#old hardhat

[safetyall]

GREEN DEVIL Full Brim Hard Hat Vented Construction Safety Helmet OSHA Approved Cascos De Construccion ABS Work Hardhat for Men&Women 6 Point Adjustable Ratchet Suspension Custom Pattern Design

#GreenDevilHardHat #FullBrimSafety #ConstructionGear #SafetyFirst #HardHatProtection #WorkplaceSafety #DurableHeadgear #IndustrialSafety #ProtectiveEquipment #SafetyInStyle

[autistickaitovocaloid]

I think it's cool that the two rolls of duct tape I've owned didn't cost me anything the first one I found on the side of the road walking home from school (it was very evidently run over) and the second I pinched off my opa's place after he died.

[kittsuneriyu]

For a while I really wanted to make my own designs for a "role swap" AU.

The idea is that characters change roles, not in between, they change sides but still have their own unique quirks to hunt or survive.

007n7 basically goes insane after losing both Noli and c00lkidd, turning back into his old hacker persona, he decides to make his sorrow into everyone's problem. 007n7's actions are way more destructive and reckless, with nothing else to lose, why should he fear getting hurt or punished? This mentality is what pushes him further into keep living to make hell break lose.

Elliot is still a worker on Builder Brother's Pizza's, the best as always. But sometimes you never felt like making some jerk pay for his actions? That's Elliot's mindset, using his freetime to hunt down anyone that dared to mistreat him or other employees. Having a twisted kind of satisfaction on making "justice" with his own hands. Of course, he would never let it affect the Pizzaria's service.

Chance is a thrill seeker, to achive it he always took the most risky choices. It lead him into involving himself with some shady people. Now working as some hitman, Chance uses this title to coerce his targets into gambling with him in change of their mercy. But somehow Chance always wins either way.

The rest of the survivors aren't as elaborated as those three.

Noob is just some generic killer, the kind that looks like an average person but later shows themselves as some maniac.

Guest 1337 as stated on the drawing works like Fliqpy, genuinely feeling guilty for hurting someone, his flight or fight reaction really blinds him when something triggers him.

Two Time achived a very high connection with the spawn after a bunch of sacrifice's. One life in change of a extra one, this allows them to insta-heal a deadly injury an keep going, of course it doesn't comes without consequences. Each scar and rebirth disfigure's Two Time's form further and further.

Builderman alongside Telamon started an iron fist moderation, punishing and banning anyone that broke rules or defied their ideals.

Builderman didn't changed much design wise, glasses to only focus on their ideals, headsets to not hear their pleas or opinions and a hardhat to protection of course.

Telamon never gave up on his hatred, some still spilled over his creation but most of it still with him.

Dusekkar never agreed with this nonsense, and the two Admins didn't took it lightly, now Duse doesn't mind that much, afterall he doesn't have a thinkng mind at all anymore.

Taph would do anything for builderman, so they hopped along with the two Admin's, Taph happened to mess up a few times but now that they got the message they're not going to fail Builderman anymore.

And of course we have our survivors.

"Poor kidd there's something about us people never really liked." Not sure about what happened to c00lkidd for him to disappear. Up to you I guess.

1x a vessel for the admin's experiment, nothing but that. And when falling purposeless they felt anger, a powerful need for revenge. 1x and 2x never happened to become sepparated entities.

John Doe a mere moderator, only wanting to ensure that robloxia's problems were solved, too good for his own sake. This was his ruin.

Noli since the start aspired that one day he would reach out the starts, but now that he has them in hands theres no one left to share their glimmer with.

Guest 666 was just some rebel, a trouble maker as people say. Unable to properly speak without an account, but also unnable to be properly punished. Not sure how his relation with Noob could go.

Azure was, alongside his partner, one out of the most faithful ones of their cult. This feat led him and Two Time into a huge sacrificial rabbit hole. After being killed Azure turned his back to anything related to spawn or cults in general.

[scozthewoz]

mercs as cat breeds + kitty merc headcanons

inspired by/in collaboration with @joonliebe (i changed a few of them sorry pookie 💔)

kitty headcanons are from my cat fortress AU where all the mercs are cats that are foster fails because nobody wants those motherfuckers and now miss pauling is stuck with them all

spy ▪︎ persian - fancy and high maintenance. the signature bond villain cat

likes to be alone. needs to be taken to the groomer once a week or he gets pissed off and starts tearing up the couch. he has a very strict schedule and if his terms are not followed he throws a tantrum. he also sneaks out of the house and dissapears frequently. a dick to the rest of the cats, except scout for some reason.

heavy ▪︎ siberian - big boys with big coats, comes from siberia

the most well behaved cat there. scarred up and scary looking from his time in the pound, but he's suprisingly very quiet and peaceful. naturally chunky and big boned. miss pauling's favorite. he's a bonded pair with medic, they can normally be found grooming each other. he tends to wrangle scout when he's being too much, he doesn't like to see miss pauling stressed.

pyro ▪︎ sphynx - just a weird lookin thing. also an affectionate and energetic breed that likes to wreak havoc

peculiar little intersex kitty covered in burns, owners died in a house fire (that she may or may not have caused). both eyes are gone, but she navigates just fine. knows how to turn the stove on and has set multiple small fires. miss pauling puts him in cute little sweaters since he doesn't have any fur to keep him warm.

sniper ▪︎ savannah - hybrid of a house cat and a wild serval

very solitary, like spy, but not hostile to the others. owners were an old couple that died and it shook up the already shy cat. miss pauling doesn't need to feed him like the others since he sneaks out and hunts his own meals. almost completely silent unless he's sitting at the window and chirping at birds. evident dislike for spy. quiet and low maintenence so not a huge headache, but he tracks mud in the house. he's very skittish too, runs off or hides whenever there's company.

medic ▪︎ turkish angora - graceful. very majestic. cunty, even

on paper, he seems like a very good cat! he's an ex-service animal that still carries out some service tasks, like deep pressure therapy when miss pauling is getting anxious or retrieving stuff. only problem is that he loves bringing dead things inside, and he goes out of his way to rip it to shreds and get blood and guts ALL over the house. he also has a temper issue, and he needs little kitty glasses because his eyesight is shit.

engineer ▪︎ munchkin - haha short legs!! oh yeah, and they're pretty smart

used to be a workshop cat around for pest control, lost a leg in an accident. workshop guys gave him a kitty sized hardhat he gets very upset without. he's got a hard time jumping up on stuff since he not only has short legs, but he's got a prosthetic one too, so miss pauling made him a few kitty staircases up to his favorite spots. he likes stealing tools from neighbors and and scrap metal from outside and stashes them under the couch.

demoman ▪︎ scottish fold - scottish, prone to eye problems

missing an eye and has some singed fur from teens with fireworks. little kitty eyepatch. he frequently gets into the bailey's irish cream miss pauling keeps on top of the fridge and has to be brought to the vet for liver issues at least once a month.

soldier ▪︎ ragdoll - developed in america !!🇺🇸 tend to rough house when playing and are very vocal

used to belong to a war veteran, then became a stray after he died. clipped ear. his body's kept shaved because of scarring and matting issues, so he's got furry boots and a puffball tail, but the fur on his noggin covers his eyes. he frequently bothers the others. a big sweetheart for miss pauling, but agressive with anyone else. likes fetch. dog in a cat body.

scout ▪︎ siamese - the extroverts of the cat world, very energetic and chatty, also very clever.

his ma and brothers are all siamese, but he's got an oddly fluffy tail like a persian.. he's a big fan of miss pauling, never leaves her alone. gets pissy and scratches the curtains or breaks a glass when she's giving one of the other cats too much attention. wayyy too clingly and always causing some sort of trouble or getting into places he shouldn't. he also meows CONSTANTLY.

[this-game-has-themes]

time passes, the industrial wastes of eastern mudos is reclaimed by freemuds, both adopters of native traditionalism and reclaimers of factories alike. its not completely harmonious, and magog 'union busters' continue to keep pressure on the edges of their lost territories, but for a lot of people the revolution has reached its peak. life settles into a new semblance of normalcy.

howler, her revenge list of tormentors crossed off at last, keeps her promise to end her violent vendetta and disbands the rebel defects, who go their separate ways for the most part. howler reclaims herself - her body, her identity, her old name. lora is still not the little girl who was taken from her burning village all those years ago, but now it's on her terms who she becomes. she picks up the pieces of what's left of her tribe, the mudella, with abe's tentative help. the brand on her hand is more symbolic than the mark of some divine destiny, and lora isnt convinced that she's made any difference in mudella's status as a recently extinct people, but her friends, her family, all take up that forgotten symbol as their own.

max, now miles away from the doll-like, objectified crimp the late mizz mayven made her into, will always bear the permanent marks and health issues that come with excessive crimp modifications. its her development into a post-industrial drone that makes her feel like a woman on her own terms, diametrically compared lora to taking synthetic hormones to achieve similar drone traits to more masculine ends. her talents and experience in tech contribute to developing an independent infrastructure for communication among mudokon settlements, inadvertently making her a more important figure among the tribeless, queenless reclaimers than she expected to become. with her experience in management and playing a certain role, she handles the responsibility of leadership more graciously than... some muds.

drill, who joined the gang as a deeply hurt, angry teen, grows into a happier, healthier adult. putting himself through therapy (what semblance of it could be found in the wastes) leads him to try helping other freemuds process the trauma of their former lives. lora adopts him, properly, through ritual establishing him as her son. he's the first to cover up the old marks of his enslavement with the mudella symbol, proud to show off his connection to his mother and family. he still busts her balls and reads her for filth on the regular, though, but some things never really change.

mal, who had spent unknown decades of his life as a body, as a non-person, doesn't expect there to be anything for him among both natives and freemuds. his connection to the vykkers and their monstrosity is inescapable to him, but lora insists that his talents and knowledge of industrialist medicine are extremely valuable, and desperately needed among the natives, whose medicinemuds are dwindling. its an immense adjustment, and lora has to bribe abe who in turn bribes his own native contacts, but mal undergoes the proper training and rituals to become a healer on native mudokon terms. he's cynical about it, at first; his modernized methods of healing are mostly foreign, and rightfully distrusted by natives who know vykkers as butchers. he stands out, and acts eccentrically even compared to neurotic former scrubs. but over time, he becomes accustomed to the traditional ways, even lauding them as he finds peace with their meditation practices; a better alternative to the dependency on self-sedation that helped him cope with the horrors before.

trip, unfortunately (or, perhaps fortunately) goes out with a bang, and ostensibly a lot of causalities and lasting property damage hits to the cartel. it was what he always wanted, and its what the rest of the gang accepts. lora has his old hardhat, adding the mudella symbol as a final trophy post-mortem.

slogmeat, after [redacted] with [redacted], eventually moves in with [redacted]. a bittersweet ending to some, since theres no 'fixing' him, and theres no bringing back [redacted] to begin with, but he's loved and well taken cared for, with [redacted] as a part of his life again at last.

[mxrp-official-steve]

Your Janurary 2nd PARPdate: Hex in a pair of baggy overalls and a hardhat covered in soot edition.

It's been a few months- how about some CONTENT?

With The Troubles have subsided for the time being, Hex has been hard at work hammering out goodies for the Dreambubble update that will then be expanded into the Msparp Update. Rapid-fire lets GO:

Login screen with form validations and visual parity with DB1!

Logging system looking GOOD!

DARK THEME WORKING

A toggleable automatic contract adjuster!

Quirking system ported from dreambubble!

The BBCode system! Quirk compatible, just like back in the old country!

BONE (will be usable with [bone]text[/bone] or [font=Bone]text[/font] !)

Gradients! WITH a new input!

This one is

[gradient=red,orange,yellow,green,blue,indigo,violet]example text[/gradient] OR [gradient=rgb(255,0,0),#ffff00,black]example text[/gradient]

Formatting expansions!

Tooltips!

[tooltip="this_is_a_tool_tip"]Example[/tooltip]

Dividers!

[div]

Dividers WITH TEXT

[div]DIVIDER WITH TITLE[/div]

These also work with both color and gradient tags!

Popouts! Good for chat descriptions! This one is: [modal buttonText=Rules] [div]RULES[/div] [gradient=red,orange,yellow,green,blue,indigo,violet,rgba(0,0,0,0)]Be Kind[/gradient] [/modal]

Countdowns! This one is [countdown=1734422353] The number represents a unix timestamp! https://www.unixtimestamp.com/

Text bubbles! left: [bubble]text[/bubble] right: [bubble_r]text[/bubble]

Pop-outable text preview! Good for super long posts!

Tables!

This cool new thing where if you're scrolled up and a new message is sent, the bottom of the window changes color to match the text color of the new message!

Hex also got the presets ported and the basics of the character system set up!

Of note is that Hex has also set up a RUDIMENTARY TEST CHAT for DB2, available HERE:

Keep some things in mind though:

Some of the BBCode is broken

Nothing is saved to the database, only 100 messages are visible at a time because all the others get deleted.

clicky the funny box on the right to change characters

We'll have a better how-to BBCode guide up when DB2 is ready to go live (or sooner!), but that's how it's looking for now. MAN this was a lot of stuff. Hope you all had a fantastic holiday season and an excellent new year.

And thanks for sticking with us, it means the world!

[dadineer]

"Well shit, yer still kickin' around, huh hardhat?" A voice the engineer wouldn't have heard in ages chimed up behind him. If he were to turn around, he would see the mechanically footed BLU Scout, the younger American had a short beard growing, not a patchy pathetic mess but a full bodied beard. "Thought ya would have kicked da bucket or retired by now"

“You wish.” Dell was beaming as he turned towards his old friend, the oily rag he’d been wiping his hands on getting flung over his shoulder as he opened his arms wide for a hug. “Come ‘ere!”

[darrowfire15]

fred hcs now

yeehaw 🤠🤠🤠🤠

-🫀

(ps ily <3)

Yeehaw! The Conaghers are staring daggers in my back...

Fred is an only child, no surprise there. The Conagher family was always too busy with their work to have kids, but they have to pass down their knowledge to someone.

As a child, Fred was a bit of a troublemaker and Radigan got most of his gray hairs from stopping his son from losing his hand at the age of 7. His mother tried her best to keep an eye on her sneaky son while tending to her beekeeping.

Fred's wife had passed away when Dell was about five years old. He had to step up big time, which meant bringing Dell with him for fights with the Classic Team. He knew how Radigan felt when he was a kid.

Fred is one of the voices of reason in the Classic Team whenever Cheavy is unavailable. The others are Bea, Cdemo, and Cspy.

His closet is the classic "same outfit for each day of the week", with includes his hardhats. It's utterly ridiculous when he points out the different outfits that all look alike for laundry day.

When he was old enough, Fred taught Dell how to play guitar as a nice change of pace between teaching him complicated equations and showing how to build sentry guns.

He's the main source for the team's drinks (beer, whiskey, etc). In fact, he knows everyone's favorites by heart when he goes out on a drink run.

This is more obvious, but he smokes cigars. Not any cigars though, the good kind that Cspy got from another country. He likes how they taste, but will settle for regular cigars if he can't get the good ones.

If Bea is the mom of the group, you'll bet that Fred's the dad. He has to juggle between watching his son in the base and making sure his sentries are still working, and dealing with his teammates on a daily. It's a wonder he's still awake by 2PM.

Fred tries constantly to reach out to Dell, his son, but both of their schedules make it hard to. A phone call couldn't last for more than a couple minutes, roadtrips were near impossible, and both were always needed. Hopefully he can meet up with Dell in the future...

Reblogs > Likes

[withered-tears]

HERE HE IS. FINALLY.

Meet my dronesona, William.

Many thanks to @1-800-hellyeah for sharing some fantastic refs with me, made the modeling process WAY easier.

Lore dump under the cut for anyone who wanna check it out

W-023 worked on Copper 9 for YEARS, back then life was pretty straightforward for a worker drone. You work. Thats it, thats your life.

Fast forward a couple of decades, the newer workers have started to choose names for themselves. W-023 likes the idea, so he goes with Will.

Fast forward some more, Copper 9's core just collapsed, and Will is EXTREMELY annoyed by it. Because for the last couple of months, Will had actually been building the nerve to revolt and kill a human.

Not for some grand revolution or something like that, nah, he just really, REALLY hated the human in charge of the factory Will worked on. Straight up LOATHED him. Will knew that if he ever attacked a human, it would mean instant disassembling, but fuck it, it was worth it.

Then the core collapsed and killed al humans. Including the one Will was about to bash in the head with a wrench. Years later and he's STILL salty about the timing.

Fast forward some more, drones had begun to build a life for themselves, with many choosing to form communities and staying together. There's also plenty of drones that choose to live by themselves, Will is the later.

Unfortunately, those are the first targets of the DD once they arrive. Only reason Will makes it alive is because there were a LOT of targets running around, and Will happened to be one of the few that made it away.

Not unscathed tho, one of the DD grabbed him by the head and used him as a projectile to hit some other drones. He was able to reattach his hardhat/scalp but now its permanently crooked.

Years of living in hiding on the surface has resulted in many, many injuries. William (he decided that Will sounded to juvenile for him) was forced to mod himself using machinery from his old factory, becoming a scrap drone (like Alice)

His jacket sleeves kept getting caught in the seams of his new arm, so he just cut them off.

He doesnt need the glasses, btw. He stole them from the skeleton of the one guy he wanted to kill.

Although he does fear the DD a reasonable amount (as any sane drone should) he holds zero resentment towards them. Being angry at a DD for killing is like being angry at a worker for working. Its literally what they are made for. its chill.

But he does finds them EXTREMELY suspicious. Something doesn't add up about the DD. He is old, he has seen JCJenson products come and go for a long time, and those three? theres NO WAY those were designed and manufactured by JCJenson.

William becomes a bit of a conspiracy theorist about the DD, trying to figure them out.

[skaruresonic]

I'm reminded of the split opinion on whether Sonic Gens and Mania are suitable "first games" for people who want to approach the series.

I personally don't think so, because the appeal of those games is precisely revisiting old levels in a new format, with a new design: you're not going to get the subtle jokes as a newcomer (and Mania can get very obscure with it). But some do think they're nice pastiches for newcomers to at least get an idea of Sonic's history as a franchise, and it helps that they're both solid games.

I assumed Shadow Gens would be the same, but you make a good point, because this game has an actual story. For veterans, it's more of the same thing, if you know Shadow's story this adds very little new, and it's mostly a repeat of what he already went through in ShTH. But newcomers who want to learn more about the cool black hedgehog from the new movie would still be confused: why did Shadow become a hero? Who is Black Doom, why is he obsessed with Shadow, why does Shadow hate him? Let's not even talk about things like Mephiles' boss fight lol. (although personally I find Gerald's mention of the time portals of '06 rather cute)

So I guess this game is for veterans who just want to soak in the Shadow vibes once more, but this time with Good Writing™

If you based your knowledge only on the information provided by SxS Gens - so no supplementary material, no Dark Beginnings, no manga, no movie, no paratext - you would learn the vaguest and broadest strokes of maybe two games, SA2 and ShTH, at most. But nothing specific.

Everything else would just come off as garbled nonsense. Hell, it appeared that way to me and I've been a Sonic fan for (checks notes) 22 years. God I'm old.

I approached this game not with my purist hardhat on (though that wasn't always the case given some lines here and there lmao) but from the perspective of a newcomer who knew nothing about Shadow's past. If everyone was going to argue that this game's existence is necessary on that basis, I thought, how well would it perform as an introductory piece?

From that perspective, I don't think the game does a very good job in giving us a crash course on Shadow's history. Gerald and Maria do nothing - I hate to say it but they're ultimately window-dressing. They don't accomplish anything that, for instance, a posthumous diary or recording could have just as easily provided.

(Tbf, the NPCs in Gens also pretty much did nothing but cheer Sonic on, but it's not like, given this sheer gravitas as seeing your dead loved ones return to life via the power of timey-wimey shenanigans.)

I was actually surprised at how little plot progression there is, given my previous expectations of there being, you know, a coherent story. The plot doesn't really kick in until you've completed 4 out of the 6 available levels, and by then you've pretty much halfway done lol.

Shit happens in weird, patchwork, nonsensical ways. We get boss fights for characters that don't matter but not a boss fight against Sonic, AKA the guy we play as in Gens proper and in a context that echoes a game dynamic where we get to fight each character as the opponent. Shadow is the ultimate life form who gets his ass handily kicked by Sonic. Maria has a delayed response at the news of Shadow's heritage; she's not instantly shocked the first time, but when Gerald says it for a second time she suddenly becomes distressed. Omega claims they showed Metal "mercy" at the end of Heroes, despite questioning whether he should destroy Metal or Sonic to prove his strength. We have to fight Mephiles even though he doesn't matter because reasons.

Characters appear who aren't relevant to the plot, but are given the screen treatment as though the game expects the player to know who they are and why they might (or might not) be relevant.

---

Who is Black Doom, why is he obsessed with Shadow, why does Shadow hate him?

>>gets Silent Hill 3 flashbacks as Black Doom waxes poetic about "possessing" Shadow

---

Let's not even talk about things like Mephiles' boss fight lol.

No. Let's. :P

Mephiles' boss is one great big time-wasting in-joke that amounts to an MCU-esque "Well, that just happened." I can easily see newcomers mistaking him for one of Black Doom's minions or something, especially given that his boss arena is found in a cave under Chaos Island and not in Kingdom Valley. Because the latter is where you find Metal Overlord instead.

Yeah, this would definitely confuse newcomers.

As I've said before, the game does the "don't think about a polar bear" thing by bringing up the matter of Shadow's blood, only to backpedal immediately afterwards with "his blood doesn't matter, I swear." At times I felt like I was playing Parasite Eve with talk of mutations and what-not.

And like, sure, the game does stress that Shadow determines his own destiny, but if that's the case, why bring up his blood eighty million times? Why turn it into a friggin' gameplay mechanic? The guy turns into a squid FFS

Oh, and I forgot to mention: the light of God that shone down on IDW!Sonic during his Sermon on the Rock also shines down on Maria when she tells Shadow the reason she gave him his name. Just in case you couldn't get The Symbolism. Very subtle, much cinematic, felt like I was playing SA2 all over again.

[princess-of-the-corner]

This is why I'm a huge fan of poorly funded superheroes/villains/costumed weirdos who have to make their own costumes by just throwing together shit they had at the house. Usually, the design ends up being really iconic plainclothes that is far less likely to malfunction than these monetized fuckers with a costume department, since the hero has to worry about replacing anything they break on their own budget.

You can't just say "they used their funding or their scientist or whatever to make bulletproof spandex." It forces the designers to think about what this character might realistically have to work with and what they would be worried about when gathering materials. It's why so many of them end out wearing like, leather jackets and trenchcoats---leather is low grade armor. It's something you could realistically get your hands on that's also easy to move in and decently protective.

Other things I've put in my own designs and seen other places are gas masks to hide your identity and protect your face, skateboard knee and elbow pads, lots of repurposed sports equipment (especially football), using theatre costumes for dramatic flair that will survive heavy movement, and stuff marketed towards hard laborers like hardhats, work boots, and coveralls.

(I'm also just a fan of poor scavenging bastards in general, because something about a dude with a baseball bat and a gun who lives in a box under a bridge being your grand rescuer is so funny and so appealing to me).

see this just makes me laugh because with bnha it's the differences between Heroes and Villains

The Heroes have funding and such to make their costumes.

The Villains are making this with the old sewing machine in the basement.

[frogmanbob]

Diving the way it was done back in the day. Ran across this on "one of the other social media platforms", so I grabbed both the post and the picture from inside it.

For those interested in old-fashioned hardhat diving there is at least one recreational diving certifying agency offering a recreational (I note that twice because they make it clear that it's *not* a commercial dive cert) standard dress course. I suspect demand for this cert is not particularly heavy, so the courses are infrequently scheduled. There are also, if memory serves, a couple of locations where you can do a one time "try dive". I know the recreational standard dress cert requires a SCUBA or commercial cert or military dive experience - not sure about the various try dive opportunities.

2025 March 19

Edited the next morning to add: If you're interested, check out https://www.classicdiving.com/programs/ and https://diveamarkv.com/

[grapefruittwostep]

This 25 year old apprentice caught me after work to split scrap money with me, with his full post-hardhat emo boy hair, and on the one hand, I was like “wow what a cute boy, I would have had such a crush on you ten years ago” and on the other had to fight the urge to be like “Christ, Dave, get a fucking haircut”

[cyberneticlagomorph]

"Rise and shine!"

The voice was shrill, needling almost, it dug into Zeb's dreams like fingernails into flesh and tore him free of his slumber.

His eyes opened slowly, grit grinding underneath his lids as if he'd used a sandstorm for a pillow.

The barracks at the Weather Factory were bare bones to say the least, gray concrete rooms buried deep somewhere in the facility's guts, safe from any storm or catastrophe short of the building falling out of the sky where it hung.

Zeb had been there 3 days in accordance with his sentence and he knew deep down that he would never get used to... all of this.

The Knights had told him that Fairyland, as a concept, was wholly unnatural but he'd never understood just HOW unnatural that was. Weather, and the movement of celestial bodies like the moon and sun, had to be done MANUALLY or else the entire planet would collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

Zeb sat up in his bunk and rubbed a hand down his face and then stared at his palms. His nails were longer now, more claw-like and just as black as the rest of his arms. It made him feel inhuman, more than inhuman, or less than inhuman?

He didn't feel like a person anymore, just a Thing slowly being devoured by something else that he couldn't stop.

He slipped on his gloves and shoved the thought as far out of his mind as he could, and then he got dressed for the day. A Factory Worker's uniform wasn't flashy, it was a jumpsuit and good boots and a hardhat, with a hair net underneath. Sure the boots had wings at their ankles that fluttered nervously as he tugged them on, but that was apparently necessary for walking on clouds and stuff.

"You're with the Sky Painter today!" Said the needling voice, a sort of dandelion fluff pixie creature with a clipboard no bigger that his thumbnail was perched on Zeb's shoulder. "She's really nice, I promise."

He didn't reply, choosing to shove a protein bar into his mouth instead. Human food was hard to come by this far off the ground, but Jack had packed him a suitcase full of snacks before he'd left and it was the only thing keeping him alive right now. He wouldn't eat fairy food, ever, if he could have one thing left from his old life it would be never ever letting fairy food touch his tongue as long as he lived.

The walk from the barracks to the Sky Painter's studio was longer than he'd expected, taking several twists and turns past the snowflake cutters and the storm wranglers, and a detour through the cloud shapes department where Zeb accidentally ran face first into a tiger made of rain clouds and got soaked.

The Sky Painter didn't seem to mind the soggy little boy suddenly standing in her studio. An odd sort of creature with big ears and kind eyes and a long tail like a living paint brush. She swiped hands and tail across a huge canvas and dotted it with the fading stars of a bleeding dawn, edged by timid rain clouds, one shaped like a tiger.

Zeb watched her work for what felt like a long time, changing the sky from bloody morning hues to the soft blues of pre-noon, to the golden glow of high noon, slowly fading into an ashy gray that heralded oncoming storms.

"Could you give me a hand?" The Sky Painter said finally, glancing at Zeb. "I'm almost out of black."

Zeb glanced around until his eyes fell on a huge jar sloshing with black liquid, he hoped was paint. He hefted it in his arms and carried it to the canvas.

A pair of wide white eyes opened in the depths of the black paint bottle, startling Zeb hard enough to shriek. The eyes stared at him wordlessly as the Sky Painter dipped her brush tail in the black paint and swiped it across the canvas in a great arc that she blended with white until a perfect shade of stormy gray was achieved. The black paint moved in its bottle, bubbling and boiling out the top until it formed something like a head with two wide white eyes that blinked and stared. The Sky Painter patted the living paint tenderly and wiped the resulting handprint on her smock. "That's my Kid, don't worry they don't bite… no teeth and all that." The Sky Painter then took the bottle and upturned it, giving it a single firm shake when nothing happened.

The Kid fell out of their bottle with a thump and slowly organized their fluid shape into something resembling a person with two arms and two legs and a brush tail like their Painter.

"Break time, go on now." Shooed the Painter.

The Kid stood and threw on a much stained sweater with sleeves that dragged the ground. They scampered away in no particular direction, leaving inky paw prints in their wake that vanished after a few seconds.

Zeb watched them go, his brain suddenly feeling liquid in his skull.

The Sky Painter retreated to a corner of her studio surrounded by drop cloth curtains, pulling them back to reveal a little apartment stashed away in the shadows. She washed her hands and put the kettle on to boil before pulling lunch out of the fridge. Zeb heard the telltale plap plap plap of the Kid's liquid footsteps behind him and glanced back to see them being chased across the studio by an irate looking Ray of Sunshine.

The Sky Painter seemed unbothered by this, so Zeb tried to be too as he sat down at the little table and ate more of his snacks while the Painter ate cloud roast sandwiches and drank tea.

"So, I feel like you have questions." Said the Painter in between bites of sky fish and cloud roast.

"Where do you get your paints?" Said Zeb, suddenly wondering if all her paints were alive like the Kid.

"Oh anywhere really, it depends on the day. Sometimes they're donated emotions, or the favorite hues of my patrons, or colors that only exist in the deepest dark where nothing has eyes to view them." She took a long sip of her tea. "Or I get them on from Hobby Lobby when they have a sale."

Zeb snorted without meaning to, and watched the Sky Painter grin. Every tooth in her mouth was a different color.

More wet footsteps came from up behind Zeb and he watched The Kid grab a sandwich, sitting on the ground to eat it. He expected eating would be difficult for them if they had not teeth like the Painter said, but the Kid seemed to manage just fine, opening a mouth in their otherwise featureless face and taking 'bites' of the sandwich like a normal person would.

Crumbs floated in their paint for a bit before sinking out of sight, they dusted off their sweater and stood up again, ready to get into more shenanigans.

The Kid waved a limb, or what Zeb presumed to be a limb (it was hard to tell with how amorphous the Kid was. Despite this, he waved back politely and turned back to the Sky Painter.

"I painted them too you know, sort of by accident." The Sky Painter poured herself another cup of tea. "One misplaced swipe of my brush later and boom, I'm a Mama."

The Kid scuttled across the art studio with purpose, diving headlong into a pile of empty paint containers and coming back out with a fairly large jar stuck over their top half. Zeb watched them wander off back the way they came as if this new hat of theirs was a regular occurrence.

…knowing them it probably was.

[biohazardousgeodez]

vent art because i could not decipher it for llike 2 days until i realised it was a bandana and what remains of his old eyepatch my hungry ass thought it was a hardhat...