Striking of the Clock
BrainDead or DeadTired idea.
During Tim's BruceQuest he uncovers hidden texts/tombs of a being that controls and watches over the Time Stream and Tim knows this being will have to be his best bet of finding Bruce while also trying to figure out on his own how to get Bruce out of the Time Stream as well.
However the being doesn't have a summoning sigil due to being an Ancient.
He does find the sigil for the Ghost King however, a being that borderlines into Ancients power territory and could in theory grant Tim an audience with the Time being if Tim plays his cards right.
In the end, Tim decides it was worth a shot. He convinces Ra's to 'help' him summon the Ghost King. Ra's wanting to see if such a being could be real and to see how far Tim is willing to go to bring Bruce back, allows League resources to be used.
It takes a few weeks, with Tim also making plans to undermine not just the Council of Spiders but Ra's as well, but eventually the time to summon the Ghost King comes.
Tim honestly was expecting the large eldritch like being that showed up, he just wasn't expecting the being to be basically a formed galaxy mixed with ice and the northern lights itself.
He also really wasn't expecting when he negotiated a deal with the Ghost King, and taken into a place called the Infinite Realms when they shook hands (Tam and Prue is also taken with him, he refused to leave them with Ra's), for the being to shrink down and turn into a white haired, green eyed teen around his age who starts flirting at him.
Nor was he expecting for another being, one that apparently is able to shift aging forms, and a grandfather clock in its chest to appear next to the teen and bonk the white haired teen with a staff and tell him to stop flirting with his future new apprentice....
Wait what?
-x-x-
Danny is rarely, very rarely summoned since taking the mantle of Ghost King. Due to being a new Ancient most old sigils that was once connected to Phantom (mostly teens from Amity tired summoning him a couple of times) no longer worked and the only ones that did were the ones he gave to his friends and family or the Ghost King ones (but again rare due to how rare texts/tombs to the Ghost King is written down)
So when he felt the pull of a summoning he made sure to go in his eldritch form, mostly to see if he could scare them or at least intimidate.
Honestly he was expecting the cult, given the fact they summoned a being known as the (freaking) Ghost King, maybe not them being assassins/ninjas but still a cult.
He wasn't expecting the cute, same age as him too, guy in the room.
(CW totally paused time for a second, gave Danny a file on who and why he was summoned, discussed getting Tim Drake out of Ra's hands (and maybe allowing CW to finally have his own future apprentice because Tim is a smarty smart whose been slowly able to figure out the freaking Time Stream itself.), and then started the timeline again)
Danny decided, after striking a deal, that since he's going to be working with Tim, aka Red Robin (who Danny found out used to be Robin! From Gotham), from now on he might as well shoot his shot and flirt with him and-
"OUCH, CW REALLY?!"
"Stop flirting with my new apprentice for now My King, we have work to do."
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I love libraries.
I'm browsing the WWI shelves (as you do) and notice a very old book about the war. I glance at the first pages that talk about how one day the war will be over and we'll look at this place and not see any signs of the battlefield.
Then it hits me. And I check the publishing date.
This book was printed before the war's end. Not written. Printed. The physical object was created in 1918, while the war in question was raging and the end was as yet uncertain.
Now I'm standing on the other side of the apocalypse, with this physical link to that era in my hands. I'm living proof that the war did end and life did go on and we can all look at the end of the world as a long-ago memory.
Reading old books is cool enough, connecting our minds and hearts through the ideas of people who lived long ago, but there's something extra profound about holding a copy of the book that comes from the time that it was written. It's a physical link between the past and the present connecting me to those long-ago people. A piece of the past come into the future that gives me the chance to almost take the hand of some long-ago reader, to hold something they could have held, connecting not just mentally but physically to their era, a moment of connection across more than a century.
Excuse me while I go weep.
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Do you think aliens would get freaked out when we crack our joints?
*human stands up after too long spent hunched over the computer, all joints cracking*
*alien coworker whose only experience with human anatomy comes from movies where crack = broken bone*
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re: that HEFTY siffrin sweep on id5’s isat favourite blorbos poll — this might sound silly but i do actually think it’s kinda fascinating that isat, as a game so inseparably steeped in (for lack of a better way to describe it) queer fandom culture, managed to so completely sidestep the common Fandom Phenomenon that i suspect was behind the poll in the first place by creating a main character that is also overwhelmingly the fan favourite character for once.
obviously there are any number of factors we could point at to explain the extent to which siffrin nomiddlenames nolastnames manages to grab people and absolutely not let go, but personally i think one of the most interesting ones to consider is the one specific to the medium — that is, how siffrin subverts the “silent blank slate video game protagonist” archetype in such a way that happens to be primo brainrot breeding grounds.
like, when a video game dev makes a silent protagonist it’s usually a bid to maximize immersion by closing the aesthetic distance between player and character as much as possible, right? which is especially true of rpg video games — players find connection in the generic, as that is what gives you the freedom of motion to insert yourself into the story in whatever unique shape suits you best. you are your character and your character is you.
(as ever, post ran long. yall know the drill. tossin in a quick header pic before thoughts on blank slates & blorboification continue under the cut)
and then you’ve got siffrin, who is expressly pointed out to be the taciturn type; who when initially giving the player exposition about their journey so far doesn’t seem to hint at a life or history or even really any motivations outside the journey; whose every thought and action is narrated in second person so as to keep tracing and re-tracing the connection between him and you.
even their design — all darkless and shapeless, bundled up in that big cloak, as if an invitation for you to fill it in with whatever lets you relate to them most! at this point they are their own character for sure, but they also have enough very clear parallels going on with the silent protagonist archetype to feel more than accidental.
of course, as you keep playing you start to recognize that his blankness is much, much more than just a grab at immersion; his apparent lack of backstory, itself a fundamental piece of backstory. this is where he flips dramatically in the player’s perception from “generic vessel for story delivery” to “thoroughly multidimensional character trapped within endless torment nexus custom-built to target and exacerbate all his very specific worst traits rooted in very specific traumas”.
yknow, the good stuff !
but by then you have also been playing enough to be feeling the effects of the thing isat’s design does best of all. i’m talkin bout that ludonarrative lockstep baby. every piece of isat’s gameplay is designed to make you feel what siffrin is feeling — you understand by now that he is not a stand-in for you, but all the same you share in his frustration, his grief, his rare moments of joy and the subsequent heart-in-your-shoes devastation when that joy is inevitably poisoned — and through it all, the desperate grasping for anything new — all as if they were every bit your own.
so in this way the connection is maintained, even if you were someone for whom siffrin’s particular traits & struggles might not otherwise cause you relate to them at all if you had encountered them elsewhere, in a setting where you weren’t actively controlling them as a player. siffrin still gets to carry all the “just like me fr” impact of the blank slate protagonist in the tropes he embodies and in the game mechanics’ design, while totally free to evolve completely into his own character and keep you relating to closely them all the same. now toss back in the fact that said traits & struggles very much ARE of a flavour that a great many people Would Tend To Relate To and just like that you’ve got a perfect storm cookin.
too individual and compellingly written to be an empty vessel for plot delivery. too closely connected with the player’s emotional state to be a story observed impassively from the outside. he has 92 mental illnesses and for the low low price of free u can give him yours to carry too. nobody is doin it like him. congratulations on your well-deserved nose sniffrin nomiddlenames nolastnames <3
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