#it's mostly worldbuilding so probs boring

[kivaember]

Obligatory Mass Effect Crossover

(I just. wanted. to worldbuild ffxiv into mass effect setting. ok tbh this is mostly FFXIV IN SPAAAACE but y’know. whatevs. i regret nothing!) 

Dalamud always looked so ominous.

It was an artificial satellite the size of a small moon, glaring red and menacingly trailing after Menpina around Hydaelyn. ‘Menphina’s Loyal Hound’, it had been called when they as a civilisation were young and ignorant, before they realised that it was a weapon of mass destruction contained within an artificial shell. The aether around it was always warped, prone to unstable flares and splutters, to the point where they had a whole institution dedicated to predicting and mapping those flare ups to warn incoming and outgoing star vessels so they weren’t reduced to superheated atoms.

It was a relic of a very ancient, reckless past – a relic that was still very much in use. Due to the way it was, ah, constructed, only a select percentage of the population could ever work on it. Only 0.01% of Hydaelyn’s population won the genetic lottery to withstand the Elder Primal’s influences slumbering within that ancient relic, and an even smaller percentage of that actually had the skill, intellect and will to be charged with its day to day running. Dalamud was, despite being a weapon of mass destruction, Hydaelyn’s only source of infinite energy.  

One of those very very very lucky few in charge of such an important, vital relic… was Aza.

---

“-ing naked when the snow falls around me! Drifting closer to the edge but She won’t have me!”

Aza hummed along to the song blasting through his helmet, idly tapping along the flickering Allagan display. The live support in the control room was still down, but considering that shit was over ten thousand years old and fine tuned for heavily genetically modified Allagan, it was never all that reliable. After an unfortunately incident a century ago where some poor sod asphyxiated to death, it was now mandatory to do maintenance work like you were ready to be spaced within the next thirty seconds.

“Wake up in sweat, full of regret, try to forget, these memories, lurking beneath, lost in a dream…”

The display flickered, and Aza frowned a little when the same error cropped up for the fifth time since his shift started. It was a minor thing – a miniscule percentage rise in temperature and aether harvesting, but it was really strange. There were no solar flares or weird space shit happening for aether levels to spike, so why…

“Unchosen paths, a broken path, forespoken wr- CHIRP. CHIRP. INCOMING CALL FROM FORWARD STATION: H A L O N E.”

“Damn it, just before the best part,” Aza muttered, sending a pulse of aether to the linkpearl insistently chirping in his ear, “Yeah, whaddya want?”

“Aza,” a very pleasantly familiar voice purred, “Is that any way to greet your partner?”

“Well, if it isn’t handsome!” Aza laughed, his mood buoying as he quickly adjusted the little error flashing across the Allagan display. It resolved itself and Dalamud stopped overproducing aether. He leaned on the console and made himself comfortable, his tail lifting in pleasure, “I thought you weren’t back from New Ishgard until the end of the year? Not that I'm complaining. I missed you, gorgeous.”

“And I missed you too, love," Aymeric returned with such warmth is made Aza's heart want to burst into glittery confetti, even if the crappy reception distorted his partner's voice. Seriously, it was good to hear his voice again! The Comm Buoys were still absolute dog wank between Ishgard's newest colony and Hydaelyn, so he greedily drank up every crackly word from his linkpearl, "I returned early as Haurchefant seemed to be handling its administrative and military duties well enough on his own despite the complaints of his ‘conduct’. He was performing well above the standard, to be honest.”

“Whaaat?" Aza gasped in utter outrage, "Who’s complaining about Haurchefant? He’s an absolute sweetheart!”

“Yes, he’s also pure and ‘best boy’, whatever that means,” Aza could practically feel Aymeric's eyeroll, “Unfortunately, his appointment to a rather prestigious position has ruffled more than a few feathers in the House of Lords-”

“Is this because he’s a gay bastard?” Aza harrumphed, “Have they forgotten that their stupid Prime Minister is also a gay bastard? There’re even photos of you being one all over the Aethernet," he adopted a sly, teasing tone, "I really like the drunken one. Y’know, the one where you’re caught groping my ass during that horrible dinner party?”

“Oh Gods, I almost forgot about that,” Aymeric groaned, sounding like he was in physical pain, “Mobbed by journalists for weeks after that, demanding to know all sorts of obscene details…”

“Yeah, I remember you having to do evasive manoeuvres every time you had to go outside. Funny as shit,” Aza sniggered and swept a bit of dust off the Allagan keyboard, taking care not to accidentally input anything. These things were unpredictable. As they were created to interface directly to an Allagan’s brain implant they tended to get confused if you rubbed your grubby hands all over them without keeping a tight lid on your ambient aether.

“So, what’re you doing on the forward station? I thought you would’ve been keen to go straight home?”

“Dalamud is being a little testy today, it seems,” Aymeric said, sounding slightly sulky, “We’re held here until it either calms, or travels to the other side of Hydaelyn, before we can board the landing shuttle.”

“And, of course, you decided to abuse your World Leader privileges to talk to your lonely boyfriend via the control room's comms?”

“I may as well cash in on some sort of privileges for all the torture my government puts me through.”

Aza laughed, pushing up from the console when that annoyingly, persistent little error flickered up again. It was beginning to worry him now. Dalamud was old as shit, so it was believable that program breaking bugs could start developing in the highly complicated system. Even after several thousand years of study, the only explanation magitek engineers and aetherochemical scientists had for how it worked was a shrug and ‘Primal Magic’?

A lot of unexplainable things were chalked up to ‘Primal Magic’… or the ‘Mothercrystal’.

Aza had to spend approximately seven years in Val University to even scratch the surface of how to work the damn console. He knew enough to identify minor errors like these, and to divert major disasters like the venting systems failing, or one of the Meracydian dragons somehow breaking free of their prisons and running amok. The last one was always the hardest – he always felt extreme pity for them, but the law was firm: if they weren’t in stasis, they had to be culled due to the danger they presented to the workers and Dalamud itself. If even one managed to rouse the Elder Primal, they were fucked. End of.

But those were easy issues to deal with, well within his power, no matter how mentally or emotionally draining. But if he was asked to really get into the technicalities… he was clueless. Dalamud was a work of art that was incomprehensible to anyone not Allagan – which was everyone, nowadays. Most he could do was try and mitigate the damage by engaging its thrusters and hoping to fuck he launched it far away enough that the resulting implosion wouldn’t totally wipe out all life in the solar system.

“Aza? You still there? It's quiet.”

"Oh, sorry," Aza gave a small shake of his head to clear the sudden cobwebs, "I was thinking."

"About...?" Aymeric asked with an amused lilt to his voice.

"About..." Aza looked at the glow of the display with a small frown, hearing and feeling the whole structure around him groan and shudder. An ancient prison that held equally ancient prisoners in eternal torment. It was kind of sick they were still using this thing, really. He was struck with an odd, fleeting urge to force it into the sun - which he quickly discarded, because that would just break the Elder Primal free, who was unfortunately sun-proof (is that the word?) and able to survive in the vacuum of space. Still, he just didn't like the fact he was standing one floor above an entire hold crammed with Meracydians contorted into tiny stasis capsules, kept on the very cusp of consciousness in burning pain, to fuel the Elder Primal's existence. There wasn't anything they could safely do about it unless they broke themselves free, but it still felt all... wrong and made him feel kinda bad, more so today.

"Just thinking how horrible Dalamud is," he said honestly, because he could never really lie to Aymeric, even if his partner was hoping for some light, easy banter, "About a month ago one of the locks on a Meracydian's stasis capsule broke and opened up. I always thought it were adults in there, y'know? But it wasn't. It was some dragon pup, just squirming in that stasis goo shit, all... deformed and in pain. I got rid of it like I was meant to, I mean, it was kinder to, right? But, it's still... the... I don't know..." he trailed off.

Aymeric was quiet for a long moment, then; "...how many consecutive days have you worked?"

"I don't know," Aza said, and he felt mildly alarmed at that. He should know how many days he worked. He was meant to track that shit strictly, "Uh, seventy?"

"Long shifts too?"

"Twelve hours, yeah," Or thirteen? It was difficult to tell the time passing here sometimes.

"Is your superior still Y'shtola?" Aymeric asked, but he didn't wait for confirmation, "I saw her not too long ago on the station. I'll speak to her and have you placed on a mental wellness break starting today."

"What- no, Aym, c'mon, it's not that bad," Aza groaned, but... well, maybe his partner had a point? He had been sulking on here because he felt lonely and bored without Aymeric around, and everyone else was busy helping colonisation efforts beyond the solar system, adventuring and shit, while Aza was stuck in Horrible Space Prison. Only a certain type of person could really work here - it wasn't just the very rare gift of the Echo being a necessity, it was having the iron will to endure the strained, screeching edge to the surrounding aether as millions of lives existed in perpetual, pitiful agony all around you, it was enduring that almost sick, corrosive heaviness the Elder Primal exuded even in sleep. It was just... being able to endure. There was always a very real, dangerous risk succumbing to the Elder Primal's influence, Echo or not, if your will faltered for even a moment. While you wouldn't reach the mindless, slavish devotion most Indoctrinated people would, you were still at risk of developing violent paranoia, hallucinations and suicidal depression. Needless to say, Dalamud had a very high 'on the job' death statistic.

It did mean you had a lot of paid sick days. You were allowed to just take breaks whenever you felt you needed them, since it was proven space and time away from the Elder Primal's influence lessened its effects dramatically. But the whole thing still sucked.

"You've lost track of your days, and you're sounding a little off," Aymeric said in that no-nonsense tone of his which meant Aza had already lost, "Quite frankly, I'm amazed it hasn't been picked up on yet. How long until your shift ends?"

"Uh, I have... two more hours?"

"One hour."

"Uh-?"

"I'll speak to you later, love," Aymeric said, "I need to hunt down Y'shtola."

"Aym-" Click. "Arrrgh, c'mon...!"

---

There was something unexplainably good about having your feet firmly on Terra Firma again.

Dalamud’s Caretakers tended to live on Forward Station Halone until they took a mental wellness break. Sometimes this could be months, or even years in particularly resilient individuals, for Aza it was six months since he last set foot on it, when he said goodbye to Aymeric at the shuttle station and not expecting to see him again for another year.

That was an unexplainably good thing too, having Aymeric back.

“New Ishgard is a cold planet,” Aymeric murmured, his large, firm hands gently kneading up and down along his back. He had insisted, even though he must be tired from his long voyage, and Aza was very glad he hadn’t rejected the massage. He could just feel all the tension that had accumulated from those six months on Fucked Up Moon Prison just melting away beneath Aymeric’s gentle touch. He never wanted those hands to leave again, “It can reach -32C on a regular business, requiring specialised survival gear to range outside of the settlements, but it has rich deposit of industrial minerals and ice that we can exploit. Haurchefant is very optimistic about its prospects, despite the, ah, harsh environment.”

“Mm…” Aza could almost imagine it. The needle-sharp smell of snow, the biting cold wind, the ice crunching beneath your boots… “Ice for… nearby stations?”

“That’s right. It will be a source of reliable water if we decide to range further,” Aymeric’s hands paused at the small of his back, and… ah, a gentle press of lips between his shoulder blades. Aza arched to the touch with a low, happy purr, “Do you want to visit it?”

“Mm, yeah,” Aza mumbled, “I wanna see it.”

It wouldn’t happen. Dalamud’s Caretakers were actively discouraged from leaving the immediate Solar System, but there was always that glimmer of hope. If, maybe, they got a large influx of prospective hopefuls, so it wasn’t just ten of them, endlessly cycling in and out and battling the encroaching pressure of the Elder Primal. When Aza had learned he had the Echo, he had been so happy, thinking he could be placed on the Exploratory Team, ready to help colonists in potential First Contact scenarios if need be and acting as force protection.

But he didn’t. Bluebird got that. He was shuffled off to Dalamud’s Caretakers when his Echo scores ranked the highest they’d seen in well over a millennium. It had broken his heart. You couldn’t exactly say no to it.

“One day,” Aymeric murmured against his shoulder, “You’ll see it. You’ll see all the colonies we’ve made. You will not be at Dalamud forever, love.”

“Feels like I’ll be there forever,” he mumbled against the pillow.

Aymeric bit him, gently, but he got the message. He huffed out a sigh that slowly transitioned into a low groan when his partner’s hands started kneading along his tense back again. He melted beneath his touch, and those dim, gloomy thoughts faded a little more into the background. Aymeric was right, he wouldn’t be at Dalamud forever. There was a strict retirement age of forty.

Three more years. He could manage that.

---

Approximately thirty-three million malms away, a tiny, insignificant ice moon in orbit to Rhalgr, the Red Planet, began to shudder.

Dalamud, as distant as it was, registered a spike of unknown energy within the solar system. Automatic systems began to warm up from millennia of disuse at the perceived potential threat, the ancient, complicated machine churning through dusty old programming to decide its proper course of action. The ice moon continued to shudder with such force that its surface began to crack, and Dalamud slotted the unknown event into its targeting solutions.

This was at 2300hrs, 16 04 102018. Last logged event was approximately 10000 years ago, when a cataclysmic tectonic event shifted the entirety of Hydaelyn’s surface. Dalamud was then placed into passive-mode when X A N D E C O N T R O L T O W E R went offline and no further commands were offered. Dalamud scanned for X A N D E C O N T R O L T O W E R and received no response. No response. No response.

At 0001hrs, 17 04 102018, the ice moon violently broke apart. The alien energy spiked. Dalamud calculated and considered. Scanning anomaly. Scanning… scanning… scanning…

0010hrs, 17 04 102018, unknown alien object emerged from ice moon. Energy spikes further.

0012hrs, 17 04 102018, multiple unknown alien objects arrive into solar systems at lightspeed. Alien energy signature violently dispersed. Unknown alien objects were U N R E C O G N I S E D, therefore default to last logged behaviour when confronted with unrecognised intrusion: A G G R E S S I V E P O S T U R E.

Weapon systems were sluggish with disuse. Dalamud increased aetherical input. Elder Primal’s consciousness rose by 0.2%. Within acceptable parameters.

0014hrs, 17 04 102018, targeting solutions complete. Alien objects still U N R E C O G N I S E D, still initiating A G G R E S S I V E P O S T U R E, conclusion is D E S T R U C T I O N O F I N T R U D E R S.

W E A P O N S Y S T E M A H K M O R N R E A D I E D.

T A R G E T S A C Q U I R E D.

A H K M O R N I N I T I A T E D.

F I R I N G.

---

Dalamud, a weapon of mass destruction, built at the pinnacle of the Allagan Empire in anticipation to assist them in dominating their immediate solar system, directed a controlled Ahk Morn through the vacuum of space toward the intruders. In a blink of an eye, it travelled multiple lightyears and speared through the collected fleet of alien ships that had leapt from the unknown, alien object with devastating effect.

It was a very bombastic First Contact with the Citadel Council.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

-tosses more Fae AU art into my drafts for god-knows-when-I’ll-actually-be-able-to-post-it-

[raksh-writes]

where do you get your inspiration from for writing? are there any activities you do that helps your creativity flow? i ADORE your work and really love the passion you put into your fics! i’m excited to see what you come up with next whenever you’re ready!💗

Hello! 😊

Firstly, thank youuu 💗💗🥰 it means a lot to read that people see how much passion I have for my writing and enjoying my stories, so really, thank you for such a sweet ask 💗🥰

Where do I get my inspiration?

Hmm, that's a quite hard question actually, feels very much like pretty much anything and everything could be inspiring for me 😄 Definitely other fics I happen to read, whether it'd bcs of the specific AU that gives me an idea or that I liked the writer's style. Music can be super inspiring for me too, tho more in the sense that whenever I just let myself listen and daydream that's when lots of scenes and ideas come to me ^^ Some prompts lists can be inspiring too (most of my smutty one-shots are from those!) and sometimes just some talks with my friends or some of their posts can give me ideas also (A simple gesture of affection or How to give a fox a forehead kiss came about this way 😄). And these days, as Im knee deep in my BatB AU, talking with my lovely beta and bestest of friends @flowers-for-stiles really helps me a lot with keeping my inspiration and motivation going + lots of ideas come out whenever we chat about the AU ^^

And as for activities that help my creativity flow, aside from mentioned above talking with my hun @flowers-for-stiles 💗🥰, which is one of the main things for Sure, then I guess it'd be mostly working around the story. For example, I like imagining some scenes from a different pov than usual, which gives me a better feel for the character or offers me just more insight into the scene/story. I outline my ideas too, writing down key points, which I sometimes use my whiteboard for to give myself a different way of looking at it too. Then, with my BatB AU now, I need to do A Lot of worldbuilding, so for example I'd make lists of what character would be which on the a/b/o scale or in the last few days I sketched down the rough ideas of how Stiles' and Void's rooms would look like so I had an easier time describing everything - which I might post here on tumblr and link to over on ao3 so y'all can have a general idea of where everything in the rooms is situated 😄 In general I like giving my brain lots of different ideas and things to munch on, bcs I always need something fresh to keep my creativity going otherwise I get bored 🙈😂

And this BatB AU I've been writing so much in this reply is probably what will come next 😄 Not anytime soon, unfortunately, but it is the WIP I'm focusing the most on rn and it has A Lot of worldbuilding and plotting to do (just on a single chapters level too, it’s actually not that easy to finds conflicts and things to do for characters that are interesting to read while I need to introduce everything important to the story and the world it happens in 😂), so often times I'm writing down notes about that instead of writing actual chapters and it makes the whole process waaaay longer. I've also divided it into three parts and will prob only start posting when I have the whole first one, or most of it, written because that's just what feels right for it, y'know? And I'm still pretty raw emotionaly after finishing up LitA -- nothing besides this AU actually speaks to me enough to write it -- so rn I'm just trying to slowly ease myself back into writing overall and this AU feels good for that ^^ I might try reblogging prompt lists and ask to send me some, because I've been thinking of trying that to see if it gets my creative juices flowing and allows me to write some short, fun things, but we'll see! For now my hopes are that you, lovely nonnie, or any of my readers won't be too disappointed that I'm not posting much these days and that when it comes it might be in a few months not anytime soon, but also that y'all will enjoy it too 💗

Oof, and I rambled quite a bit, didn't I? 🙈😂 Anyway, gotta rest my wrists now, and hopefully, I can maybe write smth in the evening ^^ Thank you for the lovely ask, nonnie, and I hope your week is gonna be wonderful, best vibes and big hugs to you 💗💗💗🥰

[spectrumscribe]

to market, to market.

rottmnt gen fic, word count 2,618. contains early morning family routines, mentions of organic foods, nonsense magic, the author’s attempt at vague worldbuilding, and cute teens being semi-responsible.

presenting an rottmnt au i’ve been toying with the past few months and finally started to really figure out! i love human aus that include magic, so... have one for the boys + gal. <3

there’s notes after the ending about the au, and here’s the AO3 Version.

Saturday morning is farmer's market day. That’s been a staple in their home since forever. It’s the best place to buy not just cooking ingredients, but more specialized ingredients, too. From the stalls that are placed between others stalls in hairsbreadth spaces, stalls that no one else but their family and others like them can see.

Raph has always loved walking up to those impossible and amazing market stalls, from the time he was little. They fascinated him, even though their strangeness is commonplace in his life.

His brothers love them, too. They would all clamor at dad to hurry up with the boring shopping so they could go pick out their treats of the day. Curiosities in jars, paints that have brighter pigments than any other, sweets made with the soul essence of a sunny summer day or a cold winter’s eve- all those and a hundred other odds and bobs they can’t ever get enough of, even now.

Of course, this doesn’t make it any easier to get everyone going on a lazy Saturday morning.

Since their pops has made it very clear he’s not moving for love or good groceries today, no one even bothers to try dragging him out of bed. Instead, Mikey, who is always the first up unless Donnie just straight up didn’t sleep the whole night, shuffles into Raph’s bedroom shortly after his alarm clock goes off.

“Ged’up,” Mikey says blearily, leaning his weight on Raph’s stomach. Raph in turn groans tiredly, unwilling to move even though he knows they have to. All the good shit will be gone before noon, probably before eleven to be honest.

“What if we just… not eat for a few days?” Raph asks, not opening his eyes just yet. He just wants to sleep, just a few more hours…

“You’d probs eat one’a us if we didn’t get groceries,” Mikey replies. He yawns, and then says, “C’mon. We gotta get more meat n’ veggies an’ you were the one who made the dumb list for ‘em anyway. You want the good steaks to already be sold out by the time we get there?”

“…No. Hhhn… ‘kay, I’m comin’.”

“Good. I’m gonna go get the waffles goin’. You get the other two.”

After Mikey’s left, Raph sits up slowly, sighing as his bones shift and creak. His eyes sting with sleepiness, and as he rubs at them, Raph feels the slide of an extra eyelid opening and closing. He feels around inside himself, finding the remnants of a feline being enticing him back to sleep, complaining that he should be sleeping much, much longer than this, he’d been out most of the night and now it was nap time right now until it was time to hunt again…

Raph shakes himself, realizing he forgot to tuck that spirit back into his core all the way. He’d tired himself out last night, giving into how the late spring evening tugged at his therianthropy magic and having an adventure in the darkness, alive with the senses and joy of creatures that were at home there.

Breathing in, breathing out, Raph dispels the effects of that animal and feels less like he needs to curl up in his bed to sleep again.

It still sucks to get out from under his warm blankets and leave his bedroom to meet the day.

Leo’s room is the closest, so Raph wanders into his second brother’s bedroom first. He steps around the piles of clothes and stacks of books and an old spell circle carved into the floor, taking a seat on the end of Leo’s bed and shaking his brother by the leg.

“Leo. Dude. Up and at ‘em, we got grocery shopping to do.”

Leo groans pitifully, rolling onto his other side and scrunching himself against his silk pillow. “No… I don’t wanna go. You an’ Mike go, you don’t need… me…”

“It’s a group trip, Leon. No take-backsies for agreeing to it yesterday.”

Leo cracks one eye open, dark irises showing reluctance at waking fully. He then smiles, speaking as he does. “Raph… I don’t have to go to the farmer’s market… you and Mikey can handle it just fine without me… and you’ll bring back my favorite honey cookies, too…”

The warm lilt and tune of Leo’s voice almost gets to Raph, coaxing the suggestions to take over and erase his original purpose to being here. Except, Raph knows this feeling, knows he doesn’t have to listen and how to stop listening, and he pulls on a creature he rarely does. Pupils shifting, teeth molding together into three points, and a malleability to his skin spreading across it. He focuses the changes on his ears, the world’s volume lowering and Leo’s voice becoming fainter and fainter until it’s gone.

Raph waits for Leo to notice the change. His brother keeps trying to spell him a while longer, silent mouth rambling who knows what at Raph to get him to go away. It’s only when Leo opens his eyes again that he notes the gently glowing patterns emerging over Raph’s dark skin.

He scowls, saying something Raph can’t hear. Raph grins with his beak-teeth.

“Can’t hear you,” he says, not sure how clear his speech is right now, but he doesn’t really care. “Just get up and get downstairs before we eat all the eggos.”

He doesn’t have to hear his brother to know Leo mumbles a (non-magical) curse and puts his face into his pillow. Raph rolls his eyes and stands up, patting Leo’s back before he leaves. Raph rescinds the cephalopod spirit that’s made his bones less than solid, moving onto the next sibling he has to wake as his humanity takes full hold again.

The room is a disaster of Donnie-organization as usual, projects scattered everywhere with scrap notes in code taped to the wall haphazardly. Plus, Donnie is sleeping weird again. He’s ended up the wrong way around on his bed, feet on his pillow and head under the covers. Going by the nearby still open laptops with their sleep mode lights blinking, Donnie stumbled into bed after doing something or other far longer than he should have.

Raph peels the blankets off the second eldest of their family. Donnie’s lost his shirt at some point, revealing the spiralling seals on his back that keep his strength-sapping blood curse at bay. Thankfully, when they visit city pools, no one but other inhumans can see the tattoos. Otherwise, they’d probably get stopped every five seconds by some concerned parent who’s freaked out that a fourteen year old has them.

“Donnie,” Raph says, bending down and putting himself at eyelevel with his brother’s sleeping face. “Hey, hey Donnie. Wake up, dude. We’re going to the farmer’s market today, ‘member?”

Donnie doesn’t open his eyes, instead mumbling out, “01000110 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101001 01101110 01110101 01110100 01100101 01110011.”

It’s always weird to hear that- how Donnie will say codes aloud but without actually sounding out how the numbers should be pronounced. Like it’s being beamed right into your brain or something. Raph is used to it enough he ignores the oddity of Donnie’s mix-up, reaching over to shake him. “Don, you know none’a us speak binary. Human languages only, please.”

With arduous effort, Donnie slurs out, “Ffffffive more minutesss…”

“I’ll give you ten seconds.”

“Noooo…”

Raph gets Donnie upright on his bed before he leaves. It takes shoving his brother’s favorite iPad into his hands and turning it on, letting the sentience Donnie has nurtured into existence in it finish waking its creator up.

Downstairs, Raph wanders into the kitchen with a yawn, having put on jeans that are mostly clean and an old t-shirt that smells like their home. He has to pull up short before he gets to the fridge, waiting for tiny flying dragons to finish carrying the butter from the counter. Following their path, a pair of large butterflies carries the syrup with their little feet towards the table.

There’s… also a child sized bipedal cat with three eyes and cowboy boots collecting the freshly popped eggos onto a plate. It glances at Raph briefly, nodding with a respectful but mysterious cat’s smile.

Raph blinks slowly, and lets it slide. Whatever Mikey has been conjuring lately, he never asks how his littlest brother came up with the ideas.

However, he can’t let slide him opening the fridge and getting a flurry of sparrow sized winged shrimp to the face.

“Fff- Mikey!” Raph snaps, turning to glare at his brother in the dining room on the other side of the counter. He shoos the remaining shrimp away from his head, feeling a tinge of the feline from earlier wanting to swat and bite them.

“Oops,” Mikey says sheepishly, holding out his arms for his creations to alight on him. They flap their wings and nuzzle their illustrare witch with their long antennae. “I was kinda wonderin’ where these guys got to last night. Guess they wanted to hang out with the real shrimp or something?”

Raph has been awake for all of fifteen minutes, and he feels tired again.

“…Please put them away, at least for breakfast.”

“Can do.”

Mikey’s sketchbook of the day, left on the far end of the table away from the syrup, flies open, pages flapping wildly. The shimpbirds become blurred and flat, losing their solidness and whisking through the air in streams of color. The sketchbook sucks them all back onto its pages, and then snaps shut again as Mikey’s magic fades.

Raph opens the fridge again, this time able to grab the apple juice without assault by flying decapods.

Leo and Donnie come into the kitchen not long after, dressed and slightly more awake. They take their share of the eggos from the plate Mikey’s conjured cat offers them, unbothered by the puss-in-boots knock off serving them, or by it turning into a stream of color to return to its sketchbook right after.

As they’re eating the first half of their breakfast- the next will be bought at the market, giving into the temptation of fresh baked goods sold there- Donnie’s phone gets a text.

“01000001 01110000 01110010 01101001 01101100 0010000001110111 01100001 01101110 01110100 01110011 0010000001110100 01101111 0010000001110011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100001,” it cheers at the top of its speakers, and everyone but Donnie covers their ears.

“They said April wants to meet us,” Donnie clarifies for all the non-technopaths in the room.

Leo rubs his temples, sighing at his twin. “That’s great, but Donnie, please tell your devices to stop doing that so early in the morning. Or at any time of the day?”

Donnie’s phone makes a screeching sound.

“They said ‘fuck off’,” Donnie translates, sipping his coffee.

Leo gives the little device a confusedly miffed look.

“Guys, guys,” Mikey says, making calming gestures, “we got places to be, newts and cabbages to buy. We don’t got time for breakfast fights with technology.”

Raph takes over the peacemaking, reinforcing it by saying, “Donnie, if you wanna talk with your tech, use headphones. Leo, get earplugs if you really gotta.”

The two middle children give each other a long look, before mutually and silently agreeing the fight isn’t one worth having and going back to being stalwart allies. Raph and Mikey exchange their own looks, silently thanking one another for helping defuse the situation before it became one.

Donnie arranges with April to meet them on the way to the market, and reminds their best friend to wear her enchanted choker so she can see what they do. She starts a group text to remind them in turn that she’s literally hasn’t taken it off since they gave it to her, and that she’s reminding them to not forget the spelled cloth bags they’ll need for the abnormal ingredients.

Raph sheepishly texts back a thank you for the reminder while Mikey hunts said bags down. They’re in Leo’s room this time around, having been left there after their family’s silvertongue witch went shopping for new spellwork inks.

They leave a plate of saran wrapped eggos with a note for their dad on the counter, since he’ll probably drag himself out of bed at some point close to noon. Better to have waiting food than to get a grumpy call from their hungry dad who wants someone to bring him home a complicated takeout meal.

April is waiting for them on a corner halfway to the market, leaning on a stop sign and scrolling through something her phone. Probably one of the chats on the supernatural enthusiast sites she follows. Sometimes they all have a good laugh over the ridiculous misconceptions people have about the inhuman members of society, and other times they get a heads up of which parts of the city to avoid for a while. It’s worth it to keep tabs on what the humans notice about NYC; there’s always the off chance someone really has seen a wayward rabid ghoul or a summons gone feral that’s entered the territory.

“Morning,” April greets pleasantly, perky as she pleases even though she probably slept less than all of them, excluding Donnie. Somehow- and they’re still trying to prove it is a supernatural gift- April is always, always energetic and awake, no matter how long or little she’s rested.

Leo eyes the half a bacon and eggs wrap she has in her hands, and he sidles up to her, grinning slyly. “April,” he says melodically, “that wrap looks like too much for you, you’re already too full to finish it, right? I can take it off your hands, don’t worry. I’ll do it as a favor to you.”

“Nice try, Leon,” April says, sneakily tugging on his long braids as revenge for the attempted charming. “You and I both know I can finish this and another three if I wanted.”

“One day,” Leo says with a pout as he yanks himself away from April’s light grip, “I’ll prove that you’re not completely human, because you are way too tiny to eat as much as you do.”

April smirks and bites into her breakfast wrap, ignoring the begging look Leo gives her.

“You’re both makin’ me hungry again,” Raph complains, and starts herding his family along the sidewalk. “C’mon, keep moving or I’ll pick you up and carry you.”

Mikey perks up. “Actually-”

He doesn’t even have to finish. Raph bends without a word, and his little brother hops onto him for a piggyback to the market. The sharpie scarabs he doodled onto his arms yesterday flutter their wings and take flight as they go, buzzing around their group swiftly and quietly, shining iridescently black in the morning sun and invisible to humans passing by. Leo whistles a brief tune at a few and convinces them to land on his hands, petting their carapace gently as possible. Donnie ignores them and shakes them off when they land on his short hair, while April sputters as one flies at her glasses out of curiosity for their reflectiveness.

Raph feels something slithery and cool slide into his ponytail of thin dreadlocks, and just sighs and lets it happen. Apparently, Mikey drew another collection of snakes somewhere on himself, too.

The market is bustling as they get there, the human community intermingling with the supernatural community without noticing. Early morning shoppers are walking around with bags bursting with produce and homemade creations- ranging from organically grown carrots to knitted summoning dolls, the faces of unspeakable beings peering out along with stalks of celery.

An average Saturday shopping crowd, then.

Raph and his family aren’t noticed in the least as they join it.

so i spent a long while poking at the idea of the brothers having magical abilities in a witch au (splinter too, but i haven’t learned enough about him in canon yet to decide properly) and came up with these possible types that make sense to me! 

(disclaimer: spec is not the person to ever ask about real magic. i just do whatever the hell i want with it in my writing because yo, it’s magic!!!)

raph has shapeshifting magic, drawing on internal power and connections with creatures he’s interacted with to change his body to fit the abilities of animals. inspired thusly bc he has nice pointy teeth in canon and bc he reminds me (’cause he’s Big) of Jin from Ran and the Grey World.

donnie can communicate with and manipulate technology. unless he withholds it, any piece of machinery he works with will a) never break down again, b) mysteriously always seem like new after you’ve taken it to him for repairs, and c) might potentially develop something of a sentience if he gets really invested in the projects. most of his personal computers have sassy little personalities now.

leo, so long as he believes wholeheartedly in what he’s saying, can change bits of reality just by talking it into doing so. if he recites poetry he made himself with enough intention to a stick, he could convince it to become a sword, or tell an alleyway to become a dead end to someone. mostly though, he just uses his magic to convince people of little things, like giving him a discount at the store, or letting him copy off someone’s homework.

mikey can give temporary life to artwork, be it sketches or paintings or murals or pottery or etc. by drawing on the devotion and emotion the artists put into the pieces. he mostly uses his own art, but since he’s got more magical juice/potential in him than all his brothers combined, if he’s pushed to it he could bring life to one of those massive murals on the sides of apartment complexes. mostly he just likes making little friends, though, haha.

april is purely human, but can and has gone toe to toe with supernatural beings and kicked their asses. she’s never had any trouble keeping up with her witch buddies, and they, of course, love their semi-adopted big sister being around as much as she loves them being with her.

uhhhhh... more to come of this at some point? zshrug, i hope other people here love witches too.

(also... pls consider buying me a kofi.... i promise i shall reward the gift with frequent fics...)

[illegiblewords]

Right now I am honestly tired as heck just out of work but I think I am figuring out a writing thing so gonna type that here.

I’m basically in the kind of :I position rn where besides on and offline responsibilities and social stuff I have:

1) A novel I am supposed to be working on through July, which is properly outlined and I feel pretty good about.

2) A fun D&D campaign that I’m :> over.

3) A new idea that hit me in the head like a sack of bricks like a day or two ago.

#3, literally it’s the second time in my life that kind of situation has happened. I don’t normally have ideas where the concept just sort of gets vomited out in a weird detailed state. But after a late af night at work apparently that was what had to happen and I ended up scribbling notes for that for like five hours into some stupid time at night/morning.

Honestly, prob some part of me had been low key preparing for that to happen. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a thing involving multiple fantasy races (main novel isn’t about that) and then when I hit D&D that basically unclogged a bunch of concepts that had previously been mushing together and they sort of exploded out in a much more articulate way than originally planned. I can see pieces of what I’d been vaguely considering before floating around.

And now I have to deal with it. :[

One of the parts I’ve been very D: about though is cast.

Let me tell you dudes, I actually talked to a dear friend who is a pro editor about writing and she gave me some advice I try to keep in mind. That advice was to not make such ungodly huge casts.

This isn’t because I can’t make solid characters with huge casts or stories can’t be told with huge casts. It’s because I’m a goddamn crazy person and whenever I try to set up a story I end up doing horrifyingly detailed levels of worldbuilding and literally with notes of like eight generations of personal ancestry and all the social circles of every single character and then when you have casts of like 60 people that goes into the sphere of hundreds of pages of OUTLINING and it’s hard to get started. Not even fucking exaggerating. My main novel I basically have two points of view (so I’d list main cast is like two people) and less than ten significant cast members because I know I’m like this and I deliberately looked at myself in the mirror and was like NO URBAN YOU NEED TO STOP.

This novel, the original main cast size I had in mind was going to be like nine. As in, the people traveling together having an adventure was going to be be nine. I would still have had to do all the “npc” types and make backstories and motives for their asses.

I realized at some point this was excessive and did that whole look-yourself-in-the-mirror thing and went DO YOU REALLY NEED A MAIN CAST OF NINE URBAN THAT SEEMS PRETTY EXCESSIVE, and so then proceeded to look at my cast and be like “DEFEND WHY THIS PERSON NEEDS TO EXIST AND IF YOU CANNOT THEN FUCK THEM”.

Basically, self-amputation is an important part of writing my friends. It really is.

So step one, there were a series of stern conversations with myself that amounted to “DO YOU REALLY NEED A SUBTERRANEAN HALF-ELF BARD URBAN?” “Well I mean I don’t know it might raise neat questions and I have so many guys in the cast and I’d like to balance things–” “DO YOU REALLY NEED A SUBTERRANEAN HALF-ELF BARD URBAN?” “… No, not really…” “SAY HASTA LA VISTA BABY” Then rinse and repeat with a bunch of other characters.

For the record, I try to do this same process when I go shopping too. It is not always successful but I do use it. In this case I was fortunate and I succeeded in whittling the main cast down to six members, which is still big but not obscenely big.

When I was younger, I used to use tv tropes as a guide to try and help myself figure things out not going to lie. As an older and more experienced writer lady I know that tv tropes does a lot of focusing on the superficial bits of writing but not so much the reasons for those superficial bits that actually let you do important structural work. Still, I did have a look back at cast calculus to see what those were in case it gave me an idea of how to approach the issue of making dynamics and fleshing out characters and doing the pacing with a situation like this.

The answer wasn’t there. But it did help me get my fucking head together, so credit where it is due.

TV tropes talks about five man band a lot, which is basically a structure of leader, person to direct foil the leader, someone intellectual in the group, someone physical in the group, and mediator of the group. It’s not actually said that nicely, they have some admin there being a royal turd focusing on “wah the mediator has to be a gurl” instead of character dynamics. Annoying and useless for storytellers but w/e. They also talk about how sometimes you get a sixth person tacked on and usually that person is an edgelord of some kind who reforms.

Superficial stuff, not that useful. But some person made a note that made me stop and just explained the whole goddamn thing for me clearly.

The sixth person usually acts as a second foil to the leader.

Huh.

So basically, shit’s like this. I’m pretty sure I heard at some point that humans are only really able of fully comprehending numbers up to 3 at a time. It’s not that you don’t know there are bigger numbers. But like picture a bunch of dots or something, they usually break into 1′s, 2′s, or 3′s. If you imagine four it’s like 2+2 or 1+3. If you imagine five it’s like 2+3 or 1+2+2 or something. Grain of salt me on this I am not a mathematician or a scientist, but I do remember hearing this is a thing.

If you look at the way cast calculus tries to break shit down on the tv tropes website, they follow this more or less. Duos you have person A and person B contrasting their qualities, they end up bouncing off each other and creating a balance. Trios you have person A and person B with that structure but then person C is also there and is a kind of mediator role. Id (impulsive and a bit selfish)/ego (aware of reality)/superego (morality or intellect) with ego as mediator if you wanna go old psych. With groups of five, the setup is leader/right hand (contrast), then mind/body (another form of contrast, doesn’t strictly need to be that probably but it is one), then mediator.

2+2+1, or you can attach the mediator to either group of two and have 3+2.

Huuuuuuh.

So six, though. What the fuck are you supposed to do with six?

3+3 my dudes, and 2+2+2. AND, if you aren’t gonna be lazy and shallow and just blindly mimic what people have done before without understanding it (disclaimer: I have in fact been lazy and shallow and blindly mimicked what people have done before without understanding it many, many times) you gotta be able to switch the party members in each subdivision and explain where they stand with the dynamic so you don’t have any redundant bits or hiccups and all the relationships read distinct.

So basically:

Character A

Character B

Character C

Character D

Character E

Character F

You gotta be able to explain:

ABC, DEF, AB, CD, EF first. Then ABD, CEF, AD, BE, CF, and so on.

Reasons larger casts get harder, you have more shit you have to figure out with fucking math. Cut corners at this and the risk of you having two characters who are basically the same person and have a boring nonsense dynamic you don’t know what to say about goes up.

But Urban (you say as my levels of insane analytical bullshit continue to climb), haven’t people figured this shit already??? A-Archetypes happened yeah, so theoretically some older and more mathematically/instinctively gifted storytellers in the past figured some shit out. Wasn’t there a thing about the sixth person being some kind of douchecanoe edgelord? Why not just go with that and pray it sticks?

See I figured that trick out my dudes. I figured it right out. The douchecanoe is a trick. Secretly, that douchecanoe has a hole and that hole is flooded with more math.

Why do you need a douchecanoe? Well, we said earlier–usually they show up and turn out to be a second foil to the leader. So you got leader, foil A, foil B. One is gonna be mediator (probably the leader) and then each of the others will be a pole of some kind. Id, ego, superego is one way of putting it but so is idk idealist, realist, cynic. You can go a lot of routes with this. For mine I have ends justify the means, ends never justify means, and maybe both sometimes depending on the situation. It’s all foiling. And depending on who you have in which position you will have greater or lesser levels of contrast or parallel going on. I could have ABC and DEF be id, ego, superego respectively but then I try ABD and in that setup D is ego/mediator compared to A and B or something.

Basically, you have a team who is mostly pretty heroic overall, the person jumping in being either a moral extremist in some ways or being extra impulsive about what they want is a way to increase the range of morality on the whole and offer more foiling opportunities. I'd like to say though that isn't the only way to do it. If you have an asshole teammate in a group of five and then send in a sixth person, that sixth person could stand out for being really decent too. It's basically about generating a big moral contrast, especially between the leader and their direct foil.

But what about shipping? Opposites attract is one thing but isn’t birds of a feather flock together also a thing? And isn't shipping is just another form of character dynamic? What the hell does that do to all this horrible math? The thing is, opposites attract and birds of a feather flock together always, by nature, have to be trends. Not absolutes. Otherwise you get selfcest or two people with nothing to bond or relate over at all. Practically aliens. Any contrast you create between characters must also parallel in some other way and vice versatile. And ye both still work. It's good general policy to always have some level of foiling AND some level of paralleling between each pair of cast members that is distinct.

Also, as a bonus--why do people think casts of four are tricky? Basically when you are doing groups of four every single character has to be equally foiled and paralleled by every other character in some way. The balance of similarity and difference is real precise and can be a little tricky to wing.

But yeah, seven and higher cast numbers scare the hell out of me especially since they don't break evenly into subgroups within human comprehension limits. I think it's still doable but Jesus.