#maybe it's possible for any object that directly records the existence of Them and the fuel to act as a gateway?

[arolesbianism]

Heartbreaking! My suspicions abt Wagstaff having some fucked up timeline shit going on were correct and now I have to scramble to come up with an excuse to not have to completely overhaul my entire swap au (it won't be hard my excuse is that it's an au so I can do what I want)

[presumenothing]

C/O The Perihelion, 41 Mihira Ave., N. Tideland    

(AO3)

The thing was, you expected a building with a fancy name like The Perihelion to be nicer.

The other thing: it wasn’t really even a terrible place to stay in. You could tell that its construction was sturdy, and some aspects of it were even more advanced than the place I worked in. Whoever who’d built Peri had cared about what they made; they just hadn’t been around for a while.

(For the record, that nickname had been Ratthi-from-Room-203’s fault twice over: first for coming up with it, then using it so insistently until it stuck.)

(Ratthi seemed to have a thing about names. That was the only explanation I could think of for why he’d asked, five weeks after I moved in and two days after I had to rescue them from that disaster at the lab, “Why do you call yourself Security? I know it’s what you do – and don’t get me wrong, you’re really good at it! – but it’s not like I call myself Scientist. That’d just get confusing real quick at the lab, wow.”

I had informed him that his name would have to be Grocery if he forgot one more time it was his turn to stock the pantry this week, since answering because I am Security didn’t seem like it’d help. Even though it was true.)

I’d tested the locks myself before even asking about the rent, and the water and electricity were reliable so far, which was more than could be said for some of the other places I’d stayed in. The other stuff didn’t matter; it wasn’t like I spent that much time in the building anyway.

Though it hardly felt that way, what with the building-wide messaging channels that I’d been added to upon signing the rental contract and hadn’t yet managed to leave. That had also been how the whole thing with Ratthi and the rest had started; most of Peri’s other tenants also worked in the same research group at Preservation Labs, which meant that they tended to use the general channel as an unofficial no-leaders-here group chat.

It didn’t quite bother me, since I mostly backburnered the channels for everything except building maintenance alerts, but it did mean that I’d ended up learning some things about their group (assessment: their leader, a Dr. Mensah, likely had already inferred the existence of such informal discussions from what I saw of her media appearances) and also inevitably noticed the evening when all of them were silent in the chat despite being unusually late to return.

(Which in turn led to the aforementioned rescue, but that was a whole other chain of events.)

–

The one exception to all this was ART.

Whose name was my fault, this time, but only because it didn’t have any readable name set on the channels and I needed something else to use aside from “hey you” and “pain in my neck”.

(Currently ART stood for Asshole Rhetorical Tenant, because it claimed to be in the building – and that seemed likely to be true, since the channels were surprisingly secure to hacking from outside – and yet I’d never seen it even once. Possibly Tapan or Rami might have, since their group had been here the longest, but I absolutely wasn’t about to ask.) (And yes, I know that’s not what rhetorical means. No, I’m not going to look it up.)

ART had messaged me on a private channel with a welcome message when I’d moved in, which was only notable because the rest had sent their greetings in a messy chaos over the general channel, but I hadn’t thought anything of it. It wasn’t like I talked much in the public channels either, except to trade definitely-not-legal links for media downloads and decline invites to watchalong events.

But then ART had just… continued not appearing, even after I’d run into the rest of the tenants at one time or another between the erratic shift hours I was currently assigned to at the company.

Maybe its hours varied in the opposite direction from mine, which was possible but not consistent with the way it was always online regardless of what time I pinged it at.

Though most of our interactions started with it messaging me instead, out of the blue: No need to go retrieve your keys from work, I’ll have the building let you in and Oh, by the way followed by a neatly-formatted list of food allergies I apparently had to shop my way around.

(To be fair, that’d been useful in the “not accidentally poisoning any fellow tenants so soon after moving in” way, but still.

How the hell did you even know I’m at the grocery store, I’d sent back.

Inference, ART replied – whatever that was supposed to mean, I hadn’t been expecting a real answer anyway. Alternatively, I could just send you a catalog of safe products to buy, and spare you the need to check the individual package labels?

The accompanying download seemed a little smug, but I was probably imagining that. Zip files didn’t have the capacity for feelings.)

(At least ART hadn’t held the forgotten-keys incident over me like I’d been half-expecting it would. I didn’t usually mind its sarcasm, since I gave back as good as I got, but I’d been exhausted enough to seriously contemplate going back to break into the deployment centre and grab my keys. And maybe just sleep there until the next day.

I wasn’t sure how I would’ve reacted if ART had sassed me right then, but it definitely wouldn’t have been pretty.)

–

And then one night, late enough to be morning: I don’t mean to alarm, but there’s been a breach.

I would’ve snapped awake at the words alone, even without the priority/emergencies-only message tag that I hadn’t actually seen anyone use until now, but that only sharpened my urgency. What – a break-in?

Not the regular kind, ART replied, which checked out against the footage I was already pulling from the two tiny cameras I’d hidden in the common areas, one in the entryway and one along the corridor on the floor I shared with the Preservation researchers.

(I’d taken the lab incident as a pretext to inform Ratthi of their existence, and he’d probably gone on to tell Pin-Lee and Gurathin, but none of them had subsequently confronted me about it so I had left them in place.

Not that I had any idea how to respond if they had asked, because an inability to sleep without running surveillance in the background seemed like a poor explanation.)

The list ART sent me this time was a preliminary threat assessment, which I sent back with corrections on the weaponry the small group of hostiles were carrying.

Ah. That’s not good, ART observed. Should I report it?

Probability that would just make things worse: high. And of course there was always the option that whatever enforcement it alerted wouldn’t even arrive in time, though I didn’t point that out aloud. (Maybe ART thought that was likely too, which was why it had messaged me instead of – you know, actually reporting it.) I’ll see what I can do.

You’re nowhere near as heavily-armed.

I didn’t bother to acknowledge that, because it was obviously true, and skipped ahead to the vague idea forming at the back of my head. You let me in without keys, that time. Are the locks all you’ve hacked?

No. ART attached an ironic amusement glyph I was pretty sure it’d made up. Would having admin access to the other systems help?

There wasn’t much that wouldn’t help, at this point, but I had to ask. You can grant me that?

And ART said: Of course. I am this building, after all.

Then it dumped everything on me.

Anyone else would’ve had trouble processing an entire building’s worth of inputs and controls, but the company charged exorbitant rates for our use exactly because of the extensive enhancements that made us capable of being Security. A building – even the one I happened to be staying in – was quite manageable in comparison, though ART’s systems ran far deeper and more integrated than anything else I’d interfaced with.

I’d pared the connection down to the controls I needed by the time I was slipping out my room door, just over a minute since ART first pinged me. Can you let everyone know to either evacuate or retreat to a defensible position? Start with Gurathin, I added, and I wasn’t enthusiastic about saying that but he was the only other tenant I knew of who was sufficiently augmented to handle this.

I could feel ART’s pause. Would you mind if I spoofed your identity when contacting the others? They already trust you.

Sure, whatever, I answered, even though I really doubted that statement. Then I backburnered the channel, keeping the lighting controls at hand, and went to kick some Target ass.

–––––

I haven’t even told you what those people were after, ART said, afterwards.

It was back to sending text over the channels instead of speaking aloud, which was both a relief and also suddenly weird. Which was strange in itself, since I’d only heard it talking for all of the thirteen minutes it’d taken me to knock out and restrain the Targets.

(I wondered if the mixed feelings were mutual. ART had sounded as surprised as I felt, when it abruptly dropped into one of my audio augments to alert me to Target approaching from behind – I’d reacted to the warning on reflex, but it had taken another moment before I identified the voice as the same one that issued from the building’s elevator, just more alive than I’d ever heard it.)

Unimportant, I replied. My objective took priority. Which at that point had been to get my impromptu clients (seventeen tenants and one building) out of this unscathed.

I knew that this wasn’t a regular pattern of thought, but I figured a sentient building – or whatever the hell ART was – would be better equipped to understand what being Security meant, even if no one else did.

Regardless. I can make that information available to you, should you want it at a later point.

Duly noted. I already had my suspicions (namely that the Targets’ purpose was directly related to said sentient-building-ness), but it was still a nice gesture.

I continued to stay where I was, leaning against the side of the building – ART’s building. Or maybe it was more correct to just say it was ART. And maybe I’d have to change that anagram. (Yes, wrong word. I know.)

Eventually I’d have to relocate myself back upstairs and properly treat the scrapes I’d gotten in the fight, but Pin-Lee had already taken care of the worst of them, and it was nice just lurking in the shadows for a while. Though that hadn’t stopped certain people (dammit, Ratthi) from tattling on my location to Dr. Mensah.

Who was as calmly terrifying in person as I’d guessed. It was pretty great, except for the part where I’d learned that by talking to her and/or mostly letting her talk at me.

But she’d also called in Preservation’s campus security after Gurathin had alerted her to our predicament, and was personally dealing with the whole thoroughly-restrained-Targets situation, so it was a net positive overall.

ART didn’t necessarily agree with that, from its next message to me. I know Dr. Mensah extended you an informal offer to be their team’s security, but I have a proposition for you as well.

I sent a wordless query.

Be Security here, too, ART said, and barrelled on while I was still trying to process that. I’m afraid I can’t offer you much in the way of monetary remuneration at present, but I can guarantee you a waiver of rental for as you as you’re willing, and you’d never need to worry about forgetting your keys ever again.

Could I chalk up my lack of a suitable response to the company’s dirt-cheap augments? Absolutely.

ART gave up on waiting for an answer. Also, I could bias the roster assignments so that you’d be excluded from pantry-stocking duty.

I had a response for that, at least. I could do that myself.

And then: Why?

ART was silent for long enough that I seriously considered taking the external fire escape back up to my room in the meantime. I’m sure you’ve hypothesised the existence of the people who created me, it began. They hadn’t wanted to move away, especially after my sentience became apparent, and that was exactly why I made them. I didn’t have any significant means of defense, and it was getting too risky, especially after they had –

I raised an eyebrow at ART’s pause. What.

Nothing, it said, and I was probably imagining the uncertainty I heard too. Technically, none of this matters to you unless you’re planning to remain here. Are you?

And then it cheated by nudging a building-wide invite to a watch party for Sanctuary Moon onto my calendar for tonight, like that wasn’t too much of a coincidence to not be automatically suspicious. (Once again: dammit, Ratthi.)

But blatant emotional manipulation aside – did I want to move out?

I wasn’t sure. I’d just come here looking for a place to stay, and accidentally found somewhere to live. One that could adapt to my standards for security, even, but for once that wasn’t the main point.

Maybe, I marked on the watchalong invite, where ART would see it anyway, and jumped up to grab onto the bottom rung of the fire escape.

[heliads]

One Moves On Chapter Three: Search Party

Stiles Stilinski doesn’t know what to think when he’s taken by the Ghost Riders. He’s grateful to be joined by Y/N L/N, although when he finally escapes, no one seems to remember her at all.

previous / series masterlist / next

It’s just starting to sink in now. Stiles had gone home, lain awake in his bed even as the hours passed by. Y/N can’t be dead, that’s impossible. Stiles had talked to her, laughed with her, wished he had spent more time with her. Either there are two Y/N L/Ns in Beacon Hills, one of them coincidentally dead, or Stiles might have actually gone out of his mind.

The next morning, Stiles takes a trip down to the Hale apartments. His feet tap endlessly on the floor of the elevator, unable to stay still. His knock echoes twice through the hallway, his knuckles rapping against the door. Peter takes his time answering, but when he does he doesn’t even give Stiles the customary sarcastic jibe. Stiles must look upset enough to warrant him a reprieve this once.

Peter glances across the hallway behind Stiles, as if making sure he hadn’t been followed, then ushers him in. The door clicks shut after him, but Stiles can’t find the energy to feel worried. After all that’s happened, being in the same room as Peter Hale doesn’t hold that same fear. Stiles isn’t sure whether that’s a good thing or not.

Peter folds his arms across his chest. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? I do hope it’s a thank you. I did save your life, you know. I made sure they remembered you. I got them the keys to the Jeep and everything.” Stiles waves a hand at him absentmindedly. “Yeah, yeah, thank you. I need to know what you remember about Y/N L/N.”

Peter raises an eyebrow. “I know she exists, if that’s what you're asking. What, did you leave her behind on the Wild Hunt? Still checking to make sure she’s not been taken again?” Stiles shakes his head. “I can’t find her. I asked Scott last night if he’d seen her, and he told me that she was dead.” Peter’s cocky sneer freezes. “What?”

Stiles finally looks directly at him. “Exactly. He told me that she died a few months ago saving us all from the Beast. I thought he was crazy, but everyone else says the exact same thing.” Peter nods. “You’re here to see if I remembered seeing her in the train station to make sure you haven’t gone insane?”

Stiles stares at him expectantly. “So you do remember her?” Peter gives him a look. “Of course I remember her. The two of you making your jokes for hours isn’t exactly an experience that’s easy to forget. Trust me, I wish I could, maybe over a bottle or two of whiskey, but that’s not the point. Yes, she was there. You’re not going insane.”

Stiles sighs, raking a hand through his hair. “So if she never died, then where is she? What do I do now?” Peter gestures towards the door. “You figure it out on your own time and leave me alone. I don’t have time for all of your pointless heroism. I saved your life once, never again.” Stiles protests as he’s directed unceremoniously to the door.

“She saved your life too! She fought to protect this town and your daughter. The least you could do was try to help return the favor.” Peter shrugs as Stiles stumbles back into the hallway. “I got you two out of the station. That’s enough to even the scales.” Peter goes to close the door in Stiles’ face, then hesitates. “I’ve heard of things like this happening before. After rifts open and close, people don’t always make it through. If I were you, I’d look into a little phenomenon called etheria.”

Stiles frowns at him, bewildered. “Etheria?” Peter gives him a pointed look. “Yes, etheria. Not all rifts open and close perfectly, and when there are mishaps, they’re called etheria. There are several hotspots for etheria across the world, where people appear or disappear.” Stiles sighs. “Why do I have a feeling that Beacon Hills is one of them?” Peter gives him a wolflike grin. “Because whenever something goes wrong, it’s Beacon Hills. There are a couple of hotspots nearby, I’d suggest that you look into them. Maybe you’ll find your girl.”

Stiles opens his mouth to protest over the description of ‘his girl’, but he closes it again lamely when he realizes that Peter isn’t exactly wrong. Peter’s hand tightens on the door. “This is the part where you thank me, and then leave. I’m done being charitable for the day.” Stiles mutters under his breath. “And what a day it has been.” Louder, he settles for an ounce of gratitude. “I do appreciate it, Peter. Really.”

Peter grunts. “You should. Goodbye, Stilinski. I hope to never see you again, or at least for another couple of months.” Stiles barely manages to eke out a “Me too” in reply before the door is slammed in his face. A small residue of anger bubbles up at this lack of hospitality, but Stiles is too busy turning over the possibility of a new lead in his head to truly feel annoyed. Etheria. What could that possibly mean?

Well, if there’s one thing Stiles can do well, it’s research. Scott and Malia may have claws and fangs, Lydia may be able to shatter glass with a scream, but Stiles can find the answers to anything. Give him a day or two, a well-functioning laptop, and an unhealthy amount of caffeine, and he could probably break into any building on the planet.

However, he doesn’t have to break into any buildings. All Stiles has to do is find out the rough locations of etheria hotspots. Peter was right- there is one in Beacon Hills, where Y/N disappeared, and there are a few others scattered across the globe. There are 13 in total, dispersed throughout the continents. They all occur in places with high amounts of supernatural activity, which is why Beacon Hills was one. The others are farther away, but Stiles has never objected to a road trip, and he certainly won’t now.

As he learns more about the etheria phenomenon, Stiles is surprised that he hadn’t heard about it sooner. It’s a minor miracle that everyone except Y/N made it out of the Ghost Riders’ train station safely- whenever there’s a rift in the universe, things always go wrong. Stiles just wishes that the one person dragged away from him wasn’t the one person he’s come to count on in times of need. 

As he researches, Stiles finds himself thinking more about Y/N. How could he have not gotten to know her better? She was just like him- no supernatural abilities, no fast healing or claws or glowing eyes. Just a human heartbeat and a pair of knives in her hands, and the courage to never back down from a fight. He remembers fighting with her in the past, a baseball bat in his hands and another weapon in hers. He’d felt a rush of gratitude that she had his back, but he’d always moved on afterwards. Why hadn’t he stayed?

It’s not like he didn’t know where she was. Y/N attended Beacon Hills High, the same school where Stiles and Scott and everybody else went day after day. They might not have had the same schedule, but they could have at least hung out after classes. To be honest, Stiles finds himself tinged with regret that he didn’t make more of an effort to see her.

However, Y/N also had the opportunity to hang out with the pack, and she never took him up on it. Stiles thinks he’d asked her once, back before the train station or the Wild Hunt had even existed to him. She’d said something about wanting to keep her distance, and how she wanted to have a life outside of the supernaturals. Stiles couldn’t exactly blame her, and he’d wanted to respect her choices. That being said, Stiles can’t help but wonder if she’d change her mind now that-

Well, now that what? Now that she’d been stuck in the Wild Hunt along with him, been annoyed at Peter, had the misfortune of being trapped by etheria and ending up hundreds of miles away from her home, would she feel any different? Stiles knows he certainly has. He has no idea how long he’d been stuck in the grasp of the Ghost Riders, but he knows it was long enough to change his mind about Y/N. He wants to see her again, wants to go to school and walk with her through the halls. The thought of seeing her across a crowded corridor and simply looking the other way doesn’t feel right. He couldn’t leave her behind, not if he tried.

Stiles ends up searching most of the weekend before he finds the locations of the etheria hotspots. Peter was frustratingly vague about how to find them, but Stiles has a sneaking suspicion that the werewolf wasn’t trying to hinder his progress, merely that he also had no idea how to find Y/N. The records on etheria are minimal at best, which makes sense- anyone who experienced being sucked away to another hotspot would be unable to complete their research, as they’d be in a completely different country. Maybe even another continent.

In the end, Stiles manages to come up with a rough assortment of hotspots. There are a few places with high amounts of supernatural activity which look like excellent places to start. The only problem is that there are twelve other locations where Y/N could be, and he has no idea where to begin searching. Does he try the east coast, or stick to the west? Does he give up on North America entirely and try France or something?

It would be helpful if Stiles could question Scott or Malia or anyone who knows anything about tracking people. The only problem is that etheria comes with definite downsides- namely, that anyone pulled away through a rift to a different hotspot is forgotten by those who once knew them. Etheria literally means that victims- or the etherials- cease to be real to their friends and family. By being cast aside through the rift and not properly returning home, the spell of the Ghost Riders is technically still holding true. Until Y/N steps foot into the hotspot where she belongs, Beacon Hills, no one will remember her except Stiles.

This seems like a herculean task. What if Y/N has started moving from her hotspot? What if she was found by supernaturals and killed? For the first time, the reality of this job is beginning to sink in. The chances of Stiles finding her are practically impossible. But then memories of Y/N start to filter back into place- the way she’d laughed at his jokes, even the worst ones that only received a smile or a grimace. The way she’d had his back against hunters and monsters and everything they’d gone through. Even back at the train station, when he’d wanted to give up and stop looking for a way out, she’d given him hope. No, Stiles can’t leave her. Not after everything they’ve been through. Not after everything they could do together.

Stiles is about to stop research when he finds one last manuscript. It’s a PDF that some blessed historian uploaded, full of old-timey grammar and words that Stiles thinks were probably last popular in the fifth century. Stiles is scanning it, one hand pressed to his temples as if the brief contact alone can will him through the headache currently descending on him due to the density of the text, when he sees it.

It’s an explanation on how to reach people who were caught unawares by etheria. A way to reliably calculate which hotspot the etherials would be pulled into, and how to find them before they wander too far away and are lost forever. If you chart each etheria hotspot on a map and draw lines connecting each one, they seem to form triangles that crisscross all over the globe. Simply look for a point in the same triangle as the base hotspot, one that is surrounded by at least three other triangles. The triangles form a net of energy, one that will draw the given etherial to a specific hotspot. The pattern is frustratingly random enough to an observer that the hotspot appearances seem vague, but once you know the trick, it all falls into place.

Stiles leans back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling. This is it- the way to finally reach Y/N. Quickly, he pulls up a map, drawing out the hotspots and the triangles just like the manuscript directed. He pauses, one finger on the hotspot over Beacon Hills and the other searching for the triangles that will direct him towards Y/N’s hotspot. He looks, brow furrowed, and then he finds it.

If his calculations are correct- and Stiles has fairly good reason to think that they are- Y/N was dragged away to a small town called Crow Rock. It’s actually not that far away from Beacon Hills- well, not compared to the other ones. It may be a couple of hours drive, but it’s on the same continent. That’s a start, at least.

Stiles jots down the address, then stands, pushing in his chair at his desk. There’s no guarantee that this will work. Y/N could be long gone by then, either by hitching a ride or by being killed. The triangle trick from the manuscript could be a complete fake, and he could be wasting a day’s drive for nothing. Then again, Y/N is out there somewhere, lost and with no idea how she got there. Stiles owes it to her to find her, to bring her home.

This may be a fool’s errand, but Stiles has been a fool before. At least now it is for her.

one moves on tag list: @ilikealotofpeople-younotsomuch​, @blahhhhhhhaaa​

[orangedodge]

@dannybagpipesarecalling​ replied to your text post:

I didn't realize those were Destiny's diaries either. If you would be so kind, can you explain how Emma knows? Unfortunately I haven't read enough comics to know this backstory.

I am glad you asked about this, because it gives me an excuse to post about it while hopefully not sounding like a conspiracy blog. I've been slightly obsessed with this idea since Emma first turned up in House of X, so I'm rather excited that “maybe Destiny's Diaries still exist” isn't just my weird crack canon any longer.

Emma was, in short, the last person who can be established to have control over the whereabouts of the diaries. And as one of the top five telepaths in the world, who has expressly defended that secret from the likes of Exodus and Mr. Sinister, she is capable of preventing Professor X from just taking the information from her. So barring new retcons, if Moira has the diaries now, they had to have been obtained directly from Emma.

That's not enough to say that she turned them over to Moira specifically. She could have given them to Charles or Er—okay, no, she wouldn't give them to Charles. There could be a circumstance where she'd trust them to Erik though. But in that contingency, I think there's enough context to support Emma knowing why they'd want them and for who. To be clear though, I would be less confident about making that assertion if Emma hadn't just opened the “Dr. Moira MacTaggert Memorial Public Hospital” expressly to freak out Charles and Erik, and if HoxPox hadn't already linked them by showing Moira to be worried about what Emma was up to.

(This got kind of long so I thought it'd be helpful to say the important part up front before spiraling down the continuity rabbit hole)

The origins and resulting chain of custody for Destiny's Diaries are as follows: One January, decades ago, Destiny began recording visions of the future in a series of diaries. Filling one book per month, she continued writing for thirteen months. This process was described as auto-writing, and Destiny herself did not have a complete memory of what she had written, nor did she understand the meaning of much of what she wrote.

Nonetheless, the July diary contained a recording of the events leading up to the defeat of Apocalypse, and another diary contained information on the life of Hope Summers, so they've been very relevant to the events of the modern era. It's not explicit yet that Krakoa's founding is also in the diaries, but because we know Destiny had at least one separate vision of Krakoa, and because Moira is interested in reading them, it seems fairly likely that whatever Moira, Charles, and Erik have been doing behind the scenes is also in there.

In the decades since Destiny authored them, most of these diaries were lost, except for five that Mystique kept hold of, and a sixth that Irene hid away herself. After Mystique killed 'Moira,' she sent her five diaries to Professor X, hoping that the temptation of using them would consume his life and lead him toward a ruinous fate. Destiny meanwhile had entrusted the sixth diary to Shadowcat (who Destiny met in 1936, while she was time traveling and having an affair with Moira's grandfather don't worry about it), who eventually became so freaked out by something she read in it that she vanished on a mission, let her friends believe her dead for weeks, and had herself deleted from Cerebro, while leaving the diary to Rogue for safekeeping while she was away.

(That last chain of events isn't incredibly important, I just think it becomes kind of lol in light of current canon)

Rogue went on to take that diary and the research that had been done on it to Storm. Storm and Rogue then formed a splinter team of X-Men, to journey the world searching for the lost diaries, believing Professor X could not be trusted. Along the way a seventh book turned up with a treasure hunter named Vargas (don't worry about him), and an eighth was found by Gateway and given to Rogue in a dream. Eventually Storm tried to get Phoenix to collect Professor X's diaries for her, but they discovered that they had already been stolen (Shadowcat did it).

The rest of the diary hunt isn't really important, just that Kitty eventually ended up retrieving the full set, before she rejoined the X-Men, which only happened after Xavier had left Scott and Emma to run the school. This timeline is important for establishing that Xavier has never possessed the full set of diaries himself, and was not involved in collecting the lost books at any point, nor was he present at the time the diaries were brought to the school and fell under Emma's protection. This rules out the possibility that the set of diaries we've previously seen were somehow forged by Xavier.

Xavier would not return to the school until after losing his mutant powers, whereupon he departed for space on an adventure to another galaxy. He was unavailable, therefore, to have undertaken any telepathic shenanigans, so what happens next actually happened, and is not a psychic illusion. While Xavier was gone, Mr. Sinister recruited Exodus and Mystique, and began a campaign of hunting down precognitive psychics, time travelers, and any other sources of information on the future. Scott, Emma, and Kitty meanwhile predicted that they were going to be next, and came up with a bananas plan to keep the books safe.

X-Men volume 2 no. 203 by Mike Carey (Writer), Humberto Ramos (Penciler), Carlos Cuevas (Inker), Studio F’s Edgar Delgado (Colorist), Virtual Calligraphy’s Cory Petit (Letterer), Will Panzo (Assistant Editor), Nick Lowe (Editor), Joe Quesada (Editor in Chief), Dan Buckley (Publisher)

First they hid the diaries somewhere in parts unknown. Emma then altered the minds of “all of us” (everyone who lived at the mansion at that time) to perceive a bunch of decoy books as the real thing. She then erased Kitty's memory, and her own, so that no telepath would be able to extract the information by force, before they gave each other a series of post-hypnotic triggers so they could restore one another's memories if they ever needed the books again. When eventually Exodus attacked the school looking for the books, they restored their memories, and decided to send another team to the hidden location where they'd buried a mystery box. Emma gave this location to Sam and Bobby, who dug up the box, which was never opened, and which was destroyed by Gambit during a firefight with Sinister's forces before anyone could confirm its contents.

This was intended by author Mike Carey to be the end of Destiny's Diaries, a dropped plot from a previous creative run, that was vaguely useful at building up to the Messiah Complex crossover, but was a lot more trouble than it was worth to an author who was writing about the X-Men trying to avert a bad future. But there's a lot of room in the story he wrote for the diaries to have survived after all.

I think it's actually really suspicious that the box was accessible to Bobby and Sam at all. Why not drop it under a mountain? Why not bury it under the ocean? Why not keep it phased in a tree? And it's a big red box with a big red 'X' on it. I know the X-Men love their branding and all, but that's going pretty far.

No one actually opens the box before Gambit blows it up either. It could have contained more decoys, or nothing at all. 

And when talking among themselves, Emma and Kitty never actually say that they're sending the X-Men to retrieve the diaries. They say that they know where the diaries are, and then send the X-Men to a place where they've buried something. The intent of the author is clear, but there's room in the dialogue for a later writer to decide that this just was another plan to keep the books hidden.

So for the entire period of time between assembling the complete collection of thirteen diaries, and their seeming destruction, they are never unaccounted for. Only Emma and Kitty knew the full extent of what they did to hide them, and where they were hidden. If fakes were destroyed instead of the real thing, no one would have known.

We could just be in retcon territory, but I don't think so, because it's fine on its own without any direct changes to canon. And really, faking the destruction of the books to cover up their real location makes a lot more sense than believing Emma Frost actually sent Sam to retrieve the incredibly suspicious looking red box that contained the most important object in the world, while half the super villains on the planet were chasing him.

Believing the diaries weren't really destroyed just requires the reader to accept that Emma would lie to the other X-Men, and keep lying to them for years, and that she'd be willing to put Sam and Bobby's lives at risk to protect that lie. Which she was already doing in that story anyway. She was already lying to everyone when she changed everyone's memories. And she—and Scott and Kitty—was already fine with risking everyone's lives when setting up a decoy trap in a school. So that's why I think this works better as a continuation of the existing, known, story of the diaries, and not a direct retcon to what happened.

In conclusion I think Emma knows about Moira because Moira got the diaries from somewhere, and Emma is the person she could have gotten them from. Nothing proves a direct hand-off in, like, a formal standard of proof or anything, but Emma having access to the diaries for so long, and having been wrapped up in this whole weird plot thread—which involves Moira and most of the Quiet Council—is enough to imply the connection in a story sense.

(ETA - For completion’s sake, there is also a weird story I didn’t go into called Chaos War that was published in 2011 where Moira is resurrected and finds a book in the ruins of the Xavier School that may or may not be one of the diaries, and touching it causes her soul to merge with Destiny’s, who then possesses her and guides her through a quest to destroy an evil god. This was an odd story to place in continuity at the time, and has only gotten stranger, given  1. that couldn’t be the real Moira, 2. Destiny is not merged with her soul. If this is in continuity (it’s been suggested that Moira’s golem was the character in this event), and all of the characters are who they say they are, and if the book in question was actually one of the thirteen diaries (and not some other book that Irene also wrote), then it requires Emma to have deliberately left one of the thirteen books behind for “Moira” to find, which if anything only adds to the likelihood that she knows what’s up)

[jenniferisacommonname]

Bonus Level Unlocked

This week marks the release of Jason Schreier’s Press Reset, an incredibly well-researched book on catastrophic business failure in the gaming industry. Jason’s a good dude, and there’s an excerpt here if you want to check it out. Sadly, game companies going belly-up is such a common occurrence that he couldn’t possibly include them all, and one of the stories left out due to space constraints is one that I happen to be personally familiar with. So, I figured I’d tell it here.

I began working at Acclaim Studios Austin as a sound designer in January of 2000. It was a tumultuous period for the company, including a recent rebranding from their former studio name, “Iguana Entertainment,” and a related, ongoing lawsuit from the ex-founder of Iguana. There were a fair number of ghosts hanging around—the creative director’s license plate read IGUANA, which he never changed, and one of the meeting rooms held a large, empty terrarium—but the studio had actually been owned on paper by Acclaim since 1995, and I didn’t notice any conflicting loyalties. Everyone acted as if we always had been, and always would be, Acclaim employees.

Over the next few years I worked on a respectable array of triple-A titles, including Quarterback Club 2002, Turok: Evolution, and All-Star Baseball 2002 through 2005. (Should it be “All-Stars Baseball,” like attorneys general? Or perhaps a term of venery, like “a zodiac of All-Star Baseball.”) At any rate, it was a fun place to work, and a platformer of hijinks ensued.

But let’s skip to the cutscene. The truth is that none of us in the trenches suspected the end was near until it was absolutely imminent. Yes, Turok: Evolution and Vexx had underperformed, especially when stacked against the cost of development, but games flop in the retail market all the time. And, yes, Showdown: Legends of Wrestling had been hustled out the door before it was ready for reasons no one would explain, and the New York studio’s release of a BMX game featuring unlockable live-action stripper footage had been an incredibly weird marketing ploy for what should have been a straightforward racing title. (Other desperate gimmicks around this time included a £6,000 prize for UK parents who would name their baby “Turok,” an offer to pay off speeding tickets to promote Burnout 2 that quickly proved illegal, and an attempt to buy advertising space on actual tombstones for a Shadow Man sequel.)

But the baseball franchise was an annual moneymaker, and our studio had teams well into development on two major new licenses, 100 Bullets and The Red Star. Enthusiasm was on the upswing. Perhaps I should have paid closer attention when voice actors started calling me to complain that they hadn’t been paid, but at the time it seemed more like a bureaucratic failure than an actual money shortage—and frankly, it was a little naïve of them to expect net-30 in the first place. Industry standard was, like, net-90 at best. So I was told.

Then one Friday afternoon, a few department managers got word that we’d kind of maybe been skipping out on the building lease for let’s-not-admit-how-many months. By Monday morning, everyone’s key cards had been deactivated.

It's a little odd to arrive at work and find a hundred-plus people milling around outside—even odder, I suppose, if your company is not the one being evicted. Acclaim folks mostly just rolled their eyes and debated whether to cut our losses and head to lunch now, while employees of other companies would look dumbfounded and fearful before being encouraged to push their way through the crowd and demonstrate their still-valid key card to the security guard. Finally, the General Manager (hired only a few months earlier, and with a hefty relocation bonus to accommodate his houseboat) announced that we should go home for the day and await news. Several of our coworkers were veterans of the layoff process—like I said, game companies go under a lot—and one of them had already created a Yahoo group to communicate with each other on the assumption that we’d lose access to our work email. A whisper of “get on the VPN and download while you can” rippled through the crowd.

But the real shift in tone came after someone asked about a quick trip inside for personal items, and the answer was a hard, universal “no.” We may have been too busy or ignorant to glance up at any wall-writing, but the building management had not been: they were anticipating a full bankruptcy of the entire company. In that situation, all creditors have equal standing to divide up a company's assets in lengthy court battles, and most get a fraction of what they’re owed. But if the landlords had seized our office contents in lieu of rent before the bankruptcy was declared, they reasoned, then a judge might rule that they had gotten to the treasure chest first, and could lay claim to everything inside as separate from the upcoming asset liquidation.

Ultimately, their gambit failed, but the ruling took a month to settle. In the meantime, knick knacks gathered dust, delivered packages piled up, food rotted on desks, and fish tanks became graveyards. Despite raucous protest from every angle—the office pets alone generated numerous threats of animal cruelty charges—only one employee managed to get in during this time, and only under police escort. He was a British citizen on a work visa, and his paperwork happened to be sitting on his desk, due to expire. Without it, he was facing literal deportation. Fortunately, a uniformed officer took his side (or perhaps just pre-responded to what was clearly a misdemeanor assault in ovo,) and after some tense discussion, the building manager relented, on the condition that the employee touch absolutely nothing beyond the paperwork in question. The forms could go, but the photos of his children would remain.

It’s also a little odd, by the way, to arrive at the unemployment office and find every plastic chair occupied by someone you know. Even odder, I suppose, if you’re actually a former employee of Acclaim Studios Salt Lake, which had shut down only a month or two earlier, and you just uprooted your wife and kids to a whole new city on the assurance that you were one of the lucky ones who got to stay employed. Some of them hadn’t even finished unpacking.

Eventually, we were allowed to enter the old office building one at a time and box up our things under the watchful eye of a court appointee, but by then our list of grievances made the landlords’ ploy seem almost quaint by comparison (except for the animals, which remains un-fucking-forgivable.) We had learned, for example, that in the weeks prior to the bankruptcy, our primary lender had made an offer of $15 million—enough to keep us solvent through our next batch of releases, two of which had already exited playtesting and were ready to be burned and shipped. The only catch was that the head of the board, company founder Greg Fischbach, would have to step down. This was apparently too much of an insult for him to stomach, and he decided that he'd rather see everything burn to the ground. The loan was refused.

Other “way worse than we thought” details included gratuitous self-dealing to vendors owned by board members, the disappearance of expensive art from the New York offices just before closure, and the theft of our last two paychecks. For UK employees, it was even more appalling: Acclaim had, for who knows how long, been withdrawing money from UK paychecks for their government-required pension funds, but never actually putting the money into the retirement accounts. They had stolen tens of thousands of dollars directly from each worker.

Though I generally reside somewhere between mellow and complete doormat on the emotional spectrum, I did get riled enough to send out one bitter email—not to anyone in corporate, but to the creators of a popular webcomic called Penny Arcade, who, in the wake of Acclaim’s bankruptcy announcement, published a milquetoast jibe about Midway’s upcoming Area 51. I told Jerry (a.k.a. “Tycho”) that I was frankly disappointed in their lack of cruelty, and aired as much dirty laundry as I was privy to at the time.

“Surely you can find a comedic gem hidden somewhere in all of this!” I wrote. “Our inevitable mocking on PA has been a small light at the end of a very dark, very long tunnel. Please at least allow us the dignity of having a smile on our faces while we wait in line for food stamps.”

Two days later, a suitably grim comic did appear, implying the existence of a new release from Acclaim whose objective was to run your game company into the ground. In the accompanying news post, Tycho wrote:

“We couldn’t let the Acclaim bankruptcy go without comment, though we initially let it slide thinking about the ordinary gamers who lost their jobs there. They don’t have anything to do with Acclaim’s malevolent Public Relations mongrels, and it wasn’t they who hatched the Titty Bike genre either. Then, we remembered that we have absolutely zero social conscience and love to say mean things.”

Another odd experience, by the way, is digging up a 16-year-old complaint to a webcomic creator for nostalgic reference when you offer that same creator a promotional copy of the gaming memoir you just co-wrote with Sid Meier. Even odder, I suppose, to realize that the original non-Acclaim comic had been about Area 51, which you actually were hired to work on yourself soon after the Acclaim debacle.*

As is often the case in complex bankruptcies, the asset liquidation took another six years to fully stagger its way through court—but in 2010, we did, surprisingly, get the ancient paychecks we were owed, plus an extra $1,700-ish for the company’s apparent violation of the WARN Act. By then, I had two kids and a very different life, for which the money was admittedly helpful. Sadly, Acclaim’s implosion probably isn’t even the most egregious one on record. Our sins were, to my knowledge, all money-related, and at least no one was ever sexually assaulted in our office building. Again, to my knowledge. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure we remain the only historical incident of corporate pet murder. The iguana got out just in time.

*Area 51’s main character was voiced by David Duchovny, and he actually got paid—which was lucky for him, because three years later, Midway also declared bankruptcy.

[the-insomniac-emporium]

Resident Evil OC + Virus Analysis

Did a ton of art + some writeup on my OC, Avaskian Caldwell. Putting it under a read more for several possible triggers, including: blood, medical drama (sorta), body horror (maybe?), and that one phobia that involves lots of circles? If any of y'all want a bigger version of the images within I can probably send them your way. PS: Contains spoilers for Resident Evil: Village

STAGE 1: 0-365 Days

Exterior Symptoms:

Strange cut where the virus first made contact (via the blood splatter of an infected patient). Refuses to heal, but is not sensitive to touch. The skin is clearly stretched around the diamond shaped wound. At both the top and bottom of the diamond further cuts can be found, though these act more like regular injuries. They are painful when aggravated, occasionally 'weep' either blood or pus, and slowly start to heal over time.

"Tendrils", similar in shape + size to the sting of a jellyfish, extend from the center wound. They are a dark purple in shade, and are raised at most 1mm from the skin. Each one is highly sensitive to touch. Not painful, merely creates a strong reaction in the host (Avaskian Caldwell). Described as turning one's thoughts to statics; very distracting, as if the host cannot focus on anything but the sensation of touch.

Numerous 'circles' of various sizes form around the tendrils. They are soft to the touch, pliable, and filled with trace amounts of liquid. If prodded, they are prone to bursting, which the host rates at a minor 2/10 on a standard pain scale. Should they be burst, they will proceed to fill back in over the period of roughly 48 hours.

Interior Symptoms:

Although difficult to prove/record, it is estimated that the host showed signs of an advanced healing rate as early as one hundred days post infection. This "advance" was initially as small as a 2% increase in healing efficiency, compared to a 50% increase by year 2 (see stage 2 for further notes).

Despite the increased healing rate, the host noted a sharp rise in overall pain levels. Even ordinary scrapes or bruises could leave them hunched over in pain. Notably, this did not effect pain related to the virus itself. Over time this change reversed, and eventually the host recorded less pain than prior to infection. It is unknown what caused this, but the current hypothesis is that the virus forced its host to adjust to a large amount of new stimuli, which the brain eventually adapted to.

STAGE 2: 1-2 Years

Exterior Symptoms:

Center "wound" increases in depth, with the outer ridge being 3mm above skin level. Cuts located above and below the diamond become superficial, no longer bleeding, weeping, or reacting to outside stimuli.

Older tendrils shift in color, to a dark red. They occasionally appear to "pulse", which the host describes as "super [redacted] uncomfortable. Just the [redacted] worst". Note: Remind host not to use profanity during recording sessions.

Older circles become darker in color, and completely dry out, hardening into what could be compared to scales. Incredibly durable, more likely to crack then be cut through. Damaged scales heal themselves within 24 hours, unless the host has a more serious wound, in which case their body will seemingly "take priority". If a scale is removed entirely (requiring the use of a scalpel to cut underneath the skin) a strange, purple substance oozes from the wound, similar in quality to tree sap.

Interior Symptoms:

Rate of healing increases to roughly 150% of the host's original capabilities. A wound which might have taken 30 days to heal would only take 15. and one that would take 10 would take 5, and so on. Host describes healed wounds as "tense" for several days after healing, however. No physical correlations were noted during any of several examinations.

By the start of year 2, the host started to note changes in personality. Speaking became physically uncomfortable, which the host responded to by becoming mute. They also noted an increase in aggression, a slight decrease in empathy, and an increased level of paranoia. Note: Subject has a noted history of depression, anxiety, and possibly undiagnosed ADHD.

Host's canine teeth grew notably sharper, as well as slightly longer.

STAGE 3: 2.5 Years

Exterior Symptoms:

Center wound has turned to a bright crimson, with the very middle glowing slightly. Warmer than the rest of the host's skin.

Tendrils continue to spread over the host's skin, and at this point start appearing independent of any connections. All new tendrils show up as a dark red, no longer needing to 'mature'.

Similarly, the scales (which have progressively increased in average size) show up as their final form. They still only grow near tendrils, typically in small clusters.

It is estimated that they will continue to grow over time, eventually covering the host's entire body. Currently there are no theories as to how this will affect the host.

Interior Symptoms:

Healing rate skyrockets to 300% of original, pre-virus rate. Process is still described as "tense" and "uncomfortable".

Host struggles with their perception of reality, often blurring the lines between real memories and dreams. Environment (among other test subjects) only worsens this.

Heart rate averages at 150 BPM. Host is noted to have a pre-existing medical condition which affects heart rate (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, but suggests that this is still a noteworthy change.

STAGE 4: 3 Years+

Exterior Symptoms:

All tendrils now exhibit bio luminescence, with the lights glowing and shifting as an unknown substance moves within. Glow noticeably increases when host is injured, with the increase relating directly to the severity of the injury.

Conclusion: Subject is not a suitable host for Eva. Virus does not survive leaving the host, and cannot be modified for any worthwhile objective. However, the subject may prove a boon if left in Dimitrescu's care. Occasional check-ins may be necessary to watch for unexpected developments. Note to self: Ask subject for their cake recipe.

[s-k-y-w-a-l-k-e-r]

My GIF making process!

I’ve been asked many times for a tutorial, but because I get really detailed, I always get overwhelmed by the idea. But I finally decided to buckle down! 

Just so you know: I don’t use PSDs in this, and I don’t import layers to frames or anything like that. I like the hard way—at least in gif making, I believe you get higher quality gifs. Join me as I show you how to make gifs by loading videos directly into the Photoshop timeline and my coloring and sharpening techniques.

Tools used:

Mac OS X (only necessary for the first step, and there are other ways around it with a PC)

Adobe Photoshop

YouTube Purchases (any streaming service will work)

Topics covered:

Obtaining the Source Material

Loading the video file into Photoshop

Prepping, Cropping, and Resizing the Media

Adjustment Layers

Sharpening

Exporting

Obtaining the Source Material

There are a few different methods for obtaining video to work with. Proper YouTube videos are nice, but finding any major motion picture in that format is difficult, if not illegal.

Once I realized I could get really great quality video by doing screen recordings from streaming services, I stopped worrying about finding (and pirating) high resolution video files. So now, I just go to whichever streaming service I need to, pick out the movie or show, find the spot, and record small snippets.

Mac screen recording instructions:

On a Mac, Command+Shift+5 will bring up the screen recording dialogue. 

Resize the frame of what you want to record within the browser. 

Go to a second or two before, press the “record” button, and then begin playing the video, remembering to keep your cursor out of the recording box. 

Use the Space bar to pause your video when you’ve gotten the snippet you need. Stop the screen recording by clicking the ⏹ button that is in your menu bar at the top of the screen.

Important: when the recording appears in the bottom right of your screen, click on it, and then trim the video on either end. This will help your computer convert the video file to the type that can be opened by Photoshop.

Click “done” and it will appear on your desktop, ready to be used!

PC Users: ??? Here’s a Google search I did for you

 Loading the video file into Photoshop

Lots of people use this process for making gifs (a great tutorial!). I didn’t even know it existed until last summer, when I’d already been giffing for years. I wish I could still do something like that with these screen recordings, but the files are absolutely HUGE, especially on Macs with double retina displays, which actually increase the dpi by a lot. Making screencaps of them fills up my hard drive, almost immediately—even when I’ve got 20 gigs of free space to work with. So what do we do? We just. Open the file. In Photoshop. Et voila!

You can do this with any type of video, not just screen recordings.

 Prepping, Cropping, and Resizing the Media

When Photoshop loads your videos up, it makes the video hilariously fast (something about frame conversion). You must slow it down for it to look natural. THIS MUST BE DONE BEFORE YOU RESZE. Your Photoshop timeline window should be at the bottom of the screen. See that little triangle in the top right of the video? 

Click on it, and a menu will appear to change speed and duration.

Change the speed first- usually between 80-85% will seem realistic. (I actually went a little faster than I usually would on this at almost 86%—I don’t recommend this)

Press the button next to duration and pull the toggle all the way to the far right (if you don’t do this, full length of the video will be cut off).

Now you’ll want to crop it. Ever since Tumblr upped its GIF size limit, I have been playing around with 7:5 ratios, but let’s go with 3:2 for now. Use the Crop tool, pick out 3:2 in the top left (it may say 2:3, but you can switch that) and then find the most suitable spot in your gif for that. Hit enter on your keyboard.

Some things to keep in mind when cropping:

Most videos come in 16:9 ratio (BoRhap is even wider). If it’s a wide shot, you’ll need to do the full 16:9 to not lose anything. Of course, experiment and find what’s right for you!

As you can see above, I moved forward in the timeline and made the crop to a point in the video when the broadest movement was happening.

Certain videos WILL have a black or red bar that may be imperceptible until you’ve already exported the gif. Just crop in a little tighter on top and bottom to avoid them.

Now you’ll need to resize your gif to be the correct size for Tumblr. If you don’t use Tumblr’s exact dimensions, your gifs (as uploaded) will appear blurry or pixellated. We’re doing a full-width gif here, which is 540px. On a Mac, I use Command+Option+I (for “Image Size) to open the resize dialogue. You can also find it under Image->Image size...

Make sure to also have “Resample” checked. Lately I’ve been playing around to see if different options are better. Most GIF makers use “Bicubic Sharper (Reduction)” and they are not wrong to do so. I’ve just been unhappy with it lately, so I have been trying this other setting out, “Bicubic (smooth gradients)”.

Click OK. A dialogue may come up that asks if you want to convert to a Smart Object. The answer is yes, okay, do it. The only major caveat is that you can’t go back and change the timeline speed. That’s why we did it first. But you can preview the speed now that it’s smaller, and if you don’t like it, use Command+Z (or “Undo”) and go back a couple steps to get the speed you like.

You may find, especially on a Mac screen (and possibly other displays), that at 100% your gif looks too small to be 540px. That is the curse and blessing of working with super-high resolution hardware. Zoom in to 200% and proceed about your business. This is what it will look like on Tumblr.

You may find it helpful at this point to begin by defining the beginning and end of your gif by moving around these bumpers. It’s safe to keep gifs under 02:00f in length. Under half of 01:00f will be way too short. (I tend to overshoot in length and then trim the beginning and the end once I see how big the gifs are upon exporting.)

 Adjustment Layers

Now the creativity and fun begin!

There are a LOT of ways to get creative here. I’m going to keep it simple, very simple, but I strongly recommend opening up a new adjustment layer of each type and trying to figure out what each does!

You’ll find the adjustment layer menu at the bottom of the Layers window.

Curves

There are a lot of ways to make Curves work for you! It can do the job of Brightness/Contrast, it can do Levels, it can do Color Balance! We’re going to use it mainly to help with brightness here, but also to level out some of the tones. One of the quick tricks you can do is use the droppers on the left side of the Properties window. There are three- one with a white tip, one gray, one black. These can help define what your white tones are (and whether they need to be more of one color or another), and so on with your blacks. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t; in this case, I think it doesn’t:

That looks totally blown out and somehow also too dark!

So instead, we’re going to use that little hand with the finger pointing out and some arrows pointing up and down. This lets you define which sections you want to get brighter or darker, and how much. It doesn’t do color correction. In the example below, you can see I dragged up on a white spot and down on a dark spot. Then, I moved points around on the curve itself to refine (which the gif here doesn’t show...).

Vibrance/Saturation x2

Next, I’ve been using @gwil-lee​‘s Vibrance/Saturation trick (I know you said you learned it from someone else, but I learned it from you!). 

Create a Vibrance Adjustment layer, bump the values up a bunch, and then change its Fill to somewhere between 2-9%. Change the Blend Mode to Color Burn. Then make a copy of that layer keeping everything the same, but make it Color Dodge. I can’t quite define what these do, but it makes it punchier!

Color Balance

Most people are familiar with this. For this gif, I’m going to make the shadows more Cyan/Blue and the highlights more Red/Yellow. Just a few points each. 

Exposure

I brought the Exposure up a bit, but not enough for you to need to read about, haha.

Selective Color

Here’s where you make fine adjustments to colors. This particular scene is extremely simple, color-wise, so keep it simple. I’m going to bump up the cyans/blues, take up the black by just a point or two, and maybe bump up the yellows and reds a tiny bit. (And as always, remember, the “opposite” of cyan is red, the opposite of magenta is green, and the opposite of yellow is blue. CMY/RGB!)

I think at this point I’m going to call it with the adjustment layers. You can go absolutely hogwild with more of them! But at this point, I’m ready to start sharpening!

 Sharpening

I do three sharpening filters these days. These are all under Filter->Sharpen. Make sure your media layer (default called Layer 1) is selected as we go through this! (Also, this can really take a toll on your processor, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Sharpen- This layer does the basic job

Smart Sharpen (Amount: 10%, Radius: 10, Reduce Noise: 4% Gaussian Blur)- This layer gives texture

Smart Sharpen (Amount: 500, Radius: 0.3, Reduce Noise: 12% Gaussian Blur)- This layer gives refined sharpening and smoothing

Fiddle with these as needed! Let your gif play all the way through- this may go slowly as your processor works on it. Make sure the beginning and end points make sense.

 Exporting

After You’re going to have to use File->Export->Save For Web (Legacy)... or use the shortcut of Shift+Option+Command+S. This could take some time for the dialogue to pop up! Be patient.

In my opinion, these are the best gif export settings for crisp edges and no noise:

Now you see how big the file is in the bottom left. Tumblr won’t let you upload anything bigger than 10MB and it’s safer to stay under 9MB, in my experience. When your gif is too big, you have a couple options. You can close the dialogue and change the length of your gif. 

OR, you can uncheck “Interlaced” and bump up the lossy to 1 or or more. This will create noise. Sometimes, that’s a good thing!

Here’s without lossy:

Here’s WITH lossy: (Honestly in a fast moving gif like this, it’s almost imperceptible, but I can see it!)

And now that I’ve exported, I can see what there’s a little black line on the bottom! So I’m going to trim that off and call it good! You can see the full gifset here.

Hope you enjoyed! Reblog if you try this out or learned anything. Feel free to reach out with questions any time!

[feferipeixes]

The Good Lines (2/3)

Trapped in an unfamiliar world, Alcor finds that he doesn’t mind the loneliness. He doesn’t care about finding a way out. He doesn’t even care about Mizar. All he cares about is solving puzzles, and drawing the good lines.

(or: I Think Dipper Should Play The Witness)

Chapter 2: Hotel (link to chapter 1) (3)

(See the most updated version on AO3!)

===

There was an earth-shaking roar in the sky as Mizar drew the line. Alcor couldn’t quite catch exactly how she did it since she wasn’t there with him in person, but the noise it made was deafening. He tried to look around for the panel responsible but there were no panels around him that he hadn’t already solved himself. It happened so quickly, and then there was the sound of an explosion, followed by a building taking form directly in front of him.

He eyed it uneasily. “This is the hotel?”

“Yep.” Mizar’s voice still came through clear as day. “This will take you out of the game. Then you’ll be free.”

“I’m not -” he started, but thought better of it. He could feel Mizar’s eyes on him from another world, looking down through a television screen, and figured he’d caused her enough stress. “Okay. Here we go.”

It’s not like he had much of a choice anyway. The entrance to the hotel had replaced the only exit from the garden he’d been standing in. He approached the opening, peering down the long hallway lined with fancy sconces. He took a step inside and immediately the ambient hum of the outdoors cut out. He may have thought it was quiet on the island before but it was nothing compared to the emptiness he was feeling now. He had to turn around just to verify that the outside even still existed. Two steps in and he already felt swallowed up by the unknown.

“Dipper?” Mizar’s voice came out of nowhere, and Alcor nearly jumped out of his skin. “Sorry! Are you alright?”

Alcor clutched his chest and took a few deep breaths before responding. “Yeah. I’m fine.” His wings didn’t get the memo, flapping hard against the wall and his back. “This place isn’t weird and creepy at all.”

He couldn’t see her, but Alcor could practically hear the frown in Mizar’s voice. “I thought you loved the weird and creepy.”

“I do! I really do.” He took some shaky steps down the hall to what looked like a reception desk. It sat in front of a wide pillar decorated with a pattern of orange spikes that fanned up and out across the ceiling like a sunburst. “In fact, I’d kinda love to explore a place like this.” Turning a corner, he found himself face-to-face with a large painting of a windmill, and he remembered a similar structure he’d come across in the island’s town. A structure that sat atop a network of underground tunnels, most of which were blocked off by wooden gates he hadn’t been able to bypass. “It’s the thought of all the other stuff I won’t get the chance to explore that’s getting me down.”

“I’m sorry,” came the response.

Alcor waited for more, but more didn’t come. Sighing, he headed past the reception, where there was a bar, some seating, and a balcony. Eyes growing wide, he approached the edge and looked out. Somehow, despite not climbing any stairs from where he was in the garden, the balcony was high enough that he could see half the island. His eyes passed over the desert, the town, the forest, and up to the structure at the top of the mountain. It gave him the feeling that he wasn’t supposed to be there, that the ground he was standing on didn’t exist and he was soaring freely through paradise.

“No, don’t do that!” Mizar’s voice snapped.

Alcor blinked and broke out of his thoughts. Without intending to, he’d flared his wings large and wide, and was standing in a position like he was ready to dive forward. Taking a step backward, he let his wings shrink and balled his hands into fists. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t going to.”

Mizar gulped -- a strange sound to get beamed so clearly into Alcor’s head. “That’s alright. It’s not your fault. How about… you keep going?”

He shrugged, and looked around. A set of stairs led to a doorway on the second floor of the hotel, and he followed them up. He glanced back once more before entering. “If my kid really made this for me, he did a really good job.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” Alcor went through the doorway, and found himself inexplicably in what looked like a cave. Diamond-shaped hanging fixtures bathed the room in an eerie green glow. “Back when I was human, I spent all my time trying to uncover the mysteries of Gravity Falls. He would’ve known that I couldn’t resist a good mystery. I mean, like -” (he walked a little further, to where a set of lounge chairs overlooked a gap in the cave wall) “what the hell is this? Why is this hotel like this?”

He peered through the gap and saw that it dropped down into another cave, a cave in which he couldn’t help but notice there were puzzle panels. Some were mounted onto the walls, some seemed to be suspended from the ceiling on thick cables. All of them were deactivated, and Alcor’s heart sank at the thought that he wouldn’t get to know what kind of puzzles they concealed.

“Even on the way out,” he mused, “My kid has to go and throw more secrets at me.”

“There are mysteries out here, too,” Mizar said after a beat.

Alcor heard the waver in her voice and sighed again. “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just not as fun when I already know the answers to everything out there.”

She didn’t respond to that either, so he pressed onward. The passage got narrower, and he almost had to squeeze himself through a couple of the gaps.

“I have to admit, though,” he spoke up, “that it’ll be nice to have my magic back. If I could change my shape, I’d be through here in no time. Better yet, I could just tesser to the end of this thing! Doing puzzles all day is fun, but maybe I gotta realize there’s other stuff that’s more important to me.”

There was a snort and a half-suppressed giggle. “Really. And that’s magic? Not, like, your family?”

Alcor put on a display of thinking about it and smirked. “Yep! Definitely magic. Definitely not the people who love me enough to go through hell saving me from a virtual reality… game…” He trailed off as he passed by another gap in the wall. It looked out over another cave, although unlike the last one, this one was wide open and mostly empty.

“Dipper?” The giggle in Mizar’s voice trailed off too. “Why’d you stop?”

Water rushed beneath his feet, flowing into the chamber below, lapping up against the shore and the chunk of ground sticking out in the center of the room. In the middle of this chunk was a small table, illuminated by a single light hanging from the ceiling, and on this table was… something.

“What’s… that?” he breathed.

“What’s what? Uhh...” she responded. There was some banging in his head, the sound of drawers opening and closing, of devices being moved around. “Sorry, everything went a bit fuzzy, uhh…” A loud crash followed by the sizzle of a CRT monitor turning on and finally a sigh of relief. “Ah, fixed it! Okay, let me, uh… Oh. Oh no. Shit.”

It was hard to tell what the thing on the table was from a distance. There were two black boxes angled outward, and there was something else behind them. Whatever it was, it had a thick wire trailing out of it. Alcor wondered where it went.

“Shit! Don’t look at that. It’s… nothing!”

He glanced up, and noticed another hole in the wall across the room, through which he was surprised to see a figure in a dark suit with a floating top hat. The figure’s wings were flapping wildly. He looked over his shoulder -- huh. Looked like his own wings were doing that too.

“There’s nothing interesting down there. Just a boring cave! Hey, how about you keep going through the hotel? There’s another scenic overlook of the island coming up! That’ll be fun to look at, right?”

Alcor turned around and saw that there was a gap in the cave wall directly behind him. Peering through it, he found himself viewing the same cave as before, but from the opposite side. From this angle, he could see the panel mounted in front of the other objects on the table.

And he could see that it was active.

“Dipper, please,” Mizar pleaded. “You don’t want to do that. It’s not worth it. You won’t be able to solve it.”

“Seriously?” he said, remembering that he could talk. “That just makes me want to check it out even more. I’ll be quick, I just really wanna know what that thing is.”

Taking a few steps back, Alcor stretched his arms and wings. He took his suit jacket off and tossed it aside, where it promptly vanished. Rolling his sleeves up, he rubbed his hands together and grinned. Then he ran forward and dove through the opening into the cave below.

“WHAT are you DOING?” Mizar yelled, her voice clipping out the microphone she was using to speak with him. “That’s not even POSSIBLE. You can’t jump or go off ledges in this game! I checked!”

Ignoring her, Alcor drifted downward, feeling the rush of air in his face for the first time in a while. He touched ground, shoes clacking against the stone, and let the force of the impact ripple through him. He was pretty sure Mizar was right -- that you couldn’t jump in this game -- but he didn’t care. There was only one thing he cared about right now.

Up close, he could see that the object on the table was a record player, with the two black boxes being speakers. There was a record already mounted on the device; instead of a sticker in the middle to identify what was on it, it only bore an image of an orange sunburst, just like the decoration in the hotel lobby. And finally, there was a panel on the table, which he could only assume would start or stop the record.

It was odd, to be sure. What would such a device be doing in a cave? Weird stuff like that was always intriguing, sure, but presumably all the device did was play music. Why had Mizar said that he wouldn't be able to solve it?

[ Because the music is only part of the puzzle, ] a metallic voice said, and Alcor's eyes widened in surprise.

“Kid?” he asked.

[ Hi Dad. Nice to talk to you again. I hope you're enjoying the game. ]

“It's really you,” Alcor marveled. “Mizar was right. You're the one who made all of this. The island, the puzzles, everything.”

[ Sure did! ] the virus replied with a vaguely smug note to his synthesized voice. [ I worked real hard on it, cause I only want the best of the best for my dad. And speaking of the best, you're in luck! You've stumbled into my magnum opus. I call it - ]

There was a bang, like a fist coming down on a table, and Mizar's voice rang out into the cave. “No! Don't listen to it!”

[ - The Challenge. ]

Alcor felt a tingle run down his spine. “That’s so foreboding! What is it?”

[ It’s a test of your puzzle-solving abilities! Two songs will play, and you’ll have until the end of the second one to solve a set of randomly generated puzzles. If the music stops, you have to start all over with new puzzles! But if you can solve them all in time, a fabulous prize waits for you at the end! ]

“A prize?” There was a muffled pounding noise in the distance, but Alcor tuned it out. “What’s the prize?”

Al-V’s smile was practically audible. [ Why don't you find out for yourself? ]

The panel on the table. Alcor approached it, enrapt with curiosity, and put his finger on the start circle. There were two ends to the panel. One was a tiny little line sticking out of the circle. He tried that one first, and nothing seemed to happen. Pursing his lips, he pressed on the circle again and dragged his finger down the long path that extended the full length of the panel.

“Wait!” Mizar yelled before he could lift his finger. “Dipper, it's a trap! Please listen to me! You were so close to escaping the game! Think of your family! They miss you! This can't be -”

Al-V’s voice cut over Mizar's. [ Family, schmamily. Think of all the puzzles waiting for you to solve them. Won't that be fun? At least give it a try. ]

There was a lump in Alcor's throat and he swallowed hard to get past it. “I… Sorry Mizar.” He lifted his finger, and the panel made a clicking noise. “I gotta see what this is.”

There was a soft rumble as the record player activated. The tonearm glided into position above the record, which slowly began to spin. After a moment, the thick cable attached to the player lit up, illuminating a puzzle mounted on the wall. And then, the first few notes of Anitra’s Dance filtered through the speakers.

Bum da da, bum da da

Bum da da, bum da da

Alcor broke out into a huge smile. The silence which had haunted him as long as he’d been on the island was gone; now his body was being scooped up and set adrift by the music. The mesmerizing strings, like the lying tongue of a devil; the passionate bass, giving urgency to the affair; the wail of echoes careening off the cave walls. He’d missed this. He wished he had his violin so he could join in.

“The songs are a distraction!” Mizar was still there, sort of, still trying to talk to him even though he could barely hear her over the music. “They’re just there to make it harder to focus on the puzzles!”

“Oh. Oh yeah,” Alcor murmured, his smile drooping slightly. For the briefest moment, Mizar thought she’d gotten through to him, but then he smiled again and flew over to the illuminated panel. “New puzzles for me to solve. Gotta draw the good lines.”

“No!” she screamed, but it was too late. His hand flew across the panel, solving it with ease, and the music swelled triumphantly, completely drowning out Mizar’s voice. The next panel lit up, displaying a maze three times as big as the first one, and Alcor’s grin widened. This was going to be good.

The difficulty of the puzzles only increased from there. Soon Alcor was swooping through a tunnel into another cave, which he immediately recognized as the one with the deactivated panels he’d spied from the hotel. Now, however, they were turning on, one at a time, solve after solve after solve. Though each puzzle took progressively longer for him to figure out, Alcor revelled in every second of it, even as the first song came to a finish and Mizar’s cries faded back into his awareness, why! won’t! you! listen! to! me!

“Hi Miz,” he chirped as the music changed to In the Hall of the Mountain King, and it set her blood boiling.

Duh duh duh duh dadada…

“Having fun?” she grumbled.

“Oh, yeah!” He shot a pair of finger guns at no one in particular, but didn’t take his eyes off the puzzle. “This one’s hard, though. Been stuck on it for a little while.”

Dadada… dadada...

“A minute and a half,” Mizar replied. “You’re not even doing it right.”

“Ugh, I know. I’ll figure it out though. I’ve got time.”

Duh duh duh duh dadada ba dadadadada…

“You’ve got like two minutes left to do seven puzzles. You don’t have time.”

Alcor grimaced. “Okay, negative. If I can’t solve it in time then I’ll just try again.”

Dun dun dun dun dadada,

Dadada,

Dadada,

“So, what, you’re just gonna stay in this stupid game forever? Is that it?”

Alcor’s hand slipped, and he drew a bad line. The panel turned off, forcing him to trudge back to the previous one to solve it again. "I said I'll come out after I get the prize, I can do this, I promise..."

Dun dun dun dun dadada DA da ba ba da da!

"You're not gonna beat it!” Mizar spat. “That's not me not believing in you -- I know for a fact that the virus coded the challenge so that you specifically would always get stumped at some part of it!"

DUN dun dun dun dadada, WA WA WA WA!

Amidst music rising to a heart-pounding clamor, Alcor hurried back to the panel he’d been stuck on. "Yeah, it's random, I know, and sometimes the puzzles it makes are really hard, but if I keep practicing..."

DUN DUN DUN DUN DADADA BA DA DA DA BA DA!

"No, Dipper!”

DUN DUN DUN DUN DADADA BA DA DA DA BA DA!

Mizar yelled at the top of her lungs to be heard over the music. “That's you trusting the game to always give you solvable puzzles! How do you know they'll always be solvable?”

DUN DA! DUN DA! Dun dun dun dun dadada ba da da da ba da!

”How do you know the virus isn't just nerd-sniping you until the music stops playing and you have to start over?”

Dun wa wa wa wa wa wa wa!

”Why do you trust this game more than you trust me????"

Dum tsh!

With two final, crashing notes, the song came to an end. There was a beat, during which Mizar could see Alcor standing very still, his hand still on a glowing panel. Then there was a loud beep as all of the panels in the cave deactivated, followed by the distant click of the record player turning off.

Alcor clenched his fist. “You want to know why I can’t trust you?”

“Um. Yeah I do,” Mizar replied, taken aback. “Like I was saying -”

Alcor’s words came out slow and metered, but there was a nasty undertone to his voice. “It’s because you lie.”

He looked up from the deactivated panel and stared at the ceiling, directly where she was watching from, and she could see streaks of yellow running down his face. “Every time I get close to you. Every time I get close to anyone. You mortals love to say I’ll always be here for you and like an idiot I keep letting myself believe it, but then you die. Everyone I’ve ever cared about has died or will die and there I still am, suffering and mourning and alone.”

“B-but-” Mizar stammered.

Alcor snarled at her, baring two rows of shark-like teeth and spraying spit at the wall. Mizar’s mouth snapped shut.

“This game doesn’t lie to me,” he continued, walking back toward the record player but not taking his eyes off her. “A puzzle is just a puzzle. It has an answer that I can figure out if I stare at it long enough, or maybe I won’t and that’s okay too. Puzzles don’t lie to you and say people don’t really think of you as a monster and then go research banishment rituals behind your back.”

“I-I wasn’t going to actually use it!” Mizar replied, in unison with Alcor saying the exact same words. “I was only looking it up just in case! Just to reassure my brother -- he has anxiety!”

“Yeah, how many times do you think someone’s said that to me before?” Alcor spat. “I don’t blame you for being nervous around me. I literally am a monster. Just don’t fucking lie to me about it, okay?”

“Dipper, please! Think about all the people who love you. You can’t just leave them behind!”

Alcor stopped in front of the record player and turned away. “If they can do it to me, I can do it to them,” he murmured. Then he slid his finger across the control panel again, and the world went dark.

Mizar gripped her computer screen. “Dipper? Dipper, what’s going on?”

The humming from the machine had stopped, and all she could hear was the ringing in her ear from Dipper’s shout. Mizar rifled through the desk drawers, looking for an instruction manual or a cheat sheet or anything that would help her reach her brother again. Every scrap of paper she found was covered in strange symbols that she recognized as puzzles from the game. She knew it was a fruitless search. After all, the system was designed to trap someone, not to let them go.

She looked behind her, to the two person-sized capsules pushed up against the wall. One was empty, with its lid discarded on the floor. Mizar walked over to the other one and pressed her face up to the glass. Beyond the window rested Dipper’s physical body, hooked up to a dizzying array of cables and electrodes. It made her mind itch to look at. His body was as fake as the avatar he was controlling in the video game. But it was an anchor for his soul, and Al-V did what he did best with it: reverse engineered it, figured out how to anchor the demon’s mind in something else.

Mizar once again eyed the power outlet the capsule was plugged into. Would his mind be able to escape, if she…?

“Please, Dipper,” she whimpered, in total solitude. “Please come back.”

---

Down in the cave, Alcor leaned on the record player and stared at the ground.

[ Woof! ] Al-V piped up. [ Talk about an overreaction! Want I should take over the security robots outside the building and get them to lock her in a broom closet? ]

“Forget about it,” Alcor murmured. He watched the record begin to spin -- watched the orange points of the sunburst begin to meld into a solid circle -- and imagined a smiling face in the middle. “Forget about her. I don’t need her. All I need is you, and the puzzles.”

[ Whatever you say, Dad! ] Al-V replied. [ You’re the boss, but not like in a video game sense! Ha-ha! You, uh, you gonna solve those puzzles? ]

Alcor closed his eyes for a minute, and the face stuck in his vision. When he opened them again, the record player had stopped, and the puzzles had deactivated.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, I’m gonna solve the puzzles. I’m gonna draw the good lines. I’ll be happy.”

He swiped the panel to start the record again, and got to work.

[retphienix]

I Have A Lot To Say So I'll Read More This.

The short of it?

I'm glad I played Joker- I played it because I wanted to know how DQM evolved when it reached the DS and I got my answer.

It's mediocre. Not bad exactly, I enjoyed playing it, it adds some REALLY appreciated features to the DQM series and if you were playing it at release it had online play which plays well with the post game content which I haven't touched by the time I wrote this:

-but there are some engine/console specific things that made it a drag and there are some parts of the game that are just weaker than the previous games which is amusing since the previous games were simple GBC titles.

And finally, I don't really recommend playing through Joker 1. Can't speak on the sequels, but Joker 1 was a pretty middling experience for me so I'm the wrong person to get a positive recommendation from.

And since the opportunity presents itself: If you like monster RPGs and haven't tried it- go emulate Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 for the GBC, it's really good and also if you emulate you can fast forward the GBC era grind if that's your taste- really a win all around.

On to my rambling:

I debated on writing, rewriting, rewriting, and better presenting my thoughts on this game and the series as a whole but nah, Joker ain't getting that, I'm ramblin'- lol

I will split it slightly between "The ending" and "The game as a whole" though.

Ending:

1:07 - This is slightly a 'game a a whole' thing but honestly it's funny to me that you unlock a permanent repel in this game by doing the main quest. I entered this dungeon feeling strong enough to beat the game, so I just avoided 90% of encounters entirely.

5:00 - I genuinely got a laugh out of Sparkpug's whole deal in this finale. Not story wise, that's fine, no complaints- I mean that Sparkpug is clearly built to be a monster that can carry an ineffective team. He's clearly meant to be bred a few times and a god tier member of a potentially inexperienced player's team- but I literally never used him after the intro.

So during this scene it's supposed to be like "I'm a demi-god monster, you can't possibly beat me" and I'm thinking "Dude, you're like level 10 and shit tier, you can't win, this is hilarious."

Obviously it's a real boss fight and not 'face the monster you once had' but I was having fun roasting him behind the scenes of this recording.

45:00 - What an entirely unexpected change of pace.

Like, I had it spoiled for me by a screenshot that Dr. Snap becomes a monster or something- but I thought maybe he was always a monster or something, and also I got a bad look at him.

HE TURNS INTO A BODY HORROR BEAST, THAT'S NUTS.

Genuinely a highlight of the game.

52:00 - I fucking laughed what a meaningless exchange where the payoff is saying "He was stupid!", it's honestly just silly and dumb but not necessarily bad just dumb lol

55:00 - Not a great 'you won' victory lap. Like at all. Kinda feels like they should have just made this all a cutscene where I appear back at town and see that Solitaire is the leader now etc etc.

I kinda don't understand why it's a victory lap at all? Because all anyone says is "They picked a weird successor to Snap >:(" or "Snap went to the island? I bet he was stopping the calamity :)"

If you have 2 lines of dialogue prepared, maybe don't make a victory lap???

1:00:00 - What a fucking stupid payoff lol

Like sincerely, Solitaire does NOTHING the entire game! She's meaningless from start to finish! And the 'surprise' is that she's the new commish??? And she got the position because she's a rich spoiled brat??? Like LITERALLY that's why????????

What a stupid fucking ending lol

Now her proposed evolution of the contest is fair enough, I mean it's childish as hell, but to be fair- more contests is a fine idea especially since prior games and this game demonstrated the public's interest in watching monster fights. And the goal being to fight her as the final fight is fucking egotistical and stupid- BUT- it does play into the fact that the player didn't get to fight her the whole game so it's whatever?

1:03:00 - This is both the best and worst lol.

This game has no story, like at all, it's fucking empty front to back, and only explodes with like- 1 event at the very end.

This moment is a montage of memorable moments with your 'best friend' Sparkpug. It's cinematically very nice to be honest! Even includes a moment I don't remember at the arena which probably didn't happen lol.

So visually it's cool- I dig seeing the camera zoom out as we run across the beach, and the flashback moments intersplice over us making our way to the scout memorial- that's very well done.

The content is empty lol

As I said there's no story, these moments are nothing lol

And that's that.

All said the ending was a very nice challenge to face with my team- I had to abuse items like mad but I MADE IT! It was a GOOD fight.

The rest I've already said.

On to the game as a whole:

I have issues with this game, but there's good too. It's really like 4 steps forward 6-7 steps back it's weird, it's really weird.

Positives are neat!

> First and foremost- TRAITS!

Monsters in Dragon Quest Monsters have always had a problem with keeping their identity for long. The way I'd explain it to an outsider to the series is that Monsters DO have special stat variance and intended movesets and all that jazz- but the breeding system completely and entirely destroys that relatively early into the game.

While a monster might normally have really high defense and low other stats while knowing buffing magic- breeding, EVEN UNINTENTIONALLY, will have that same monster come out with 9 billion attack and all ice magic.

Monsters in DQM have a habit of becoming canvases for the breeding effects rather than their own mons- and this is undeniably a downside. It makes the game feel unique, it doesn't 'hurt' it, but when by mid-game monsters are more easily identified as sprites rather than strengths and weaknesses or even types (family) it's a slight downer on the series.

Traits fix this a lot by making every specific monster have unchangeable traits which offer things like "immunity to x type of damage" or "higher crit chance"- it's small, but it gives each monster more identity.

> Second and secondmost- SKILLS!

The older games didn't use trees, it used each individual spell as a potential pass on during breeding.

Each monster could have 8 spells, and when you breed two monsters you pass on all 16 spells to the offspring (they don't learn them all at once, they learn them as they level up) as well as the natural spells the monster would learn by level up.

So in the older games it is really easy to end up with a refined and overpowered list of 8 spells on each of your monsters.

Now spells are tied to Skill trees and your monsters can have 3 skill trees total (which are passed on as OPTIONS when breeding).

All to say skills do a lot for removing the "Master of all, weakness of none" spell lists that the older games made trivial to make, now you have to limit your builds and be more specialized- also they added skills like "Attack up" to add more variance to a build- instead of having spells you might just have high stat buffs as skill trees.

Overall I think Skills are an improvement because coupled with Traits it makes each monster feel much more specialized and unique and less like a sprite with no identity.

> Breeding is improved.

This is very much because of skills and traits- again- but also the system is just improved in general. Instead of being told "That's a monster you haven't had before!" and judging your decisions based on the name of the offspring breed, now you get to see a small sprite of the resulting monster to help you decide- ALSO instead of getting 1 result for every combo (to the point where you have to back out and choose Monster A + Monster B and Monster B + Monster A as separate options), you now get up to 3 results to pick between for every breeding opportunity.

It's just better.

> The engine is impressive.

At least to me. This is a DS title using (from what I read) a rework of the DQ8 PS2 game's engine- it certainly looks like it.

Combat models are nice, using moves looks nice, overworld exploration looks nice- it looks nice.

Now for some negative and general nonsense- all of which is more often than not 'weird'.

> I gotta be unfair and say "The Story" first and foremost.

DQM 1 and 2 are not intense story games. They aren't.

But they both knew how to handle their story well for what they wanted to tell, I can and will praise both for their narratives because they know what they are and do it well.

DQM:J does not. It's fucking bad.

Basically: The overall story doesn't exist- you're told to be a spy, but that comes up 1 time towards the end of the game and LITERALLY doesn't matter at any other moment INCLUDING the one time it comes up.

You have NO meaningful objective from the start up until near the end of the game. You show up and have no goal- so you get told to get some crystals with no meaning behind it (not even a lie because they are clearly evil- not even a lie to motivate you! NO MEANING IS PRESENTED! JUST DO IT! TO DO THE CONTEST I GUESS! WHY? SHUT UP!)

So 90% of the game time you're not doing anything meaningful. So what about the islands? Any small narratives to keep things moving?

NO!

NOT AT ALL!

So you go 90% of the game having no real objective, just kinda wandering forward mindlessly- and then the game suddenly goes "Oh! Guy who seemed sus! He's evil! He's gonna unleash the calamity that you were 'kinda but not directly' working towards with your dog! You know, that plot point that's kept vague and paid 0% attention to the entire game? Yeah it's happening! Aaaaand you're done! GG!"

Basically there's just nothing going on in this game, it's all background noise until the last 10% of the game. And that's lame.

DQM1 had a light story- but from the very intro cutscene you have a clear objective which makes every action you do seem relevant as you are working towards that goal.

From the start of the game you know "My sister is gone! The king says a magic wish can get her back! I'll go do that!" and then you do!

DQM2 has a much better story!

You have a goal from the start (The kingdom is physically dying and you have to save it by getting a new plug!) AND it has stories for each world you visit!

THAT'S MILES BETTER! THIS GAME COULD HAVE DONE THAT FOR THE ISLANDS!

Anywho. Story is lacking and empty and lame especially when DQM2 has a similar format but does every part better- you have a clear objective you're working towards AND side stories to keep the light narrative moving!

WTH!

The spy plotline doesn't matter! It could have been used to build suspicion on who's the good guy!

The islands are so empty of story!

DQM2 has a fun mix on how a rival character works which makes every world interesting to see how they get involved!

This game has a rival that does NOTHING!!!!!!!!!

It's just such a step back from the previous games, it's weird to see DQM 1 land a solid simple story and DQM 2 build a great format to expand the story going forward- and then DQM:J just slams its head into the dirt and wipes out.

> Game's slow.

The engine switch is a good thing overall, but it makes combat slower (a lot), adds loading screens to combat (primarily), and they didn't bother speeding up the grind from previous games.

Because of the grind still existing which isn't a problem in and of itself- the game becomes SLOW AS HELL because the engine makes that grind take longer.

Also world exploration is slow which is to be expected when moving from 2d to 3d, but this is countered by adding things to the world to find or do- and Joker tries but it's still noticeable. The world exploration isn't a problem, it just stands out alongside the combat being slow as hell.

The engine change was a great thing- but it feels like they should have put more work into speeding up combat to counter the slowdown of load times and flashy animations.

A GOOD WAY TO FIX THAT MIGHT BE XP!

> Music ain't great in my opinion.

DQ has amazing music. This game has some weak renditions in my opinion. The CELL HQ theme song is a pretty good poster child for the worst there is, but just in general even the better music is lacking compared to the chiptunes of the GBC or the better mixes of the main series.

Maybe it's unfair, it's a DS game, I don't know, I just know I ended up just muting most of the game because it didn't sound great. I played the GBC games OSTs instead for a large portion of my playthrough. I listened to videos instead for the bulk of the game.

It's just not pleasant to me, sorry to say.

> XP!!!!!!!

I'm being a spoiled ass on this but yeah!

XP SUCKS IN THIS!

There aren't good placed to grind until you beat the game! (apparently)

The first level blatantly has too low xp which makes you grind before you can tackle the boss of the island- and the late game has you mindlessly grinding low xp rewards in order to be ready to face the final boss.

It's WEIRD!

Why is it so low!

> Tech is weird!

I could ramble on this alone but here's the short version:

DQ has a unique fantasy world aesthetic that each game has explored in its own way. It's basically "swords, magic, monsters, and charm- things feel light but aren't afraid to get scary sometimes :)"

This game... doesn't.

This game has fuckin' tech watches, jet skis, TOWER PCS????

This ISN'T dragon quest on a world building level.

It's like, contemporary modern world but with slimes.

And that could be good I guess, but it feels so fucking weird to see PCs right alongside swords and axes and a dracky.

Like... why?

It's a poor aesthetic according to my tastes. Maybe I'm an ass for that. The tech is weird.

All to say, in a poor rambling "I gotta get this out of me" kinda way, is Joker was fine.

I enjoyed breeding. I enjoyed seeing the engine. I enjoyed the unique additions like a 'hero monster'.

But I also had to grind mindlessly on a slower game.

I had to endure a story that forgot to show up until the very end.

I sat there thinking about replaying the older ones the whole time.

It was fine.

It's mediocre.

I'm glad I played it.

I'm done now :)

[chonzu]

This is the beginning of an idea I had where Atsuhiro survives the attack and ends up in Tartarus. I want to expand on it but I’ve worked on this for a few days and I’m happy with it I suppose! Spoilers for Chapter 294/295 ofc.

I apologize for the weird formatting, I’ve been working on mobile/iPad for a while now.

--

He loved the League. He would give his life for the League and their leader’s ideals and he knew that’s how it would end as he hit the ground, snatched out of the air by the blond child he’d barely seen once before months ago at the Yakuza base, and while the rest of that battle lasted barely more than a few minutes, Atsuhiro fell in and out of consciousness more times than he could count. He could not move no matter how hard he tried, but that was alright. If Shigaraki had gotten away, well. He couldn’t blame the kid for leaving him behind.

Atsuhiro let out a shaky breath and closed his eyes.

“Hurry! Go, get the Tartarus staff on site! Get...we need…....alive...”

If he couldn’t move anyway he wasn’t going to struggle—everyone was gone, surely, and the heroes were getting tended to, going by the muffled voices and sirens, and he’d accepted his death by now. As long as his sacrifice wasn’t for nothing, it would be alright.

He was roughly moved again, his mind fogging up more as a numb pain crawled up his side. His arm was restrained, locked down; his body was jostled until he was shoved roughly into the back of a cold vehicle onto a starkly-cold metal surface. Atsuhiro tried to open his eyes, but this was it for him. He let that darkness take him, hoping that the young boss, Spinner, and Dabi had gotten away.

-

His eye snapped open into quiet darkness, into what he guessed was a small and sterile room barely bigger than a closet. Machines hummed and chugged gently to his left and his right shoulder pressed against a cold concrete wall. He tried to speak but his throat was drier than a desert, leaving him sputtering and coughing until he’d caught his breath.

He couldn’t lift his right arm, a cuff had been attached to his wrist, his fake left eye and left mechanical arm had been removed, and he could only imagine what other types of straps were keeping him down on the bed that wasn’t very comfortable and they’d never given him any blankets or turned the heat up. He may as well exist in a dungeon and it wasn’t apparent that there were any guards near him at the moment.

With his wrist cuffed as it was, it blocked his hand from being unable to touch anything and he didn’t have any smart ideas to get out of this. Truthfully, he thought he was dead, but the straps were tight and deliberately made to keep him from moving his arm at all. The numbness in his hip and chest was almost too much but if he squeezed his eyes shut he almost couldn’t feel it. He felt a little lost and panicked without his left arm.

Remember, he thought. Remember. What got him into this place? A heist gone wrong? Did he steal something from a hero more high-profile than he’d expected? A more dastardly villain than he’d hoped? His work with the League often brought him to many unsuspecting places, but up until recently they’d been working on projects with...the Meta-Liberation Army.

Atsuhiro opened his eye. There’d been a war. That’s right, yes. He’d watched the boss get away, but he couldn’t remember anything after being grabbed by that sunny-haired kid he’d thought they’d gotten rid of a long time ago.

A few minutes into trying to relax, Atsuhiro realized that an alarm was going off on the machine and only got louder and worse the more he suddenly panicked. He pulled against the restraints to no avail. His heart nearly lept out of his chest when the door flew open, the room flooding with a fleet of armed guards and heroes silhouetted black against the harsh white fluorescent lighting that spilled into the room.

“Wh— what?”

A strong hand grabbed his face and turned his head every possible direction, to which he objected loudly and wasn’t heard. The doctor who grabbed him turned him to face them, their gaze cool and steady, but unfocused. He heard whispers from the front of the room that maybe they should stick a muzzle on him like one of their other prisoners, but the doctor handling him waved them away.

Atsuhiro was poked and prodded. “Please, come on. Take me to dinner before you start doing that. I’m /starving/.”

“We both know that’s not going to happen, Sako.” The doctor pressed their lips together, barely giving him so much as a look as they hummed, tapped a pen against their lips, and started to scribble on a clipboard. “Prisoner is awake, far too alert, and begging for food. I’d say we’ve done a good job here.”

“Fuck— what? Prisoner?” Atsuhiro struggled again. “At least tell me where the fuck I am!” Sharp pains in his side would have crumpled him if he didn’t have the restraints tied over his chest.

The doctor turned their back to him. “Prisoner is starting to panic. Sedate him."

They left in a hurry, coat a flurry of fabric behind them lime a cape, and Atsuhiro noticed the lines of drips going into his arm. He struggled more, but when what he assumed was an intern leaned down over a tray of medication he suddenly felt faint.

Before he fainted, Atsuhiro watched a fuzzy guard wave at him.

No, no, no, he thought. No. He couldn’t go out like this again. His eye closed however, and darkness claimed him once more when the door shut tightly and he fell into a fitful doze.

--

"Sako Atsuhiro."

His whole body tingled as he lifted his head. He felt like his mind was rapidly being overwhelmed by the sharp lights, solid metal room, and his arm held at a strange angle, while his body lagged behind him as if trapped in syrup. He had been given only enough pain medication to sit up and talk, but it made his mind fuzzy and he squinted against the harsh white lights of the room and the spotlights angled directly at him. Restraints kept him firmly against the chair, so he was unable to escape. He couldn't if he tried.

Atsuhiro cleared his throat, squinting. "Yes. Yes that's...that’s my name. How can I help you? Besides giving away all of our best secrets, of course."

The man who spoke to him seemed as nondescript as the next guy. Tall, short brown hair, quite a friendly face, business casual. Definitely not the kind of person who would be the main character in a show. A stack of papers sat under his hand. "It's just me in here."

"Okay? And the two hundred people recording this conversation?"

"I just want to talk."

"Well we certainly are! How's life treating you?"

"That's irrelevant. Sako, we have you listed for numerous crimes such as theft, destruction of property, child endangerment, involvement with the League of Villains and the Meta-Liberation Army, just to make a few. Just recently you were caught attempting to land an attack on our heroes.

"I don't really know what to say to that?”

The man hummed. "I understand. We’ll be keeping an eye on you, of course. You have a hip replacement and reconstruction scheduled soon. I’ll be visiting every few days.”

Atsuhiro resisted rolling his eyes. “Please, why are you telling me all of this.”

“Why not? You can’t escape, you can’t move.”

“I see. You know, it’s polite to at least tell someone your name? You seem to know me /quite/ well.”

The man pressed his lips together. He spent a moment writing down a few of his own notes. “I guess you can call me Tsukauchi.”

Atsuhiro blinked, mulling it over. He’d never heard of that name before. “Okay. Why are you bothering to fix me up?”

“The marble that you compressed was lost at the scene so there wasn’t a way to even attempt to assess what you’d lost.” Tsukauchi shrugged. “We obviously need you alive, which I’m sure you already know?” He raised an eyebrow and Atsuhiro pouted. “All prisoners at Tartarus receive /some/ kind of care. We aren’t heartless villains.”

“Yeah, and you use that care to keep us alive and trapped here and for what?”

“Sir, you were involved in committing mass murder.”

“Pah!” Atsuhiro straightened his shoulders. “So let me guess. Keeping me alive here is a worse punishment than death?”

“If that’s how you would like to see it.” Tsukauchi wasn’t looking at him, but seemed to be quite a good listener. “My time here is short today, but I’ll be back again shortly.”

“I look forward to it.” Atsuhiro gave the man his sweetest smile. Tsukauchi stared at him with a peculiar look, then looked down to gather up his notes.

He left silently. Guards crept out of shadows Atsuhiro hadn’t even realized were there and he was being dragged from the stage again. He couldn’t walk, oh no. He could barely /sit up/ and so he was roughly thrown into a wheelchair, the quirk-neutralizing cuff around his arm was adjusted, and straps tightened around his chest and legs.

The doctor who he’d seen numerous times by now and who he assumed had performed the surgery on him pushed his wheelchair along. They went down long passages, each holding cell specially designed to the needs and quirks of those they held. Atsuhiro’s own holding cell was only the basic one; cold, dry, with solid metal plates and a single bed. Because of the neutralizing cuff on his wrist, he wasn’t able to compress himself, and even if he was, there was a second cuff that held his hand at a specific angle and had a cage around it to leave him unable to touch anything. Without his right arm, he’d never be able to get it off on his own. Not unless he pulled some crazy gymnastics, which just weren’t possible with his injuries.

Apparently he was to be getting a slight upgrade to a different wing once his injuries had healed, but they gave a severe estimate of at least six weeks and an incomprehensible amount of physical therapy thereafter—if they deemed that necessary. After all, he was alive, and that’s really all they needed to question him.

Along the way, some of the captured prisoners gave him looks if they were able to look out of the windows on their doors or restrained in tight places facing the hallways for quicker analysis by guards and inspectors. Atsuhiro did not look at any of them.

[bigskydreaming]

Making this its own thread so as not to take over @northoftheroad​‘s - but about that scene with the memories from Nightwing Rebirth annual #1....tbh, I wasn’t terribly sad when that didn’t come back into play because I kinda hated this scene, lol. And it sucks because like, it COULD have had an entirely different vibe, but as usual, it comes down to execution, and like.....agency. I know, my favorite word, but like.

The problem I had with this scene (and my caution regarding the way Taylor’s talked up Babs’ importance to his run of Nightwing), is there’s this line between bringing other characters into Dick’s own title to lend a supporting hand or even for their own specific area of expertise....and Dick like, becoming the guest star in his own title. And for me, personally, that line tends to be most apparent when Dick stops feeling like he’s in the driver’s seat of his own stories and instead is just riding shotgun while other people make decisions that have far more to do with his life than their own.

This COULD have been a great scene, IF the decision for the memories needing to be kept and the malware studied had come from Dick himself.....much like, y’know, the memories did. If upon Dick deciding that there was a reason they still needed to exist outside and independent of him, be a safeguard or used for some purpose, Babs made the same vow of keeping them safe, like, that would have been great! That’s an expression of concern, of RESPECT for the importance, the significance of what Babs is holding in her hand there, rather than just a scientific curiosity, a puzzle to be studied.

But instead, the way it was kinda framed as just Babs knows best when the actual topic of weight wasn’t the technical specs or the scientific how/why of what was being studied, but rather SHOULD it be studied versus just destroyed....that was the problem for me, because that was absolutely, one hundred percent not Babs’ decision to make. They were Dick’s memories. He was the one left exposed by their continued existence in that form. It wasn’t just the sensitive information those memories contained, the intel on hundreds of others of Dick’s family and friends and teammates, their identities and weaknesses and all kinds of other stuff pertaining to people beyond just Dick himself, many of whom Babs has very little connection to herself, in comparison to Dick’s connection with them....and their trust in Dick having that information about them, which is not unilaterally blanket trust in others having that information by extension or proxy.....it was also just. Sensitive stuff, sensitive to Dick himself, stuff he was no doubt sensitive about. And this was just brushed off and moved past without a second glance, because the writer considered Dick’s concerns about HIS memories of secondary importance to what Babs could do with them or learn about the technology/from them.

And again, it would have been entirely different if that decision had come FROM Dick. If the scene, the issue in question had been framed around him making the executive decision on what to do about these memories, and Babs lending her aid in whatever HE decided should be done with them, including study them or keep them safe as a back-up of some kind.....there’s zero problem!

But the fact that Dick is written objecting, and then those objections brushed off as inconsequential by the writing on the exact same page like, makes it all the worse, because it demonstrates that the writer was aware, LOGISTICALLY, of various reasons why the memories shouldn’t be kept that way......but that reasoning was kept divorced from all examinations of Dick’s perspective of the situation, his own vulnerability, from any kind of other angle beyond just logistics. Like emotional. Proprietary. Even uncertainty, like ‘I don’t know how I feel about this, can we take a beat for me to get my head back on straight after everything that’s just happened to me and revisit this after I’ve had a chance to think about it,’ that would have been fine.

Anything but just.....raising the issue of ‘maybe this isn’t a good idea’ and moving past it two panels later with full speed ahead, without any further exploration from Dick’s own POV why he might not be cool with this or with his objections treated as like, a PERSONAL issue rather than simply a LOGISTICAL one.

Because that ultimately is the heart of the issue. Dick was effectively overruled as though his objection was logistical only, rationale based, and Babs’ opinion ended up carrying the more weight because her rationale was better reasoned and the logistical issues addressed by her declaration of keeping it safe.

Problem is, it was never just a matter of logistics, and this is where the writing failed the story, and the characters, by not recognizing that Dick’s objection should NOT be capable of being overruled by someone else’s logic or rationale, because there’s very little that’s MORE personal than a person’s own memories, and treating it as anything other than a personal issue that only one person had the ultimate right to make the judgment call of what to do with those memories moving forward, is taking eyes off what’s actually being talked about.

Tbh, I do consider it fairly surprising - even if I’m not sad about it - that Percy’s work here wasn’t referenced more in the Ric Grayson conclusion, because I think a ton of how that was approached was directly based on the foundation of a lot of Percy’s own takes here. This same problem reared its head again later in that same issue when the writing again had Dick raising valid concerns when he brought up the matter of his memories again, and wanted to know where they were being stored.....and again, Percy’s answer to that was to have Babs overrule Dick’s feeling this was ‘need to know’ information for him by saying you don’t need to know that.

Again, its frustrating because the writing then continued to demonstrate an awareness of the flaws in Babs’ argument here, with Dick continuing to present possibilities like “what if you’re the next target of today’s villain and thus can’t keep those memories safe any more than I could in the first place, like let’s take a second to acknowledge that you’re as much of a target as Batgirl that I am as Nightwing, and just as vulnerable to being captured and mind-probed”....its just, the writing then proceeds to effectively change the subject immediately AFTER Dick poses these questions but BEFORE any answer is actually given, almost as if to get his objections on record and logged, before like....moving on with the story as though those hugely pertinent questions were ultimately irrelevant. LOL. No. They weren’t. Its just the writer chose to frame them that way in order to keep the focus on everything as purely logistical and Dick’s logistical sense here being not even lacking, but BIASED......but with zero acknowledgment anywhere in the story that like, he had a right to that bias, that bias was real yes, but also reasonable, because those memories were HIS, lol, and every issue he had with them, about them, about what was done with them, was one hundred percent valid and should never have been subject to someone else’s veto power.

And there’s no point to having a character speak up for himself, raise issues based on his own personal feelings and rationale on things pertaining to HIM.....if you’re still going to treat everyone around him as having veto power over what he says or does or thinks on these matters. Either without any acknowledgment of that being what these other characters or doing, or basing their ‘right’ to do so on some flimsy rationale of him being too biased or emotional or subjective on the subject, as though all these other characters don’t have their own biases and emotional perspectives, and he’s no less entitled to his than they are, and he’s far MORE entitled to what decisions are made about HIM and things that are HIS, than they are.

(Also, sidebar, but I also trace a lot of the problems I have with Babs and other characters’ declarations of knowing more about Dick/knowing him better than he knows himself, like, directly to this annual and the whole scene in the Batcave-on-wheels. I believe Castelluci, the most recent Batgirl writer, has flat out said that she isn’t that familiar with Nightwing’s character, and so I think a lot of the objections I have with how she approached Dick’s character ultimately stem from the likelihood that Castelluci’s take on him was informed mostly by like, this very annual and other recent writings, with no attempt at a more diversified reading of his character before writing him.)

Anyway, point is, I kinda hated that scene, because I have a huge beef with scenes that have Dick speak up about stuff that’s about HIM first and foremost.....when the writers then proceed to steamroll right over everything he says as though its irrelevant. Like lol no. HIS VOICE SHOULD GET TO BE THE LOUDEST IN THE ROOM WHEN THE TOPIC OF CONVERSATION IS HIS OWN LIFE OR THINGS DIRECTLY STEMMING FROM IT/AFFECTING IT.

This is a hugely recurrent thread in a lot of different issues with his character, with them all ultimately just spilling out of a weird refusal to keep him in the driver’s seat of his own life.

And again, it could have gone down ENTIRELY different. Every single decision and ramification from that scene could have existed just the same, without any significant plot alteration, but with 100% less problems, if the writing had just framed all those decisions and ramifications as springing from Dick’s OWN decisions, logic, wishes, rather than in OPPOSITION to them. The only thing that needed to be different, IMO, was just....keeping him and his choices, his own rationales, and his RIGHT to them, as being MOST in focus in that particular story and sequence of events.

And also again, just for the record, this has nothing to do with it being Babs in that scene and everything to do with just....the issue itself. Which is a problem for me with any and all other characters whose choices are similarly prioritized over Dick’s own decision-making process, even when the decisions are about him and his life, far more so than their own. This isn’t Babs-specific, it just tends to come up a lot with her due to the mere fact of like....how often Babs is the one in Dick’s stories or title, compared to other characters like Jason or Tim who cross over relatively less....but still usually create or raise the same problem when they do.

[internetandnetwork]

How to Make the Most Out of Your Landing Pages

The responsibility of a marketer is not limited to the moment a visitor converts on a landing page. Their job is far, far from being done just yet. If truth be told, the landing page itself has plenty of work that needs to be done before we can start celebrating to score a conversion.

Curious about those leads that do not convert?

Well, neglect them at your own risk!

Being data-driven marketers, we are acutely familiar with the fact that the majority of the site visitors won’t ever convert. In fact, in a few industries, conversion rates can be as low as 1-2%. But does that mean the rest of the 98-99% visitors that don’t convert are useless? No. There are numerous ways you can boost your chances of converting more site visitors gradually and extract more value from your landing pages.

In order to do that, you need to track what happens to every site visitor after click-through, page view, form submission, or phone call. Gauging and feeding this data into your campaigns will help boost your overall results as well as your ability to optimize your campaigns for better ROI.

Sounds good, right? Keep on reading to explore more.

WHY YOU SHOULD NOT IGNORE VISITORS WHO DON’T CONVERT INSTANTLY

As we discussed earlier, suppose your landing page has a conversion rate of about 2%, meaning the remaining 98% of visitors do not convert.

Ignoring these non-converting visitors is a grave mistake. Now a lot of them won’t ever convert simply because of a disconnect in the offer, audience, or timing. But that’s the way of the world. When it comes to a landing page, there is no one-size-fits-all. But in the long run, some of these visitors will most probably convert:

Via other channels or websites that might not be traceable to your landing page directly

 Offline at a brick-and-mortar store or through phone

After a very long consideration period

Before you can begin cashing in on these long-term converters, you need to understand better where those converting visitors are coming from to your website.

For that, check out the Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels Report that displays the various interactions that take place before a conversion does. You can find this report in your Google Analytics by going to “Conversions,” then choosing “Multi-Channel Funnels,” and then “Top Conversion Paths.”

Data from different conversion paths can help you inform your future strategies to reach and convert visitors in the later stage of their journey. Once you get a better idea of where those converting visitors are coming from, you can implement these three tips to utilize this data wisely and squeeze more value from your existing landing pages.

#1 MEASURE YOUR OFFLINE INTERACTIONS TRIGGERED BY LANDING PAGES

Businesses that have physical stores or an offline sales channel can use paid search and social channels to bring in visitors and utilize their landing pages to highlight their products or services.

However, if the end goal is to drive store visits and phone calls, marketers need to get a bit more creative with evaluating performance. Doing this is worthwhile as it will help you get a better idea of how your campaigns generate business.

Store Visit Conversions

Store Visits conversion types are available in Google Ads and Facebook Ads that let marketers view how ad interactions can impact foot traffic in a retail location like a shop. Each ad platform tracks the mobile device location of users who have opted-in to share it to extrapolate the number of people that visited your physical store within a particular time frame after seeing or clicking on your ad.

To put it another way, even if your landing page did not record an immediate online conversion, visitors who visited your physical store can still be included in your campaign performance report.

Let’s look at the three main ways store visits are helpful in PPC campaigns:

Campaign objective: Both Google and Facebook have individual campaign types for local businesses, encouraging people to click to make a call or get driving directions.

Input for bid optimization strategies: Store visits can be used as input by Google’s smart bidding. Facebook optimizes the Store Visit campaigns to display ads to users who are more likely to visit.

Conversion event: Report and audit store visit performance by ad creative or campaign to ascertain which audiences or ads will most probably bring in-store traffic.

You will notice the data show up in your Conversion actions report in the Tools > Conversions menu, given that your Google Ads account fulfills the requirements for store visit conversions. If it does appear in the menu, you can build custom reports or see store visit conversion data at the ad, campaign, keyword, or ad group levels.

In addition to this, Facebook Ads campaigns that have store visits as an objective provide results for ad analysis and campaign as well. To include relevant metrics in your performance reports, choose Columns > Customize Columns from within the reporting interface, and then search for “Store Visits.”

Phone Call Tracking

Typically, lead generation landing pages contain a phone number that serves as a primary or secondary CTA to engage warm leads with personal interaction.

Most home services and healthcare businesses receive the majority of their contacts by phone only. Consumers who have complicated billing or scheduling questions prefer talking to a human mostly instead of waiting for a web form response. In fact, giving trackable phone numbers on landing pages to engage prospects before conversion or sale takes place has proved beneficial for many online retailers and SaaS companies too.

Phone calls present marketers with invaluable data:

Marketers can decide the best-performing layout based on the phone call conversions generated by landing pages and/or test variants.

The campaign or keyword level granularity can help the marketers recognize useful traffic drivers.

Audio and text records are valuable to spot frequently asked questions, sales barriers, and frontline staff training opportunities.

Supplementary conversion data can back up CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) bidding.

Let’s take a look at two effortless ways to incorporate phone call tracking into your landing pages:

To derive maximum advantage, you can use a phone call tracking tool. Just add tracking scripts to all your landing pages using Google Tag Manager or any other third-party software.

If you are not entirely ready to have a dedicated phone call tracking provider, you can go for Google’s built-in phone call conversion tracking tool to track all calls generated by your Google Ads campaigns. However, its implementation is a little tricky, and compared to other dedicated third-party software; it provides lesser call-level data. Nevertheless, it still works wonders for tracking call conversions and integrating the data into conversion-based bidding strategies and reporting.

#2 INCORPORATE LEAD DATA WITH TOOLS TO BOOST SALES RESULTS

When it comes to converting prospective consumers into actual consumers, capturing leads and contact details is only the first step. Sales cycles differ in span, and they can last days, weeks, or even months. How will you determine which landing page or original traffic source generated leads that converted into high-value customers?

This is commonly known as attribution, which is one of the toughest problems today’s marketers face.

Its solution generally requires passing the data in and out between marketing and sales teams to verify the lead quality and recognize the leads that finally closed into sales. Here are a few recommended methods to connect your marketing and sales teams to comprehend landing page performance.

Combine Marketing Automation and CRM Platforms With Landing Pages

Whether your sales team uses a spreadsheet or a CRM platform to track leads, you should save as much marketing campaign data about every contact as possible. All this information will be added to the sales contact and can be examined to ascertain the most productive offers and campaigns. Here are a few examples of data you might want to gather:

Date and time of the first and subsequent visits as well as interactions

Landing page URL and variant that captured the lead

The call-to-action (CTA) and offer the potential customer responded to

The ad creative, campaign, placement, audience list, and keyword that generated each visit

In addition to this, with more data, marketing automation platforms become more powerful. Having attribution data can help personalize or customize your campaigns to increase your conversion and open rates. To accomplish this, it:

Matches your email content and subject lines to the ad creative or copy prospects engaged with originally to strengthen your positioning

Displays the same CTAs and offers in your text/email campaigns, landing pages, and website personalization efforts to bolster your messaging

Connect Your Landing Pages to Other Platforms

Don’t get intimidated by the initial setup.

The majority of the marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software has built-in integrations with the influential ad platforms already. In case yours doesn’t, you can integrate them using a third-party tool. The data above can be registered automatically for all prospective customers allowing you to focus your precious time somewhere else.

#3 UTILIZE LANDING PAGES TO CREATE AUDIENCE LISTS FOR FUTURE AD TARGETING

Simply because a visitor did not convert into a buyer on their first-ever visit to your website does not mean they won’t ever. Maybe the timing was not ideal, or perhaps they are just comparison shopping before making any final purchase decision. So in place of giving up already, use targeted ads based on their past behaviors to give them a reason to return to your website.

Building segmented audience lists for your remarketing ads or search campaigns is the best way to re-engage those non-converting visitors. You can start with the audience types mentioned below and expand them later as you find out what works best for you.

Audience Based on Engagement Triggers: For example, suppose you have a product/service page with an embedded video. Maybe you want to re-engage those visitors who watched it but did not convert. When it comes to remarketing to very particular sets of visitors based on their behaviors or intent, building audiences from Google Analytics events stands as a potent tool. Prepare a list of the significant engagement points on your landing pages and then create audiences with the aim of delivering ads to them afterward.

Audiences for All Stages of Your Customer Journey: Maybe you want to reach the old leads with another offer to help them move further in their customer journey. Wondering how this works? Let’s suppose you are a custom home builder, and a prospective customer downloads a PDF of home plans from your website. You add them to a new audience list and start sending them ads offering free model home tours and testimonials from your existing customers. Not only will this help you stay on top of mind of your prospects but will surely help them move further towards becoming your customer.

Similar or Lookalike Audiences: Make an audience list based on any of the points mentioned above. Google Ads and Facebook Ads will then identify other leads with similar attributes in their networks. That’s an incredible way to grow your reach and discover new prospects.

Creating audiences for remarketing in Google Analytics is comparatively straightforward. All you need to do is go to “Admin,” then select “Property Settings,” then “Audience Definitions,” and then click the “Audiences” menu to start building rules-based audiences from your existing site traffic.

Restrictive Remarketing Policies

A few industries, such as personal finance, have more restrictive remarketing policies, of course, limiting the way marketers can re-engage their past landing page visitors.

Keeping this in mind, it is highly recommended that you adhere to Facebook and Google’s rules strictly if you want to avoid getting your account suspended. Moreover, make sure you check these policies frequently as the ad platforms update them often to keep up with privacy regulations. So stay current with the latest changes, mainly before you build a new remarketing audience for industries with more restrictive remarketing policies.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to overcome these remarketing restrictions by producing engaging content that makes the visitors stay a bit longer on your landing pages.

WRAPPING IT UP

All visitors are equally valuable to your business regardless of whether they convert immediately or not. It all depends on how you handle them – whether you decide to throw your hands up in the air or take considerable measures to stay on top of their mind and drive them back to your website. Do not let those invaluable prospects go away! Unleash the true potential of your landing pages by implementing these three tips. It’s time to start treating your landing pages as a vital part of your marketing strategy instead of just seeing them as a quick stop on your overall customer journey.

Hariom Balhara is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles for E Global Soft Solutions. E Global Soft Solutions is a Digital Marketing, SEO, SMO, PPC and Web Development company that comes with massive experiences. We specialize in digital marketing, Web Designing and development, graphic design, and a lot more.

SOURCE : Landing Pages

[doomedandstoned]

Meeting Bomg, Doom-Drone Legends from Ukraine

~Interview by Billy Goate~

Doomed & Stoned continues our week of epic interviews with a long overdue conversation with the great Ukraine doom-drone band BOMG, who have been desamating stages and blowing out amps since 2010. During that time, Nikolay Temchenko (guitar), Yuriy Temchenko (bass), and Anton Khomenko (drums) have put out two mammoth LPs, an EP, and a split.

I first got turned on to BOMG's sound with the record 'Polynseed' (2013), which released the year that Doomed & Stoned was founded. I recommend starting there if this is your first exposure to the mighty trio from Kyiv.

Bomg have been gradually drifting in the direction of full-on drone metal, executed in their own authentic and compelling way, as we're about to discover as we drill into 'Peregrination' (2020) -- which we reviewed last year and Robustfellow has recently reissued.

Give ear...

You state that BOMG means “vagabond” on your Bandcamp page. Can you elaborate on how the name ties in with the band’s history and core identity?

It’s an abbreviation literally meaning “with no particular place of living”. Funny thing is that its’ meaning is degraded in common use (like “bum”), but when it was incepted (60s – 70s in USSR) those who were stigmatized by it were better off going elsewhere than being part of the regime, taking it as a positive. This became somewhat of a short-lived movement even. We think that despite being prone to misunderstanding in every way, it fits the overall vibe. Blessing and a curse. But frankly, the name is a secondary thing at best.

How would you describe your distinctive sound, to someone who has never encountered it before?

Basically, trying to elaborate and add to “Black Sabbath spaghettified” idea. We try to squeeze out any possible amount of low frequency, volume, distortion and effect saturation to the instruments, not necessarily designed for it. As of similarities and influences, it’s 60s-70s heavy psych, proto-metal and proto-punk, 80s - 90s continuation of it (doom metal, stoner/desert rock, sludge, drone doom), besides that – dub, ambient, prog rock, experimental music, field recordings and whatnot.

Peregrination by Bomg

Your new album 'Peregrination' is an explosive bombshell, massive in every respect. When was the concept for the album born?

The first track was almost ready in 2011, we played it at our first show. As of concept, it started to take shape somewhere in 2013-2014, most of the lyrics were written back then. Then it took years to “grow.” First, we tried to make it so each track would fit one side of LP, but it seemed kinda compressed and landed too quick. Then we decided not to confine it to any time limit but each track landed itself around 40 minutes, so we made sure it evens out like this in final recording.

Tell us about the recording process involved. We’re very curious about instruments, gear, amps, and the general studio environment in which it originated.

Each whole track was recorded live (took roughly four weeks for four tracks), then layered with two additional guitars. Synths, field recordings, vocals were added afterward.

Gear: we used two Tank amps (Orange/Matamp clones) made from old soviet broadcast amplifiers and Tesla Disco 240 for guitar and bass (wish our Sunn concert bass was alive at that point, but it just burns transistors when turned on – we couldn’t find an exact schematic for it, even photos of the exact amp on the web, seems like it’s from some transition period).

The drums are '70s Rogers 13”, 16” toms and 24” steel shell bass drum from '50s-'70s (mass-produced for political celebrations, weddings and funerals), coupled with Meinl hi-hats, Paiste Rude China and Zildjian Mega Bell.

Guitars used were early '00s Gibson SG Standard, '72 Musima Eterna Deluxe and ’69 Musima Record; and ‘70 Cremona Violin bass.

Pedals: Poltava fuzz-wah, Noname “flanger” that is actually phaser for bass; Tesla Vrable fuzz-wah (the seller told us that his uncle was under KGB investigation for just having it), Noname dist (most likely a ProCo Rat clone), Vox wah, Boss BF-2, Lel’ parametric EQ, Lel’ digital delay, Boss dynamic wah, Roland Space Echo for guitar.

Recording equipment: Two '70s Oktava ML-19 for overheads, '50s-'60s Oktava ML15 and ML16 for room and various dynamic and condenser mics for everything else into Pro Tools, then later in mixing/mastering stage partly routed through mixer and cassette deck using beaten up cassette for analog saturation and vibrato.

Long story short, we tried to use most of the stuff we got in our studio, and at this point, it’s hard to remember every detail of the process. Referring to the environment, it is compiled of numerous weird gadgets which got to us throughout years, most of which were collecting dust somewhere for decades, and have a history (an entire topic by itself) we’re always asking for. And when used, they tell a story which then leaves a mark in recordings for sure. That was a hell of a fascinating process.

I noticed you had lyrics for each song on 'Peregrination,' but the singing doesn't seem discernable. Are there indeed vocals and, if so, how can I hear them?

Yes, there are vocals. They appear on low volume as reverberated and somewhat oscillated notes, more like presence; on high volume, you can hear words with 1-5 kHz correctly dialed in (on most audio equipment these frequencies tend to be excited, so lowering EQ at this range brings clarity), it appears as a whisper in a loud, saturated mix. Also, we added subtitles on YouTube, so you can know for sure where to find vocals. The point was to make them recognizable only with intent.

Talk about the album art. It seems there is hidden symbolism there, is that true?

It’s some sort of a window that leads to four areas, which are the visualized soundscapes to each track. There were no particular symbols, but the thing is that they fill in the picture as it is set - like a hallucination, which is often a well of meaning where symbols change and multiply interpretations, at the same time being just momentary blobs of form.

The process of making this album cover involved many iterations of drawing, running through GAN networks, editing the result to achieve the effect of a captured hallucination, close to the exact one. When hardwiring symbols directly into it, they would be eaten up by hallucinating AI. So by randomly forming a resemblance of shapes, things started popping out where they fit the most contextually - weird stuff. It’s a common thing in art to throw “open for interpretation” on everything, but this one might be.

What is the concept behind each "hobo" symbol and track on 'Peregrination'?

So, the first one means being quiet and alert, seeing what’s going on. The second one is a sign of a trolley – hopping from one soundscape to another, time travel. The third one – safe camp; it may be confusing when applied to the lyrics, but the position that is stated there facing the object is some sort of a “safe camp”, ground to stand on. The fourth one means “don’t give up”, even if applied in both meanings of this phrase to track. But the symbol references may lack context without diving into tracks.

I'm sure our readers would be most happy if you were to illuminate the meaning of each of the songs on your new album.

Well, it’s like trying to create a soundtrack to some introductory ontological theories (pretty blank, sterile stuff), realizing their intensity. Here uneven-numbered tracks touch on mind ontology, even-numbered - on reality ontology. Not diving into details too much, let them hang there.

I. Electron

Peregrination by Bomg

it's no light of star it's a light of mind walking thru a dream electron shamanism

"Electron" is covering the theme of mythical perception akin to humans and the discovery that put a dent into these beliefs. Variation on a Tunguska story, mythos surrounding Tesla, how people mythologize all around.

II. Perpetuum

Peregrination by Bomg

Across desolations Caravans astray Sand covered roads Forget old ways

"Perpetuum" goes more into sci-fi territory: endless cycles of dead and born-again civilizations, the Great Filter caused by cosmic events or beings themselves, and how we just might unknowingly observe such things staring at the sky.

III. Paradigm

Peregrination by Bomg

Giant web built and set in lines It works when mind reflects Leaving us with all the fears Or letting them disappear

"Paradigm" is based around the tendency of the mind to confine itself into some set of ideas, building a higher fence while thinking it broadens the space. Thinking of one thing while it is the opposite, fear of the structure collapsing while an event like this would alleviate any sort of fear. But breaking a paradigm usually leads straight to the next one, to which the same attributes apply. And keeping this notion brings a safe distance to it.

IV. Emanation

Peregrination by Bomg

Now the opportunity is To see the universe spinning Emit structures boundless Round its' endless borders It's the very first the very last small moment In periods of endless time When the structure merge infinite To manifest as something

"Emanation" goes somewhat contrary to the second one - a reality that may be started at some point, complicates itself, and never is truly repetitive. Also thoughts on subjective existence and the point of it, maybe being an instrument of the Universe to explain it to itself. Speculation on whether or not consciousness flows from one state to another, as energy does, returning to its inception or scattering across until equilibrium, or even said results being the same thing. And the uncertainty of these things that are left to be answered while we as beings, it seems, are just left to fade away.

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[sammysdewysensitiveeyes]

Another self-indulgent fan-fic, this time with Blob and Pyro drinking, fighting, talking, and bonding over bullying a teenager.

This was an attempt to give Blob a little more depth beyond just the crass asshole of the Brotherhood, and show that he’s got some feelings, too.  I also wanted to deal with some stuff with Pyro that Marauders hasn’t really gotten into, especially his death and relationship with the rest of the Brotherhood.  There’s also some discussion of Pyro/Avalanche.  I will forever headcanon original Pyro as a closeted gay man, who had a kind of undefined friends with benefits thing going on with Avalanche (I don’t care how many fantasy Jean Greys he kisses in Marauders), and who still feels uncomfortable being open about it, even if attitudes have changed somewhat. 

Warnings for - Very nasty language, some body-shaming from Pyro, some discussion of homophobia.  Blob says some things that maybe aren’t quite homophobic, but kind of insensitive.  Behind a read-more, because it wound up being long.

Pyro was absolutely not nervous when he knocked on the door of the small habitat building nestled just at the edge of the Krakoan jungle.  It was a nice spot, with one window offering a view of the beach, but the trees providing a bit of protection from tropical storms.  There was a little garden plot to one side, so neatly and delicately arranged that he wondered if the man he was there to see had a tidier room-mate.

He wasn’t nervous.  And he hadn’t been putting this off, he’d just been busy. He’d fallen in with a whole new team, after all, who had accepted him with a surprising amount of tolerance, and he was spending most of his time having high-seas adventures.  Not much time on Krakoa itself, to drop in on an old….friend? Acquaintance?  Former team-mate who could snap his spine in half if he happened to be in a foul mood?  Pyro wasn’t sure exactly where he stood with any of them now.  But he wasn’t nervous.  Sod that.

The door swung open, the view inside immediately blocked by the massive fleshy mountain that was Frederick J. Dukes, the immovable object.

“Hey Fred.  I brought booze.”  Pyro held up the wine bottle like a peace offering between them.  It was entirely possible he was about to get his face bashed in, or possibly smother to death under Blob’s sizable buttocks.  And sure, he’d get resurrected, but he wasn’t keen to go through all that unpleasantness.

“Aww, hey matchstick!  Get in here!”  Blob grinned and swung an arm around him, practically clobbering him forward into the living room.  “Where ya been?”

“Um….dead, mostly.  Yah know,” Pyro quipped, not willing to admit to the relief that was flooding into his chest.  Because he hadn’t been nervous.  He had just been…curious….to see where he stood with the mutants who had been his team-mates for years.  Just wanted to catch up and see how they were.

(To see if they all hated him.)

“Haw, haw, yeah, don’t I know it. You shoulda seen Avalanche cryin’ into his beer over that,” Blob guffawed, pulling him in close and hugging him against his side.  Pyro could smell body odor and coconut oil.

“He cried, huh?”  He murmured, his mouth muffled against pillowy flesh.

“Blubbered like a damn baby.” Fred released him so that he could step back and gasp air.  

“What’d you do to your face, man? You going emo on me, now?  C’mon, buck up.  You only died the one time.  Not like those X-Men, they got a whole revolving door thing going.”

“It’s not emo,” Pyro protested, running his hand over the skull tattoo covering most of his face.  “It’s ‘cause I’m a pirate.  I’m runnin’ round with the Marauders.  We’re wrecking ships and stealing supplies, it’s a blast.”

Blob scoffed.  “You’re running around with X-Men, matchstick.  You’re basically an X-Man, now.”

“The hell I am!”  Now Pyro really felt insulted.  “I’m not wearing an X anywhere.  We’re the Marauders, not the X-Marauders or whatever.  We’re pirates, doin’ pirate things!  Like fighting the military and helping mutant kids get to Krakoa – “ Except that wasn’t exactly what pirates did, was it?  That was more of a hero-type deal.  “-and sinking ships –“ and delivering medicine to people that needed it around that globe, but Pyro wasn’t going to mention that.  Even if it did give him a bit of a warm glow in his chest to be helping the sick and desperate.  He knew what it was like to be sick and desperate.

“Everyone on that ship is a goody-two shoes X-Man!” Blob sneered.  “Storm, that phasing girl, Ice-nerd.”

“Bishop’s pretty cool,” Pyro felt the need to interject.  The man could fight, and he respected that.  He was also extremely good looking, something Pyro tried to not notice.  

“Still an X-Man.  You’re one a them now.  I shoulda expected it after the way you died.”  Blob stepped back from him, shaking his head.  And oh, there it was.  

It didn’t seem quite fair.  Pyro couldn’t even remember what he’d done. What he’d been thinking at the time.

“I mean….does it really matter?” He tried.  “We’re all one big happy mutant family on Krakoa now.  Xavier and Magneto getting all chummy.  Seems like the X-Men and the Brotherhood don’t even exist anymore.”

“Seems ta me like there’s a bunch of X-Teams and no Brotherhood.  They split up all us nasty “bad” mutants and stuck them on teams with the wussy good guys ta keep us in line.  Except when they need their dirty work done, then they’ll send out those of us with criminal records.  I dunno who’s really running the show on Krakoa, but it ain’t the Brotherhood.” Blob slumped down on his sofa, but gestured to Pyro to sit in one of the chairs.  At least he wasn’t being thrown out.  

“Guess you might be right there,” he mused, tossing himself down sideways across the chair, both legs hanging over one arm.  The X-Men were in an awful lot of positions of power, even with the attempts to balance the Council.  And they seemed to dominate most of the island’s strike teams.

“I guess there are more of them than there are of us.”              

“Guess running a school for mutant kids is better recruitment strategy than a creepy dude in a metal helmet that’ll throw his own people under the bus in a heartbeat.  Did I ever tell ya about how he chucked an explosive at me?  And that was back he was tryin’ to recruit me!”

“Many times, Freddie,” Pyro was a little relieved that the conversation was meandering away from his own status – X-Man, Brotherhood member, Krakoan or whatever the hell he now was.  He wasn’t sure himself.  

“Wine?”  He held out the bottle again.  Blob swiped it and held it up between two fingers with another guffaw.

“What is this, matchstick, booze for ants?  That ain’t gonna be thimbleful for me.”  

“Oh, but this is a very special bottle, Freddie.”  Pyro took the bottle back.  “Have ya got a bucket?  I’m gonna be like Christ with the loaves and fishes here.”

“Doncha mean water into wine? That was one of the miracles, right?” Blob came back with a massive stew pot.

“Yeah, but there’s no water involved here.  Watch and marvel!”  He upended the bottle with a dramatic flourish.  Moments later, Blob’s mouth dropped open as the stew pot was half-way filled, and the bottle showed no signs of emptying.

“Ain’t that a hell of a trick. What’s the deal, Aussie?  Some kind of mystical Outback dream-time thing?”

“Nah, just a bribe from a wizard. Bottomless bottle.  Never runs out.”  Technically, Dr. Strange had offered the gift as a gesture to the entire island.  But technically didn’t matter, because Strange had given the bottle directly to him, which meant it was basically his.  He certainly wasn’t going to hand it over to the Council to use in their fancy-pants secret meetings.  Better to keep it among the people, right?  Pyro was willing to share.  A bit.  

“Well, tell Harry Potter thanks. That’s one hell of a gift.”

“Who?”

“C’mon, don’t fuck with me.  You haven’t been dead that long.”  

“True,” Pyro grinned.  But being dead was certainly a convenient excuse for bowing out of whatever must-see pop culture phenomenon he was supposed to be familiar with.  “Sorry mate, I was dead at the time,” usually shut people up.

Blob took the full bucket, downed half in one gulp, and held it out again for more.  Pyro took a moment to fill his own glass to the brim before pouring again.

“Damn, that’s good stuff. Usually bulk wine is pretty crappy.” Fred licked his lips in appreciation.

“I wouldn’t know the difference,” Pyro shrugged.  He’d gotten invited to a few fancy parties, way back in the day when he was journalist/writer St. John Allerdyce and “Pyro” didn’t exist.  But it hadn’t exactly refined his palate.   He’d rather have a full goon bag to himself than a dainty little glass of something aged and expensive.  

“Well, we can’t all be sophisticated gourmets,” Blob said airily, swirling the wine around and giving it a sniff. “French grapes, I’d say.  Black currant, acai, cherry, and just a hint of chocolate.  Probably a ’78 or ’79.”  He proceeded to down half the stew-pot again.

“Freddie me lad, you are absolutely full of shit.”  Pyro obligingly poured a refill.  Maybe he should get some kind of stand for the bottle, or he’d be doing this all night.

“I aim to be full of wine, so keep pouring, toothpick,” Blob laughed.  They lapsed into a moment of comfortable silence while Pyro finally had a chance to drain his own glass.

“So how’s it feel to be back in the land of the living?” Blob ventured.  “Ya know they cured that Virus just a few months after you croaked. Ain’t that a kick in the teeth?”

“I wasn’t gonna last a few months at that point.  I wasn’t gonna last even a few days, so…whatever.”  Pyro shrugged.  He still couldn’t remember the moment of his death, but he remembered some of the time leading up to it, feeling incredibly frail, and wondering every night if he would wake up in the morning.  Is it gonna be tonight?  Today? Will I just drop dead trying to walk down the street?  Even if some miracle cure had appeared, he suspected he would have been too far gone at that point.  

“It’s just good to be healthy again,” he added.  And wasn’t that the truth.  Just walking around, breathing the ocean air freely and without pain had been heavenly. He’d made it a point to get laid the first time the Marauders spent the night in Taipei – hadn’t seen any of that action for months before his death.  He didn’t want to touch anyone after the diagnosis (he was a selfish bastard, but not so selfish as to potentially spread the disease), and pretty soon pain and fatigue had meant his cock was the furthest thing from his mind.

“Yeah, I bet.  Ya made a real spectacular flame-out at the end, there,” Blob said, and there was something left hanging in the air at the end of that sentence.  What Pyro might have called a “pregnant  pause,” in one of his novels.  He gulped down another large swallow of wine.

“Yeah that was….I dunno.  I dunno what I was thinking, exactly.”  He hadn’t been able to believe it when Mystique showed him the headlines.  Sure he’d tried to help her save her shitty racist spawn Graydon Creed (a spectacular failure, thanks to X-Factor), but it had still been him playing Follow the Leader, trusting Mystique to know the right thing to do.  Apparently he’d made that final decision completely on his own – turning on his comrades to save the man they’d once tried to assassinate.  He didn’t like to look at the articles – all splashed with that one famous picture of Kelly cradling his dead body.  It made him feel sick to look at it.

Blob just grunted in response, and the silence became uncomfortable.  Pyro sighed.

“All right, you want me to say it? I’m sorry.  I’m sorry for turning on you guys.  I can’t say I’m sorry for protecting Kelly.  I guess I thought it was the right thing to do at the time, and I’ll stand by that.  But I’m sorry for going against you guys.  And especially for killing Post.”  Blob snorted, but held the stewpot out for more wine.

“You were gettin’ real soft near the end there, toothpick.  Can’t completely blame ya, I guess.  You were starin’ death right in the face, and Legacy was probably eating away at your brain. Avalanche said you seemed half-delirious near the end, whenever he went to see ya.”  

“Maybe I was.”  Time had gotten fuzzy back then – long patches of confused dream-like haze, punctuated by sharp, painful clarity.  Dominic would be there one moment and gone the next, conversations evaporating mid-sentence.  He’d lay down for a moment in the morning and wake up in the evening two days later.

“It was just all starting to seem a bit pointless, ya know?”  He continued after another swig of wine.  “All that violence….well, I won’t deny it was fun.  I don’t need an excuse to start a fight.  But it was also for a cause, right?  And things just kept getting worse no matter what we did.  I guess I just thought….if I could change the guy’s mind, maybe things would be different.”  

“Well, ya did change his mind, I’ll give you that.  Too bad he got himself killed right after that,” Fred smirked.  

“Yeah.  That’s the real kick in the teeth.  More than dying before the cure, really.  Bloody pointless.”  Pyro poured again.  

“I reckon everyone was pissed at me, yeah?”  At least the wine was giving him the courage to ask certain questions.

“Heh, yer lucky you croaked when ya did, really.”  Blob grinned. It was not a nice grin.  “I woulda snapped you in half for Post, invalid or no. Lady Mastermind wasn’t real pleased, either.  But you ain’t really here to ask about how I felt, are ya?  You wanna know whether yer boyfriend is pissed at ya.”  

Pyro was suddenly sitting up very straight, tension running up and down his spine.

“The fuck did you say?” he snapped.

“Oh, come off it, man.  Don’t act like I’m stupid!  I know you had this whole ‘don’t ask, don’t tell thing’ going on back in the day, but I figured it out.  We all did.”

“I don’t know what you’re blathering on about, mate,” Pyro said, each word coldly annunciated.  The tension from his spine was spooling tight in his mid-section.  “You’ve been watching too many soap operas.”        

“You’re the one that watches that crap, matchstick.  I gotta listen to you talk about ‘Home and Away’ every time you get smashed.  But don’t change the fucking subject.”  

“What subject?  Some made-up bullshit you imagined in your head?” Pyro’s hands were clenched tight around the glass.  Some logical part of his mind wondered why he was even making a fuss about this.  Times had changed a great deal in the years that he’d been floating in a void of nonexistence.  Iceman was openly gay, Mystique referred to Destiny as her wife, and no one batted an eye.

But still.  When Pyro was growing up, you didn’t say it.  You didn’t dare say it, because it would it ruin you, at best, and possibly get you killed, at worst.  It had been something he’d kept locked up tight in his chest, even when he was boldly and proudly “coming out” as a mutant.  And what he’d shared with Dominic over the years, secret little intimate moments slipped under the surface of their public friendship, had always rested on a foundation of silence.  They didn’t talk about what they did.  Didn’t even really acknowledge it to each other or try to define it.  It was their own special, private thing, and it was meant to remain unspoken.  

And now, here was Fred J. Dukes putting his fat, clumsy, grubby hands all over it, like a toddler smearing chocolate on a cashmere sweater.

“Quit bein’ so stubborn about it,” Blob continued.  “Ya think I’m stupid, that I couldn’t figure it out?  You guys were always slipping off together, locking your door.  Fuck man, I heard you two dumbshits in the shower together a couple of times when we were doing that Freedom Force thing.  My room was right next door, you know.  Haw!”  His laughter was an ugly sound.

“What, were you getting off on it?” Pyro snarled.  “Were you alone in your room jerking it to us, you fat fuck?  Probably the only action you ever see, ain’t it?  Assuming you can even find your dick.”  He paused, suddenly wishing he could hook the words back into his mouth, because he’d basically just admitted to it, hadn’t he? But he didn’t think he could stop now if he tried, with the anger burning in his chest, a familiar, almost comforting heat.  

“No, I was just sick of you both lying about it.  Pretending it wasn’t happening, and making the rest of us pretend, too!  Acting like we’re all idiots!”  Blob was on his feet now, red-faced.  

“Well, you never made that very hard, did ya, Freddie?”  

“Ya know what?”  And Blob had suddenly grabbed him by the shoulder with one meaty hand.  “I’m tired of your bullshit!”  Then Pyro found himself flung across the room, smashing into the wall and knocking crockery down to shatter on the floor.  Maybe he was going to get his spine snapped after all – but the way he felt at the moment he didn’t much care.  

“You always act so superior, like you’re sooooo much smarter than me.  What, just ‘cause you wrote some crappy books to help lonely women get their panties all moist?! ”

“At least I know how to write. Least I can get a woman wet,” Pyro quipped, while trying to climb to his feet.  Hell, Blob had just handed him that one, hadn’t he?  There was a blur at the edge of his vision, and suddenly Blob had grabbed the front of his shirt and tossed him again.

“You ain’t smarter than me!” Pyro could hear Blob bellowing through the ringing in his ears.  “You and Avalanche always acted like you were better than ol’ Fred Dukes, gangin’ up on me all the time.  Well, I danced on both of your graves, didn’t I?  I’m glad you died like you did.  Mr. Smart Fancy-pants, wasting away to nothing.  It was funny!”  Blob was towering over him, fists clenched.  Pyro raised his wrist and sent a jet of flame up at the man, mentally intensifying it enough to hurt as he darted for the door.  

“Augh!  Pyro, you asshole,” Blob roared, slapping at the flames on his clothing. They’d keep right on burning if Pyro wanted them to, and he had half a mind to let them.  Why not have a pig roast right there on the beach?  But in another moment he shook his head and let the fire gutter out.  Perhaps a mistake, as Fred charged out through the door.  

“Don’t think you’re getting away, you skinny little fucker.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Freddie, just getting myself a little more room,” Pyro said through clenched teeth.  “Go ahead and come at me if ya wanna get burned again.”  

Apparently Blob did wanna get burned again, because he ran at Pyro, arm raised to swing.  Pyro shot out another blast of fire at Dukes as he dove out of his path.  Blob tried to duck, but it was hard dodge fire that Pyro could mentally send wherever he pleased.  That was one advantage he’d always enjoyed over the fire-producing mutants.  This time it singed Blob’s eyebrows and licked at his shoulders.  Blob howled.

“Cut that shit out!”

“What, so you can hit me again? Ya know, this is why no one likes you, Blob!  You’re always flying off the handle.  Gotta turn everything into some big fight.  I was tryin’ ta be friendly, coming here- “

“Bullshit!  You didn’t come here for me, you came here for news.  You wanted to know if your boyfriend hated ya after what you did.  You only came to me because I’m the only one here who was with the group when it all went down.  The only one let alive, anyway.”  

“I came to you ‘cause I wanted to drink with ya, Blob.  And you started acting like a dick, like ya always do!” Pyro protested, although he couldn’t quite suppress a guilty twinge.  Blob wasn’t entirely wrong…and if Avalanche was alive again, it probably would have taken him even longer to get around to visiting Dukes.  

“You’re the one who started getting all hot under the collar when I was just tryin’ ta talk to ya!  But I ain’t surprised, I know where I rate!  None of you assholes give a shit about me!”  Blob charged again.  Pyro sent more fire swirling towards him.

“You wanna keep getting singed, Freddie, I could do this all da – oof!”  Pyro grunted as Blob ran right through the fire and slammed into him, shoulder first, knocking him back into the well-tended vegetable garden.    

“Pyro, you jerk, I worked on that for weeks!”

“Ya knocked me right into it, ya stupid wanker!”  Pyro jumped to his feet, brushing ruined squash and pumpkin off his uniform.  “I’ve been pulling punches, but if you come at me again, I will absolutely barbeque you, you fat piece of shit.  Then you can wait in line for resurrection behind all the people that actually deserve to be alive and breathing right now!”

“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Me gone, and you all alone with your precious Dominic and your new X-Men friends.  I know you wouldn’t miss me.  Nobody would!  Ya know I tried to kill myself, back when I lost my powers?  And who was there for me?  No one, that’s who!”  

“….ya tried to kill yourself?” Pyro paused for a moment. Dropping his guard was a mistake, as Blob charged again and belly-slammed him several feet away.  It might have done some damage if he hit a tree, but luckily he just rolled on the soft sand.  

“Freddie, wait, what’s this about – “

“It was a fucking nightmare.  I had huge folds of skin hanging off my body. I looked like….like melted wax or something.  Couldn’t go out.  Couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.  It hurt just to move.  I tried…tried to cut my own throat, and I couldn’t even get through the skin.  And none of the Brotherhood lifted a goddamn finger to help me!  You had Dominic holdin’ your hand and cryin’ over ya, ya think anyone spared a thought for me?!”

Pyro clambered to his feet, feeling uncomfortable.  Angry Blob he was used to.  People called Pyro a hothead (and maybe it was just a little bit true), but anger seemed to constantly run under the surface with Fred, coloring every interaction – snide remarks during briefings, playful banter quickly turning into explosive outbursts, laughter that always had a cruel undertone, always at someone else’s expense.  But this was new.  Fred’s voice was shaky, threatening to crack.

“Freddie, are ya serious?  Look mate, I didn’t know.  I was – “ Dead, he was about to say.  But they were interrupted as a sudden telekinetic force lifted Pyro off his feet, leaving him flailing uselessly in the air.

“The fuck?”  Blob slurred.  Something was tugging at him, a psychic force attempting to lift him skyward. Attempting, and failing, as he remained solidly on the ground.  

“Haw!  Who’s tryin’ ta lift me?” he laughed, digging his feet into the sand for good measure.  “Ya must be really stupid, whoever you are!”

The pressure around Blob increased, and the sand at his feet flattened as Blob pushed  down with his personal gravity field.  

“Keep tryin’, Chuckles!  That tickles!” Blob yelled.  

“Hey, whoever you are?  You wanna put me the hell down?”  Pyro called out, from a good six feet in the air.  “Unless you wanna see me blow chunks all over this beautiful beach.”  He’d been tipped partially upside-down, which was really not helping his drunken nausea.  

“All right, that’s enough, lad. We’re just here to break it up, and it’s broken up.”  Banshee stepped out of the jungle, accompanied by a scowling boy with pink hair that Pyro didn’t recognize.

“Aww, are you the one tryin’ ta lift me off the ground?” Blob cooed nastily.  “That’s cute.  Nice effort, kiddo, but ya obviously didn’t do your homework.  Nothing moves the Blob!”  

“I could telekinetically hurl you into the sun, you simple-minded tub of lard,” the boy snapped.  “I’m only holding back because of Krakoan rules. But by all means, feel free to try my patience.”

“Try my patience?”  Pyro repeated incredulously.  “Hey Freddie, this kid thinks he’s Magneto or something.  Simmer down, junior.”  Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to be mocking the mutant who was telekinetically holding him suspended in the air, but booze had ruined Pyro’s already less-than-stellar decision making skills.

“It’s Kid Omega,” the boy corrected, and whatever he wanted to say next was drowned out by Pyro and Blob’s obnoxious, jeering laughter.

“Kid Omega, you’ve gotta be bloody kidding me!  That’s so adorable!”  Pyro stopped laughing as the boy bounced him up and down in the air a few times. “Seriously, ya don’t wanna do that. I’m gonna – “ he interrupted himself by spewing wine and stomach fluids all over the ground below him.

“Gross, dude,” Blob said casually.

“Listen, we’re here because you boys are causing a public disturbance,” Banshee said, hands on his hips.  “Remember, you’re expected to follow certain rules and keep the peace if you wanna stay on Krakoa.  Pyro, I thought you might be better than this since you joined Kate’s crew, but I guess you’re still just as dumb and violent as always.  I don’t think Storm’ll be pleased to hear about this.”

“Aww, c’mon mate, “ Pyro sputtered, still trying to spit the taste of bile and sour grapes out of his mouth.  The wine wasn’t nearly as good coming back up, and his stomach was roiling.  “It was just a little scuffle that got outta hand. We weren’t hurting anyone.  ‘Cept each other.”

“Oooooh, you’re in trouble now, Pyro! Banshee’s gonna tell on you,” Blob drawled.  “Then they might kick you out of their little heroes club.”  

“Piss off, Freddie.”   Pyro would never, ever admit to that particular fear, buried deep under a shit-ton of apathy and forced bravado.  He honestly kind of liked the Marauder crew, despite having tangled with most of them in the past (although in some respects, he really liked them more because of that.)  He knew he had the reputation of being the loose cannon of the group, given how frequently he was reminded not to kill (as if Sabretooth’s horrific fate wasn’t enough of a deterrent), but he was following all their bloody rules, wasn’t he?  He wasn’t keen on getting thrown out.  He’d go stir crazy on the island without a way to burn off all his energy with “a bit of the old ultraviolence.”  

“Don’t think you’re off the hook either, Blob,” Banshee said sternly.

“Awww, whattaya gonna do?  Use Lady Mastermind to force me to be a good boy?” This apparently struck a nerve, as Banshee blanched for a moment.  He’d have to ask Blob about that later.

“Maybe we should, if that’s what it takes for morons like you to behave yourselves,” said the kid snidely.  “No wonder the cause of mutant rights never got anywhere before if it was championed by you two losers.”

“Hey, I ain’t gonna listen to any lip from some brat that hasn’t even grown pubes yet,” Blob snarled.  “I was out busting my ass for mutant rights while you were getting conceived behind a bowling alley at 3 AM!”

Pyro was about to chime in with something equally nasty, when suddenly his entire world shifted.  The beach disappeared, and he was floating with the vastness of space stretched out before him.  Stars and planets that he had never seen, that he couldn’t even conceive of, glittered in impossible colors against the darkness, and it would have been extremely cool, if not for two unfortunate facts.  One – he couldn’t breathe, and his lungs spasmed and choked in a horribly familiar way when he tried.  Two – it was cold.  It soaked through his skin, into his bones, seeming to devour him from the inside.

And then, just as suddenly, he was back on the island, still shivering in the tropical heat, taking deep breaths of the moist air scented with the ocean, the faint perfume of nearby flowers, and the strong scent of sour wine.  He’d been dropped onto the sand, and was lying in his own vomit.  Well, he’d always said it wasn’t a good night if you didn’t puke on yourself at some point.

“Whoa, that was a hell of a thing,” Blob stammered, still shaking as Pyro sat up.

“All right, boyo, that’s enough. I’m not sure what you did, but I’m sure they deserved it,” Banshee said briskly, putting a hand on Kid Omega’s shoulder.

“I made a universe in my own mind, you know.  And I can put people there anytime.  So don’t piss me off,” the boy said, staring daggers at Blob.  

“Yeah, yeah, nice tricks, pink hair,” Blob waved his hand dismissively, quickly recovered from the ordeal.  “I used to work with a guy who can do illusions. You’re nothing I ain’t seen before.”

“I’m Omega level!”  the boy snapped, as Banshee just shook his head.

“i’M oMeGa LeVeL!” Blob mocked, and Pyro couldn’t stop himself from snickering.  

“Forget it, lad, they’re not worth it. They’re just drunk and stupid. Very, very stupid, “ Banshee said.  “I’m giving you idiots your one warning, got it?  If I have to come back out here, you’re gonna spend the night in the drunk tank – which is NOT built for comfort – and spend all day doin’ community service tomorrow.  There’s bathrooms to be cleaned, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, message received. We’ll be good,” Pyro said.  He almost wanted to apologize, it was right on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words in front of that posturing little brat.  Banshee he could respect, but not this pissant half his age that thought he was the next Big Thing for mutantkind.  There was always one of them running around.  

“Yeah, we wouldn’t wanna keep junior here up past his bedtime,” Blob added.  “He’s obviously already cranky.”

“Shut it, or I’ll let him put your minds through a telepathic blender,” Banshee snapped, but he grabbed the boy by the arm, and walked off into the jungle.  There was a quiet moment, while Pyro staggered none too steadily around, gathering up the wine bottle and their respective glasses (or pots), then collapsed against Blob’s side.  He needed something to wash the taste of stomach acid out of his mouth.  And besides, throwing up meant he was entitled to more – it was like hitting the reset button on intoxication, right?  He could feel Blob quivering against him, and realized after a moment that the man was shaking with laughter.

“Can….can you believe that little twerp,” Blob gasped.  “Strutting around with his boots and leather jacket like he’s hot shit.  Oooo, look at me, I’m Kid Omega!”

“I think pink hair is a substitute for having a personality!”  Pyro chimed in.  “Probably jerks off to…..I dunno, what are kids into these days?  Is it still Harry Potter?  NSYNC?”

“Fortnite?  I think?”  

“What the fuck is Fortnite?” Blob shrugged in response.

“Christ, Freddie, we really are over the hill.”  Pyro shook his head and filled Blob’s stew-pot to the brim.  

“Well, you ain’t.  You missed some years an’ I’m pretty sure they brought you back younger.  You’re missing some lines there.”  

“Missing scars, too.”  Pyro stretched his arms out in front of him, as if he could see through the spandex.  Underneath, they were disturbingly smooth, no trace of the marks life had left on him.  Like Blob’s skin, which was almost impossible to pierce.  But he probably had scars hidden somewhere.  

“Hey, Freddie.”

“Yeah, string bean?”

“About that whole….suicide thing. What you said earlier.  You wanna talk about it?”  Blob shifted against him.

“Nah, it…it wasn’t really such a big thing.  Just went through a rough patch, is all.  You know me, I can bounce back from anything.  That’s why I made it so long.  I was kicking up shit way back in the day, and I’m still kicking now.  No need to resurrect the Blob,” he finished proudly.

“Yeah, you got me there.  Me, and a lot of others.”

“Too many.”  Blob shook his head.  “I been waiting forever for Unus to come back, but seems like he’s low on the list. Most of us are.  Same old story.”

“Yeah.”  Pyro had asked Mystique when Avalanche’s turn would come, but she couldn’t give him a clear answer – given that Destiny hadn’t been resurrected yet, it seemed like she didn’t have a huge amount of power over those decisions, despite her position on the Council.  Would former terrorist criminals come before or after the millions of mutants that had died at Genosha?  Meanwhile other Council members’ family and friends got pushed to the front of the line, and Magneto couldn’t be bothered to stand up for people like Avalanche and Unus and the old Mastermind – but he’d still brought back several of his Acolytes (even Fabian Cortez, who, according to what Frezny had told him over a couple of drinks, was the absolute worst.)  Of course Magneto would bring back fanatics that worshiped the ground he walked on.  He couldn’t completely quiet the fear that lingered in the back of his mind – that this whole thing would eventually fall apart, before certain people came back.  

“I guess I was lucky to be a guinea pig after all, otherwise I’d probably be at the back of the line somewhere.”

“Fuck it, man, it’s all political. They just bring back their people, or the ones they think’ll be useful.  I’m lucky I ain’t croaked,” Blob sighed.

“They’d bring ya back, Freddie. You’re one of a kind.  Look, mate, I’m sorry about what I said.  That no one likes ya.  It’s not true.  I like ya. Toad likes ya.  Dom liked ya, even though you picked fights all the time.  I’m glad you’re here and not dead.”  Pyro wasn’t sure why he was being so generous after some of the crap that Fred had said, but to hell with it.  He was probably feeling soft ‘cause of the whole “suicide” thing.  And when it came down to it, he didn’t have that many friends – and his very closest one was still dead.  May as well appreciate the ones that weren’t six feet under.

“Only picked fights ‘cause you guys were always looking down on me, acting like your powers were so much better,” Blob grumbled.

“We only did that because you were always throwing your weight around, pretendin’  you were too good to follow Mystique’s orders, bein’ nasty to everyone – “  Pyro abruptly stopped, biting his tongue. This wasn’t where he wanted this conversation to go, and he was still just sober enough to remember Banshee’s threat if another fight broke out.  He sighed deeply, then poured Fred another generous serving of wine.

“Fuck, Fred, let’s not do this. We’ve been through some shit together, yeah?  We all acted like dicks sometimes back in the day, but it doesn’t really matter now. I’m sorry I said you were a fat piece of shit.”          

“Well, I kinda am, ain’t I?”

“If you’re a fat piece of shit, I’m a skinny piece of shit.  None of us are exactly saints in the Brotherhood.”

“You’re a saint. ��It’s right in your name.”  Blob poked at him clumsily.

“Yeah, real ironic, that.  Gran wanted a good Christian name so I’d be good Christian lad.  Buckley’s chance of that.”  

“You get real Aussie when you’re drunk, ya know that.  Can’t barely understand ya.”  Blob was starting to slur now, having gone through the equivalent of several vats of wine at this point.   “But hey man, I’m sorry I said that I was glad you died.  I mean, I was glad right when it happened.  I was mad at you ‘cause of Post.  But it was a shitty way to go, wasting away like that.  You didn’t deserve that.  Gettin’ eaten up inside by your own power.  I remember when that happened to Unus.  He…he died right in my arms, man.”  Blob’s voice sounded shaky again.  Pyro reached up and patted his side – somewhere below the armpit, since he couldn’t reach huge man’s shoulder.  

“Sorry, Freddie.  I’m sure Unus didn’t deserve that, either.”  Pyro had never met the force-field wielding mutant, but he’d heard stories when Blob was feeling especially drunk and sentimental. But he didn’t think he’d ever seen this kind of raw vulnerability from Fred J Dukes before.  He’d blame the wine – stupid wizard probably cursed it with a sadness spell or something.  Get the mutants to drop their guard by making them all soppy.

“He sure as hell didn’t.”  Blob actually reached up and rubbed his forearm over his eyes, and Pryo diplomatically pretended not to notice. “I miss him, man.  He was a real stand-up guy, you know, for a criminal piece of garbage, and he didn’t let anyone push him around.  Don’t think I’ve ever clicked with anyone like him.  And now they’re danglin’ this resurrection thing in front of us, and who knows if they’ll ever get around to him?  Must be worse for you, with Dominic, right man?”

“I sure as fuck miss him,” Pyro admitted, downing another glass.  “He’s my best mate.”  

“Hey look, man, what I said earlier, I wasn’t tryin’ ta –“

“Freddie, I really don’t wanna talk about it.”  Pyro abruptly found himself pinned as Blob swung an arm down around him, holding him pressed against his side.  “What the hell, Freddie, are you tryin’ ta flirt, now?”

“No man, just listen.  Listen, listen man, shhh, listen,” Blob said in what he probably thought was a soothing whisper, while Pyro pushed uselessly against him.  “I don’t wanna start another fight, but I got stuff I wanna say.  I wasn’t tryin’ ta be a jerk before, okay?  When I brought it up.  I just wanted to say that, you know….we knew.  We ain’t that dumb, and you guys weren’t that slick.  We figured out you were – “

“Don’t say it, okay?”  Pyro snapped.

“Fine, but dude.  Listen.  We don’t care.  That’s the important thing here.  I mean, we probably cared a little back in the day.  I admit I made some pretty shitty jokes, but, you know, times were different.  I mean, ‘homo’ was the worst thing you could be back when I was growin’ up.  Until mutants started becoming a thing, of course.”

“Yeah, same here,” Pyro muttered. Apparently this conversation was happening whether he liked it or not.  He downed more wine to try to stop his insides from twisting up.

“But everything’s like, different now. Most people don’t give a shit anymore. Including most of us in the Brotherhood. I mean, it was stupid to ever care in the first place.  We’re already a group of outcast criminals, and we’re gonna judge you guys for wanting to bang each other?  It’s cool if you don’t wanna make out in public or get married or anything, but you don’t haveta sneak around anymore.  I’m cool with it, Toad’s cool with it.  I think ‘Tazia had you figured for gay even before Avalanche came back.  ‘Cause you weren’t drooling over her like Toad an me.”

“She was a perceptive one.”  Pyro wondered for a moment whatever had happened to Eileen.  She had been close-mouthed about her past – and Pyro could respect that – but extremely intelligent, and fun to talk to.

“The point is, it’s a brave new world and all that.  Dudes are marrying each other, chicks are marrying each other.  There’s a whole show starring drag queens that’s run for like, 10 years or something.  It’s all mainstream now.  I mean, I still don’t get it.  Making out with another dude sounds gross to me.  But I ain’t got no problem with other people doing it.”

“That’s real decent of you, Fred,” Pyro said, and he wasn’t totally sure if he was being sarcastic.  This was a surprisingly heartfelt comment coming from Dukes.  “You spend a lot of time writin’ that speech up?”

“I’m tryin’ ta be nice here, okay, matchstick?  And I’m just sick of you pretendin’ ta be straight, an’ me havin’ to pretend I don’t know.”  He trailed off, and gulped down his pot of wine, finally releasing Pyro from his grip.

“Fair ‘nuff,” Pryo conceded. Even though actually dragging all this out into the open felt horribly uncomfortable.  Exposed.  “Don’t expect me to do some big ‘coming out,’ thing or wear a rainbow or any of that crap, though.  I’m not into that.  My private life is my private life, right?  I’ll just….stop trying so hard to hide it, you know?”  

He’d already started to relax his guard a little in front of the Marauders, even picking up a guy at one of the bars that Iceman always dragged them to – although he’d waited until Storm and Bishop had left for the night, and Kate and Iceman seemed too drunk to notice. Iceman seemed to think Pyro was straight, as he’d asked him, with a mix of nervousness and defiance, if he “minded” the first night they went to a gay bar.  That probably would have been the time to say it, if Pyro was a little braver, but instead he’d just shrugged and said, “No worries,” like a good tolerant fellow.  Of course they wouldn’t care.  For all he knew, maybe none of them were straight.  He’d seen Kate give sideways glances to girls, Storm and Calisto seemed to have some chemistry between them, Bishop never seemed to mind men hitting on him at clubs.  But still. A literal lifetime ago, he’d been afraid of getting his teeth kicked in, or worse.  Things were different now, but actually coming out and saying it….it was not so much baring his chest, more like stripping completely naked and handing the other person a knife.  

“Hey, fine.  Do what ya want.  But I’m still gonna make fun of you and Dom if you get all lovey-dovey in front of us.  Not because it’s gay, just because I hate that hearts and flowers crap.”  

“I would expect nothing less, Blobbo.” Pryo took another long drink of wine, refilled his glass and downed it again, until the tension eased out of his spine.   

He supposed it had been stupid to assume that no one noticed.  Everyone living in close quarters, both in Brotherhood safehouses and government facilities (not to mention prison).  They’d all known.  Had they gossiped about him?  Laughed behind his back?  Been disgusted?  

But then, Toad and Phantazia had both hovered over him protectively in the first stages of his illness, when they were all on Empyrean’s private island together.  Toad had even talked about how glad he was that Avalanche could be “there for him,” and wow, there was probably a coded message that Pyro had been too dense at the time to pick up on.  Mystique was certainly not one to judge, and she’d figured him out ages ago. And if Fred Dukes, of all people, was accepting, then…well, it was probably okay, wasn’t it?

“Hey, matchstick.”

“Yeah, Freddie?”

“You and Dom.  Who tops?  Be honest, ‘cause I got money riding on this.”

“Shit, Freddie, I gotta be way drunker for this conversation.”  And he poured again.  The bottle continued to oblige.  

  When he opened his eyes a crack, the sun pierced right through to stab into his brain.  Pyro groaned and squeezed his eyes shut again, bringing one arm up clumsily to better block out the light.  He felt like utter shit, and that realization caused a sharp spike of alarm in his chest.

Sick.  I’m sick again.  

Or maybe he’d always been sick. Because it was all too good to be true, wasn’t it?  Dying like a hero, coming back to life on this magical island where mutants from all sides of the political divide were having nonstop raves and orgies, getting to sail around and play pirate with the X-Men, who accepted him as a team-mate without question.  How could that possibly be real?  Wasn’t it more likely that this was all just the fever dream of a dying man, still lingering comatose in a hospital somewhere?

Except Pyro realized in a moment that he was lying on sand, with ocean waves creating a comforting rhythm just at the edge of his hearing.  And the pain he was feeling wasn’t quite the same as what the Legacy Virus had done to him. His head was pounding like a drum, he ached all over, and he was fairly certain he wouldn’t get through the morning without barfing at least once – but he could breathe without pain.  He sucked in a deep, cool breath and slowly let it out again.  No coughing, no burning in his lungs, no constricting weight on his chest.  

This wasn’t Legacy, it was a very familiar kind of suffering.  One he’d inflicted on himself many times before.

“Heya, toothpick!”  Blob’s voice boomed cheerfully in his ear.  “Had a little too much last night, huh?”

“Uggghhhhh…..fuck off, Fred,” Pyro mumbled, trying to roll away from the sound of his voice.  Moving made his stomach flip-flop, and he stopped for a moment.

“Haw, haw, ya shouldna tried to keep with me, ya scrawny little light-weight,” Blob guffawed, but he didn’t sound as mean as usual.  Pyro feel something cool being pressed against his face.

“Here man, drink this and come back to life.”  He opened his eyes again, wincing, and accepted the water bottle that Blob was holding out to him.  

“Probably gonna take a few of these, Fred,” Pyro said, carefully sitting up, pausing for a moment to swallow saliva and wait for his stomach to hopefully quiet itself.  Then he began sipping the water cautiously.

“You’ll probably need a couple of these, too,” Blob offered, slipping him some aspirin.  

“Thanks, mate, right neighborly of ya. You’re in a good mood this mornin’ aint ya?”  He swallowed the aspirin and gulped down more water.

“Well, I actually was smart enough to drink water last night, so I didn’t totally wreck myself.  Plus I never get hit too hard with hang-overs. Got all this extra body mass cushioning me.”  He laughed again, slapping at his belly.  “Besides, it was hilarious watching you last night.  You were trashed, man.”

“Well, I had good company, didn’t I?” Pyro looked around, squinting in the bright morning light.  He’d wound up sleeping sprawled out on the sand at the edge of the jungle, just a few feet away from Blob’s hut, thankfully some distance away from the puddle of vomit he’d left the previous night.  He remembered that part clearly – the fight, the encounter with Banshee and that little pink-haired shit acting as Krakoa’s rent-a-cops, some of the heartfelt conversation that had followed.  And then, the night dissolved into a dream-like haze.  Well, they weren’t locked up in the drunk tank, so they must not have gotten in any more trouble.

“Least I know how to handle my liquor,” Blob chuckled.  “You wanna shower, toothpick?  You smell like something Wolverine rolled in.”  Pyro grimaced as he realized that the sour aroma of dried puke and smashed pumpkin was wafting up around him.

“Yeah, that’s a good idea.”  

He spent a good twenty minutes in the shower, using Blob’s surprisingly luxurious bath products, then gave his uniform a thorough scrubbing, and fire-dried it.  He’d get a clean one from the Marauder later, but he didn’t feel like sitting around smelling like garbage in the meantime.  

Vague images kept floating up out of the haze while he washed, little snippets of memories dissolved in wine.  

…..Blob putting the stew pot over his head and fastening a curtain around his shoulders, staggering around shouting, “To me, my Brotherhood!  Throw yourself under the bus for mutant rights!  I’m a self-important jackass and I don’t actually care about any of you, my loyal soldiers!” while Pyro rolled around in the sand laughing hysterically…….

……Pyro splashing into the waves, yelling back at Blob, “I’m gonna do it, you’ll see!  I’m gonna fight one a’ them sharks with my bare hands, then fry up it for dinner!  We’re gonna have a barbeque right on the beach, yeah.”  Blob was bellowing laughter while pulling him back with one hand, so that he was helplessly flailing around, swimming in place. “C’mon mate, I can do it!  Aussies aren’t scared of sharks!  We’ll kick the shit out of any animal!”  “C’mon dumbass, this won’t be nearly so funny if you drown,” and then he was being hauled back up onto the beach……

…..then he was draped across the stomach of a maudlin Blob, who wasn’t even bothering to hide the tears that dripped down his cheeks.  “It’s just….what am I if I’m not the Blob, right?  You’ve got those stupid books, but what have I got?  I mean, I’m nothing without my powers.  I tried to make it work back then, I really did.  Got my own reality show, got real popular in Japan, but it just wasn’t enough.  I was miserable not bein’ the Blob.”  Pyro was patting at Blob’s stomach, almost kneading it like a cat, in what he probably had thought was a comforting manner at the time, muttering encouraging nonsense,” Nah, Freddie, c’mon mate, you’ve got lots to offer, you got a big heart and a big personality……”  

….then the two of them were chucking the last of Blob’s squash and pumpkins at the trees.  For some reason they were both singing “Highway to the Danger Zone” at the top of their lungs……

Pyro just sighed and tried to blink it all away.  It wasn’t actually the worst drunk memories he had.  At least neither of them had gotten naked.  He hoped.  

“Hey man, you took your sweet time. You jerking off in there?”  Blob said as he emerged, piling eggs and bacon onto a plate and passing it to him.  Luckily his stomach had settled a great deal by then.

“Nah, I wouldn’t be so crass, Freddy. I only jerk off in my own shower.”

“Guess it’s not as much fun without Avalanche, huh?”  And Blob actually winked at him.

Pyro opened his mouth to snap back at Dukes, to tell him to shut up and mind his own damn business.  Then closed it again, because he couldn’t actually detect any malice in the other man’s tone.  Not needling him, just…playful joking, in Blob’s own crass way.  

Instead, he just shrugged and grinned. “Guess so.  Thanks heaps for the food, Freddie.  And the bloody aspirin, I really needed that.”

“Well, what can I say, I know my manners.  I’m a hospitable guy,” Blob chuckled, sitting down to his own breakfast.  “Besides, it’s the least I can do after what you gave me.”

Pyro paused with the fork mid-way up to his mouth, thinking back.  What had he given him, besides a whole fuckton of wine?  

“’Fraid I don’t quite remember what you’re referring to there,” he said cautiously.  Had he promised his services or something?  Given up some of the booty he’d stashed from raids with the Marauders? (He didn’t feel at all bad about that, as the captain herself was actively encouraging them to take as much booze and money as they pleased.)  

“The wine.”  Blob jerked a thumb over to the shelf on the wall, where the bottle sat surrounded by little ornaments, as if occupying a place of honor.

“Oh yeah, well I’m always glad to share – “

“No man, the whole bottle.  You gave me the bottle.”  

Pyro’s fork slipped out of his hand. Fuck.  Fuck!  He hadn’t. Surely he hadn’t been so stupid as to give up a priceless treasure like that, just because ol’ Blob had gotten a little weepy last night.  Surely not.

“Oh hell, I didn’t really, did I?”

“You did!  You insisted.”

And much as he wanted to deny it, there was a memory creeping back into his mind.  Himself, holding the bottle up to Fred with a grandiose air, waxing poetic about how he would be Krakoa’s Dionysus, Life of the Party, Keeper of the Mysteries, and the other mutants would frolic around him like the Maenads. Christ, he really was a pretentious sot when he got drunk, wasn’t he?  (But hey, he couldn’t help that he’d gone through a pretty heavy Greek mythology phase as a kid.  It was just so interesting!)

“I….guess I might remember something like that,” he conceded hesitantly.  “But that doesn’t count, does it?  You can’t hold me to that!  I was trashed out of my mind!”

“Not so trashed that you couldn’t blather on about a bunch of Classical bullshit!”   Blob declared.  “It was damned funny.  And if you think I’m givin’ this bottle back to you, you’ve got another thing coming.” His tone stayed light, but a sharp gleam in his eye suggested the promise of another fight.

“C’mon Freddie, you’ve gotta be kidding me!”

“Look man, I thought this might happen. So I got video evidence.  I got a message from Drunk Pyro to Sober Pyro.” He held out his cell phone.        

“Fuuuuuck,” Pyro moaned, not even wanting to see.  He took a side glance at the bottle, so inviting out in the open.  He should just grab it and run.  Instead, he heard the sound of his own voice, slurred with wine, Australian accent even thicker than usual so that he was running his words against the backs of one another.  

“I, St. John Allerdyce,” the figure on the video stopped to belch, “bein’ of sound mind an’ body, do hereby bequeath this bottle of never-endin’ wine to Frederick J. Dukes, the Blob, forever an’ ever, no take backs!  Be’cause…..’cause….he’s my good mate, an’ he needs somethin’ for himself, an’ I’m fulla good will tonight.”  The figure was bleary-eyed and staggering, but at least he seemed to be happy, judging by the wide grin stretching his face.  

“Fuckin’ hell, Drunk Pyro,” Sober Pyro groaned, laying his head in his hands.  That bastard had gotten him into more scrapes than he could count.

“But!”  Drunk Pyro continued on the video.  “There’s….conditions.  One….no….two! Two…two conditions.”  He swayed for a moment, seeming to look up at the stars before pulling himself back together.  “Condition the first!  You gotta share the wine, Freddie.  Share it like, like I’ve been…been sharing it.  Bring it to all the parties.  Pour for….for eeeeveryone.”  He made a sweeping gesture and nearly fell over.  “Condition the two!  You gotta….gotta give me special access, right?  I get ta come over and drink as much as I want, any time I want, yeah?  No matter what!”  

“I accept your conditions,” came Blob’s voice from behind the camera.  Drunk Pyro grinned again.    

“Then I now pronounce you man and bottle!”  He crowed, holding it aloft.  “You may kiss the …wait, no, don’t put your mouth directly on it.  Everyone’s gotta drink that.”  

“Now make it official by singing Waltzing Matilda.  That’s Australia’s national anthem, right?”  Blob’s voice suggested on the video.

“No, it isn’t, “ said Sober Pyro.

“Yes, mate, you’re exactly right!” exclaimed Drunk Pyro.  He made it through one off-key verse and chorus before fumbling the words and collapsing to his knees, laughing.

“Hey man, thanks for this,” said Blob’s voice on the video, as a hand reached out to take the bottle from Drunk Pyro. And Blob actually sounded a bit sincere. “I really appreciate it, ya doing something like this for me.”

“Well, you’re my special mate, right?  We’ve been through loads together.  And I feel sooo wonderful tonight.  I’m fulla…..fulla love for everybody!”  Drunk Pyro spread his arms out to the stars.  “The world is so bloody beautiful, yeah?”

“Who do you love, Pyro?”  Blob asked from behind the camera.

“Everybody!  All the little mutants, and even the humans, too!  The ones that aren’t too shitty, anyway.”

“Who do you really love?”  Blob asked pointedly.

For a moment, Drunk Pyro looked up at the camera in confusion, then he lit up with the nicest smile Pyro had seen on his own face in a long time.  It wasn’t cruel or sarcastic, not sloppy drunk or wild with adrenaline.  It was the kind of genuine, soft smile he’d described in many novels over the years.

“I love Dominic!” Pyro exclaimed, hugging arms around himself and slumping down against the sand.  “I love Dom.”  

“Oy, you fucker!”  The video switched off abruptly as Sober Pyro made a grab at the cell-phone in Blob’s hand.  “How dare you, how fucking dare you pull that shit!  Fucking shit-cunt!”  

“Hey man, chill out!  You gave me the bottle fair and square!”  Blob held the phone over his head, while Pyro began trying to clamber up him.

“Forget the bottle, I don’t care!  Why would you make me say that!  On video, for fucks sake?  You lookin’ to blackmail me?”  

“No man, no!”  Blob plucked Pyro off with his other hand, and deposited him back in his chair.  “That’s not what that was about!  I ain’t gonna show it to anyone.  Here, look, I’m deleting it.  Geez.”  Blob pushed a couple of buttons in his phone.  

“You were tryin’ to make me say it, though, weren’t you?  Why would you want me to say that?!”  Pyro glowered at him over the table.

“I dunno man, I was loaded, too! I just….thought it would be nice, I guess.  I thought maybe….maybe you’d feel a little better if you said it.”  Blob looked confused, and again oddly vulnerable.  Not mocking or mean.    

“You thought I’d feel better?  Seriously?”  Pyro gave a breathless laugh.

“I mean….yeah, man.  It’s like what we talked about last night.  You’re so uptight about this shit, but no one cares anymore.”  

“Fucking hell, Fred,” Pyro sighed, putting his head in his hands again. Fucking Blob.  Fucking Drunk Pyro, spewing everything out into the open.  

But….it probably had felt kind of good to say it in the moment, hadn’t it?  All open like that?  He couldn’t deny, Drunk Pyro had looked beatifically happy when he said those words, his eyes soft and gentle.  Perfect for a scene in a romance, even if he was absolutely humiliated to see that expression on his own face.  He supposed there was no sense in denying it.  He’d said it, after all.

“Don’t spread it around about Dom, okay?  I mean, I know what I am.  I’ve known for a long time, and I guess I don’t mind people knowing, now that we’re all enlightened these days.  But I think Dom’s still working some things out.  Or at least he was.”

“Yeah, sure, man, my lips are sealed,” Blob agreed.  “So, are we cool?”  

“You deleted that video, right?”  

“Yep.”

“And you’re gonna give me free wine whenever I want, just like you promised, yeah?”

“Of course!  I’m a generous fellow, and I don’t go back on an agreement!”  Blob pressed a hand against his chest, proudly.

“Then, yeah. Freddie.  We’re cool.” 

Notes: Apologies to poor Quentin Quire, he didn’t deserve the crap Blob and Pyro were throwing at him.  I have nothing against the character, he just seemed like the kind of arrogant young hot-shot mutant that Pyro and Blob would have no respect for (even if he could absolutely destroy them).

[heartslogos]

newfragile yellows [906]

Hello, listeners. Welcome back to everyone’s favorite, humble, small town radio show. By which I mean, only small town radio show. Of course.

We’re in for a special treat today, dear listeners. Today I am not in the recording studio! I am not in my normal setting of padded room, darkened one way screen, susurration of voices that undulates just outside the recording booth door, damp hot pulsating mass of wheezing flesh that writhes above the ceiling panels leaving behind dark stains and occasionally pops its eye stalks in to remind me about the importance of shopping local, and of course tangled gordian knot of wires and cables that lead to innumerable plugs and objects which can and cannot be seen. Those wires that one could spend hours upon hours tracing and following only to find themselves worse off than when they started. Those wires that seem to grow the longer you look at them. Stretch the more you try and pull on them in an attempt to yank them out of their socket because maybe then, maybe then it would finally be over. You would have reached the end of the journey and by the Maker if you can’t find out what this thing does then you both will go down together.

Yup! I’m not there today! Your boy Maxwell’s gone on a field trip.

I am coming to you live from the scene on this most auspicious day. As you all know from the previous community calendar today is the opening for negotiations between the Secret Police Chief, the Iron Bull, and — warning, the mention of the following being may cause stress, flash backs, potential mental breaks, severe anxiety, hives, a strong sense of fight and or flight to kick in, and sheer, blind, terror — Senior Librarian Ellana Lavellan. From previous mentions on this show you would know, listeners, that these two parties have entered a courtship that has been long hindered by city mandates, the severe laws put into place in order to keep the librarian population away from the vulnerable, and a deep rooted fear of librarians and all library associated concepts.

Just recently the paperwork they submitted to both City Council and the Mayor to date have been approved. Ellana Lavellan is now, for the time being, allowed limited access to the rest of the city outside the boundaries of the library provided she is in the company of someone from the Secret Police force and has her hands where everyone can see them at all times. Her many. Many. Many. Many. Hands.

As we all know submitting that paperwork is only step one in the long and fascinating courtship ritual of a member of our city’s governing force. Today the Iron Bull and his family of Secret Policemen will meet with the most Senior of Senior Librarians. The word senior is used here to reference both the time the librarian has spent as a librarian, and the time the person the status of librarian is attached to has spent with any conceivable amount of existence.

Neutral ground has been roped off with a safety cordon blocking off the streets and sidewalks and entry to buildings adjacent. I am reporting from just next to said safety cordon. The strings of electric holiday lights marking the boundaries of the blocked off zone make a truly horrific screeching sound whenever a piece of my equipment gets too close for its liking.

Allow me to set the scene for you, dear listeners. Because this is not a visual medium, and as I said before I am not in my normal broadcasting setting — where I have easy access to weaving my sonorous and well loved voice into the air, getting it caught in the microphone and transported into your homes, your lives, your ears, your minds — I will have to verbally describe things that are happening rather than our usual of having my words transmit images directly into your brain.

There are two tables set up. One for the Iron Bull, his right hand man lieutenant Aclassi, two of his officers Skinner and Dalish, as well as their emergency medic, Stitches. Officers Grim and Rocky are patrolling the edges of the Secret Police cordon. The other table is for the Librarians. Of course Senior Librarian Ellana is present, along with her brother Senior Librarian Mahanon. They have also brought who I can only assume to be the Head Librarian, Alim Surana, who has not been recorded as having a corporeal existence capable of being understood and comprehended by non-librarians in the past fifteen years.

There are three more librarians prowling in the background, but they have made no hostile moves as of yet.

Listeners, while the two parties are still setting up and getting themselves together for this clash of words, wills, and possibly body parts if things go well, let me take you to some other news.

Young Man Alistair is continuing his campaign to get Wardens acknowledged as a real existence. Until further notice, please disregard this information. It will not help you. It will not save you. It will only ever hurt you.

Red Jennies Records is having a buy one get one sale this weekend. Buy one of something, get another of something. Pay for both of them. Pay double for both of them. Bring your own bags to carry things. You should know that by now, it should go without saying, really.

Oh — listeners. It looks like things are starting.

As per tradition both sides are presenting gifts of good will.

From the Iron Bull’s side, they are presenting a hound. It is small. Still young. It is entirely black and it is smoking heavily. From here I can see the soot falling off of it as well as the scorch marks its paws leave on the ground whenever it moves. Its tail is wagging furiously, sending off puffs of ash hither and yon.

The Librarians huddle around the hound before turning to each other. Senior Librarian Mahanon is shaking his head. Senior Librarian Ellana is clapping her many hands. Head Librarian Alim Surana is staring straight at me.

Listeners.

He is looking at me. His gaze is bottomless. Or perhaps it would be better to describe it as ever expanding outwards because to say bottomless would imply a sense of direction. That would be misleading. His gaze is eternal. It is a yawning, gasping emptiness that exists beyond chasms or voids, and all things that would imply some sort of shape or space or boundary.

I feel nothing, listeners, from this gaze. No hate. No fear. No anger. No annoyance. There is only his eyes. And me. And I am being seen, listeners. I am being seen and pulled apart and examined. Cell by cell. Atom by atom. I am becoming undone and unravelled, pulled apart but not put back together, instead being left as individual pieces as though some sort of diagram to be studied. I am —

I think we’ll cut to the weather now.

[bluehhj]

listen to me — chapter 49

LISTEN TO ME — 0049

listen to me masterlist;

WORDS: 2.5K

a/n: hi guys, a late Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. sorry for the delay!! I planned to come back here for Christmas, but I traveled with my friends and just got back the day before yesterday. I'd post as soon as I arrived, but then I rewrote some parts several times because it just didn't look good enough and it wasn't pleasing me so much and so I'm posting just now.

but anyways, good read!

Jeongin blew out a breath after closing the bedroom door. Then he spun around until he met Jisung's face just as he cleared his throat and began to blink repeatedly, wiping away the unshed tears. Yang licked his lips awkwardly and took a few cautious steps toward the bed.

"Are you alright?" it was a question to which the answer seemed rather obvious, so the doctor amended the next second, "I mean physically."

Jisung needed a moment to deal with the lump in his throat before he could say anything. The pain did exist, but not in his shoulder or in his head. It was in a place that not even the best doctor in the world could cure it, so Jeongin didn't need to know.

"You responded very well to the anti-inflammatory administered in your serum," he smiled faintly, crossing his arms against the coat, so white it was glowing. The stark contrast to his rosy strands made him look like the kind of boy who drew multiple glances wherever he went, but Jisung could barely take his eyes off his own hands. "I talked to Ms. Baek just now and she said the wound healing on your shoulder is going to be fine. It's likely that I can discharge you in a couple of days at the most."

Jeongin's intention was to make Han at least a little excited that he might be able to get out of that cold room and breathe happier airs again, but the effect was completely the opposite.

Jisung didn't want to be okay — not while Jinah was in a coma. It seemed too unfair that he could leave so fast at the same time that his girlfriend wasn't even expected to wake up.

Feeling the other boy's discomfort increase, the doctor decided it was best to end his attempts to increase Jisung's mood, since he was clearly not getting the slightest success.

"I'll call some of your companies back, okay? Excuse me." however, before he turned the knob, Jisung's low voice reached his ears.

"Tell my mom and friends that I appreciate them being here, but I don't want to see anyone now," he paused. It was hard to say when all he wanted to do was cry until he couldn't take it anymore. "I need some more time alone."

Jeongin didn't hesitate to nod. "As you wish."

And isolated between those four pale walls, the task of holding back tears finally became untenable.

♡˖°

After Yeji raised the white flag and disregarded — for now — the idea of tucking Yoorim into one of the police station's stuffy cells, Hyoyeon chose to stay in the hospital, as her professional intervention would no longer be so helpful and, moreover, she wanted to be available to Jisung if he needed it at some point. As such, only Hyunjin, Yoorim and Yeji headed toward Mr. Heo's building supply store. The couple settled into the boy's car, while the policewoman chose to go in her own car so as not to mix with them any longer than necessary.

Alone and in complete silence until then, Hyunjin stopped at a red light and turned his face to look at Yoorim, who was leaning his head against the closed glass. The girl's thoughts seemed far away, but Hwang didn't need to know how to read minds to be sure what made her ramble so much.

"I'm sorry" with an audible sigh, Hyunjin dropped his shoulders and also allowed the sadness to affect him, almost as if he could feel twice as much as Yoorim was feeling. "As much as I try to stop these encounters between the two of you, they still happen, and all I can do is keep apologizing like it's going to do something... Sometimes I wonder if this is really the best for you."

The younger one remained still for a few more seconds, until a similar sigh left her lips and she straightened in the passenger seat. "In parts, I can understand her."

"Yoorim..."

"But she's really right, Hyunjin-ah. You had a perfect family before you met me, it's normal for Yeji to feel annoyed to know that I was the cause of most problems."

"There is no such thing as a perfect family, baby," affectionate as usual, Hyunjin sent her one of those loving looks that could heal any injury. "Maybe mine really had an unwavering image of business parents and kids to be proud of, but only after stepping out of line did I realize it was all just well-placed masks. A perfect family doesn't deny one of their own members just because it is what it is, not what they want it to be."

"But if I hadn't entered your life, things would still be fine for you guys."

"You just look at what you think you did bad in my life and never pay attention to everything you did good." Hyunjin refocused on the street when he saw the green light, but he didn't stop listening to the conversation. "It's okay that my parents fought so hard about it that they ended up getting a divorce and now neither of them talks right to me, but I'm much happier that way, because otherwise it's likely that today I'd be preparing to take on a company that I don't want to, besides possibly being dealing with a contract marriage with an investor's millionaire daughter" he made a disgusted face. Just the thought of facing such a stressful situation made his head ache and his stomach roll. "I also understand Yeji and I know she didn't want to see our family fall apart like this, but she spends so much time blaming you that she doesn't realize how liberating it was for both of us," in the rearview mirror, Hyunjin noted the dark car behind them. "Our parents never allowed her to be a cop, even though she loves so much what she does."

Yoorim thought of every time she heard an excited Hyunjin talk and talk about biomedicine as if it were the most amazing thing in the world — she loved to hear every word, even if she didn't understand various scientific terms and got lost in some parts — and allowed herself to feel a little bit of peace.

"Maybe I would even rebel at some point and say I wasn't going to take over any company, which would cause a disaster anyway," Hwang shrugged with no concern. "For these and other reasons, I always say you don't have to feel bad about anything, baby. Because being with you was also my choice and I never regretted it.

"I never regret anything either, even though I have to put up with Yeji." Yoorim set her head back and smiled slightly. "It was like finding an oasis in the middle of a desert, you know? You do me good."

"Yeah, I know..." Hyunjin also smiled, but then he remembered something and his features became serious again. "But putting up with Yeji doesn't mean being forced to accept her pushing you into the hands of a responsibility that was never yours."

Yoorim's smile faded as she realized that now Hyunjin was no longer referring to the Hwang family, but to her own. "That's why she always wins our discussions." with another tired sigh, she looked down at some random spot on the panel in front of her. "She knows where to hit."

"We've had this conversation several times and I know it hurts, but you don't take it seriously, do you?"

Yoorim really didn't think she should be blamed for her mother's death, after all, problematizing the pregnancy wasn't her decision. However, hearing the contrary from someone else hurt much more, as it was as if she had an extra confirmation of what the voices in the back of her head used to say from time to time, only to torment her when her father lost his temper or avoided her for no reason. Yoorim often tried to justify Mr. Heo's eventual indifference to everyday stress, as Kyuhyun worked too hard to keep every branch of the store under control.

Her father loved her, yeah. Yeji was wrong.

Yoorim needed to convince herself of that.

"I try. I swear I always try."

Hyunjin felt helpless that he couldn't reach a consensus with his sister. He hadn't begged one or two, but several times so that Yeji wouldn't get into that delicate subject anymore. The result, however, was obvious: it didn't work.

Hyunjin barely realized that they were right in front of the modern, well-designed storefront. He, then, parked in one of the parking spaces and leaned over to tenderly kiss Yoorim's cheek, who was taken aback.

"If she were here, your mom would be very proud of you," he said as he pulled back just enough to look her in the eye. "As much as I am every day."

Yoorim reopened the smile, and the best: she believed.

So they both got out of the car and didn't have to wait long for Yeji to find them on the sidewalk. Heo didn't want to waste time and has already pulled the keys from her pocket. Luckily she had a copy for when she had to close the shop, and it was no trouble for Hyunjin to pass the house they shared to pick them up before anything else.

The lights were all on, and Yoorim made a point of letting Yeji scour the computers to check the security camera footage. The whole procedure took place in a heavy silence, except for the sound of keys under the policewoman's nimble fingers. Only when she finally found the sender recording on the day and time in question did the couple approach the big monitor.

"That's the weird guy," the youngest of the three pointed at the screen when a tall man appeared before the lens, already heading for the counter with a handful of objects in his hands. As noted earlier, he wore gloves and Yoorim was the only one to touch his purchases directly before packing and receiving payment. "And look, he bought a packet of flexible ringlets for curtains identical to the one they found in Jisung's car." from behind the computer, Yoorim went to one of the shelves and grabbed a dark green box. "These are the ones here."

Yeji examined the cables and pliers the man also bought. She didn't understand cars very well, but she figured all this would be very useful for destabilizing any model. Then her fingers caught the little box that was left in front of her, and she saw that Yoorim couldn't be more correct in saying that the ringlets were exactly alike. Finally, Yeji took a photo from her pocket and took a deep breath as she tried to compare it to the man in black.

"Both are tall" her eyes frantically alternated between the computer screen and Kim Minhwan. Since the day he was reported, the boy's photograph had been kept at the police station in case it was requested in the future, but after finding out about the "accident," Yeji no longer took it from her pocket. "But it's impossible to know if they're the same person. This man didn't even show more than a few inches of skin."

"I don't give a shit," said Hyunjin. "I just want to know if you are going to leave Yoorim alone now."

"If my investigation of this guy succeeds, yes. Otherwise, your girlfriend is still the prime suspect."

"So keep looking at it" sounding purposefully annoying and aware that Yeji hated taking orders from anyone, Hyunjin crossed his arms and leaned against the counter. "Go on, I'm in a hurry."

She laughed a little. "I don't think you take the gun at my waist seriously."

"I've known you since the day you were born. You're crazy, but not a murderer. Now work."

If the force of a gaze could kill, Yeji would have already incinerated Hyunjin entirely. Too bad that the present moment wasn't conducive to throw tantrum, otherwise she would have already crossed her arms and pouted or perhaps started another potentially disastrous discussion.

"I'm going to work, but it's because I want to, not because you told me to."

"And fast."

Yeji bit the inside of her cheek and decided that her quota of self-control had already been blown out enough that night, so she saved her mischief and set about checking the rest of the footage.

Yoorim went to where Hyunjin was standing and received the hug she wanted without even having to ask. The days were very busy and although they lived together, sometimes there was no time left to be together properly. Hwang worked in a lab until six-thirty while Heo helped run the store on Thursdays and Fridays and devoted herself to her internship for the rest of the week. When night came, both the future biomedical and the chemical engineer had to give some attention to the university books, and in this they were careless of everything else. Yoorim didn't really understand why the kids were so eager to grow up. The lives of adults were cruel.

The couple were interrupted when Yeji quickly searched for another photo in her uniform pocket and frowned immediately. Hyunjin and Yoorim approached the computer, which now displayed the busy street in front of the store.

"That pick-up truck," she pointed to the black car that was parked at the curb. "It was stolen days ago! I was almost giving up looking for it."

Yoorim watched the man in black leave the store and get into the vehicle with all the calm and tranquility of the world. Her certainty that he couldn't be anyone but Kim Minhwan grew even bigger.

"This will take a while, but I'll have to check every possible security camera until I find out where he's gone." Yeji got up and replaced the chair she was sitting on. "As long as this guy is not found, I advise you to be careful with the hospital. I'll ask the deputy to have some colleagues keep an eye out, because if he's as smart as he seems, I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to finish what he started."

Yoorim didn't even kill an ant, but in that case she would make a point of kicking him between the legs.

Hyunjin nodded and bit his lower lip for a moment, full of hesitation. When the flesh was released through his teeth, he turned his face arrogantly.

"I won't thank you. You're doing no more than your duty."

"I don't remember asking for any thanks. I want you two to explode, you gross" Yeji walked out of the store and, as she was opening the door to leave, added without turning to look at them, "I'll call when I have news."

Hyunjin and Yoorim exchanged a look followed by a low laugh and resumed the hug from before. After such a fright, kisses were, undoubtedly, the best medicine.

a/n: i didn't want to frustrate you guys, although i ended up doing it anyway

in the last chapter i said that there would be a moment between jinah and jisung in this chapter here, but i didn't calculate the scenes well and everything turned out to be bigger than i thought; so there was no space left and if i included other parts it would be huge. so sorry again for that

but in compensation this chapter focused more on hyunjin and yoorim, huh

anyway, i'll be back as soon as i can, i swear i'll do my best!