? (Pretty sure I’ve read five new-to-me ships already; I love this challenge!)

And so much more! Feel free to talk about, list, or mention anything you like!! Even things you’d like to see next year, or that could’ve been done better or not at all. While being polite, of course. ;)

I’ll leave these questions here for now, answer a couple myself, head to bed, and then tomorrow I’ll share some more of my own stats, favourites, and even some of my frustrations with you! I look forward to it, and to hearing from all of you as well!

If you don’t feel like sharing publicly in reply to this post, please feel more than free to tag me in your own post (and ask me not to reblog) or send me an Ask, or a Submission to this blog that I can approve, or as a Direct Message to this blog or to @juuls — my main blog. I would love some distraction tomorrow, instead of going off on another rant about the world being stupid. :P

I’ll leave you with a few stats to get this started, however!:

I currently have over 700 fics listed on my Reading Log, and only 72 have been read completely!

I read The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins for my Hard Mode book-not-fic task (though I could’ve chosen from 13 other books I’ve already read for that spot!).

I’ve read 52 unique authors.

A new to me fandom (well, sub-fandom, as I’ve read DS9 and AOS/TOS) is Star Trek Discovery, and I’ve even found a fic for literally the very first fandom I became obsessed with as a wee little fanling: Escaflowne. Man! This fic dates back twenty years, back to when I read it on freakin’ GEOCITIES lmaoooo. But then again, I’ve also found some HP fic that goes back further than that, even if I wasn’t actively reading it until one or two years later. My goodness, time flies.

I have also read 25 unique ships and am well on my way to probably tripling that by year’s end. I just love everything, how could I not?

I’ve definitely read short fics, but it looks like my average completed fic (71 fics -- 1,393,005 words total) works out to around 19,620 words! Not too shabby!

The total word count (so far) of the fics I’ll possibly read is creeping well past 12 million now.

I may have a (many) problem(s).

The longest fic I’ve completed so far is a Doctor Who fic at ~207k.

The longest fic I am currently reading -- and it’s still being written!!! -- is an ASoIaF/GoT fic that is ~407k words and counting.

BUT I also have eight fics set in Potterverse waiting for me, which are all more than 600,000 words each. (and tons others in the more than 200k word range -- what is it with that? Do we just love the sandbox or do we want to make Rowling’s characters touch in ways she would despise?

................ maybe a bit of both.

Yes, dear ones, I am insane. And loving every minute of it.

I may share some more stats tomorrow, but that’s a lot right there! For now, I’m going to go back to an A/B/O guilty pleasure fic (oo, there’s one task down!) I found... ;D

Anyone have a copy of Draco Dormiens? Coulda sworn I had one hiding out in my hard drives somewhere, but for the life of me I can’t find it... Hm.

Anyway! Have a good night or day y’all! Be kind to one another. <3

And hopefully this rambling made at least one person smile, for that was my aim! I just want this to be fun for everyone and a happy event. No pressure, no best or worst, no comparisons to each other, just to yourself.... learning new things about your own self, too! That’s always wonderful. :) And reading fic in a way that makes it feel like we’re accomplishing something, by making a fun little game/challenge out of it with an aim and a purpose for all those words going in one eyeball and out the other! You can read a book and feel like you’ve “added to your repertoire” and I just want this to feel the same way. :)

It does for me, and I hope it will for you too.

Much love, all.

#2021frc #2021 fic reading challenge #fandom #fanfiction #reading challenge #book reading challenge #2021 #i'm too tired to tag #but i think i got the important ones :P

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invitedeath · 3 years

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SEPHIROTH — relationship & plotter call.

hello lovely isolians! it’s been actually ages since i made my first one, or my second one, so i’m coming back with new vigour & hopefully some new ideas to tempt you all into friendship ( or...enemy...ship) with sephiroth!

so liking this post means that you are 100% down with interacting with me in some fashion! ways this might happen may be... → me sending you im’s / tumblr asks to plot or chat! i can be quite a talkative person as a forewarning, as i love discussing rp things as well as getting to know my rp partner! → if we are already friends on discord or twitter, i might message you that way to ask you about plots or ideas or to run things by you. → exchanging ask memes / meme day things that might be a bit more personal than a general sentence meme. → possible random starters or musings dedicated to your muse, sometimes i get sudden inspiration for these things! i will always check first that you’re okay with taking on a new thread, but yes this is for just... if i get inspired & want to put something up for you! → general tomfoolery and shenanigans in character ( and ooc if you like )

you can contact me via the im system here, by the /ask feature or you can ask for my discord/twitter if you prefer those. just let me know. discord is the most private however so we’d need to chat a bit more elsewhere first just for my comfort! i am in the isola discord sever however so we can totally talk in that server for a bit too!

FRIENDS.

↪ honestly friendships aren’t typically on the agenda for him. he is arrogant beyond belief and considers everyone to be weaker than him or to some degree unworthy of his time or energy. he really does not have any interest emotionally in anyone besides himself, instead he is far more likely to use and discard people when they are no longer needed. HOWEVER, in 2020 sephiroth underwent quite a big character development stage, essentially his long-term goal came to a head and it backfired pretty back when he got all his powers back, so while he’s super strong again now, he’s also semi-content (i guess) with living in isola for a while, if only so he can figure out how the multiverse works (meta, i know). he talks to people now (wow!) and engages in mostly philosophical conversations, about... life. death. etc.

↪ i am down to... vague villain-alliance type deals with fellow power players here. he wont consider your muse a friend, but rather a pawn or even a means to an end, that end being his goal of generally using this island for his means, apologies. preferably the intellectual, over-powered, edgy types will probably gravitate towards him more, but i’m willing to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks. he’s not a nice guy, by any means, but it would be interesting to see how he has to play the game here to his advantage until he regains powers. i especially would like to interact with other villains who are kind of just chilling, maybe they’re veterans in spirale also and they can share a glass of wine over watching all the citizens running around like ants. we could also do a murder if you are into that.

↪ there are some cases where he might engage in conversation with non-villain types and these would likely be far more dialogue-heavy threads including metaphorical topics or debates. the conversations of life, death, mortality, good vs evil, frailty of existence, legacy, power and corruption, calamities, birthright and betrayal are just some of the topics possible to arise in discussion. that being said, whilst these topics would be of interest to him, the character themselves must meet his standard of what he considers worthy of his time eg. those just willing to argue with him will bore him whereas someone curious to his nature might be treated to an actual conversation. over time this has opened up into most people being capable of talking to him. he has less patience for over-eager plucky types, but anyone with a respectable manner who likes talking a lot will probably find an interesting conversation partner in this... ONLY SLIGHTLY CHILLED sephiroth. he’s not totally chill, he’s just a lil chill.

↪ warriors, outcasts, villains, intellectuals, fellow puppet-master type villains especially, those he ‘befriended’ in past events, perhaps even neighbours to his castle would all be likely connections. friends of those he has worked alongside or met, or those wishing to seek great power and know of his existence might seek him out also, but yes... ““““friends”“““ is a very difficult term for him. he’s getting better.

→ his most recent developments see him as a far more casual version of his canon self, over a year of living as close to a “domestic life” as possible have meant that whilst he is aloof and cold, he is also far more likely to be out and about, buying wine at some creepy gas station at 4:30am for example. he chats when he’s in the mood and might even stick around to cause some chaos for the sake of boredom eating him alive. so whilst he is still very much a dangerous inhabitant here in spirale, sephiroth is currently Domesticated somewhat.

ENEMIES.

↪ heroes of all shapes and sizes might feel threatened by the ominous presence of a monster who seems inclined to side with chaos as opposed to peace. he’s not outright starting fires here but he is present in the more morbid moments of isolian discourse, an omen of death lingering on the sideline. he has his plans and he may just mock you with them, but in general since he does and WILL cut down npcs ( or players ) alike, he makes for the perfect villain. BE WARY he has all of his powers unlocked and knows the island well. fighting him would not guarantee your victory, especially if you are a freshly applied character.

in feb 2020 he almost brought chaos to spirale too so i’m sure anyone holding a grudge or wary of a potential threat like that would be very aggro towards him.

↪ he has traumas. plenty of them. some of them originate from labs and white coats, meaning he might just view you as an enemy if you’re a scientist or someone who dabbles in human experimentation. his reasons are his own, but let’s just say that if you consider him a good candidate for poking and prodding with scientific equipment, you may just lose an arm.

↪ i LOVE fight threads especially really gritty, bloody types. i would prefer to plot these out so we know what’s going on beforehand, but feel free to develop these with me honestly i love a good old classic villain hero showdown. he’s less likely to get into these without a good reason but if we do one, the winner is randomly determined via generator to make it fair if your character is also uncapped!

→ police/law enforcers/general crime stoppers might remember him for causing a bit of trouble in the past! insert how bad me be gif. try and ??? get him to apologise i guess. arresting sephiroth sounds like the plot of a funny movie.

LOVERS.

↪ this man has a bf now, can you believe it? 2021...isola gay rights.

MISC.

↪ pawns and such would be a fun dynamic later. his general presence is pretty terrifying, so it wouldn’t be a stretch if you have an appropriate muse for them to be fearful enough to carry out some little tasks for him. this might be more common later on, but i’m down to discussion for it currently!

↪ places you may find him can include: ↪ near his residence ( personal housing; castle in the mistwood ) ↪ fibonacci ward ( levels 3 and 4 especially due to the museums and things. but also the lowest levels, he tends to wander around there as if searching for something... feel free to try and figure out what it is ) ↪ golden ward ( the university if only to borrow books from the library, he can read there for days at a time without sleep or food. he reads all kinds of things, both fiction and non fiction. ) ↪ archimedes ward ( pretty much everywhere in this ward, it’s my favourite. he enjoys music and art sometimes. hit me with that biblical shit. ) ↪ the mistwood ( 100% down to be that cryptic creature that leads you from your path to your likely doom ) ↪ the city of yesteryear ( typically the underground areas, just investigating really. any strange occurrences would likely draw him there as would any presence of a strong power. ) ↪ atop skyscrapers, looming at the ‘edge’ of the world we can currently explore, typically more active at night, perhaps at the scene of a murder / attack ( plotted ), if he’s feeling extra ballsy he might be found in a bar but its very rare. very VERY rare, wandering broken buildings, invading scientific facilities or buildings. he’s not going to be found in busy, socially strained areas basically.

↪ i’m down for any ideas you might have too for plots so feel free to just message me if nothing here caters!

STATS PAGE | APPLICATION | PLOTTING PAGE

#isola relationship call #isola plotting call #cw // long post #AAAYYY

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artificialqueens · 4 years

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Nostalgia, Part 4 (Rujubee) - Dartmouth420

nostalgia is a series that follows the re-ignition of raven/jujubee’s friendship (with benefits) while jujubee competes on all stars five and raven is working on set. there will be one chapter for every episode of AS5 where jujubee appears. drag names used with male pronouns.

summary: Jujubee is not going to be in the bottom this week due to a damn curse, thank you very much. But messing with other people’s feelings is never a good idea… because his own tend to get caught up in it too.

a/n: i had writers block but then i recovered by listening to hit the back by king princess like twenty times in a row lmao. enjoy the side mizbee (crackjubee?) also this is not how negotiating a dom/sub relationship should go in real life my friends, this is one hundred percent pure fantasy.

tw: dom/sub dynamics, mild daddy kink, mild choking, jealousy, smut

The day wasn’t going particularly well.

Jujubee was very much not appreciating the ‘challenge winner one week, bottom two the next’ curse that loomed over him. The challenge was improv and while Jujubee was confident in his improv skills he was feeling a little chagrined at the production’s decision to group together the queens with the most conflict. But whatever, this wasn’t RuPaul’s Best Friend’s Race, after all. Ha.

But Cracker decided that once again he needed to make a speech about however the hell he was feeling towards Blair. Blair took it in stride and Jujubee watched the whole thing like a tennis match. These little white boys needed to get their damn selves under control. Jujubee re-focused on the task at hand.

Luckily they broke from filming for lunch soon afterwards. Everyone ate and bitched and complained.

Movement caught Jujubee’s eye, and of course, there was Raven sauntering into the break room like he owned the place. He made a beeline to Jujubee, who nodded and opened his mouth to say hello. But with an extra little swing of his hips, Raven changed direction at the last moment and went over to Mayhem, whom he gave a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“I’ve been missing you bitch, it’s been too long!” said Raven, an arm around Mayhem, radiating charm.

The two of them were friends, considered Jujubee, shutting his mouth and taking in the surprised and pleased look on Mayhem’s face. They chatted back and forth for a couple minutes until Raven glanced over his shoulder at Jujubee, and then went over to speak to Shea.

“What you’re doing on the runway is everything,” complimented Raven, with a flirtatious little shake of his shoulders.

Jujubee raised an eyebrow. Raven was laying it on a bit thick.

“Thanks?” responded Shea, slightly confused, flashing Raven a smile, “Can I expect good reviews on FPR?”

“I’ll see how I feel in eight months, honey.” That stupid little tilt of Raven’s head. Shea’s wonderful laugh.

Raven gave Jujubee a knowing side-eyed look and then went over to Blair. Mayhem and Shea, Jujubee could understand, but he knew that Raven did not have an established rapport with Blair. Blair seemed surprised and vaguely taken aback by Raven, who asked him how filming was going and nodded understandingly to his answer and delicately touched the younger man’s back.

Well, now Jujubee was disgruntled. And pissed off about being disgruntled, because Jujubee did not lose his gruntle easily, thank you very much.

But two could play at this game. Jujubee glanced over to Cracker and India.

“… I just don’t know, I’m feeling fucking weird-” continued Cracker to India, who was nodding. Jujubee had to do something about this because he was not going to lose the challenge. Cracker needed to calm the fuck down, stat, and Jujubee could certainly manage that if he played his cards right. Succeeding in the competition was way more important than whatever the hell Raven was playing at.

“Hey,” said Jujubee, going over to Cracker, who was anxiously running his hands through his already-greasy hair again, “Come here for a minute, I need to talk to you.”

Jujubee glanced over at Raven who was watching him, a slight frown on his face as he half-nodded to what Blair was saying. Then Jujubee turned and left, Cracker in tow, feeling Raven’s eyes on his back all the way out.

Jujubee quickly made his way through the backstage area to the hallway where Raven had led him during that first week of filming. A PA stopped him and asked what he was doing but Jujubee waved her off with the excuse that they were heading outside for a smoke break. Cracker followed him silently.

“You need to calm the fuck down,” said Jujubee, opening the door to the disused equipment room where he and Raven had had such a lovely time, and motioned with his head. Cracker went in ahead of him, a suspicious look on his face. Jujubee flicked the light and shut the door.

Cracker looked around, “I’m trying, alright? I don’t know why I have all this drama out of the blue, but the challenge-”

“Look I’ve been doing this for a long time, it’s not that complicated,” stated Jujubee, “You’re funny. I’m funny. Blair’s a baby with a billion Instagram followers. We’re professionals, we can do this, and at the end of the day it’s just a damn TV show, so relax.”

“Yeah, I- okay,” said Cracker, nodding to him, gritting his teeth, “I can relax.”

That was just about the least relaxed statement Jujubee had ever heard in his life.

But perhaps words weren’t the best way to go about this. Perhaps Cracker just needed someone else to take charge. Bizarrely deciding to trust Raven’s statement from the other night in his hotel room, Jujubee went for it.

“That doesn’t sound very relaxed, girl!” laughed Jujubee, comfortable, “But maybe I can help you out with that…”

Now Cracker looked confused, and glanced around the room again, before his brown eyes landed back on Jujubee’s. And there was a little bit of intrigue, wasn’t there?

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying…?” said Cracker, inclining his chin.

“Stay quiet and don’t be a little bitch about it,” said Jujubee, allowing the dominant tone to slip into his voice. Clear, expectant, authoritative.

Cracker quirked an eyebrow in response, an interested smile growing.

Very pleased that things were going his way, Jujubee stepped forward and knelt in front of Cracker. Cracker took in a breath and gave Jujubee a quick nod of confirmation and Jujubee unbuckled Cracker’s belt, pulling his pants them down around his thighs and made straight for the rapidly hardening cock in his briefs. Interesting.

Aiming for efficiency, Jujubee got Cracker’s cock out, gave it an appreciative look and swirled his tongue around the tip, earning a very aroused noise from Cracker. Jujubee took it in his mouth and went to work.

“Oh, fuck,” muttered Cracker, the muscles in his thighs tensing. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Jujubee didn’t particularly like being touched while he gave head, but Cracker didn’t seem like the type to touch without asking, and he refrained from doing so, keeping his hands to himself.

Jujubee worked Cracker’s cock enthusiastically, and gripped his ass with his left hand and a little thrill grew in his gut. This was fun, quick and dirty and hopefully it would lead him to his end goal, which was getting Cracker to chill the fuck out so they could win this challenge together.

It wasn’t quite as much fun as face-fucking Raven in drag, but he really shouldn’t be comparing…

Soon enough Cracker’s breath was ragged, and he whispered, “I’m gonna come-”

Jujubee briefly considered the fact that he hadn’t properly prepared for this, and there weren’t any great options other than to just swallow. It wasn’t his favourite thing, but it would have to do for today.

Cracker let out a filthy groan, and Jujubee took it and swallowed, and then he moved back, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood. Cracker was still recovering, tucking his cock back into his briefs, and re-buckling his belt with a shaking hand.

“Woah,” said Cracker, with a quick shake of his head, “That was good.”

“You feeling more relaxed, baby?” teased Jujubee.

“Yeah, actually,” murmured Cracker, “Maybe I was just pent up…”

Jujubee gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder and then opened the door and glanced outside. There was no one in the hallway, so they left together.

That had been pretty fun, considered Jujubee as he followed Cracker back down the hallway to their break area, and he’d heard rumours of Cracker’s other talents in the bedroom. This could become a sensible arrangement. It wasn’t like Jujubee needed Raven, after all. Raven was chaotic, and he wasn’t even on the show this season. He was in an entirely different headspace than Jujubee and his fellow contestants.

Just as they were rounding the corner back to the break room, movement caught Jujubee’s eye again. He glanced through an open doorway into the makeup studio to see Raven look up, and give him a very pointed glare before returning to furiously brushing out a big blonde wig.

Jujubee didn’t say anything, nor did he stop. Raven’s feelings were his own problem, and Jujubee couldn’t let this nonsense get to him. But he did feel sorry for that poor wig.

Jujubee’s team performed excellently in the challenge and Jujubee felt pretty damn good about it. Almost having a little in-drag make out session with Cracker was pretty fun too, and Jujubee found he liked Cracker a lot better when his confidence was up.

The next day was the runway. Jujubee realized while watching everyone else get ready that perhaps his outfit was a bit minimal in comparison. Nonetheless, he thought it looked sleek and expensive, and the matching nails, clutch and shoes were a nice touch. But whatever.

Cracker won the challenge. Jujubee placed high as well and privately allowed himself a sigh of relief. He’d broken the curse, at least for tonight.

After the critiques they all trooped off the runway, and Jujubee affectionately touched Cracker’s back on the way out.

“Congratulations on the win, bitch,” whispered Jujubee into Cracker’s ear.

“Thanks,” he replied, “I think you’re owed it too.”

“Ah, I barely did anything.”

Cracker snorted, “You got me to relax, do you know how hard that is? I’ve led several doctors to burnout.”

“Looks like all you needed to be prescribed was a decent blowjob.”

Cracker chuckled and Jujubee followed him, last in line. The queens moved through to the backstage, going past where they filmed Untucked for the regular season into the area with the moveable walls that made up the hallway. There was a stretch where the crew was sparse, the cameras guys going ahead. A gap between two walls was ahead on Jujubee’s left. The PA behind him turned, pressing his headset, summoned back to the runway area.

A hand closed around Jujubee’s wrist and yanked him into the gap between the walls. Jujubee yelped in shock and then recovered his balance as he saw Raven before him in the dark alcove, six feet of petulant anger.

“Why are you flirting with him?” demanded Raven.

“The fuck?” managed Jujubee, yanking his wrist out of Raven’s grip, “Why are you pulling me out of the end of the line like some girl who’s the first to die in a horror movie?”

Raven ignored his question and asked another, “What was that, yesterday?”

Jujubee took a moment before answering. This seemed to be developing in a way that wasn’t ideal. First of all, he was in the middle of filming. Second of all, Raven’s behaviour had impulsive, chaotic, bratty bitch written all over it.

“You’re acting crazy,” stated Jujubee.

“Cracker’s the most annoying one of the lot-”

“I’m not gonna dignify this bullshit with an answer-” replied Jujubee, making to head back between the halls into the hallway. Usually there’d be a camera person or somebody in this little alcove, but-

“No, wait,” said Raven, and his tone had changed. No longer whiny and entitled, but serious.

“What?” demanded Jujubee, turning back to him, irritated. Just when Jujubee was fed up with Raven’s bullshit, he would change his tune. And it worked every time. He should really just leave-

“If we’re going to do this then I don’t want you fucking around with anybody else like, here,” stated Raven, crossing his arms, expression serious.

“What do you mean, this?”

“You know what I mean, this, this thing that always happens between us.”

Jujubee straightened and gazed at Raven imperiously, “You’re the one who suggested I fuck around with Cracker in the first place, and now you’re jealous?”

Raven rolled his eyes.

“Because I remember yesterday,” continued Jujubee, “When you were all over everybody at the lunch break, glancing over your shoulder making sure I was noticing you. You were trying to make me jealous, or some nonsense?”

“Well, it obviously backfired…” said Raven, giving Jujubee a self-deprecating half-smile, “I just wanted to get you riled up. You know why.”

Ah, of course that had been Raven’s angle. To be behave badly, to make Jujubee jealous and riled up so that he’d want to punish him the next time they interacted. Oh, it had worked on All Stars One, that’s for sure, and even way back on Season Two. They’d both been exhausted, stressed out messes, but still, Raven had always wanted to play. They were repeating some very old patterns here, Jujubee couldn’t do anything but shake his head.

“Bitch, you could’ve just said that.”

“Well-”

“No, seriously,” said Jujubee, gesticulating with frustration at the ridiculousness of it all, “Why the fuck are we standing in this hole in the hall talking about it? We’ve been doing this on and off for years, just admit that you want it. You want me to get dominant and possessive over you, and I want to punish you and fuck you silly. It’s not that complicated!”

Raven paused for a moment. Then he nodded and shrugged, leaning back against the wall and looking at Jujubee with a lazy, inviting expression, “Yes ma'am, you’re right. That’s exactly what I want.”

A thrill went down Jujubee’s spine, cutting through his irritation. Here they were, right in the middle of filming, between some fucking movable walls, sliding back into this dynamic. It was so easy, every time. Fuck, he should really just go, but-

Instead of leaving like a sensible human, Jujubee stepped froward and traced his long red nails down the side of Raven’s face. Raven practically shivered under his touch. Jujubee traced his jaw and then caressed Raven’s neck. A little sweat under his fingers, some stubble just beginning to grow back in.

Jujubee dug his sharp nails into Raven’s throat. Raven flinched, and let out an absolutely shameless moan under his breath.

“You have to give me respect,” ordered Jujubee, standing straight, holding eye contact, gaze steady, “When we’re in the same room you don’t even so much as look at anyone else.”

“Yes ma'am.”

“When I’m around you’re mine. You’re my bitch.”

“Yes, daddy,” replied Raven, running his tongue over his teeth.

“That’s right.”

Jujubee tightened his grip for a split second and then stepped back with a laugh and the moment was broken. Raven blinked a couple times, and stepped forward, picking a speck of fluff off Jujubee’s wig.

“Right, okay,” said Raven, smoothing out Jujubee’s camo-lined cape on his shoulders and looking him over approvingly, “Mmm, you look sleek. I love doing this when you’re in drag.”

“Why do I put up with you?” asked Jujubee, raising an eyebrow.

Raven leaned forward and whispered into Jujubee’s ear, with a tickle of warm breath, “Because I’m the best you’ve ever had, Cracker doesn’t hold up and you know it.”

“He has a real nice ass, actually-”

“Ugh, stop it!” replied Raven, bratty demeanour returning as he pulled back. The pink marks from Jujubee’s nails were apparent on his neck, but Jujubee hadn’t pressed hard enough to actually hurt him, let alone break the skin. It was satisfying to see them there nonetheless. They had a tendency to leave marks on each other, both visible and invisible.

“Get over yourself.”

Raven whined in response, and then he laughed, “Fuck. It’s always like this, isn’t it? Who was it I was trying to make you jealous with last time around? Manila?”

Jujubee laughed and the nostalgia tugged at him, but he held off indulging in the memory. There had been many petty disagreements all those years ago, but they were either jokes or water under the bridge now. They’d have time to reminisce later, if it came up.

“Come up to my hotel room in a couple days.”

“I’d love that.”

A voice from the hallway, “Anybody got eyes on Jujubee?”

It must be a producer. Uh oh. Jujubee craned his neck, glancing into the hallway.

“Ah shit, sorry-” murmured Raven, finally seeming embarrassed.

“I’ve gotta get back out there now, before they notice us,” whispered Jujubee.

Raven gently pushed Jujubee’s arm, “Go. I’ll hide out for a minute.”

Jujubee slipped back out into the hallway and made himself known, and was hustled away by some stressed-out crew member. Raven stayed hidden, presumably until the hallway was empty, and Jujubee didn’t bother looking back. Instead he reflected on what they’d both just admitted to, and seemed to have established between them.

Later on Morgan wiped the floor with Cracker during the lip-sync, and somehow they both won (that would have to be made up later in the editing, considered Jujubee) and Mayhem was sent home. Jujubee would miss him. The queens were dropping like flies, but he fully intended to be the last one standing.

The special little arrangement he had with Raven on the side would only add to his fun.

#rpdr fanfiction #rujubee #jujubee #raven #miz cracker #smut #canon compliant #jealousy #nostalgia #dartmouth420 #tw dom/sub dynamics #tw mild daddy kink #tw mild choking #submission #on set fic #as5 #s2

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rosie-janeposie · 4 years

Text

Gold Charms Part 2

Chapter 2: Green with Envy

AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24974863/chapters/60500830#workskin Summary:

Andre watched Ellie unscrew the top of the green bottle. Murphy’s hand was resting gently on her knee. This little exchange was either missed or ignored by everyone but Andre. He honestly was jealous of how detached the two could be from the world when they wanted. Perhaps he was naive, or he was shallow, but he just wished to have a boy look at him like Murphy looked at Ellie.

Notes:

Hello, my Lovelies!

Two uploads in one day. I wish I could say I am skilled, but, I had this chapter done before "Simple Charm." Actually this was my first idea for Gold Charms: Two-shot, it just didn't have quite the same light-hearted feel I like for Murphy and Ellie. But, I couldn't scrap this chapter because I honestly loved it very much.

Hopefully, you guys will appreciate it as well!

Disclaimer: I do not own Hogwarts Mystery Characters.

I do however own Ellie Bennett (So Yay Me!)

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.) ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Andre blinked, “You want me to watch out for Charlie?”

“That’s not what I meant at all,” McNully noted as he held out his wand hand. Andre noted McNully had his left pinky finger painted a soft baby blue, while his index was shiny silver.

In fact, Andre could remember a time when McNully had his whole right hand-painted gold. I seemed nowadays McNully would always have at least one to two nails painted with odd colors. It was certainly an interesting fashion choice, Andre noted, but he didn’t want to embarrass his friend either.

Andre sighed, shaking his head. He had not been following his friend’s train of thought as close as he thought. “What do you mean then?”

McNully quirked an eyebrow. He paused briefly “There is a 68.9% percent chance that Charlie Weasley is the one to watch when it comes to Seekers here at Hogwarts.” The hands started to go. Andre let his eyes follow their movements; the colors were slightly distracting, “You know-” The entryway to the common room opened as four Ravenclaw girls came walking into the circular room. McNully’s words died. They were snickering amongst themselves. Andre wished he could have taken a photo at the soft look that crossed the Commentator’s face as he whipped his head around to look at a bespectacled redhead. McNully’s girlfriend, Ellie.

The redhead was smiling as she tried to reach over and jokingly push a girl with evidently singed two-toned hair, “Skye, you’re terrible!”

“Listen, all I am sayin’ is he is barkin’ up the wrong tree with Haywood,” Skye noted as she took a seat next to Andre on the couch. She carelessly discarding her bookbag on the floor in front of the sofa.

A dark-hair girl, Rowan, smiled as she flipped a strand of hair over a shoulder, “Yes, well, I think Ben’s crush is cute.”

Another redhead chirped in pulling over a stuffed armchair to make an impromptu circle, “If we were first or second years maybe…” She sat in the blue chair, Tossing her feet over the side of the armchair, “Now, I kinda feel bad that he is unable to read the context clues. Bennett, what’d you think?”

The first redhead merely shrugged, “Ben’s Ben, I don’t think he’ll actually ask her. He had a harmless crush on Rowan,” ignoring the outburst from Rowan, “Then he had a harmless crush on Liz. Just leave him be.” The redhead stopped behind the blond, wrapping her arms around his shoulders as she leaned over the back of the couch, “Hey, you.”

McNully leaned back into the cushions to give her a small peck on the lips, “Hey yourself.”

Andre smiled at the pair in front of him. It was a relief to everyone in the Ravenclaw common room when the news of the two became official. At least until their friend groups became subject to candy moments like this. The Seeker grabbed the pillow, in-between him and Skye, tossing it at the pair, “I have virgin eyes!”

“Virgin eyes that have a thing for Orion,” Rowan muttered. Andre stood up, “No!” Her eyes widened as she tried to place space between them. “No!” She tried to dodge him in between the couches and the coffee table that they were sitting around.

Tulip pulled her legs up to her chest avoid getting stepped on, “Why can’t we all just get along…” she jokingly whined.

“No!” Rowan squealed as Andre managed to grab her cloak. Their friends broke into laughter as Andre pulled Rowan onto the couch. He had her pinned so she wasn’t able to move as he started to pinch her cheeks. “HEY!”

Andre was laughing as he continued to pinch her cheeks, “Sorry, I just want you to have effortless rosy cheeks.”

“STOOOOP!” Rowan whined she has attempted to push Andre off her. “I don’t want your fashion advice!”

“Never!” Andre joked, keeping her pinned to the couch, but his assault on her cheeks stopped. Their laughter filled the common room, earning some dirty looks from fellow Ravenclaws.

Ellie giggle as she stole another peck from Murphy, “I’ll be back.” her hands slid up his chest and off his shoulders.

McNully smiled before he turned his head to the wrestling pair on the third couch, “Orion, huh?

Andre sat up, letting Rowan pull herself out from where Andre had pinned her. “You.” The Seeker pointed at the Commentator, “And you!” He turned the Ravenclaw Chaser, “Will say or know nothing.”

“Aw, someone’s shy!” Tulip piped in as she smirked.

“More like embarrassed,” Skye snickered, ignoring the glare Andre was sending their way.

The evil redhead snickered, “How cute!” Andre blushed with embarrassment and turned to look away and cross his arms. “Andre…” Tulip let her snickering stop. “I didn’t mean to push it too far…”

“It’s fine.” Andre huffed, “I highly doubt Orion feels the same.” He stated as he sat back into the cushions. His cheeks were flushed, was it that obvious that he was interested in the Ravenclaw Captain. Perhaps he was naive, or he was shallow, but he couldn’t resist the carefree smile that was always present on the other boy’s face. Andre would do anything to have that smile directed at him. “I can’t tell what he is thinking most of the time, you know…”

What part of the smile was because of Orion optimism, and what part was because of him?

“Orion is high most of the time,” Skye noted as she pulled her legs up and sat sideways. She had a hand under her head for support. “But Orion is not as ditsy as he pretends.”

Murphy readjusted his seat, “As much as I hate to admit it, Skye has a point.”

“Watch it, blondie.”

“What I mean is,” The blond continued, “If you talk with Orion, there is an 89.9% percent chance you will get your answer.”

Rowan stretched before looking at her best friend’s boyfriend, “You have a stat for that?”

“I have a stat for that…” Murphy replied plainly. Rowan’s raised her eyebrows before shrugging, who was she to argue.

The sound of footsteps coming up the stone stairs filled the common room. Soon Ellie reappeared, dressed in a simple ivy green sundress and a gray cardigan over top, her feet were bare, pattering against the stone floor as she made her way over to her group of friends. “Really?” Tulip piped up, “Bare feet on this floor?” Ellie’s small but handsome tuxedo cat. “Tell her, Binx! It’s all nasty, tell all the nasty stuff people bring in.” The redhead cooed at the small black cat. Binx let out a mew of neither agreement nor dismissal as he walked lazily around the circular room.

Ellie rolled her eyes as she took a seat next to Murphy. In her hand were two small colorful bottles. Andre noticed Murphy held his hand out to look at the colorful bottles that Ellie was holding, one was silver in color while the other look similar shade of green as her dress. Murphy moved his right arm to rest behind Ellie, he left hand moved the bottles, so the green bottle was visible, “This new?”

Ellie shook her head, “No. I’ve had it, just I’ve never used it.” Murphy shrugged. Ellie relaxed into Murphy’s side, “Anything exciting happen today?” She asked innocently, looking between Skye and Murphy.

“Potions was eventful as always.” Skye shrugged as she tried to hide the very evident burnt hair.

“I was wondering why you’re hair was burnt,” Rowan noted as she pushed herself further back on the couch. “Fire potion?”

“More like she tried to speed up her potion brewing. Skye has never been one for patience.” Murphy chuckled as he felt Ellie reach for his left hand.

Andre smirked as he looked at the Chaser, “If you decide to blow up the dungeon, can you make sure you get that awful tapestry.”

Skye quirked an eyebrow, “There’s a tapestry in the potions room?”

“Of course, Andre would know there was a tapestry in the potions room.” Tulip snorted, “Everyone else is avoiding Snape glaring at them, while Andre is stirring his potion glaring at the woven string.”

“That woven string makes the room even more unbearable.” Andre joked as he watched Ellie unscrew the top of the green bottle. Murphy’s hand was resting gently on her knee. The distinct scent of nail polish hit his nose.

Skye huffed, “Well, I heard you guys had an interesting Care For Magical Creatures class.”

Ellie adjusted her glasses, the brush still in her hand, “Well, any class with Barnaby and Charlie is interesting…” Ellie started, as she adjusted Murphy’s hand looking at his left fingers. Murphy merely watched with mild interest as she reached for his ring finger. “Their Firecrab, apparently, was ill.”

“I’ve never smelt as much sulfur as I did today.” Rowan mutter as she pinched her nose, “I was horrible.”

Ellie started to carefully paint Murphy’s ring finger, a ghastly muted green color. Her nose scrunched in disgust, “It wasn’t that bad.”

“You and Merula were off chasing a bowtruckle. You two didn’t have to smell it, “ Rowan whined.

Murphy leaned towards Ellie, not moving his hand, “Ah, you’re leaving me for Merula, I see how it is.” He gave her a fake pout as he jutted out his lips.

Ellie looked up and gave him a quick peck before she returned to her task at hand, “You are the only one who deals with my bullshit,” Ellie whispered. Pinching his finger as she attempted as she rolled Murphy’s finger removing any excess paint off the sides. She dipped the brush back into the nail polish and started possibly the second coat.

This little exchange was either missed or ignored by everyone but Andre. He honestly was jealous of how detached the two could be from the world when they wanted. Andre was surprised at the sudden weight rolled onto him, “It was horrible.” Rowan cried dramatically as she laid across the seeker’s lap.

“And you say I am dramatic,” Andre noted with a chuckle, it was like having a little sister he thought as he tried to push Rowan off. “Skye, help…”

Skye shook her head, examining her own fingernails, “Oh no… you are on your own.”

“Traitor.”

“Whiney.”

“Bitch.”

“Chicken shit.” Skye retorted with a smile on her face, “Just say the word, and I will be sure to help you get on our fair Captain’s radar?”

Murphy snorted as he looked across the way, “I wouldn’t trust her.” Skye’s protest was lost in his next comment, “There’s a 72.5% chance that she will screw up your chances.”

Skye shrugged, “Orion is hard to read…”

“Listen,” Murphy spoke, trying to play cool, “I can do some research and see if Orion is interested in anyone.”

Ellie let out a snort, “Yes, the blind leading the blind.” She uttered, smiling at her boyfriend before tapping his nose, “It will certainly be entertaining to watch.”

Murphy looked shocked, and playfully grabbed his chest with his dry hand, “You act as though I didn’t pick up on the signals.”

“I practically had to tell you ‘Ask me out, dumbass’.” She noted the smile on his face.

Murphy shrugged, “Still a signal…”

The group laughed, cause more Ravenclaws in the common room to glare. After a moment, Andre starting to feel the circulation in his legs go, “Damn your heavy…” Andre quipped, trying to push his dark-haired friend onto the floor.

Rowan shot up from Andre’s lap, her hand tossing the tail of his scarf over his face. “How rude…” Rowan had a mocked offended look on her, “And here I was feeling sorry for your love-life.”

“Coming from the one who doesn’t want a love-life…” Andre quipped g,ently tugging on Rowan’s dark hair.

“Children,” Ellie spoke up, examining the final product on McNully’s finger, “Fight nice…”

Rowan rolled her eyes with a smile, “but, Mom…”

Andre let out a laugh, “Mom, She started it!” imitating a child ratting on their sibling.

“If you can’t fight nice, then you can’t fight together…” Ellie started pretending to take up the maternal role, “Now, behave, or you won’t have dessert.”

Tulip stuck out her tongue to tease the pair across the way, “Ha-ha, you got in trouble by Mom…” The redhead joked as she tried to set her back against the chair. There was a brief pause before her eyes were wide-open, quickly she sat up, “Hey Rowan, when is our essay due for Ancient runes?”

“Tomorrow,” Rowan began as she turned to look at the other redhead, “You forgot all about it.”

Tulip gave a sheepish smile, “I kinda forgot about it.” She noted, “I was busy though with the whole snooping into Rakepick thing…”

“That was your know decision,” Ellie sang as she wiped more paint off the side of Murphy’s finger.

Tulip folded her hands as she stared at the dark-haired girl, “Please help?”

Rowan sighed before rolling her eyes, “Fine, but you so own me.” The girl stood up, dusting off her uniform. She cracked her back, “But we are going to the library, there will be fewer distractions for you there.”

“You don’t know me very well then,” Tulip quipped before sticking out her tongue.

Rowan turned to pick up her bookbag, “Ellie coming?” She asked, looking at the girl dressed in green.

Ellie shrugged as she stood up slowly, Murphy gave a noise at the sudden movement. “Yeah, I should start my Divination assignment anyway…”

“While you ladies go to the library,” Skye began, she pointed back and forth between herself and Murphy, “We’ll deal with Andre and the Captain.”

“Do I get a say in this?”

Murphy answered quickly, “No.”

Ellie rolled her eyes before gave Murphy’s hand a gentle squeeze before she started down the stairs to the dormitories. “Good Luck, Andre, you’ll need it with those two.”

“Thanks…” Andre mumbled with his head in his hands.

“ELLANA BENNETT, WHY ARE YOU WALKING BAREFOOT ON THIS FLOOR? IT’S DISGUSTING!” the distinct voice of Badeea resonant up the stairs.

Tulip threw her hands in the air agreeing with the statement.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Notes:

Ta-dah!

Seriously Ellie, gets some shoes on!

Be sure to leave a comment and/or kudos down below!

Until next time!

~Rosie 🌹

#hphm #hphm rowan #hphm mc #hphm orion #hphm andre #hphm skye #tulip kasaru #nail polish #part 2 #gold charms #Ellie Bennett #Murphy mcnully #andre egwu #binx the cat #fanfiction

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schalaasha · 5 years

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Favourite Games of 2019

I don’t like making ranked lists anymore. So here’s a bunch of games old and new I played in 2019 because I was busy catching up due to not playing FFXIV as much as in previous years.

Ciconia When They Cry Phase 1: For You, The Replaceable Ones

I think going in, and even starting to play it, I felt like maybe the game would abandon the WTC mystery game conventions. It ended up not doing that, because the game leaves you with far more questions than answers at the end. The A3W World (“after World War III”) is still trying to deal with political issues and social issues that existed prior to World War III. A global stalemate exists due to the military implementation of the Gauntlet weapon. Eventually things happen where different countries need to deal with a shortage of resources, territorial conflicts, etc which sets off a chain reaction to World War IV. However, the children who grew up in the A3W era, settled into new ideologies and views of how society currently works are at odds with what the older generation wants and requires of them. Along the way, they need to deal with other groups and conspiracies in order to maintain the Walls of Peace.

So in essence, R07 still crafts a mystery for readers to figure out, but it isn’t a murder mystery. It’s an international conspiracy mystery and I am more than okay with that. I think this chapter required a lot of worldbuilding to set that kind of story up and coming out of Phase 1, I understood why the first chapter wasn’t exactly like Umineko’s. I thought that it was handled well, despite some of the purple prose (but if you’ve played a R07 game before, you’re likely used to it). I also thought he really tried to introduce and incorporate themes including gender, generational differences, societal tiers, geopolitics disguised as sports events (possibly mirroring the 2020 Olympics in Japan), etc. as well as he could throughout the story through the game’s cast. Even if the game meanders a bit (and it definitely feels that way towards the start), when it actually starts to roll, I felt compelled to keep reading.

And truly, the game has an incredibly large cast of characters. The TIPS section handles introductions well, and while some cast members don’t have as much time in the spotlight as others, I can see them getting their time eventually in subsequent chapters. Clearly Phase 1 exists to focus more on the children from the Arctic Ocean Union (the “AOU”) as evidenced by the additional stories unlocked at the end of the game so hopefully other chapters have the same amount of character backstory for the other factions. I also genuinely enjoyed that the big international cast of characters allowed for many different types of designs with characters with different types of hairstyles and hair texture or characters wearing hijabs and still managed to make them retain adorableness or a sense of style. I do not recall seeing it as often in Japanese media and I’m very happy to see it here.

I think Ciconia Phase 1 is a very good start to this subseries’ planned four episodes and I hope to see more sociopolitical commentary. It feels as though R07 looked at everything happening in Japan and social media/how news is consumed and decided to write a four-part SFF series about it. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next chapter.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

I backed Bloodstained when it got put on Kickstarter a few years ago. It was shipped to me at… possibly the worst time since Shadowbringers was coming out very shortly after. My fiancé and I played ours for a short bit, felt very positive about the game, then dropped it to play Shadowbringers. We didn’t return to it until maybe September/October? Both of us ended up getting our Platinum Trophies for it so we both played through everything the game had to offer.

Bloodstained is a good experience, but not without its issues. I played on PS4 and I’ve had a few outright crashes or some glitching into walls early enough that I couldn’t come out of them again due to not having the required skill to try to get out of it. I also felt like the game meandered or had a bit of padding in its earlier stages). Later on, you realise you have to put in the farming work to have a better and faster time not unlike its Igavania counterparts, but I did feel like the drop rates prior to actually working towards higher luck stats/drop shards were low enough almost to the point of unfair or deliberately wasting my time. I also felt as though there were too many weapon types; with adequate shard use and shard grinding eventually you can settle into one weapon type that suits your playstyle or eventually use the gun for everything when you get the special hat quest reward).

However, I’m speaking about this game as someone who platinumed it which requires a lot of farming and synthesis. As a player going through the main campaign, I think the maps are adequate. The backgrounds are very lovingly crafted, and the music is absolutely one of the best of the year. Boss design is also fun and rewarding, requiring the player to learn how all the different weapon types work, adequate backstepping and closing in, and boss patterns. If you suck, the game will show you that you suck very quickly and deliberately. Essentially towards the end, I felt as though Bloodstained tried very hard to cater to fans of the metroidvania style of game, and the classicvania style of game. I personally don’t think it completely succeeded but for a first time experience of trying to combine the two into one, it did its job with preparation for another game.

I also feel like some criticism was lobbed towards the game’s narrative for being told in library/book entries, and while I understand that (I actually couldn’t open all of the books for fear of my game crashing), I don’t think elaborate cutscenes and continuous dialogue would work well with this game’s flow. Bloodstained prioritizes gameplay elements and player exploration over anything else, and to be honest, I’d rather it happen that way than with long elaborate cutscenes. I also felt as though I got more out of the game because I’d played the 8-bit prequel as well.

Overall, Bloodstained is a passable experience. I’m glad I played it, and I’m glad I put the work in to try to make the game a better experience. I got what I wanted out of the game for as much as I backed it and I hope they try again with a similar formula because this is a very good first step.

The Touryst

Sometimes when I see a game with voxel graphics, I feel pretty compelled to pick it up because it looks so darn lovingly rendered and it usually ends up being fun. The Touryst does a good job with its graphical style and visiting new islands is a complete delight because of it. It looks like a game with style, and performs super-well on the Switch. It’s also one of the freshest games I’ve played in a while.

Basically you’re playing a blocky dude with a moustache who just wants to have a good time but when he gets to TOWA Monument, he’s told he has to find monument cores to unlock the world’s secrets. And then you can do whatever you want. The different islands have their own little personalities: there’s an island called Fijy which is volcanic, there’s Ybiza with a bunch of dudes chilling on the beach and passed out on their chairs, there’s Santoryn which is just Greece, and a few other places that are essentially recreations of real-world places.

As you explore, there’s a lot of stuff to do. A variety of things to do. There are puzzles and mechanics that don’t necessarily overstay their welcome, you can play footy, you can play spelunker, you can take helicopter rides, you can take pictures, get stuff for a museum, surf, play rhythm games…. It’s your vacation, do what you want. It’s a little like Vegas. Unlike Vegas, you can use your ever-increasing money and diamonds to get new moves for your moustached character to reach new objects.

As a little game where you can do whatever you want little by little, and makes for a smooth experience, I’m glad I picked up the Touryst after asking another person what they thought of it. It has great puzzles, lots of stuff to do and explore and see, and ton of minigames for whatever mood you feel like you’re in. The game is fairly short, but I’m very glad the holiday doesn’t overstay its welcome.

A Short Hike

A Short Hike places you in the shoes of a bird who is utterly determined to walk to the top of Hawk Peak to get signal for her phone. I totally understand; sometimes you’ve gotta do what you gotta do.

But the game allows you to undertake that journey however you want to. You can go right away and finish up and get that darn signal. Or you can take your time and we’ll build that bridge when we get there. There are different types of terrains to explore if you opt to take the scenic route… and it’s rewarding to do so. You can find treasure, you can water a flower, you can talk to the Animal Crossing-esque characters to do some sidequests, you can do whatever you want.

I’m sorry to say that when the game introduced fishing, I spent a lot of my time doing that. Fishing ruins me. The completionist in me wanted to fish. But the whole thing is that you don’t have to do any of this. If you want to finish the game, you can absolutely positively focus on that and the game doesn’t pressure you for it.

And that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s just whatever about the whole ordeal. I don’t feel like I’m completely and utterly missing out if I don’t decide to do something. Even the task of getting Golden Feathers to progress is fine since you only need eight for it, and the game easily gives you enough rewards to get four or five before sidequests or exploration is factored in.

Sometimes you just need to take a walk and kind of think of nothing just to clear your head. And A Short Hike accomplishes that very well.

Worldend Syndrome

In my effort to try to find other games to play in 2019 because I’d fallen a little out of love with FFXIV, I realised that taking baby steps with visual novels and bite-sized games would be the best idea to try to get back into traditional games (particularly since I was, and am, still questioning whether I like games as a hobby or not). On a whim, I decided to download a boatload of visual novel demos one night and tried a bunch of them out. Worldend Syndrome’s demo didn’t exactly grab me until perhaps halfway through the demo when I a) realised that this demo was long af, and b) nothing appeared what it had seemed as I kept going through it and the characters were enjoyable.

So I decided to get the game and dragged my fiancé along for the ride. It’s one of those standard decision-making/pick which girl you want and go down her route VNs but it didn’t really feel skeezy or ecchi other than one particular point in each girl’s story where you get confessed to. You go through the VN as an unnamed protagonist who is visiting his cousin over the summer, and you and your friends get dragged into a school club whose focus revolves around folklore. The town the protagonist finds himself in is haunted by the Yomibito, spirits of the undead who look exactly like regular people but are eventually driven mad enough to kill.

One of the things that drew me to this visual novel was its assortment of animated backgrounds. They colourful and gorgeous. Every CG looks nice and coloured well, and the backgrounds for each area you visit are so beautiful and makes every single location easy to settle into. The cast is also surprisingly decent, where I expected to hate a few people but I ended up being okay with them because they were written well and weren’t as tropey as I had expected. I was also very pleased that the character that you were roleplaying as wasn’t skeezy when put into situations where he could have been, and that he treated the girls very well (though I won’t deny that there are some spots where behaviour was questionable but it doesn’t happen as often). Because the characters were written adequately enough, the game’s true ending route comes together very well and very naturally to a point where I could seriously believe that every character got along with one another to make sure the emotional impact of the mystery was satisfying.

In order to finish Worldend Syndrome, you have to do each route. A few characters’ routes don’t get unlocked until halfway through the game or even until the very end. The game also remembers everything you’ve done when it autosaves the system data on the world map, so if you need to reload a save to figure out someone’s schedule or if you mess up, it’s relatively easy to come back to something you’ve missed. I’ve played a lot of multiple route VNs before and Worldend Syndrome is easily one of the better VNs that allows the player to skip through to something they’ve missed or skip through previously-viewed text for another route.

As it is, Worldend Syndrome doesn’t really try to do anything spectacular, nor does it try to stand out like other visual novels of 2019 have (ie: Ciconia, presumably AI but I only tried the demo and I hated parts of the script, sorry). It does its job and tells its story which has a very good payoff in the end.

Judgement

I bought my fiancé Judgement earlier this year, as I had retired from playing Ryu ga Gotoku after Dead Souls/Ishin, and he was still playing the series religiously. I watched him play through part of it and I felt compelled to get my own copy because the combat looked nice, and the characters were compelling enough that I felt comfortable picking it up.

Judgement follows former lawyer Takayuki Yagami who is now a detective. His tale is one of redemption and conspiracies, reminiscent of some Phoenix Wright games (which this game gives clever nods to when the protagonist is in the courtroom). Yagami is more serious and down-to-earth than Kiryu is so the tone of the game feels quite different than other RGG games (or at least the ones I’ve played).

It still feels like a regular RGG game where you’re still wandering through Kamurocho, you’re still getting into fights with randos and Yakuza dudes, you date girls, you go to buy food, you play minigames, etc. But it isn’t as big as a standard RGG game; because you stay only in the one area, the cast is smaller, you get a job board to get your sidequests from, and the story itself is fairly short and sweet. I actually prefer that as a lapsed RGG player since it’s easier to get back into the games this way.

Judgement, however, disappointed me just a little in how little you spend in the courtroom. You’re given opportunities to present evidence, do some suspect tailing, use your smartphone to catch a cheating husband, or use a drone to search for evidence. I felt like when you had to use the drone to search for evidence, it ruined the pacing a little. The tailing missions are also reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed, and no that isn’t a good thing! Due to this, I felt like Judgement was not necessarily a great detective game but it did a decent job of trying to mold the RGG experience to a different main character.

Yagami can… fight… for some reason so he can beat up whatever randos come up to him on the streets. He’s actually more acrobatic than I remember Kiryu being in previous RGG games. He can kick off objects, he’s hard to back into a corner, he can do wall-flips, etc. It’s also much easier to earn XP where it’s all in one bar so you can do whatever you want to fill it up like play darts and just put stuff into his lockpicking. As a lapsed fan, the streamlining feels okay. The streamlining for combat also feels good because if you fights go on too long, the popo can come for you and you’d get fined, so emphasis is on finishing fights cleanly and quickly.

Overall, as a lapsed RGG fan, the way Judgement looks and feels and wraps up its twists and turns was really exciting for me. It may not have as many things to do as other RGG games, but honestly I think being a leaner experience was better and thus didn’t make the game overstay its welcome. I also am eagerly awaiting RGG7 since I enjoyed the demo a lot and I think the new protagonist can carry the series the way Yagami carried Judgement.

Cadence of Hyrule

Sometimes, after my fiancé and I bought our Switch, I’d wake up, go brush my teeth, and return to bed just to see my fiancé awake and playing Cadence of Hyrule. I was perplexed as it’s been ages since he’d willingly played a Zelda game, and his hands are super-huge for the joycons so he doesn’t like using them much.

You can easily say that Cadence of Hyrule is just a Crypt of the Necrodancer reskin with Zelda stuff all over it, but feels pretty clever in that it uses stuff from roguelikes and a rhythm game and makes the A Link to the Past world feel incredibly fresh. Bosses, especially, feel very fresh. Enemies move according to the rhythm and have a unique pattern that’s easily memorized so you can fall into the rhythm and take advantage of. If you’ve played Necrodancer, you’ll probably feel at home in this aspect, especially since the maps are also randomised (which leads different playthroughs feeling fresh).

The Zelda feels comes from recreating tunes from older Zelda games in puzzles, the magnificent sprite art, the great Zelda remixes, a simple-enough story, and a standard set of things to find in each procedurally generated dungeon. You also find a variety of traditional items like the bow, the bombs, boomerang… and a spear? It’s a nice blend of Zelda and Necrodancer.

The caveat is that it takes a little getting used to, since you’re not exactly used to not being able to freely move in a Zelda game. But when you do get used to it, it feels good. Everything is pretty expendable and if you die, you don’t feel like you necessarily lose a lot since you can accrue it all easily enough again. It’s unpredictable and that random roguelike nature is something that makes the Zelda experience feel fresh.

Spirit Hunter: Death Mark

My fiancé and I were trying to find spooky games to play for Halloween that wouldn’t make me squeamish because despite my profession dealing with analysis of body parts and human body fluids, I can’t see that kind of stuff on TV or in games in a realistic sense. It grosses me out. At least when it’s in front of me, it’s already out and off someone’s body and in a fume hood/biosafety cabinet and I didn’t have to see how it happened. My fiancé picked up Spirit Hunter: Death Mark on a sale we went through it together.

Death Mark is a tale about horror-themed urban legends and a curse that needs to be broken. People get marked with a crimson bite mark in the game’s H City and they eventually develop amnesia and die. A group of people live and gather at a spirit medium’s mansion (who is dead upon arrival). The only hint to break the curse in this mansion is a little talking doll named Mary. The protagonist eventually goes through several mysteries in an effort to break his curse and stop others from dying.

Death Mark does some surprisingly well-crafted worldbuilding. Each spirit you deal with has a well-told backstory, sometimes especially ghoulish (particularly the bonus post-game episode, the first episode, and the one episode with the telephone booth). The game excels with psychological horror and the enemies involved in each boss battle assist in making the player feel that way as well. The backgrounds also lend well to this as while they are simplistic, the shading and colours used help to execute a sense of dread. One particular chapter harkens back to Japan’s Aokigahara, and the backgrounds used connect very well to that particular location so that it feels super-eerie.

Regardless, Death Mark relies a lot on its text to establish its atmosphere and as someone who reads stuff like R07 VNs and other regular VNs with a lot of text, I was okay with that. The localization was well-done, albeit with some issues that would have been caught in editing but overall it carried the story very well.

There are boss battles prior to the end of each chapter, where you must use each item you find in your exploration segments. You need to use specific items in a specific order (even with the correct party setup) in order to achieve a good ending for that particular chapter (and thus eventually the game). I thought this was an interesting mechanic and while it got a little tired depending on the spirit, it showcased how creepy some of them can be on your screen.

Unfortunately, Death Mark does not have a variety for its soundtrack and it’s almost disappointing that the same piano tunes and boss themes played repeatedly as I felt it detracted from the experience.

Otherwise, I felt like Death Mark was a short and sweet horror experience that played into urban legends and folklore experiences. I loved the little vignettes that eventually ramped up to a central story point. I hope the sequel is good when we get around to it.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

So my fiancé and I are doing this thing where we’ve started buying one copy of a game so we’d both own it together and go through it together. Sekiro and Man of Medan were two of those games this year.

Sekiro isn’t really like Souls. Eventually you’ll come to learn that very quickly when the game throws a boss at you and if you try to play like Souls, you’re not going to get the job done. It will show you that you never learned how to parry properly and you’re going to have to go back and learn it. Or if you didn’t grab a prosthetic that will make the job easier, you’re gonna have to do that too.

The game is interesting in that you aren’t exactly whittling down health bars all the time; you’re striking properly so you can overwhelm their posture bars, find an opening, and go in for the kill. Enemy health bars are essentially secondary to that posture bar. You have your own posture bar so you’ve got to learn how to parry properly. Sometimes you need to parry complete combos in order to deliver posture damage back to an enemy. It’s all about getting into the flow and rhythm of combat. And you must beat bosses in order for you to get a stat boost, so being able to beat a boss lies in your skill, and not necessarily your level/equipment.

Sekiro is Souls-like in its storytelling and worldbuilding. You can run around rooftops and areas to find secrets off the beaten path. You go back and forth between areas and speak to different NPCs to find out their backstories. The plot is also told via NPC conversations with the main characters. At first it’s a little dry but the story opens up eventually. It also has some great voiced NPCs for quests (one quest in particular had voicework that made me feel so sorry for the character that I was like “we need to get the proper item for this guy please don’t make him suffer”).

It feels rewarding to put in the work in order to beat the bosses, make it so you don’t resurrect as often to make people sick, and meet whatever standard Sekiro is throwing at you. It lets the player know that they’ve met that standard, and then throws another boss phase at them so you have to get even better.

Owl I’m looking at you.

Super Kirby Clash

My fiancé and I bought a Switch together this year (which, outside of dinner and movies and clothes, etc. was one of our major purchases together). We downloaded a few demos to try the control scheme out, including Super Kirby Clash. I am aware that this game is probably old, but hey it’s still going and it’s still being supported and I’m catching up.

I’m probably putting it here due to bias, but I think It’s really cute and the hats are super-adorable. I love getting new hats and new weapons for my little Kirby. It’s fairly standard as far as a “mobile experience” is concerned and playing it a little when I have the time to and hacking away at it little by little is rewarding when I get a new hat or new gear. My fiancé and I played it in multiplayer as well, which felt a lot like Kirby’s Return to Dream Land.

It’s pretty inoffensive and I haven’t paid real-life money for anything in it, and I still feel like I’m progressing. So as a Kirby game with light RPG elements (ie: something I’ve wanted for years and years), it’s nice to finally see realised.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

An artist I commission very often from convinced me to move this game further up in queue than I originally had it when we were talking about games we were playing after finishing Shadowbringers’ main campaign.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is the spiritual successor inspired by Wonder Boy III, with the formula being modernized for a new era. It feels fast, and it looks soooooooo pretty. The tracks are bumpin’ too. It’s also a little tough but with every difficult section successfully platformed through, you feel really good about it.

You play as a plucky boy named Jin whose uncle is an insano who turns everyone in the kingdom into animals. After you experience sweet freedom as a human boy platforming across things easily for like 15 minutes, Jin’s uncle turns him into a pig. Whoops. From there the platforming gets a little harder and you need to learn how to manipulate different forms and different spells in order to get across various sections.

Different animal forms give you different skills. Pig form allows you to sniff out secrets literally, snake form lets you cling to walls and go through tiny passages, frog has a sticky tongue for swinging, and lion form lets you go through obstacles. You need to use these forms well to platform well enough to get through each area and finish the game. Being successful at platforming in this game feels good and fulfilling and satisfying. As you unlock more, platforming experiences get more and more complex with more obstacles put in your way, so in essence it feels like the opposite of a standard metroidvania. Playing both Bloodstained and this in one year felt like playing polar opposites. That said, the checkpointing in Monster Boy is really good. Game Atelier knew what they were doing.

The bosses by contrast were really easy and it’s nice to take the time to look at the art for each boss. All of the effects are also super-nice. Playing Monster Boy on a 4K TV is quite a visual treat for its boss sections, its town section, and its platforming sections. The colours are off-the-charts. Each animal sprite has its own set of unique animations: the piggy farts and looks like >_>, froggy looking at flies, etc. And the music is so good. If this game were a 2019 game I’d definitely put its soundtrack on my list, but it isn’t. It’s a nice blend of new and old stuff and it’s a delight to hear in-context as encouragement to keep going when you fail a platforming section.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a faithful representation and homage of the old Wonder Boy games. It’s filled with references and secrets and awesome art, and I’m glad to have been convinced to move it up my queue for this year.

Most Disappointing Game: Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

I love Final Fantasy XIV. It’s brought me closer to so many people in recent years and I’ve met so many more through it. Playing this game means so much to me and I want the best for it for years to come. It’s one of the reasons why I’m so critical about it. If I hated this game, I would stop playing and honestly, I wouldn’t care about its future. I will say this before getting started: I like Shadowbringers’ story so far (we aren’t going to be finished with its story until 5.3). I don’t think It’s necessarily as consistent as Heavensward, but I think Shadowbringers’ story is the most Final Fantasy story we’ve gotten since perhaps FF10. Truly, it’s the best we’ve seen for the series this decade.

I had a lot of hopes and hype for Shadowbringers. I hated Stormblood, for a myriad of reasons: social reasons, gameplay reasons, and narrative reasons. The direction Shadowbringers was going and all the trailers made it seem like it was going to be fresh and exciting and new. My fiancé and I (and a few others) swapped servers+data centers in advance of the expansion for a fresh start, to boot. I watched the Job Actions trailer over and over and tried to decide what I was going to eventually main and gear up because I didn’t really have a main in Stormblood due to the combat changes and how easy things became for certain things.

During a live letter, they mentioned that they’re changing how things work in battle, and that’s when I became a little cautious. I was hoping for the best leading up to release and then I saw the scholar/healer changes and got very worried. I changed mains in Stormblood because playing Scholar was freaking horrible at the start of Stormblood.

I eventually had to change mains at the start of Shadowbringers because I was not having fun playing Scholar. For people who didn’t bother to level a healer at all, the writing was on the wall for healers during Stormblood. Essentially, it introduced an age of healing where you barely ever used your GCDs to heal. You mostly used OGCDs and preplanned shields. 90% of the time if you wanted to be a good healer, you’d mostly DPS. I don’t think I’ve cast a GCD heal at all in SB and ShB content unless things were going super-wrong.

The healing changes introduced in Shadowbringers made us think that things were going to change, that things were going to be harder to heal. I had my doubts, however, because all fights are scripted and if they were to introduce a substantial change to incoming damage, they would have to make it so most people (casual, midcore, hardcore, less experienced newbies, experienced folks) would be used to It and could handle it. There was no way they were going to introduce more difficulty given that subscription numbers were increasing.

And so, healers during Shadowbringers got some damage skills taken away, but in their place, they were given more tools to heal with:

- White Mage came away from this as a very well-rounded healer at launch. It had its damage spells, it had a damage spell with a stun, it finally had long-standing and easily useable mitigation, it has substantial MP recovery, and it has a damage spell that rewards you for using three GCD heals to make up for damage lost. White Mage still making out like a bandit in 5.1.

- Scholar felt dramatically different and didn’t feel as solid as it used to be. It had most of its damage tools taken away, the usefulness of its fairy was decreased because let’s be honest it was super-overpowered, it got one of its fairies and its AoE esuna taken away, and it was given its PvP move to act as an AoE that doesn’t have another effect. I had to completely unlearn everything I did as scholar in the last 5-6 years in order to play current scholar. Current 5.1 scholar is overpowered as heck and I don’t feel as satisfied to play it in SB/ShB content.

- AST LOL. All the cards are balance. MP regen is what. Heals are what. Everything is just what. Other fun skills were removed. That said, I really like AST just because it feels like I have to work twice as hard to achieve the same effect the other healers bring to the table.

So eventually with all of these changes, we had assumed that healing was going to be harder. It wasn’t. It’s the same experience and all we’re doing is pressing one single button all the time. I barely have to heal in dungeons. I barely have to heal in raid unless my party members step in stupid. I just can’t bring myself to play healer every single day anymore, and I love healing in this game. Or I loved it back when it was more dynamic. I just press one button over and over and over and over and over and maybe sometimes another but I just press one button a lot. It’s really sad and it makes me miss old Cleric Stance of all things.

I like Shadowbringers’ story. I felt rewarded playing through it as someone who’s played the game for years and did everything when it was in-content. So for me, it was like a good reunion. There were a lot of points where the story dragged or felt rocky. I felt like the start of the 5.0 campaign was utterly boring and poorly paced. It picked up again, then slowed down again, then picked up again, then got REALLY BAD, then picked up again for a good finish. I don’t think it’s as consistent as Heavensward’s 3.0 campaign, but it was very solid and made up for the 4.0 campaign.

However, story is only 20% of the experience for me. The rest of the time, I need to actually play the game. I actually liked the levelling and crafting changes and new skills they brought in during 5.0 because leveling a crafter never felt easier. I felt like I still had to work hard but the payoff came quickly and my macros still worked as well as they did from during Stormblood. I also used my Stormblood melds and Stormblood equipment for the entire levelling experience and had to make concessions for some of my macros as time went on. I still had to know what my skills did, basically. The 5.1 crafting/gathering changes kind of make me want to craft less since I don’t feel like I have to solve a puzzle anymore and to be honest, everyone crafts now so you make far less money than you previously did. The desynth changes also made it so that most of my markets tanked since what’s the point of gathering half the materials when desynth makes those materials easily accessible. I’m not saying to gatekeep at all, but I feel like the experience should have been a little harder (ie: like the Ixali experience where you had to learn what your skills did or desynth shouldn’t be this easy to keep the market fairly balanced). My server is a crafting server so I am more impacted in general from this. That said, I don’t have anything to spend gil on so it doesn’t matter, I guess. I just feel far less inclined to participate in what was one of my favourite pastimes in XIV.

I mained Ninja which got killed in 5.0. I was already dealing with the servers moving from East Coast to West Coast, so adding a bunch of stuff to squeeze into your TA window in 10 seconds in Shadowbringers utterly killed the job for me. 5.1 Ninja throws me off as someone who played this game since the time Ninja was introduced, and I can’t make myself play it. The current opener is the Doton opener (which is something I didn’t like in SB at all) and I can’t always rely on my tank to bring the thing to my Doton. That, and making it so you do different things per every other or every third TA just makes the job a little unpalatable for me at 80. I’m one of those people who wants TA to go. I don’t like that Ninja’s become the TA bot in recent years. I can still do well with it. People still throw buffs at me, but I don’t find enjoyment in the job anymore and I hope we get a proper retool in 6.0.

I switched back to ranged. Thankfully Bard hasn’t changed as much since SB (though I still prefer HW Bard like a weirdo), and Dancer is one of those “I worked too damn long today and I just wanna do the mindless brainless rotation” jobs. I miss old Machinist oddly enough. It felt really good when you played it well and pulled off a decent wildfire. Now it’s a little easier and I don’t feel as fulfilled playing it. That said, it’s probably the best incarnation of the job since it’s sad little introduction in 3.0.

Even tanking is substantially easier and that’s a mostly good thing. It sucked going into a low level dungeon and having trouble keeping aggro due to the level syncing and your DPS’ stats. Now you can just turn your stance on and go to town without losing any damage potency like you used to. I kind of miss swapping stances after I’ve established aggro though, because you could tell the difference between a good tank and a bad/less practiced tank if they didn’t bother to swap stances in a fight. Tanks came out of this expansion very balanced, though. They might need some work here and there (warrior I’m looking at you), but overall, they came out the best out of the three roles.

Other than that, you have monks not knowing what they should be, samurai continuously getting buffed and nerfed, black mage staying consistent, red mage being lol, summoner getting changed to the point where now it’s overpowered, among other DPS changes. DPS overall don’t have as much synergy so you can take any job you want to into raid and it’ll get the job done. That said if you want to do as much damage as possible, you’re generally going to take the same few classes into the raid if you’re less educated about them. And I feel like the lack of synergy or utility between classes or even the loss of something like mana shift makes the whole experience a little boring. It’s very “f you, I got mine” or the onus is on the player for their own personal burdens and no one’s really helping each other unless you’re a dancer, trick attack bot, dragoon or bard.

I really hope the other pieces of content are substantial but what I’ve seen aren’t exactly what I had in mind. Boss refights with an alternate version is really neat but I didn’t really want that for this raid tier. I wanted something more original given what we had to deal with in Omega. I don’t really care for the Nier Automata crossover because, again, I wanted something original to the XIV lore and the First. I think doubling down on Blue Mage is a bad idea and while some folks like its party-based content now, I can’t bring myself to keep doing the content given that it’s clear they don’t know what to do with it (or didn’t know what to do with it). With one dungeon coming per patch I have to question what’s happening internally or what they’re working on. I know SE is weird internally and I really hope that the kind of stuff I’ve read in previous postmortem articles isn’t happening.

Either way, I’m really disappointed that I want to stop playing XIV so much when it’s the most popular among my friends and followers because it’s so dissatisfying to me and it’s the most accessible that it’s ever been. I hope things get better eventually but going by what I think they have in store and their old reliable formula, I don’t have hope. I’m tired of the formula and I feel like it needs a shakeup. Overall, I’ve been less happy playing FFXIV than I’ve ever been and it makes me feel really sad.

#goty 2019 #ciconia when they cry #bloodstained #the touryst #a short hike #worldend syndrome #judgment #cadence of hyrule #spirit hunter death mark #sekiro #super kirby clash #shadowbringers

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flipping-voltron-imagines · 6 years

Text

“I will find you”

Shiro x reader

A/N: Woah, who’s this chick? That’s right, after many weeks, I’m releasing something I’ve been working on for about a month now. I hope y'all like it, and hopefully there are more things like this in the near future. Also, VOLTRON SEASON 8 IS GOING TO DROP TOMORROW! WOAHHH

Word Count: 3756

Gender neutral

Warnings: death of close friends, mentions of blood

“We’re stuck in the gravitational pull,” Captain Murdoch summarized, turning around to look up from his computer screen at Regis and I. Tears waited to fall at the brim of his eyes. “I don’t know what will happen or what’s on the other side of it, but we have a decision to make.”

When I left on a mission two years ago, I didn’t think I would end up dying. We were supposed to be collecting data on a planet that could be used as a human colony. The play was this: two years to journey there, one to collect data on planet, and two for the return trip. When I got back, I’d planned on marrying my boyfriend, Shiro, who would be coming back from a mission of his own at around the same time. We hadn’t even made it to the planet before we got stuck.

Next to me, Arianna Regis huffed. She was our mechanic and several years older than Murdoch and I, and always seemed to be grumpy. Luckily Murdoch and I were cheery enough to combat her negativity. “What other options do we have? We’re going to die. No use trying to delay the inevitable.” She crossed her arms and stared Murdoch down.

The captain shook his head and gestured to the computer screen behind him. It had a different flight plan and stats than we were used to seeing all the time. “Not necessarily. We could try and use the amount of fuel it would have taken to get to Ardexian-” the planet we were were checking out, “-and try to pull out and head back home, as well as expel extra supplies, making it easier to escape.” Turned and touched the screen with his fingernail to trace the updated flight pattern. “Or we could allow ourselves to be sucked in and possibly die.”

“So we can either die having done nothing, or die trying,” Regis commented. “Gee.”

“No. It’s more like... we can either most likely die putting up a fight, die not trying, or live after fighting.” Two of those options sounded terrible and one sounded slightly better that then others. I looked outside. The glowing blue blob in space, while it would have made an excellent and beautiful aesthetic wallpaper for my phone, terrified me. It would probably be the cause of our demise, but I wanted a chance at escaping it. I wanted a chance at marrying my boyfriend, the love of my life.

“This is ridiculous,” muttered Regis. “We’re going to die, there is no question about it. I say we just speed up the process and crash into this... thing...” She messed with the hem of her shirt and glared out the window.

Murdoch gave her a steely look. “No, we aren’t going to do that,” he sighed, then inhaled deeply. “I’m suggesting we try and escape. Now whether or not we actually do that is up to you two.”

“You know where I stand,” Regis announced. She stood up and stretched her arms over her head. “I’m going to sleep. Let me know what we’re doing.” Then she stalked off to the back of the ship where our individual tiny quarters were, taking the negative air with her.

Murdoch and I simultaneously released a relieved breath. I stood straighter and moved closer to one of the windows. I leaned my head against the thick glass. The decision seemed simple to me. If I were to die, I’d want to die knowing I’d done my best to escape. Getting out was a possible bonus, like attempting the extra credit on a math test, where you know you’re probably not going to get it right but just in case you do, it’ll help you and save your grade.

The captain relaxed in his chair, slumping forward. “What do you want to do?” He was so casual in his approach that it almost felt like he was trying too hard.

“We try and get out. If it doesn’t work... maybe there’s something on the other side.”

And something on the other side there was. They’d tried to escape the gravitational pull but couldn’t, and for days they floated through space, aware of their impending doom. They entered the glowing blue thing without even realizing it was happening. Suddenly out monitors turned all fuzzy and all of our machinery made weird noises. Just about everything shut down. It took Regis almost a week to get everything up and running properly again, but we couldn’t figure out what our location was. The blue light gone, and with nothing else do to, we put our sensors on the highest setting and continued on in hopes of finding some sort of planet we could survive on.

We drifted for about a year. One tense year. Regis was constantly in a mood worse than before, having lost hope in ever seeing her family again. The captain, though he tried not to show it, was losing hope as well. He had to keep up a brave face. Every waking moment was spent in front of his computer, staring, watching for any sign of a planet that we could inhabit. As for me, I tried to stay upbeat. My job, as a communications officer, was to stay in contact with the garrison and be on the lookout for aliens and try to be on good terms with them. Since passing through that weird blue thing, which wed established as some sort of portal, my lines had been dead and I couldn’t make contact with the garrison at all. So basically I had nothing to do all day for a solid year. It took all I had not to go crazy, so I ended up creating random tasks for myself, such as creating an entirely new language. I taught it to Regis and Murdoch, and we sometimes used it to communicate.

Then we stumbled upon a giant ship. We received no replies to my messages, and it wasn’t moving. Common sense told us that there was something bad in there and if we went in, searching for supplies, we were dead; common sense also told us that if we didn’t take this chance, we could be dead anyways. Who knew we would become scavengers?

Despite all the dead bodies around, we kind of liked being on this ship. There was a lot of food, oxygen, and softer beds. After a little debating, we decided that we would stash our ship in one of the holding bays and keep it ready, just in case we had to escape suddenly. In order to make the ship seem undisturbed, we only lived in a few of the rooms tucked away in the corner by the kitchen. Whatever alien species lived there kept a very orderly ship. I took it upon myself to learn the language so that I could translate should the need arise, and also so that I could help maneuver around the ship.

We stayed there for months. During that time we met Sven-who I thought was Shiro, for a short time-and Slav. Regis didn’t like either of them very much, but Murdoch and I were both grateful to have someone new to talk to, someone less depressing than Regis. Slav was crazy but insanely smart. Murdoch really liked him. After I determined the difference between Shiro and Sven we became great friends. Our friendship reminded me of my own pre-relationship friendship with Shiro, but I still had hope we would get back to Earth; there was no way I was going to pursue a relationship with him. I wanted to marry Shiro, not his lookalike.

A day of action came when I was tired. I’d slept terribly the night before, kept awake by dreams of my wedding day, one of which included Sven.

My bedroom door opened and Murdoch poked his head into my room to see if I was awake, which I was, and had been for hours, so I just looked at him out of the corner of my eyes. “Y/N, you need to come check this out,” he said. “The scanners started going crazy, but we don’t know what they’re saying.” Even though I doubted I would be able to translate for them, as I was only able to recognize a few words, I got up. My pajamas were rumpled and I was completely unaware that I would soon be seeing the faces of people I hadn’t seen in a very long time.

“I think we should get back into hiding,” I muttered as I brushed past him. “It’s probably someone coming to see what’s going on. We need to get out of the way so they don’t find us.” I made my way to what I called “the command center” but it was really just a couple of computers I’d moved early on.

“No. Not until we find out who’s here.” He caught up to me easily. “If they’re just pirates, we can scare them away. We’ve done it before.”

Soon we heard voices. They spoke English and sounded younger. Regis stalked them quietly for a while, and finally we determined them to be trustworthy. Somehow people from Earth had stumbled upon this same ship, and we wanted to stay with them.

“Maybe they can help us get home,” Regis reasoned when she reported to us. Suddenly given a spark of hope, she was willing to do anything to help us get out of here.

I was super ready to get out of this alien ship. It smelled weird, and... I thought the skeletons might have been watching me... their creepy heads inside their helmets sometimes seemed to turn when I walked by.

The next thing I knew, Regis’ screams echoed through the hall. She’d gone back out to continue following the group, who weren’t human but didn’t seem all that dangerous. Murdoch and I froze. My body turned cold, and suddenly Murdoch was shoving me inside a hollowed out computer system. He told me to be quiet. I thought he was finding a place to hide too, but then I heard him get shot and a loud metallic thud.

I shrunk pack further into my hiding spot and covered my mouth with my hands. I wanted to scream and cry. Captain Murdoch was dead, and so was Arianna Regis, and I had nowhere to bury them.

The intruders ransacked the place, destroying all of my equipment. The steady beeping that once filled the room because of my scanners stopped. I was left alone.

I stayed in my hiding place for a long time. I slept four times before I finally worked up the courage to leave. My body was incredibly stiff. As I emerged and stretched, I kept my eyes on the ceiling. Murdoch’s body was probably on the floor, and judging from the lack of that distinct smell of iron, there was no blood, so I forced myself to look. Two years spent with this man, supporting him and being supported by him, having really deep conversations with him, and growing to genuinely love him as a friend... I felt robbed of an experience and a friendship I could have had for the rest of my life. There were scorch marks on the cloth over his heart. He didn’t suffer, which was a relief.

For five minutes I sat by the door just listening and staring at Murdoch’s body. Those... pirates had robbed me of more than just my equipment. They’d stolen my best friends. If I ever found them, I would kill them.

For days I stumbled around, gathering supplies. I’d never leave my control room if I didn’t need to. The only time I left was to shove Murdoch and Regis’ bodies out of an airlock and send them into space. If they couldn’t be buried, I knew that that was how they would have wanted to be dealt with. They both had a love for the stars.

Slav and Sven came back again, this time bringing company. When they found me, they had been running and I could tell they were in danger. They needed a place to hide for a few minutes and I could give them that.

When I realized who one of the people in the large group was, I burst into tears. “Keith!” I cried, and latched onto him.

“Y/N?” He wrapped his arms stiffly around my shoulders and pat my back. “What are you doing here?”

I pulled way from him and sniffled. “I uh... my team... we got trapped in this gravitational pull and ended up here, wherever here is.”

“It’s an alternate universe,” said one of his friends, dressed in white and green armor. I noticed then that all of Keith’d friends had matching armor. I recognized her as Matt’s sister. He’d shown me a picture of he and his sister together while telling me a story about her. I think her name was Katie, but Matt always referred to her as “Pidge.”

“Wow, really?” I put my hand on top of my head.

“Where’s the rest of your team?”

My silence seemed enough of an answer for Keith. He quickly went around, introducing his friends and explaining what he was doing out in space. “We’re the Paladins of Voltron,” he finished, “and if you want, you can come with us.”

I agreed, and after some adventuring and an adrenaline rush, I was safe in this weird castle. Allura, whom I became close friends with, helped teach me the language I’d been trying to teach myself. Lance, Hunk, and Pidge were all teens that I had met at one point or another. I remember them always being together on campus, and they reminded me of my own team. Seeing them together warmed my heart and made me incredibly sad at the same time.

When walking back to our rooms one night with the rest of the paladins, I noticed that there was a door between my room and the last one, Lance. “Whose room is this?”

Lance looked at me with wide eyes. His eyes flickered back and forth rapidly between me and the door in question. “It’s uh... it’s Shiro’s.”

“Shiro,” I repeated shortly, my lips turing down. “As in Takashi Shirogane, my Fiancé.” I rolled my eyes and put my hands on my hips. “Why wasn't I told about him? Where is he?”

“He’s been missing.”

Missing?

No no, that can’t be. After everything I’d been through, with my teammates dying and being lost in space for who knows how long, I thought that if I were to be rescued I would have some peace, but peace would not find me just yet. It wasn’t my time. As soon as I find Shiro, I’m dragging him back home and neither of us are leaving Earth ever again.

“Y/N, I’m trying my best to find him,” Keith told me softly, “and I could use all the help I can get.”

Of course I’d help him. Shiro was my person and there was no way I would just let him go. I told Keith as such and he led me to a room where I could stay. He told me to sleep and that I could begin to help him once I was well rested.

Finding Shiro was more difficult than I thought. Before I left on my mission, I thought I understood just how big space is. Soon after my mind was blown when I realized that there was truly nothing out there for more than I could possibly imagine, and again I thought I understood just how big space is. Finding Shiro proved me wrong. I went out with Keith in his black lion all the time, constantly checking various places and taking over different alien-sorry, Galran-ships in hopes of finding him blew my mind once again. I soon came to the conclusion I would never understand just how big the universe is. “Never get too comfortable with how much you know,” I told myself almost every day, “because when you do you stop learning.”

I was hardly comfortable when searching for knowledge on Shiro’s whereabouts. He had to be somewhere. My heart always felt a strange tug, like I knew he was alive somewhere, and I think Keith felt something similar. Our constant, subtle tugging is what kept us going. Even though the others didn’t say anything, I knew they were giving up. They didn’t feel the tug like we did.

Confident we’d find Shiro in time, I urged Keith to relax a little. “He’s not going to be found any sooner if you run yourself ragged. If anything, you’re only preventing yourself from finding him.”

Bitter that I was “less serious about finding Shiro” than he was, he muttered, “At least I’m looking,” but in a much longer, less friendly statement.

“Listen bud, you’ve got two choices,” I told him soon after that interaction. He was sitting at the kitchen, awkwardly avoiding eye contact with me while he ate breakfast. “You can either accept the little bit that I’m doing to help, or you can push me away like you have everyone else in this castle. I’ve known you since you were a kid. I really want to help, but I can’t do that if you don’t let me.”

Keith’s eyes then flickered and met mine. After offering him a small smile, he nodded and muttered an apology.

The kid may be a brat sometimes, but he was very stressed.

The next day I woke up with an urgent anxiety settled over my chest. I needed to do something as soon as possible, so I woke up Keith. “We have to go. Now.”

“What?” He pushed himself up onto his elbows, staring at me with bleary eyes. “What’s going on, Y/N?”

“I don’t know, I just have a weird feeling.”

Keith got dressed, I grabbed some food from the kitchen to take with us and eat on the go, and we met at the Black Lion.

We were out for a long time. Keith was a little annoyed with me because we weren’t going anywhere in particular but he understood that I was antsy. He had days like those, too, after all, but I knew what that feeling was, and this wasn’t it. I don’t know how to explain what I felt, really, other than that feeling when you’re running really late for an appointment so you’re going way above the speed limit when driving but knowing that it won’t get you there in time.

Suddenly, the Black Lion stopped and turned. It threw me off my feet and I hit my head on the ground. The roar it let out seconds later added to my pain.

“What’s wrong?” he asked the lion, gripping the controls a little tighter. A scanner popped up and began to pulse.

“It’s Shiro,” I whispered.

“We found him,” Keith agreed.

I started to dance on my feet with a huge smile. “Keith! We found him!” I leaned over his seat and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. After giving him a few shakes and squeezes, we laughed, feeling the huge weight be lifted from our shoulders. That relief was so sweet, something I hadn’t felt in years.

“He’s too far away for us to go now.” I had yet to learn Altean completely, so I had no clue what his screen said. “We need the castle.” Why we needed the castle I would soon learn. It could travel through space a lot faster than any of the lions could. Within a couple of hours, Shiro’s ship was in our sights.

Once the Black Lion was close enough to Shiro’s ship, I scrambled to put an extra space suit on and together Keith and I jetted to the Galran ship. Shiro, with movements sluggish and weak, managed to press a few buttons to open it and we took him back to the lion. I sat with him, hugging his bicep and rubbing his back as he took long, deep breaths.

“How did you get here?” he rasped, looking at me with a soft expression. He was a little dazed because of his previous lack of oxygen, but he seemed to be doing better now.

I shook my head. That story was too long to tell now, while he was barely conscious. “I’ll tell you later, my love.” I pressed a kiss to his scruffy cheek and brushed his long stringy hair out of his eyes. A decent hair washing and haircut were definitely in his near future.

It was then that I noticed the glint of metal on his other arm. I would ask later.

“I’m ready to take a nap,” Shiro said and laughed breathily.

“Me too.” After a few moments of silence, Ketih landed the lion back in the castle. I helped Shiro stand up. Walking down the ramp was a struggle for him. He was so weak shaky, I was afraid that he would fall down. Luckily he managed to stay upright. He nodded and said hello to each of the Paladins, and we took him to shower and get cleaned up. Keith helped with that, me being too dazed to be of any use. Shiro emerged wearing clean clothes and sporting a new haircut. I helped him to his room.

“Stay,” he murmured when I helped him lay down. Of course I would stay. In fact, I would never leave his side again.

Shiro insisted on hearing my story before he went to sleep, so I recounted my journey to him: being stuck in another universe, my teammates dying, meeting Slav and Sven, being found by Keith and going back with him, finding out he was missing... I described to him how I felt while trying to find him. I told him about the tug I felt in my heart and how I knew he was alive through that. “And then today, I felt so anxious, I think I knew I needed to find you as soon as possible. It’s like my soul knew you were in trouble. And... in finding you, I think that... in whatever universe, my soul will find you.”

Shiro smiled and kissed me softly. Soon we were asleep, comfortable in each other’s arms. I was so relieved that the weight on my chest was gone. I had survived, I’d found Shiro, and even though my teammates were dead, I wouldn’t have this ending any other way.

#vld #voltron #shiro #takashi #shirogane #x reader #imagine #scenario #fluff #reunion #prompt #black lion #black paladin #black #lion #paladin #paladins #lions

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thesportssoundoff · 6 years

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“A good yet stained main card with plenty of prospects and debuts on the undercard” The UFC Fight Night Tuivasa vs JDS Preview

Joey

November 27th

After a TUF FInale, the UFC heads to Australia where...well...things have always been hit or miss. Australian PPVs tend to be damn fun shows but these Aussie fight nights? Woof. They can be hit or miss. The one last November holds the record for the longest UFC fight night ever and I believe it STILL holds the record to this day. The UFC rolls into Australia with a really good main card and some intriguing prelims but I'm not as excited about it now as I was a week or so ago. We'll get into that. The main card's theme in so many words is about the best Australia has to offer minus stars like Robert Whittaker taking on some proven talent that's either looking to take their place (Justin Willis, Tony Martin) or looking to hold onto their spots (Shogun and JDS). The fights are well put together and intriguing on paper----but I'm having a tough time really getting into it. The prelims feature some tremendous fights at the lighter weight classes, a few intriguing debuts and a welterweight looking to survive the Yushin Okami test. This show SHOULD be well worth your time and hopefully your concerns are not my concerns either.

Fights: 12

Debuts: Jim Crute, Sodiq Yusuff, Suman Mokhtarian, Kai Kara-France, Damir Ismagulov, Alex Gorgees

Fight Changes/Injury Cancellations: 3 (Ross Pearson OUT, Damir Ismagulov IN vs Joe Duffy/Joe Duffy OUT, Alex Gorgees IN vs Damir Ismagulov/Askhan Mokhtarian OUT, Elias Garcia IN vs Kai Kara-France)

Headliners (fighters who have either main evented or co-main evented shows in the UFC): 6 (Shogun Rua, Mark Hunt, Junior Dos Santos, Jake Matthews, Yushin Okami, Wilson Reis)

Fighters On Losing Streaks in the UFC: (Wilson Reis, Mizuto Hirota)

Fighters On Winning Streaks in the UFC: (Tai Tuiavasa, Justin Willis, Tony Martin, Jake Matthews)

Main Card Record Since Jan 1st 2016 (in the UFC): 26-12-1

Tai Tuiavasa- 3-0 Junior Dos Santos- 2-1 Justin Willis- 3-0 Mark Hunt- 2-3-1 Shogun Rua- 2-1 Tyson Pedro- 3-2 Jake Matthews- 4-2 Tony Martin- 5-1 Paul Craig- 3-2 Jim Crute- 0-0 Suman Mokhtarian- 0-0 Sodiq Yusuff- 0-0

Divisional Breakdown:

Flyweight- 3 Welterweight- 2 Lightweight- 2 Heavyweight- 2 Light Heavyweight- 2 Featherweight- 1

Too High Up- Jim Crute vs Paul Craig

I actually really really like this fight----as something for the prelims. Paul Craig has struggled with guys like Crute; hard hitters who are a smidge more athletic than him who are don't panic on the feet and pressure him into making mistakes. Jim Crute fits that bill and there's a lot of unknowns about Crute that makes this a compelling match up. Crute tends to start slow and is hittable; opening up some doors for Craig. We also don't know how good he is on the ground which is an avenue by which Crute could be exposed. It's a fine fight as a prelim headliner or something of that ilk. It's a good fight, just a bit too over the top for the main card. Chances are this one is about to be a little ugly too. Both guys have some serious technical flaws on the feet.

Too Low- Wilson Reis vs Ben Nguyen

The prelims on this card are perfectly fine for a filler December Fight Night; it's basically a lot of Japan vs the world fights (Australia, Russia and Germany) with a few filler flyweight fights thrown in. I like Reis vs Nguyen though. Even though Ben Nguyen has basically been scrubbed every time he gets tasked with taking a step up, Reis is the sort of guy he can have a hell of an action fight with. Reis vs Nguyen could be a fun fight and the main card could use that even if it interrupts the Australia vs the world run.

Stat Monitor for 2018:

Debuting Fighters (Current number: 32-40-1): Jim Crute, Sodiq Yusuff, Suman Mokhtarian, Kai Kara-France, Damir Ismagulov, Alex Gorgees

Short Notice Fighters (Current number: 31-30): Elias Garcia, Alex Gorgees

Second Fight (Current number: 39- 33-1): Elias Garcia, Salim Touahri, Alexey Kunchenko, Christos Giagos

Cage Corrosion (Current number: 22-37): 0

Undefeated Fighters (Current number: 31-23-1): Alex Gorgees

Keeping An Eye On But Not Really; Fighters with at least four fights in the UFC with 0 wins over competition still in the organization:

Twelve Precarious Ponderings

1- Has Tito vs Chuck dampened anybody else's enjoyment of this card? MMA tends to be a swing of extremes and so when something's really good, it tends to make everything else seem really good and when something's really bad, we tend to all swing in the opposite direction and assume everything is bad. I'm in the latter right now with the top three fights on this card. JDS has been flattened every time he's faced a puncher recently with Overeem and Miocic (twice) beating him up pretty badly. The Cain fights speak for themselves of course. Tai Tuivasa may be limited in a collection of areas but he hits really hard and carries that power pretty well seemingly. I just saw Shogun get laid out by Anthony Smith and while the damage Shogun's taken may be somewhat overstated compared to the other guys involved in the "big" fights, he's been laid out in four of his last five losses. Lastly you have Mark Hunt who is way over 40 and had a full medical evaluation done after he did an interview alleging some form of brain damage. He was cleared ("and said he was joking") but he's fighting another guy who hits really hard after decades of combat sports abuse. It just feels like all of these fights paint a somewhat unsettling picture and maybe that's just the Chuck/Tito afterglow on it. I still am pretty excited for three "young guy vs old lion" fights----but man if I'm not giving this a second look and hoping we've got quick trigger finger refs available.

2- Is JDS a step too far for Tai Tuivasa? Tuivasa debuted around this time last year and he ran through some so-so dudes in Rashad Coulter and then Cyril Asker. He got a sturdy test in Andrei Arlovski in the midst of yet another career rebirth and he passed that well enough. He looked lost early, got hit a bit and then made adjustments and brawled his way back into the fight. It wasn't the sort of performance that would make you think he's ready for JDS but at the same time, JDS isn't the same guy he was in 2012 or 2013. Dos Santos' wins have all felt the same; he's comfortable when there's space and when he can press forward, he still has the primary traits and tools necessary to trouble dudes who are limited athletically or the types of HWs who rely on toughness and grappling (since he's impossible to take down) but dudes like Stipe and Overeem had zero issues walking him down and less issues finding his chin. JDS' ability to get in and out of harm's way comes and goes and fighters who can pressure him early can get him to back straight up and give them ample avenues to fire away. Lastly, Tuivasa just has a lot of different avenues to hurt JDS and while I have questions about HIS defensive ability; I feel like when shit gets squirrely you bet on the youth. At the same time this is HW and at heavyweight, nobody is ever really "done" unless they're completely comatose. Andrei Arlovski has been gone, come back and then been gone again. Alistair Overeem feels like he's one win away from pushing himself into the big fights again. Derrick Lewis' early UFC runs were blemished by losses to dudes like Shawn Jordan and Matt Mitrione. This shit is never really over and so I'm wondering if JDS is about to wow us with yet another HW renaissance.

3- This has to be Tyson Pedro's last chance to be something, right? Losses to Latifi and OSP in fights that he probably should've won puts you in this do or die spot, no?

4- Can't tell if Justin WIllis vs Mark Hunt is an attempt to body Hunt on his way out of the organization or the UFC just throwing names and faces they have no interest in together. Willis is kinda good but also 31 and struggled with Chase Sherman's pressure at times. Not an ideal step up for him.

5- Jake Matthews vs Tony Martin is pretty interesting on paper and could be a lot of fun come fight night. I threw in the towel on Matthews a while ago but he's rallied to win three straight at 170 lbs and looks like a different fighter mentally than the dude who struggled with Andrew Holbrook. Martin is a fine fighter who has also found himself up 15 lbs at 170. Martin is probably still going to be worlds smaller than Matthews but he's a pressure fighter who is good enough everywhere that Jake Matthews shouldn't be able to run over him. If he does then it'll be pretty damn impressive and another stamp that Matthews at 170 lbs is a serious big time fighter to keep in mind.

6- Can we pencil in Overeem vs the winner of JDS/Tuivasa now or should we at least wait a while?

7- Either way I wonder if a quick turnaround is coming for either HW winner if he gets it done in short order. Both Ngannou and Overeem had quickie finishes and January's ESPN+ show is approaching quickly.

8- What is the incentive to make weight if you're a flyweight? Wilson Reis is a guy who has a pronounced big cut, Ben Nguyen could probably make 135 lbs easy enough, Kai Kara-France is in his debut so he can't fuck up his weight cut obviously while Elias Garcia is a small dude (like natural 125 lber small) who is taking it on short notice. What's the point if everybody knows this division is going away?

9- Sodiq Yusuff is about become yet another really talented kinda impossible to promote "problem" for the UFC. Dude's damn good and worthy of your time though.

10- Chrisos Giagos fought in late September vs Charles Oliveira and now he's back out here throwing down in December vs Mizuto Hirota. Maybe this is how he keeps his stay in the UFC, as the busy hungry man dude who takes a bunch of fights nobody else wants at any time. He has a good chance to beat Hirota from distance at least.

11- If you thought Alexey Kunchenko could be a big star, why the fuck would you put him in there vs Yushin Okami of all people? That SEEMS like a bad idea across all levels.

12- Damir Ismagulov was signed shortly after the UFC's big success in Russia and it makes sense given that he's an M1 champion and big enough deal in Russia. The UFC tried to get Imsagulov onto the China card with apparently three different opponents falling through. They squeezed him in on a short notice deal vs Joe Duffy (and I think he would've won that fight personally) but Duffy pulled out so now he faces undefeated Kiwi Alex Gorgees. Something tells me Ismagulov is going to get fast tracked.

#MMA #UFC #Australia #Hunt #JDS #Tuavasa #Pedro #Shogun

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taeyamayang · 2 years

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i'm late but congrats on graduating and hitting 1k followers!! i'm so proud to see how far you've grown ^^ there is nowhere else to look but up now, all the best for your future endeavours ヽ(＾Д＾)ﾉ

idk why it is, but this semester has been having my brain running on fuel 25/8 . i suppose it's due to the increase of projects compared to last sem, but boy do they suck the life out of you. 😓 these last few weeks/month have been me running on autopilot trying to catch up to deadlines and constantly trying to not cause an argument with my groupmates every minute (whoever said that engineering guys are green flags need to change their opinion stat.). thank heavens that my sem break is soon because i can't stand being around them for any longer 😫(these are the same people i have to put up with until i finish my final year project, can you believe it? 🥲).

as i'm writing this, i have an exam i need to sit for in t minus 10 hours so wish me luck 🥲

anyways, now that you've graduated, are there any big plans that you are excited for? maybe a trip you've always wanted to go to or something you wanted to do but couldn't because you were still studying, let me know!

as always, stay safe and hydrated, remember to not skip meals, and never let someone affect your worth. ♡

🌻

AHHHHH MY RESPONSE IS LATE :(

agh i understand how you feel although we may not have gone through the same circumstances. days are dragging and all you want to do is to get everything done to the point that your mind is wired to getting tasks done over getting enough rest but i do hope you find time to take a break and breathe since a human's brain can not function to its optimum when you're tired and because you deserve it. engineering is never easy and i'm proud of you for pursuing it!! heckk you even do your best at every project. i salute you 😭 DUDE ABOUT ENGINEERING MEN AND GREEN FLAGS I-

story time! i was in a band in uni and our lead guitarist was an engineering student. he was nice and all that but boy he was flirty. he charms a lot and he does it through music or during practice sessions (since i hold the rhythm electric guitar and was the vocalist we practiced together a lot) that's when i thought engineering men are not green flags lol.

since i replied to your ask very late... is it your semester break? i could have wished you luck on your test on the day you sent this BUT LETS JUST SAY I DID IT UNCONSCIOUSLY 😭 i hope your test went well!

plans? hm, i'm still studying as of the moment lol. studying. never. ends. i'm telling you. i have a licensure exam next year and it's a countrywide exam for psychometricians. though i can go straight to work with my degree, the license adds credibility to my name so i'm working on that. and i'm planning on studying... again, told you it never ends, a graduate degree on clinical psychology since i aim to become a therapist soon but ya know with all the relatives, friends, and even neighbors knowing i finished a pre medicine course they're all encouraging me to continue med school. one of my friends in high school brought up (recently) how i initially had plans on pursuing medicine (gave up on that dream ages ago. figured it isnt for me lol) and told me that we should take the "entrance" test for med school together and i'm just gsndhsjs even the neighbors were surprised i graduated as a full scholar in my 4 year degree and told me i should definitely pursue medicine since i have a chance to continue med school with a scholarship again and that it's an opportunity not everyone has. it's kinda guilt tripping me in a way. med school is not easy. ALL THIS IS JUST MAKING ME- ugh

i just want kageyama bro

lol

but yeah, i'm taking one day at a time. for now, i'm studying and vibing. hopefully i get to visit a place outside of my country tho i went on a trip to beach with my family recently (helped with relaxing) if you missed the photos i posted i'll attach them here so you can feel the relaxing vibes of the sea. hopefully this helps you ease your mind of stress.

i'm happy to hear from you! missed you here :)

#anon.🌻#pea.asks

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megamanx1994 · 6 years

Text

SRMTHFG Chapter 5

Chapter 5: The story about Mandarin (Disclaimer! I own nothing of SRMTHFG!) Chiro was continuing training drills with Antauri with his newly acquired armor. “He’s improving at an incredible level,” said Gibson viewing his stats. “Well he sure knows how to be optimistic,” said Sparx. Chiro had on some strange orange gauntlets. “Alright, try this one out for size!” he said. The gauntlets unleashed a sword and shield. Using them, he took out the formless soldiers in a flash. The other monkeys were deeply alarmed at what he found. “What?” asked Chiro. “Chiro, those were Mandarin’s weapons,” said Nova. “Wait… the sixth monkey?” asked Chiro. “Yes,” said Gibson, “We don’t really talk about him much ever since that faithful day.” “Well if Chiro is going to be part of our team now, we have no need to keep secrets from him,” said Antauri. He showed Chiro visions of Mandarin. “Mandarin was our original leader, the smartest, strongest and wisest of us all,” said Antauri, “He was given the same task as we were given; to protect the gem of imagination from the skeleton king.” In the visions, Mandarin started attacking innocent people. “Though he was too consumed by power and greed, and wanted to rule all of humanity with an iron fist, which we could not let happen,” said Antauri, “Acting quickly, we took the power coin from him, and his the gem deep within the planet.” “Whoa,” said Jinmay. “Whoa indeed,” said Gibson, “This monkey is bad news, which is why we have been training Chiro, because one day, the two of them will face off in battle.” “I’m not afraid of him,” said Chiro, “If this coin chose me to protect Shugazoom city, then I’m ready.” “That is why the coin chose you,” said Antauri, “Because you never give up on what you dream of.” Otto was still working on that machine that will hopefully get back the armor for the other monkeys. Smoke started to come out. “Aw crap,” said Otto, “What did I do wrong?”

“You might wanna fix that part first,” said Jinmay. She got out a wrench and started screwing some of the nuts in. “Young lady please step away from the machine!” said Gibson. “Relax, I know what I’m doing,” said Jinmay, “My mom was a mechanic when she was younger.” The smoke stopped. Gibson was surprised. “My word,” said Gibson, “You’re a gifted mechanic!” “Well I do take after mom,” said Jinmay as she smiled. Later at school Chiro was taking out another comic book that he wrote. “Its finally finished!” said Chiro, “My rough draft of Thunder-man meets the Sun Riders!” He was walking to Class when BT and Glenny blocked his way. “Where do you think you’re going?” asked BT. “You’ve clearly forgotten what happened last time,” said Chiro, “Unless you want another ass kicking, then I suggest you move.” He tried to head out but Glenny grabbed him and pushed him to a locker. “Its time we paid you back for the bloody nose you gave BT!” he said. “Get off of me!” said Chiro. Jinmay saw them and intervened. She threw her wrench at Glenny to get his attention. “You leave Chiro alone!” said Jinmay, “What did he ever do to you?” “You did not just do that,” said BT. “Uh oh,” said Jinmay. They both started hitting Jinmay and made her drop her art project. “Maybe next time you’ll think twice before talking like that to someone who’s stronger than you,” said Glenny. They left. Chiro went to go and help her. “Are you ok?” asked Chiro. “Yeah, I guess so,” said Jinmay, “But I can’t say the same about my art project.” “I’m really sorry,” said Chiro, “If I hadn’t gotten in that scrap you wouldn’t have had to save me.” “It was worth it Chiro,” said Jinmay, “Besides I still owe you for that one time you saved my life.” “Still, somebody ought to teach those bozos a lesson,” said Chiro. “Yeah,” said Jinmay, “And we’re just the guys who can do it.” They spent the next few days rewriting Chiro’s rough draft and decided to make BT and Glenny some of the bad guys in his story. They sold some copies to their friends and BT and Glenny were made laughing stocks, and even the teachers enjoyed it. BT looked at a copy. “You are so dead Logan!” he shouted. Chiro and Jinmay were at his house coming up with new ideas for comics. “So I had this idea for myself,” said Jinmay, “I was thinking that I could have a kind of titanium coating armor and can fly and shot repulsor beams.” “That can be arranged,” said Chiro, “You really have some good ideas in your head.” “Thanks Chiro,” said Jinmay. “Chiro,” called Howard. “Yea?” asked Chiro. “Come downstairs, I need to talk to you right now!” he said. He came downstairs. “Have you been bullying people at school?” he asked. “What?” asked Chiro, “No way!” “Well then would you care to explain why this young man came over with his parents to talk to us?” asked Howard. BT was with his mom and dad with fake tears. Howard had one of Chiro’s comic books in his hand. “BT says you wrote some rude things about him in his comic books,” said Howard, “I know you were raised better than that!” “But he was…” said Chiro. “I don’t wanna hear it!” Howard snapped, “You apologize to him right NOW!” “I’m sorry,” said Chiro. “If I see one more comic book saying rude things about this young man, it is over for you mister!” said Howard, “Do you understand?” “Yes sir,” said Chiro. BT left while taunting Chiro. “And that’s not all I saw in this comic book,” said Howard flipping through pages. “You read my comic?!” asked Chiro. “And wasn’t I surprised when I read what I read!” he shouted, “WHAT BUSINESS DO YOU HAVE PUTTING THIS STUFF IN YOUR COMICS?!” Chiro looked down at the ground. “Don’t look at the ground, look at me!!” he said, “Who put this in that comic book?!” Chiro was about to speak but Jinmay covered for him. “I wrote it,” said Jinmay, “He told me about it and I put it on there.” “Jinmay why the hell would you go and do that?!” asked Howard, “I let you in my house, you’re over here playing with Chiro, and then you wanna take our dirty laundry and expose it to the world?!” “I didn’t think…” said Jinmay. “GET THE HELL OUTTA MY HOUSE!!!!” shouted Howard as he chased her out. He shut the door and turned to Chiro. “I’m only going to say this once so listen up young man,” said Howard, “You are not friends with Jinmay Sunban. I will not allow her in this house, and I will not allow you to spend anymore time with her writing these silly comic books!” “You don’t know Jinmay!” said Chiro, “Who are you to judge who I’m friends with?” “I am your father, and you will show me some respect,” said Howard, “And you’re supposed to be studying how to be a scientist like me!” “Its not who I wanna be!” said Chiro. “Who cares?” asked Howard, “It’s a family legacy.” “I don’t care about the family legacy,” said Chiro. “Well you’re about to care,” said Howard, “Leslie, from now after school, you bring Chiro straight to the lab so I can show him the ropes.” “Howard you..” said Leslie. “Chiro, you’re gonna learn to be a scientist,” said Howard, “Whether you like it or not.” “No I’m not!” said Chiro, “I wanna be a comic book writer and not be forced to hide that talent from my friends.” “That ‘talent’ humiliated a classmate!” said Howard. “Well he deserved it!” said Chiro, “You can’t just force me to be somebody I’m not!” “What you say BOY?!” he shouted as he smacked Chiro. “Howard!!” yelled Leslie. Chiro looked back with tears in his eyes. “You go to your room,” said Howard. Chiro walked up to his room. “I wish you weren’t my father,” said Chiro. “What did you just say to me?!” asked Howard. “I said I wish you weren’t my father!!” said Chiro. He slammed the door. Later that day Chiro was looking out the window. Leslie came in with some bags. “Come on Chiro,” she said, “You’re going over to Jinmay’s place for a couple of days.” “How long?” asked Chiro. “For as long as you need to,” said Leslie, “Your father was wrong to say such rude things about your little friend.” They quietly packed some things and Leslie drove Chiro over to Jinmay’s. He rang the doorbell and Jinmay hugged him. “This must be Chiro,” said Jinmay’s father. “Um… yes sir,” said Chiro. “I’m Andy, and this is my wife Mei-Ling,” he said. “Its an honor to meet you young man,” said Mei-Ling. “Your mom told us everything,” said Jinmay. As they went inside to talk, Mandarin was watching

#mandarin srmthg #chiro #jinmay #chiro x jinmay #antauri #sparx #gibson srmthg #nova srmthg #otto srmthg #super robot monkey team hyperforce go #srmthg #FFEU Phase 2 #fan fiction extended universe #smash bros

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dailybestiary · 7 years

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Oaur-Ooung

From an age before demons—from before even proteans—a Colossal fungal jellyfish undulates in the deepest oceans of the Abyss. She is a being of evil fecundity who births inhuman monsters from blisterwomb pustules in her bell…half of which she devours on the spot, but the rest of whom escape to torment all creatures born of souls and sin…

This is the qlippoth lord, Oaur-Ooung.

You’re probably expecting me to invoke Lovecraft here. But nope. Oaur-Ooung isn’t a being out of Lovecraft—she’s a being out of Justice League Unlimited. (The DC Animated Universe was very, very good at creating undulating blob monsters that birthed horror after horror. Tentacles, pseudopods, and flying jellies were all in the DCAU wheelhouse. Lovecraftian it wasn’t, but Lovecrafty? Sure.)

There are lots of stat block reasons for a wicked GM to love Oaur-Ooung, including mythic ranks, near-immortality, tentacle attacks that reach 600 ft. (hope you brought a big enough battlemat), skin that spews swarms when wounded, blisterwombs that can birth a CR 20’s worth of qlippoth each day…oh, and any creature she kills with her slam attack rises as a qlippoth too. Good times!

But the best reason to use her is that she is a truly terrifying mother of monsters. Everyone gets that. If you’ve spent too much brainpower trying to parse the subtle gradations of lawful evil separating asuras, devils, kytons, and rakshasas, or if you’ve faced a table of blank-faced players as you attempted to make effable the ineffable horrors of the Outer Gods vs. the Dominion of the Black, there’s something wonderfully simple about Oaur-Ooung. “Before demons existed in the Abyss, there were these horrible bug-crab-dog-proto-demons called qlippoth. This one is their queen. In fact, she might also be their mom. She’s a jellyfish who flies. She gives birth to monsters, and she looks like she’s about to disgorge something the size of Godzilla any day now. Roll for initiative.” It turns out horror can be cosmic and from the-time-before-time and yet not make your brain hurt. Who knew?

PS: For those parties not up for tangling with a mythic CR 23 qlippoth lord, she has cults too! Dedicated to surgical alteration, fleshwarping, and consuming one’s enemies. So that’s always fun. Even if your PCs never actually face Oaur-Ooung at the table, she can still inspire plenty of lower-level evil.

One final note: In D&D 3.5, the tanar’ri (roughly equivalent to Pathfinder’s demons) once overthrew the obyriths (Pathfinder’s qlippoth)…but a new race known as loumaras was growing in strength. Pathfinder doesn’t have a loumara equivalent…but maybe that’s what Mama Oaur-Ooung is cooking…

To their horror, adventurers discover that their entire career has been guided—and even, at times, aided and abetted—by the dread hand of the demon lord Pazuzu. Yet even the party’s holiest allies can detect no sign of the demon lord’s corruption upon them. The reason for Pazuzu’s machinations eventually becomes clear: He fears the child swelling in Oaur-Ooung’s greatest blisterwomb, and he needed to hold a few pawns untouched by the Abyss in reserve to end the threat the qlippoth lord and her child pose to existence.

The good news: Adventurers don’t always have to fight Oaur-Ooung. They bad news: They may have to act as bait. Adventurers tasked with returning a long-lost race of sylphs to the Elemental Plane of Air must first ferry them through the waters of the Abyss. Such a foul baptism is the only way to remove the ancestral curse the sylphs have labored under for so long…but it will put them dangerously close to the qlippoth lord’s domain unless she is distracted elsewhere…

After repelling an invasion of fleshwarped corsairs aboard skinwing cutters, a party of do-gooders has taken the fight against demonkind to the stars. Their adventures have seen them hopping from planet to plane and back, introducing them to water-tainted dwarf summoners, girtablilu temple ships, dream-farming dragons, angelic anarchs and a moon lost to oni corruption. But always the adventurers have sought ways to drive the skinwing fleet from their solar system…which will eventually lead them to a dead star, an ark made of chitin, and a qlippoth queen who long ago traded the waters of the Abyss for the vacuum of Birthspace…

—Pathfinder Bestiary 6 236–237

If you’re at all curious about D&D 3.5’s demons, I once again invite you to check out my series on the best D&D 3.0/3.5 books for Pathfinder GMs, especially this entry (which covers Hordes of the Abyss) and this entry (Book of Vile Darkness).

Tumblr readers got a preview of this on one of my radio show posts, but for my Blogger readers and those who missed it, I’ll paraphrase: After a promising start, October became the perfect storm of bad health (mine this time), caregiver demands, and unexpected surprises. Please bear with me for a little while as I (hopefully) start to right the ship. I’m starting to have more breathing room, but it’s a ways off yet. Thanks.

#daily bestiary #pathfinder #paizo #3.5 #dungeons & dragons #dungeons and dragons #d&d #dnd #oaur-ooung #outsider #qlippoth #qlippoth lord

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ruthjsmithfl · 4 years

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Competitor Research - The Ultimate Search Engine Optimization Solution

If you’re designing a new online venture, or are simply sick and tired of losing to competitors in organic search, then you need to do an SEO competitor analysis.

You can learn many things from your competitor. In fact competitors are a goldmine of information that can inform you about every aspect of your SEO strategy and help to increase your website’s organic traffic.

In solid terms, performing an SEO competitor analysis lets you:

Get In Touch

Learn what works and what doesn’t in your industry.

Find competitors’ weaknesses, and capitalize on them.

Find competitors’ strengths, and replicate them.

Understand what SEO tasks to prioritize going forward.

Understand how difficult outperforming competitors in the SERPs are likely to be.

Here, I will run through the SEO competitive analysis process for a hypothetical new infographic design tool—Minimagraphic.com.

Minimagraphic.com — a hypothetical new infographic design tool launching soon (maybe).

#makeInfographicsGreatAgain

We have also added a competitive analysis template so you can follow along with your site.

Things to Keep In Mind

Getting Started

You can do this complete process with only two tools

Ahrefs (take a 7‑day trial)

This Google Sheets template (IMPORTANT: make a copy!)

It would be great if you also make a copy of the completed sheet for our hypothetical website, as that may come in handy for clarification if any of the instructions given below feel unclear. (Hopefully, they won’t!)

You can do that here.

Got it? Let’s get started

Identify Competitors

First we need to identify our main competitors than we should proceed further

These are the websites struggling for our desired keywords in organic search.

Some competitors that come to our mind are Canva, Piktochart, Infogram, easel.ly, and Visme regarding our hypothetical infographic design tool However, our organic search competitors may not be the same as our direct business competitors.

So let’s first look at how potential customers would search for our service.

I thought that this would be something like “infographic design tool,” but it appears that I was wrong as when I search for this in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, it tells me there is no search volume.

So let’s inspect the “Also rank for” report and see if we can find a better keyword.

It seems like “infographic maker” is the most famous way people search for such tools.

Now let’s see the SERP overview to see who currently ranks in the top five.

Not an Ahrefs user?

Run a Google search instead.

It appears that our top five competitors are Piktochart, Venngage, Canva, Visme, and Infogram.

The interesting thing is, Easel.ly didn’t make the cut as they don’t rank in the top 10.

This is why you should not always rely on your instincts for direct business competitors because they’re not always competitors when it comes to SEO.

SEO is like another world, imagine that a person has a butcher business in a small town. The business that keeps him awake at night is the other small butcher down the road. However, when it’s come to SEO, they’re no competitors because they don’t even have a website.

I will note these five competitors to my spreadsheet.

PRO TIP

If you are trying to find competitors for a blog or ecommerce site, then looking for sites that rank for a single keyword may not be the best way to go about things.

That is because you are probably targeting hundreds or thousands of keywords and topics across many pages.

So it is good to see who is competing with you across the board.

For this, you can use the Competing domains report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > enter your domain > Organic search > Competing domains

Analyze the Competitive Landscape

Next, we have a high-level view of the competitive landscape.

To do that, we will pull a small number of key stats and SEO metrics which should give us an idea as to how established the competition is.

Let’s use Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool to do this for all competitors’ websites at once.

Batch Analysis > Enter competitors’ domains > Analyze

Batch Analysis will return many useful stats for each site, and I am interested in:

Domain Rating (DR)

Ahrefs Rank (AR)

Number of referring domains

Estimated organic search traffic

Estimated number of keyword rankings

Now add them to our sheet.

To explain these SEO metrics a bit more:

Domain Rating (DR):

Having a high DR score means that the website has a solid backlink profile. Instead of considering DR absolutely you should judge it relatively. For your understanding let’s take an example, suppose that your website is DR30 and your competitor is DR50, that is a bit higher. If your website is DR30 whereas yours competitor site is DR90 that is similar comparing your mom and pop store to Walmart—they aren’t your competitor.

Ahrefs Rank (AR):

Having a low Ahrefs rank means that the website is strong. AR explains the same thing as DR but with more details. For example, if you have two competitors with the same DR like DR33 websites, you can use AR to see which is the stronger of the two sites.

Referring domains:

If your links are of good quality then having a large number of referring domains could also mean that the website is strong A high number of referring domains can also indicate a strong site—provided that those links aren’t low-quality. However, keep in mind that grabbing DR is always useful as this takes into account both the quality and quantity of links to a website.

Organic traffic & keywords:

This is quite obvious that the higher these numbers are, the better the website is performing in organic search.

In simple words the more distance between your stats and yours competitor stats, the more you have to struggle.

Still these metrics don’t explain everything about our competitors’ SEO progress.

Study Backlink Growth

We have studied approximately 930 million pages and it appears to us that link popularity is a clear SEO “ranking factor”

That is why we have to learn more about our competitors’ link building efforts.

Let’s look at the speed with which they acquire new referring domains (linking sites), as this gives us an approximate target to shoot for with our link building.

To do this, we’ll use Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > Enter domain > Overview > Referring Domains graph > Set to ‘One year’

For each participant, we take the number of all referring domains that today have minus the same number from a year ago, and then divide it by twelve to get the average monthly value.

Here is the calculation for Visme:

(7,603 — 5,599) / 12 = 167 new referring domains per month (on average)

Also keep in mind that this is the cumulative growth or decline in referring domains. For example, if a competitor gets links from a hundred new RDs in a month but loses links from ten existing RDs, their cumulative growth is ninety.

Let’s also inspect the growth trend for our other competitors.

We need to check if there is an element of consistency or not, In other words, do their link profiles show consistent or inconsistent growth or decline?

For Venngage, besides from a small irregularity earlier this year, their growth has been relatively consistent.

This might be natural, or it might be the byproduct of long-term link building efforts.

Whatever the case is, it would be worth following these two articles to go deeper into their backlink profile to see what we can learn… once finished with the basic competitive analysis, of course.

For Piktochart, their growth seems more inconsistent.

They have gained the experience of “hockey stick” growth between May and July last year, which may be the indication of a specific piece of content performing well, or them ramping up their existing link building efforts. It could also provide an indication of negative SEO attacks.

To get a sense of which, we can check the New referring domains report.

Site Explorer > Referring domains > New > use the date range to filter for that period

It is probably a negative SEO attack if most of the domains look like spam. (Hint: Confirm this by looking at the New backlinks report for the same date range)

It is probably down to a particular piece of content doing well if most of the links point to the same web page. If the spike happened recently, use the Best by Link Growth report in Site Explorer to help identify which piece of content attracted the links.

It’s likely the ramping up of existing link building efforts if you find lots of links from a specific type of content—e.g., guest posts, resource pages, etc.

For now, I am going to add some growth-related stats for each competitor to my spreadsheet.

Find Superfans

Those who have linked to our competitors on multiple occasions are called Superfans. These are people with whom it is easy for us to build relationships because they tend to link out to websites they like regularly.

In order to find these people, we can check the Referring domains report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > Referring Domains > add a “dofollow” filter > sort by “links to target / dofollow”

Now we will go through the list for industry blogs.

Here is just one that stood out for Canva:

If we hit the caret, we can see that this site links numerous times across many blog posts.

By just spending five seconds on the website we found that this is a single author blog by a woman named Elaine—she is the one with whom we may want to build a relationship and introduce to our product.

Now look for five superfans for each of our competitors and add them to our sheet.

Find Broken Pages

Have you ever heard the saying that one person’s junk is another person’s treasure?

That saying is true on the web too.

So now we need to see if our competitors’ websites for a specific type of junk: broken pages.

To this task we will use the Best by links report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > enter competitors domain > Best by links > add a “404 not found” filter > sort by the Referring domains column (high to low)

Sidenote: I am searching for content on a subdomain here so that I only see dead informational pages—e.g., blog posts, infographics, etc.

If we see broken pages on our competitors’ websites, that have backlinks, and are also somewhat relevant to our business, then we may be able to take advantage of such pages by:

Figuring out what the dead page used to be;

Publishing something similar, but better;

Finding everyone linking to the dead resource (use the Backlinks report in Site Explorer)

Asking them to swap out the dead link in favor of our working resource.

Learn how to carry out this strategy in our broken link building guide.

Now we are going to focus on competitive analysis and not link building, let’s just add any related broken pages from our five competitors to the spreadsheet.

Quick Note: In Following step (6 , 7 and 8) we will focus on organic traffic

By having a knowledge of which countries our competitors get the bulk of their organic traffic from can help us to understand where the opportunity lies in this niche.

For this, we will use Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > enter competitor’s domain > Overview > Organic search tab

Let’s add the top five countries along with their traffic percentages to our spreadsheet.

I’ll then do the same for our other competitors.

Here’s what we get:

Seems like the United States is where the bulk of the traffic opportunity lies in this niche, as this is where our competitors get approximately 31% of their traffic from on average.

There is some opportunity in other English-speaking countries like the UK and Canada too.

So we now know that we should almost certainly prioritize content creation for folks in these countries, as this is where we see the bulk of search demand.

Hardly surprising.

However, the fact that there is traffic potential in Latin America and Asia has got me thinking: perhaps it would make sense to translate our landing pages into Spanish, Indian, and possibly Indonesian?

We could even launch a multilingual blog to maximize traffic from these countries.

That’s what we did here at Ahrefs—we have a Spanish blog and a Chinese blog.

The Spanish version of the Ahrefs Blog.

The Chinese version of the Ahrefs Blog.

Many of our landing pages are available in multiple languages too.

Pro Tip:

Organic traffic is not always representative of traffic value. It might be misleading to look solely at organic traffic numbers.

For example, Visme gets roughly the same amount of search traffic from the UK and Mexico.

But if we look at the traffic value for Mexico VS UK, We see that UK traffic is worth 700%+ more!

So it probably makes sense for us to prioritize UK traffic growth.

Break it Down

What Are The Different Types Of SEO?

At Syndiket, we believe four types of SEO exist – and we have an acronym to represent those 4 types of SEO. The acronym is T.R.A.P.

“T” stands for Technical, “R” stands for Relevancy, “A” stands for Authority, and “P” stands for popularity. Search engine optimization has many smaller divisions within the 4 types, but all of them can be placed into one of these 4 buckets.

I’m Interested!

Technical SEO

Generally, technical SEO for local businesses carry the least importance for ranking. Technical SEO has a bare minimum that is required and this usually includes things like site speed, indexation issues, crawlability, and schema. Once the core technical parts are done, minimal upkeep is required.

Relevancy SEO

Relevancy is one of trivium elements of SEO. It has equal importance with popularity signals and authority signals. Relevancy signals are based on algorithmic learning principles. Bots crawl the internet every time a searcher has a search. Each search is given a relevancy score and the URLs that pop up for a query. The higher the relevancy score you attain, the greater your aggregated rating becomes in Google’s eyes. Digital marketing is a strange thing in 2020, and ranking a website requires the website to be relevant on many fronts.

Authority SEO

Google’s Co-creator, Larry Page, had a unique idea in 1998 which has led to the modern-day Google Empire. “Page Rank”, named after Larry Page himself, was the algorithm that established Google as a search engine giant. The algorithm ranked websites by authority.

Every page of a website has authority and the sum of all pages has another authority metric. The authority metric is largely determined by how many people link to them (backlinks). The aggregate score of all pages pointing to a domain creates the domain score, which is what Syndiket calls “Domain Rating”, per Ahrefs metrics. The more a site is referenced, the more authority it has. But, the real improvement to the algorithm came when Google began to classify authority weight.

If Tony Hawk endorsed Syndiket for skateboarding, it would carry a lot more authority than 5 random high school kids endorsing Syndiket. This differentiation in authority happened in 2012 with the Penguin update. Authority SEO is complicated but VERY important.

Popularity

Popularity signals are especially strong for GMB or local SEO, but popularity and engagement are used for all rankings. The goal of this signal is for Google to verify its own algorithm. You can check off all the boxes, but if your content is something real people hate, Google has ways to measure that. Syndiket has proprietary methods of controlling CTR (click-through rate) but we also infuse CRO methods into our work to make sure people actually like the content. Social shares and likes are also included in this bucket.

I’m Interested!

Continued …

Spy on Competitors’ Organic Keywords

Next, we need to find out which keywords are currently driving organic traffic to our competitors’ sites.

We can do it by running the Organic keywords report for each domain.

Site Explorer > enter competitor’s domain > Organic search > Organic keywords

Above we can see that visme.co currently ranks for 133,667 keywords in the US.

By default, the Organic Keywords report shows keyword rankings for the country that generates the most search traffic. And that is not a problem, but if you want to see keyword data for a different country, hit “more” and choose from any of the 150+ countries in our database.

Now look for some juicy keywords that might be worth targeting.

There are some that jump out right away such as “infographic maker,” “infographic creator,” etc. But there are also a lot of unrelated results muddying the waters.

So now first exclude all branded keywords with the “exclude” function.

I will also try to filter only for keywords for which our competitor ranks in the top 10 so that we only see the most relevant keywords.

Let’s keep things simple for now and note down the top five relevant, non-branded keywords sending the most traffic to our competitors, and their search volumes.

A few of those keywords would be a good match for our homepage. Others would make better blog posts (For example “what is an infographic?”).

Note: If you’re following along and are only interested in finding keyword ideas for your homepage, use the “URL” mode in Site Explorer as opposed to “*.domain/*”. That way, you will only see keyword suggestions from the homepage instead of the whole site. And don’t forget to exclude branded searches from the report!

PRO TIP

Some of the keywords that I noted down have high Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores, which mean that they will be hard to rank for without building lots of links.

For example, “infographic maker” has a KD score of 73 … and will need backlinks from approximately 235 domains to rank in the top 10.

Recommended reading: Learn more about how we calculate Keyword Difficulty.

I am not really concerned about this right now as I am looking more for “ultimate goal” keywords.

If you are following along and would prefer to find keywords that you stand a chance at ranking for in the short-to-medium-term, feel free to filter for keywords with a low KD score.

Spy on Competitors’ Featured Snippets

One additional thing you should pay attention to while analyzing your competitor’s organic traffic:

SERP features for which your competitors rank.

Featured snippets alone show up for approximately 12% of search queries, as per our study…

… And they get approximately 9% of clicks from the results on the first page:

So let’s keep things simple and focus solely on those.

The first thing is that I need to know which featured snippets our competitors own and for that, I’ll use Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > enter competitors domain > Organic search > Organic keywords > SERP features filter > Featured snippets > Only linking to target

Piktochart owns 87 snippets in the US right now and gets a fair amount of traffic as a result.

Visme owns 216.

I will add these numbers to my sheet for each competitor.

To be honest, if our competitors rank for a lot of featured snippets, there could be an opportunity for us to do the same.

This can even be easy traffic because it’s not always the #1 ranking page that owns the snippet.

59.2% of featured snippets come from pages ranking in positions 2–5.

In other words, even if the SERP is competitive, there’s still a chance of owning the snippet provided that we can make it to the top 5.

Recommended reading: How to Optimize for Google’s Featured Snippets in 2020

QUICK NOTE

In the few steps (#9, #10, and #11), we’ll delve deeper into competitors’ content.

Find Content Gaps

If you look at a particular site for some information that is not there, this is what a content gap is.

Content gaps in SEO are keywords for which your competitors rank, but you don’t, that is a gap you will probably want to fill.

To find content gaps, we can use Ahrefs Content Gap tool.

Site Explorer > enter your domain > Content gap

You can see that this prefills the “But the following target doesn’t rank for” field with our domain.

Now we need to fill the other fields with competitors.

I will then set it to “Show keywords that all of the below targets rank for,” tick the “at least one of the targets should rank in the top 10” box, and run the search.

You can see that this returns some quite relevant keywords above.

Sidenote: If you are following along and don’t see any relevant keywords, feel free to loosen the settings a little and find keywords for which two, three, or four of your competitors rank, rather than all of them.

We have limited resources therefore targeting all these keywords is an impossible task.

Let’s use the filters to focus in on low/medium difficulty, high-volume opportunities.

Having low difficulty scores means that it would be easy to rank for whereas the solid search volume means that ranking will give a nice bump to our search traffic.

However, some of these keywords look to be ones we already found in the previous step.

So I am just going to add the five most relevant new keywords to my sheet.

Find Competitors’ Most Popular Content

There is no doubt that keyword search is a critical part of SEO but these days, Google’s understanding of the intent behind searches is arguably better than ever.

This is why; one page can easily rank for hundreds or even thousands of long-tail keywords.

By finding our competitors’ top pages, we can figure out which of their articles are:

ranking for a ton of keywords

pulling in loads of traffic

Then we can write about these overarching topics and earn some traffic.

For this, we can use the Top Pages report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Keep in mind that we are interested in finding blog posts here so if possible, we actually need to search the blog folder URL/subdomain as opposed to the entire domain.

Site Explorer > enter competitor’s domain > select “prefix” mode > Top pages

PRO TIP

If you are not sure where your competitor’s blog is located?

Check the Top subfolders report in Site Explorer and look for their blog path.

If you don’t find anything, check the Top subdomains report instead. Some websites host their blog on a subdomain.

Either way, make sure the traffic percentage for the subfolder/subfolder is in the doubt digits. If it isn’t, then it’s likely that their blog posts aren’t nested within that URL structure.

In which case, stick with a domain search.

Now one thing to note about this report is that the pages on sites with the most organic traffic often tend to have a lot of referring domains. That is hardly surprising, as backlinks are a strong ranking factor.

So let’s skim this report for each competitor and eyeball the RD column.

What we are looking for are pages with lots of traffic but not too many referring domains, as these are likely to be much easier to compete with.

I will add five relevant pages that fit the bill to my sheet, plus their traffic.

Sidenote: If you are interested in the individual keywords for which these top pages rank, click the caret in the keywords column.

Find Competitors’ Most Linked Content

Links mean referrals and often as a result, more organic search traffic.

So we know we need to build links, but where do we begin?

We will see what is working for our competitors.

The Best by links report in Ahrefs Site Explorer shows competitors’ most linked content. If it worked for them, then something similar will probably work for us.

Site Explorer > enter competitor’s blog subfolder/subdomain > Organic search > Best by links

Sidenote: If you are doing this for a competitor whose blog posts aren’t nested under a subdomain (e.g., blog.domain.com/��) or subfolder (e.g., domain.com/blog/…) then use their domain instead. You will have to be a little more vigilant when browsing the report.

Here, I will add the URLs of the five most relevant top pages from each competitor, the number of referring domains to each page, and what “type” of content it is to my sheet.

Now we can find at a glance what types of content work best for each competitor and in general.

For example, 60% of the most linked pages articles from Venngage are listicles, and it’s a similar story for Visme too.

Sidenote: Not every niche is the same. You may see that a different type of content is more popular in your niche.

On the other side, gaps can also present opportunities.

For example, Canva has a lot of links to text-heavy content. Such content could be simplified as an infographic and possibly attract even more links.

We could also use what is commonly known as the ‘skyscraper’ technique to attract links:

Create a similar but even better piece of content

Show it to everyone who links to our competitor’s now inferior content

Ask them to swap out the link in favor of our superior content

If you are wondering how we can find out who links to our competitor’s content, all we need to do is click the number under the Referring domains column, and we will be able to see all the sites linking to that page.

In other words, our competitor has kindly created a list of prospects for us.

Find Competitors’ PPC Keywords

Analyzing competitors’ PPC activity can be perceptive when it comes to planning an SEO strategy for one simple reason:

If they’re paying for traffic from a keyword, then that keyword is most likely profitable.

To find our competitors’ PPC keywords, let’s use the PPC keywords report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > enter competitors domain > Paid search > PPC keywords

It looks like Venngage is bidding on a lot of infographic-related terms.

Which lead me to another point:

If you look at the competitors’ PPC data, you can find small volumes of keywords with high conversion, which can be easily omitted when conducting keyword research.

For example, a keyword like “make infographics online” (70 searches per month) is likely to have a much higher conversion rate than “creator of free infographics” (600 searches per month).

If the conversion rate for a keyword of 70 search queries per month is 20%, and the conversion rate for a keyword of 600 search queries per month is 2%, what do you think is the most appropriate keyword to rank?

I’m sure you’ve already done the math. That low-volume keyword will make more money.

Following this logic, I’m going to add five PPC keywords for each participant to my sheet, but I will intentionally choose keywords that, in my opinion, can convert well.

DISCLAIMER Take this idea with a pinch of salt. Just because a competitor spends money on a checkpoint does not necessarily know what they are doing. Before using PPC, you can check any keywords you find before trying to get a ranking for yourself.

Learn From Competitors’ PPC Ads

Viewing an ad copy of PPC members can help write title tags and descriptions that increase CTR.

This is because competitors pay cold cash to attract customers with specific keywords, and Google encourages more relevant ads with lower CPCs.

So it’s in their interest to make sure their ads win the click!

To use the PPC keyword report, look again at the copy of your competitor for the keyword for which we want to assign a rating, “Infographic maker:”

Site Explorer > enter competitors domain > Paid search > PPC keywords

To preview an ad for a keyword, hover over the yellow ‘Ad’ icon.

They seem to use speed, cost (or lack thereof) and ingenuity to lure clicks.

These are all things we could incorporate into our meta titles and descriptions to generate more traffic from organic search.

Recommended reading: How to Craft the Perfect SEO Title Tag (Our 4-Step Process)

Final Thoughts

Competitive analysis is a vast field; everything mentioned above is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you are familiar with Ahrefs, then you know that there are many additional reports in which we can dive deeper into the overall strategy of our competitors in the field of marketing, content and link building.

You just need to follow the process described above and then use other reports to delve into any Ahrefs area of interest (and possibly other competitive analysis tools).

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Competitor Research - The Ultimate Search Engine Optimization Solution

If you’re designing a new online venture, or are simply sick and tired of losing to competitors in organic search, then you need to do an SEO competitor analysis.

In solid terms, performing an SEO competitor analysis lets you:

Get In Touch

Learn what works and what doesn’t in your industry.

Find competitors’ weaknesses, and capitalize on them.

Find competitors’ strengths, and replicate them.

Understand what SEO tasks to prioritize going forward.

Understand how difficult outperforming competitors in the SERPs are likely to be.

Here, I will run through the SEO competitive analysis process for a hypothetical new infographic design tool—Minimagraphic.com.

Minimagraphic.com — a hypothetical new infographic design tool launching soon (maybe).

#makeInfographicsGreatAgain

We have also added a competitive analysis template so you can follow along with your site.

Things to Keep In Mind

Getting Started

You can do this complete process with only two tools

Ahrefs (take a 7‑day trial)

This Google Sheets template (IMPORTANT: make a copy!)

You can do that here.

Got it? Let’s get started

Identify Competitors

First we need to identify our main competitors than we should proceed further

These are the websites struggling for our desired keywords in organic search.

So let’s first look at how potential customers would search for our service.

So let’s inspect the “Also rank for” report and see if we can find a better keyword.

It seems like “infographic maker” is the most famous way people search for such tools.

Now let’s see the SERP overview to see who currently ranks in the top five.

Not an Ahrefs user?

Run a Google search instead.

It appears that our top five competitors are Piktochart, Venngage, Canva, Visme, and Infogram.

The interesting thing is, Easel.ly didn’t make the cut as they don’t rank in the top 10.

This is why you should not always rely on your instincts for direct business competitors because they’re not always competitors when it comes to SEO.

I will note these five competitors to my spreadsheet.

PRO TIP

If you are trying to find competitors for a blog or ecommerce site, then looking for sites that rank for a single keyword may not be the best way to go about things.

That is because you are probably targeting hundreds or thousands of keywords and topics across many pages.

So it is good to see who is competing with you across the board.

For this, you can use the Competing domains report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > enter your domain > Organic search > Competing domains

Analyze the Competitive Landscape

Next, we have a high-level view of the competitive landscape.

To do that, we will pull a small number of key stats and SEO metrics which should give us an idea as to how established the competition is.

Let’s use Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool to do this for all competitors’ websites at once.

Batch Analysis > Enter competitors’ domains > Analyze

Batch Analysis will return many useful stats for each site, and I am interested in:

Domain Rating (DR)

Ahrefs Rank (AR)

Number of referring domains

Estimated organic search traffic

Estimated number of keyword rankings

Now add them to our sheet.

To explain these SEO metrics a bit more:

Domain Rating (DR):

Ahrefs Rank (AR):

Referring domains:

Organic traffic & keywords:

This is quite obvious that the higher these numbers are, the better the website is performing in organic search.

In simple words the more distance between your stats and yours competitor stats, the more you have to struggle.

Still these metrics don’t explain everything about our competitors’ SEO progress.

Study Backlink Growth

We have studied approximately 930 million pages and it appears to us that link popularity is a clear SEO “ranking factor”

That is why we have to learn more about our competitors’ link building efforts.

Let’s look at the speed with which they acquire new referring domains (linking sites), as this gives us an approximate target to shoot for with our link building.

To do this, we’ll use Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > Enter domain > Overview > Referring Domains graph > Set to ‘One year’

For each participant, we take the number of all referring domains that today have minus the same number from a year ago, and then divide it by twelve to get the average monthly value.

Here is the calculation for Visme:

(7,603 — 5,599) / 12 = 167 new referring domains per month (on average)

Let’s also inspect the growth trend for our other competitors.

We need to check if there is an element of consistency or not, In other words, do their link profiles show consistent or inconsistent growth or decline?

For Venngage, besides from a small irregularity earlier this year, their growth has been relatively consistent.

This might be natural, or it might be the byproduct of long-term link building efforts.

Whatever the case is, it would be worth following these two articles to go deeper into their backlink profile to see what we can learn… once finished with the basic competitive analysis, of course.

For Piktochart, their growth seems more inconsistent.

To get a sense of which, we can check the New referring domains report.

Site Explorer > Referring domains > New > use the date range to filter for that period

It is probably a negative SEO attack if most of the domains look like spam. (Hint: Confirm this by looking at the New backlinks report for the same date range)

It’s likely the ramping up of existing link building efforts if you find lots of links from a specific type of content—e.g., guest posts, resource pages, etc.

For now, I am going to add some growth-related stats for each competitor to my spreadsheet.

Find Superfans

In order to find these people, we can check the Referring domains report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > Referring Domains > add a “dofollow” filter > sort by “links to target / dofollow”

Now we will go through the list for industry blogs.

Here is just one that stood out for Canva:

If we hit the caret, we can see that this site links numerous times across many blog posts.

Now look for five superfans for each of our competitors and add them to our sheet.

Find Broken Pages

Have you ever heard the saying that one person’s junk is another person’s treasure?

That saying is true on the web too.

So now we need to see if our competitors’ websites for a specific type of junk: broken pages.

To this task we will use the Best by links report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > enter competitors domain > Best by links > add a “404 not found” filter > sort by the Referring domains column (high to low)

Sidenote: I am searching for content on a subdomain here so that I only see dead informational pages—e.g., blog posts, infographics, etc.

If we see broken pages on our competitors’ websites, that have backlinks, and are also somewhat relevant to our business, then we may be able to take advantage of such pages by:

Figuring out what the dead page used to be;

Publishing something similar, but better;

Finding everyone linking to the dead resource (use the Backlinks report in Site Explorer)

Asking them to swap out the dead link in favor of our working resource.

Learn how to carry out this strategy in our broken link building guide.

Now we are going to focus on competitive analysis and not link building, let’s just add any related broken pages from our five competitors to the spreadsheet.

Quick Note: In Following step (6 , 7 and 8) we will focus on organic traffic

By having a knowledge of which countries our competitors get the bulk of their organic traffic from can help us to understand where the opportunity lies in this niche.

For this, we will use Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > enter competitor’s domain > Overview > Organic search tab

Let’s add the top five countries along with their traffic percentages to our spreadsheet.

I’ll then do the same for our other competitors.

Here’s what we get:

Seems like the United States is where the bulk of the traffic opportunity lies in this niche, as this is where our competitors get approximately 31% of their traffic from on average.

There is some opportunity in other English-speaking countries like the UK and Canada too.

So we now know that we should almost certainly prioritize content creation for folks in these countries, as this is where we see the bulk of search demand.

Hardly surprising.

We could even launch a multilingual blog to maximize traffic from these countries.

That’s what we did here at Ahrefs—we have a Spanish blog and a Chinese blog.

The Spanish version of the Ahrefs Blog.

The Chinese version of the Ahrefs Blog.

Many of our landing pages are available in multiple languages too.

Pro Tip:

Organic traffic is not always representative of traffic value. It might be misleading to look solely at organic traffic numbers.

For example, Visme gets roughly the same amount of search traffic from the UK and Mexico.

But if we look at the traffic value for Mexico VS UK, We see that UK traffic is worth 700%+ more!

So it probably makes sense for us to prioritize UK traffic growth.

Break it Down

What Are The Different Types Of SEO?

At Syndiket, we believe four types of SEO exist – and we have an acronym to represent those 4 types of SEO. The acronym is T.R.A.P.

I'm Interested!

Technical SEO

Relevancy SEO

Authority SEO

Popularity

I'm Interested!

Continued . . .