#speed and direction sensor | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

keferon · 5 months ago

Note

Part 2 of Jazz and Prowl in space!

Gonna start calling it Odds of Survival.

Prowl loves entrusting his life to reckless strangers.

———————————————————————

Prowl pulled the release to the airlock and the music was swallowed by the vacuum of space.

Bursting forward, Jazz launched outwards riding the pop of escaping air. The first quintesson had its eye socket repurposed as an ankle bracelet before the second measure even began.

Ah.

Prowl probably should have specified he wanted to try speeding past rather than confront their opponents directly.

Jazz's improvised footwear writhed sluggishly before the mech twisted his ped inside its brain case, finishing it off and turning to face the next nearest opponent.

Odds of survival 26%

The white and blue mech launched himself upwards as the nearest quintesson went for a dive bomb. It's teeth breaking on impact with the sky bridge. Jazz twisted in midair.

They fell in slow motion, back arching against a starlit backdrop. An upside down visor met blue optics. Jazz nodded his head to the side, flicking one horn up and one horn down.

Did he just wink? (#^%)

The falling mech unsheathed a blade from his wrist, driving it through the sputtering quintesson.

Oh Primus has he been flirting the entire time?

Jazz spun, slicing into the next quint to close the distance.

I can not. I can not assume that was intentional. It has to be a cultural miscommunication.

The last two quintessons pounced. Swinging hard, Jazz caught one's jaws with a forearm while he kicked the downed another in the side of the head. The third was attempting to bite into his back but the teeth couldn't get a full purchase on the rounded compact plating.

Odds of survival 22%.

Prowl snapped out of his social etiquette downward spiral. Sprinting from the safety of the airlock door, he knelt behind a large section of external piping, lining up his shots.

Tacnet spun to work.

It was designed to calculate hundreds of possible variations of large scale engagements, including the number of soldiers, type of weaponry available and could even determine the approximate number of ammunitions that would be left over, provided Prowl had enough data at his disposal.

Calculating the marksmanship needed to dispatch three hostiles at medium range while distracted by a highly competent ally?

Odds of Survival 32%

Laughable.

Three shots burst through the thin atmosphere.

Quintesson wreckers were built thick skulled and stubborn. Luckily they came with easily identifiable gaps in their organic construction.

The Quints fell from Jazz, each with a smoking hole where and eye used to be. Jazz looked at Prowl, then the smoking quintessons and back up to Prowl before doing finger guns again.

Speaking of thick skulled and stubborn.

Prowl put on his best Commanders Scowl and pointed in the direction they needed to be currently running in.

Doorwing sensors hiked as he picked up on movement from behind. The incoming hostiles was palpable even in the moons thin atmosphere. Quintessons rarely favored stealth.

Prowl began running.

Jazz kept pace, half turned around to keep track of the incoming troop. Prowl kept his optics locked forward, not remotely willing to risk tripping on the torn apart path.

Tacnet locked on to a large silvery pillow that'd been exposed to the atmosphere.

Expanding LLX Lithium battery. Explosion on contact 90%

Prowl shouted a warning but the air was too thin to carry beyond his own audials.

Jazz will step on the lithium battery in 1.5 clicks (88%) and will be critically injured in at least one leg (76%).

Prowl grabbed Jazz's servo and yanked.

Music erupted in the moment of connection.

Vibrations ran up his arm and across his frame. Inside his audials, Prowl could make out the song Jazz had begun in the airlock. Looking at his visor, mouth agape, only one thought could form in Prowls mind.

How fragging loud is he playing that music?!?

Jazz perked up, and pulled Prowl around in an arc. Multiple sharp impacts thudded into the ground behind him. Prowl turned and almost wished he hadn’t.

Three heavily armored Quintesson bombers equipped with bio-mechanical ballista.

The javelin like spikes were as long as Prowls arm and designed to pin targets in place while the slow moving blimp-like body of the bomber got into position to blow them all to the Pit.

Prowl tugged Jazz in the direction of their objective, refusing to let go in case he tried to launch himself at the bombers. Prowl wasn't sure how Jazz would manage to do so, but Prowl felt an overwhelming nagging sensation in his tanks that he'd fragging try.

Jazz was evidently fine with this arrangement.

As the music pulsed between their palms, Jazz leapt at a diagonal, pulling Prowl along for the ride. The low gravity was so damn floaty. It continually forced Prowl to readjust his footing so he wasn't frantically treading air every time his peds left the ground.

Jazz was evidently fine with that too.

Another round of ammunitions impacted where the two of them had been running.

Their egress began to take on a pattern Prowl was quick to pick up on. It took the bombers 8 clicks to reload, launching at the same time, half a click after musical flair in Jazz's song. At the moment of the flair, the mech would launch them in a nearly unpredictable pattern. After the first two times of nearly getting his arm dislocated, Prowl began catching onto these moments and moved his momentum in sync with Jazz.

They'd started dancing.

The Tactician had an iron fisted focus on matching Jazz’s frankly eradicate lead. The longer the duet continued, the more data he had to work with. Prowl steadily progressed from Reacting to Anticipating. Feeling a core deep satisfaction that came from sinking into mastering a new skill.

By the time they’d escaped the bombers range, they’d made it too the base of the first hurdle.

Their reprieve would only be brief. The bombers would catch up in approximately 50 clicks (88%), giving the mechs a small window of precious semi-safety in which they needed to scale the wall before them.

Prowl craned his helm back at the barrier.

He would not be able to scale it on his own in time (95%).

Could Jazz? (65%)

While carrying him? (19%)

Jazz rapidly tapped his side.

The alien was crouched low, impossible legs bent with potential energy. He tapped his own back, gesturing for Prowl to grab on already.

Prowl threw himself over the mechs broad back. His digits frantically searched for a hand hold, flinching away from nearly digging into fragile vents.

I can’t-

Jazz leapt.

“You’re really grab-able - Isn’t that kinda stupid?”

Stupid stupid stupid.

Prowl skated off of Jazz’s rounded compact plating, that he specifically SAID was supposed to make him hard to hold on to.

He landed hard on his aft, denta clanking together painfully.

47 clicks remaining.

Jazz hit the ground beside him before Prowl had fully gotten back up. Now facing him, Jazz grabbed Prowl by both wrists and pulled him chassis to chassis. Jazz positioned his arms to link Prowls servos behind his helm, then set his own servos tightly onto Prowls waist.

Jazz nodded once, like he was satisfied with what he’d just done.

Prowl made a facial expression that a psychiatrist would find concerning.

42 Clicks.

Jazz nodded again, like expected Prowl to respond in any coherent manner, and lifted.

Prowls legs swung forward on instinct. Following the motion, Jazz wrapped them around his waist. Through the screaming haze of his processor, Prowl had the presence of mind to lock his ankles together as he realized Jazz’s true intentions, and manually aborted the logic cascade that had nearly crashed over him.

Package secured, Jazz let go and started their ascension.

Legs bent at an impossible angle to slam multi segmented peds flat against the metal walls. Despite Prowl’s body blocking most of his view, the alien mech was unfettered by the lack of vision. Jazz hardly bothered with proper hand holds, instead opting for incredibly strong magnetic grip built into his servos.

The magnetic backwash splashed over Prowls doors wings, forcing him to temporarily offline them or risk crippling vertigo. The structure they were scaling shook violently like something large had just irrevocably broken.

This is fine this is fine this is fine this is fine.

At 35 click’s remaining, Prowl centered himself enough to search for their pursuers.

Damn it!

The bombers were a fraction faster than he initially calculated. Six clicks before we’re in range (87%). Luckily, Jazz was more than a fraction faster than initially calculated as well. At this rate, they’d reach the top simultaneously.

No reason not to be proactive.

Prowl found that if he tightly cupped one servo around the back of Jazz’s helm, he had just enough leverage to bring out a side arm. After all, the bombers were already in range of him.

Steadying his elbow over the other mechs shoulder, Prowl took aim.

Five clicks.

The bombers flew in V formation.

Four clicks.

Too heavily armored for a standard sidearm to pierce.

Three clicks.

The lead bomber opened up its front in preparation for combat.

Got you.

Prowl threaded the gap, his shot skirting over the ballista in favor of impacting the bombers prodigious cargo. He watched something spark inside a split second before it succumbed to total annihilation.

The shockwave felt like a single soft papft of a breeze in the starlit air.

Jazz hefted them over the top of the wall, not dropping Prowl in favor of sprinting with him at full speed across the top of the hurdle.

One of his arms curled around to support Prowls back, allowing the Praxian to release his death grip on their helm. Prowl leaned back into the hold, allowing Jazz freedom to see again.

Jazz turned his helm around 180 degrees-

Did not know he could do that did not know he could do that.

- to look at the fire works behind them.

Jazz whistled appreciatively at the sight. He turned back to Prowl, visor locked onto his face as they carried him across the roof.

Reverberating music, nearly crashing, numbed doorwings, and a deeply satisfying kill all followed by a display of casual body horror was making Prowl just a little bit delirious. As a result, Prowl wasn’t entirely sure what expression he was making, just that Jazz was inordinately fascinated with it.

Without looking away, Jazz leapt off the end of the roof.

Prowl watched as Jazz glanced over his shoulder and back to him.

Do a double take.

And then crush Prowl to his chassis.

Jazz’s visor was over bright, both horns snapped completely forward and from somewhere inside his chassis, Prowl could feel some internal component spinning into overdrive, sounding for all the world like teeny tiny screaming.

Why are we still falling.

Prowl turned as far as possible in Jazz’s iron grip.

The sky bridge was collapsing.

Odds of Survival 4%

———————————————————————

Jazz, everytime Prowl one-shots an enemy: I need to get his number.

If you’re curious, the song Jazz is playing can be whatever you like. Personally I kept switching between listening to “I Was Made For Lovin’ You” by Kiss and “I Feel Love” 12” version by Donna Summer while writing.

- SSTP

OH GOD AHAHJFKFK THIS IS SO FUCKING GREAT HELP

And the concept of music playing between them??? I'm s o l d. "I was made for lovin' you baby" is basically JP OST for me at this point ehehhmgmgm

Jazz: Hookay I need to transport the machinery from the point A to point B. Focus! Let's go!

Prowl: One of those tiktok videos where you can see some Reddit post and hear AI narrating it while Minecraft parkour is playing on the background. Except it's gay panic instead of reddit post and internal screaming instead of narration and even more gay panic instead of minecraft. ......and everything is overheating probably lmao

Also can you really call it a JP fic if their odds of survival never dropped lower than 10% according to Prowls brain? Ahahjgkgk all amazing JP fics have to do this. It's inevitable and I love it so much~~

#You made me think of like....#Jazz is impossible to grab unless he wants you to grab him #so whenever Prowl wants to hold/grab/stop him he can do that because Jazz lets him. Like he feels a hand touching his shoulder and stops #or smth #while Prowl is very grabbable and Jazz could just yank him by literally any part of his body lol #Cybertronians made of metal plates with pretty wide gaps between them #also often placed in layers #so Jazz could just stick his fingers literally anywhere and ta daaah~ perfect holder #....well if we don't count the fact that sticking your hands under someone's plates is extremely intimate gesture for those you're close wit #or doctors #where do I lead with this thought #idk. I just think it's funny. Cultural miscommunication do be extremely gay flavored in mecha universe what can I say #mecha writing #mecha jp writing #mecha pilot jazz au #jazz #prowl #jazzprowl

825 notes · View notes

ssahotchnerr · 8 months ago

Note

Hello, I have a request. How about Aaron going costume shopping and Aaron loses her FOR A MINUTE before he finds her where all the princess and fairy costumes are. Like she is completely mesmerized by costumes that she doesn’t notice Aaron picking her up and saying “I’m reconsidering making you a leash kid, you know” but he doesn’t really mean it and she’s just pointing at a costume “I want this one, daddy!”

jumpscares

i changed this up a tiny bit but the overall concept is still there <33 cw; fem!reader, protective girl dad!aaron (small angst), jack calls reader mom, references to your usual cm violence, halloween and fluff!! wc; 1k

"Dad, c'mon." Jack whined in slight impatience and excitement, prying the door open and hanging back slightly on the handle.

"We can only move so fast bud." Aaron responded, maintaining his current pace. We as in Ellie. Her tiny legs limited her speed, she was practically skipping to keep up with just him. "The costumes aren't going anywhere."

With the holiday quickly approaching and Jack's insistent worries the cool costumes will be gone soon - while you ran necessary errands of your own, he had been tasked with taking the kids to the Halloween store.

Upon entering, Aaron lost Ellie's hand almost immediately as she halted, causing it to slip abruptly from his grasp.

She was frozen in place with her gaze directed forward, keeping a generous distance from the frightful animatronics greeting the three of them at the entrance.

A scowl was on her face; it didn't appear she wasn't necessarily scared, but a mix of disgust and worry were vividly present instead.

"They're not real sweetheart." Aaron tried to reassure, his gaze softening. "They're just decorations."

"I don't like that one." Ellie grabbed his hand, using her other to point at the menacing, horrific clown. "He looks mean."

"He does, doesn't he?" Aaron agreed, his mouth drawing into a pensive line as he played along. "But that's okay. They're meant to be for fun."

"They're not very fun."

The three began wandering through the display of frightful animatronics, led by Jack, a good idea in theory. Jack disciplinarily left Aaron's mouth a few times, as he attempted to get his sister to step on the sensors in order to get spooked.

Ellie ended up in his hold, gripping onto the collar of his t-shirt while Jack indulged himself in getting delightfully jumpscared. She merely watched, each burst of sound causing her to scoot closer into her father, more like her shield.

"Alright, let's find what we came here for." Aaron placed Ellie down, Jack beginning to browse as they reached the costumes. "It is a school night. We can't be out too late."

Selecting a costume, or even brainstorming an idea was bound to a lengthy task, the two of them utterly indecisive. Ellie adored every costume they passed, had to stop, look and point it out. Jack, on the other hand, was pursuing a more silent, observational strategy.

"Anything sticking out?"

"Maybe Spiderman?"

"You never stick to Spiderman." Aaron reminded him with a small smile, the fond memory of when Jack dressed up as him coming to mind - easily within his top five Dad moments of all time.

"Yeah... so maybe not that." Jack breathed out a huff, his eyes continuing to peer around. "Or we can all be superheroes." He poked an adult Batman costume, causing it to sway. "You can be this, and then Mom can be Wonder Woman or something."

Aaron nodded slowly, although he personally didn't plan on dressing up. But could he be persuaded by you and the kids? Maybe. "That could be fun."

"And then Ellie could be Spidergirl-"

Speaking of Ellie, she had grown suspiciously quiet - her chatter stopping altogether. Aaron's eyes shot down, only to find Ellie not besides him.

Jack was the one who verbalized it, his eyebrows crinkling in confusion. "Where'd Ellie go?"

Panic immediately swept through him, his heart rate heightening and his body succumbing to a numbing freeze. Fuck.

Suddenly, he didn't know whether or not his knowledge of child abductions were an advantage or disadvantage; knowing how to act quickly, but also the unfortunate outcomes.

his mind instantly shot to the conversations he had with victim's familiies with what felt like daily. The scenario had turned- he was in their shoes. And just as they all stated in their interviews: He should've been paying closer attention. He only looked away for a minute. He knew these things - why did he look away?

Attempting to push the statistics in the back of his mind, he was on the move, Jack following right at his heels.

"Ellie?"

Luckily the fear was short lived; she was two aisles over, captivated by the girliest costumes one could imagine, very Ellie-esque.

"Eleanor." Aaron breathed out in relief as he saw his piggytail-headed daughter, sweeping her right off her feet again. "You know better than to wander off."

"I wanna be this." Ellie pried a princess costume off the rack, Aaron paused as he lifted her so she could remove it successfully. "Can I Daddy? I really wanna."

"Well, let's make sure it's your size." He took it, doublechecking and allowing his heart rate to calm down. Upon confirmation, his eyebrows furrowed. "Are you sure you want to be this? Or do you want to be a superhero with Jack?"

"I wanna be a princess." Ellie insisted, a pleading tone within her voice. "Pretty please?"

"Sure, if that's what you want. We'll have to find you a crown too, or use one from home, it doesn't seem to be included." She nodded as Aaron tucked the packaging under his elbow, allowing him to hold both it and her. However, his demeanor switched over to one more serious. "But hey, look at me please."

Her adjacent brown eyes met his own; a touch of fault, and sincereness. She knew she had disobeyed in one way or another. And whenever she did, it was written all over on her face.

"No running off, okay?" He instructed sternly, but gently. "It's really important I can always see you, and you can always see me. We don't want you getting lost, yeah?"

She shook her head. "That would be bad."

"Very bad. Mom would not be happy with me if I came home without you." Aaron affirmed, eyebrows raised. "Do we have an understanding?"

"Yes we do." She replied cheerily, oblivious to the heart attack she had just given her father. "No running away."

"Thank you." He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, exhaling and the tension in his shoulders alleviating. Ellie was fine. No need for further panicking. Everything was fine.

And Jack, ever the dear, comically inputted, a witty grin plastered on his face. "Maybe Ellie should be the Flash instead."

#aaron hotchner x reader #aaron hotchner #aaron hotchner fluff #aaron hotchner x you #aaron hotchner x fem!reader #aaron hotch x reader #aaron hotchner imagine #criminal minds #criminal minds x reader #criminal minds x you #criminal minds drabble #aaron hotchner drabble #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds fanfiction #hotch imagine #criminal minds x fem!reader

992 notes · View notes

akula-blue · 2 months ago

Text

Ok so we've talked about mech dysphoria and dysmorphia before yeah? Your body doesn't feel the same when you climb out of a mech, doesn't feel 'right' anymore.

Too few limbs, not enough sensors, everything feels too big, now that you're not? There's no more combat stims and pleasure chemicals either, you're down to just your stock standard dopamine, which you have a clinical deficiency of now, btw. You struggle to pick objects up, your hands an unfamiliar shape, with not enough strength. You struggle to get out of bed sometimes because you can't tell what proportions things should be anymore?

Yeah, all that has been discussed to death.

What about communication?

What about pilots who, just, can't talk outside of their mech? Become socially inept without all the assistant systems they plug themselves into within the cockpit?

Think about it, mech combat becomes very disorganised very fast if it's allowed to. We are talking clashes of potentially dozens of war machines, the size of buildings, with enough guns to level cities. Orders need to be direct, easily understandable, followed immediately, actually projected onto the pilot's vision.

Every order, every report, every sentence, is punctuated by hundreds of layers of feedback. Tactical simulations and overlays, attachments for battlefield plans, every order having many implied conditions transmitted to the pilot through code and dictionary references to make sure a pilot cannot POSSIBLY misinterpret it in the few seconds before the command should be executed. On top of that, each order can also be wired to project a different cocktail of stim/pleasure chems/whatever have you, ensuring a pilot knows exactly what to feel about the order, establishing the priority of it through the pilots own brain chemistry.

And the same can be true about communications between squad mates! So much of it would be sending those same simulations around as sit reps, or enormous data packets containing not just the words the pilot is trying to say, but also links to relevant information and mountains of meta data, establishing tone, intention, context. Within the cockpit, a portion of the onboard AI is delegated to parsing this metadata, projecting it into the pilots consciousness, speeding up the process of understanding these mountains of digital documents to mere moments.

Now put a person used to that in a social setting. Where they are not made instantly aware of what someone is talking about or referring to. Where they cannot just query an AI and receive every piece of relevant info at once. Where they have to understand the subtext of what that person is saying without any metadata to indicate sarcasm, annoyance, disinterest. Where they are unable to understand the many nuances of communication and body language and expression without the helpful hand of their mech's processors. Hell, where they don't know how hearing certain things should make them feel without the presence of the chemicals to guide their response. Imagine them seeming lost outside of their mech, unable to talk or connect anymore, the social, human part of their brain having atrophied from disuse much like their neurotransmitter production. Imagine them scurrying back to the safety of their mech where, in the digitally overlaid world, everything is so much clearer and understandable and-

HAS THIS BECOME AN AUTISM METAPHOR???

#mech posting #mech #mecha #mech pilot #mechsploitation #autism #autism metaphor #neurodivergent #neurodiversity #lancer #lamcerrpg

198 notes · View notes

sightseertrespasser · 2 months ago

Text

Odds of Survival part two: Electric Boogaloo

Part 2 of Jazz and Prowl in space!

Prowl loves entrusting his life to reckless strangers.

———————————————————————

Prowl pulled the release to the airlock and the music was swallowed by the vacuum of space.

Bursting forward, Jazz launched outwards riding the pop of escaping air. The first quintesson had its eye socket repurposed as an ankle bracelet before the second measure even began.

Ah.

Prowl probably should have specified he wanted to try speeding past rather than confront their opponents directly.

Jazz's improvised footwear writhed sluggishly before the mech twisted his ped inside its brain case, finishing it off and turning to face the next nearest opponent.

Odds of survival 26%

The white and blue mech launched himself upwards as the nearest quintesson went for a dive bomb. It's teeth breaking on impact with the sky bridge. Jazz twisted in midair.

They fell in slow motion, back arching against a starlit backdrop. An upside down visor met blue optics. Jazz nodded his head to the side, flicking one horn up and one horn down.

Did he just wink? (#^%)

The falling mech unsheathed a blade from his wrist, driving it through the sputtering quintesson.

Oh Primus has he been flirting the entire time?

Jazz spun, slicing into the next quint to close the distance.

I can not. I can not assume that was intentional. It has to be a cultural miscommunication.

Odds of survival 22%.

Prowl snapped out of his social etiquette downward spiral. Sprinting from the safety of the airlock door, he knelt behind a large section of external piping, lining up his shots.

Tacnet spun to work.

Calculating the marksmanship needed to dispatch three hostiles at medium range while distracted by a highly competent ally?

Odds of Survival 32%

Laughable.

Three shots burst through the thin atmosphere.

Quintesson wreckers were built thick skulled and stubborn. Luckily they came with easily identifiable gaps in their organic construction.

The Quints fell from Jazz, each with a smoking hole where and eye used to be. Jazz looked at Prowl, then the smoking quintessons and back up to Prowl before doing finger guns again.

Speaking of thick skulled and stubborn.

Prowl put on his best Commanders Scowl and pointed in the direction they needed to be currently running in.

Doorwing sensors hiked as he picked up on movement from behind. The incoming hostiles was palpable even in the moons thin atmosphere. Quintessons rarely favored stealth.

Prowl began running.

Jazz kept pace, half turned around to keep track of the incoming troop. Prowl kept his optics locked forward, not remotely willing to risk tripping on the torn apart path.

Tacnet locked on to a large silvery pillow that'd been exposed to the atmosphere.

Expanding LLX Lithium battery. Explosion on contact 90%

Prowl shouted a warning but the air was too thin to carry beyond his own audials.

Jazz will step on the lithium battery in 1.5 clicks (88%) and will be critically injured in at least one leg (76%).

Prowl grabbed Jazz's servo and yanked.

Music erupted in the moment of connection.

How fragging loud is he playing that music?!?

Jazz perked up, and pulled Prowl around in an arc. Multiple sharp impacts thudded into the ground behind him. Prowl turned and almost wished he hadn’t.

Three heavily armored Quintesson bombers equipped with bio-mechanical ballista.

The javelin like spikes were as long as Prowls arm and designed to pin targets in place while the slow moving blimp-like body of the bomber got into position to blow them all to the Pit.

Jazz was evidently fine with this arrangement.

Jazz was evidently fine with that too.

Another round of ammunitions impacted where the two of them had been running.

They'd started dancing.

By the time they’d escaped the bombers range, they’d made it too the base of the first hurdle.

Prowl craned his helm back at the barrier.

He would not be able to scale it on his own in time (95%).

Could Jazz? (65%)

While carrying him? (19%)

Jazz rapidly tapped his side.

The alien was crouched low, impossible legs bent with potential energy. He tapped his own back, gesturing for Prowl to grab on already.

Prowl threw himself over the mechs broad back. His digits frantically searched for a hand hold, flinching away from nearly digging into fragile vents.

I can’t-

Jazz leapt.

“You’re really grab-able - Isn’t that kinda stupid?”

Stupid stupid stupid.

Prowl skated off of Jazz’s rounded compact plating, that he specifically SAID was supposed to make him hard to hold on to.

He landed hard on his aft, denta clanking together painfully.

47 clicks remaining.

Jazz nodded once, like he was satisfied with what he’d just done.

Prowl made a facial expression that a psychiatrist would find concerning.

42 Clicks.

Jazz nodded again, like expected Prowl to respond in any coherent manner, and lifted.

Package secured, Jazz let go and started their ascension.

This is fine this is fine this is fine this is fine.

At 35 click’s remaining, Prowl centered himself enough to search for their pursuers.

Damn it!

No reason not to be proactive.

Prowl found that if he tightly cupped one servo around the back of Jazz’s helm, he had just enough leverage to bring out a side arm. After all, the bombers were already in range of him.

Steadying his elbow over the other mechs shoulder, Prowl took aim.

Five clicks.

The bombers flew in V formation.

Four clicks.

Too heavily armored for a standard sidearm to pierce.

Three clicks.

The lead bomber opened up its front in preparation for combat.

Got you.

The shockwave felt like a single soft papft of a breeze in the starlit air.

Jazz hefted them over the top of the wall, not dropping Prowl in favor of sprinting with him at full speed across the top of the hurdle.

One of his arms curled around to support Prowls back, allowing the Praxian to release his death grip on their helm. Prowl leaned back into the hold, allowing Jazz freedom to see again.

Jazz turned his helm around 180 degrees-

Did not know he could do that did not know he could do that.

- to look at the fire works behind them.

Jazz whistled appreciatively at the sight. He turned back to Prowl, visor locked onto his face as they carried him across the roof.

Without looking away, Jazz leapt off the end of the roof.

Prowl watched as Jazz glanced over his shoulder and back to him.

Do a double take.

And then crush Prowl to his chassis.

Why are we still falling.

Prowl turned as far as possible in Jazz’s iron grip.

The sky bridge was collapsing.

Odds of Survival 4%

———————————————————————

Jazz, everytime Prowl one-shots an enemy: I need to get his number.

- SSTP

<- First Next ->

#tf mecha universe #writing #nearly fixed

201 notes · View notes

marlynnofmany · 5 months ago

Text

At Home in the Mud

“Hey Wio, does your hover stool work over mud?” I asked from the door to the cockpit.

“Not deep mud,” Wio said, glancing at me with her tentacles at work on the controls. “The sensors feel for solid ground.”

“Dang.” I sighed. “Guess I’m stuck with cleaning the exo suit after this delivery.”

“Yeah, sorry,” she said. “There are fresh batteries for the gravity wands, at least. Shouldn’t take you too long.”

Zhee stalked past me, his many bug feet clicking in what was probably irritation. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I, at least until he was out of earshot in the direction of the cargo bay.

I whispered to Wio, “And at least I only have two legs to clean.”

“Good point,” she agreed. “Best of luck!”

I thanked her and headed off after Zhee to where the exo suits waited. He had a head start in getting his on, which he needed. I tried not to draw attention to how easily I tugged mine on over my regular clothes (minus the shoes). Zhee didn’t even take the opportunity to make fun of my need for footwear; he seemed determined to get this delivery over with as quickly as possible.

He said, “Be sure to hold on to the hoversled so you don’t fall and slow us down.”

“Sure thing,” I agreed. I’d planned to keep a solid grip anyway. Hopefully this mud wasn’t the foot-sucking kind.

The ship landed gently — or rather, arrived. There was no landing pad close enough to our client’s location, at least none above the mud at this time of year, so Wio held the ship just above the surface on stable thrusters. The ramp nearly touched the mud.

Captain Sunlight had come in to see us off, and she stood to the side as we hustled down the ramp. “Be quick but careful!” she told us.

Zhee replied, “That’s the plan.”

I freed a hand to wave, then grabbed the edge of our most reliable hoversled. I would have liked to ride on it next to the cases of medical supplies (low priority, not urgent, thankfully), but that wouldn’t have been fair to Zhee. So I did my share of pushing and stepped cautiously into the mud.

Whew, I thought. More watery than thick. I can walk in this. And it was cold, but the exo suit did a decent job of insulating for temperature. I took in the sights more confidently, appreciating the fuzzy moss on all the trees, and the intricate shapes that the bushes grew in. It didn’t quite look like an Earth swamp, but it didn’t look hostile, and that was all I could ask for, really.

Behind us, the ship closed the bay door and lifted up to a more comfortable height to wait. Zhee, with a better view of the screen on the front of the sled, pointed with a pincher arm. We changed direction slightly and trudged through the mud.

The depth changed a few times in quick succession, going from ankle deep to above the knee and back. I did my best to maintain a careful speed, though it was tricky since I couldn’t see the bottom. Zhee seemed to be doing fine. I held onto the sled and took long strides, feeling the way with one foot before trusting my weight to it. Thicker lumps and rocks lurked along the uneven ground. I focused on stepping between them without losing my balance, trusting Zhee to keep us on track.

“Scenic,” I commented to break the monotony of silence and my own breathing inside the helmet.

“Wet,” Zhee replied.

“Scenic and wet.” I glanced up at the mossy trees, then back down at the watery mud. Muddy water? Somewhere in between. “Not the easiest place to walk, though.”

“The captain could have chosen Blip and Blop for this delivery,” Zhee griped. “But no, they’re busy helping Eggskin prepare some complicated food.”

“And Paint wouldn’t be up for this temperature,” I said as I stepped into deeper water that chilled me to my thighs. “Or this depth, really.”

“Paint misses out on a lot of unpleasant environments. Lucky.”

I looked over at him across the pile of strapped-down cases. “Only because she’d pass out and die if she got too cold. I don’t know if I’d call that lucky.”

Zhee tapped an antenna against the inside of his helmet. “Bah. Today, she’s lucky to be coldblooded. We’re stuck with this instead.”

I mentally ran down the roster of our other crewmates. Some of them, like Wio, had other jobs to be doing. “I suppose Mur wouldn’t have an easy time in something this deep either.” I didn’t even know if he could swim. Looking like a squid didn’t necessarily translate.

“No one is likely to have an easy time in this,” Zhee said, shaking a foreleg and splattering watery mud across a tree trunk. “I can’t imagine why the client chose to live here.”

“Maybe they like mud,” I said, trying to watch my feet even though I couldn’t see them.

“They are welcome to it. I look forward to getting back to the ship.”

I was in agreement about that. The info summary about this location had said it was the wet season (Really? Shocking) and that the regular roadways were unavailable. I was under the impression that there was a town somewhere nearby, or at least other people than just the one, but all I could see was endless swamp.

With rocks and the occasional tree root just waiting to trip me. I focused on stepping carefully and trying not to slow our progress.

Concentrating as I was, I didn’t realize we’d arrived until Zhee tugged the sled to the side. I looked up to find the first dry ground I’d seen rising out of the mud into a walkway of flat paving stones. A round stone house perched at the top of the rise.

We slogged up to leave an interesting set of footprints along the walkway: my left/right muddy bootprints and Zhee’s collection of much smaller splats. With the hoversled between us, it looked like this house was getting two visitors interested in staying as far away from each other as possible, instead of a single delivery.

When we got close, a chorus of tiny squeaks started up. I located the source: a small cage hanging beside the door, which held a handful of cricket-sized whatevers. While Zhee found what passed for a doorbell, I took a surreptitious look. They were small and blobby, not mini near-cousins of his, which was definitely for the best.

“Delivery!” Zhee announced while a chime jangled.

Various bumps and a muffled voice sounded from inside, then our avian client opened the door eagerly. “Thank you for coming!” he said in the same trade language we were using, just with the distinct quackity overtones of his particular species. His dark feathers were flecked with white and he kept his arms folded as if they were wings. He said earnestly, “I hope it wasn’t too long of a walk.”

“It was fine,” Zhee said. “Would you like your packages unloaded right here?”

“Oh! Ahmm…” the ducky fellow looked indecisively between the stack of boxes, the paving stones, and the indoors.

I said, “We could carry them in for you, but we’d track in a bit of mud.” The sled was much too wide to fit through the door.

“That’s all right; I’ll move them,” he decided. “Out here is fine. Now where should I—? Yes, thank you.” He took the payment screen from Zhee and signed for the delivery while I undid the straps holding everything down. We didn’t always bother with those, but I was starting to think we should. If I’d managed to trip and knock a box into the mud, that would have been an embarrassing bad mark on our record.

While we unloaded the boxes, those little whatsits serenaded us with a fresh chorus of squeaky chirps. It reminded me of tame finches with just a touch of guinea pig. I wondered if this was the local version of a windchime or something else.

The client saw me staring and said, “My dear little Cozy went missing, and these are his favorite food. I’m hoping to lure him back. You haven’t seen him, have you? A young cuddlebeast about this big, with a white stripe on his head?” He held clawed hands a few inches apart.

“Sorry, no,” I said with a look at Zhee. “I didn’t see any beasts at all. Did you?”

“No,” Zhee agreed. “Just mud.”

The client ruffled his feathers in a way I didn’t know how to read; maybe he was embarrassed. “They did tell me he’s suited to living in this environment, and he might not return if I let him out, but I haven’t given up hope. My home is nice and warm, after all.”

“We’ll keep an eye out on the walk back,” I told him. “Does he come when he’s called?”

“He always did when he was inside the house,” the guy said. “Cozy! Cozyyy!” He waited for a moment, then looked down. “He loves his cuddles. I hope nothing bad has happened to him.”

Zhee set down the last box. “You’ve done what you can,” he assured the client, sounding like he might have even meant it.

“I suppose so.” The ducky guy looked sad for a moment, then rallied. “Well, thank you again! I don’t want to keep you. Safe travels!”

We bid him goodbye and headed back down into the mud, with me waving goodbye and Zhee trying to make good time. The client went back into his house and I focused on taking long strides again.

We went slightly to the side of the route we’d taken before. The mud was much lumpier here, with herds of round rocks that rolled around and made the footing treacherous. Despite my death grip on the sled, I was nearly swimming at a couple points in an effort to keep up. The muddy water was deep enough to swim in, but not consistently so, otherwise I might have given up and started paddling.

I had just decided to ask Zhee to slow down when I lost my footing completely and went under, holding my breath in panic before I remembered the exo suit covered my head. I got my feet under me by kicking lumps out of the way and I stood in the waist-high mud, wiping futilely at the dirty face mask.

Zhee sighed audibly and stopped walking. “Really?”

“It’s hard to find somewhere solid to step!” I exclaimed. “There are rocks and lumps of mud everywhere!” I scooped one up to prove my point, ending up with what looked like a potato. “Huh. That’s too light to be a rock. Tuber?”

“Fascinating,” Zhee said drily.

“It reminds me of an Earth food, but those don’t grow in swamps,” I said, giving it a closer look.

“Do not bring it back to the ship for eating,” Zhee said sternly.

“I wasn’t going to!” I protested.

“Good. It’s probably horribly smelly and liable to poison half the crew.”

I started to protest more, just on principle, then the potato opened an eye and I dropped it. “Ah!”

“What?”

“It’s a creature!” I shuffled in place, feeling more potato-like shapes bump against my ankles in the cold watery mud. “Are these all animals??”

“Ugh,” Zhee declared, lifting a couple exo suited legs out of the murk on his side of the hoversled. “What an unpleasant choice of environmental niches.”

I was thinking fast. “Wait, these could be like toads. It’s cold right now; maybe they’re hibernating. Hey, do you know what a ‘cuddlebeast’ actually looks like?”

“Not a clue. That’s your area of expertise.” Zhee gave me a look through the domes over his faceted eyes. “Do these things look especially cuddleable to you?”

“I don’t know, maybe.” I felt around gingerly for another one, hoping they didn’t have sharp teeth to use on people who interrupted their hibernation. “But that would explain why Cozy never came back, if he’s out here dozing with his distant family.”

“Well I’m sure he’s very happy if so,” Zhee said, stepping forward. “Let’s be off.”

“Wait, lemme try something first.” I put a hand on the sled as it eased past, but did my best impression of the squeaks that the food animals had made earlier. Cute little questioning sounds, like they were curious.

“If that didn’t work close to the house, it’s unlikely to work out here,” Zhee said. But he stopped again.

“It’s worth a shot,” I said. “Cozy! Cozyyy!” Then I squeaked some more.

“What a surprise; nothing. Now let’s—” Zhee flinched when something by his hind leg croaked.

“Cozy!” I said with a grin, ducking to look under the hoversled. “Here, boy!” Something potato-like with big eyes and a distinct pale swatch on the top was treading water in the murk.

Zhee stepped fastidiously to higher ground. “I can’t believe you found it.”

“Yup,” I said, testing my footing. “Now I just have to catch it.”

“As long as you keep your mud to yourself.”

“No promises,” I said, making the first lunge of many and only splashing a little.

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).

#my writing #The Token Human #humans are weird #haso #hfy #eiad #humans are space orcs #writeblr #writblr #writing community #science fiction

107 notes · View notes

kalixora · 3 months ago

Text

Bounty pt 3

It had been close to a year since you joined the Autobots, but you rarely engaged in combat unless it was a life-threatening situation. Most of the time, you focused on training the other Autobots and your hounds, teaching them where to improve and honing their skills.

Finally, a critical mission arrived, and Optimus called you for backup against Megatron. You and your hounds swiftly passed through the ground bridge, arriving at the battlefield ahead.

“Sick ’em,” you commanded in Cybertronian, your hounds responding instantly by rushing towards the battlefield. You followed closely behind them, switching your servo to a cannon and narrowing one optic as you focused your aim from a distance, targeting whomever was your vision.

Optimus spotted you—again. His optics flicked in your direction, a brief glance amidst the chaos of the battlefield. But it wasn’t the first time. His gaze had lingered more than once, always circling back to you as if he needed confirmation you were still standing.

You gritted your denta. Focus, Prime. Stop looking at me. He was supposed to be leading, fighting—not checking on you like some fragile protoform.

The sharp, gravelly laughter of Megatron sliced through the noise. Your sensors twitched at the sound, locking onto his massive frame as he charged toward Optimus with terrifying force and speed, like a living missile of rage and war.

The ground trembled with the impact as the two titans clashed, brutal blow after brutal blow. Megatron didn’t let up, pounding relentlessly until Optimus staggered backward, boots scraping the rocky incline. His footing faltered.

“SCRAP—OPTIMUS!” Smokescreen’s shout broke your focus as a flash of blue light burst from his blaster. You turned just in time to see it veer off course—direct hit. The bolt slammed into the side of Optimus’s helmet, sparks flying.

Your spark leapt.

You didn’t think—just reacted. You raised your weapon and fired at Megatron, catching him in the side. It barely slowed him. But then—

A blur of fur and fury. Your hound, the largest of your companions, launched himself onto the Decepticon leader. Claws dug in, jaws snapping as Megatron reeled, crashing into Optimus. Your second shot hit its mark just as they collided, the explosion blasting them both off the ledge.

The terrain groaned. Then crumbled.

The rockface split beneath them, a jagged maw opening up as both warlords—and your hound—plummeted into the shadowed drop below.

Your optics widened. “No—” The word tore from your throat before you were even aware of running.

You sprinted, but Bulkhead tackled you mid-stride, slamming you to the ground. Bumblebee grabbed your arm, holding fast as you writhed beneath them.

“Get off me!” you growled, struggling. “Move!”

But they didn’t.

“It’s too risky,” Bumblebee beeped, his tones strained with panic and restraint.

You glared at them, fury in your optics. “He went down there with them. I have to go!”

Bulkhead’s voice was low, almost apologetic. “And if you go down too, we might lose you.”

The silence that followed was deafening—punctuated only by the distant crashing of falling stone and the haunting echo of the fight lost to the chasm.

⸻

“Lose me?” you scoffed, voice laced with bitter disbelief. “Bulkhead, the war has your sensors scrambled. I will stand with you, yes—but never beside you.”

He froze, expression faltering just for a second. That line cut deeper than your blaster ever could.

“That’s a load of scrap,” he muttered under his breath, barely audible over the hum of static in the comms.

You turned your optics sharply. “Pardon?” your tone sharp as serrated steel. “Speak louder, Autobot.”

Bulkhead’s fist clenched. “That’s a load of SCRAP!” he snapped, voice rising with the weight of everything he couldn’t say until now. “You think you’re the only one who cares? You think you’re the only one who’s lost someone? You act like you’re above all of us—but we bleed too! We fight too!”

Your chassis heaved with restrained rage, but there was a flicker—just a flicker—of something else behind your optics.

“You hold onto that superiority like it’s armor,” Bulkhead continued, breathing heavy, “but all it’s doing is isolating you. We’re not your enemy. We never were.”

Bumblebee’s helm turned back and forth between you both, the tension almost too thick to bear.

You swallowed hard, but your voice came out low, sharp. “I don’t need allies who hesitate. My hound could be dead. Optimus could be dead.”

“You think we don’t know that?” Bulkhead hissed. “You think we don’t feel that weight too? But rushing into a pit blindly doesn’t save anyone—it just gives the Decepticons another corpse to throw on the fire.”

You pushed yourself halfway up, eyes narrowing. “You think this is about you? About your war?” you spat. “I don’t give a damn about your Autobot cause—or Megatron’s chaos. I never have.”

Your voice lowered, fiercer now, raw. “I fight for them. My hounds. The only ones who never lied to me. Never used me. Not like this scrapheap war between you and them.”

Bulkhead opened his mouth, but you cut him off.

“I raised them with my own hands. Pulled them out of scrap piles, oil-starved and spark-flickering. You? You had teams. Bases. Brothers. I had silence and rust and them. And now one of them is down there—maybe dying—because I trusted someone outside of them.”

Your optics flicked, the rage cracking—revealing something else.

“Because he told me there was more,” you admitted, just above a whisper. “That I didn’t have to do this alone. That maybe… maybe there was a place for me beyond the hunter I was built to be.”

Bumblebee shifted, quieting, watching you carefully.

You exhaled, heavy and bitter. “And now I don’t even know if I’ll ever get the chance to tell him that I believed him.”

Bulkhead looked at you differently now. Not as an outsider. Not as a threat. But as someone on the edge of loss. Just like them.

“Then we go after them,” he said quietly, stepping back. “But together.”

—

Below the cliff…

The world had gone silent.

Dust hung thick in the air, illuminated by the flickering embers of stray energon and fractured terrain. A groan rumbled low through the ravine as shifting metal stirred from the wreckage.

Optimus lay half-buried beneath a fallen slab of rock, energon dripping slowly from a tear in his side. His optics flickered—dim, but active. Systems struggling to stabilize.

Across from him, Megatron had fared worse. Smoke curled from the torn plating of his chest, his cannon sparking violently from the impact. But even now, even wounded, his optics burned red.

Between them… was your hound.

Your largest and most loyal beast, his massive form panting with strain as he tried to rise. One leg was bent wrong, crushed beneath fallen stone. But his eyes—bright and unwavering—remained locked on Optimus.

A low growl rumbled from his throat as he stood, protecting the Prime.

Optimus stirred, trying to rise, hand pressed to the wound on his side. “Easy,” he rasped to the hound, voice weak but steady. “You’ve done enough.”

The hound didn’t budge. He stayed between the two leaders, growling low every time Megatron twitched.

Megatron spat a glob of energon to the side. “Still clinging to your pets, Prime?” he sneered, his voice ragged. “How… sentimental.”

But the hound barked sharply—loud, fierce. A warning.

Optimus grunted as he pulled himself upright, plating scraped and dented, energon still leaking from his side. His optics locked on Megatron—worn, weathered… but not defeated.

The hound stayed rooted in place, lips curled, stance ready to lunge if needed.

Megatron shifted, gears grinding as he propped himself against a shattered boulder. “Don’t waste your breath, Prime,” he spat. “I didn’t come here for teamwork.”

Optimus didn’t flinch.

“If we want to make it out of this place,” he said, voice heavy but resolute, “we need to do it together, Megatron.”

The air held still, crackling with silence.

Megatron stared at him, optics unreadable.

“Together?” he repeated with venom. “You’d stand beside me now—after everything?”

Optimus nodded once, his expression unchanging. “Not as allies. Not as enemies. But as survivors. For now.”

Megatron’s optics narrowed. He looked at the hound still guarding Optimus, then up at the rim of the cliff where your shadow had just appeared—fury in your stride, weapon ready, eyes only on your hound.

The Decepticon warlord chuckled darkly, resting his head back against the stone.

“This day grows more absurd by the minute.”

Crumbling edge of the ravine just as Megatron finished his sneer. You didn’t wait. The second your optics locked onto your hound—wounded, growling, standing guard—you jumped.

Bulkhead shouted behind you. Bumblebee beeped in alarm.

But you were already falling.

You hit the ground hard, rolling over shattered stone before landing in a crouch, blaster drawn, eyes locked on Megatron. Your hound turned, limping toward you with a pitiful whine that shattered the fire behind your eyes.

“Easy, girl,” you murmured, rushing to your wounded hound, wrapping an arm around her thick neck. You looked her over, hands shaking. “You stubborn scrap-eater. You held your ground.”

The hound whined again and nuzzled your side, panting.

Optimus watched you silently, one hand pressed to his wound. He made no move—just looked at you. That same way he always did. Not like a soldier. Not like a Prime.

But like he cared.

“Optimus,” you snapped without looking at him, voice hard. “Are you functional?”

“I will manage,” he replied quietly.

Your eyes flicked to Megatron, who was smirking despite the scorch across his chest.

“Oh good,” you growled. “Then you can both tell me why you had to drag my hound into this.”

Megatron laughed—low and hoarse. “He threw himself in. Loyal little monster.”

You stood slowly, placing yourself fully between the Decepticon and your hound. “Megatron. You’ve seen, better days. Allow me to put you out of your misery now.”

Optimus raised a hand—not to stop you, but to speak.

“There is no point in further bloodshed,” he said. “We need to get out of here before this place buries us.”

You exhaled through your nose, eyes still burning.

“I’m not here for your cause, Prime,” you muttered. “I’m not here for his either. I came for her.” You motioned to your hound. “And maybe I came for you too.”

Optimus looked at you then—not with judgment. But with something gentler. Something that made you want to look away and hold eye contact all at once.

“I know,” he said softly.

You glanced at the shifting rocks overhead. “Then let’s move. Before the whole mountain decides to finish what you two started.”

The climb out was rough—stone crumbled underfoot, and the incline was steep, but none of it mattered. Not with your hound limping beside you and the weight of everything unsaid pressing harder than the terrain.

Bulkhead and Bumblebee met you halfway down the ledge, helping to secure a makeshift line to lift Megatron—unconscious now—and ease him toward a neutral drop zone. The truce held, fragile and temporary. But it held.

You paused partway up the path, optics scanning the injured Prime just a few paces behind. He was silent, focused. But you knew he was hurting—more than just the visible wounds.

You waited until it was just the two of you, with the others ahead tending to your hound and clearing the last section of debris.

“I didn’t ask for this,” you said quietly, still facing the rocks ahead.

Optimus’s voice came gently behind you. “Neither did I.”

You turned slightly, just enough to catch his gaze. “I’m not one of your Autobots. I never was. You know that.”

“I do.”

“I was fine on my own. Me, my hounds. I didn’t need your missions. Your cause. Your speeches.” Your voice cracked slightly—just enough to betray you.

He said nothing.

“I didn’t need… anyone.” You let the words hang in the air, bitter on your tongue. “But then you looked at me like I was worth saving. Like I was… more than a weapon.”

Optimus’s voice dipped lower, calm and honest. “Because you do.”

“Why?” you asked, almost desperately. “Why do you care? I’ve shot at your soldiers. I’ve walked away when I could’ve helped. I’ve made it very clear I’m not one of you.”

“Because I see you,” he said, stepping closer. “Not the bounty hunter. Not the threat. You. The one who chose compassion in a world that taught you not to. The one who fights like she’s alone, but still puts herself between danger and those she loves.”

You didn’t realize you were holding your breath.

“Even when you push others away,” he added, “you’re still fighting for something bigger than yourself. You just haven’t let yourself admit it yet.”

Your hands clenched at your sides. You wanted to refute him. Wanted to push him away again. But the words didn’t come.

Because deep down… you knew he was right.

“I’ve been alone a long time, Prime,” you whispered, barely audible. “It’s safer that way.”

“I know,” he said, and his voice softened like something precious breaking open. “But you don’t have to be anymore.”

Your hound pressed her head gently against your leg again, and you blinked back something you hadn’t felt in a long time.

Warmth.

Not just survival. Not duty. But family. Another kind of family,

And this time, you didn’t pull away.

“I’m not joining your war,” you said, voice steady but quiet. His servo extended to yours—quiet, steady, open.

You stared at it.

The metal was worn, scratched from battle and time, streaked with dried energon and dust. Not the hand of a myth. Not some perfect symbol of hope.

Just a mech who had seen too much. Lost too much. Survived it anyway.

Your gaze lifted to his optics. They weren’t blazing with command or conviction like they were in battle. They were calm. Soft. Patient.

He didn’t pressure you.

He just… waited.

Your hand hovered in the space between you, uncertainty rattling your spark. You didn’t do this. You didn’t reach. You survived. You endured. You trusted only the things you raised with your own hands—your hounds, your weapons, your instincts.

But something about this…

Something about him..

You slowly placed your servo into his.

His digits closed around yours—gentle, but solid. The contact was warm. Not physically, maybe, but it felt warm. Grounding. Steady in a way the world rarely was.

And just for a second… you let yourself feel it.

Not weakness.

Not surrender.

Just connection.

He looked at you, optics searching yours.

“You are not defined by what you’ve walked away from,” Optimus said, his voice low. “You are defined by what you choose to walk toward.”

Your grip tightened, just slightly. “Then maybe… maybe I’ll walk a little further with you.”

A flicker of something—relief?—moved behind his gaze.

You stood in silence for a moment, together. No longer enemies. Not quite allies. But something that mattered more.

60 notes · View notes

flying-nightwing · 1 year ago

Text

Moonlight by the Docks (And They Say Romance is Dead) - Slade Wilson

Hi. It's been a while. But guess fucking what babes, I'm pulling all the stops to be forgiven. It's been more than a YEAR in the making, and mark my word it probably won't happen again so take it all in, but here is the Deathstroke smut a LOT of you have been wanting. Y'all, this is the long awaited sequel to Tango à Deux. Please forgive me?

(it's technically a sequel but can be read as a standalone if you accept that batsis and Slade already know each other)

Also, enjoy!

Pairing: Slade Wilson x Nightshade!Batsis

Word count: 4721

Warnings: violence, death/killing unnamed NPC, porn with plot, dirty talk (lots of it), unprotected sex, p in v, batsis and deathstroke fighting for dominance (NO classic dom/sub dynamics bc that's a pass for me), more dirty talk, body fluid, kinky shit, creampie, biting, rubbing, rough sex, reference to voyeurism, major praise kink, everything is extremely consenting and willing by both ADULT parties, might have missed something but I think if you made it this far you're into it.

Have fun ;)

“Nightshade, status”

You barely heard Batman's hushed check in as you barrelled into a boarded up window, breaking the moulding wood with your shoulders and rolling out of the building as bullets rained over you. You wasted no time getting back on your feet, starting to sprint away from the semi automatic rifles rapid firing in your direction.

“Nightshade, status?”

“JUST A MINUTE” You yelled as you dived behind a large container, flinching at the sound of the bullets hitting the metal and ringing loud into your head. “Fucking fuck shit”

“What's going on?” Batman's voice grew agitated despite remaining a low hiss. “Talk to me Nightshade”

“Wrong fucking intel!” You replied as you jumped on your feet again, taking advantage of the opportunity window their reloading gave you to run across the dockyard to find better cover. “It's happening now! There's at least twenty guys here, all trained and armed to the teeth. And they're all on my ass right now”

What was supposed to be a simple recon mission with a possibility of stealth takedown op turned into a giant mess at the first opportunity. The second you slipped into the warehouse, you quickly realized that the three guards on shift that you had been briefed about was, in fact, a small militia that was ready to be deployed on some combat mission, or that's what you believed was being said before you got made.

You would have also liked to know in advance that the building was littered with state of the art tripwires, movement detectors and heat sensors. Alas, you had gone in believing it was just a normal warehouse, and you had realized a moment too late you had triggered pretty much every alarm on the upper floor and very much alerted the militia of your presence.

“Tell me your position, I'm coming”

Your eyes went to the containers around you, taking as much information as you could without slowing down. Going into the maze of old containers was a great idea until you had to describe your surroundings. “I'm westbound, but those crates all look the same, B”

“On my way”

You ducked as much as you could to make yourself smaller as the symphony of bullets bouncing on the metal caught up to you. You took a hard left, trying to remember which way was more likely to not end up with a dead end, then went to your right. You could hear them shout, not giving up the chase, but you still tempted a look over your shoulder. They weren't on you yet. You faced forward and picked up some speed, rounding the corner towards the darkest and narrowest path to the left.

Before your eyes could even adjust to the shadows cast by the containers, your feet lifted off the ground and a large gloved hand was slapped tight on your mouth. On instinct, you began trashing to get away before your back was pulled flush against a hard armoured chest with a strong arm locking your waist against it.

“Quiet, little bird”

The militia paused at the crossroad, then after a string of barked orders, turned right. At the same time, your brain took in the orange and dark grey of the armour around you and pieced it with that voice you couldn’t mistake for anyone else's. You stopped struggling, yet, he didn’t release you. His hand was still firmly cupping your jaw while you could feel his other arm flex around your waist.

He tsked as the echoes of the yells grew more distant. “Once again getting in my way. What will I do with you now?”

You replied something, but it was muffled by his glove. You reached up and pulled his hand down, but he still let it linger on your neck once your mouth was free. You felt a bit weak in the knees and cursed yourself for getting turned on so easily, and even more for your next words. “Hopefully finish what you started last time if you’re not a coward”

Oh, that was so not the thing to say right now. You felt his hand around your neck tighten enough to be noticeable, but still loose enough for you to weigh your next words carefully. The yells once again grew closer, telling you the militia found a dead end and were backtracking towards your position.

“Do you really want to do this right now?” His voice was so close to your ear, sending a shiver down your spine. As much as pouncing on him right there and then was generating divine images in your brain, you were still being hunted down by an enemy who’d be on you much sooner than later. And well, if you died riding Deathstroke, Bruce would bring you back to life just to kill you himself, his own code be damned.

“As much as I wanna say yes,” You breathed back. “This bunch of angry men want me dead, so I believe the smart thing would be to deal with them first”

He released you. “Alright then. I’ll be here”

Your feet were fully back on the ground and you turned around to face him. Wow. You had been so right in your assumption that his other suit–namely, the one he was currently wearing–would be hotter on him. Even in the dark, he looked positively glorious and mighty delicious in all that armour, and with a small armoury worth of weapons strapped all over his, big, strong, menacing body–

You forced yourself to calm your thoughts down. “A little help would be appreciated”

“Why?” You couldn’t see his face, but you just knew it was full of smug arrogance. “I’ve got my own mission here. Who says they're part of it?”

You glanced in the direction of the ever growing noise, then back to him. “C'mon, I'm literally about to have sex with you, the least you could do is make sure I'm alive for it”

He sighed loudly. “I suppose you make a compelling point”

The militia rounded the corner and spotted you as Slade stepped between their fire and you. In one swift movement, he pulled out his sword and twirled it in his hand, as if provoking the armed men in front of him. For a moment, he just stood there, shielding you from the onslaught of bullets suddenly incoming your way. They all bounced on the front of Slade’s armour, painting him off as some kind of god of war, and you couldn’t help but gawk at the sight. You were so caught onto just how hot he looked that you almost didn’t register him springing into action and starting to cut through the group.

You reached for your karambit blades in your thigh straps and followed him in, making sure not to stray too far from his shadow to keep your cover from the fire.

You waited for the reload to duck under his arm, sliding on your knees in a spin and slicing the tendons of two men. That sent them straight into the path of Slade's swords, adding to the bloodshed. You swiftly returned behind him as another round of bullet was fired, but by the sound alone, the number of gunmen was plummeting.

The next reload came and you once again stepped away from him as he brought his two swords down onto some poor son of a bitch. You noticed a knife coming down and aiming for the small opening between his suit and his mask, so you sprung into action.

Literally.

You used his propped up knee to propel yourself up and jump onto the guys' shoulders, gripping onto him by squeezing your thighs around his skull. He tried to get you off of him by spinning and thrashing like a mechanical bull, but you held on tight. He was getting desperate to throw you off as pressure grew around his head, lifting his knife in the air to stab your leg. You were faster however, reacting on instinct and plunging your karambits into his neck.

He began sputtering as he tried to claw at his throat, blood squirting out of his artery and onto your suit. He dropped down to his knees and you got off, only then noticing he had been the last one standing. Key word, had been. He fell down on the floor in a puddle of his own blood as you observed him. Then, you felt like you were being watched intensely.

You trailed your gaze up to see Slade on his feet and unmoving among the carnage he had mostly caused. You couldn't help the thoughts that flashed into your mind, or the way your body reacted to it. You closed your eyes and let out a sigh, wondering what the hell was wrong with you.

Because somehow, you found it fucking hot.

And the fact that he did all of that just to get a taste of you? Yeah that did it. You completely switched your brain off as your feet took determined steps to him, quickly closing the distance to him and paying no mind to the bodies littering the floor. The second you were in front of him, you ripped his mask off and kissed him hard.

And he was ready for you. Without a single after thought of hesitation, his gloved hand yanked your hood back and cupped your neck, dragging you back in the shadows with him.

Just like the first time you sneaked out in a quiet place to make out, his lips were rough and insistent on yours. His hands were busy mapping your body, gripping your hips tight as he pushed you back onto the metal of the container. Like a reflex, his fingers seeked your back for a zipper, but found none. He kept searching for the proper way to undo your suit, until he pulled back with a glare of frustration.

You rolled your eyes. “I'll take care of mine, take care of yours”

Of course it was hard to figure out, it was made as such. But telling him that would only push him to try and get it and you weren't nearly patient enough right now to nurse his ego.

In practiced motions, you undid your belt and unclasped several buckles that held the top part of your suit to the bottom. You barely had the time to pop off the button of the waistband that you were pushed once again on the cold metal, a much larger hand quickly replacing yours.

Your pants were quickly undone and his hand slid down your stomach, reaching their destination with haste. You gasped as his calloused fingers began working on your clit, rubbing it in circles at a pace that was both tortuously slow and absolutely fantastic. His free hand slapped on your mouth just as you let out a moan that would have definitely bounced around the whole shipyard.

He tsked. “As much as I would like to hear you, I'd rather not get interrupted by another armed militia. You'd agree, wouldn't you?”

Your breath shuddered and you nodded. Still, his hand didn't go away.

He gave you a smug smirk. “I'll keep it there just in case”

You didn't even think about arguing, instead, you squeezed his forearm to encourage him to keep going. His fingers expertly worked you, alternating between pressure and friction and making your eyes roll back into your skull. Your hips followed his movements, chasing more friction from the fabric of his glove. You were greedy for him, for his hands, for his body. All you wanted to do is take, take and take, and luckily for you, he seemed more than happy to give it all to you and more.

“That's it little bird, fly for me”

His hand moved just right with his words, and you couldn't do anything else to obey his command. You let go and came harder than you had in years, your vision going completely white for a second. Good thing his hand was muffling your voice, otherwise you were sure the whole city would have heard your scream bouncing from the dock.

When he was certain your whimpers had quieted to an acceptable level, he took off his hand from your mouth and caressed the side of your head. “I think I like you like this” He hummed. “Being a good girl for me”

You were already half coherent from your orgasm, but him calling you a good girl like this, even if it was most likely condescending, was definitely getting you worked up for round two. “Fuck, if this is what you give me every time, I'll be whatever you want”

Oh yeah, you were NOT thinking with your brain at the moment.

And the groan coming from him did not help calm down your heartbeat. And judging by how his entire body flexed along, you could only figure out those words of your equally turned him on, creating a feedback loop that threatened to keep you here with him until well past sunrise.

Like a man starved, he shoved you back into the wall with his whole body, pinning your naked hips with his. You took in a sharp breath when his hard cock rubbed against your sensitive clit, spreading your orgasm all over his pants. Before you can make any more noises, his lips were on yours, reclaiming back with interest his dues from the previous ride. The grinding of his hips against yours drove you delirious and made you forget everything that wasn't about him right now.

He reached between his body and yours and pulled out his cock, letting it bounce on his chest piece and stand proud, already glistening with precum. Just like the rest of him, he was huge. Good thing you had a whole waterpark going down there, otherwise he would never have fitted. He snaked his arms around your thighs and put his hands on your ass, then hoisted you up like you weighed nothing more than a feather.

“Not one drop on this suit” You warned breathlessly as he lined himself with you.

“What, no more ruining your clothes?” He raised a teasing eyebrow.

“That dress was worth pocket change compared to this” You replied, eyelids half open as you forced the moment of clarity. “Buying me a new one would have you file for bankruptcy”

“Fine, no stain whatsoever” He drawled out, leaning into your space once again and ghosting his lips on your ear. “Will you be my good girl and take it all inside then?”

The spell you had broken returned tenfold over you as your knees buckled. It took you several seconds to find your voice and prepare an answer that wouldn't be an embarrassingly loud moan. “If I say yes, will you get going?”

The pressure from his tip at your entrance alone made you whimper in absolute delight. This is what had been peeking more and more often in your naughty dreams ever since you met, and more often than not they ended with your hand doing what you now knew was a mediocre impression of his.

Slowly, he lowered you into him until you couldn't go further down. You were so full of him it was literally impossible to think about anything other than the pressure between your legs and the massive cock impaling you. That too, had been greatly underestimated by your imagination. Nothing would have done the real thing justice. You wrapped your legs around his waist and pulled him just a little bit deeper, and it took all of his restraint not to start fucking you like an animal after that.

“Fuck little bird,” He said, his voice low and rough. You hadn't started moving yet, but a quick squeeze around him made him let out a low grunt that you would definitely replay in your head later on. “You always take ‘em that easy?”

“I think that's only you,” Feeling bold at how much he tried to act tough about it, you decided to return the favour. You snaked your arms around his neck and pulled yourself closer, leaving a trail of sloppy kisses up until you reached his ear. “Maybe your little bird has just been dreaming about getting railed by the big bad wolf one night too many to give him any resistance”

He switched his hands from your ass to your waist and pushed you back roughly on the wall. The angle changed and stars flashed in your vision for a moment.

“Why don't you tell me about those dreams?” His words were demands and he started moving inside of you, hips thrusting forward in a tortuously slow movement. Yet, it made your body sing along, meeting him halfway.

“It always starts with you dragging me off to a dark secluded place after I said some shit to get you hard” You smiled as he kept hitting the right spot. Your focus on his questing was a lifeline you gripped with all you had not to just become some fucked out doll for him. You intended to make him work a little more before getting to this point.

He gave you a particular hard thrust that made you gasp for air. “Keep going on, little bird” He grunted in your ear.

“And then– Fuck” You threw your head back on the wall. He wasted no time claiming your open neck, grazing his teeth on the skin. “No marks either”

You could practically feel him rolling his eyes, but he backed off with the teeth and kept going on with his lips. “And then what?”

“And then we rile each other up properly” You smirked as you threaded your hand in his hair and gripped hard. The low reverberating moan that came out of him combined with the very obvious twitching of his dick inside of you nearly made you finish right here and there. “Your head between my legs, taking good care of me…”

His thrusts definitely picked up speed as your words hit their mark. He did nip your neck at the moment, but it was light enough that you let it fly.

“Then when you show that you know how to warm me up, I'd get down on my knees–” That made his hips jut forward and hit a deep spot in you that made you moan like a whore. “Maybe– Maybe even let you fuck my face if your tongue made me cum hard enough–”

“Fuck, who knew Gotham's little princess had such a dirty mouth on her, huh?” He straightened up and returned his glove to your oversensitive clit, brushing it hard enough to catch your voice in your throat. “What would everybody think if they saw you so eager to be my good little fuck toy?”

That would be a proper scandal indeed.

“I don't care what they'd think” You managed to mumble. It was getting harder to keep your mind sharp now that he had begun rubbing you again. “They can even watch, as long as they don't interrupt”

You should have kept your damn mouth shut, you realized seconds later. You had obviously called irony upon yourself just by speaking the words.

“Nightshade?”

It was like you were suddenly doused with a bucket of ice water. You grew rigid as your earpiece came to life with probably the last voice you wanted to hear right now. Your eyes slowly widened as you remembered that your father was on his way to be your backup. And him walking in on you and Slade wouldn't be as low key as it had been with your brothers. There would be bloodshed.

Slade obviously noticed your change of attitude and paused his thrusts. You dreadfully raised your hand to your comm and double tapped it to turn on the mic.

“B?”

It took a few seconds for Slade to understand what was going on, and the shit eating grin he gave you told you he definitely wouldn't make the next step easy. With his good eye never leaving your face, he began thrusting again, challenging your murderous glare.

“I got delayed by another armed group in the shipyard,” He explained. “I’m on my way now. Where are you?”

You thanked whatever divine intervention that put obstacles on his way, because you had totally forgotten about him once you had caught sight of Slade. You were in an uncomfortable situation, but not as much as if he had walked on you. You took a moment to come up with a good enough excuse to keep him away just a little bit longer for you to get out of this mess. In the meanwhile, Slade still kept at it, obviously trying to make you slip. “Um, I–” You coughed to hide a gasp as he hit you deep.

‘Fuck you’ you mouthed to Slade, which he replied in the same fashion, ‘Already am’. That fucker.

“Nightshade, what’s going on?”

You could have killed him right there if he hadn’t been doing it so right.

“Nightshade?”

“Yep, uh,” You took a deep breath and got a hold of yourself. Batman was getting impatient and you had to start being credible. You made a show of coughing exaggeratedly before speaking your next words, your eyes never leaving Slade's. “Just got sucker punched. It's fine though, it just took me by surprise. T'was nothing but a weak shot”

Slade’s smug expression faltered just a little, and you gave him your own version of the shit eating grin he was no longer giving you.

“Ok, where are you now?”

“I've backtracked and now Northbound, but I’ve got it under control” You took the opportunity of your previous lie to breathe deeply and counter some of the absolutely not family-friendly noises that were threatening to come out of your mouth instead of words. “But I’m not the only one here–” Deep breath. “I was being chased, and then I wasn’t. Only a couple of guys kept my trail… Somebody is picking out targets here. I think it would be smarter to fall back on the meetup point and recon”

“... Are you sure?”

“Positive” The word came out short and dry. “I think they might have done the same”

“Alright, I’ll reroute”

“I’ll catch up to you” You managed to say without tripping. “Nightshade out”

You made sure your comm was definitely off before hitting Slade on the chest. He only let out a quiet chuckle at what most likely felt like a breeze to him. “Asshole”

He leaned forward and rested his whole forearm on the container behind you, then thrust up. The new angle had you rolling your eyes in your skull, seeing black and orange stars in the blur of your vision. “Gotta make you pay somehow for all that work you made me do”

“As if you haven’t enjoyed it– oh”

He resumed his pace from before the untimely interruption, effectively cutting off your train of thoughts. “Now little bird, I believe you have somewhere else to be. Such a shame I don't have time to make you beg for it”

“Mhhfp, fine” You muttered as your arms went back around his neck. “Just because you have been quite compliant with my demands–”

He seemed confused for a second, until you pulled yourself up and nuzzled against his neck, letting out your prettiest little moans every time his hips hit yours. With your voice low enough just for him to hear, you gave him what he wanted.

“Please Slade, I need it” The out of rhythm thrusts and the low grunt that you felt through his chest told you everything you needed to know. “I need your cum inside of me, fuck your cum into your good girl”

He slapped a hand on the wall behind you and wrapped his other arm around your waist, moving you faster up and down with his own thrusts forward. He grunted louder and louder in your ear, getting closer to his release. You had no idea if it was the begging or his reaction to it that turned you on, but you were getting pretty close as well.

“Fuck, little bird” His voice was rough and low, and you couldn't help the nip to his throat instead of something louder. “I'll ruin you– I'll fucking ruin you”

“Please ruin me” You whined, feeling the familiar crescendo of your orgasm build. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, please, I'm so close, please don't stop”

“C'mon, be a good girl and cum for me”

He drove you into the wall with his hips and the friction of his belt on your clit drove you to the edge. You had expected it, but holy shit, your orgasm hit you like a freight train. Your walls clenched around him hard and you pulled him deeper into you with your legs, holding onto him with everything you got. Your vision fully went white and your teeth bit into his neck like they had a mind of their own.

After a string of swears, he completely lost his rhythm and stilled, his hips sputtering forward and spilling inside of you with a low moan that almost got you ready for another round.

You didn't move for a moment, focusing on catching your breath. Your eyes were half closed, glazed over, watching sweat pearl over Slade's exposed skin and your bite mark slowly disappearing on his neck.

“Something interesting about my neck, miss Nightshade?”

A genuine smile curved up your lips at his comment; the same he had made all those weeks ago when you were waltzing around the dance floor. “Just admiring the view, that's all” You signed, content. “Why, are you afraid I will bite it off?”

He shook his head, looking up at the sky in a failed attempt to appear annoyed that you also remembered exactly what you replied.

“Huh, I guess you were into it after all” You mumbled as you slowly let yourself slide off of him and fell back on your feet.

He took a good look at the mess he had made, seeming satisfied at how your knees slightly buckled as you hit the ground. Without a word, he pulled himself back in his trousers and readjusted his belt.

You then started to pull back on your suit, the rough material now sitting uncomfortably on your sweaty skin. “That's gonna be a bitch to clean…” You thought aloud, realizing tonight's run was far from over and the many body fluids would have time to nicely settle in the fabric.

“You said not a drop on the outside” Slade commented, then pointed at the clearly not soiled outside layer of the suit. “And none there is”

You couldn't help but laugh as your eyes subconsciously went to his own suit, where the glistening on his thigh guards extended to darker spots on his trousers. Anybody catching a glimpse of it would know exactly what caused the wet spot, and nobody would mistake it for him soiling himself. “Can't say the same for you”

He looked down, then frowned in what you could only describe as a cartoonish way. “Hm. This is upsetting. Whatever will I do”

Both of your eyebrows shot up as you let out a short laugh of disbelief. “What that… a joke?”

He only gave you a stern look that didn’t quite reach his good eye as he put back his mask on.

“Oh, he has a sense of humour now? Who would have known” Despite your half dizzy state, your brain still found enough drive to tease him about it. Considering he was rearranging your guts minutes ago, you believed it was now fair game.

He pointed a warning finger at you after he finished making sure everything was strapped correctly on his armour. “You’re lucky I’m in a good mood”

You rolled your eyes as you flipped back your hood on. “Yeah I fucking bet. ‘Can say thank you Nightshade about it”

As expected, he elected not to comment on that. He only turned around and looked over his shoulder. “Until next time, little bird”

You did gratuitously check out his ass as he walked away, then prepared a damn good reason to give Batman to explain your dishevelled state.

#slade wilson x f!reader #slade wilson x batsis!reader #slade wilson x reader #deathstroke x reader #deathstroke x f!reader #deathstroke x batsis!reader #dc fic #dc writing #dcu #DCU fic

202 notes · View notes

random-guy01 · 5 months ago

Text

Feederism "science" - Liquid Calories

Disclaimer: This text is speculative, fictional writing exercise for entertainment purposes only. Don't take anything written here as if it is factually true and as if it would actually work. 1) Liquid calories Solid food hits a "wall"/speed limit thanks to gastric distension, the stomach's mechanoreceptors (stretch sensors that signal the fullness of the stomach) and its elasticity obviously can't handle endless volume; such sensors trigger a cascade of satiety related hormones like cholecystokinin and peptide YY, while suppressing others like ghrelin (the "hunger" hormone). Crafting a hypercaloric "slurry"/shake to maximize caloric density and rapid digestibility would be ideal. The first important ingredient would be maltodextrin. It is a glucose polymer with a "dextrose equivalent" of 10-20 (this basically means that it easier and faster to digest and absorb), it has a high molecular weight to minimize osmotic pressure (the "thirst" signal that can be triggered, which wouldn't be good, since too much glucose could pull water from your body, which would bloat your stomach quicker and it might also upset it); the maltodextrin will be quickly broken down into maltose and glucose. This will flood your bloodstream with such simple sugars, spiking insulin, making your body store nutrients/fat into adipocytes. The next ingredient would be fructose, which is absorbed via GLUT5 transporters in the intestine. It bypasses the pathways that are mediated by insulin and goes directly into the liver, avoiding further blood insulin spikes (which can promote diabetes and a higher visceral fat deposit proportion), where it fuels "de novo lipogenesis" (DNL), where the liver will convert the excess fructose into palmitate, a "precursor" of triglycerides. The next ingredient would be "Medium-chain triglycerides" (MCT) oil (C8/C10). They are absorbed directly by the portal vein and sent to the liver, and with the ideal volume/amount, the liver will get "overwhelmed" (the excess acetyl-CoA gets rerouted into DNL) and won't be able to burn all that fat at once, specially since it will also need to process the fructose. The leftovers that couldn't be processed would get turned into fat, creating a "lipid tsunami" that will be stored by your body. MCT has a neutral osmolarity, almost 0, which is good since we want to avoid triggering a rapid gastric emptying (which would cause a sudden glucose spike). Some avocado oil could be added to add more calories and some monosaturated fats, which upregulates PPAR-γ expression in subcutaneous adipocytes (fat cells under the skin), directing lipids away from visceral storage. Adding a bit of hydrolyzed whey would be beneficial to add some protein to your metabolism and prevent muscle catabolism. Not too much though, to prevent CCK/PYY release. A few other things that could be added to aid digestion, reduce bloating, and promote a better balance of electrolytes would be: a small amount of salt, potassium citrate and betaine HCL. Small amounts of flavor/palatability (cocoa powder, sucralose, etc.) could be added. I won't give the numbers and proportions that I estimated to be ideal in such slurry/shake, because no one should actually try this and I might be forgetting/missing something; I reiterate that everyone should treat this text as mere fantasy.

Also, I won't delve much deeper into it, because it is long enough as it is, and the next part (which I'm not sure if I'll write) could still be quite extreme and dangerous. Things like using prokinetic drugs to significantly speed up digestion and defecation, using pioglitazone to reroute lipids into being stored subcutaneously, using berberine to reduce the inflammatory fallout caused by the weight gain and excess fat, and some other stuff.

#feedee encouragement #wg encouragement #unhealthy weight gain #wg text #gaining weight on purpose #feedee piggy #fat piggy

59 notes · View notes

chaussetteblanche · 1 year ago

Text

jason todd x biker partner

A/N : just a few thoughts on jason written at midnight, not really proofread, so be kind. might make this a mini series, so feel free to send in any asks of jason with a biker partner :)

- i hc jason with a civilian gf because he has had enough of the vigilante life and having someone “normal” anchors him in the best way possible

- but him with a biker, jesus-

- so lowkey a badass because that just goes with being a biker

- anyway it’s just a pairing that precious to me

- so you guys would meet on your bikes duh

- maybe it’s the middle of the night

- maybe you’re both waiting for a super long red light

- and you know, when you pull up next to him you give him a curt nod, keeping to yourself because yeah maybe you’re a bit intimidated and scared to talk to the hot hunk of man on a supersport bike next you

- but when the light takes even longer than usual, you sigh as you realize what’s happening

- he realizes at about the same time too and his shoulders drop before he looks at you

- “it doesn’t see us, does it?” he asks, his voice muffled by the helmet

- you don’t hear what he says at first and scramble to turn your music off

- “sorry, what did you say?”you ask apologetically, your voice way higher than usual

- he pushes up his visor, chuckling and it’s a sound you’d like to fall in love to

- “i said, i don’t think it sees us,” he jerks the bottom of his helmet in the stop light’s direction

- your eyes stay on what you can see of his face and the black lashes surrounding his dark eyes

- “no, it definitely doesn’t”

- long story short you end up sitting on his ridiculously broad shoulders at 1 am, waving your arms around like a clown, trying to get the light to see you and turn green

- it finally does and after lots of laughing and some flirting, you both get back on your bikes and continue with your night

- but of course you can’t get the hot biker out of your head, not after he laughed at your jokes and lifted you up like you weighed nothing

- not after the searing warmth of his large hands on your thighs, of the words of praise that had left his mouth as he urged you to move around for the sensor

- not after he had been so gentle about putting you down, making sure you were okay

- not after the way he’d let out a giggle when you’d bumped your helmets together when he was setting you down

- needless to say each time you rode your bike or walked around in Gotham, your eyes wandered, hoping to catch sight of the red helmet once more

- you hated yourself for not asking for his number and thought about it at least one a day for weeks

- but you don’t see him for a while, almost long enough for you to forget about him

- almost

- then one evening you break down with your bike

- you don’t know what happened, one sec you were going well above the speed limit, doing fine, and the next second your engine was spluttering and you were hurriedly pulling over, trying not to get hit by any passing cars

- you curse your rotten luck as you helplessly look around your bike, trying to see the cause of the problem

- until you heard an engine

- you recognize the sound, of course, desperate hopeless romantic you were

- and there he was, your knight in shining red helmet

- he pulls over, as does a good biker when he sees a member of his community in trouble, before recognizing you

- “Oh, it’s you !!” he’d exclaimed, sounding genuinely happy to see you as he set his bike on its peg, smoothly getting off

- subconsciously, you wandered how he moved with such grace when he was just so big

- “Yep, it’s me,” you sheepishly answered, hoping you’d have met again under less embarrassing circumstances

- “are you all right?” he’d asked, that concern lacing his low voice again, making your knees weak

- “yeah, yeah, i’m fine, it just died on me and i don’t know why or how to fix it”

- he looked around your bike, commenting on how nice it is (no, you did not blush), poked and prodded a few things before explaining to you what was wrong with it

- you didn’t really remember, all you needed to know was that your bike needed to be towed

- which wouldn’t have been that much of a problem had you been closer to your apartment

- but no, you were a good 45 min drive away with no bike and no apparent way to get home other than calling up one of your friend to come pick you up

- “where do you live?”

- you startle at that and jason immediately puts his hands up

- you ignore the way you see the material of his jacket strain because of the bulge of his muscles

- “sorry, fuck, that must sound super creepy ! i meant that i could drop you off if you like, if you want me to. i totally understand if you don’t though, if you’re not comfortable with that or anything!!”

- you kind of want to cry because he’s so kind and thoughtful and sweet

- “if you’re sure you wouldn’t mind, that would be really great. i live in gotham.”

- “no kidding ? me too.”

- and so that’s how you finally get his number

#jason todd #jason todd x reader #jason todd x you #jason todd fic #jason todd fanfiction #jason todd x biker

155 notes · View notes

dangraccoon · 4 months ago

Text

Untitled Spreadsheet - PRIVATE

Chapter 8 - Shielded

Word Count: 837

Content: canon-typical violence, acceptance of death, injuries, brotherly affection (teasing)

For @literallyjustanerd, based on this post

Ever since the beginning, it had been something of an unspoken rule that Cody and Kenobi fought side by side unless the battle plan or other necessity separated them.

And they had been separated for quite a while by heavy bombing early in the day. He hadn’t been sure where his General was, the chaos of the battlefield only cut by the need to go, go go.

A shiny behind him was hit–a shot directly to his right shoulder–and he hauled the brother to his side behind cover.

“Stay here, stay down,” he ordered. “Medic’ll get you soon.”

The brother nodded with a groan, and Cody jumped up, calling to the others nearby.

“Push forward!” he called. “Move it! Let’s go!”

He raced through the field, firing on the droids before them, then fighting them off hand-to-hand when he was close enough.

“Commander!” someone shouted but it was already too late.

The world around Cody slowed as he watched a B2-HA fire directly at him.

In the precious few seconds left in his life, he could only think of his General and his regret in never getting an answer to the question that had been gnawing at his soul since they’d met.

Though, mostly, he thought of how pissed he was that he didn’t see that clanker.

He didn’t close his eyes–no, he had always wanted to face his inevitable death head on–and he was thankful that he hadn’t, otherwise he might have missed the sight of the person saving his life.

Kenobi appeared out of nowhere, jumping between Cody and the ammunition with his number on it, deflecting the round back to hit the B2 squarely between its optical sensors.

The war raged on around them, back to normal speed.

Kenobi turned back to face him, his chest heaving. He held his lightsaber off to the side and stretched his left hand towards Cody. It was shaking; Cody had thought at the time it had been due to the strain of the battle, but later he wouldn’t be quite as sure.

Cody accepted his hand and let himself be pulled to his feet.

“Cody, I-I apologize for knocking you over,” Kenobi half-shouted over the sounds of the battle around them, his hand gripping Cody’s forearm the same way many of the Generals had picked up from the Vode. “I saw the SBD look in your direction and- well, I acted rather without thinking.”

Cody’s head spun so hard that he wondered briefly if he’d hit his head.

“Sir, please don’t apologize for saving my life,” he said, chuckling lightly.

Before long they were called back to the fight and forced to release their slight embrace. As they marched toward the front, Cody noticed the General drop his left hand to his side, flexing it open, closed, open, and closed again.

Now, Cody tapped at his datapad, brow furrowed in concentration.

Despite not having the opportunity to document the latest incident, it had been on loop in his mind since.

“Oh good,” Rex said, appearing in the doorway of the medical bay. “They found you.”

Cody glared at him. “As I told Pulse and Kix, there are others who need medical attention far more urgently–”

“And they’ve already received it,” Kix piped up from the side of the next bed over. “Your leg should’ve been seen to with the second wave!”

Rex chuckled. “What are you so busy with anyway?”

“I’m a Marshal Commander, Rex,” Cody deadpanned. “I have a lot to do.”

“Ah, so it’s the spreadsheet then,” Rex grinned wickedly. At least he had the sense to lower his voice. “What act of hidden love has he performed today?”

“Go kriff yourself, kih’vod,” Cody grumbled.

“Hm,” Rex said, seeming to consider this. Cody should have known better.

In a flash of chaos, Rex jabbed his fingers against Cody’s side–right where he’d recently had stitches from an incident with some shrapnel–and took advantage of Cody’s distraction to grab the pad out of his hands.

Cody felt a low growl coming from his throat. He cursed the tendency of himself and his batch to adopt tubies back when they were cadets, and how damn copik’la Rex had been at that age. Maker, save me from mouthy kih’vode, he’d always heard Alpha-17 grumble, not realizing he’d soon feel the same.

“Saleucami? You haven’t updated this for two weeks?” Rex asked. “You have been busy.”

Cody merely rolled his eyes.

“He was flexing his hand?” Rex murmured. “What’s that matter?”

Cody swallowed, choosing to find the cot beneath him more interesting than the confused expression on his brother. “I thought, maybe, that his hand might’ve felt the same as mine. That maybe he felt the same as me.”

Rex hummed, his expression a mix of quiet curiosity and practiced neutrality. Cody briefly wondered what had been giving him such practice. “How did your hand feel?” Rex asked.

Cody’s face felt hot. This was much easier to talk about over a comm channel. “It, ah- it was… tingling a little.”

Event: During the last tour on Saleucami, an SBD fired a heavy artillery round in my direction. General Kenobi, who I thought had not been aware of my position, suddenly threw himself between me and the droid to deflect the bolt, forcing me to the ground behind him. Once the droid was dispatched, he offered me his hand, which was shaking. After I stood, he gripped my forearm and apologised for pushing me to the ground, stating that when he saw me in danger he “acted rather without thinking”

Rational Explanation: General Kenobi is a hero whose prowess in battle is matched only by his compassion for his comrades. He is unparalleled in skill and will always protect his men, me included, with his own life, which is incredibly admirable

Irrational explanation: The thought of losing me in battle drives General Kenobi to monitor my position constantly and upon seeing I was in danger, he threw himself in front of me without thinking because he is madly in love with me and would die to protect me as I would for him

Additional notes: After I let go of General Kenobi’s hand, I saw him flex it several times at his side as we walked away

↫ Previous Chapter

Next Chapter ↬

Thanks for reading! - River

Untitled Spreadsheet - PRIVATE Master List DangRaccoon Master List Tag List Form Read on AO3

Tags: @nekotaetae @lokigirlszendaya @get-wr3ckered @jediknightjana @idoubleswearimawriter @lucyysthings @unstable-kiwi @6oceansofmoons @l3xi3luv @savebytheodoresnonjosestuff @winter-phoenix1995 @nomercyforthewarrior @padawancat97 @wishyouthetest @orangez3st @flowered-bicycles @error6gendernotfound @techs-goggles9902

#DangRaccoon #Dang writing #commander cody #obi-wan kenobi #codywan #the clone wars #the clone wars fanfiction #clone wars fanfiction #tcw #tcw fanfiction #Untitled Spreadsheet - PRIVATE

32 notes · View notes

hot-claws-420 · 6 months ago

Text

[AFTER ACTION REPORT]

[UPLOAD DELAYED BY: {29}DAYS]

[NOTIFYING COMMAND OF OPERATION: @albatross-lancer]

[GREETINGS. I AM OMA, ONBOARD MEDICAL ASSISTANT TO CALLISIGN {SINGED WHISKERS}. WHILE DOING ROUTINE MAINTENANCE, I HAVE PARTIALLY RECOVERED {1} FILES DAMAGED BY REACTOR STRESS DURING OPERATION {SIEGE OF ERDAF}. DESPITE THE DELAY, I AM REQUIRED BY MY DIRECTIVE TO RELAY THIS REPORT TO COMMAND {ALBATROSS}. NOTE, INFORMATION ON PILOT AND MECH STATUS IS OUT OF DATE AS OF NOW. PLEASE STAND BY FOR FILE UPLOAD...]

[CALLSIGN: SINGED WHISKERS; STATUS: ALIVE]

[MECH DESIGNATION: SLAG KITTY, ENKIDU UNIT; STATUS: DAMAGED, STRUCTURE FULL, REACTOR STRESSED {1} TIMES, SINCE STABILIZED]

...<UPLOADING MISSION RECORDING>

[An ever growing view of the side of Pirate Vessel "Direption." Its hull has been punctured by some manner of breach charge. More and more debris floating around the massive hole becomes clear as the mech rapidly moves closer. SLAG KITTY appears to be carried by another, mounted mech, boosting to build speed.]

Callsign Photon: Releasing you in T-15 seconds. Ready?

[RELEASING COMBAT STIMS DOSE ONE]

Callsign SINGED WHISKERS: HHRRRHMMMM fucking KILL!!!

Callsign Photon: That... sounds like a yes. Dropping. Slowing myself and covering your six. The rest are just behind us.

[CALCULATING TIME TO IMPACT...]

[10 SECONDS...]

[5...]

[4...]

[3...]

[2...]

[The vacuum devours the sound of impact. Metal silently bends, rips, tears. SLAG KITTY lands claws first on a pirate chassis with the speed of a missile. With the momentum, SINGED is able to halfway bisect the mech vertically as she crunches it against the ground.]

SINGED: HEY, HEY!!! AHAHAHAHAHEHEHEHE!!!

[A hail of gunfire rains in both directions as Albatross forces begin landing in her wake.]

Photon: Three hostiles pointed your direction, SINGED. Covering ya. Pick 'em off.

[Sparks shower the deck as SLAG KITTY and the remains of the destroyed chassis scrape along and bounce back up in the zero g. The enkidu leaps from the wreckage towards an incoming pirate mech armed with some sort of integrated chainsaw. The weapon is torn from the chassis in seconds as plasma claws rip across the machine's arm.]

SINGED: GRaAAHH!!!

[As the mech's arm is shredded, a war pike streaks past SLAG KITTY'S head, striking one of the remaining two in the shoulder and knocking the aim of its rifle off target from SINGED. She takes the opportunity to latch her claws under the head of the chassis and pull upward, tearing it from the body.]

Photon: Seems we scared them off.

[SLAG KITTY digs its claws into the deck to bring its momentum to a screeching halt and keep from floating off. SINGED turns to see the remaining two attackers fleeing towards a set of hanger doors.]

Photon: I say we pursue. If they call for reinforcements, that pulls guns away from our folks working towards the bridge.

SINGED: Aye aye! HeheHEE!!

[SLAG KITTY grips its claw into the deck of the ship and throws itself, floating in pursuit of the targets. The pair of pirates stop at the doors. An emergency light flashes yellow when the first of the two slams its fist onto the chassis-scale console. The door does not open immediately.]

Photon: It's depressurizing. There'll be two sets of doors. Looks like we have time to pick one of- t---- o-- f-- f-- f

[A pair of antennae atop one of the pirate chassis produce a series of blinks, and the sensors of the SLAG KITTY are occasionally interrupted by static.]

[REACTOR HEAT CAPACITY {16%}.]

SINGED: PPFFFT AHAHAHAHAAHHAHAAHAA!!!! U FUCKIN CALL THAT HEAT??? I BURN MY REACTOR HARDER THAN THAT CUZ ITS FUNNY!!!! WATCH THIS!!!

[SINGED gives a triumphant roar: the only thing audible over coms as there's a single, brief flash from the muzzle of SLAG KITTY. In an instant, the entire middle of the tech mech simply ceases to be, cockpit and all. The legs of the doomed machine begin to drift in either direction, just in time for the door to begin slowly opening behind them.]

[WARNING: REACTOR HEAT CAPACITY {97.8%}. STABILIZATION RECOMMENDED.]

Photon: Nice shot, kid.

SINGED: HEHEHAHA!! BYE BYE!!!

[The remaining pirate flees through the barely open doors, which close behind them. As they do so, SLAG KITTY pursues.]

[ENGAGING RAPID HEAT VENTING...]

[SLAG KITTY reaches the doors as it cools, immediately throwing itself against them and clawing like a caged animal.]

SINGED: Let me IN!! LET ME IIINNNN!!!!

[A Nelson, presumably Callsign Photon's mech, flies into frame on its mount.]

Photon: Kid. You just need to hit the button.

SINGED: Oh.

[Photon does so, and the yellow light begins flashing again. Eventually, they begin to open once more.]

SINGED: Hrrgh... Hmm... HRRGH GRRRR.

Photon: What are you doing?

SINGED: It's too SLOW!! My PREY'S gonna get away!!

Photon: Patience. We want them to get help, remember?

[SINGED growls again but says nothing, the enkidu staring at the doors like a cat staring through a window at a bird. After about twenty seconds, the door opens wide enough for the duo to get through, and SLAG KITTY immediately slams the next button. As the first set of doors seals behind them, SINGED begins clawing at the next set.]

SINGED: OPEN OPEN OPEN OPEN OPEN

Photon: SINGED. The chamber has to depressurize before that'll happen.

SINGED: I CANN MAKE IT GO FASTER!!!

[Before Photon can protest, SLAG KITTY has backed up, and another flash escapes the displacer in its maw. A large circular portion of the doorway is erased. Both mechs stagger backwards as the vacuum rips air from the next corridor into the chamber. With the doors behind the pair sealed, this lasts only a moment.]

SINGED: NO MORE FLOAT!!!

[She quickly scurries through the hole.]

Photon: Well, if it works it w-

...<ERROR. FILE DAMAGED. SCRUBBING VIDEO FILE FOR INTACT FOOTAGE>

[A number of short, disjointed clips follow, ranging on average from 1 to fifteen seconds. They show Photon and SINGED working through the ship, chasing the fleeing pirate, and SINGED subsequently tearing through mechs like a rabid beast. It seems that at some point in the chaos they engaged their second round of stims. Photon's plan was to draw fire from the main team, and the two certainly seem to have succeeded by that measure.]

[Finally, the footage begins to come in longer intact clips again. SLAG KITTY appears to have have just reached the end of a catwalk, before...]

Photon: LOOK OUT!!!

[Photon's mech slams into SLAG KITTY, bringing it out of the line of fire of a shotgun at the last second. There's hardly time to make out the shape of the mech rounding the corner before more gunfire sprays the catwalk from elsewhere.]

Photon: Intercepting long ranged hostile.

[Photon leaps over the side and into flight. More gunfire follows. SINGED's focus returns to the shotgunner. Examining the frame, it appears to be a modified blackbeard.]

SINGED: HeheEE. Get in CLOSE so I ca- AAUGH!!

[The blackbeard obliges, too quickly for the SLAG KITTY to tear into it with Primal Fury. The pirate slams the shotgun into her like a club, sending her flying a great distance backward. She claws into the ground to gain traction and retain her footing.]

SINGED: GRRRRrRR!!!

Blackbeard: Heheh.

[The pirate, looking over the SLAG KITTY, drops his shotgun, pulling from his back a long, two-handed axe.]

SINGED: OHhhh I like u. IM GONNA EA- GAHH!!!

[The pirate's grapple catches SLAG KITTY and reels him in close. AS SINGED takes a step back, caught of guard by the speed, the axe is brought down into the enkidu's shoulder.]

SINGED: AUGH!! GRRRRRAAA!!

[The pirate twists his axe, using the leverage to throw SLAG KITTY to the side and off of the catwalk. SINGED does her best to tuck and roll, but from the crunching sound of the impact, it's clear she isn't able to avoid damage entirely.]

[The blackbeard leaps from the catwalk after her, engaging a jump jet and descending upon her. Seeing an opportunity, her burning claws engage, and like a cat with a bird she latches them into the flying opponent.]

SINGED: GRRR GET DOWN!!!

[The plasma talons rip through the chassis, but aren't enough to stop it from landing atop SLAG KITTY and pinning it to the ground.]

Blackbeard: Time to put ya down, ya feral fuckin dog.

[He swings the axe overhead towards the ground, and SLAG KITTY has just enough time to move its head aside before it can chop through. Instead, it embeds itself in the ground. As the pirate pulls, it's not released immediately.]

[RELEASING COMBAT STIMS DOSE {3}.]

SINGED: I. AM A CAT!!! MRRAAAAAAAAHH!!!!

[SLAG KITTY's maw wraps around the pole of the axe and bites with all its might. Heat builds in the frame's mouth, and metal softens as teeth rend. The axe-head is snapped violently from the pole.]

[WARNING: REACTOR HEAT CAPACITY {86.4%}. STABILIZATION RECOMMENDED.]

SINGED: I DOTN CAREE!!! RAAAAAGH!!!

Blackbeard: Oh fu-

[The jaws' next target is the leg of the frame, and the teeth sink in just as deep, producing even more slag. In short order, the blackbeard is wrestled to the ground, leg mangled to the point of near removal.]

[WARNING: REACTOR HEAT CAPACITY {EXCEEDED}. POWER PLANT DESTABILIZED.]

SINGED: I SAID I DONT CARRRE AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!

[SLAG KITTY's claws rip into the chassis, leaving a wide, molten gash with each strike.]

...<ERROR. FILE DAMAGED. SCRUBBING VIDEO FILE FOR INTACT FOOTAGE>

Blackbeard: FUCK NO NO NO!!!

...<ERROR. FILE DAMAGED. SCRUBBING VIDEO FILE FOR INTACT FOOTAGE>

[The cockpit of the Blackbeard is torn open just enough for SLAG KITTY's head to fit through. SINGED gives a horrific roar, and the pirate inside goes ghostly white.]

...<ERROR. FILE DAMAGED. SCRUBBING VIDEO FILE FOR INTACT FOOTAGE>

SINGED: AHAHAHAHHHAAA

[SLAG KITTY looks over the unmoving wreckage of the blackbeard, then to Photon's side of the battlefield, which has gone quiet. Photon holds his lance trained on the remaining enemy frame, which was disarmed, raising its hands in surrender.]

Photon: Just got word, kid. We've taken the bridge. It's over.

SINGED: Wha? BUt. KILL. KILLLLL!!!!!

[RELEASING POST-COMBAT SEDATIVES]

SINGED: Wha... Wh... hrrn. eepy...

Photon: You did good, you little maniac. Get some rest. You've earned it.

...<RECORDING ENDS>

#ooc WOWIE im glad i could finally get this out! was more relevant nearly a month ago but thats how it is sometimes #also id like to point out that i used a license from the Corsair Gruntworks LCP for the blackbeard #the axe he used was a breidax from the Stamford license and i was also inspied by one of the Stamfords systems #so thanks to Pines! :D #lancer rp #oc rp #oc rp blog #lancer enkidu #sally screaming #OMA updating #tw drugs

34 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

Text

Solar is a market for (financial) lemons

There are only four more days left in my Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it's in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.

There's a (superficial) good case for turning markets loose on the problem of financing the rollout of an entirely new kind of energy provision across a large and heterogeneous nation. As capitalism's champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action. Merely dangle the incentive of profit before the market's teeming participants and they will align themselves towards it, like iron filings all snapping into formation towards a magnet.

But markets have a problem: they are prone to "reward hacking." This is a term from AI research: tell your AI that you want it to do something, and it will find the fastest and most efficient way of doing it, even if that method is one that actually destroys the reason you were pursuing the goal in the first place.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/engineering/failure-modes-in-machine-learning

For example: if you use an AI to come up with a Roomba that doesn't bang into furniture, you might tell that Roomba to avoid collisions. However, the Roomba is only designed to register collisions with its front-facing sensor. Turn the Roomba loose and it will quickly hit on the tactic of racing around the room in reverse, banging into all your furniture repeatedly, while never registering a single collision:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/when-ais-start-hacking.html

This is sometimes called the "alignment problem." High-speed, probabilistic systems that can't be fully predicted in advance can very quickly run off the rails. It's an idea that pre-dates AI, of course – think of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But AI produces these perverse outcomes at scale…and so does capitalism.

Many sf writers have observed the odd phenomenon of corporate AI executives spinning bad sci-fi scenarios about their AIs inadvertently destroying the human race by spinning off in some kind of paperclip-maximizing reward-hack that reduces the whole planet to grey goo in order to make more paperclips. This idea is very implausible (to say the least), but the fact that so many corporate leaders are obsessed with autonomous systems reward-hacking their way into catastrophe tells us something about corporate executives, even if it has no predictive value for understanding the future of technology.

Both Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross have theorized that the source of these anxieties isn't AI – it's corporations. Corporations are these equilibrium-seeking complex machines that can't be programmed, only prompted. CEOs know that they don't actually run their companies, and it haunts them, because while they can decompose a company into all its constituent elements – capital, labor, procedures – they can't get this model-train set to go around the loop:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Stross calls corporations "Slow AI," a pernicious artificial life-form that acts like a pedantic genie, always on the hunt for ways to destroy you while still strictly following your directions. Markets are an extremely reliable way to find the most awful alignment problems – but by the time they've surfaced them, they've also destroyed the thing you were hoping to improve with your market mechanism.

Which brings me back to solar, as practiced in America. In a long Time feature, Alana Semuels describes the waves of bankruptcies, revealed frauds, and even confiscation of homeowners' houses arising from a decade of financialized solar:

https://time.com/6565415/rooftop-solar-industry-collapse/

The problem starts with a pretty common finance puzzle: solar pays off big over its lifespan, saving the homeowner money and insulating them from price-shocks, emergency power outages, and other horrors. But solar requires a large upfront investment, which many homeowners can't afford to make. To resolve this, the finance industry extends credit to homeowners (lets them borrow money) and gets paid back out of the savings the homeowner realizes over the years to come.

But of course, this requires a lot of capital, and homeowners still might not see the wisdom of paying even some of the price of solar and taking on debt for a benefit they won't even realize until the whole debt is paid off. So the government moved in to tinker with the markets, injecting prompts into the slow AIs to see if it could coax the system into producing a faster solar rollout – say, one that didn't have to rely on waves of deadly power-outages during storms, heatwaves, fires, etc, to convince homeowners to get on board because they'd have experienced the pain of sitting through those disasters in the dark.

The government created subsidies – tax credits, direct cash, and mixes thereof – in the expectation that Wall Street would see all these credits and subsidies that everyday people were entitled to and go on the hunt for them. And they did! Armies of fast-talking sales-reps fanned out across America, ringing dooorbells and sticking fliers in mailboxes, and lying like hell about how your new solar roof was gonna work out for you.

These hustlers tricked old and vulnerable people into signing up for arrangements that saw them saddled with ballooning debt payments (after a honeymoon period at a super-low teaser rate), backstopped by liens on their houses, which meant that missing a payment could mean losing your home. They underprovisioned the solar that they installed, leaving homeowners with sky-high electrical bills on top of those debt payments.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it shares a lot of DNA with the subprime housing bubble, where fast-talking salesmen conned vulnerable people into taking out predatory mortgages with sky-high rates that kicked in after a honeymoon period, promising buyers that the rising value of housing would offset any losses from that high rate.

These fraudsters knew they were acquiring toxic assets, but it didn't matter, because they were bundling up those assets into "collateralized debt obligations" – exotic black-box "derivatives" that could be sold onto pension funds, retail investors, and other suckers.

This is likewise true of solar, where the tax-credits, subsidies and other income streams that these new solar installations offgassed were captured and turned into bonds that were sold into the financial markets, producing an insatiable demand for more rooftop solar installations, and that meant lots more fraud.

Which brings us to today, where homeowners across America are waking up to discover that their power bills have gone up thanks to their solar arrays, even as the giant, financialized solar firms that supplied them are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks to waves of defaults. Meanwhile, all those bonds that were created from solar installations are ticking timebombs, sitting on institutions' balance-sheets, waiting to go blooie once the defaults cross some unpredictable threshold.

Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth opportunities. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn't owned by the homeowner – it's owned by a solar company, which is to say, "a finance company that happens to sell solar":

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solarcity-maintains-34-residential-solar-market-share-in-1h-2015/406552/

And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks – sometimes more than 100%.

The solar companies would be in even worse trouble, but they also tricked all their victims into signing binding arbitration waivers that deny them the power to sue and force them to have their grievances heard by fake judges who are paid by the solar companies to decide whether the solar companies have done anything wrong. You will not be surprised to learn that the arbitrators are reluctant to find against their paymasters.

I had a sense that all this was going on even before I read Semuels' excellent article. We bought a solar installation from Treeium, a highly rated, giant Southern California solar installer. We got an incredibly hard sell from them to get our solar "for free" – that is, through these financial arrangements – but I'd just sold a book and I had cash on hand and I was adamant that we were just going to pay upfront. As soon as that was clear, Treeium's ardor palpably cooled. We ended up with a grossly defective, unsafe and underpowered solar installation that has cost more than $10,000 to bring into a functional state (using another vendor). I briefly considered suing Treeium (I had insisted on striking the binding arbitration waiver from the contract) but in the end, I decided life was too short.

The thing is, solar is amazing. We love running our house on sunshine. But markets have proven – again and again – to be an unreliable and even dangerous way to improve Americans' homes and make them more resilient. After all, Americans' homes are the largest asset they are apt to own, which makes them irresistible targets for scammers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

That's why the subprime scammers targets Americans' homes in the 2000s, and it's why the house-stealing fraudsters who blanket the country in "We Buy Ugly Homes" are targeting them now. Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/

America can and should electrify and solarize. There are serious logistical challenges related to sourcing the underlying materials and deploying the labor, but those challenges are grossly overrated by people who assume the only way we can approach them is though markets, those monkey's paw curses that always find a way to snatch profitable defeat from the jaws of useful victory.

To get a sense of how the engineering challenges of electrification could be met, read McArthur fellow Saul Griffith's excellent popular engineering text Electrify:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

And to really understand the transformative power of solar, don't miss Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works, where you'll learn that we could give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder) by capturing just 0.4% of the solar rays that reach Earth's surface:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

But we won't get there with markets. All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for "carbon offsets," which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

We can address the climate emergency, but not by prompting the slow AI and hoping it doesn't figure out a way to reward-hack its way to giant profits while doing nothing. Founder and chairman of Goodleap, Hayes Barnard, is one of the 400 richest people in the world – a fortune built on scammers who tricked old people into signing away their homes for nonfunctional solar):

https://www.forbes.com/profile/hayes-barnard/?sh=40d596362b28

If governments are willing to spend billions incentivizing rooftop solar, they can simply spend billions installing rooftop solar – no Slow AI required.

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28 - TOMORROW!) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image:

Future Atlas/www.futureatlas.com/blog (modified)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/87913776@N00/3996366952

CC BY 2.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

J Doll (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Sky_%28140451293%29.jpeg

CC BY 3.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #solar #financialization #energy #climate #electrification #climate emergency #bezzles #ai #reward hacking #alignment problem #carbon offsets #slow ai #subprime

232 notes · View notes

stevebattle · 6 months ago

Text

Armadillo (EMR 1020) by Feedback Inc. (1985). This "computer-controlled, educational robot is ideally suited to teach robotics principles. Under computer control, the ARMADILLO will run around forward, backward, and to the left or right at a speed of 15 feet per minute. Each wheel is independently controlled. Whenever the robot encounters an unmovable object, touch sensors send data back to the remote computer, which then directs either evasive or exploratory action. ARMADILLO has blinking "eyes," beeps in either of two tones, and when directed by the computer, will press down a pen and chart it programmed progress on paper. According to the company, the ARMADILLO connects to the input/output ports of the ZX81 (Timex/Sinclair 1000), the AIM65, or other microcomputers. The interface circuit enables the robot to be treated as a memory-mapped I/O device so data can be sent to and received from the robot as if it were another memory location in RAM or ROM. The robot comes fully assembled and tested or, for increasing learning, is available in kit form for self-assembly. It runs on a dc supply of 9 to 15 volts drawn from the host computer. Price of the fully assembled model is $525." – The Personal Robot Book, by Texe Marrs.

#cybernetics #robot #turtle #1985 #Feedback Inc.

32 notes · View notes

papagabu · 3 months ago

Text

Okay, I was gonna wait till I got my invitation to AO3 to post this there, but I’m getting impatient so for now, here is the very first chapter of my Sonic AU, Metal Breakers.

Just read it here below.

"Metal! Sonic is arriving at the Speedway as we speak, get into position and intercept him as planned!"

Dr. Robotnik’s commanding voice echoed inside Metal Sonic’s head, his words charged with urgency and confidence. Without hesitation, Metal gave a curt nod and silently assumed his position. His glowing red eyes scanned the winding tracks of Stardust Speedway, every sense locked onto detecting his copy. The neon-lit cityscape shimmered in the distance, the metallic pathways humming with energy. The moment was close. He could feel it.

And then, there he was.

Sonic tore down the track at breakneck speed, just as the doctor had meticulously predicted. Every movement, every turn, it was all according to plan. Metal's circuits surged with anticipation. This was it. His moment of triumph. Without a second thought, he propelled himself downward, slamming into the track below and cutting Sonic off in an electrifying crash of sparks and steel.

The blue hedgehog skidded to a halt, dust and debris swirling around him. Metal straightened, his metallic frame gleaming under the Speedway’s vibrant lights. His clawed hand curled into a fist before he jabbed a finger in Sonic’s direction, his voice laced with triumph.

"Finally! The time has come for me to rid the world of you, faker!" Metal declared, his mechanical voice ringing with unshakable conviction.

But Sonic? He barely reacted. Arms crossed, he simply tapped his foot against the metal surface, unimpressed. His emerald eyes locked onto Metal's, unreadable yet unwavering.

Metal bristled at the silence. "What? Nothing to say, fake hedgehog? Ha! Just as I'd expect from-"

His taunt was cut short by the sound of deep, booming laughter.

"Ho ho ho ho! Ahahahaha!"

Metal’s sensors flared as he recognized the voice instantly, Robotnik. The doctor’s Egg Mobile descended smoothly, its thrusters humming ominously as he hovered into place just behind Sonic. A wicked grin stretched across his face, his eyes gleaming with sinister delight.

"So, the meddlesome rodent has finally fallen right into my trap!" he declared, his voice dripping with satisfaction.

The Speedway pulsed with an electric energy, the moment hanging thick with tension. Metal tightened his stance, his focus unbroken. This time, there would be no escape.

"Metal has been waiting for this moment for so long, the day he finally eliminates you, Sonic!"

Robotnik leaned over the cockpit of his Egg Mobile, his sinister grin stretching across his face like a dark crescent moon. His beady eyes gleamed with sadistic triumph as he loomed over the blue hedgehog.

"But why end it so quickly?" he mused, his voice dripping with mockery. "Where’s the fun in that? I’ll give you one final rush before you’re wiped off the face of Little Planet!" He chuckled darkly, letting the words sink in before continuing.

"How about a race?" Robotnik proposed, his tone laced with amusement. "If you can beat Metal to the end of this speedway, which, let’s be honest, you won’t! You’ll earn the privilege of facing my ultimate creation, the Egg Spinner. Oh, and you might just get the chance to rescue that little pink girl Metal scooped up earlier." His grin widened. "Fail, and you’ll be vaporized!"

To punctuate his threat, Robotnik activated the laser on his Egg Mobile, a brilliant yellow beam slicing through the air. The sheer power of it sent sparks flying as he cackled maniacally.

"Aho ho ho ho hooo!"

Sonic, however, remained unfazed. He uncrossed his arms, rolling his eyes as if he’d heard this all a hundred times before.

"Yeah, yeah, same old song and dance, Robuttnik," he said, emphasizing the nickname with a cocky smirk. "You really think your new toy here stands a chance against me? Pfft, you’re even dumber than I thought, and that’s really saying something."

Robotnik scowled but quickly regained his composure. "You fool! You underestimate Metal’s speed! I’ve studied you meticulously, analyzed every technique, every strength, and perfected them all before giving them to him!"

Metal Sonic tensed slightly at Robotnik’s words. Him? The doctor spoke as if Sonic were the original and Metal was merely an imitation. The thought sparked something deep within Metal’s circuits,a flicker of something unspoken. But he shoved it aside. This was his moment. His victory. And nothing,not even his creator’s careless words would shake his resolve.

He stepped forward, taking a ready stance at the start of the raceway. His thruster hummed to life, glowing with raw energy.

Sonic stretched his quills, flashing a confident grin at his mechanical rival. "Alright, I suppose I could humor you a bit." He bent down into a low, ready stance, his eyes locking onto the finish line with razor-sharp focus. Then, he glanced sideways at Metal, smirking.

"You ready to lose, tin can?"

Metal didn’t respond. He simply narrowed his eyes, the crimson glow intensifying. No words were needed. His determination was absolute.

Robotnik watched the two prepare, a satisfied smirk playing across his lips. He tapped the side of his Egg Mobile, anticipation gleaming in his wicked eyes.

"Aho ho ho, this is going to be quite the show." he muttered to himself.

Metal crouched lower, his sleek metallic form glinting under the artificial sunlight. The Speedway stretched ahead, a battleground of speed and power.

"Alright, you two…" Robotnik drawled, his finger hovering over a control switch. "On your marks… get set… hehehe…"

Then, with a sudden, gleeful sneer, he reactivated the laser and shouted, "GO! Ahahahahaaaa!"

With an explosive burst of energy, Metal Sonic blasted off, leaving behind a searing trail of blue electricity. At the same time, Sonic lunged forward, hitting full sprint in an instant.

The race had begun.

With a thunderous roar, Metal Sonic’s rocket thrusters ignited, unleashing an explosive surge of energy that sent him hurtling down the twisting raceway. His streamlined form cut through the air like a blade, effortlessly weaving past the track’s treacherous obstacles with razor-sharp precision. Every sharp turn was executed flawlessly, every hazard narrowly evaded as he surged forward, his metallic frame vibrating from the sheer force of his velocity.

The finish line was in sight. Victory was inevitable.

Metal’s confidence soared, his calculations were perfect. Sonic had to be far behind, lost in the dust of his own inferiority. But then, a quick glance over his shoulder sent a jolt through his circuits. Sonic was gaining. Fast.

The blue blur closed the gap with astonishing speed, his signature smirk plastered across his face as if the laws of physics themselves bowed to his will. Metal’s optics flared in disbelief. Impossible!

But Metal quickly regained his confidence, reassuring himself with the knowledge he was the original and that the blue hedgehog gaining on him was just a cheap knock off. "You might as well give up now, faker! I am the real-"

"Ha! So you're supposed to be me?" Sonic cut in with a cocky grin, his voice carrying effortlessly over the roar of the wind. "Well, let’s see how you handle the real deal, bolt brain!"

And with that, Sonic blazed past him, a streak of blue light tearing through the air.

Metal’s hands clenched into tight fists, his mechanical joints straining under the force of his growing frustration. How? How could this inferior copy be outrunning him? His processors reeled, but his fury drowned out the logic.

"That’s impossible!" he snarled, his voice laced with pure outrage. "I’m the real Sonic! I can’t lose to a mere imitation!"

His engine roared like a caged beast as he forced his thrusters into overdrive. A deafening growl erupted from his core, his body surging forward in a desperate bid to reclaim the lead. Sparks flew as he skimmed dangerously close to the track’s edges, his sheer speed bending the very air around him. He had to win. He would win.

The race had become a war, a relentless clash of speed and skill. Metal relied on raw power, unleashing bursts of acceleration to rocket ahead, while Sonic used finesse, maneuvering through the track’s twists and turns with an effortless grace that no machine could replicate.

But then, Metal saw it. The finish line, a large steel door loomed ahead, the entrance to Robotnik’s factory. And just beyond it, a control panel. The key to sealing the exit shut.

A surge of determination electrified Metal’s circuits. This was it! He would cross first. He would press that button. And he, not Sonic, would decide how this race ended. With a final, desperate burst of speed, Metal hurled himself toward the threshold, ready to leave his loathsome copy trapped behind him, once and for all.

But at the very last second, all Metal Sonic saw was a streak of blue, then slam!

The door in front of him slammed shut right in his face. There was no time to react, no time to slow down. A thunderous bang echoed through Stardust Speedway as Metal Sonic crashed head first into the unyielding steel. The sheer force of the impact sent a violent shock through his entire frame, rattling his circuits and leaving a deep dent in the door.

Sparks erupted as he ricocheted backward, hitting the metallic ground in a screech of grinding metal. His systems screamed in protest, pain surging through his mechanical limbs like an electric shock. The world spun around him, his vision flickering with static as he struggled to regain control.

He let out a disoriented groan as he attempted to push himself up, only to realize something was wrong, His leg was stuck under the door.. The massive steel door had come down directly on top of his leg, its crushing weight pinning him to the ground. Metal’s optics flared as he strained to pull himself free, his servos whirring frantically. But it was no use. The door wouldn’t budge, he was stuck there, and worst of all, Sonic had won.

Despite the crushing weight pinning him down, Metal Sonic refused to stop. He clawed at the ground, yanked at his trapped leg, and pushed with all his strength. His servos whined in protest, but he didn’t care, he had to get free. He had to keep fighting.

He continued this struggle until he suddenly heard a familiar voice let out a weary sigh from behind him..

"I really thought the robot double idea would work this time," Robotnik muttered, his tone more disappointed than angry. The Egg Mobile hovered just above Metal, the doctor stroking his mustache as he mused aloud. "Perhaps I should go back to the Mecha Sonic model… Yes, it’s brilliant! Another robot Sonic, but with Mecha Sonic MK.I’s offensive and defensive capabilities combined with Metal Sonic’s speed. A true masterpiece!"

Metal froze. Mecha Sonic? MK.I? The words meant nothing to him, but the way Robotnik spoke, so dismissive, so detached, it sent a foreign sensation coursing through his circuits. Then, he heard something that did make sense.

Speed.

At least Robotnik acknowledged that.

"Doctor! Please! Help me!" Metal called out, his voice edged with urgency.

Robotnik didn’t respond to Metal’s plea so he tried again, “Doctor! I’m stuck!”

Robotnik’s expression instantly soured, and he pinched the bridge of his nose in irritation. "Ugh, enough of that aggravating buzzing noise, you useless pile of scrap!" he snapped, his patience wearing thin. "I swear, I'm regretting not installing a voice chip in you, that static is unbearable."

Metal’s optics widened.

Not installing a?

What?

A voice chip?

What was he talking about?

He could always talk. He was speaking right now. Words came to him just as naturally as running did, didn’t they? But… if that were true, why wasn’t Robotnik hearing him?

A strange sense of unease crept through Metal’s processors, something deeper than frustration,something close to fear. His mind raced, his memory banks struggled to recall a moment, any moment, where he had truly heard his own voice. A reflection. An echo. Anything.

There was nothing.

For the first time, the thought entered his mind like a virus, corrupting everything he thought he knew. Had he ever spoken at all?

No, that can't be right… His optical sensors flickered as he tried to process the revelation, his core whirring unevenly. I’m Sonic. I’ve always been Sonic. Talking is my thing.

Metal shook his head, his claws digging into the metal beneath him.

"I'm not just some machine…" he muttered to himself, his synthetic voice crackling with uncharacteristic uncertainty. "I'm Sonic… right?"

Desperation overtook him, and he tugged at his leg again, as if breaking free would somehow validate his existence.

Robotnik’s scowl deepened. "I said silence, Metal!" He waved a hand dismissively, already growing bored of the spectacle. "Sigh... I have to reach the Egg Spinner before Sonic does. As for you…" He paused for a moment, then smirked cruelly.

"I no longer have use for something as useless as you."

Metal stiffened.

"But," Robotnik continued, his tone mockingly charitable, "I’ll at least give you the dignity of not having to waste away here until your battery runs dry."

Something inside Metal twisted. He had fought so hard, raced so fast, he was supposed to win. He was supposed to be perfect, he was SONIC.

And yet, here he was, discarded like a failed experiment. Like he had never mattered at all. His mechanical heart felt heavier than it ever had before. A cold, unfamiliar mix of anger, confusion, and… something he couldn’t quite name.

"You… you can’t do this," he rasped, struggling against the crushing weight one last time. "I can still be useful. Please, Doct-"

Robotnik let out a heavy sigh, rolling his eyes as he tapped a button on his Egg Mobile’s console. "I truly have no patience for failure," he muttered.

With a mechanical whir, the laser beneath his vehicle hummed to life, glowing an ominous yellow.

Metal Sonic's optics flickered as he processed what was about to happen. His servos strained against the weight of the door one last time, but it was futile. He was trapped. Defenseless.

"Doctor—"

A brilliant beam of searing energy lanced downward, Metal barely had time to react before BOOM! A deafening explosion consumed him, engulfing the entire section of the track in a blinding flash of light and fire. The force of the blast shattered the surrounding metal framework, sending debris raining down as thick plumes of smoke billowed into the air.

Metal Sonic’s world became nothing but static.

His charred, twisted form was launched from the wreckage, his broken thrusters sputtering weakly as he tumbled uncontrollably into the abyss below. The wind howled in his audio receptors, the blinding neon lights of Stardust Speedway warping into a blur as he plummeted, spiraling helplessly through the vast mechanical city.

Then, a sickening crash rang out as Metal slammed into a lower section of the Speedway. His body crumpled upon impact, sending another shower of sparks into the air as he skidded across the steel surface. His already damaged limbs scraped violently against the ground, leaving deep gouges in the metal beneath him until with a loud clang he finally came to a halt.

For a moment, he didn’t move. Couldn’t move. His vision flickered in and out, static distorting his display as errors flooded his systems. His once flawless armor was scorched and dented, deep cracks running through his sleek blue plating. One of his arms lay limp at his side, sparking intermittently. His left leg, presumably still trapped under the door in the wreckage far above, was simply gone.

And yet, he was still operational, just barely.

Metal’s red optics flickered weakly as he stared up at the endless expanse above him. The flashing lights of Stardust Speedway still pulsed rhythmically, indifferent to his suffering. Somewhere far, far above, Robotnik was already moving on, leaving him behind without a second thought.

Discarded. Forgotten.

His clawed fingers twitched, scraping weakly against the steel beneath him. The realization settled in..

He had lost.

And worse than that,he had never been what he thought he was.

For the first time since his creation, Metal Sonic felt something he had never been programmed for.

Emptiness.

#sonic the hedgehog #sth #sonic fandom #miles tails prower #sth au #sonic au #metal breakers au #dr eggman #eggman #robotnik #doctor robotnik #dr ivo robotnik #metal sonic #sonic #sonic series

32 notes · View notes

gumnut-logic · 6 months ago

Text

Happy new year

With the new year passing here in under an hour, I would like to wish all and Thunderfam a fantastic new year full of fun and creativity. May 2025 be a good one for everyone.

Also, what would this blog be without a nuttyfic reblog :D

Ten...the match caught and flickered in the breeze. She caught it, wrapping it with her hands, nursing it to the candle, and letting out a breath as flared into life.

Module Four hit the surface of the North Pacific Ocean and immediately started rolling in the swell. Thunderbird Two’s heavy-duty spotlights tracked it as it was tossed about.

“Gordon, you okay?”

“Riding it out. Though I have to say, I’m glad I didn’t over indulge at dinner.” Virgil watched as all the module indicators flicked to green. “We are go for module deployment.”

“Make it fast. That swell is unpredictable.” He would have preferred to have lowered TB4 using the grapples, but the wind gusts were more problematic than the swell. As if to reassure him of his decision, TB2 was suddenly swiped sideways. He compensated hurriedly, bringing her back to stability, her lights once again training on the module. It was the better of two poor choices.

The undersea habitat didn’t have a choice, so here they were, in the pitch dark of the last hour of the year, attempting to fish more scientists out of the deep.

The weather was not cooperating.

Gordon lowered the ramp, and with a speed he would not usually deploy, shot off into the cold and turbulent water.

Virgil grunted as the wind caught his girl again.

Module retrieval was going to be a bitch.

-o-o-o-

Nine...she took the first candle from its holder and gently tilted it towards its brother. The two wicks touched and flickered. The two became one.

Space is silent, but it isn’t. There is always some kind of machinery functioning to keep life alive. Whether it be Thunderbird Three herself, or his own helmet, Alan was always accompanied by sound.

At this very moment, it was his own swearing.

“Goddamnit, move!”

But the airlock refused to obey. Likely fused shut by the explosion that had set the ship adrift, it was between him and the three remaining life signs. He had to get it open, their life support was failing.

“John, what are the chances of me cutting through this?”

“Not great. It is reinforced. Have you tried the Claw?”

The Claw, complete with a capital C, was a piece of equipment designed by Virgil based on his exo-suit. Virgil rarely made it out into space, but there was occasionally the need for heavy lifting out in the void. It used a grip attached to a thruster pack and could be deployed to create force in any direction.

“It was next on my list.”

“You’ve got nine minutes left.”

“Working on it.” He pulled in his equipment pack, tethered to his sled, and grabbed the Claw. Fastening the grip onto the airlock wheel, he deployed the thruster pack to give the correct directional push.

And the wheel refused to budge.

-o-o-o-

Eight...the first candle flickered haphazardly, once again teased by the breeze as she moved it to the second of its brethren. She smiled just slightly as it, too, caught and flared.

“How do they expect me to catch something I can’t see?!”

It was muttered at his instruments and he didn’t expect an answer. All his scanning equipment was trained ahead attempting to locate the hidden exhaust of an experimental plane deployed by the GDF. It would have been an interesting experiment, if the pilot wasn’t currently trapped inside. It was codenamed Nighthawk because the plane was designed to work best at night - apparently testing it during the day would have made Scott’s rescue attempt a little too easy. So here he was after dark, on New Year’s Eve of all nights, flying over the back end of New South Wales attempting to find an invisible plane.

Yet again, International Rescue was the only organisation with the mechanical guts to fix the GDF’s problems.

It pissed him off big time.

His sensors flickered, his arms moved, and Thunderbird One darted to starboard. For just a moment he had the craft clear as day in his sights.

Then it was gone again.

It was only a matter of time before it crashed. He could communicate with the pilot, but the signals were scrambled and misdirected and no use for locating anything. When the GDF screwed up, they screwed up big time.

“C’mon, c’mon!” He brought TB1 to a hover, every sensor combing the darkness around him.

A flicker.

Another.

Nothing.

A godawful metallic screech as something impacted his ‘bird’s hull on the port side. She swung around, spun on her axis, and suddenly Scott was in free fall.

-o-o-o-

Seven...the third candle wouldn’t catch. She bit her lip, and prayed just a little. The breeze threatened.

John Tracy wished he had more hands. Two were not enough when he had four brothers - one in space, one underwater, and two in the air.

“Scott! You need altitude! Impact in twenty seconds.”

His brother grunted as his hologram grimaced, fighting the controls of his ‘bird.

John didn’t need a damage report, TB5 provided him with all too much detail. Damage to Thunderbird One’s port side VTOL and flight stabiliser had her in a spin.

“She’s not responding.”

“You’ve got additional weight on your port side.” John’s fingers flew across the hologram, attempting to ascertain exactly what the readings were trying to tell him. Damn. “You have a mass embedded in her superstructure, despite the fact we can’t see it.” Calculations. “You’re going to have to attempt to land vertically. Use your rear thrusters to support the imbalance.”

It wasn’t going to be easy. Thunderbird One wasn’t designed to be anywhere vertical but on her gantry, but there was no way Scott would be able to sustain a horizontal landing.

“FAB, Thunderbird Five.” It was said through gritted teeth.

He couldn’t help but think that if Thunderbird Two had been sharing the same airspace as her sister, she could have pulled her out of her dive.

But she wasn’t.

And John was left to watch.

-o-o-o-

Six...the third wick absolutely refused to light and her heart clenched. Let it rest a moment. She moved onto the fourth candle and touched the flame to the waxed cotton.

Night rescues weren’t really out of the ordinary, but they could be eerie. As he left the reach of Thunderbird Two’s powerful spots, he had to rely on the illumination his own Thunderbird could emit. And Thunderbird Four could shine a considerable wattage.

Underwater nightlife was a whole different ocean full of fish in comparison to that under daylight. Despite being in the middle of open ocean, this particular spot was above the very top of a great undersea mountain, just high enough to support the beginnings of a temperate reef system. No doubt one of the reasons the mobile observatory was in the area.

“Undersea Habitat Victor-Two-Zero-Romeo, this is Thunderbird Four, do you read me?”

The line crackled a moment, but a female voice gasped and answered. “Oh, thank god. We are down to our last module. Please hurry.”

“FAB, ma’am. I’m on approach. Can you give me any further detail on the cause of the problem?”

“It won’t go away and keeps attacking.”

Gordon frowned. “What won’t go away?”

“The whale.”

“A whale?!” And his spots lit up the damaged habitat. It looked as if it had been pummelled with a giant baseball bat. Of the five interconnected modules, only one had any sign of life. “Why would a whale attack you?”

But he didn’t get a chance to listen to her answer as his spots lit up a giant mass of flesh, an eyeball, and suddenly Thunderbird Four was rolling.

-o-o-o-

Five...when the fourth candle refused to light, she took firmer measures and turned to the iron fire pot and touched the first candle to paper. It burst into flame.

“Alan, you’ve got incoming debris!”

“What?!”

But John didn’t need to repeat himself as the first of the projectiles tore through the space in front of his helmet and ricocheted off the hull of the space freighter, narrowly missing his arm.

“Shit!”

“Take cover. Freighter’s starboard side. Now.”

Alan grabbed the Claw and flipped himself vertically to thrust in the right direction and tore around the engine compartment of the ship and hid in a crevice directly opposite the incoming stream. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Apologies, Alan, I didn’t catch it early enough.”

Alan sighed. He knew his brother was stretched thin at the moment. Apparently dangerously thin. He should have been paying more attention himself.

“We’re down to five minutes.”

“I know.” Silent impacts thundered around him. “Is there any other way in that doesn’t require me to be swiss cheesed?”

“Only the maintenance hatch you dismissed earlier.”

“We may not have a choice.” Alan sighed. “I’ll see what I can do, but it is going to be tight. It wasn’t meant for ship access.” But he would make it work.

Grabbing the Claw and his laser cutter, Alan darted out from his crevice and along the length of the ship, hiding in its shadow. A snap of a carabiner and he was secured once again.

“Okay, you hunk of junk, I’m going to kick your ass.”

-o-o-o-

Four...The breeze was stronger and the first candle flickered out, leaving just the one burning, flickering sporadically. She added fuel to the fire pot.

The flash was blinding and Virgil swore.

Lightning wasn’t a problem, but the storm was. “Gordon, you need to make this quick, the weather is deteriorating faster than we anticipated. He swore again as a nasty downdraft attempted to shove the cargo plane into the turbulent ocean.

The module below was being thrown about like a cork. Virgil made the decision. “Thunderbird Four, I am submerging the module. You will need to dock underwater.” His fingers darted across controls as Thunderbird Two shuddered through another nasty downdraft. Below, the mechanics of Module Four started pumping water and it slipped beneath the waves to hover at a depth that would protect it from the turbulence.

“FAB, Virgil - Shit!”

“Gordon?”

“We have a pissed off whale down here!”

Virgil watched as his readouts tracked Thunderbird Four. She was darting, rolling and suddenly shoved sideways by massive lifesign. He grit his teeth, unable to do anything to help.

-o-o-o-

Three…she built up the fire pot until it was a massive towering flame.

Scott yanked the lever backwards and let off a prayer to the god of pilots.

Thunderbird One attempted to respond, and he grit his teeth. “C’mon.” Without her port thruster, getting her vertical was a challenge. “C’mon, damnit.” The extra weight dragged and she refused to stabilise.

The air was dark around him, but his instruments were screaming altitude loss and collision warnings, his cockpit lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Goddamnit, fly!”

Gordon swooped around the mass of angry whale. What the hell was his problem. And it was definitely a ‘he’, a full-on bull sperm whale, a very unhappy one.

He ran through whale behaviours in his head as he swooped and dove towards the habitat. A hand darted across his instruments, searching...

Alan hit the hatch with his fist in frustration. Grip, for crying out loud!

He was down to three minutes to get these guys out and he still hadn’t made it into the damn ship yet.

There was no sound in space, other than the scream in his own helmet as suddenly the entire side of the ship was torn away, a chunk of rock tearing through its hull.

The Claw spun off into space.

John bit through his lip, his concentration total on all four brothers. One hand played his holographic controls like Virgil played his piano, data shunted off to where it was desperately needed at the flick of a finger. The other spun between views, scans and acquired information at the full speed his highly advanced Thunderbird could manage.

“Virgil! Waterspout!” And the information was shunted directly to TB2.

“Waterspout?! What the hell!” Thunderbird Two groaned as he forced her sideways out of the path of the anomaly. The crosswinds were shit, and she dipped noseward. Damnit!

He kicked in her rear thrusters, killed the VTOL and tore across the ocean in an arc, circling around to return for pickup. She bucked like a rebellious mare.

-o-o-o-

Two...she grabbed all five doused candles in one fist.

Gordon swore again as the whale clipped him on one side. “Okay, I’ve had enough of this. Undersea Habitat Victor-Two-Zero-Romeo, I want you to kill all transmissions. All kinds. I want you silent as the grave.”

“What?”

He spun TB4 on her axis. “Now. If I think what is happening is happening this is your own fault, do what I say!”

He sighed as all transmission bands went silent. He scanned the full spectrum. No....no...ah, damn there it was. “I said all of them!” And it finally disappeared.

Another dodge of a whale fluke and Gordon peeled off in a curve.

Alan tasted blood. He had bitten clean through his cheek. He spun slowly in space, the ship in front of him sporting a jagged hole in its side.

Just big enough for an astronaut to crawl through.

Two minutes and counting...

Thunderbird One bucked like a mule, but he finally managed to get her vertical enough to fire her rear thrusters. Their plummet slowed.

The holographic ground was still coming up fast.

Virgil homed in on the module’s signal, finding once again his place in space. Lightning flashed in warning.

John held his breath. Seconds ticked by...

-o-o-o-

One...with determination she thrust all five wicks into the roaring flame of the fire pot. Burn damn you.

Scott yelled as his thrusters made contact with solid ground.

Gordon flicked a control and Thunderbird Four sung into the darkness.

Alan dove into the ship, calling out in desperation.

Virgil swore yet again as Thunderbird Two bucked.

John wished he could close his eyes.

-o-o-o-

All five candles burst into vibrant flame, the five merging into one, defying the breeze, taking on the energy of the fire pot and burning strongly.

Just as midnight passed over Tracy Island, Sally Tracy separated out the five candles and placed each of them in their holders. She smiled just slightly as each eagerly leapt up brightly, dancing.

“Grandma? Have you heard anything from John?” Kayo walked across the comms room towards the balcony where Sally had set up the fire pot. The breeze tousled her hair as it lay loose around her shoulders.

“Not in the last ten minutes.”

Kayo came up close and hugged her. “Happy New Year, Grandma.”

She kissed her granddaughter on her cheek. “Happy New Year, honey.”

-o-o-o-

Epilogue

As dawn lit up the sky on Tracy Island, the sun was witness to five very tired brothers flying home. Thunderbird Two had Thunderbird One grasped under her undercarriage, the severely damaged craft sporting a massive dent in her port side. Her pilot sat very unhappily beside Virgil in the cockpit of TB2. Gordon was asleep in the seat behind them.

The sky roared as the great red rocket of Thunderbird Three tore out of re-entry and spun in for landing.

She was followed by the ever-silent drop of the elevator from Thunderbird Five.

Virgil lowered his brother’s ‘bird to the side of TB2’s runway. He and Brains, and no doubt Scott, would be out later to assess the damage and plan repairs. As fast as possible. Scott was intolerable when his ‘bird was down.

He rolled his shoulders as he brought his own ‘bird into land. There would be no shortage of checks to be done on Thunderbird Two, either. Gordon was already complaining about the work to be done on both TB4 and Module Four, and he wasn’t even fully awake.

Thunderbird Two spun in her hanger and he powered her down.

All three brothers sighed.

“Debrief in ten?”

Scott muttered an affirmative and while Virgil ran through post flight, his brothers crawled out of their seats and headed up to the villa.

In the distance, Thunderbird Three roared as she docked in her hanger.

-o-o-o-

“The idiots were emitting random noise on a frequency that could have been designed to piss off a sperm whale. Once I had them kill it off, I dug up something that would interest, but keep that same whale calm, and I led him off. When he was gone, it was easy to grab the three idiots. We docked with the module, surfaced, and then had wonder pilot over here do his retrieval magic. I have to say, Virgil, that was some damn fine manoeuvring.”

Virgil blinked at the unexpected praise. Gordon must be seriously tired. “Thank you. I admit it wasn’t easy, but we made it in one piece. Brains, I will need to do some thorough checks on the grapple launchers and the module connectors, they were put under some serious strain.”

The engineer nodded.

Scott blinked as if he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. “Good job, Gordon, Virgil.” He turned to their youngest brother and frowned. Virgil followed his gaze and found Alan asleep in the corner of the couch.

“I can report for Alan.” John looked as tired as Virgil felt. “All the crew of the freighter were saved. In spite of the unexpected debris storm Alan encountered. Virgil, he will need a new Claw. He might have some modification requests on that front as well. “John yawned. “Sorry, full report will be available as soon as I’ve had enough sleep.”

“Scott, your turn.” And despite himself, Virgil yawned as well.

“I’ll keep it short. Stop doing that.” And Virgil grinned as Scott caught the yawn bug. “The GDF night camouflage is pretty damn good. I had a lot of trouble locating their craft. That problem was solved by said ship colliding with Thunderbird One’s port side. You’ve seen the damage. She’s down for repairs. We’ll know for how long as soon as Brains has a chance to assess it. Pilot was a lucky bastard and survived with only minor injuries. Apparently, the camouflage works both ways and navigation from inside the ship is extremely difficult. It’s back to the drawing board for the GDF.” And he spat the acronym. “Brains, you might want to check out One’s logs on what she could detect. All I can say is that Thunderbird Shadow walks all over them.” There was no shortage of smugness in that statement either.

Accompanied by another yawn.

“Well done everyone.”

They all muttered something congratulatory, punctuated by another round of yawns.

“Oh, and Happy New Year.”

A couple of grunts followed that.

“Get some sleep and we’ll look at throwing some belated fireworks.”

More grunting.

“Dismissed.”

Virgil stood up with creaking bones and stumbled towards the stairs.

And almost collided with his grandmother.

“Oh, so sorry, Grandma.” He steadied her with one hand, suddenly aware of four brothers lining up behind him. In the corner of his eye, Alan was wobbling with Gordon holding one of his arms to keep him steady.

Grandma grabbed him in a hug. “Happy New Year, Virgil.”

He startled and immediately returned the embrace, dropping his chin onto her head and holding her tight. “Happy New Year, Grandma.” He kissed her hair. His eyes darted to his brothers, all four frozen to the spot.

She let him go, but looked up at him and smiled, before darting to Scott and repeating the process.

Virgil frowned, staring just a little as she moved from one brother to another, wishing each of them a Happy New Year and hugging intensely.

His attention was suddenly drawn away, however, as, silent as always, Kayo appeared and wrapped her arms around him. “Happy New Year, Virgil.”

His eyes widened, but he hugged her and wished her the same. She smiled up at him and then, just like Grandma, moved onto Scott and, hugging him, wished him a Happy New Year.

Virgil simply stared.

Once all the brother hugging had been completed, both women stood back and Grandma started ushering them up the stairs. “Well, off to bed with you. We can celebrate later tonight.” She smiled at all of them.

Kayo’s smile was a little smaller, but just as genuine.

Virgil decided he was too tired to work out what the hell was going on. He turned and began to tackle the stairs. He would think after he had slept.

-o-o-o-

Sally watched her boys climb the stairs wearily.

They were home safe. Tired, but safe.

So far it had been a good year.

-o-o-o-

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #scott tracy #virgil tracy #john tracy #gordon tracy #alan tracy #nuttyfic reblog

27 notes · View notes