werebird

[dimorphodon-x]

Megatron during the fight with Skywarp and Novastorm in episode 9:

[groovycatanime]

Modern AU: Kuzan fell asleep with his webcam on in Discord without telling anyone, just to see what would happen...

Kuzan: *is asleep on a couch in front of the webcam. Blackbeard: What the fuck??? Wait... Laffitte: Why is Kuzan doing this? Burgess: I don't know! Doc Q: Did he say anything to you? Shiryu: God, look at-look at that fuck. Shot: Call a Pizza Hut to his house. Order him a pizza. Laffitte: Wait, does anyone know his-I know his address. Pizarro: Stay still if you want Dominos, turn around if you want Pizza Hut! Devon: *starts laughing* Doc Q: I hate National Geographic. Augur: I just wanted to drop in and see Kuzan dead. Burgess: Who sleeps with the fucking lights on??? Kuzan: *starts moving* Devon: Oh my god, he's twerking! Blackbeard: Oh my god, he's moving! Wolf: Is something happening??? Laffitte: He's hatching! Shot: He's moving! Burgess: Is he awake?! Kuzan: *stops moving and is still asleep* Burgess: Aww... Doc Q: Aw Pizarro: Aw man! Devon: Let's use our minds to move the couch so we can make him fall. Burgess: *acting like he's trying to use his mind* Bzzzz! Wolf: *doing the same thing* Pshoooo! Blackbeard: We've been here for two hours, just sitting here... Kuzan: *wakes up* Burgess: *gasps* Pizarro: OOOH! Laffitte: *claps giddily* Doc Q: *wheezes a laugh* Shiryu: You piece of-*leaves chat* *others follow suit* Kuzan: *laughs*

[curlyhairednerd]

Zoro: *is asleep on a couch in front of the webcam*

Nami: What the fuck??? Wait...

Sanji: Why is Zoro doing this?

Usopp: I don't know?!

Luffy: Did he say anything to you?

Gin: God, look at-look at that fuck.

Franky: Call a Pizza Hut to his house. Order him a pizza.

Rosé: Wait, does anyone know his-I know his address.

Crossette: Stay still if you want Dominos, turn around if you want Pizza Hut!

Chopper: *starts laughing*

Robin: I hate National Geographic.

Sanji: I just wanted to drop in and see Mosshead dead.

Gin: Who sleeps with the fucking lights on???

Zoro: *starts moving*

Crossette: Oh my god, he's twerking!

Franky: Oh my god, he's moving!

Robin: Is something happening???

Usopp: He's hatching! Chopper: He's moving!

Nami: Is he awake?!

Zoro: *stops moving and is still asleep*

Luffy: Aww...

Usopp: Aw

Chopper: Aw man!

Crossette: Let's use our minds to move the couch so we can make him fall.

Franky: *acting like he's trying to use his mind* Bzzzz!

Luffy: *doing the same thing* Pshoooo!

Rosé: We've been here for two hours, just sitting here...

Zoro: *wakes up*

Rosé: *gasps*

Nami: OOOH!

Robin: *claps giddily*

Gin: *wheezes a laugh*

Sanji: You piece of-*leaves chat*

*others follow suit*

Zoro: *laughs*

[moldwood]

a little more blender tutorial before bed. pshoooo

[thishasbe]

pshoooo mimimimimimimimin pshoooo mimimririr

[mythgendered]

i am using my 100th post to say i love my girlfriend very very much

c:

[skenpiel]

if theyre gonna keep updating fallout 4 they better fucking make nick valentine romanceable. or else

[ata-art]

Another few spellbook pages are done! This time with a bigger Lup focus since Taako kinda dominated my last set

(First set here)

Edit - This has fanart now!!! Check it out its real cute

(Transcript under the cut like before)

First Image

L: so taako’s learning blink today. i’m writing it down because SCIENCE T: You’re gonna make me look like an asshole. L: nah it’ll be fine i promise ^^ T: I do not believe you in the slightest.

L: take one!! ^^ L: literally nothing happened. taako stood in a field for ten minutes and looked like a dumbass. [an illustration of Taako with a blank expression, and a speech bubble saying “yo what up im taako and i definitely know how to do magic”] T: What did I just say, Lup, what did I just say. L: XP T: For the record, my theory was sound. Opening portals to the etherial plane is HARD.

L: take two!! L: everything got all hazy and black and white for a second? taako still in this plane of reality though. [a drawing in black pen of lup sitting in the back of a caravan with a book and taako standing in the grass near her staring at the sky, which is dark]

L: take five!! L: taako made his arm do the thing! but just his arm. also he can’t work out how to get it back, which means this book is MINE! >:D L (in the green pen taako uses): hey check it out im taako. lup is the best sister ever. L (back to her usual red): thank you taako! ^^ T (in shaky handwriting, using his non dominant hand): Fuck you Lup L: ;)

L: take, uh... thirteen? L: arm’s back! taako did a lot of phasing in and out of reality until he was all in one piece again. T: Yeah, I’m done for today. Taako is 100% FINISHED. Also tired as fuck, and I think I’m out of spell slots? T: But I did it! Kinda. Needs work. I can get in and out in one piece, but my timing’s still off, and I need more control over my location, it’s still too random. L: okay mr perfect, go take a nap. i got dinner tonight. T: Really? L: yeah, you earned it. T: Gods, you’re the best, I love you so much, you’re my favorite sister L: i’m your only sister, dummy :P [taako’s drawn a bunch of hearts underneath, lup has filled them in with hearts of her own] [lup has also drawn an elf lying face down on the floor with an arrow pointing to them labelled “taako”]

Second Image

Page one L: fireball!! [a doodle of lup casting fireball with the caption “pshoooo”]

L: alright this is a classic. L: most evocation spells before this don’t need components because they’re T: basic [Lup has crossed this out] L: better than transmutation. but to make a fire this big, you need a little extra SPARK.

L: apparently the official book recommends sulphur and bat shit? which sounds like a great joke to play on fancy ass rich wizards, eternal respect. but really, anything flammable enough will do. trust me.

L: evocation spells need a chain reaction. you use the energy of the world and the world uses the energy of you and the spell keeps getting bigger until something explodes. if you did it right, you blew up the thing you wanted to blow up. if something else explodes, you fucked up, re-do your technique. 

L: normally you call on ambient elemental energies, like the sun, for fire spells. here, you hold the fire in your hand to begin with, which makes it EXTRA powerful. and then you chuck it at someone. boom. T: brilliantly explained.  L: what, it’s not like anyone but us needs to understand.

[a diagram by taako of a group of trees and bushes labelled “before Lup uses Fireball”, followed by a diagram of burned ground labelled “after Lup uses Fireball”. In the “after” diagram, Lup has added extra fire, and drawn a picture of herself standing over everything, with the caption “mwahaha!! XP”]

Page two L: lup’s tiny hut [a doodle of two kids standing in a bubble while it rains outside, the rain is not penetrating the bubble]

L: like leomund’s tiny hut, but BETTER. also it’s really more of a bubble than a hut? no idea what the fuck leomund was thinking. lup’s tiny bubble? except it’s big for a bubble. T: Lup’s huge bubble for protecting us from weather and stuff. L: yeah, that!

L: so this spell needs a small crystal bead, which is easy to get when your brother is a bomb as fuck transmutation wizard. T: Hell yeah. L: kinda cheating, but who’s counting? L: the harder the crystal, the stronger your spell, cuz that’s what you’re channeling to protect yourself.

L: when you cast this spell, you’re basically picturing you and whoever/whatever you wanna protect inside the bead, and then you expand the crystal shell to form an actual magic barrier around you.

L: if you cast it right, it lasts 8 hours, anything inside when you cast it can move through the barrier, and can see through the barrier if you want. to outsiders, it’s opaque and impenetrable.

L: it’s also weatherproof (always warm/dry), and you can make it dark if you need to sleep. all in all, a dope as fuck spell, and SUPER useful on the road. lup wins in all spell choices forever XP T: Yeah yeah whatever.

[redrunningshoes]

If you need anything about Overwatch explained, I'm here for you

tbh I really wanna get into it myself but i keep.....forgetting to invest like the idiot i am

[kiwibaskerville]

Pshoooo !!!

[screamo420]

pshoooo

[ckret2]

Tedium

Fandom: Borderlands, pre-canon Characters: Zer0, an OC invented to play off Zer0, and a smidge of Mordecai at the end. Words: 5600 Summary: Blue Collar said he called him "Seventeen" because of his little speech quirk, expressing himself in exactly seventeen syllables at a time. But the other reason was that Blue Collar had the deeply uncomfortable sense that the spindly amateur killer in front of him was just some kid, around seventeen years old, in deep over his head without even understanding how fast he was sinking. "Don't know about other planets, but that's how hitmen work around here: we don't interfere with each other, we don't hunt each other, but we don't help each other, either. It's a lonely profession. I don't want it to be lonely for you." Notes: Zer0's called "he" when the narration is from the perspective of someone who would make that assumption and hasn't been told otherwise, and "they" when the narration is from their own perspective. Warnings: Canon-typical violence & character death.

###

"Don't listen to anyone who tries to hype up Dahl. They're amateurs who like to think carrying a gun with camo on it makes them a soldier instead of a thug. A real professional hitman uses Tediore." Waving his hot sauce-coated chopsticks at Seventeen as he spoke, Blue Collar leaned across the sticky fast food restaurant table, warming up to the topic. "Quietest guns on the market. Easy to make impossible to trace. Break the gun's digistruct chip and toss your pistol in a trash can and boom, the murder weapon no longer exists. There's a hundred places on the ECHOnet that'll teach you how to corrupt a Tediore gun's serial number so it isn't printed on the bullets, in case you're worried the cops'll use it to track down the gun's registered owner��which probably won't be you anyway, since they're a dime a dozen to get second-hand. If you really wanna go incognito, get a five-dollar digistruct chip from the nearest corner store and pirate a Tediore gun. You can even download some with Maliwan barrels if you wanna shock a shield off someone."

Seventeen shifted on the cheap vinyl seat, as if to speak, and Blue Collar lifted a hand placatingly. "I know, you're not a fan of Maliwan, I'm just saying. Now, the only exception to Tediore is rifles. That's when you wanna go Dahl."

Seventeen snorted derisively. "For sniper rifles? That's a waste of good ammo. One bullet, one death."

Sarcastically, Blue Collar asked, "Oh, and I suppose you get a lot of jobs that pay so bad you can't afford to buy four bullets?"

"Yeah."

Blue Collar had no idea if that was supposed to be a joke, but he went for it like it was serious. "Then you're taking the wrong jobs. No wonder you're so scrawny." He jabbed a meaty finger in the direction of Seventeen's chest. Seventeen swirled a straw in a cup of bubble tea in feigned indifference.

"What you call a 'waste of ammo,' a smart killer calls 'double tapping to be sure.' There's a reason a snake has two fangs. You know how many stories there are about freak cases of people surviving a bullet through the heart? There's a lot less about people surviving two bullets." Blue Collar sat back, scooped up some fried rice, and talked through the mouthful. "Your pride at taking some sap out with one bullet isn't half as important as the assurance that he's dead. That's what being a professional is about. You double tap; you hit 'em while they're unaware; and you don't waste a second between kills. Dahl for rifles, and Tediore for everything else."

"But I like Jakobs," Seventeen protested. "I like the way firing feels—"

"That's called 'recoil' and it's a con, not a pro."

Seventeen flicked a balled-up straw wrapper at Blue Collar. "—and I like headshots." Hands pressed to masked head, then expanding outward, pantomiming a brain exploding from a smashed skull: "Pshoooo."

Blue Collar shook his head, equal parts exasperated and charmed. "Yeah, yeah. I know you do. Damn."

They were an odd pair, sitting together with a couple plates of fried rice and egg rolls between them. Blue Collar was a grizzled, heavyset man, dressed like he could be anything from a factory worker to a mechanic to a janitor, depending on what tool belt he slapped on; hence his professional name. He dressed to blend in with a crowd, hid his gun in a tool bag slung over a shoulder or in a pocket if the pistol was small enough, and was never noticed.

Seventeen didn't blend in. Gangly, spindly; perpetually dressed in all black; combat boots and gloves; ski mask and goggles with reflective red lenses. If Blue Collar had said it once, he'd said it a hundred times: stealth wasn't about dressing like some kinda wannabe urban ninja. It was about dressing like the most uninteresting person on the street. His advice went in one ear and out the other—assuming Seventeen had ears.

What Seventeen didn't have was an identity. Never offered a name, not even a professional name—never so much as offered a gender, although Seventeen used a voice modulator set to such a hilariously low pitch that Blue Collar couldn't help but read it as cartoonishly masculine. Calling Seventeen a "he" was only an educated guess, although a guess that Seventeen himself didn't dispute; just like he didn't dispute when Blue Collar started calling him "Seventeen," just to have something to call him.

Blue Collar told Seventeen that it was because of his little speech quirk, expressing himself in exactly seventeen syllables at a time. That was part of the reason, sure.

The rest of it was that Blue Collar had the deeply uncomfortable sense that the spindly amateur killer in front of him—sticking the straw of his bubble tea under a bandana around his face and noisily slurping up the boba left at the bottom—was just some kid, around seventeen years old, in deep over his head without even understanding how fast he was sinking.

He rarely had more than thirty bucks at any given time—and Blue Collar knew he wasn't squirreling away savings anywhere. He slept on couches, benches, and homeless shelters, where anyone trying to track him down after a job would easily be able to identify the tall scrawny kid covered head to toe in black and kill him in his sleep. He didn't know how to market himself, how to make his name known—didn't have a name to make known—didn't know how to make one successful job lead to another, better one. He wasn't building a career, just doing one lousy bloody job after another. Sometimes, Blue Collar saw him wobbling on his feet, like a skyscraper swaying in an earthquake, unsteady with hunger.

And still—still—he talked about challenging, interesting, fun kills; about how burst fire made things "too easy"; about how he thought, if he was missing half of his shots at 200 meters, then he should be trying to shoot from 200 meters more often, not moving to 100 meters where he knew he could hit the target. He was still a cocky kid who didn't get it. Wetwork wasn't about being cool, about making the most impressive trick shots: it was about paying the bills and buying the groceries.

Blue Collar really got the feeling that Seventeen thought, if he got deep enough into the bloody underworld of assassins, normal people problems like taxes and hunger would just disappear.

"What?" Seventeen said, defensively.

Blue Collar looked down at his food, and scooped up a final decent mouthful of fried rice. He'd been staring at the kid, worriedly, a moment too long—trying to figure out if he'd put on any weight at all under that baggy windbreaker in the few months since Blue Collar had taken him under his wing. "Nothing. Just marveling at how you get that straw under your baby bib."

Seventeen huffed and tugged at his bandana self-consciously.

"Jakobs is fine," Blue Collar said, grudgingly. "And it's important that whatever guns you use feel natural to you. But they're a lot harder to work with. High recoil, low firing speed, incredibly noisy..."

"Kills in one shot."

"When you're lucky. And when you aren't, it's that much harder to get the second shot off." Seventeen moved as if to retort, and Blue Collar waved him off. "But if you're committed, you're committed. I get it—some guns feel right. Just know that it's gonna make some jobs harder than they have to be—and be ready to compensate for that."

"I like a challenge." Seventeen picked up an egg roll in one hand and used it to point. "You know I do, Blue Collar. I'm gonna be fine." He held the tip of his bandana out of the way with his free hand, and took a bite.

Blue Collar shook his head. "Edgy little shit," he said affectionately. Seventeen flipped him off.

Blue Collar reached into one of his many pockets, tossed a few bucks on the table, and pulled out a pen. "Listen, I know you don't have your own ECHO unit." He smoothed out his discarded chopsticks wrapper and scribbled a frequency along the length of it. "But if anything happens to you, you find one, and you call me, all right?" He pushes the wrapper over. "This isn't normal in our line, I want you to know. Don't know about other planets, but that's how hitmen work around here: we don't interfere with each other, we don't hunt each other, but we don't help each other, either. It's a lonely profession."

Seventeen picked up the wrapper and looked at it.

"I don't want it to be lonely for you."

Seventeen looked up at him.

"Listen." Blue Collar leaned forward, voice hushed, looking Seventeen in the goggles. "You're new at this. And I like you. I kinda see you like a..." He wrestled with whether "little brother" was fitting, decided "little sister" was straight out, and settled on "... a younger sibling, to me. I wanna help you out when I can." He smiled tiredly. "I'm not gonna be in this business much longer—might be nice to pass on what I know before I quit."

Seventeen looked down at the wrapper again. And then said, so quietly and low that his voice modulator almost distorted the words out of recognition, "Thank you."

###

It was about one in the morning when Blue Collar was stirred by his ECHO unit's buzzing. He groaned, slapped at his bedside table until he picked it up, and stared at it.

Unknown number, no name, just a one word text message:

«Run.»

He stared at it, tried and failed to recognize the number, then let his head drop back on his pillow.

Then bolted out of bed. You work in a dangerous business, somebody you don't know tells you to run, you do it. He had on his coveralls, a work boot, and a random tool belt before he even thought to wonder who'd messaged him.

It was probably Seventeen. Not many other people had his private frequency, and all of them he knew the numbers of. (Didn't have them saved in his ECHO unit—didn't want somebody to get a hold of it and start hunting down the few people he liked—but he'd recognize the numbers by sight.) Seventeen was the only one who might call him from an unknown frequency.

Even though Blue Collar had given him the number in case of emergency, all these weeks he'd expected that if he got a call, it'd be because Seventeen was the one in trouble. Not that he minded the head's up. He was gonna have to thank the kid, once he shook whatever was coming for him.

With a small Tediore pistol in one of his larger pockets and a Pangolin shield weighing heavily on his back, he climbed out the window onto the fire escape with a grunt of exertion and started climbing down.

It was raining heavily. Some high-end Pangolins could keep the rain out along with the bullets. Blue Collar could afford one, but hadn't wanted to make himself so conspicuous, with each raindrop bouncing off and illuminating the invisible shield in electric blue snowflake patterns, so he used a cheaper model. He was glad he had, now, with who-knew-who—police? a corporate assassin?—hunting him in the dark; but he was already soaked and cold by the time he reached the ground. One way, towards a main street, he could see huge sprays of water being kicked up in the lamplight by nighttime truckers. He went the other way, deeper into the darkness.

He felt like he was being followed. Was he, or was that just paranoia? How close was whatever he was supposed to be running from? He checked his ECHO unit, but there was no new info. Just Seventeen's warning. Damn, where was Seventeen? Was he okay?

He'd prepared his escape routes years ago, as soon as he'd moved into this apartment. It's harder to kill in a crowd; harder to find your target, harder to separate and eliminate them. A couple blocks away was a dance club, near it was a bus stop; if he could get into the club, he could stay there until it closed, then slip onto the three a.m. bus with the other tired clubbers going home. The bus would take him to a hub where he could grab a train heading out of town in a random direction.

The ATM near the club only let him take out $1500. That and the hundred bucks in his pocket would have to hold him; he didn't know how sophisticated the people after him were, whether they could track his spending or withdrawals. He'd be working in cash for a while.

There was a short line to get into the club, huddled up against the front wall for the meager shelter of the roof's slight overhang. Cargo trucks came down this street less often than the street in front of Blue Collar's apartment, but every time they did, a pair of kids in a miniskirt and skintight pleather jeans squealed as they were sprayed with water. Blue Collar just shuddered with cold. He kept his back to the club's front wall, squinting, looking for any odd shapes moving in the night shadows.

A thick door opened for the pair in front, and Blue Collar caught a few seconds of throbbing dubstep before it swung shut. Sounded like a remix of a lawnmower. He stepped up to the bouncer.

The bouncer was a massive muscled man dressed in the same mix of matte black and slick neon as the clubbers coming in, but his hair was thinning and he looked closer to Blue Collar's age than to the pleather-clad kids who went in before him. He looked Blue Collar's soggy work clothes up and down, clasped his hands together in front of his belt, and said, "I'm not sure this place is your scene, man."

"I just need a roof over my head for a few minutes," he said, smiling a well-practiced smile, like a mild-mannered salt-of-the-earth construction-and/or-factory worker. "It's pouring out here."

"There's a cover."

"I know, that's fine," Blue Collar said; and then, when the bouncer still looked skeptical, he lowered his voice. "Listen. I'm being followed. I just need to get out of the open."

The bouncer tipped his head up slightly in understanding; then unfolded one of his hands, palm up. Blue Collar shoved fifty dollars in. "I'll give you another if I get out of here alive." Just to head off anyone else trying to bribe the bouncer.

"No worries. It's my job to stop fights." He stuffed the money in one pocket and pushed open the door. "Come on in." His words were almost lost under the thudding bass.

Blue Collar paid his cover and wandered into the darkness and flashing colored lights. A few strobe lights pointed straight in his face, and he blinked hard, trying to clear the spots from his eyes so he could see in the club.

His dark brown coveralls and salt-and-pepper hair didn't exactly fit in with the crowd; but they didn't stand out across the room, either. The crowd was made up of rainbow neon hair—every hue from pitch black to lightning white. Dark clothes with colorful strips designed to reflect the lights and dazzle the eye. Flashing LED-like pictures blinked on and off in front of the faces and over the heads of the dancers, :) and <3 and ☆ and 愛, in green and red and blue, courtesy of prosthetic optical implants or temporary body mods stickers that could be slapped on your forehead. Anyone who wasn't making an effort to stand out would blend into the shadows. Blue Collar waded onto the dance floor, found a narrow gap between a few clustered circles of dancers where he wouldn't get in their way but wouldn't visibly stand out as on his own, and grit his teeth against the garbage disposal roar of music as he tried to figure out what to do next.

It would help if he had the slightest idea what was after him. If it was somebody pissed over a kill, someone's grieving family, he might need to move a town over—or maybe only get a hotel out of town for a few days until the funeral was over. If somebody was getting paid to find him, though, they'd keep coming; he might need to get off planet. If only Seventeen had sent him more info...

One song ended, and the next began: something with a light drum machine and synthesized instruments and an artificially high-pitched singer, repetitive but much easier to think through. Dammit, Seventeen—that was a factor Blue Collar hadn't even considered. He was probably tangled up in this somehow—how had he found out there was something Blue Collar needed to run from? What if they'd taken him hostage? Or were trying to get info out of him? He couldn't leave town without making sure Seventeen was okay. How was he going to check Seventeen's usual haunts while avoiding being seen by anyone expecting him to do just that?

Blue Collar didn't consciously notice that the music sounded like it was building toward something, the singing halting and the drums speeding up, until suddenly it paused and the whole club seemed to hang in anticipation; and then the bass slammed down like a bomb dropping. Something whizzed through the air beside Blue Collar's temple. In front of him, he saw the back of a dancer's head explode, and the body pitched forward.

He'd automatically crouched down before he figured out what he'd seen. Shit! They were audacious, whoever they were. He turned, peering between backs and upper arms in search of anyone who stood out, looking up at the crowds at the bar and tables that circled the room a few steps higher than the dance floor. The bouncer wouldn't have let someone in who looked suspicious, right? Or maybe they'd offered the bouncer more than fifty bucks. Or maybe the bouncer was dead. The first screams started up behind Blue Collar, where the dancer had been shot. He zigzagged through the crowd, heading toward the front, unwilling to exit through a back door and risk getting trapped in a dead end, hoping he could escape ahead of the crowd and the hitman.

He wasn't the first out the door, but he was close. He glanced back as people trickled and then poured screaming out of the club, looking for anyone who stood out—fingering the pistol in his pocket as he did. Nothing but kids in black clothes and flashes of color. He backed away from the door, watching as he went, heading toward the safe shadows of another alleyway.

Blue Collar had scanned over the same figure in the crowd three times, before recognition hit him: he knew those reflective red goggles, and the ski mask around them, and the black windbreaker beneath. His heart leaped into his throat and his stomach dropped. Oh, please no. Not Seventeen.

He was looking at Blue Collar. He flipped up his windbreaker's hood against the rain, and stalked through the panicked crowd, unnoticed, toward Blue Collar.

Blue Collar turned and ran.

Hitmen don't hunt hitmen. Not on this planet, anyway—not unless they're in a corporation's pocket. Had Seventeen gotten a job with a big biz? Even now, running panting through the pouring rain, Blue Collar hoped for Seventeen that he had—corporate assassination was steady work, the kind that came with benefits and could carry you through to retirement if you weren't executed during a merger—but why would they send him after Blue Collar? He made a point to only take personal jobs, rarely political ones; he never messed with business. Why—?

A midnight trucker with a malfunctioning muffler roared past, thunderously loud; a bullet slammed into the back of his head, pounding on his shield. The shield spread the shock of the impact across his entire upper back, but it was enough to bring him to his knees, one hand landing just past the curb in wrist-deep water. He couldn't get up before a heavy combat boot kicked his back, knocking him to the ground as it ripped his shield off. The Pangolin clattered into the road.

"Disappointing."

Blue Collar rolled onto his back, huffing, and looked up at Seventeen. "What the hell are you doing?"

"My job." He pulled out a Jakobs revolver, a cheap thing with the faux wood paneling on the barrel already rubbing off the corners.

"Who?" Blue Collar demanded. "Who hired you, kid? How much?"

He jerked one shoulder in a shrug. "Somebody's cousin. Job you did a month ago. Couple hundred bucks?"

That was all Blue Collar's life was worth to Seventeen? He laughed wheezily. "Damn, kid, you're never gonna make it big taking high-risk low-pay jobs like that. Lord..." He reached slowly into a pocket; Seventeen's aim jerked to follow his hand, but Blue Collar waved him off, grumbling, "You know that's my wallet pocket." Seventeen lowered the Jakobs, but only slightly. Blue Collar pulled out his wallet, pushed himself up with one hand, and held the wallet up to Seventeen. "Here. Damn. I've got fifteen hundred on me."

Seventeen made a disgusted noise. He'd set his dumb voice modulator so low it sounded like a dog growling. "I don't want money."

"No, I know you don't, but you need it." Seventeen didn't move. Blue Collar shook the wallet. "Take it even if you're gonna shoot me. What am I gonna do with it?"

Seventeen hesitated. Then crouched down, snatched the wallet angrily from Blue Collar, and stuffed it in his back pocket. "Moron."

Blue Collar sank back to the wet concrete, holding himself up with both elbows, fingers of one hand dragging in the water below the curb. "You don't wanna do this."

"I do," Seventeen said, sullenly.

"You don't. I know you don't. You wouldn't have sent me that text if you really wanted to finish the job," Blue Collar said. "You couldn't bring yourself to turn down the job but you couldn't bring yourself to do it clean and quick like you should." He smiled shakily. "Don't do something you're gonna regret. You want me to escape."

"I want a challenge." He snarled it so emphatically that he lurched forward with the word. "I wanted to make this hard! I wanted a hunt!"

Blue Collar's stomach dropped again, the way it had when he'd first seen Seventeen in the crowd. Suddenly, sinkingly, he felt like he'd deeply misunderstood his gaunt young protégé. "Wha—Why? Why?"

"Because you're a pro, you're supposed to be badass. You should be a threat!" Anguished, desperate, water flying off the barrel of his revolver as he waved it, vocal modulator fritzing with static, Seventeen cried, "I'm bored, Blue Collar! Every job's so damn easy! I need a challenge!"

Blue Collar had misjudged him. Seventeen wasn't out there making tricky one shot kills out of pride, taking high-risk jobs out of arrogance; he was a junkie. He had the skinniness of a guy who gave up on food in search of a fix; he was trembling, right now, in front of Blue Collar, like he was going into withdrawal without enough stimulation to get his adrenaline pumping.

No wonder all Blue Collar's talk of Tediore, talk of safe and stable and secure, had flown right over him. He didn't want any of that. He didn't want the money. He didn't want to make a living. He wanted all the jobs he could get.

Blue Collar could hear a truck approaching from behind him. Seventeen glanced at it, then held up the Jakobs again, pointed it at Blue Collar's head. Seventeen had taken his advice, about how damn loud those Jakobs guns were; he was using the noise around him to cover up his shots.

"I'm really sorry." Seventeen's eyes weren't on Blue Collar as he prepared to kill him. Blue Collar saw the reflection of the truck's headlights in his goggles. "This was supposed to be hard. You should've fought back."

A moment before the truck passed, Blue Collar swept his hand through the water beside the curb, sending a spray into Seventeen's face. Seventeen reeled back, sputtering and rubbing his goggles on one sleeve; Blue Collar kicked one of Seventeen's feet out from under him, knocking him sprawling headfirst in the street. Blue Collar rolled over, stood, and ran as the truck honked and swerved. He didn't stop to see whether it hit Seventeen.

He crossed the street, waved at another cargo truck coming his way, standing directly in its path; it slammed the breaks, but kept skidding in the rain, and Blue Collar had to dive to the sidewalk to avoid being hit. The driver banged the cab door open and circled around the truck. "The hell do you think you're doing?!" she bellowed. She was waving a knife, a four-inch glowing blue digistructed blade extending from a solid handle, that sizzled where the rain hit it.  "Middle of the night, pouring rain, I coulda—" Blue Collar pointed his Tediore at her before he'd even gotten to his feet. She stopped in the middle of the street. "Whoa—okay, buddy, look—I didn't mean to almost hit you, let's be..."

"Back in the truck," he said hoarsely. With some difficulty, he got to his feet. "I need a ride."

He didn't say another word except "Knife, down," until the truck was moving again, heading down the street and picking up speed. "I'm sorry about this, ma'am," he said tersely. "There's a guy back there trying to kill me. Didn't have time to call a cab."

Her gaze flicked to a side mirror, then back to Blue Collar's gun, then forward again. "Would this have to do with the truck that was stopped in the middle of the road back there?"

Blue Collar nodded grimly. "With any luck, he's under its tires." It stung his heart to say that.

She nodded. "Okay. I get it. I'm sympathetic to that." She glanced at Blue Collar. "Now that we're all on the same side—do you mind pointing that somewhere else?"

He hesitated. "You're not going to go for that knife?" Its handle was in a cup holder in the center console between their seats.

"I'm not stupid."

He lowered the gun to point at his footwell. "Yeah. All right." He flopped his head back against his seat, and sighed.

Something crashed into the truck from the driver's side. The trucker swore and swerved.

Blue Collar fell sideways over the cup holder. "What the hell—" 

A second impact. Blue Collar braced one arm against the driver's seat, the other hand fumbled on the center console for something to grab onto, and he looked out her window. "Oh, my god." Slowly pulling level with them was another truck—with Seventeen crouched on the hood, one hand on the roof of the cab and the other pointing his revolver through the window. 

Blue Collar didn't have time to warn the trucker, didn't have time to do anything but gasp. The first bullet hit his shoulder, and the arm supporting him collapsed; two more shots, a pained scream; the truck veered off the road. When it crashed, Blue Collar's back slammed into the windshield, shattering it, and he tumbled down the hood to land on the ground. The rain poured on his face. He heard the other truck skid and crash a moment later.

He could hear Seventeen laugh—harsh, breathless, exhilarated.

Seventeen took his time coming to Blue Collar's side. When he was in view, Blue Collar could see why; he was limping, one arm wrapped tight around his chest, moving gingerly with pain. "Five shots on one job." He checked the ammo in his cylinder, then clicked it back in place. "Only one left for your head." He dropped uncoordinatedly to his knees and held the revolver to Blue Collar's forehead, apparently too unsteady to feel confident of making the shot from a distance. "Can one-fanged snakes kill?"

With a roar, Blue Collar lunged up, activated the trucker's digistruct knife, and slammed the blade through Seventeen's left goggle lens.

He didn't scream when he fell back. He just sucked in a breath, like he was shocked—maybe scared. Blue Collar hated the sound of it. Damn stupid, ungrateful, self-destructive kid. If Blue Collar had realized sooner what it was he was looking for, what desperation was gripping him—maybe he could've helped him out better, maybe they could have found a way to get him whatever it was he needed.

Voice tight with pain, Seventeen croaked, "Well-fought, badass." He raised his revolver one last time.

The Jakobs was the loudest thing Blue Collar had ever heard.

###

"God, no, I don't actually enjoy Maliwan snipers." Mordecai waved off the suggestion with one arm, briefly startling Talon off his perch on his shoulder. "Sorry." He waved at Talon, calling him back down, then settled back slouching in his rickety folding chair overlooking the rolling Highlands below. "I just like 'em for the utility. There's nothing more satisfying than a headshot with a Jakobs—"

"Yes," Zer0 said emphatically, their back ramrod straight where they sat on the ground beside Mordecai. "Exactly."

"See, you get it!" Mordecai laughed. "But when you're working fast—and me, Lil, and Brick, sometimes we've gotta work fast—most efficient thing to do is have a guy out of the line of fire to slag targets as fast as possible so the guys on the ground can pick them off. And the only guy in our group with that skill..." He pointed a thumb at himself. "Seen you hauling around some Maliwan rifles, too. Same reason?"

Zer0 sighed in frustratin, nodding. "Our skills are wasted," they said. "Anyone can slag and spray. One shot kills are art."

"Yeah?" Mordecai grinned crookedly. "You think so? Me, an artist, huh."

"Mm." Zer0 nodded, inordinately pleased to have gotten that smile out of the more experienced sniper.

They'd been told, years and years ago, that assassination was a lonely profession. Blue Collar had been right. Small interludes like this, when Zer0 could get out of their own head—break the monotonous cycle of long waits and unsatisfying jobs between the rare real thrill kills—were a blessing and a relief. Almost enough to keep them sane.

"Hey, we should hang more," Mordecai said, clapping a hand on Zer0's shoulder. Zer0 stiffened, but found they minded the uninvited contact much less than they expected to. "Don't get a lot of other good snipers around here—or even folks that appreciate me as a sniper instead of just 'the support guy with the slag.' What do you think? I know some good spires in the Dust that let you see for miles around. We can pick off spiderants—I wanna see how far you can really shoot."

An LED red smiley flashed out of their prosthetic left eye. "Sounds fun."

Mordecai got to his feet, considered the folding chair, then decided either nobody would steal it or it wasn't worth preserving. "I'm heading back to Sanctuary. You coming?"

"Later," Zer0 said. "Gotta drive around."

###

Once every few days, when they didn't have enough to shoot and found themself walking along the roofs of Sanctuary on windy days just for the meager thrill of trying not to fall, Zer0 took their technical on a long circuit through Pandora, checking out every single bounty board they could find. They bounced over hard tundra roads and unevenly packed sandy highways so fast it physically hurt, using the speed to distract them from the itch for something to do.

They were bored, god they were bored. It was the kind of boredom that crushed you, suffocated you, like a heavy weight pinning down your chest while you writhed and clawed at the dirt trying to get out from under it. They could feel the boredom sucking on the inside of their chest, threatening to form a black hole in the pit of their abdomen. Their hands shook and their feet bounced, trying to shake off the boredom. It didn't abate. In their heart, Zer0 knew that this boredom was going to kill them someday.

They circled from one bounty board to the next, like a junkie looking for a dealer, looking for a fix to stave off the boredom. Anything, anything—exterminate a skag den, deliver a package, go to a birthday party—anything. 

Finally, at the Happy Pig bounty board, Zer0 found an illuminated yellow sign. They pushed down the gas, although they were already going as fast as they could, and leaped out of the technical before it stopped rolling. It crashed into the motel room with the weird altar for human sacrifices. The cultists would have to set up a new firepit.

They flipped through the offered jobs—package delivery, package pickup, take down a local bandit—and then stopped. And they stared.

They felt cold.

«Reward for anybody who brings down the cheating S.O.B. known as Mordecai. Originally from Artemis, last seen with a pack of vault-hunting bandits on Pandora...»

They couldn't move. They re-read the bounty, hoping that the name would change.

It didn't.

They thought of shooting contests in the desert, of long debates about rifle features and sniping techniques, of how the hours melted by comfortably and steadily in friendly company. They thought of Mordecai's breathtakingly infallible aim. They thought of their modest home in Sanctuary—and of Sanctuary's defenses. They thought of the people they considered mutual friends—the powerful people, so very powerful, who would come to Mordecai's defense. They thought of what it would be like to lose those friends—they thought of what it would be like to gain them as opponents.

They thought about the boredom sucking them inside out.

They stared hard at the bounty, until the letters swam together and the reward was a string of digits.

Then they turned to look at Sanctuary.

###

Comments/reblogs are welcome! If you want to leave a tip or like the fic on AO3, the links are in my description!

[douxreviews]

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - ‘Hippocratic Oath’ Review

Bashir: "We are dealing with a complex situation here." O'Brien: "No, it is not complex. It is simple."

By nature I love brevity: DS9 continues to make use of the pairing of O'Brien and Bashir, here delivering an interesting character study of both men. But it's also a far more unlikely character study of the Jem'Hadar.

Let me start by laying out the situation. O'Brien and Bashir are made to crash land on a remote planet in the Gamma Quadrant on their way home from a bio-survey of Merik III. When they exit the runabout, they are captured by a squad of Jem'Hadar soldiers. The Jem'Hadar First, Goran'Agar, initially intends to kill them both, but decides not to when Bashir reveals he is a doctor. It turns out Goran'Agar crash-landed on the planet three years ago, and when he ran out of Ketracel-White, he discovered that he was no longer addicted to the drug. Now he wants Bashir to figure out how to free his other soldiers from their addictions to the White.

Obviously, Bashir and O'Brien have very different reactions to this situation. Bashir wants to help Goran'Agar to cure his men, and O'Brien simply wants to escape and leave the Jem'Hadar to fend for themselves. Both of these approaches are so very in character for the two.

One of Bashir's defining characteristics is his arrogance, as we all know. But his arrogance is channeled by the redeeming parts of his character: his kindness and charity, and his overwhelming optimism about the world. This is what makes him such an interesting character to watch, and his response to Goran'Agar's plight is right in line with it. Not only is he kind and generous enough to want to help the Jem'Hadar, he is arrogant enough to believe that he is capable of doing it, and he is optimistic enough to believe that the Jem'Hadar will respond to their freedom in a constructive way.

In stark contrast to this is O'Brien's harsh, down-to-earth realism. This conflicts with all of Bashir's relevant traits in such a way as to give him the opposite viewpoint. Part of this is that O'Brien was once a soldier. As the Federation edges ever closer to open war with the Dominion, his warrior instincts are coming back to the forefront of his mind, and he approaches any situation involving the enemy from a soldier's perspective. And O'Brien's soldier's perspective tells him that nothing good will come out of a situation like this, one way or the other. It tells him that they need to get out as quickly as possible to avoid worse consequences.

But this is not the only set of conflicting values that 'Hippocratic Oath' presents us with. The other one, at least in this main story, is between Goran'Agar and his soldiers, represented by Second Arak'Taral. Goran'Agar's experience of slowly discovering that his core beliefs about himself are now wrong has made him disillusioned about all he has been taught. He is questioning all of his beliefs that he was given by the Founders and the Vorta. Even his gods have fallen in his eyes. The problem is that, as a Jem'Hadar, his entire worldview has been shaped by them, and reinforced by all his Jem'Hadar brethren who believe the same way. At the end of the day, he is still a Jem'Hadar. Can he separate himself from the Ketracel-White? Yes. But can he escape the influence of the Founders and the Vorta? No, it turns out he cannot. They are his gods, impersonal and distant though they may be. And he cannot bring himself to disbelieve everything he has believed for his entire life.

But his efforts to leave the shadow of the Dominion put him at odds with Arak'Taral and the rest of his men, who are still addicted to the White and thus still buy in almost completely to the worldview they have been programmed with. To question these ideals is perceived as weak to their eyes, and weakness is to be expunged. Only the strong are of worth, because worth is derived entirely from one's service to the Founders. If you can't serve the Founders anymore because you are weak, it is better that you are dead. But they are willing to follow Goran'Agar to some extent, because he is their First and that is the order of things. As the White disappears, this willingness slowly goes too, along with their sanity.

All these clashing perspectives come to a head in the conclusion. Bashir, true to form, wants to stay and try and finish his work. But his arrogant optimism is still tempered by reality, so O'Brien removes his last reason for being optimistic. Was he right to do so? The episode doesn't say. Certainly, Bashir's perspective is portrayed as naive, even though it was legitimately dealt with. But O'Brien is wrong, too - this is a much more complex situation than his perspective will allow. This is one of the things I love about DS9: its readiness to not give you all the answers and to allow you to draw your own conclusions.

There's a 'B' plot here, to drive home the point about complexity and shades of gray. I don't have a lot to say about it, except that it uses Worf well. Fans will be used to seeing Worf alongside the TNG crew, and on TNG terms. 'Hippocratic Oath' cements the reality that Worf, and by extension the fans, will have to learn to play by DS9's rules here. It's good to have Worf take a few episodes to learn this, and it makes sense on both an in-universe and a real-world level. Simple judgments, such as Worf's initial assessment of Odo, are no longer necessarily accurate. We are dealing, as Bashir aptly puts it, with a complex situation here. Good and evil aren't black-and-white anymore. Welcome to DS9, Worf.

Strange New Worlds:

The planet is never given a name. It is uninhabited and in the Gamma Quadrant somewhere between the wormhole and Merik III. It orbits a red giant, but there is an unexpectedly high concentration of chlorophyll in the plants. It is never made clear whether the planet was actually responsible for Goran'Agar's freedom from White addiction.

New Life and New Civilizations:

The mercenary Worf is after, Regana Tosh, is a Markalian. This, as far as I can find, is the first canonical mention of the species' name, although members of it appeared many times before this episode.

Pensees:

-I love the new theme equally to the old one. This one suits the show DS9 is becoming better, and the old one suited the first few seasons.

-Worf never calls Quark by name in this episode, referring to him only as 'the Ferengi bartender.'

-After taking a prominent role in 'The Visitor,' Cirroc Lofton's Jake Sisko does not appear in this episode.

-This is the first mention of Ketracel-White by name.

-Goran'Agar is played by Scott MacDonald, who has had a few other Trek roles. His most famous was Dolim in Enterprise Season Three. I'll get there eventually in my reviews of Enterprise so we can talk about him.

-This is the third DS9 episode directed by Rene Auberjonois, after Season 3's 'Prophet Motive' and 'Family Business.'

Quotes:

O'Brien: "Why can't she be more like..." Bashir: "More like?" O'Brien: "Well, a man. More like a man." Bashir: "So... you wish... Keiko was a man." O'Brien: "I wish I was on this trip with someone else, that's what I wish."

Bashir: "I'm just surprised." Goran'Agar: "Surprised that a Jem'Hadar soldier would want something more than the life of a slave? You know nothing about the Jem'Hadar, except that you fear us."

Wounded Jem'Hadar: "You know the rule. If the death of one will make the rest stronger, then he dies." Goran'Agar: "We came here to be free of the Vorta. It is time to stop living by their rules."

Goran'Agar: "I have fought against races that believe in mythical beings who guide their destinies and await them after death. They call them gods. The Founders are like gods to the Jem'Hadar. But our gods never talk to us, and they don't wait for us after death. They only want us to fight for them and to die for them."

Arak'Taral: "If being free of White means becoming like you, I don't want to be cured."

Goran'Agar: "You are a soldier?" O'Brien: "I have been." Goran'Agar: "Then you explain." O'Brien: "He's their commander. They trusted him. He can't leave them."

Worf: "When I served aboard the Enterprise, I always knew who were my allies and who were my enemies." Sisko: "Let's just say DS9 has more shades of gray, and Quark definitely is a shade of gray."

O'Brien: "I'm sorry I had to destroy your work." Bashir: "You didn't have to, Chief. You had a choice, and you chose to disobey orders, override my judgement, and condemn those men to death." O'Brien: "Yes I did. Because I thought it was the only way to save your life. Whatever else you may think of who I am and what I did, at least try to understand that."

5 out of 6 clashing perspectives.

CoramDeo thinks he won the Powerball. Pshoooo.

[sapphic-scylla]

Destcember 5th 2018-Prompt #4-“Little Joys”

(This one was a little more personal for me. Enjoy!)

A steady breath. Tunnel vision. Hypersensitive energy reverberated around him. Not a sound.

*pshoooo*

*Shpffff*

“Grlllllllll!” A Fallen captain yelled as he witnessed his vandal friend get his head blown clean off.

“Come on, Devrim, give me a hard target! I’m not here for basic training!” Cassus laughed.

“I’m just getting you warmed up.” He said in that British sassy tone of his. As he looked back down his scope, he mildly frowned. “Bugger...those scavengers hightailed it. Guess we’ll have to wait for the next group.” Devrim said, leaning back.

“That’s fine. I needed a warm drink anyways.” Cassus agreed.

It was beginning to chill a bit in the EDZ. Frost covered the ground, wind started biting at people who had skin, which was not him, but he hated the cold anyways. Sapphire, strangely enough, was “tired” and was taking a nap in my backpack. He didn’t know ghosts got tired. As he set down his Supremacy next to him, he pulled out some flint and steel.

“Dev, shame on you. You let our little hot drink kettle burn out again. How am I supposed to have hot chocolate with ice water?” Cass teased.

“You know bloody well I’m not in charge of our stove. Perhaps, you could use those fancy knives of yours.” Devrim retorted.

Cass laughed. “Dev, if I lit the stove with one of my knives, it would make the San Francisco fire look like a cigarette lighter.”

Dev chuckled. “Please don’t. I like my crow’s nest.”

As the water boiled, Cass sat next to him on the couch. “Dev, can I ask you an honest question?” He said, turning a little more serious. “And can you keep this between us?”

“Of course, old friend. You may be coming up on 130 years living, but you are technically still 25.” Devrim responded.

“Ok...um...what did you do when you found out you were gay?” Cassus asked, nervous.

Devrim sensed his anxiety and, like always, read the situation perfectly. “Well, not much changed, but then again, I’m not a guardian. What brought this on?”

“I guess...”. Why was he still talking? The Cassus he used to be never opened up to anyone.

“All these years I’ve been alive and I never really felt like I fit in. I felt awkwardly in between a lot of things. Lately, I’ve been trying to figure myself out and realized that there are a lot of things that don’t necessarily matter as much as they used to when I was growing up.” Cass spilled out.

“Are you saying you’re bisexual, Cass?” Dev responded in an inquisitive yet respectful tone.

“I’m saying I’m pansexual, Dev. Like, I’m still picky about who I trust, but love is purely about the person, not the...well, you know.” Cass responded.

“I feel another question coming on.” Dev said, stirring his tea as Cass dunked 16 marshmallows into his hot cocoa. And yes, he had counted.

“Well, who should I tell? I mean, I don’t want to feel like I’m hiding a decent part of who I am from people, but what if they see me differently. I know we’re all like gods and such, but I want to feel...I don’t know...a part of something...”

Devrim thought while he sipped his tea. “Well, let’s put it this way. If someone you don’t really know was aware of this about you, would it affect you?”

Cass thought hard. “Not necessarily.”

Dev sipped again. “What about a family member?”

Cass looked up from his shyness. “Well yeah, I would, but it wouldn’t change me.”

Devrim grinned. “Well, then there is your answer. The point I’m trying to make is that even immortality like yours is still going to feel short. Acting on the little joys of discovering yourself over and over again is part of the human experience. You still are human, Cass, even though you are made of steel now. Are you going to weigh yourself down with what everyone else thinks or keep learning more about yourself every day?” Devrim finished.

“You’re right, Devrim.” Cass said warmly smiling.

“Damn right I’m right. And bugger off to those people who think they have you pinned down because you’re dating a Queen.” Dev said.

“Dev, get out of the church. Very few people know about that.” Cass said, surprised.

“You talk a lot when we do our drinking games.” Dev said, without an ounce of regret on his face.

“Jesus...” Cass said.

“Be you, Cass. If people don’t believe you, then they aren’t important.” Devrim reassured him, finishing off his tea.

“I enjoy our little chats, Dev.” Cass said, feeling much more proud of himself than he was five minutes ago.

“Cheers, my young metal friend, cheers.” Devrim said.

[rabidwerewolfie]

PSHOOOO!!!!

[pinkfloralcake]

pshooo pshoooo my drawing program crashed twice on inktober #13...