#the entire upper right quadrant of my face is just completely stopped up to the point that even my hearing's off

[miodiodavinci]

well i've reached the point where i'm no longer suffering in an Active way (read: my fever is gone and the chest pain and sore throat have resolved themselves) but i Do uniquely feel like a swamp™

[aching-tummies]

"Us together on a Ferris wheel that is stuck with us being on the top. The management couldn't do anything and we are stuck there for sometime now. You have acrophobia and in order to avoid any mishap you haven't eaten anything since yesterday afternoon. Now, you stomach is full on growling with continuous hunger pangs.

You beg to rub your stomach and when I hit the right spot I couldn't help myself and create a full blown stomachache for you.

Your tummy is really hurting now and you beg me to apply pressure. You're well aware about my fascination and let me have my way it it. But I lost control and now I'm full on probing your stomach disregarding your attempt to stop me."

There’s the construction crane…wait…what direction was it pointed at from our house? What orientation would it be relative to the event grounds…it was slightly to the left from the living room…it’s facing to my right from this angle…so…is it even the same crane? ARGH! Ugh…

I clutch my stomach as a pitiful burble vibrates in the upper left quadrant, rattling against my ribs. Vertigo tickles at the back of my skull, dangerously close to triggering the sensation of nausea that usually hits slightly lower down. Queasiness is already in full swing under my palm, and I can’t seem to muster the pressure to squeeze it out of my guts. I close my eyes, desperately trying to slow my rapidly increasing heartrate as I feel what’s below me sway from the very slight movement of me leaning back in my seat.

“…dumb idea…” I fail to bite back my words.

“Hm? You say something, Sweetheart?” You look up from your phone where you’ve been nonchalantly texting some friends, maybe updating your status to ‘Stuck at the top of the Ferris Wheel--#romantic’ or something. Unlike me, you’re actually enjoying this.

Our city decided to put on a winter-time fair, complete with rides and everything. We came to the event to see the Christmas light decorations and attractions. Well, I came for the lights; you came because you heard they brought in a Ferris wheel. A really, really big Ferris wheel.

The health crisis kind of shot down traditional ‘romance’, the kind of thing that you craved. Dining-in at a place with non-disposable cutlery, having our hands brush up against each other in a container of overpriced popcorn, or just getting out and doing something together. A lot of places have been closed for the last two years and even without that it was hard enough to get me to agree to go anywhere. Sharing a blanket as we watch a totally-not-romantic movie at home is basically my go-to idea of a ‘date’. I agreed to come out tonight because you lit up at the opportunity to go to an event and have a “proper” date. The Ferris Wheel had me on edge though.

I’ve never ridden on a Ferris Wheel before. I’ve got a few phobias, but I wouldn’t count acrophobia among them. I just get really uncomfortable with heights or with see-through flooring. I get a little disoriented. My brain sees the thing and then fills in the sensation of falling, of having the ground beneath me disappear. It’s like that movie where the feeling of falling is supposed to be a sure-fire way to wake someone up…I get that imbalanced feeling whenever I’m high up or when the thing I’m supposed to be standing on isn’t as sturdy as I want it to be or when the railings are too low to be up to code.

A small part of me was hoping that we’d miss the last ride. You had your heart set on getting on the thing as part of the last ride of the night for the best ‘romantic’ atmosphere. The health crisis, busy schedules, and my guilt over my aromantic tendencies caused me to cave and agree to pre-purchasing tickets for the last ride.

I like how Christmas lights look so stunning in the dark. I like how the little pinpricks and tiny bulbs shine brighter than neon signs in the dark. You told me that getting to the top of the Ferris wheel would turn the entire city into a grand light display. The idea of witnessing that kind of thing is the only reason I didn’t bolt when we got in line for the Ferris wheel. I wanted to see our city as a sea of lights. Stupid, in hindsight. I’ve seen lit-up cityscapes in pictures. I’ve witnessed them while on buses between towns.

The idea of being disoriented, of my brain filling in the feeling of falling and leaving my stomach contents behind made me nervous. I didn’t want my brain tricking me into losing my dinner in front of you—this is supposed to be a date and all. So…yeah…I kind of skipped dinner…and lunch…and breakfast…and dinner the night before. I don’t even remember if I ate lunch yesterday. You had a closing shift yesterday and cooking for one wasn’t too enticing for me and I think I got absorbed in a hobby or whatever so that’s what happened to yesterday’s dinner. My alarm didn’t go off this morning, so I was rushing to make bus transfers rather than hunting down breakfast in the morning. We were busy at work, and I had the looming threat of the Ferris wheel to look forward to tonight, so I opted to skip lunch too. Our original plans had us going out to grab dinner before heading out to see the lights. I’d planned to maybe eat something light because my stomach was pretty achingly empty by lunch, but a coworker failed to come in, resulting in me agreeing to stay for an extra couple of hours until the boss could find a replacement.

I squeeze my eyes shut as my tummy rumbles angrily. I rub gently over my shirt, but the sensation seems to just wake my stomach up even more and I bite back a groan. Vertigo and nausea are still warring at the back of my head, but hunger has dealt a KO to queasiness in my guts…for now. I’m hungry. No. I’m beyond hungry. It feels like my stomach is twisting itself into knots, trying to take a bite out of itself in an effort to get something to digest into it.

GrrRRlll..rrrr…grk…

I curse under my breath. The hunger pangs are really intense and in my starved state I don’t have the strength to give myself a good massage. I’ve been feeling a bit faint since we got to this event. My body’s running low on energy. The lights were kind of blurry to me while we walked around. The hunger pangs had subsided (thankfully) while we were walking with just the occasional quiet rumble muffled by the warm layers of coats and clothing I have on.

I was staring out into the distance as our capsule slowly made its way up, higher and higher. I got on this thing to see the cityscape lit up before me like some huge birthday candle array and I wasn’t going to miss my chance to see it. Also, staring into the distance kept the uncomfortable disorientation at bay. The view of the horizon doesn’t change all that much, while closer landmarks would surely intensify the vertigo. As our pod rose, steadily, so too did the discomfort in my belly. The cramps were gnawing and chomping at the bit, preparing to snarl and embarrass me in front of you and ruin the moment.

That’s when it happened. With a massive jolt, our capsule just stopped. We were tossed around in our pod, like dice in a cup before everything just stopped. The jarring movement had sent you barreling into me, and your palm had buried itself painfully into my midriff. That set the hounds of hell loose in my guts and I’ve been fighting the hunger pangs ever since, digging my fingers into my tender tummy whenever I could feel a cramp building to a head. I’ve been disarming the growls amazingly well for the last ten minutes or so. Silver lining: the task of hiding my angry tummy has distracted me from the creeping vertigo of being over two hundred feet in the air, swaying in a pod of welded-together sheet metal.

Your sharp gaze snaps to my midriff. Screw it. Abandoning the pretense, I finally give into my body’s desires, and I curl up on my seat, opposite yours, bringing my knees up and sandwiching my arms over my achingly empty tummy. I lean to the side, resting my head against the cool metal of the side of the cart. The pod sways at my movements and I bite back another groan. It’s a good thing I’m so empty because I’m pretty sure I’d have thrown up when the ride came to such a jarring stop. Nausea is putting up a really nasty fight with vertigo in my head and it’s only a matter of time before the two of them decide to join forces to make me heave. Hunger has won the battle in my guts and queasiness is down, but not out. Once the hunger pang passes, I’m sure I’ll be back to feeling queasy too. As much as the hunger pangs hurt, I’m not looking forward to feeling nauseous and queasy on an empty stomach. Once we get off this ride, I’m going to hunt down something to cram into my belly to shut it up. Yeah, I’m tired from the unexpectedly long shift at work and all, but damnit I’m hungry and I want food!

The pod sways again and I groan, wondering if strong winds are the cause.

“Babe? You okay?” Nope—it was you, getting up from your side and walking over to my side of the gondola. The pod tips slightly as you sit down, and I swallow a puff of air from my stomach clenching in a non-productive heave. Unbidden, I let out a whine as my stomach cramps like a vice. I feel miserable.

Your hand tentatively reaches out, resting on my elbow and creeping forward steadily. Your slender arm acts like a shiv, getting between my knees and my arm and forcing me to uncurl slightly.

“Sweetie, are you okay? What’s wrong?” Your other hand has gone to my shoulder, trying to coax me out of my curled-up position.

“Unngh…urgh…h-hungry…” I moan and curl up tighter as my stomach clenches yet again. With our proximity, you finally hear the growl tear through my insides. A swell of pity wells up in you.

“Oh…oh, Honey.” You coo at me, pulling me away from my almost laying down position so that I’m now leaning against you. Your left arm goes across my back to rest on the far side of my waist and your right pries my arms away from my stomach, pushing incessantly against my thighs to lower my legs back down to try to make me more comfortable.

“Did they do that thing again where they scheduled your lunch break too early in your shift? You did take on those extra hours today.”

“Ah…uhm…n-no…” I look away from your gaze, suddenly sheepish. I rub at my belly again, hand worming between two of the buttons on my coat. I’d long since pulled the zipper down on my hoodie underneath, allowing me to rub at my stomach over my T-shirt. The lack of calories is making it hard for me to regulate my body temperature. My extremities are very cold and even with all those layers of clothing I feel like my core is quickly losing heat. It’s uncomfortable. “I…I kinda…s-skipped lunch…?” I shrink under your gaze. You’ve already put it together, knowing that I skipped breakfast too and that there wasn’t any evidence of me having eaten the night before either. Your frown tells me everything.

Body image and food/calories have been a bit of a problem for me all my life. We both love tummy-kink and indulge a few times a month. To circumvent the nastiness of eating problems we’ve got a hard rule about intentional fasting. We usually reserve it for days off when we can fully indulge in our fun side. Choosing to skip lunch on a non-kink day is a big no-no for us. You know I packed a lunch today, so the skip had to be intentional.

Grrrk…grrblrr…

My belly rumbles between us, almost like the awkward tumbleweed in old Western films. It breaks the silence and the awkward tension between us though. I shrink back into myself, curling up as best I can against the building clenching of my guts. I whine against it as the cramp intensifies beyond what I thought was the peak. My own hands fail to provide comfort. This cramp goes pretty deep, and I swear I can feel it by my spine. No matter how hard I try, my prodding fingers don’t provide any relief. In an instant, I’ve snatched your hand and have pulled it into the folds of my jacket. I press your palm against my belly, reveling in the slight warmth your hand provides.

You feel my stomach quaking beneath your palm as a result of the massive, empty rumbles resounding throughout. Quickly, you find the epicenter of the latest growl and prod deeply with two fingers. A whimper builds in my throat but my grip on your wrist pushes your hand deeper. You can feel the warm squishiness of my organs around your fingers, the differences in firmness giving you an idea of the edges of different organs. We wait out the hunger pang. You can tell when it begins to ebb, both from the easing beneath your fingertips, jabbed so deeply into me that it must hurt, and from the way my body unclenches. The sharp growl ends in a pitiful rumble that goes on for a few seconds. Migrating air bubbles send the sound churning around my abdomen until it tapers off somewhere. You pull your arm back as my grip on your wrist relaxes and I pout at the loss.

“Uhm…uh…c-could you…couldyourubmytummy?” I say the words in a rush, my face coloring. You know exactly what I asked but you can’t help but want to tease me just a little.

“Sorry, didn’t catch that.”

I take a deep breath, wincing as the intake of air causes my stomach to spasm again.

“M-My tummy really hurts. I’m so…so empty. C-Could you p-please rub my tummy for me?” I tug at your wrist, trying to bring your hand back to its rightful place over my sore guts.

You smirk and move your hand on your own, but you don’t slide it back into my coat.

Pop…pop…pop.

You undo the buttons on my coat, starting from the bottom and moving up. You pull my coat open once the buttons are undone, revealing the partially unzipped hoodie. The temperature difference causes my stomach to spasm, and you make quick work of the zipper, pressing your palm firmly over the thin T-shirt hiding my tender, chilly midriff. You run your hand all over my belly, sliding your hands under my loose waistband and mapping out my starved guts. I haven’t allowed myself to get quite this empty in a long time and you’re having fun getting reacquainted even as I wince and groan as a result of your ministrations.

Without the muffling properties of my layers of clothes the growls are quite loud now. The sheet-metal of our small capsule creates an acoustic phenomenon that’s music to your ears as the growls ricochet off the metal and back to us. I whimper and shiver and squirm in your arms, fighting to pull my coat closed to trap as much warm air as I can. The movement of your arm prevents my coat from staying closed for long and any residual trapped heat quickly disappears. My only source of warmth now comes from you.

Your barely-there rubs across my tummy have caused my loose T-shirt to ride up, exposing my bare stomach to the elements. You’re transfixed, watching my abdominals contracting against the cold, twitching like I’ve been attached to a live wire. It’s adorable to you and it stirs your sadistic side.

I bite my lip and buck up a bit, trying to get more pressure and warmth to my gut. You’re leaning over me, and my hands are trapped at my sides in this position.

“C-Cold! B-Babe, i-it’s c-c-cold.” I whine as my stomach continues to convulse, much to your delight. In my starved state each muscle spasm is clearly visible and it’s like my midriff is dancing before your very eyes. You trail your fingers across it, barely touching it, walking two fingers over my bare stomach like some ballerina hand-puppet. All the while my stomach quakes from chills and the growls going off like pop-rocks throughout my digestive tract. I’m utterly empty right now and it shows.

The chill sets in, awakening a new sensation in my guts. Being achingly empty and chilly has mixed into a foreign ache that I’m having a hard time placing. My stomach is starting to hurt. There’s the ache from my muscles getting tired from being torn up in all the cramps, the gnawing hollow ache from being hungry, but I’m starting to feel a dull, throbbing pain in my organs. I wince, whining against the new sensation. My tummy continues to rumble, but nothing like the really loud one that caused me to ask for belly rubs. You look up, your attention broken by the pained whimpers I’m making. You lay your palm over my belly, providing some of the pressure I’ve been desperately seeking.

“Sweetheart, you okay?”

“N-Nnno…” I slur out while still biting back my cries of pain. “Hurts…s-s-stomach…h-hurts…” My teeth chatter. I’m so cold. “I-I…’m g-getting a-a stomach a-ache.” I squirm beneath you, not liking the building ache in my guts at all. A bubble of air squeezes passed all the clenched muscles and I let out a barely noticeable burp of empty air. My guts grumble at the loss.

You pull my shirt back over to cover up my belly and run your palm over the smooth surface, providing me with a little bit of warmth. You’re basically straddling me at this point.

“Sweetie, what color? Tell me honestly, do you want to stop?” We use the traffic light system often in our adventures and explorations. Red means ‘stop immediately’, yellow means ‘slow down’ or ‘continue…but with conditions/in a different direction’ something of the like, ‘green’ means all good and go ahead.

I think for a minute, the cold making it really hard to concentrate. I focus on your warm hand over my shirt. We’ll probably be up here for however long it takes them to fix the ride. What we’ve been doing has been a stellar distraction from the disorientation of being so high up. I’m starving, cold, and my stomach is starting to ache in earnest…but I don’t feel like I’m falling. Actually, lying here has made the vertigo almost completely disappear. My view out the windows at this angle just shows me the sheer black of the sky. I can almost pretend we’re getting frisky in the back seat of a car or something rather than hundreds of feet off the ground.

“Y-Yellow. I-I’m really c-cold. C-Cont-tinue…b-but…c-coat…warm…d-don’t want…d-don’t like…tummy ache…” I’m having trouble putting my desires into words, but thankfully, you get the picture.

You tug my coat back together, buttoning the buttons back together. You push the bulk of my infinity scarf into my coat, sealing in the warmth around my chest and neck. I expect you to get off me and allow me to sit up, but you do not. You use your hand to push my shoulder back down against the hard seat, the other slides in from the side, slipping between the buttons on my coat. You rub and prod at my tummy over my shirt from that position. I lie back again, closing my eyes against another building hunger pang. As it builds, you lie down over me, resting an ear directly over the epicenter of the building hunger pang over my thick coat. The hand buried in my coat doesn’t stop moving, prodding and probing at my belly and applying varying increments of pressure. Your intent being to churn up my guts and see how intense you can make my hunger pangs. In my starved state, I can’t actually push you off of me. Not that I’d want to. You’re warm and your familiar weight pressing down against me grounds me. An odd thing to say when we’re over two hundred feet above ground, but you get the idea. We have our safewords and the traffic-light system. We’ll be alright.\

Your palm presses deeply into the middle of my stomach as another large rumble starts to make my insides quake. Another puff of empty air is squeezed out of my guts by your hand. This one’s larger and slightly audible, drawing a sharp little ‘urp’ sound from my throat. I whimper after it, my throat hurting from the air pocket being so rudely forced upwards.

“Aww…well, you can’t be that empty if you’re burping,” You tease, your hand continuing to swirl slow circles over my still-quaking guts. “My, my, I wonder what’s in here. What could be making this cute little tummy so vocal?”

Pat, pat. A hollow thumping slap sounds from the impacts of you patting my sore stomach delicately—almost patronizingly.

A cramp builds, stuck at its apex. I bite back a grunt and wrestle your hand over to the cramping area. You’ve been intentionally avoiding that part of my belly, knowing that eventually your actions would create something intense over there.

“Press here—ah!—p-please!” I whine against the tightness of the cramp. It feels like it got stuck, like it’s a growl that wants to rip through my guts, but it’s just stuck. You smirk devilishly and move your hand away from the area, prodding at a smaller bubble of air diagonally across from where I so desperately crave some pressure. You chase the air bubble over, knowing that it’ll find its way over to the stuck cramp and add to the agony.

This edging goes on for a while, with you dancing your fingers lightly over the cramp but never pressing down on it. Eventually, you decide to grant me some relief. Using two fingers, you prod sharply into the cramp, causing me to let out an exclamation that’s drowned out by the long and painfully loud rumble that rips through the air. You don’t relent, pressing your fingers in deep and firmly as the growl forces its way around your invasive fingers. You’re definitely going to leave a bruise there.

My stomach throbs, though not from your actions. I guess the chill did its damage. I’m empty, in the middle of a nasty bought of hunger pangs that you’ve got no intention of letting pass, and I’ve got a stomach ache too on top of all that.

“Urgh…you’re buying me a burger or something on the way home.” I mutter, resigning myself to letting you have your fun. Honestly, I’m not even sure if I want to eat anymore tonight. I can tell that the new aches in my stomach aren’t a result of being hungry or your rough treatment. My intestines are reacting badly to the chill, twitching and twisting every which-way. If it’s still like this when I finally have an opportunity to eat, then it’s probably going to result in a nasty upset as my intestines fail to move anything along. On top of all that, the only food-places open at this hour are going to be fast-food. Past experience has taught me that breaking my fast on heavily processed, greasy, low-brow fast food often results in a really bad time for my guts. Still, the thought of food—any food—right now stirs a new hunger pang to life. The cramp builds quickly, surprising you as you feel my abdominals tense rapidly against your prodding fingers. It all comes to a head in a near-deafening growl.

You smile, continuing to poke and prod at my belly even as the growl echoes around us. A finger slips during one of your jabs, nailing the sensitive nerve at the base of my navel. I bite back a cry as it triggers another hefty growl before the last one had a chance to end. My digestive tract quakes and something sour stirs as gastric juices begin to secrete from various organs. My stomach burns, accumulating acid with absolutely nothing to dissolve in it. You kick your legs happily behind you, the very picture of a child entranced with a new toy. You hear it when the empty rumbles begin to get laced with some wet squelches, a sure sign that the acid levels in my stomach are rising. Finally, something other than empty air to push around my guts. The idea excites you, like discovering another level in a video game or finding out that your new item of clothing has real pockets. I lie there, letting you do as you will. I guess our first true date night in almost two years is a success: you’re happy.

[extasiswings]

Hopping on this train of writing to cope with promo image-induced feelings.  No thoughts, just vibes.  Also on ao3. 

The air inside the warehouse is thick with smoke and blisteringly hot.  A snapping sound splits through the crackle of flame and Eddie is abruptly yanked off balance as Buck grabs his arm and pulls hard just as a beam from above comes crashing down. It doesn’t miss him completely—catches the side of his helmet and knocks it off, making his ears ring with the impact. 

He sees Buck’s mouth moving and shakes his head. 

“What?” 

“Are you okay?” Buck repeats, nearly shouting to be heard over the din of the fire. 

A light fixture groans above them before dropping down as well and it’s Eddie’s turn to push Buck out of the way, even if it means a bit of flying glass catches him in the face. 

“We need to get out of here,” he shouts, and it quickly turns into a coughing fit as he chokes on smoke, his throat and lungs burning. 

Buck nods. “Go! I’m right behind!”

Eddie turns and manages to work out a path to the closest exit with a single-minded focus. His head is aching and he’s dizzy, can feel blood dripping down his cheek as well, and when he stumbles out into somewhat fresher air he nearly collapses into Bobby before he’s passed off to the paramedics. 

Hen had been one of the first ones in and out and has since stripped off her turnout coat and is helping the other medics. Eddie doesn’t argue when she checks his throat and pupil responses before pressing an oxygen mask into his hand. 

“Where’s Buck?” Hen asks as she swipes an alcohol pad over the cut on his cheek and secures it with two butterfly strips. 

Eddie lowers the mask and coughs. “He was right—“

Behind me. 

The words fade on his tongue as he scans the area only to come up empty. And then his eyes light on the door he’d come out of, nothing clear beyond the frame but black smoke and the red and orange glare of flickering flames. 

His world tips on its axis.  His vision swims.   And the feeling—

It reminds him a little of the tsunami, when he’d noticed Christopher’s glasses around Buck’s neck and had felt himself fracturing at such a rapid pace that even now he’s sure he wouldn’t have remained standing if he hadn’t caught sight of his son over Buck’s shoulder. He can feel the same sort of cracks spidering up the foundation of his walls—the ones that he throws up when he needs to be Eddie Diaz, firefighter, medic, soldier, competent professional, any version of himself that has to play at having his life together—and he scrambles internally to shut down the panic, to plaster over the cracks before they can spread too far, because if he lets himself think—

“I need to talk to Bobby,” he says, trying to push himself up to standing. Hen shoves him back down with hands firmly on his shoulders. 

“You need to sit and keep breathing into that mask,” she says, her voice sharp with authority before it gentles. “I’ll get him, but only if you stay here.”

Eddie’s jaw tics, but he lifts the mask back up to his face and takes a few pointed breaths while she watches. Finally, she nods. 

“I’ll be right back,” she promises. 

There’s an itch between his shoulder blades that desperately wants an outlet. Something to do, something to control so he doesn’t feel so much like he’s on the edge of a cliff. So that he can work on a solution instead of his mind unhelpfully focusing on Buck’s still in there.  He’s not an idiot, he knows he’s in no shape to go back in himself, but he needs something. 

“We were in the southwest quadrant,” Eddie reports when Hen returns with Bobby, keeping his words short and clipped.  “It wasn’t overrun but there were a lot of things falling from the upper levels. He said he was coming right after me, but he could have gotten stuck.”

This is easier. Staying mechanical. Sticking to facts. There’s no room for getting overly emotional, no allowance for breaking down.  He has a commanding officer in front of him who needs information, and that is something Eddie can handle. 

“We tried him on the radio but there was no answer,” Bobby says. 

“He may have dropped it.”  When he pulled me to safety. Eddie shuts that thought down. 

“There are windows on that side,” he adds. “If the exits are blocked—“

“We’ll look at all possible options,” Bobby replies.  His face is drawn and tired, face streaked with sweat and soot. 

For some reason it’s the flicker of doubt Eddie catches in his eyes that makes him say—

“He wasn’t being reckless. I know—we all know he can be sometimes, but he wasn’t. If he’s not out, it’s because he needs help, not because he’s trying to be a hero.”

Bobby looks at Eddie for a moment, something passing across his eyes like recognition before it fades and he’s left looking more tired than before. 

“We’ll look at all the options,” he repeats finally. He doesn’t make promises. Eddie’s not sure whether or not he appreciates that. 

It takes another several minutes for anything to happen, and Eddie’s shoulders get tighter, his mood blacker. His head aches and he snaps at another paramedic, some clearly new young kid, when he notices him dressing a burn improperly. 

It doesn’t make him feel better. 

Finally though, finally, after a heart-stopping moment when the warehouse windows blow out on the side where they’d last been, Eddie hears shouts. And a figure comes stumbling around from the back of the building, knees giving out just in time for someone to catch him. 

“What happened to I’m right behind?” Eddie asks roughly when Buck is helped over, looking worse for wear but alive. 

Buck coughs and closes his eyes. “Part of the catwalk came down,” he says. “Blocked me in. Couldn’t see you. Couldn’t see anything hardly through all the...everything.”

“I didn’t know.”

Buck shakes his head and dutifully brings his own oxygen mask to his face when one is pressed into his hand. 

“Wouldn’t have wanted you to stay even if you had,” he replies. “At least I had all my gear.” 

Eddie wants to keep talking, keep asking questions, keep reminding himself that Buck is sitting next to him and going to be fine, but that irrational impulse wars with the rational thought that Buck needs oxygen not an interrogation. So he drops it.  And they both withdraw into their own heads. 

Eddie watches though. As Buck flickers between present and vacant, numb. The haunted, hunted look that passes over his face every so often a clear indication that whatever ghosts are whispering in his mind, they’re saying nothing good. When the shift ends and they’re cleaned up, Buck still looks half-dead, so Eddie snatches his keys. 

“I’m taking you home,” he says, tone booking no argument. “I don’t want you driving like this.”

Buck sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. “Okay.”

The drive is silent, but there’s a tension in the air, the weight of things unspoken. Eddie’s not entirely sure what exactly would roll off his own tongue if he opened his mouth, his head a mess, but when he parks his truck in front of Buck’s apartment, Buck finally speaks. 

“You know what I was thinking while I stuck in that building? Besides that I was going to die.”  He swallows hard. “That if it had to be someone it was good it was me.”

Eddie’s heart stops, his stomach rebelling violently at sheer wrongness of the thought. 

“That’s not true.”

Buck nods and lets out a small, bitter laugh. 

“See, I do know that actually,” he admits. “It’s one of the things I’ve been working on in therapy. Except then my parents rolled into town and it was like none of that work mattered, I was right back to square one assuming I’m not wanted, that no one would miss me—and I hate, I hate that they have that kind of power, that they can make me feel so fucking worthless.”

“You’re not though.” Eddie reaches over before he can stop himself, his hand curling around the side of Buck’s neck, thumb settling over his pulse to feel that steady thrum of alive alive alive. “God, when I thought—you’re worth everything. You have to know—“

You have to know how much you mean to me. You have to know how much I love you. You have to know I can’t lose you.

You have to know. 

Buck makes a small sound of disbelief, his gaze turning searching as Eddie bites his tongue to keep from saying too much he can’t take back. He feels somehow even more precariously positioned on the edge of a cliff than he had in the field, but that cliff was positioned above an ocean of grief. He doesn’t know what’s at the bottom of this one should he fall. 

Somehow that’s almost more terrifying. 

Eddie sways forward unconsciously and Buck presses his forehead to his. Neither of them are breathing steadily. And they stay like that for a long moment until Buck shivers and pulls back. 

“I want to kiss you,” he says quietly, and Eddie can’t quite help the frisson of want that sparks through him, the whisper of yes, please, do it then that threads through his mind. 

“But,” Buck continues, his tongue sweeping out to wet his lips as Eddie watches. “But it’s been a long and really fucking difficult day and I’m not—I don’t want to fuck this up before it even starts. If—if there’s anything to start at all, I don’t want to assume—“

“There is,” Eddie assures. I love you. I’m in love with you. 

That gets him the faintest smile as Buck reaches up to squeeze his hand. 

“Thanks for the ride home.”

“Of course. Anytime.”  

When Eddie gets home, he pauses long enough to check on Christopher before falling into bed. And only then does he think back over the day and finally, finally let himself shatter. 

[whitewolfbumble]

To Be Alone with You

A Bucky x Reader Fluffy One Shot

Summary: Combine an Avenger’s midnight snowball fight, some mulled wine, a misunderstanding with the man that supposedly hated you, and it was one unique winter tradition to remember.

Prompt: “We’ve never really gotten along but you just threw a snowball at the back of my head and it’s fucking ON”

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Warnings: Two competitive snowflakes melting into fluff! Some language because it’s me writing so.

Word Count: About 3k

A/N: Written for @buckychrist Holiday Writing Challenge! Thanks so much for hosting this one Hayley! This story evolved a few times so I’m in just under the wire here lol (please excuse any typos!). Hope you enjoy this darling!!

MY MASTERLIST // JOIN MY TAG LIST

_______

“This is the worst Avenger winter tradition, I swear to god,” you muttered, struggling to close your thermos of deliciously hot mulled wine.

“Listen, no arguments here,” Clint said, mirroring your crouching position several feet away behind a tree. His look betrayed him though, clearly loving every minute of this.

Clint’s eagle eye’s were scanning the playing field, watching for the opposing team with an undeniable gleam. Meanwhile you rolled yours, huffing and trying to keep the snow around you from crunching too loudly as you shifted, trying to take a look out into the snowy woods that surrounded the compound.

“And why at night of all times?” you whispered.

Clint sighed, his head lulling down for a moment before looking up with a raised brow and pursed lips.

“Because we’re a merry band of sharp shooters, enhanced individuals, super spies, and so on, who spend their time hunting down bad guys. You expect us to do this is broad daylight?”

Alright, you had to give him that one.

“I hate snowball fights,” you muttered, a weak comeback at best.

Although to be honest about it, you could admit that you did want to completely pelt one person in particular: Bucky Barnes.

You hadn’t been on the team long, and although for the first few months you thought you were getting along with him- even friends, and maybe the closest you had for a time- he decided to change that arrangement and decided not to even have the common courtesy to tell you why.

It had been after a mission that had gone badly. Almost as bad as it could get actually.

You had done the valiant but stupid thing to save a team member- the same one crouching near you in the snow now- and in doing so left you shredded. Maybe it saved his life, but it went against orders to pull back. As a prize for your actions, you came back to homebase ripped apart, unconscious, and barely hanging on to your life.

Left in critical condition you were precariously close to death, but after a lengthy healing process that didn’t change the no-holds-barred conversation from Steve and Tony (and a proud smile from both after, because let’s face it, you had in fact been a fucking hero that day). So you had recovered and maybe the leaders of the group forgave you, but apparently not everyone got over it. Specifically Bucky.

He probably thought you were an idiot after pulling a move like you had. Or maybe he thought he couldn’t trust you, one of the closest friends either of you had, to not jeopardize missions.

So he had been distant, wanting nothing to do with you, you figured. He made comments. Kept you at arm’s length. Doubted your ability to face the tough situations repeatedly. Barely even spoke to you outside of what was absolutely required, particularly when you tried to get him to explain himself.

Sometimes though you thought the old him was back, with kind smiles and soft looks, but those were fleeting and shut down fast. It fucking stung because for a brief moment it reminded you of how you used to be.

So, since he wouldn’t tell you the reason behind why he suddenly hated your guts, you could at least pelt his ass with snow.

“Movement, south-west,” Clint whispered into his comm. Your eyes narrowed at the spot he was looking to before you clicked your thermos of heavenly mulled wine closed and shoved it in your coat, zipping it up.

“I’ll flank west,” you said hushed. Silently you moved behind one tree than the next, your entirely white outfit blending seamlessly into the dim winter setting around you. “Tony, are you still in quadrant seven?”

“Affirmative, kids.” buzzed in Tony.

“Clint, ideas?” you whispered, stopping behind a large tree a distance from his now invisible location, poking your head around the trunk ever so slightly.

Nothing but silence followed.

The low creaks of the snow-ladden trees edged out. The wind softly whistling of the wind picking up snowflakes and brushing passed your ears.

But no Clint on the comms.

That was not good.

Shit!

In a split second- noise be damned- you were off racing away from Clint’s position, ducking and weaving. You crunched down hard and snapped branches hidden under the snow under your feet as you sprinted out, overtaken by the feeling of someone on your tail. Maybe you couldn’t see them well in the darkness but you just knew it.

“It’s Bucky, he was right behind you!” whispered Clint on the comm finally, maybe sounding like he was running after someone too, though you could barely hear over your breathing and footfalls. “Head south and meet up with Cap, you’ll need-”

Thwack!

You heard a heavy mound of snow hit the tree an inch from your shoulder as you zigged passed it. Anything else Clint had to said was beyond your hearing now, focused on the steps of the invisible snow monster of a man pursuing you.

Get on higher ground!, you thought to yourself. Find cover to get the upperhand!

It took some endless minutes with sudden bursts of snow whizzing through the air around you when you found the right spot to turn the tables.

You swerved to a steep incline, praying you’d find your footing and not trip under unknown logs and branches underfoot. But you propelled yourself to the top, launching yourself to hide low under a thick cover of bushes.

Instantly you stopped and waited, the sudden silence deafening.

Bucky had stopped his pursuit once you got the high ground, going on the defensive now. He must have.

You had the advantage of looking down to where you had just come from, able now to make out two footprints in the snow: yours and his.

But where yours lead you to your position now, his seemed to disappear.

Damn snow leopard.

You quieted yourself and scanned the dark blue, dim white, and pitch black surroundings, determined to take Bucky down.

But you heard it, body reacting in trained muscle memory before you mentally could. You turned and ducked down just as the former Winter Soldier lobbed a hard pack snowball, hitting you right in the side of the face.

Standing shocked you felt both freezing from the snow and burning from the impact, a big red mark already starting to show as you stood upright and turned slowly around to face the man. 

Bucky was standing there, several feet away, clad like a shadow and just as silent. He had taken a few steps forward, unable to stop the snow ball once it was free of his hand but knowing where it would land once you sensed him.

“Y/N!” he said, the snow sniper looking convincing apologetic, blue eyes bright and concerned with hand outstretched towards you. “God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean too-”

“Barnes just pelted me in the head,” you snapped into the comm, eyes burning hot enough to melt snow, though he just stood motionless, lips parted in a wordless apology.

“Immediate disqualification!” Tony all but yelled, followed quickly by curses under his breath as he was probably getting walloped himself by snow.

“Fat chance...” you said, shaking the snow out of your coat with a sneer, wiping the wet droplets that remained on your face. Your tone turned determined and low, body shifting in a second from exasperated and loose to frustrated and ready to pounce: “Barnes is mine!”

You threw down your comm in the snow before moving to swing the ball of snow in your hand to the spot where he was.

But the place he once stood was empty, the snow flying right through the spot he was just in.

“Coward!” you yelled, not letting him get away from you this time and taking off like a bat out of hell.

Running fast through the crunching snow, you jumped over fallen trees and whipped through brushes and around trees, trying to catch a glimpse of the once Winter Soldier. Clearly he had an upper hand considering the terrain of his “upbringing” but it was fucking on and you refused to let him best you.

A flash of white was hurdling towards you and you slid along the snow, foot first, hopping up in one swift motion, barely any speed lost and a mound of snow now in your hand.

A shadow to your left running in tandem with you quickly became your target and you launched. You guess you missed, a moment later another snowball heading your way. Another quick dodge and another, You and Bucky began weaving and dodging, snowballs flying out in the dead of night like bullets.

Now an untold distance away from the game boundaries, you and he were truly alone here, determination and competition driving you both to an area of the dark woods neither of you had been before.

Somehow you and he had ended up in a rather large valley, rocks and cliffs dead ahead, leaving escape only the way you came from. And you weren’t about to run from this. You were going to destroy him.

Huffing from running, you sought to get some distance away from him before striking again.

“I’ve got you pinned, Barnes,” you called out, voice echoing in the valley, keeping him from knowing exactly where you were.

“Don’t think so, Y/N, not this time,” he said, velvet voice sounding like it was coming from all around you. “We’re not getting out of this cold and back to the compound ‘til I’ve got you beat.”

“Yeah,” you mumbled with half an eye roll. “Rather be at the compound hating me, than here, hating me in the snow.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked, catching your words though you weren’t fully sure you were try to hide them. He carried on, his tone sounding obvious. “I don’t hate you, Y/N.”

“Yeah, you do Bucky,” you said, continuing to roll the snow in your hand, hardening the once soft snowball. “And for the record, you don’t play a very subtle game at it either.”

“It’s not a game, Y/N,” he called out, voice still echoing, but coming from a different location now. Your head snapped left, but you couldn’t pinpoint where he was.

“You’re right, you don’t just hate me for the fun of it,” you said back, bitterly. “Guess you must really mean it.”

“Stop, you know I don’t hate you,” his voice rung out, sounding serious and maybe a little closer?

You paused trying to hear anything but damn him if he didn’t have the upperhand here in the snow. How someone his size could move so silently you’d never know.

“How could I hate you?” he asked, making your eyes flash wide and panicked, whipping around at the suddenly close voice.

He was right behind you, hand at his side, face pulled into a confused look.

You threw your hands up in frustration at him sneaking up on your for the third time that night, which was definitely a mistake, because Bucky didn’t take it as an innocent (if not exasperated) gesture. Immediately his reflexes kicked in, hitting you again with a snowball, this time directly at your chest.

Gasping, you looked at him shocked, his face falling fast and hard.

Oh god though, you felt he broke your fucking sternum, pain overriding just about any other thought. But realization dawned on you as you felt the telltale feeling of warm liquid spread across your chest.

In a quick motion you zipped off your coat, the material (and thermos under it) falling away. It revealed dark red liquid spreading across your white shirt.

Bucky’s face went from deep regret to an even deeper and all-encompassing terror. You took half a step back as you looked down to your chest, but slipped on an unseen ice-covered rock, collapsing back into the snow and knocking the air out of you as your back hit the stony ground.

Of course this was how the night had to go.

But suddenly the dark appearance of Bucky was practically on top of you. His hands were on you, a flash of confusion and shock hitting you as hard as the ground had.

Bucky quickly was trying to rip the layer of clothes off of you, exposing thin fabric and flesh to the winter as he tore open your sweater and tank top underneath. You could only sputter, hands clutching onto his wrist uselessly until ice cold air finally entered your lungs again, bitter and stabbing.

Coughing, you tried to sit up but Bucky’s hands pushed you down.

“What’re- Bucky!- What’re you doing?!” you eventually forced out hoarsely.

You were now able to see a frantic panic and biting heartbreak in his eyes, staring down at you. As he caught the look in your own eyes, his movements suddenly stilled as fast as they had started.

He looked down at the small amount of ripped fabric covering your body, pressing his fingers into the red stain that drenched it before pulling away and rubbing his fingers together.

“This is not...What is this?” he whispered, confused.

“It’s my mulled wine,” you said, a mix of amused, exasperated, and pained. Clearly you hadn’t shut the thermos as well as you should have, Bucky’s close range and powerful throw enough to break the lid open and spill the warm liquid all over your chest.

“So it’s... not blood,” he said a sounding a bit dazed, his face as pale as the snow.

“No,” you said back, because with a look like that even you couldn’t help pitying your once friend, what with his crushed face that was only slowly coming to realize you were relatively fine. “The cap must’ve--”

He cut you off before you could explain more, his sudden movements freezing you still in the mound of snow you had fallen into. Because a heat in equal measure to the cold against your back erupted over you as Bucky moved flush to you, his lips sealing in blinding speed against your own. You lay there shocked momentarily as man who hated you suddenly was kissing you, pushing you deeper into in the ground.

But it only took a moment of bewilderment as his lips moved against yours, tinged a little desperate and urgent, before you began to truly feel the heat underneath that kiss.

You could have sworn you heard the crackling of a burning fire, tasted the smokey heat on your tongue, saw the red flickering flames behind your eyelids. That kiss seared you in the icy snow, stealing your breath and thought and burning it all to ash where you lay.

A deep sigh escaped from his soul as he pulled away, quick breathing returned to him for a different reason this time. He stayed clinging to you, face a breadth away from yours.

“But you…” you whispered, your turn to be dazed and confused. “You hate me? You have for so long?”

His eyes closed, half cringing against you as the ends of that long chestnut hair brushed your face. He hated those words, you could see it at this close distance, like hearing that hurt him.

“I don’t… hate you, Y/N,” he repeated, breathing the quiet words into the tiny space between your lips and his.

He struggled with what to say next, leaving you with breath held while you waited for the blow.

“I… I just…” he stumbled softly. “I almost watched you die in front of me and it was easier to push away… I mean it’s easier to not show… It was too hard to…”

Oh.

You thought you breathed the word and his eyes snapped open, only to look down as the warmth in his cheeks turned a tinge of red.

“Please don’t make me say it,” he continued in a whisper, shaking his head slightly. “I’m not good at saying it.”

Oh.

Okay, there it was.

The puzzle pieces clicked in place and you saw the whole picture now.

“Quite the opposite, I guess?” you said softly back, sounding a lot more breathless than you realized you were. Because if that kiss didn’t steal the air right out of your body, his unspoken words would.

“I mean,” he said, looking back up to you. “That is not why I ripped off your clothes, just to be clear.”

You could practically feel the heat radiating off of his face, embarrassed but also not drawing back. At least not this time, like he had before and for all those months.

And if he had the courage to just come out and kiss you, you could have the courage to not let him go back on it. You decided in that moment you wouldn’t let him. Maybe you had been too self-conscious and given up too easily when he all but removed himself from your life. You wouldn’t make that same mistake again.

Because you understood it. It’s easier to push someone away that you liked then let the pain of possibly losing someone in instead. You had almost died after all. And it’s easier for you to believe you’re not worthy of someone’s time- and maybe even love- rather than view yourself as too valuable to lose.

“And you’re okay?” he asked, vulnerabie and searching. “With me? With this?”

You took an extra moment in the frigid night and cold snow, still needing to even the score a little here (despite the frostbite a minute from sinking in).

“I guess I’m really conflicted here,” you said slowly, Bucky’s face contorting into one of pain in a second flat. “I mean, my chest is burning from the wine and my back is freezing from the snow.”

He wasn’t sure if he was going to throttle you or laugh, but he landed on smiling.

“I meant us and you know it, Y/N,” he said with that crooked grin you had missed so much over these last months.

You reciprocated with a grin of your own, knowing full well he wasn’t talking about the cold.

“I mean, yeah, I guess we would make a great team if we worked together, you and I,” you said cheekily.

You almost didn’t catch his eye roll as he stood up, taking you right along with him and carrying you close in his arms.

“Okay, just don’t almost die on me again, either for real or not,” he said as you shifted down to press yourself as close to the furnace of a man as possible.

“Well Barnes, why don’t I just stay this close you from now on?” you mumbled rather contently into his coat.

“Yeah doll, I think that’d be best,” Bucky said, bright grin lighting up the dark woods. You would be lying if you didn’t admit it lit your heart up too.

“Take me home?” you said up to him instead, sure your eyes told him the whole story anyways.

“Sure, doll,” Bucky smiled softly, hand brushing your cheek where earlier a snowball had hit.

He planted a small kiss on the top of your head, binding you in closer to his chest and carrying you back to the compound through the snow.

You might have sprinted out here “hating” each other, but you were walking back- maybe even a little slower than strictly necessary- feeling quite different. Sure, it was cold out here in the snow but your soul felt warmer than it had in a long time.

_______

A/N: The story in which Bucky can’t say his feelings and you almost get hypothermia because of it lol. A classic tale. Please let me know what you thought!

Permanent Tags: @dontpanc, @smodvocate, @bunsterjonez, @buckybonky, @marveloustrashpanda, @hangirl93, @captainrogerrsbeard, @friendly-neighborhood-lich-queen, @thisgirllikeme, @jjsoccer11, @innerpandablizzard-blog, @fanatic-fanfic, @mdgrdians, @christinky, @universal-death-of-a-fangirl, @cauraphernelia, @ailynalonso15, @cassiopeia-barrow, @1elboomdemsechevarria, @cameronskywalker, @rogrsnbarnes, @verygraphicink, @onlyanothersocialcasualty, @lisalisa007

Bucky Barnes Tags: @bexboo616, @kaaatniss, @lost-in-translating, @emabookcookie, @crazybutconfidentaf, @jitterbuck

[fourohfourrealitynotfound]

Shattered Hopes

Loren became slightly concerned when her timer unexpectedly broke only a a few minutes before she was due to meet her soulmate.

Meanwhile, when Annabelle broke her timer, her hopes and dreams of meeting her soulmate shattered along with it.

-

Based on “Cellphones between soulmates are in the same condition (cracked screens are in the same places)” and “A timer for when they shall first meet” from the masterlist of soulmate au prompts.

On the subway, Loren distracted herself from the crowded car by examining her timer screen. From the upper left hand quadrant down to the middle of the screen was a surface level scratch. The mark, a result of carelessly putting her timer in her pocket with her apartment keys, wasn’t enough to alter the display. Loren could still clearly see the numbers behind it and the other crack.

She didn’t know what caused the crack in the bottom right corner of her timer’s screen. Sometimes, like when she was stuck in a crowded subway car, Loren would stare at it an imagine how her soulmate caused the crack. Maybe they dropped the timer, or sat on it at an odd angle, or threw it at someone in a fit of anger. There was no limit to the possible soulmates and situations that she could imagine.

Loren was daydreaming about a her soulmate knocking their timer off a table to reach a pizza box when her own timer’s appearance suddenly changed. The screen made an awful crackling noise as the screen split into a web of white lines. The number display was completely unreadable underneath the cracks.

This was rather concerning to Loren. Her first thoughts were about her soulmate: Was this an incident involving clumsiness, or a serious accident in which they were injured? Then, she remembered that when she last checked, her timer had less than an hour remaining. If her timer’s internal mechanisms had been damaged, there would be no way that Loren could identify her soulmate unless they pulled out their timer while she was watching.

A soft ding alerted Loren about her upcoming stop, so she slid the timer in her pocket and rose to exit. Filled with newfound worry, she shook her bangs out her eyes and kept moving through the busy station. Upon leaving the station for the cold streets, she set out in search of a warm beverage to calm her nerves and warm her rapidly chilling body.

-

Annabelle was extremely nervous about meeting her soulmate. She didn’t want to leave the safety of her bed, but the ticking timer forced her to get out of apartment. It took her an hour to settle on ripped skinny jeans and a sweater that didn’t make her feel too ugly. Before she could second-guess her decision again, she left the apartment to find the nearest coffee shop.

The only problem with her plan was that Annabelle had no clue where the nearest coffee shop was. She had only moved to the city a week ago and hadn’t had the chance to explore yet. Google Maps said that there were three coffee shops nearby: two independent cafes and one Starbucks. Annabelle didn’t like the cliche of meeting her soulmate at a Starbucks, so that option was eliminated. Of the other two, one was five minutes away and one was fifteen minutes away. She was supposed to meet her soulmate in ten minutes, so she chose the closer one to avoid having to meet her soulmate in the street and possibly loose them forever.

The walk to the cafe was nerve-wracking. Annabelle kept worrying about how she would meet her soulmate. What if she accidentally spilled hot coffee on them, or got sidetracked and then awkwardly ran into them on the street? As her anxiety about the upcoming meeting increased, she began to obsess over her appearance. Her clothing choice, though fashionable, made Annabelle feel like she looked idiotic for being ill-prepared for the cold weather. She crossed arms tightly to warm her hands in her armpits while attempting to keep her last shreds of confidence.

When the cafe was in sight, Annabelle pulled her timer out of her coat pocket to check it again. She had just registered the time as a little over five minutes when her body jolted forward for no reason. A man in athletic clothing, watching Fitbit instead of his path, had run into her while jogging down the sidewalk. Annabelle tripped forward and reached her hands out to catch herself before her face hit the freezing pavement.

”Sorry!” the man shouted over his shoulder, not bothering to stop and help her up.

After regaining her breath, Annabelle made her way to the cafe’s nearby outdoor seating to examine the damage. Her palms and elbows were a bit scraped up and felt a bit bruised from her sudden meeting of the sidewalk. The thing that made her stomach drop, however, was the status of her timer. Because it was in her hand when she fell, the device’s screen had been against the cement. The display was completely unreadable, and the internal mechanisms may have also been damaged.

Annabelle’s throat clenched and hot tears welled up in her eyes. Of course something like this would happen to her instead of getting to meet her soulmate normally. The timer had been around five minutes when she fell, but she wasn’t exactly sure how much time had passed since then. All she could do was sit at the cafe and wait, hoping that the internal mechanisms of her and her soulmate’s timers had not been damaged by Annabelle’s carelessness. With any luck, the timers would still beep when she met her soulmate, and she wouldn’t loose them forever.

-

Loren knew The Whispering Bean quite well. It was a small and quirky coffee shop on a busy street corner that received a fair share of customers. The interior was warm and cozy with comfy chairs and floor-to-ceiling windows. The best part of all was their mascot: a mysterious green coffee bean wearing a mustache, monocle, and pink fedora.

Entering the heated shop made Loren’s cold face feel funny for a second as she began to warm up. She hesitated in the doorway to pull off her gloves and decide what she wanted to drink. When she shook her head to move her bangs out her face, Loren noticed a girl sitting in at window table near the door. The poor thing was sobbing violently, but nobody in the shop was attempting to console her. Loren abandoned her mission for a warm beverage to do just that.

”Hey, are you ok?” she asked, unsure how to address the girl in a more casual manner.

The girl just nodded unconvincingly through the tears. “Yeah,” she choked out while wiping tears out of her pretty brown eyes with her back of her hand.

Loren sat down across from the girl and grabbed some napkins from the table’s holder to offer as tissues. The girl accepted, wiped up her eyes, and blew her nose while Loren patiently waited for her stop crying. It took a minute but the tears finally began to subside. “Ok, what do you want to drink? I’ll get you some coffee while you collect yourself.”

The girl sheepishly gave her a simple order, seeming to know that Loren wouldn’t take no for an answer. After getting their coffees, she carefully brought them back to their table and managed to gracefully set them down without spilling anything. The girl pushed money towards her to pay for the drink and left it out on the table as an open offer when Loren politely shook her head.

”Thank you. I’m Annabelle, by the way.”

”It’s no problem. Nice to meet you, I’m Loren.”

Together, they sipped their beverages in silence and watched pedestrians on the rainy city streets.

-

”Do you mind telling me what’s wrong?” Loren asked her. “Maybe I can help you somehow.”

The entire situation was so bizarre to Annabelle. She was mostly embarrassed to be seen crying in public to the point that someone felt they needed to come and help her, but she was also extremely grateful. Loren was taking the time out of her day to sit with a complete stranger and calm them down at their one of their lowest moments. That spoke volumes about her character.

Annabelle finally decided to just go ahead and tell her about her problem, since she probably couldn’t embarrass herself any more than she already had. She took a few wavering breaths to collect herself. “I think— I think broke my timer.” At the simple mention of it, her eyes began to well up, but she aggressively wiped the tears away before they could spill over again.

”Broke as in it can’t count down or alert you?”

Annabelle nodded, unable to speak without her voice revealing her despair.

Loren pushed back her bangs and furrowed her brow as if thinking deeply. “That’s definitely a problem. Do you think it’s repairable? Maybe you could take it somewhere to be fixed?”

”Where would you even do that?” Annabelle asked. “At a clock repair? Is there some sort of government section for dealing with soulmate situations?” She hadn’t ever heard of one, but she was desperate for any hope that she could still find her soulmate. Her brain tried to remind her that it was probably too late, but she pushed the negative thoughts aside.

She pulled out her timer from her pocket and studied it. In the time since Annabelle had crushed it against the pavement, its appearance had only gotten worse. The screen was to the point where it looked like pieces might start chipping off, and the entire front half seemed like it might pop off at any moment. Overall, the sight filled Annabelle with a sense of defeat. “It’s probably too late,” she choked out. “I think that I’ve already missed them.”

”Actually, I don’t think you have . . .” Loren trailed off cryptically.

When Annabelle blinked the fresh tears from her eyes, she saw that Loren had pulled her own timer out. It lay on the table beside hers, broken in the exact same way. Unable to believe her eyes, she slowly reached out to trace her fingers over one shattered screen and then the other. Filled with newfound hope, she looked up the meet the sparking eyes of her soulmate.

Loren’s face was set in a light smile, as if to say, “Hi, it’s me.” She reached out a hand either offering to hold hands or give a hand shake; Annabelle wasn’t sure which. Instead, she got up and went around to the other girl’s side of the table, where she was promptly greeted with the desired hug.

Maybe broken her timer hadn’t been a mistake. Though her hopes and dreams had been shattered for a minute, her soulmate came along to piece her back together as the universe intended.

[breakingdownsu]

Spiderweb Chapter Three

Note: This is coming out later than I anticipated, I'm under a new treatment regimen so I'm unsure of what writing time is available right now, but will hopefully keep updating on a semi-regular basis. Thanks for your patience.

…..

Pearl ownership turned out to be very different than Slim had initially feared. She had acquired enough cash over the orbits to afford a brand-new one, for her needs were modest, but her natural wariness over being in the company of other gems had her thinking it would be awkward to have a gem, even a gem that barely counted as a gem, permanently in her space.

But the pearl was so unobtrusive she kept forgetting it was there. She could spend entire quadrants going over spatter evidence with such focus that whenever she turned around and spotted the pearl, she jumped. It wouldn't move unless she told it to, so it was more-or-less a constant fixture in the corner of the apartment.

Slim asked it to pick up things, tidy the apartment, even process some of the more boring data for her, but she was naturally self-sufficient and there just wasn't much work to give the pearl. A fleeting thought of using the pearl for her carnal urges occurred to her, but it was gone in the next moment; Slim had never really had trouble with those urges in the first place, and she found the idea of doing that with the pearl oddly distasteful.

It wasn't until a full seven cycles passed since Orthoclase had handed over the pearl that Slim finally hit a breakthrough.

She had been analyzing some crime evidence that didn't seem to make sense. Improvising as she always did, she picked up an object of equivalent weight and heft to the supposed weapon (a small sulphide container) and swung it in the supposed trajectory of the evidence. But her swing was clumsy, and the container was heavier than she expected, it slipped from her grasp.

She had, more-or-less, hurled it at the pearl.

There was less than a single pelmetre between Slim and the rest pod that the pearl had been sitting on, and less than a parsec to avoid being hit. Slim didn't see the pearl move, but it had, and the container hit the back of the rest pod, smashing the control panel there.

“Hm. You dodged it,” she murmured, a little stunned.

“I'm sorry,” the pearl responded.

“No, don't be sorry,” Slim said. Her mind was ticking over fast, as it usually did when she was piecing evidence together. “Why did you dodge it? I didn't have time to tell you...”

“I have a basic self-preservation program in place, and you did not order me to ignore it.”

“I can do that?”

“It's recommended in the manual.”

“Which I never got, because you're illegal,” Slim mused, tapping her forehead. “And your previous owner didn't follow the instructions?”

“My previous owner didn't read the manual. She only owned me for three cycles before she lost me on the tracer.”

“I see.”

Slim wanted to test the pearl's reaction time, so naturally she didn't give any warning when she struck out and slapped it across the face. To her shock, the pearl didn't even attempt to defend itself.

“What...?” Slim sputtered. Her hand stung, she hadn't held back. “Why didn't you block me?”

“I'm sorry. Did you want me to block?”

A deep purple bruise was already blooming across the pearl's cheek. Looking at it, Slim felt a little sick.

“Well, yes!” she said, fiddling with her hair as she always did when she felt on edge. “You just told me you have self-preservation programming, I assumed you'd stop me and I wanted to see how fast you could...”

“You're my owner. I can't defend myself from you.”

“Even without me ordering you to let me beat you up?” Slim snorted, incredulously.

“Of course. It's a basic rule.”

Slim made a little noise in the back of her throat. She had assumed the pearls that had been mutilated by their murdered owners had been ordered not to defend themselves, but she hadn't realized that all pearls were programmed to be helpless towards their owners in particular.

“Okay,” Slim sighed. “I'm going to hit out at you again, and this time I do want you to try and avoid getting hit. In fact, I want you to avoid getting hit by anyone or anything from now on, okay?”

“I understand.”

Slim held off for about half a quadrant before she struck out again. This time, the pearl had been idling by the corner of the apartment and the only way to avoid Slim's fist was to jump over her.

She did.

It looked to Slim like the pearl had disappeared into thin air, with just the slight air displacement that set Slim's hair floating to indicate she had moved at all. Slim's fist just about glanced the wall, and the pearl was behind her.

That's interesting.

Slim knew from the evidence she had found that a pearl's physical strength was nothing compared to even the weakest of gems, but not much had ever been written about their speed. It made sense for them to be fast, they had considerably less mass than normal gems, but it seemingly had never been utilized in any real way.

A little shiver ran down her spine. The great advantage that the zoatox species had had against gemkind had been their unbelievable speed. Breeding, growing and attacking had all happened in the blink of a gem's eye, and every time gems managed to gain some upper ground the zoatox evolved and attacked in a new and more vicious way. Diamond Core's great and horrific sacrifice had just barely managed to stop them.

Whispers across Homeworld were saying that these murders bore the hallmarks of a zoatox attack. Perhaps they did, but pearls had been compared to zoatox more than once and for good reason.

Slim was just about to download the most recent pearl ownership manuals when her holocast rang. She didn't even have to look at it.

Another one.

…..

The markets were so busy when Slim made her way to the far quadrant it was hard to believe a gem had been shattered.

Let alone two.

Well, one and a half. We can't register a pearl as a gem shattering.

On the surface, it looked like the pearl was mere collateral damage. According to the witnesses (who were talking rapidly in the constructs about the little they had seen), whatever had struck Hematite had gone through the pearl. Slim inspected the perspex box the pearl had been inside, measuring the cracks.

There goes my theory.

Her mind had just been starting to come around to the idea that a pearl had committed these crimes, perhaps on the order of some gem that had seen possibility in their speed. Whatever had hit those targets had been long and thin, and could only do serious damage if they were used at high velocity. But she couldn't imagine a pearl destroying another pearl in the process.

On the other hand, pearls didn't seem to be capable of going against orders even at risk to their own safety, why wouldn't they destroy a pearl if they were following orders?

I don't know enough about pearls for this.

And that was probably why Orthoclase had handed over the pearl.

Lavender. That's its name. Her name.

“What are you thinking?” the commanding Amethyst asked her. “Turf war?”

“Unlikely,” Slim mumbled. “Hematite's had this shop here for seven hundred plus orbits.”

“So?” the Amethyst scoffed. “This whole quadrant changes hands every couple of orbits. Maybe she was a holdout.”

“Whatever you say,” Slim said, rolling her eyes.

The attack trajectory was once again coming from the ceiling. It had gone through the upper corner of the perspex box, through the pearl's gem, out of the base of the box and through Hematite's shoulder. The pearl wouldn't have felt a thing, but the Hematite had been in enough pain to scream, loud enough to attract the attention of every gem shopping in the district. By the time anyone was in direct line of sight, Hematite was shattered and whatever had attacked her was long gone.

All within the space of three parsecs at most.

No gem was capable of that kind of speed.

As far as they knew.

“Aw, they got the pearl too?”

A Spinel was lingering by the door (probably just released from the evidence constructs), staring at the perspex box with vague dismay.

“I'm afraid so,” Slim told her. “But even if it wasn't, it would have been taken in as evidence.”

“I know that,” the Spinel groaned. “I wanted to get dibs when it gets released on the pre-owned circuit.”

“Why? What's so special about this pearl?”

“It's freaky,” Spinel said with a cheerful grin. “Hematite used to sell tickets.”

Aha.

“Freaky how?” Slim asked, feigning disinterest by rummaging through her toolkit.

“Like, it's been dead the entire time she had it,” the Spinel explained. “Except sometimes it used to move when you weren't looking. Hematite kept it in that box to show she wasn't making it move. It was seriously spooky,”

Curiouser and curiouser.

“How shattered is it, exactly?” Spinel asked.

“Completely.”

“Ah, slag it,” Spinel muttered and slumped away.

Two mutilated pearls and a dead one that moved.

The squad dealing with the case were packing up and moving on. No doubt they'd be pinning this as a turf war between rival gangs and Hematite as an innocent bystander. Slim, of course, knew it ran much deeper than that, but she also knew they wouldn't listen to her.

…..

Slim lingered around the market stalls for a little longer than was comfortable for her. In the past it had been a good place to pick up rumours that lead to case facts, so it was worth the mild anxiety being surrounded by so many gems tended to provoke. They never clocked her for a patrol Amethyst; at her size, she was usually mistaken for a strangely-coloured Jade.

Even so, the cycle had nearly ended before she heard anything useful.

A downstreet stall selling offcut compound mixes was a quiet corner in the otherwise-crowded market, a steady stream of gems stopped by to drink compound and chat to the Iolite running the stall. Slim camped out there for a while before a Larimar stopped by and, over the course of three compounds, told her entire life story. Slim half-listened right up until she heard something interesting.

“She just hasn't been the same since,” the Larimar moaned. “It's like, nothing's really exciting anymore!”

“Well, why don't you hit the backstreet? They've got that blind pearl, it's supposed to be pretty nifty...” the Iolite responded. She sounded bored.

“We got banned from that place,” Larimar groaned. “She got carried away....besides, when you've seen the Murder Pearl take out old zoatox veterans everything else just pales in comparison.”

Murder Pearl?

“Better you than me,” Iolite shivered. “Personally I find the whole idea of murder pearls creepy.”

“Lucky for you there's only one then,” Larimar laughed. “But I asked and Hematite says she has no idea when the next fight is going to be. She says the pearl is down for maintenance, but like I believe that...”

There were many Hematites on Homeworld, and a good number of them involved in criminal activity, but Slim knew exactly what Hematite this Larimar was talking about. Only one Hematite was known for hosting underground fighting matches. She paid large amounts of cash to the Amethyst squadrons to look the other way.

…..

“I don't have it,” Hematite growled. “Don't you need a warrant?”

“Actually, I don't. I have authority to raid at random,” Slim responded. “I don't really feel like doing that, though.”

“Okay, what do you want? I can give you a few thousand...”

“I don't want cash, I just want you to answer some questions. All off the record.”

Hematite cursed under her breath, rubbed her temples and sighed.

“Okay, fine. I'll tell you what I can. Off the record. If it goes any further, I'll deny everything.”

“Deal,” Slim shrugged. “Tell me about the pearl.”

“It was a joke, okay? It was just some old broken pearl I got off the black market, got it rejigged and set it up in the arena. It was supposed to get smashed. It was never meant to fight.”

“But...it did fight?”

“It did. It fought and it won. Over and over.”

“How is that possible?” Slim asked. “Pearls aren't built for fighting, and from what I understand you get really tough gems volunteering for this kind of thing...”

“I don't know how, it just kept winning. It just...always found a way to kill them.”

“What orders did you give it?”

“I didn't give it any orders,” Hematite moaned. “I just said something stupid, like 'try not to die too quickly' or something, I don't know! I never had a pearl before, Larimar had a bunch of them...I didn't know what I was doing, okay?”

“Okay,” Slim agreed. “So, where is this pearl now?”

“No idea,” Hematite growled. “Orthoclase borrowed it and never returned it. Not that I want it back, it made me lots of money but it scared the slag out of me...Larimar left me for a while because of it....why do you want to know, anyway?”

“No particular reason,” Slim lied.

[bonecleaver]

great short story™ (A humans are weird story)

This is a story about a man whose wealth was so great those who had less looked to him as the true paragon of wealth. But instead of letting his avarice cloud his mind, he instead replaces it with munificent actions in poorer communities. He was also a real debonair individual who always tried to do the right thing. He was so larger than life that all descriptions of him sound like caricatures, but that does not mean that he is a megalomaniac. Now prepare for the amazing story of Steve the Great. Steve started out like most revolutionary inventors with the only thing separating him from them is that he was trained by epitome of researchers and inventors. He was a quick study surpassing even the most grandiose expectations anyone could have had. Eventually he built himself a lab and sealed it off, except to get resources and food. When he finally came out of his hiatus, he looked very disheveled like he had been on three hours of sleep, but when he revealed what his years of self isolation yielded, nobody cared how bad he smelled or how unkempt he was, they would rush to him for interviews he really didn’t want. If one wonders what he built, they could just look at the pictures he snapped from Jupiter. Even though his tech was vastly superior, companies still tried to elicit it from him using force or saying they need it to buttress the human race’s defenses. Over many years he made covert constructions of a space battle fleet to go and live his herculean dream of ruling the galaxy. His ships after completion made themselves known to the world then shortly to all the galaxy. With one simple motion he transcended the abilities of any civilization in the stars in recent millennia. “Engage the FTL drive Sir Memeston.” commanded Steve. “Right away Steve,” responded Sir Memeston. “I thought I told you to refer to me as Supreme Emperor,” berated Steve. “Sorry my Supreme Emperor.” whimpered Sir Memeston. Then the FTL engaged launching Steve’s capital ship the Destiny Manifester and its support fleet into the Alpha Centauri system; spotting a small ship under fire Steve thought, I should help them or at least scare off their attackers. “All hands prepare for combat! We are helping that ship!” “Yes sir!” the crew responded with a mighty clangor. As the command was given shields were thrown up, weapons powered up,  all systems nominal, and targets locked. Then as they were rushing the ships, about to cause mass carnage, the  attackers left, because an entire battle fleet was bearing down on them. The ship they just saved hailed them “I thought I had just meet the most squeamish pirates but apparently I meet the only battle fleet in this quadrant. So which empire are you from?” blurted out the thankful alien. “From what ever I decide to name my empire,” declared Steve realizing he never thought of a name for his space empire. “But only the three empires have a battle fleet that size.” “You could call us the novice fourth empire,” retorted Steve almost sanctimoniously. “Well how many systems do you have in your domain?”asked the alien. “For now just our home world, but soon I will accrue the entire universe!” announced Steve. “A pretty bold aspersion to make towards the great empires.” said the alien with just a little sass in its voice. “You have been talking about these empires like we know about them.” “You really don’t know about the great empires?” “Yup.” “Well each empire controls about one quadrant, except this quadrant which is just referred to as the Expanse of Madness.” “Why is it called that?” “Because there is an aura of madness that keeps the bigger empires out and civilizations from developing past the stone age.” Steve let that ferment before he tried to wheedle more out of the alien. “Then my species must be very bizarre, because we evolved not very far from here.” “That is most anomalous, but there was always a chance that a space faring civilization would develop in the untouched depths of the Expanse,” finished the alien. “Thanks for the short history lesson. If you don’t mind my asking, why were you out here?” “Well rumor has it that there is a natural metal that is stronger than the iron carbon alloy that makes up the armor of every ship in the galaxy.” “I think my ships are made from the metal you are looking for.” “Well then your dream of galactic domination may not be the petulant dreams of a young and anxious empire.” said the alien. Then Steve said goodbye and left to make plans to invade one of the three empires, but he still didn’t think of a name for his empire 5 months later “If our probes are correct, the capital of the Th’rul Empire is the most powerful and technologically advanced empire out of the three.” said Steve’s tactical officer and son Gabe. “Then we will strike at their bulwark and show the might of humanity!” A few weeks later at the main Th’rulian defense station. “Sir I have detected a foreign battle fleet infringing on royal Th’rulian space!” “Nonsense no species would be mad enough to attack our capital. Well all technology is susceptible to malfunctions so we can surmise that is the most logical answer.” “Nonetheless, I will still send the message that interlopers will not be tolerated,” replied the small crab like alien. “Fine.” Back to Steve. “Sir we have just received a transmission saying that we are not welcomed,” said the comms officer. “Reply with ‘we will not stop due to some bovine drivel.’ Then increase speed and go into attack mode.” “Roger that my lord.” We got this, thought Steve, I concocted this perfect strategy that we have been practicing for weeks and their weapons will barely damage us, let alone destroy us. Back on the station “Sir, they replied.” Cue the station master letting loose a string of invectives. “Do we at least know who they are,” sighed the station master. “No, their shields and armor cannot be identified.” “How can their armor not be identified?!?!?” yelled the station master loud enough for it to reverberate. “It may be the metal that some of our scouts went looking for in the Expanse.” “Can we at least determine what kind of ships we are going to fight.” “There seems to be one super dreadnought, several battle ships, and a plethora of much smaller ships.” described the station’s tactical officer. “Anything on the dreadnought?” “Only that it has more weapons than our entire fleet.” “Well then we should take their transgression more seriously, for now we are vulnerable,” the station master with stalwart courage declared to the defenses to ready for the attack. Back to Steve “It seems our reply has expedited their response,” chuckled Steve. “We will dissipate any hope they had and force them to surrender their capital or we will bomb it from orbit!” The two forces were two amorphous blobs, with one bracing for impact while the other charges recklessly into the other, but bracing did not help the blob of stations from being all but obliterated from a distance. “We have just dealt a scathing blow to their entire defense matrix.” Now having orbital supremacy, Steve sent his demands and any caveats they might have. On the planet Th’rul prime. “My liege,” a messenger whimpered to the heavily armored Crab like King. “What is it?” replied the king. “We have been invaded.” “Surely you jest, for I am not that daft,” said the king pretentiously. “I am afraid not, my liege.” “Well, what are their demands.” “All they want is loyalty, resources, and information.” “That’s it? Why no territory?” “The want to have us as a vassal, which is where we would have a lot of autonomy, but still be under their rule. Also they said if we do not comply, they will start bombing the planet.” “We shall agree due to the fact the loss of the capital would put to many of our citizens at risk.” Back to Steve. “They have responded very nicely to our demands.” “Good, Good.” “Invite their king up so we can meet face to face, also make sure to scan for contraband. And make any of the sleazy looking personnel are out of sight.” In a very nice conference room on Steve’s flagship. “Thank you for coming up here so we can discuss your new provincial status in my empire.” “Yes, I hope this enjoining of our empires will go smoothly.” “Do not worry, we will not flout your empire like a corpulent deer killed on a hunt.”  said Steve very calmly. “ We will make sure the transition is very transient.” “You seem like a very astute strategist to be able to defeat us.” “I thank you for you adulation, but I had a full team of strategists to help me.” Said Steve with no hint of betrayal in his voice. “ We want to make sure to enhance our relationship from the very start.” “Thank you for inviting me,” vocalized the ex-emperor impassively. “Now let's eat. I hope none of the food here is heresy for you to eat.” “I don’t even know what that word means.” “Good to know so let’s dig in” After a few hours eating and drinking the two rulers got into a carousel and almost fought each other that no one but the two drunks knew why, but it was blatant the the two were going to kill each other. Even though the alien emperor had size on Steve, Th’rul prime’s gravity is much lower than Earth’s, giving Steve the upper hand. The next morning. “What happened,” groaned Steve. Gabe was there helping his father up with his big strong muscles. “Dad you nearly killed the emperor, but some perceptive guards stopped it from happening.” “Make sure that it does not disseminate throughout the empire.” “Yes, Father.” “I liked his demeanor, for he seemed like a man who really cared for his people, and if they were in another empire he would still protect them. I was going to suggest foisting the work of inculcating the population, but he may just do it willingly.” “As you wish my father,” Gabe left in a hurry to please his father. Hours later on the bridge. “You have permission to deplete some of our missiles for fireworks to signify our victory to all below.” “Sir you should also give a speech to mollify them further.” “I guess I have to do it impromptu.” Steve gives a moving speech on how he is going to treat the citizens. To the relief of many he won’t be a sadistic ruler. After curtailing the speech with a fly over of his elite pilots it was easy to see he has the support of the people. When news on his takeover got to the most extraneous parts of his new empire and beyond. The Garuck Empire and Shr’Tis ascendancy (the other two great empires) all they heard was; there was a shining, invincible, and irresistible fleet out there with plans of galactic domination. So to preserve their cultures and peoples they entered a coalition. After gathering the Th’rulian Navy, Steve sent most back to where they were, but he took some and put them in a fleet under Grand admiral Zak. So he can help lead them to conquering the remaining empires. At the coalition fleet. “We should attack first.” said a Garuckian admiral. “What if the rumors are true?” retorted a Shr’Tis admiral. “If we wait too long we may be attacked first.” “Fine we will do it your way Garuckian.” conceded the Shr’Tis admiral. Back to the Destiny Manifester. As the two fleets are working on moving and fighting as one entity. “The fleets seem to working well together,” said Gabe with some seriousness. Just then the entire coalition fleet jumped in, looking for a fight. “It seems we can get every bird with one stone here,” smugly declared Steve. Now the two composite fleets raced toward each other with no regard for safety. In the middle was a bloodbath so intense the narrator does not have the correct words to describe how brutal it is. In the end Steve’s Ships remained mostly untouched, but the ships under Zak’s control were not as lucky with fifty percent of the original fleet left. Now with both enemy fleets destroyed all that needed to be done was to go to the enemy home worlds and demand their empires, which is exactly what Steve did.

[jadekitty777]

Troika - Chapter 3: To Speak Good

Troika - (Noun) Russian in origin, meaning “set of three” or “three of a kind”. It is a three-way dance between people.

Summary: Taiyang has a bad dream, Qrow has homesickness and James has a headache. Not necessarily in that order.Or, a series of snapshot events at different times of this trio’s relationship together.

Rating: T

Pairing: James/Qrow/Taiyang

AO3 Link: Chapter 3

Note: There’s one more after this, and then the story is done!

~

If someone told Qrow five years ago that he’d one day call Atlas his home, he would have laughed.

If that same someone added he’d do it entirely for James Ironwood, he would have told the guy he was more drunk than him.

Now, with the general dozing in the seat beside him and the tall white buildings that encompassed the upper streets of Atlas growing closer as the airship reached its port, he figured he probably owed that imaginary guy a round or two.

They’d both been gone a few months – he on a mission and James on security detail duty for this year’s Vytal Festival, as he often was. Both conveniently put them in Vacuo, so once he’d finished cleaning up an infestation of Grimm in the lower quadrant, he headed to the city, enjoying the rest of his time away with the other man. James was a bit too rigid to really appreciate the less reputable side of the kingdom which was rot with gambling and underground fight rings, so Qrow improvised, taking him to sand-sailing races and hiking trails instead. It was the walk through the hollowed-out mines, once filled with Dust and now left glittering with natural minerals and stalagmites that kaleidoscoped colors across the stone, that truly fascinated the elder man to the point he wanted to explore every inch of it. Rarely seeing him so boyishly eager, Qrow was happy to oblige even long after his feet were aching from standing too much.

It was all worth it if only for the moment he watched James place his hand against one of the crystals, awash in a gentle blue hue from the reflecting light, and Qrow couldn’t help but correlate the likeness of his lover to this place: that even if parts had been forever lost or broken, what remained was even more beautiful.

Of course, he never said it out loud. Spouting poetic nonsense like that was more Tai’s thing.

Qrow had gotten a chance to see his eldest niece too. She, along with Blake and some of the other kids from the old crew, were on a march across Vacuo with the restructured White Fang, hoping to spread awareness on Faunus civil rights using peaceful protest. They’d chosen to complete their pilgrimage at the crux of the festival, knowing the streets would be crowded from the event and the news reels would be more likely to headline their efforts.

So, mostly, Qrow stood in the thin shade of a light pole in a poor attempt to hide from the burning sun, holding up a sign and letting Yang talk his ear off. She had been so happy, animatedly recounting all the sights and cultures she had seen, all the strange foods she had tried, every new place bringing a new excitement. All of it wasn’t pleasant of course. They’d met a lot of opposition on their travels throughout Remnant that she mostly alluded to, but he couldn’t help but swell with pride as he realized his niece had found her way into following her dreams of being both an adventurer and a hero.

He stretched out his arms up above his head, hearing the slight crack of joints stiff from sitting too long, before he placed a hand on James’ metal shoulder, giving him a slight shake. As he started to rouse, Qrow said, “Time to wake up, Rin Tin Tin.”

Blue eyes blinked at him blearily, saying sleepily, “How do you even know that reference?”

“You have met Tai, right? If you think he didn’t own the deluxe boxset and spent every summer vacation watching it, you’d be very wrong.” He said in way of explanation, feeling the shift of gravity as the airship started to descend for a landing.

“I didn’t, because he doesn’t own it.”

“Not anymore.” Qrow said. “Someone accidentally put it in the fireplace.”

“You did not.” There wasn’t an ounce of belief in that retort.

He grinned cheekily, “You’ll never know.”

James eyed him critically. “Well, you’ll be disappointed to know I did find the send button on my scroll.”

“Jimmy, you’ve evolved! What’s next old man? Using the coffee maker?” He snickered as the other reached out and shoved him.

“Oh, shut up.”

He saluted him. But, after a few seconds of silence, said, “Permission to speak, sir?”

James had a better poker face than most, but even he was struggling not to smile. “Denied.”

“Rude, sir.” He considered it a personal victory when he heard the other laugh softly.

“Come on, cadet.” The man said as the plane jerked on its landing. “I’ve got to drop some stuff off at my office, but we can stop at the café first, alright?”

He responded with another little salute. “Sir, yes sir!”

~

Qrow sipped lukewarm coffee from the plastic cup as he watched the man who had bought it for him putter about his office, putting away some last-minute documents that he’d have to organize properly when he was next there. Back before they were dating, he used to ruthlessly tease James about how much of a workaholic he was, until the other eventually told him that he wasn’t the one who once spent literal years out on the field for his own profession. It had been one of the few times someone had managed to make him pause and actually think.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t heard a variation of it before – how the war was over. How he could take a break every now and again. But it was the way James said it, reminding him that years of his life were just gone, that struck a chord with him and suddenly he understood he’d missed so much. He would never get to be at Yang’s graduation ceremony from Signal as the fiery blond cheered. He would never be able to capture the moment Ruby came home, shouting with joy over her early acceptance to Beacon. Hell, he’d never get to see that stupid, goofy smile Tai probably had when he adopted Zwei. The more he thought, the more the key events piled up, the more seriously he considered removing his name out of the Huntsman rotation permanently.

He never did, but he did lessen his prominence in the roster significantly.

So there he was, in the middle of restoration efforts for Vale city, trying to redefine his life choices, when James walks up to him and says, “Why don’t we go get some coffee?”

He hadn’t really grasped the implications when he agreed until he actually had the cup in his hands and was sitting across from the other. “Jimmy-boy, did you just ask me out on a date?”

“That was my intention, yes.”

“Oh.” And maybe it was because, after having worked together in close quarters for months as the war came to an end, he’d found that he didn’t dislike James nearly as much as he used to or maybe it was because he just wanted to have something he hadn’t allowed himself in years, that he found himself tacking on, “Well good.”

And that was the start of their relationship.

Now, as he sipped on the bitter, overshot brew and realized years had passed since that moment, he found himself not regretting the choice.

“So, we’ll be home within the hour.” James said as he shoved a few more papers into his desk.

“Sounds great!” Was the chipper reply from Tai, voice a bit crackly from being on speaker. “Either of you two hungry? I can make dinner.”

When that blue-eyed gaze turned to him questionably, Qrow called, “Something light.”

“Yeah. It was a long flight.” The general agreed.

“No problem. I can’t wait to hear all about your trip.”

With it being so early in the semester at Apollo Academy, Tai wasn’t able to get the vacation needed to join them. Not that he really wanted to abandon his class for that long anyways. Apollo was a small, secondary school designed to support smaller classrooms for children with special needs, such as amputees. Having a daughter and a lover both living with permanent prosthetics, it had sparked the man’s interest in helping others learn how to cope with their new body parts and reach a sense of normalcy again. While looking for work after he’d lost his former job following the whole newscast fiasco, he’d barely paused to think when he applied at the institute.

Watching Tai whoop and holler as he danced around the house after he’d gotten accepted for the position, Qrow could have sworn his friend was twenty again.

James closed another cabinet. “We’ll see you soon.”

“Yeah.” There was a smile in Tai’s voice as he added warmly, “I missed you guys.”

Qrow ducked behind his coffee as he smiled. James, who had paused to stare down at the phone, didn’t bother hiding his own as he said, “Yeah, us too.”

~

As he walked into their home, the first thing Qrow noticed was the smell of something sweet in the air that told him there was some confectionary baking in the oven. “We’re home!” He announced as he held the door for James, who came into the house with their luggage and carefully shuffled around Zwei who, despite his age, still found the energy to joyfully dart around his peoples’ legs whenever they got back.

There was a whistle, Tai standing in the alcove leading to the kitchen, “Zwei, come on buddy. You’re gonna make him trip.”

“It’s fine.” He said, lifting his square suitcase higher when, without warning, the clasp broke and a few weeks’ worth of clothing spilled out over the floor. The lump of dog underneath the clothing shifted and then he was popping his head back up, a pair of plaid briefs on his head.

When James sent a disgruntled look his way, Qrow shrugged, “Hey don’t blame me! I told you to replace that old thing years ago.”

“I still blame you.”

Laughing, their blond lover walked over, unearthing the rest of his poor corgi first before he started to gather up the clothes. James knelt down, seemingly to help, until his hand caught the younger’s wrist and, when he looked up, lent forward to press their lips together. Tai gave a gentle hum, smiling as he wound an arm over the other’s shoulders. They might have stayed like that awhile, if not for the buzzer from the kitchen that pulled them apart.

“Oh, that’s the dessert.”

“I got it.” Qrow said, giving Tai a wink as he passed on by.

“Well,” The wisecrack followed him, “There was dessert at least.”

He could hear the softness of their voices continue on as he entered the kitchen where he was definitely not planning on stealing pieces of whatever confectionary Tai had decided to make. He found the mitts as he pulled open the oven door, and at first, he thought they were cupcakes, until he lifted them out and brought the tray into the light to discover they were actually muffins.

Huh. Today was just full of ironic food choices.

He set it down on the cooling rack and flicked off the oven, before giving the area a look over. Tai, whether it be on the team, in the family or in their relationship, had remained the cook – so his little haven was pristinely clean except for the vestiges of where dinner was being made. There was something shimmering on the stove and, when he lent forward to look through the glass top, saw it was soup – chicken noodle, he guessed. Lettuce, freshly cut and washed, sat in a strainer. On a cutting board, shredded carrots and radishes that were probably going to be mixed in to make a simple salad. The tea kettle puffed out steam where it sat on the counter; he’d bet every lien he had that it was Jasmine. Their table had already been set; wooden chopsticks by his and Tai’s plates and more durable, metal ones for James.

By the time he was peeling off the paper liner from one of the muffins, his best friend was back, rolling his eyes at him. “Really?”

“It’s what you get for baiting me.” He replied before taking a huge bite.

Tai chuckled, before he went back to making dinner, dicing the rest of the radishes. As he worked, Qrow destroyed the rest of his muffin in a few quick bites, then sidled up next to the other. The knife slowed, the blonde observing him from the corner of his eye. “Can I help you?”

“Well I was thinking,” He started, dancing his fingers along the other’s back, but trailed off when the other jolted away. “Uh, you alright?”

Tai flushed a bit. “Yeah, sorry. That surprised me.”

“Geez, you’re getting old too.”

“Make more jokes like that and I’m hiding the rest of the muffins.”

“Forgive me!” Qrow rested a hand over his heart overdramatically, falling against the other’s shoulder. “For I know not what I say!”

His friend tried his best not to snicker but his grin was untamable. He set down the knife in favor of winding his toned arms around him, bringing them flush together. Tai pecked fond, little kisses along his face, until finally he got to his lips, lingering there. Qrow’s eyes slid shut, leaning in to the caress as he raked his hands through blond hair.

It was the hissing of the overflowing pot that drew Tai away this time. “Ah damn it,” He cursed softly before hurrying over to lift the pot off the burner.

Qrow lent back against the counter, watching him as he pulled off the top, letting the steam out to cool the angrily bubbling liquid. His eyes wandered a bit, pausing curiously on the patch of reddened skin around the edges of the heart tattoo. “Your arm…”

“Huh?” Tai glanced at him, then followed his gaze down to his own still-healing skin. “Oh yeah; I got it touched up, remember?”

“Thought you said you were doing that a few weeks ago?”

He shrugged, turning away to stir the soup. “Well, yeah but Ruby wanted to come with me. So, I postponed.”

That took a minute to compute. “Wait. Did you convince my niece to get a tattoo?”

“No, no.” He was grinning almost manically as he pointed the spoon his way. “She convinced Weiss to get one.”

That revelation took longer, but when it did, Qrow’s eyes bulged. “What!? Ice princess got some ink?!”

“Please tell me Winter doesn’t know.” They both glanced over at James as he entered the room, looking weary already. “Otherwise I’ll never hear the end of it on Monday.”

“Well, it’s not exactly in a discreet place, unless she’s wearing a long dress or really tall boots.”

“Just perfect,” Was the sigh of defeat.

Qrow started to guffaw. “So it’s on her leg? What is it?”

“A red rose with the stem wrapping around her ankle. It’s quite pretty actually.” Tai said, sounding almost fond. Whether it simply be for the art of tattoos or over his unofficial daughter-in-law, it was a little hard to tell. “Anyways!” He reached up to pull down some bowls. “Dinner’s pretty much done. Qrow will you pour the tea?”

“You got it.”

As the day faded to evening and the three of them enjoyed dinner together for the first time in nearly five weeks, Qrow felt a familiar wash of calm overcome him. He had missed this: a dog dozing under the table at their feet and them talking about their day. James recounting somewhat irritably about how lack his security team was. Tai excitedly detailing how well the students from his class were doing. Qrow chiming in about the highlights from the festival.

And when James finally remembered to ask, “By the way, what happened to your copy of Rin Tin Tin?”

And Tai answered, “Oh. Qrow was drunk one night and thought the trees on the cover were firewood, so he put it in the fireplace.”

Qrow couldn’t stop laughing, feeling more at home than ever before.

~~~

A/N: So, if anyone is wondering about the chapter titles, I was looking for another “set of three” idea to name them after. While looking for ideas, I found out three is a really common number in a lot of religious practices – and I stumbled upon Zoroastrianism. One of the philosophies is just like the titles of the chapters – Thinking good, acting good and speaking good will lead to a good life. There’s a lot more to it of course, but that’s a basic principle on their lifestyle.

I realized the chapters aligned pretty well with these ideas, so I went with it.

Chapter 1 is all about good action. It certainly fits James and his disciplined nature the most but Qrow and Tai both have their moments on debating “what the right thing to do” is.

Chapter 2 is focused around good thinking, hence Tai’s many bracketed thoughts in which he’s trying to fight his poor psyche with better views (I actually added a few when I decided on the chapter title). Likewise, Qrow’s own thoughts are a bit see-sawed while James is the reassurance.

Chapter 3 has the weakest connection, because Qrow himself is not a “good” speaker seeing as I depicted him struggling with expressing himself and the plot definitely revolved around a “slice of life” style story. The entire decision basically comes down to the ending – where he finds the most peace and happiness in the simple act of talking around the dinner table with James and Tai.

Now, there’s only one chapter left, but don’t worry, I have a great title in mind! Stay tuned, it’ll be up within a week!

[pernatius]

Lost in Space Part 2: Ch 3

Ch 2

Summary: After returning to Earth, an unnamed Space Explorer must face the consequences of going past Quadrant 5.

Attempting to write 10k words for part 2 by the end of the week.

Part 1:

Ch 1

Ch 2

Ch 3

Ch 4

Ch 5

____________________

“You bastard,” I continued. My fists shook and my eyes watered. I was about to do something stupid. I was about to repeat the same mistake I’ve made too many times before, but what stops me from doing it is Mikrovos’ hand being placed above my chest. 

“This isn’t the time to mope. She’s gone,” Mikrovos bluntly forced me to come to terms with. 

I didn’t know her but seeing someone die just like that sickened me, especially when she helped them finally get to me. She knew the man that killed her. She must’ve as she was on their side at one point, but he killed her. He just killed her like it didn’t matter. Like she never mattered. 

“A few more minutes,” the red-haired girl whispered to us. 

Because some of her blood had gotten on him, he flicked his hand and wiped his shoes onto the dirt. This causes me to become even more pissed, but I buried it. I trusted the two near me. I trusted what they were waiting for. I needed to. 

“If you simply wanted to play it the hard way then you should’ve just asked.” The guards’ commander moves his hand into his pocket. He takes out what appeared to be a small rod. Then, with a press of its button, a whip made out of electricity comes bursting out of it. He cracks it onto the ground. “Who wants to die next?”

Mikrovos tries to step forward. He wants to take the lead as usual. He wants to shield us from the pain that lies ahead, but as much as he wanted to his body spoke otherwise. My friend fell to his knees. As he tries to force himself back up, he grunts. 

“Mikrovos, stay down,” she ordered. She pointed her gun at the guard’s commander and stared dead into his eyes.  

He turns to her. “You won’t survive if that thing hits you.”

“That’s why I’m not going to let it, but besides it’s not like we have any other choice.”

With my friend shutting up, she lets him go. I’m left to sit next to him with his right arm around my shoulders. 

Her stepping forward, the commander raises his hand. The guards around us lower their weapons and step back. “Ah, so you’re the next one that’s going to fall by my hands.”

“Probably not,” she shrugs, “The man in front of me is going to fall by my hands, though.”

“Cocky, I like that. Hopefully, you can survive longer than the man I last used this on.”

She makes the first move. She shoots. The blast flies towards the space between his eyes, but it’s deflected with his whip. It lands in a nearby bush, which causes it to be set ablaze. 

A smirk makes its appearance on their commander. Then, he flings his whip. It’s too fast. Too fast for her to completely dodge. She lands away from it, but not unscathed. Her shoulder bleeds, causing my friend to try to once again stand on his own, but as much as I want to help as well I know I’m not in a position to. I’d just get in her way. We both would, so I place my hand in front of his chest. I met with his eyes because of it. Neither of us needed to say anything as he set himself back down. 

Her hand pressed on the wound in the hopes of stopping the blood. She gulps as her dominant hand shook. Her blood dripped down from it. He wounded the hand she’s been using to shoot, her dominant hand. As she bites down her cries, he laughs, “You won’t be able to accurately shoot your next shoot, but it’s not like things would’ve been any much different if I got your other arm. You won’t ever be able to shoot me.”

“If you think I’ll go down that easily you’re mistaken.”

“Funny, I heard something similar earlier. Maybe you’ll fall to your knees just like her.”

Thwip. 

This time she’s able to dodge, but she’s unable to shoot anywhere close to him. As panicked as we all became, especially her, she still didn’t yield. She kept dodging and shooting even if she’s off by quite a distance. With every passing second, I saw her grow more and more tired. I saw her grow more and more hopeless. That is until she cracks a smile. 

Their commander and I question why her attitude has suddenly changed. Unlike him, I’m able to figure out why. His shades reflect a familiar spaceship. Once its shadow stretches across the courtyard everyone lifts their heads. “What are you idiots doing? Shoot it down!”

They all scramble to get out their guns and shoot at it. Their lasers just bounce off of it and once the ship lands Saamuki opens the door. “Get in.” 

As I help Mikrovos inside, they turn their attention to us. They shoot at us. Saamuki, thankfully, isn’t weaponless. She shoots back, killing some of them, which causes the rest to seek cover. Once we’re inside she asks for some girl named “Ashley”.

I don’t know who she’s talking about, so I stared at her with a blank face, but she gets her answer from one of the ship’s windows. So, even though the ship’s computer advised her to stay inside, she ran outside. After sitting him down, I watch Saamuki and who I assume to be the Ashley girl battling it out against the guard’s commander. It was two against one. Well, it was one and a half against one, but still, he was outnumbered, yet he somehow still held the upper hand. The two dodged every swing, but they weren't able to shoot him. He’s just too fast. 

Saamuki grew anxious. I saw her gulp. She knows Ashley doesn’t have the time for this, especially Mikrovos. So, this time when he swung his whip at them, she grabbed it. It caused her to scream. He then tried pulling his whip out of her hands as they blackened. As he is, Ashley took the shot. She doesn’t kill him, but she is at least able to get a chunk of his neck torn off. The two then hurried back, dodging the shots from the guards in the process. 

The door closes, Saamuki orders for the ship to fly us out of there. It does, but we don’t leave so easily. From left and right we get shot at by The Confederate’s ships. This caused the ship to tip from left to right and for us, to, of course, lose our footing. We slip and fall on our backs. Saamuki crawls towards the AI. She bites her lip, holding back the pain, as her hands touch the cold floor. Once she gets there she has the AI give her manual control. It does and she takes a seat where the AI was. Then, before her, a holographic screen appears. She places her hands on it and flies the ship. We’re able to lose them, but we soon lose our altitude. 

Its nose points towards a field as it descends. The ship’s lights blink red and alarms go off as it does. They scream. I’m not able to make out which scream is who’s, though. Then, before we know it, we crash. I blackout. 

Stars twinkle up in the night sky. Although, there aren’t as many compared to what I saw outside this quadrant. The sight isn’t as colorful as well. The sky is just plain black. Even though the sight in the corner of my eye is dreary, as their faces held frowns, it’s at least colorful. The bonfire’s orange glow reflected onto them and the crops around us. It looked like a Renaissance painting. 

“She didn’t know, Ashley.” Saamuki’s voice was somber. Her eyes didn’t face Ashley and they didn’t even look down at her hands as she poured water onto them. I watched her grunt as she watched the fire eat the wood beneath it. 

“You’re lying. You have to be.” My focus turns to Ashley who’s plucking out the shards of glass deep inside Mikrovos’ back. I also note how a piece of her shirt is now wrapped around her wound. Speaking of him, “I don’t want it to be true too, but you were there at the meeting. You heard what she said.” Between his words, he grunted as after every word the glass was removed. 

I get up. It hurt, but I forced myself to. This gets them to realize I’ve woken up. “What are you guys talking about?” 

Ashley turned away from me. She focuses on removing the rest of the glass instead of on me. As for the other two, they look at me then look at each other. It was awkward and it was especially quiet. Thankfully, Mikrovos asks, “Did they get to erase your memories?”

I grip either shoulder, ending the conversation abruptly. I also look away from them. Silence masks the scene once again. 

“Do you remember this place,” Ashley had finally broken out. 

“Should I?”

“It’s not the same place, but it’s similar. You had a home in a place like this.”

I move my hands to the cold dirt beneath me. I feel it. I move the dirt around, I try to remember, but all I see is just plain old dirt. Nothing more. Nothing less.

“Then, it’s true. We’re too late,” she continued. She then began to quietly cry. 

Mikrovos turns to her with his newly freed back, freed from the glass, and rests his hand onto her shoulder. “Not exactly. We’re not entirely. She knew my name.”

As Ashley wipes away her tears, Saamuki steps in, “Then, what do you still remember?”

“I remember you and Mikrovos. I remember that whole journey we went on.”

“Then, do you remember why we went on it,” Mikrovos asked. 

I shook my head. I remember just about everything about it. I remember how Mikrovos saved my life. Well, he’s saved it a bunch of times. I remember how protective he was and how his ears went up when I thanked him. I remember how much his eyes pleased for me to get Saamuki off of him. I especially remember him almost dying. I see him running. I see the crystal in his hands and how he struggled to keep it there as his old commander pummeled him, but I can’t remember why. I can’t remember why we risked our lives. 

“It was for her.” Mikrovos moved away from Ashley just enough for me to note who he was talking about. 

I trust Mikrovos. I trust his words. I can tell myself that he’s right, but I’ll never remember. I’ll never truly remember why I did all those things for her. While they see her as their friend all I can see her as is a stranger. 

“I’m sorry. I just don’t remember. I believe you, but…”

We all lower our heads in defeat. That is until Saamuki lifts her head and points a finger up. “Wait. Didn’t you tell me this happened before? When my sister-”

“That’s different. What happened to her then was a head bump. She had only forgotten them This is them being erased,” Ashley cleared up. 

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. 

“It’s not your fault,” Ashley responded.

“Well, if you knew ahead of time I’d get my memories erased do you guys at least know why?”

Again, silence had broken between us. I saw Mikrovos gulping before answering with, “As you already know, humans are not allowed past Quadrant 5. So, it means a huge profit to anyone if they saw a human. The Space Pirate Tauvoxes asked your government for payment, so that word of your appearance would not spread. Unfortunately, your government doesn’t have enough of what they’re asking. So, they offered you as payment.”

“What? Then, why even erase my memories?”

“Because of what happened last time you were on their ship, they wanted a blank slate, especially for what they had in store.” The look in his eyes leads me to figure out what he meant. I try to not gag. “While we didn’t want any of your memories to be erased, we're at least thankful that we found you before they came here.”

“When are they arriving on Earth?”

“A whole Earth day from when we escaped.”

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 318: Swords and Sorcery (1978)

The castle ramparts depict all of the different enemies in the game.

           Swords and Sorcery

United States

Independently developed in 1978 on the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois

Date Started: 28 January 2019

Date Ended: 30 January 2019

Total Hours: 7

Difficulty: Medium (3/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)            

We’ve had a look at several PLATO games over the years, and most of them fall within two branches. The first is the single-character iconographic maze-crawler, represented by The Dungeon, The Game of Dungeons, and Orthanc, all originally released in 1975. The second is the multi-character, first-person sub-genre, represented by Moria (1975), Oubliette (1978), Avatar (1979), and Camelot (1982). I’ve at least dipped into all of these except for Camelot.              

Swords and Sorcery has you navigate a series of map grids with monsters, treasure chests, and obstacles.

             But in my survey, I overlooked Swords and Sorcery, which owes its lineage to none of these other titles. Instead, it is a variant of the prolific Star Trek, written originally by Mike Mayfield in 1971 on his California high school’s SDS Sigma 7 mainframe. From there, he ported it to several other systems, and it became so popular that variants of the game began appearing in books of type-it-yourself game code. A decade later, it was tough to find a computer system that didn’t have some version of it. PLATO has one, under the lesson name trek.

Star Trek featured gameplay on a gridded star chart, with 8 x 8 quadrants, each quadrant divided into 8 x 8 sectors. The player piloted the Enterprise through these various sectors, tried to complete his mission to destroy 17 Klingon vessels, and found refuge at the occasional starbase. Stars served as obstacles to navigation and combat.            

Gameplay in Mike Mayfield’s Star Trek (1971) took place on a tactical grid.

          Swords and Sorcery is a fantasy adaptation of this basic idea. The character gets quests from a king rather than missions from Starfleet. Instead of Klingons, he contends with orcs and goblins, and instead of phasers and photon torpedoes, he fights with a sword and arrows. The tactics associated with positioning and movement are otherwise all present, with trees taking the role of stars in the earlier game.

But Swords‘ developer added some elements that qualify the game as an RPG in the way that its science-fiction predecessor did not. First, the character is persistent. He doesn’t “win” upon killing 17 enemies, but rather turns in the quest for a reward and then gets another. He gains experience, earns gold, finds items, and retains these things between quests. And the quests themselves vary, with the player able to specify the size of the overall game world and thus (to some degree) the quest difficulty.           

Creating the game world.

           “Character creation” is just a matter of specifying a name. Characters start with a regular sword and nothing else–not even any hit points. As the first mission begins, the player determines the size of the game world, from 1 x 1 to 10 x 10. This in turn determines how many enemies you face, treasure chests you have to open, and safe “magic circles” you can visit.

The first mission is usually just to chop down trees, the specific number dependent on the number of quadrants in the game world. Sometimes you get treasure-collecting missions or monster-killing missions as the first one. Tree-chopping never occurs after the first mission, which is merciful. Game begins in a random quadrant within the world you created.            

An early-game mission on a small map.

           The most difficult moments are the opening ones. Experience points are the same as hit points, and you have none of either. Monsters will kill you in one hit if they get adjacent to you. You spend these early stages avoiding monsters rather that engaging them. It takes some experience before you get a feel for how quickly monsters can close the distance, and thus how much room you have to play with on a given screen.

One of the oddities of Swords is the movement system, which works like it did in Star Trek but makes less sense than it did there. You specify a direction and “speed,” which is the number of squares you move in one turn. You can choose between 1 and 3. Finding or buying adrenaline phials lets you crank it up to 4. Once you assign these variables, you’ll keep moving that direction and speed each round (after whatever other action you take) until you change it or hit “0” to stop entirely. So if one round brings you adjacent to a creature and you choose to attack him on the next round, you can do that, but then you’ll continue sailing past your foe whether you kill him or not. If you run into an obstacle, you’ll take damage and stop. Any damage is enough to kill you at the beginning of the game, so until you get a feel for the movement system, a lot of your characters will commit suicide by running into trees.           

This happened to me a lot in the early game, too.

           To survive, you need to find treasure chests. These may contain arrows, which will allow you to kill enemies and build experience at range, or they may contain gold, with which you can buy arrows or experience at magic circles. Rarely, chests will contain magic items like improved swords, shields, armor, boots, and adrenaline phials.              

Until you start opening chests, you don’t have many options. These 5 bags of gold will now allow me to buy experience (and thus hit points) or arrows.

            Finding chests isn’t as hard as reaching them without encountering any monsters on the way. Fortunately, while the quantity and type of contents on a screen are fixed, the distribution changes every time you leave and return. So if you arrive on a screen to find a treasure chest on the opposite side with four goblins in between, you can pop off and on the screen, and hopefully the next time you’ll find a better arrangement–specifically, one where you can avoid the goblins long enough to reach the chest.              

Once you have some arrows and understand the movement system, it’s not hard to keep enemies at bay and kill them from afar. Some arrows have damage multipliers that let you kill more than one enemy along the same trajectory. Once you gain a few hundred points of experience, you can engage enemies in melee combat without worrying about instant death; fighting is just a matter of specifying (S)word and then a direction, the only real “tactics” being the use of movement and terrain to ensure you strike first and don’t get surrounded.           

I’m in the upper-right corner. The three goblins lined up to the south will fall to a single arrow, leaving just the zombie at their tail.

           “Magic circles,” of which there are about one per four screens, serve in the role of the “starbase” in Star Trek. Monsters can’t attack you while you stand in them. You can sell gems and jewelry that you’ve found and buy arrows, swords (as replacements for those that break), and adrenaline. You can also spend money directly on experience points.              

                 For the tree-chopping quests, I found it easiest to clear out the enemies first, then walk along the border, hewing a tree every step. For monster-killing and treasure-finding quests, you generally complete them as you naturally explore the maps. When you’re ready to go home, you enter one of the magic circles and hit “q.” You’re transported back to the castle and the king gives you gold and experience as a reward. From there, you just hit ENTER to create a new map and get a new quest.                 

After those initial difficult stages, the game becomes a bit too easy. I played several characters, and if they survived the first quests, they had enough money to keep a large stock of arrows and continue building experience and health. Subsequent missions introduce tougher creatures like werewolves, zombies, wizards, and dragons (along with quests to kill n numbers of them), but their difficulty doesn’t keep pace with your own character development unless you get lazy or sloppy.          

In my second quest, I face werewolves, zombies, thugs, and goblins in the same screen. It would be smart to just leave to the north rather than fight them all.

           One way to force a greater level of difficulty is to create a map of 1 x 1. This leaves you nowhere to run. While your quest will be easier quantitatively (e.g., killing one dragon instead of seven), it will be functionally harder because you’ll have to clear out all enemies on the confines of a single screen.

     Some people must either like the relative ease or find other ways to make it challenging, because the player list shows 31 players who have each amassed more than 1 million experience points in the 18 years since the game was last reset. The top player, with a user name “paley” and a character name of “hi,” has about 1.66 billion experience points. The creator has a character named “goodgulf” with 776 million. Dirk Pellett, one of the authors of The Game of Dungeons, also seems to be a fan: his “Aumkua” has 16 million.               

Part of a list of rabid devotees.

            Swords and Sorcery was written by Donald Gillies, who first alerted me to its existence in an e-mail. He was a student at Urbana High School, which had access to PLATO, from 1976-1980. Swords was based on a previous title that went under the lesson name think15 before it was deleted by system administrators. Gillies credits the author of that game, Jim Mayeda (a fellow UHS student), on his own title screen. (In between the two, another student’s attempt to replicate think15 as think2 was also deleted.) Gillies wrote a first draft in 1977 but says it only included fighting; the full version was finished in the spring of 1978. By 1980, it was the seventh most popular game on PLATO at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Gillies–who went on to an undergraduate education at M.I.T., a doctorate at the University of Illinois, and a career as a software engineer in the private sector–kept a printed copy of the source code and re-typed it when Cyber1 resurrected the PLATO system in 2003.            

For no particular reason other than I had the time, I chose this game to create a video review, which you watch below or on YouTube. This is the first video I’ve narrated in about 5 years, and I tried to introduce some “production values” that will naturally improve as I gain experience. I’m happy to take recommendations on my approach to videos.

                           Swords and Sorcery is left off most lists of the classic PLATO RPGs, so I’m glad Dr. Gillies wrote to me, and I’m glad I had a chance to experience his game’s unconventional approach. In the coming months, we’ll have at least one more PLATO entry covering the last of its RPGs: Camelot (1982).

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-318-swords-and-sorcery-1978/