Noises at Night (11-7-22)
Hank could hear the dragging and thumping outside. It was keeping him awake. He sat up, scared out his mind, at an especially loud thump, near his window. Hank frowned, slightly fearful, and unable to go to sleep.
"T-Theodore?" He looked towards the other side of the room he shared with his friend. Theodore was sound asleep, unaffected by the noise. Hank's mind immediately went to the story George had told the day prior, about Kamel, the ghoul of Big Harbor. He could feel something watching him, as he quietly got out of bed. Hank didn't dare turn and look at the window, for fear that Kamel would be there, staring unseeing ahead with empty black sockets.
As he soundlessly made his way down the hall, he passed Rebecca's room. Her reading lamp was on, which meant she was awake.
"Rebecca?" He knocked lightly on her door, and waited. The door opened, and he rushed inside.
"Hank, what's the matter?" Rebecca asked, as Hank tightly clung to her. He told her about the noise, and George's story and Kamel. She hugged him.
"Cherub," She murmured, stroking his hair. "Those are just stories. Kamel, has been dead for a long time."
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Half the jobs Fox is sent on are not within his jurisdiction. This certainly isn’t.
Planetary protection unit, they said. Military police. Orbital security force.
And now Fox is being pointed at Count Dooku on some backwater planet and told to fetch. How the mighty have fallen.
He’s pretty sure Kenobi, Skywalker and their units could’ve karked this all up perfectly fine on their lonesome; they don’t need three Guardsmen there to watch them do it. But the Chancellor says jump and Fox surpressed the urge to bash his head in with a durasteel chair. So it goes.
Which is when things start going terribly, terribly wrong, of course.
“Is that Spinder?!”, Skywalker exclaims, arms wheeling out in the air wildly to try and catch his balance. “The Count fucks?!”
Across the room, Cody rips his helmet off, several shades redder than a baseline human should be. “The Count fucks my brother?!”
Two lightsticks hover uselessly in the air, Skywalker’s zig-zagging in a relentless hum with his gesturing. Fox stands stock-still, in the hope that maybe he’ll spontaneously turn invisible if he does. Around them, 501st and 212th troopers gape through helmets. Behind him, Nuisance gasps for air amidst screaming laughter.
Ping, went Fox’s comm unit, in that unmistakeable lascivious jingle sound. Ping, answered Count Dooku’s within a split second. Match found close by.
For a moment, Fox considers what it would be like to run at the Count’s lightsaber at full speed.
…not like that.
“Count”, Kenobi says, with a face like he’s bitten into a rotten fruit. Not that Fox knows what fruit tastes like. “This is a highly… unexpected development.” He fwoosh-es his lightsaber shut, obviously having given up on fighting. “I’d call it a conflict of interest, but I’m not sure that applies?”
“Oh, it’s gonna be a conflict of something, for sure”, Cody hisses, fists clenched at his sides. He looks about ready to boil over, with Crys and Waxer inching closer in preparation. “What have you done to my brother, you monster?!”
“I don’t think you want to know that, Commander”, Nuisance gasps out between barks of laughter, proving why he’s eternally Fox’s least favourite. Cody’s splotchy red complexion slowly fades into ghostly white as a sheen of horror settles over the room. “Thanks for the fancy chocolate bouquet last week, Count!”
Dooku, who has been thus far staring at the floor with an empty thousand-klick stare, looks up at that. Fox has seldom seen a man that defeated outside of the mirror, he has to admit - but shudders when he remembers exactly what the chocolates were for.
Oh Force, he’s sexted Count Dooku into buying him gifts. Does that make him a Seppie spy? Traitor by proxy?
“I feel”, says the Count, gravely, still holding his long red laserknife in a white-knuckled death-grip, “that I have been taken for a fool.”
“Uh”, says Fox, nervously. All eyes snap to him. Oh Force, oh Force, oh Force. They’re going to invent a whole new kind of decommissioning for this and name it after Fox.
“Is it really scamming if you actually get what you pay for?”, asks Grids, considering. Fox slowly pulls off his helmet just for the comforting feeling of burying his head in his gloved palms. The sounds of a struggle ensue, and Kenobi makes a choked-off noise. Maybe if he’s embarrassed enough he’ll give himself an aneurysm.
“Grandmaster, why are you paying people for naked pictures of themselves on the holonet?!” Kenobi asks, despairingly. “Aren’t you a little old for that?”
“Oi, no one said I was naked!”, Fox exclaims, head whipping up.
“So naked”, Nuisance laughs, palm thumping against the floor. He might be crying.
“I’m not decrepit”, the Count blusters, and Skywalker makes a gagging noise. “I have - there are needs, and they are perfectly natural!” It takes three troopers to restrain Cody from launching himself at the Count.
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Local big sister experiences emotions, more at 6
Been wanting to do one of these with Lauren for AGES, but I never got round to it. Then I saw the Lydia and Phinium expression sheets on @littledigits’ website and I felt inspiration like never before.
The funniest struggle I have with Lauren’s design right now is that she nose too big for she got damn face. Literally, Hilda characters noses take up a fairly small portion of their faces, and her’s took up WAY too much, leaving little room for her to make facial expressions. But I struggled to find a fix because when I made the nose smaller it just didn’t look like Lauren anymore, so I took this as an opportunity to work on that!
She still has a larger nose than most characters, starting higher up (like her grandad!) and ending lower down (but not quite as low as before). I also made her eyes a little smaller and with a shape similar to Lydia’s (though you can see in some of these I hadn’t quite landed on that yet and her eyes are a bit too big), which works both as a nod to her parentage and because I think it makes the nose look bigger. This still doesn’t leave as much room for the mouth as most other characters, but that’s okay — Lauren is a very private person who keeps her feelings close to her chest, I think it works for her to have subtler expressions, adds to how guarded she is! Oh and I also updated the shape of her hair slightly, just to make it a bit more style accurate.
These changes are pretty small on their own, but I think combined they work well to make Lauren feel a lot more…alive? Far less stiff, anyway. I think she also has a more unique facial structure now, instead of just “what if Johanna was 90% nose”. She’s still got a big old nose and I love it but now she can emote, yay!
This is really all just concept stuff, I’m hoping to get a new fullbody style-ref for Lauren out soon! Now that I’ve improved the main issues I had with her face in the last ref, now it’s onto the silhouette! I want her to read as more of a strong character (though it comes across decently in her current ref, I wanna push it more without being as exaggerated as Ahlberg, which is. A challenge for me lol), streamline her silhouette, and finally make her taller than Johanna like she’s always meant to have been <3 I made her shorter for so long because I thought it would help her read better as her daughter but you know what? That’s dumb actually, she’s tall.
ANYWAYS, thank you for listening in on the annual Lauren redesign, and to the artists behind the show for posting so much amazing inspiring show stopping concept work for free because it makes my autism worse /pos
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I think it would be so funny if Nightmare had been going to Ccino's cafe for years and casually talking about his boys but Ccino thought they were cats the whole time.
Like I'm picturing at the start him describing Killer like "There's an overactive beast in my castle now, he shreds almost everything and gets distressed when I'm out of sight for too long" so obviously Ccino thinks he got a pet or something. He suggests maybe getting another one to keep him company so he won't be so clingy and Nightmare takes the idea on board.
Then the next time he comes in he's got a bone to pick (pun not intended), that he got another one - this one sleeps all day and hates doing work but they hate each other and won't stop fighting. Ccino nods along because he's been there before and kinda motions to some of his shop cats. "Whenever I bring a new one in here, I always introduce them slowly, you need to give everyone a chance to get used to each other y'know? Understand that the new one isn't a threat". Nightmare assumes he's just using the cats as a metaphor and also takes this in as good advice.
He comes in a while later telling Ccino how he got another one, introduced them more carefully like he said, but this one has a strange relationship with food. He goes on saying how he came from a place where there was very little so he understands, but it's hard manage his eating needs and the whole time Ccino is just really surprised Nightmare is taking in all these poorly stray cats.
He comes in to tell him he took in another one ("another one?? Nightmare, is this four now?" "(sigh) Yes") and he was all alone and such a pit of negativity Nightmare couldn't bring himself to leave him. How the others took to him much faster and he seems so much happier just to have a home again.
This has been going on for years and neither of them realise. Nightmare thinks Ccino is the most knowledgeable mortal out there because he always seems to know what his boys need. Ccino thinks Nightmare has a huge soft spot for 4 little cats who sound like the toughest pets in the multiverse.
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