#the kind that fractures trust for little reward

[musubiki]

lol I love the idea that Clarinette in her “Lime collects weird things I’ll find some weird things for him!” she accidentally finds something SUPER rare and hands it to him and he just casually pockets it. He thinks he can just get away with giving it to Mochi and taking all the credit but then has a mental crisis of LYING????? to MOCHI???????

Funny continuation of this is it’s AM (after Mochi) so he sheepishly confesses that Clarinette is the one who found it and Mochi goes up and thanks her

Sad contunuation of this is it’s BM (before Mochi) is him having a mental crisis of how dare he even think of lying to her. He would never lie to her before she left! What’s changed in me. And then slowly watching it wilt away.

OKAY FOR ALL FOUR OF THESE POINTS I WANNA SAY SOMETHINGS!!!!! first of all i love it and it makes me sad and happy thinking about them :')

1 ) first i think clarinette would think its so cute that lime collects random stuff. everyone says "Ah nice, so the witches cant use it. good thinking" but clarinette sees just a LITTLE bit past it and thinks its a weird and endearing hobby of his. imagine how disillusioned she is when she finds out "Oh, this cute quirky thing he does isnt actually a cute quirky thing, its him thinking of the other woman the whole damn time."

2 ) LIME ACTUALLY LIES TO MOCHI MORE THAN HE SHOULD!!!!!!!! and it SUCKS because its always to save himself from looking like a simp or a dumbass because the truth is embarrassing for him, but it damages her levels of trust in him unfortunately. and she keeps telling him to stop but then another thing comes up where he doesnt want to admit the truth so he lies again (lime flaw). one example is when she asks him why he stays in the m34th, and his answer is "Because they pay well and I'm bored," but no matter how much extra commissions she finds and money she can magic up, he stays anyway. she has to learn from fucking clarinette that he stays because they make him stronger (real lime quote). he doesnt want to tell mochi that he feels so inadequate and inferior when he cant keep up with her, and the m34th is the only way to get his ass up to her level consistently. without it hes back to 16 year old lime who can barely help for shit in the face of magic and monsters

3 ) THAT LAST POINT IS SO TCWG IN NATURE!!!!!!!!!!! lime finding a super rare ingredient and its about to go bad so fuck it, sell it to the merchant. maybe he can keep it fresher than me and i get some money for it. and mochi sees it among the merchants wares and buys it :') bonus points if however shes keeping it fresh with magic, he sees it among her spell ingredients years later. its not IMPOSSIBLE to find one, its just so rare that makes him think if its the same one <3

(and of course the merchant doesnt say shit about where he got it. mochi goes "wow! so rare! where did you get this!" and instead of telling the TRUTH he goes "Industry secret!")

[monkeyseemonkeyship]

Touch Starved

Pairing: Noa x Mae

Rating: PG13

Warnings: None

A/N: First chapter of a series of 3 or 4 one shots I have planned. They take place after an alternative ending to the movie, in which Noa and Mae decide to travel together back to the human base in an attempt to foster human/ape relations. There's really no plot, just a few scenes of some intimate moments. I hope you enjoy!

Smoke from their campfire curled into the air, joining the hoard of clouds that kept the stars from view. It had been a while since Noa and Mae had been allowed the luxury of a fire. A few days prior they had encountered a fractured remnant of Proximus’ clan. For four nights they had remained in darkness, taking shifts so one could rest while the other kept watch. There had been a few close calls, but by some miracle the pair had escaped the gang. After so many tense hours and sleepless nights, the campfire was a welcomed reward.

The warmth of the flames was calming, the silence comfortable. Mae and Noa had grown used to one another’s companionship. There was still trepidation due to their recent past, an unsteadiness about their relationship. But trust was beginning to form again, fueled by their agreement to try and foster human and ape relations. They had a long journey ahead, and Mae wasn’t sure it would even bear fruit. After all, humans were weary of apes, to put it mildly. Many even flat out hated them. But still, something in her had to try.

As the evening wore on, the fire began to dim. Mae was growing tired, but before she would rest, she needed to try and fix her hair. The once neat braid has become knotted from days of neglect. She had hoped keeping it in a plait  would help lessen the mess, but her efforts had been in vain. She removed the tie and began to unwork the strands, but found she was met with tangle after tangle. From the corner of her eye, she could see Noa watching her, and his gaze only made her more flustered.  

Eventually the semblance of a braid turned into a rat’s nest, and Mae couldn’t stand it any longer. She reached down into her boot, retrieving a knife, and brought it up to the matted knot. She only got a few strands in, before his voice stopped her.

“What are you doing?”

Noa’s voice was confused, maybe even a little concerned. Mae lowered the knife, the few severed hairs falling to the ground. “I can’t untangle it.” She spoke as if it was an obvious solution, and in some ways it was. Long hair was a nuisance at best in this world, and a danger at worst. An enemy could easily grab her braid, and she would be finished. In truth she had thought about cutting it for a while, but had been unable to go through with it. Her mother had worn her hair long, and doing the same reminded Mae of her.

“Let me…try.”

The offer took Mae by surprise, and to be honest, Noa was surprised by his own words. But the thought of the woman cutting her hair saddened him. When she chose to wear it down, he enjoyed the way it danced in the wind. When they had the luxury of rest, he enjoyed watching her run her fingers through the strands before deftly braiding them back. Something about it was beautiful to him.

Silence hung in the air for a moment, and Noa worried he had crossed a boundary. After all, the act of grooming was intimate for both human and ape alike. So he was relieved when Mae finally nodded her head, sheathing her knife as he made his way over to her. The ape positioned himself behind the human, gently moving the braid off of her shoulder. He let the knotted mess slide over his palm, surprised by the softness despite the matt.

Standing so close, Noa was keenly aware of his mass compared to Mae. He was so much stronger than her, than all of her kind. One wrong move and he could seriously injure her. Even though he was only touching her hair, the thought made him nervous. With a new resolve he began, his large fingers easily managing the delicacy required for such a task. He was mindful of Mae’s breaths, how they seemed to quicken as he worked. Was she scared? Was he hurting her? He attempted to be even softer, his fingers working on small sections at a time, making sure not to tug or pull at her hair. He tried to ignore her small movements, how delicate the curve of her neck was, how he could hear and almost feel every breath. He told himself just to focus on the task at hand, but still, every small thing distracted him.  

Mae felt warm, her skin flushed. She told herself it was embarrassment about being unable to handle such a simple task on her own. But there was something more to it than that, thoughts she dare not explore. Not yet.

 She was amazed by how soft his touch was, how he barely tugged at the tangled strands. The feeling would have been calming, had she not been so tense. As he made his way from the tips towards the roots, his fingers began to occasionally graze against the skin of her neck. She could feel the callouses, the strength of the digits. The first time it happened she shivered, and Noa paused for a moment, making sure she was okay before he continued. The second time she nearly did the same, but forced herself to remain still. The added tension only caused her heart to quicken. Why was she reacting so strongly? She was no longer scared of Noa, he had proven time and time again that he would not hurt her. No, the feelings were pleasant, enjoyable. Which was terrifying. The only explanation for her reaction consisted of two words: touch starved.

Mae couldn’t remember if she had read about it in a book, or if she had heard the phrase from a fellow human. It didn’t matter. Those two words had to be the reason for her strong reaction. She had been without contact for so long that her body was craving it. This was just a physical response to loneliness. It meant nothing.

That didn’t feel entirely honest, but Mae refused to think of any other explanation.  

All too soon Noa had come to the end of the knot, freeing the last few hairs. He had completed his task, but still he kept going, unwilling to admit he was enjoying the task of grooming her. He told himself he was being kind by continuing on. He would braid her hair as well, but not because he enjoyed the softness of it. Or the way the brown color seemed to warm in the firelight. He would do this as a way to help a tired friend care for herself. Just like he would help groom any close friend. He ran his fingers through the base of her hair, ghosting along her skull, trying to ignore the way the woman shivered again. He wondered if she was somehow cold? No, Mae’s ears were slightly pink, and her skin was warm beneath his hands. She felt hot, yet still she trembled.

Gingerly, Noa worked his fingers from root to tip, turning his thoughts to how similar yet different it was tending to hair rather than fur. The technique was almost the same, but the length of hair was almost overwhelming. When he was satisfied her hair was tangle free, he separated it into three even sections, beginning a new braid. At first he felt clumsy, he was used to braiding vines for rope, not silky thin strands. But soon enough he was able to adjust. As he worked he could almost feel Mae wanting to speak, her body practically vibrating beneath him. Yet she remained silent, as she often did when unsure of the perfect words.

Once he reached the end of the braid, he moved to hold it together with one hand. With his free hand, he reached over her shoulder, palm up, silently asking for the tie. Mae startled slightly from the movement, and he gestured to the string in her hand as an explanation. She understood, placing it in the palm of his hand, her fingers lightly grazing his skin. It took Noa a little time, but after a few attempts, he had tied a secure but simple knot. One he was sure the human could easily undo on her own. He let the fresh braid slip from his hand, watching as it fell back onto her neck.

After he finished his task Noa gave Mae her space, though his eyes lingered on her form. He watched as she moved the braid over her shoulder, fingers running along its length. She was surprised by the smoothness of it, by how tightly woven he had made it. “Thank you.” She offered, and Noa grunted in response.

They did not speak the rest of the night.

[spideywhites]

What are your thoughts on deadpool and spiderman?

This is a LOADED question. ‘Cause like, do you mean as a relationship or as individuals? Either way, I have many, many thoughts. Probably too many to really type out here. I’ll give quick little rambles about each, though.

Deadpool/Spider-man. A devastating and complex ship that is often regaled as something lesser than what it is. Deadpool idolizes Spider-man, probably even loves him, and Spider-man struggles under the weight of such pointed worship because 1) he doesn’t trust most, let alone a killer, and 2) he has an explicit fear of disappointing people. My favorite thing about them is that together they embody a sort of… “discovery of human nature”. Wade can learn that Spider-man is also just Peter, who is not quite human but also excessively so. Peter makes mistakes and he is both wrath and disaster tied with loose knots. Peter can learn that Wade is multi-faceted individual that hurts, loves, cries, laughs just like every other person and the sum of Wade’s parts don’t match the whole of the image Peter thought was true. Plus, they’re funny together. Humor-wise and with the “I like you but I shouldn’t” trope.

Spider-man. Peter Parker is the love of my life, my everything, my favorite marvel character ever. He’s the kind of hero that other heroes talk about, look to for moral guidance, and place on a pedestal. He is consumed by rage and guilt, swallowed by the enormity of all that is placed upon him with reward and the expectant eyes of those who believe he stands for this and that, and then are violently disappointed when he doesn’t match it. He is a guiding light, a source of hope and despair. The people of New York treasure him because he IS them. The other heroes think him both worthy and incorruptible while also demeaning him in the same breath. It’s not that they hate him but I think that, in the end, they’re terrified of him. Of the fact that so much power saturates Spider-man, and not just in the sense of strength but in sway and words and emotion. If Spider-man falls, then who are they? I think the absolute world of him, and I think it’s a disservice to his character to ignore the weight of his poor personality traits and the struggles he faces in changing, adjusting, or smothering the fact that he is rather monstrous.

Deadpool. A hilarious character that invokes a lot of both intrigue and sympathy. A lot of very bad, very terrible things have happened to Wade Wilson. Exploring the course of his fractured character development is really incredible, and he’s very likable in a humorous (fictional) way. Yes, he’s a murderer. There is a lot of depth to his trauma / implied backstory that shows you how he became who he is. I love him, I really do!!! I don’t know as much detail about him as I do Peter, however. Haven’t read all of his comics. From what I have seen, read, and consumed, I know he’s a character that seems to embody two extremes: tragedy and comedy. I guess I have a soft spot for violent, depressed little men, lol.

[shimmershae]

Halfway There (a Walking Dead ficlet, Caryl).

A little bit late but here’s day 3′s offering.  

Season 11 AU.  Kind of.  Carol and Daryl haven’t seen much of each other since they arrived at the Commonwealth.  Daryl’s part of Mercer’s security force and no, they don’t wear the ridiculous storm trooper suits in this.  Carol’s been doing her own thing.  They cross paths at one of the CW’s many frivolous events.  

Some adult language.  A bit of angst.  

“Ever been lonely in a crowded room?”  

 That voice, her voice?  After weeks of not hearing its soft, familiar cadence, it snakes past Daryl’s lowered defenses.  Burrows deep beneath his ribs and wraps around his fractured heart like the last embrace they shared.  Before he fucked things up by not keeping a tighter rein on his insecurities.  His anger.  Before he chased her back into the darkness of her brittle shell.  

 “Nice suit, Pookie.  You clean up well.”

 There’s a gentle air of teasing that briefly eclipses her strained tone when she acknowledges his uncharacteristic attire.  It vanishes like mist when his silence persists, giving him a perverse thrill of pleasure.

 One tiny, sharp intake of breath and she matches his reticence.  

 Stands apart from him the way she used to when grief and a river used to divide them, and Daryl feels his heart squeeze painfully.  Because this is his doing.  She trusted him and he attacked her very nature.  Carol’s a runner.  Always has been.  Like a graceful deer wary of a hunter, it’s what she’s long been conditioned to do to survive, and he? He unfairly shamed her for it.  For protecting herself.  

 The Commonwealth orchestra strikes up a cheerful tune and Governor Milton’s most devout patrons spin in whimsical circles, carefree and utterly oblivious to the dangers outside the safety of their walls.    

 It’s a mockery of the most insulting order to those they’ve loved and lost, one Carol is unable to let pass without comment (Fools), and for the first time?  Daryl spares her a sideways glance.  Anything more hurts too goddamn much.  Nothing good can be gained from losing himself again in her tumultuous blue gaze.  Besides. He’s on the clock.  Doing his best to be the good, obedient soldier that gets rewarded around these parts.  The kind of provider that pulls himself and the kids that are feeling more and more like his own out of the kind of poverty he thought the end of the whole fucking world had vanquished.  He wants to agree with her.  Instead, he gruffly dispels any more talk that might land them both in hot water.  “Judith.  RJ.  They like it here.”  

 “They do? That’s good.”  

 The soft flicker of a smile touches her lips but it never quite reaches her eyes and all at once, Daryl is paralyzed with a profound sense of homesickness.  Not for Alexandria.  Or Hilltop.  Oceanside or the Georgia woods.  But for her. He’s been so off-center, being at odds with her. Felt so unmoored, learning how to deal with her absence from his day-to-day life.  Having her within arm’s reach again?  It’s almost too much and yet it’s still not enough.  It can never be enough, but he’s worthy only of loving her from a distance.  He chews his lip.  Nods before he turns his head to dutifully scan the room once again.  

 “Daryl?”

 His shoulders tense and his breath catches halfway between hope and despair.  

 Ever brave, she echoes the words he spoke to her a lifetime ago.  “I don’t like not seeing you.  I just wanted you to know that.”  A soft rustle of red fabric and silver curls and she turns to go.

 Daryl recovers his voice just in time.  “Carol. Wait.”  

 She faces him again.  “Yeah?”

 She’s half fairy goddess, half fierce warrior, and he thinks, maybe.  If they meet each other in the middle, that future he promised her?  Might someday come to be.  “You don’t have to be lonely.  We don’t have to be.”        

 “Lunch?  At the diner?  My treat.”

 “Pfft.”  

 “We can go dutch.”  

A hopeful light sparks in her beautiful eyes and something inside Daryl unknots.  The terrible ache he’s been carrying around since that fateful day in the cabin starts to lessen by degrees.  To fade.  “It’s a date.”

[the-darklings]

❛ there’s so many things i wanna do to you. ❜ + santino/v : ))))

pairing: santino d'antonio & clara!v

prompt: ❛there’s so many things i wanna do to you.❜

wc: 941

warnings: slight nsft, but more angsty lmao; also santino being santino & v being v : )

note: RIs have been giving me grief lately so technically clara!v but no major descriptors are used : ) also, I know some of you prefer this format. also thank you ash for my whole life!!! muah (●'◡'●)

There are insistent, troubling occurrences when Santino sees the hands that have morphed V.

Hands that had influenced her and changed her with years and hardships. Most wisdom stems from Winston, other times — more unfortunately — Santino sees John. In the solemn determination, in the premeditated control in how she approaches situations. There are flecks of steely control coming to life from shadowing Winston’s side for years. Learning from the best to match the best. Winston’s beloved little hatchling.

Winston would have gladly kept her to himself, Santino is perfectly aware. Made her his heir, made her his protegee. She’s always been that, albeit undeclared. New York is as good as hers. Her roots and support running deep there.

But years have taught Santino the virtue of patience. Hard-earned and fickle as it may be, his faith has been rewarded.

“So grumpy,” she breathes, pressing her heated lips between his furrowed brows. “What’s troubling you, Santi?”

Many things. Doubts, primarily. The kind he would never voice aloud, not even to her, though his trust in her is bone-deep. She earned it so long ago, Santino can’t recall who the boy she met even was. Foolish, brash, arrogant — he’s still those things, in a sense, but where she had once seen him as a nuisance, now she considers him hers, and hers alone.

She can be as stubborn, as unyielding as her namesake. Seen as cruel by many, too dangerous by an even larger number. Cold and calculated and reactionary all at once. Right now, Santino wants her to react, wants her craving him with the same desperation he’s spent years waiting and craving her. Years have passed in purgatory and even winning her no longer truly feels like winning after all. Part of him is convinced this is too good to be true, that he never recovered from the bullet John planted in his head — that she never saved him.

“Santi,” she chides, a warning sliding into her low call. “I can hear you thinking. Am I not entertaining you adequately?”

He can’t form a fucking thought when she grinds against him like that. Half naked, dishevelled, and far too tempting. Mean in her iron-like grip and stare. Expression awashed by shadows and eyes glinting, serpentine and seductive. Perhaps it should worry him. A man of his status should think better than invite a woman capable of killing him with her bare hands to his bed, his life, but if not her then who?

“There’s so many things I wanna do to you,” she mumbles hotly against his jaw, a hot puff of breath fanning, wet with her desire. Her fingers tighten in his curls, tugging, claiming, and a groan bubbles up in his throat, trembling there. “Where should I start, Santi? Your neck, chest… lower?"

She traces a single finger down the column of his throat, and Santino senses her sly smile tucked against his chin. She laughs softly; a dangerous sound he feels unmade by, fractured. Her hips slot between his hands. He’s gripping her tightly to him but she likes it even tighter, harder, meaner. Santino’s breaths thin into shallow and deep.

Fuck. Fuck he can’t think straight when she gets like this. When ghosts and pain haunting her melt away, leaving the woman she could have been had life been kinder. These appearances are becoming more frequent, and it prompts only one request from him:

“Become Lady Camorra,” he rasps, guiding her closer for a kiss, for a taste, his arms full of her. “Marry me, amore.”

One desire she refuses to satisfy. Body and soul he can have her. Fuck her until he’s incoherent, but this, she will not give him. He understands what he’s asking. Marrying him is not the issue, he knows, but forcing herself to become what she doesn’t wish to be, is.

It’s not me, she had told him, her regret clear.

Power suits her. Beautifully, fitting her like a glove. She’s born for it. He’s been telling her this for years, and she’s more inclined to believe him now. But not this kind of power. She never stops gazing out into the world as if she’s not quite certain where she belongs, if anywhere. As if she should be somewhere else, doing something different. He thought her coming to him, choosing him, would have erased that. That her waking up in his arms and kissing him unabashedly, owning him so effortlessly, means she’s finally his. At long last, his.

But…

A soft smile curls her mouth, leaning closer to kiss him gently, regretfully. It’s a wordless denial. He’s tasted plenty from her to no longer be stung by them.

Heels of her hands pushing on his shoulders, she guides him down on the bed, her toned thighs straddling him.

“I love you, Santi.”

He knows. She loves too much. It’s what tied her to John for years. Even now, she still holds love for him in her heart. She only says it if she means it. He would never doubt as much.

She kisses him again, wet and sweet. His hands drag down her waist, her bare thighs, desperate to capture as many of these moments as he can. Her love is honeyed and warm, a fire warming and burning, palpable in every stroke and skim of her lips on his.

“I love you more, amore,” he exhales. He always has. He says it again, so deep inside her, he hardly feels himself. Moving with her, in her.

Santino hopes one day he will stop feeling like she’s about to slip away from him even when she’s right there in his arms.

[lloydskywalkers]

any port in a storm

Pixal and Lloyd and the evolving nature of friendship, as highlighted by the regular burning down of your city. 

(desperately trying to break through writer’s block and classes again, this was supposed to be under 2k and it is...very much not hdfjkgh but! i’ve been meaning to write for Pixal and Lloyd for a while so here are a whole bunch of feelings about the two of them and s8)

Pixal meets — truly meets — Lloyd Garmadon shortly after his brother’s been blown to pieces.

She says truly, because if you ask her, Pixal will tell you she met Lloyd Garmadon at exactly 8:48 in the evening outside his father’s monastery, moments before a horde of nindroids led there by Pixal herself descended upon them.

But Lloyd argues that since they said about two words total to each other, it doesn’t really count as meeting, and by the time Pixal’s spending the better part of her day with him running high and low around Ninjago City, she’s learned that it’s easier not to press the point.

Lloyd can be stubborn, like that.

She’d first learned that when she’d met him, just after they’d lost Zane. That loss hadn’t lasted long, especially for Pixal, but the immediate aftermath of it had been devastating. She’d watched with blank eyes as the team had fractured, splitting at the seams as they all fled their separate ways, too heartsore and dizzy with grief to do much otherwise.

All of them had fled, save Lloyd. She hadn’t paid him much attention before that point, the surprisingly small bearer of the Golden Power. Of course, he wasn’t the bearer of that power anymore, but his eyes alone had shown the experience of it. There’d been a brief, lost look that had crossed his face as the others had mentioned leaving, before it had been swept under a mask of stubborn, determined blankness. He wouldn’t be leaving. Someone had to stay behind and watch out for things, he’d claimed, even as the loss had bled through his voice.

Pixal hadn’t quite grasped the concept of empathy at that point, but she’d felt something dangerously close to it.

At any rate, the only interaction they’d had alone was brief. In fact, the only one Pixal can truly remember — and her memory never fails — is the quick exchange they’d had in the hospital lobby directly after the battle. The hospital was for Mr. Borg, and for the ninja’s minor injuries.

There was nothing any hospital on earth could do for Zane.

Pixal had found herself next to Lloyd in the waiting room, trying to distract herself from those thoughts while Lloyd stared at the stark white tiling with dull eyes.

“They never mentioned what your power was,” she’d asked him, almost absently. Collecting data, processing information — anything she could do to distract from the crushing grief.

“Oh.” Lloyd had blinked, startling back into awareness. He’d suddenly looked painfully young. “It’s, ah, I guess it’s just green, now.”

It had been Pixal’s turn to blink. “Green.”

“Yeah.” Lloyd had bit his lip, rubbing the back of his head awkwardly, two habits he’ll never quite lose. “I mean — it’s more than that, but it’s like — energy, I guess, is the best way to put it?”

“Interesting,” Pixal had remarked.

“Yeah.”

They’d stared at each other in silence after that, before they’d both been called off to other errands — and then they were having Zane’s funeral and then Pixal was making realizations she never got to tell anyone, and that had been that in her early introductions to Lloyd Garmadon. Quiet, awkward, and possessing an incredible power he hardly even knew the name of.

Looking back, Pixal figures her introduction hadn’t gone much better.

They’d continued as passing acquaintances as time went on, separated by danger and the confines of Zane’s head, and Pixal had figured that’s all they’d ever be. But then their Sensei goes missing and, despite Pixal’s increasing disappearances on Zane as she rebuilds her own body, she’s been given the role of watching out for Ninjago city along with Lloyd.

She quickly learns that quiet is not a term fit for Lloyd Garmadon when you’re trapped alone with him.

************

“How is there not a single station playing actual music?” Lloyd seethes, flicking through the channels almost manically. “It’s two am, who’s gonna be listening to your stupid commercial for toothpaste now, are you kidding me?”

“Statistically speaking, this is the prime time for long-distance driving near Ninjago City,” Pixal supplies, her voice a hint scratchy where it comes through the his car’s radio speakers. “Or, if you factor in the construction in the east district, there could still be traffic from late-night bars.”

Lloyd groans, thunking his head against the steering wheel as another ad screeches through the small space. “Wonderful.”

“Your vocal tones suggest you find it otherwise.”

“Dont trust ‘em, my vocal tones are traitors.” As if to solidify his point, Lloyd’s voice cracks in the middle of his sentence, shooting up an octave higher. Lloyd goes bright red, and thunks his head against the steering wheel again.

Taking pity on him, Pixal aims for reassurance. “It is normal for your voice to break, Lloyd. It shouldn’t last too long.” She pauses, momentarily scanning through another article. “On second thought, this one suggests it could also take two to three years for your voice to stabilize.”

Lloyd gives a strangled moan. “End me.”

“Unfortunately, that would defeat the purpose of why I’m here in the first place.”

Lloyd tilts his head, cracking an eye open as he glances at the camera feed he knows she’s watching him from. “Unfortunately, huh,” he muses. “So you’re saying if Zane hadn’t made you promise to look out for me, you would end me?”

“That — no, that is not — of course I wouldn’t end you,” Pixal backtracks. An odd feeling flickers through her, almost as if she’s lost her place, floundering.

Or embarrassed might be more accurate, she thinks wryly. She briefly considers projecting a a glaring face at Lloyd from the monitor. This is his fault. She rarely stuttered before Lloyd started teasing her at all hours of the morning.

“I mean, you wouldn’t be the first,” Lloyd continues, conversationally. “And if we’re being honest, I’d definitely rather you be the one to off me, instead of like, random bad guy number eighty-five—”

“I know you think you are funny,” Pixal cuts over him. “But casually planning for your death is something Kai listed I was not to let you do. Also, it is not nearly as funny as you think it is.”

“Ouch,” Lloyd mutters, though he looks chastised. “Never mind, you just took me out in one sentence.”

Chastised might be the wrong term.

Pixal studies him through the monitor, then sighs. “I am, however, honored you think highly enough of me to offer the right to murder you,” she gives in.

She’s rewarded as Lloyd breaks into a bright grin.

He still looks painfully young these days, but it’s less obvious. His voice is pitching lower and he wears his hair different, and he’s gained a whip-like tendency to quip at people, as Pixal’s experienced firsthand. Kai calls it sass in grumbling but fond tones, and Nya calls it snark somewhere between the fourth book series she’s sent for Pixal to try.

The ninja have been kind like that, sharing the interests they have in an attempt to make her feel…well, more human, she supposes. Less confined to a voice in a computer. Of course, Pixal isn’t confined to a voice in a computer anymore, but they don’t know that yet. She’ll tell them someday soon, she promises herself. Any day now.

In the meantime, it’s easy enough to keep up with Lloyd by lurking in his car radio, as he spends half his time in there anyways.

************

“You’d think we’d have found their hideout by now,” Lloyd notes, as they wait in a darkened alleyway again. It gives them an excellent view of the major highways, so if the rumored biker gang does show up, they won’t miss it.

If they show up being the key point.

“Whoever their leader is, they certainly know how to keep a low profile,” Pixal answers, closing out another dead end police report in frustration.

“It’s weird,” Lloyd says, propping the notebook he’s sketching in on his knee as he squints at the paper. “Normally the boss types aren’t this quiet. They like to show off, y’know? Make a big scene, dramatic speeches and all.”

“Are you referring to the villains, or yourselves?”

“Touché,” Lloyd snorts. “But still, you gotta admit it’s weird they haven’t even made any demands. What’s their end game here, elaborate advertising for motorcycle design?”

“I would hope not,” Pixal says. “Their color coordination is lacking.”

Lloyd fights back a smile, his pencil scratching as he shifts his notebook again. “I don’t know, I kinda like the punk look.”

“I noticed that, when you tried to redecorate the car.”

“Hey, skulls are cool.”

“They are also conspicuous, especially when they come in acid green colors.”

“Everyone’s a critic,” Lloyd sighs, making a face as he scrubs the eraser across the paper. Pixal tries to tilt the camera further, to see what he’s drawing tonight, but the angle he’s holding it at remains just out of sight.

She could probably guess what he’s drawing, if she tried. The notebook is one they’ve been steadily working their way through on these late-night patrols, the pages filled with little hangman games and Lloyd’s sketches of animals and his teammates. He’s drawn her a few times from memory, and she’s been tempted to ask him to draw her in the new Samurai X armor more than once.

Soon, she tells herself.

“What are you drawing?” she finally asks, curiosity getting the better of her.

Lloyd’s cheeks tinge pink, and he quickly plasters the notebook to his chest, hiding it entirely from view. “Nothing.”

Pixal waits, letting the silence fill with her judgement. “Lloyd, I have seen your drawings before.”

He doesn’t reply, and Pixal tries again. “It gets boring, being stuck with the car monitors for eyes.”

“I know you can hack other cameras,” Lloyd mutters, but he sighs, relenting as he turns the notebook over. Pixal’s eyes rake over the detailed sketch — it’s a comical little thing of her and Lloyd, jammed together on a tiny lifeboat in the middle of a darkening ocean. She can spot the smudges where he’s redrawn her head several times, and the numerous attempts he’s made at his own hair. Pixal studies Lloyd’s portrayal of himself, which is noticeably lacking in facial features. While Lloyd draws the others plenty, it’s a rare occasion that he draws himself, and she can’t help but be curious.

“I thought you were drawing the others again,” she admits.

“They’re on the ship,” Lloyd says, absently. “I’ll draw them when they remember to pull us back in.”

There’s nothing bitter in his tone to suggest it has any bearing on their actual lives, but the lost expressions Lloyd ends up giving their tiny caricatures feel familiar nonetheless.

“Zane has assured me they will be back as soon as they can,” Pixal speaks ups quietly.

Lloyd finally looks up fully, and flashes the monitor a smile. “I know,” he says. “So we better have this thing busted by the time they do, or they’ll never let us run a city on our own again.”

“If only we were truly running the city,” Pixal grumbles. “I could do a better job in two days than the current leaders could do in a year.”

“I’d vote for you,” Lloyd says, sincerely.

It’s a sweet gesture, but Pixal is unable to resist. “You don’t know how to vote.”

“Yes I do, it’s not hard!”

“Really? Then why are you not currently registered in the Ninjago voting system?”

Lloyd makes a strangled noise. “That’s a thing?”

She’s unable to keep the smugness from her voice. “I make my point.” Lloyd scowls, and scribbles a mustache on his drawing of her in revenge.

Pixal thinks it looks nice nonetheless.

************

She can’t really hold it against Lloyd for talking as much as he does, considering she does the same. It gets dull, sitting on patrol for hours on end, and there are only so many hours of light reading they can do before the silence begins to drive them both insane.

Pixal finds herself talking about more useless things with Lloyd than she has in her existence, pointless conversations in circles with each other. She also finds she doesn’t entirely mind. She’s become quite good at quipping back and forth with him, at least. It’s different than the kind of talk she has with Zane, lacking in the depth of feeling with the love they share. Her exchanges with Lloyd are lighter, though that’s not to say they’re less sincere.

For example, Zane hasn’t tried to teach her how to redesign a gi in poor lighting in the early hours of the morning because he’s bored out of his mind, that’s for sure.

“I’m teaching you how to sew,” Lloyd corrects, wincing as he accidentally stabs himself with the needle. “And I’m not redesigning the whole thing, I’m just adding some designs to spice it up.”

“I did not know you were allowed to wear colors other than green,” Pixal comments.

Lloyd pauses, squinting at the monitor. “You’re teasing me,” he finally says. “You’re making fun of how much green this gi has in it.”

“I would never,” Pixal replies, her tone flat and even. “The intricacies of your human humor evade me—”

“Human humor, nice—”

“—unlike the unusually bright shade of green you’ve chosen will fail to evade any eyes of your enemies.”

“I knew you were making fun of me!” Lloyd accuses, then flinches as he stabs his finger again trying to point at her. “And bright colors are our thing. Being subtle is, uh…not. Usually.”

Pixal is losing the battle to laugh at his expression by the minute. “I am shocked.”

Lloyd glares at the monitor, shifting his sewing to rest on his knees as he slouches in the car seat. “How’d you even get so good at sarcasm, anyways,” he mutters. “Zane still doesn’t get it half the time.”

“Perhaps it is part of my glowing personality,” Pixal says. Lloyd gives a huff of laughter, relenting.

“Fair enough,” he says, shifting in his seat again. “Fine, you win. The green is probably too bright, but that’s not the point. I’m gonna show you how to do a backstitch."

Pixal falls quiet, letting Lloyd gesture with the needle as he explains. There are a hundred, a thousand tutorials she could pull up online, digitized knowledge instantly learned on all the countless types of stitches she could use, sorted and categorized in neat columns of use and effectiveness. All of them more detailed, more easily understood than Lloyd’s absent rambling and unsteady hands as he struggles with the end of a knot.

Not one of them will care whether or not Pixal learns the odd way Zane likes to loop his stitches, or will quietly add which stitches knit skin back together quickest.

So Pixal ignores her programming, and does her best to follow Lloyd’s rambling instructions, watching as his scarred fingers tug another thread of dull gold through the green mess of fabric, the city quiet around them.

“You never did tell me where you learned how to sew,” Pixal says, as Lloyd starts up a new thread of black on the other side of the gi. “Was that something the others taught you in training?”

“They’d have to know how to be able to teach it,” Lloyd snickers. “And, uh, no. I taught myself to back at Darkley’s.”

“Oh,” Pixal falters. She’s heard about Darkley’s, both from Zane and the legal reports she’s read online. Neither gave a positive impression of the place. Her mind is suddenly filled with images of a younger Lloyd trying to give himself stitches, and her heart twists.

Lloyd starts, seemingly having picked up on her train of thought. “I mean, I did it for fun, mostly. I like sewing,” he explains. “It’s useful. You can pull things back together, and fix ‘em.”

Pixal is quiet, but she hopes Lloyd takes her silence as agreement with his motive. She likes to think he knows her well enough for that, by now.

************

Pixal finds, somewhere during their fourth month alone, that she’s glad the team elected to stick her and Lloyd together. Not because she doesn’t want to be with Zane — there’s never a moment she doesn’t miss him, and with every day that passes her resolve to keep her secret from him grows weaker, as the longing for actual connection grows stronger.

But there are conversations she can have with Lloyd that she can never have with Zane, and the dangerous thing about spending time with Lloyd, Pixal finds, is that they’re more similar than she’s realized.

“Sometimes I think I’m jealous,” Lloyd whispers to her one night. It’s one of the bad ones, the ones where their enemies struck too sudden to stop, and the mission ends in the hospital. “I think I’m jealous of Zane, and I hate myself for it.”

Pixal is quiet, trying to pick apart the tone of his voice in the words he’s just spoken, and factors in the victims they’ve just left behind at the hospital. She finds herself no closer to an answer.

“Is it the metal skin part?” she finally asks, though she knows that’s wrong. “The, what was it, technical immortality?”

“No,” Lloyd shakes his head. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he says emphatically, his fingers fluttering at over the steering wheel, tapping incessantly with unspent energy. “I don’t want to, but that’s — it’s not what I’m scared of. I’m more scared of how I go out.”

He swallows, and his fingers move to dance over the woven bracelet on his wrist instead, twisting at the tiny beads and tracing senseless designs in constant, steady movement. It’s a motion he does often, and it had puzzled Pixal at first. She’d decided to write it off as an odd tick, a way to spend excess energy.

Now, she recognizes the desperate kind of reassurance that movement gives. She understands too well the need to remind yourself that you can move — that your body will obey you and you alone.

Pixal thinks back to the other factors in tonight’s accident, of the way the drugged man’s eyes had cleared when they’d finally turned him over to the police, the way he’d sworn he’d never do such a thing in his right mind. She thinks of the way the first victim had thrown themselves over their companion.

That victim hadn’t made it to the hospital.

“Ah,” Pixal says, quietly.

She’s silent again, and she thinks back to when she’d met him, the very first time. She recalls the way her programming had rebelled against her in favor of the Overlord, corrupting her body and forcing it against her, twisting everything she was and wanted to be into something different.

She thinks back again, to the searing-hot anger, the terror, the despair as she was torn apart, piece by piece like a machine, burning out at the whims of another. Her end purposeless, her demise belonging to someone else, just like every other part of her.

She thinks of the last glimpse she’d caught of Zane, bright and beautiful as a supernova. Burning with the terrible brilliance of his own, determined choice. Terrible, because the death of something always is. Beautiful, because it was his own. Zane died, not a machine, not a weapon, not a tool of anyone or anything, but as himself. Zane died to save the ones he loves. Pixal could’ve died for spare parts.

Never again, she promises herself. If she goes out, she goes out on her own terms. This time, they choose the end of their own destiny themselves.

In hindsight, it’s the kind of promise they’re both too young to make, but neither of them have ever seen themselves as such, and promises like that are easy.

“Love can be terrible, sometimes,” Lloyd murmurs. Pixal watches him scrub at the blood on his uniform, and thinks how ironically well-timed it is that he finished the stitching on his new gi this morning. “Sometimes I forget how ugly it can be.”

************

The end of their nighttime stakeouts begins with a break-in at Mr. Borg’s tower. Lloyd argues that she should get to call it her father’s tower, if she wants, but the ninja aren’t the only ones Pixal’s hiding herself from.

And then Lloyd gets very tense at the thought of fathers very fast, and they never finish the conversation.

They stay at the edge of the bridge long after the parachute, emblazoned with the unmistakable visage of Lloyd’s father, disappears from sight. Pixal wonders if it’s burned into Lloyd’s eyes, like the way she’s read black spots linger in humans’ vision after they’ve looked at something too bright. The way Lloyd stares at the river, his shoulders tense and his teeth worrying at his lip, she thinks she might be right.

They’re waiting on the report from the commissioner —they’re waiting for anything, anyone who can offer them any explanation of what’s going on. Pixal’s reminded of how much she loathes this kind of waiting.

“It could be—” Lloyd begins, then breaks off, his voice wavering. He swallows, and Pixal can see the way his fists clench tightly from the cameras they’ve put in his car. There’s a fierce part of her that longs to reveal herself, to meet his eyes herself and offer some semblance of comfort. But there’s a time and place for things, and Pixal isn’t ready.

“It could be anything,” Lloyd finally continues, his voice small. “It could — it doesn’t mean anything. It could mean nothing, right?”

Pixal is silent, her mind racing. She’s run the calculations over and over in her head already, scouring the internet for anything related to the bikers. She’s been foolish, she realizes — they both have. Letting the gang go unnamed for so long, thinking nothing of it. Now, with the name flashing vibrant across Pixal’s vision, a part of her wants to let them go nameless just a bit longer.

Before she can answer, Lloyds phone goes off with a sharp ping, just as Pixal’s sensors alert her to the message from the commissioner. Lloyd snatches for his phone like it’s on fire, and Pixal’s already scanning the message frantically, as if she can salvage this if she’s fast enough, save Lloyd from this one pain.

Lloyd’s gotten much better at reading quickly though, these days.

She can pinpoint the moment he reaches the last paragraph, because his breath hitches. There’s a long, pressing pause of silence, Lloyd’s hands trembling as they clutch weakly at his phone. Then it’s punctured by a reedy, wheezing gasp, and Pixal’s suddenly wishing she’d revealed herself after all.

Instead, all she has is her voice as Lloyd crumples, crouching over in visible distress. Pixal’s mind races, recalling everything Zane’s ever told her about his team, the way their panic manifests in different shades. Lloyd’s is quiet but desperate, rapid breathes that stutter as his eyes slide more and more into a frightening kind of blankness.

“Lloyd, please, listen to my voice,” she begs, trying to reach him in the only way she can. “Please, you have to breathe—”

“He’s gone,” Lloyd rasps, unhearing of her words. “He’s s’posed to be gone, it’s supposed to be over, I’m supposed to be done—”

Pixal fights back the sense of overwhelming helplessness. She knows loss. She knows how to finish his sentence. He’s supposed to be done grieving, done mourning, done clinging to false scraps of hope that his father isn’t lost forever only to be met with heartbreak.

And now, to be met with the possibility of something so much worse.

“We’ll stop them,” she tells him, unflinching. “We won’t let it happen.”

Lloyd’s eyes are a vivid green where they stare at her through the monitor, almost ghostly in the misting light reflecting from the river.

He’s silent, but Pixal is, too.

Pixal remembers the way her head had spun when she’d first picked up the traces of Zane in the system, how the world had rushed then steadied, flooding with color as she’d realized he might not be lost after all. She remembers the surging, overwhelming flood of joy, that someone she’d thought she lost might live after all. She remembers being so happy, at even the smallest chance to get him back, because the voice was Zane’s, without a doubt.

She watches the color seep from Lloyd’s expression as his shoulders shudder, the words from the commissioner’s message almost echoing through the air. Watches the terror as the both of them fill the silence.

Will we?  

The radio scratches, as if echoing Pixal’s anxiety. Love can be terrible, sometimes. She’s underestimated how it also be so cruel.

************

She’s also, apparently, underestimated how the universe on the whole could be so cruel.

She should’ve revealed herself to them from day one. That way, when Harumi’s corrupted programming suddenly ravages through her like an electric shock, she could be reassured they’d at least be familiar with the person they were fighting.

Instead, she doesn’t even get to scream. Pixal’s only able to force out a desperate, broken warning before she’s lost again, drowning in her own body as she’s forced under. Furious panic grips her as she screams without lungs, bashing herself against the overwhelming helplessness that’s taken over her.

Not again, not again, not again—

Her limbs creak and jolt against her will, lashing out at the people she cares most about, and Pixal can’t even rage back in her own voice. She’s sworn, she’s promised herself she’d never let anyone do this to her again — she’s sworn she’d die before she let someone reach into her head and snatch control away, and yet here she is, frozen as her body’s used to target her friends.

If she could cry, she might.

There’s not much more to say than that. She breaks free, her body her own once again, but by then it’s too late.

************

If Pixal had the same gift of foresight that Zane did, maybe she would have seen it coming. Maybe she’d have remembered how similar her and Lloyd are, and that this kind of pained desperation always yields impulsiveness and mistakes.

She doesn’t, though. She barely even manages to do what she’s trying to, which is convincing Lloyd to join the others while they celebrate their victory. Their off-key singing is something he normally wouldn’t hesitate to join in on, she thinks, and she hates Harumi a little more.

Maybe she’ll try his mother next. The expression on Lloyd’s face screams unapproachable, and remains fixedly sullen.

Almost to her surprise, he meets her eyes as she draws near— it’s odd, being able to meet his back — and his own eyes are dark, from despair over Harumi or despair over his father, Pixal isn’t sure. She’s thinking it might be both, when his eyebrows crease, and a flicker of concern cuts through them instead.

“You good?”

It takes her a moment to realize why he’s asking, but the answer is obvious. Her head tilts downward, and she watches as her fingers curl and uncurl. Her movements, her choices. She lets out an even breath.

“As I can be,” she replies. Lloyd nods, and his eyes are understanding. His lips twist in a scowl.

“She shouldn’t have done that to you. That was a low blow.”

Pixal’s mouth curves into a humorless smile. “That it was. She’s rather good at those, isn’t she.”

Lloyd’s eyes shadow again, and he looks away, crossing his arms. “This isn’t supposed to be about me,” he mutters.

“Yes, it is,” Pixal counters. “It is why I came over here, in the first place. She hurt—”

“All of us, and who’s fault is that,” Lloyd snaps, his arms crossing tighter.

“I would hope you know it’s hers,” she says, holding firm.

Lloyd looks away again, biting his lip, and Pixal shifts anxiously, rolling her wrists. The sensation of control sliding away still haunts her, worse than it had the first time. She should be better than this, she tells herself hotly. She’s lived without a body long enough that losing it so briefly shouldn’t effect her this much.

Curse her programming, she thinks, tapping agitatedly at the banister. She knew she should have reinforce it sooner.

“Hey, um.” Lloyd is looking at her again, hesitant. He twists at his bracelet, and his eyes lose a fraction of that darkness. “Kai made this for me, after Morro,” he says. “I kept shredding the sleeves of my uniform, so he told me to mess with this instead, when I needed to remember that…that I was in control.”

He shrugs, hesitant. “We could make you one too, if you wanted. It helps, having something.”

Pixal lets out a steady breath, despite not actually needing to. The action is grounding, she’s found. “I would like that.”

Lloyd gives her a ghost of a smile in return. “Soon as this is over, then.”

There’s a heavy weight to his words, and Pixal’s eyes narrow.

“Lloyd,” she says. He looks at her, his eyes dark. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

He’s quiet, not meeting her eyes, and this is where Pixal should stop him. This is when she should see the end of the road they’ve been on since they started this, and force him to turn before it’s too late.

“I know what I’m doing.”

She doesn’t.

************

Lloyd is battered and bleeding by the time they drag him onto the ship, a gruesome portrait of cruelty. Pixal is frozen as she watches him writhe in Kai’s hold, his screams cracked and wet as he thrashes erratically like a broken thing.

Nya is already barking orders before they’ve even gotten Lloyd fully on the ship, and Zane is running scans with a horrified, wavering focus. Pixal follows Cole as he carries Lloyd to the medbay with a blank numbness, the rush of wind streaming past the Bounty sails thunderously loud in her ears.

This isn’t Lloyd, she thinks, staring at his crumpled form. Lloyd isn’t this battered, broken shell of a person. Lloyd isn’t hazy eyes that fail to recognize them and frantic murmuring through bloody lips. Lloyd is bright-eyed and gentle and would rather die before he screams the way he does when Cole moves him to the table.

Lloyd is her friend, and this is where that promise they made has led them. She knows why Lloyd set out for the prison, hot on the collapse of his own star. She also knows he wouldn’t have chosen to burn out like this.

Cole calls out for Zane, his voice ringing in panic as Lloyd screeches in pain again. Pixal thinks of quiet words in the safety of his car, and she feels sick. This is the ugliness of love, the terrible, hideous side of it.

And Lloyd would hate it, if he could see himself, if he were any semblance of lucid. He’d hate to know just how much better he was at breaking himself than Morro ever was.

Zane is gentle as he pushes past her, but Pixal can feel the tremble in his hands. He’s every bit as rattled as she is, if not more so — Zane’s heart is larger and softer than hers has ever been, and he cares about each and every one of them with a painful intensity. It’s a cruel thing, to have to pull those same people back together with your own hands.

Kai’s eyes are streaming as he clutches at Lloyd’s wrists, pinning him in place. Zane’s hands waver again over one of the jagged wounds near Lloyd’s ribcage, the green of his uniform already dyed dark in blood, soaking over the careful stitches Pixal watched him put in himself.

Pixal finally finds her footing, reminding herself of the solid wood beneath her feet. She recalls the steady, smooth stitch Lloyd’s scarred fingers traced out for her.

“Here.” She takes the needle from Zane’s hands, squeezing his briefly before letting go. “I can do it.”

She sets the needle against Lloyd’s skin and wonders what kind of stitch it’d take to pull your heart back together.  

************

Pixal cannot cry. It’s one of the features Mr. Borg spent hours debating, weighing the pros and cons of giving her the ability before he was truly sure how rust-proof she was. He’d never gotten the chance to, as the Overlord had interrupted him, then Pixal had lost any body to give the ability to cry to, which had eliminated the need entirely.

She cannot cry, but she can hurt, and the rain that streams through her hair, dripping down her forehead spotting raindrops on her cheeks, could be tears if she pretended.

She doesn’t, though, because tears are a waste of water and overall useless in the grand scheme of things. She doubts they’d have helped her fare any better in the battle with Colossi, either.

Tears won’t bring anyone back.

Lloyd cries anyways. She can’t see him, but she can hear it in his voice, the way it wavers and breaks over the radio, nasally tones pronounced.

He’s barely able to gasp a few coordinates to her before he cuts the radio off abruptly. Pixal’s spent enough time with him to envision his scarred fingers snapping it off with a particular desperation, green sparking from his hands in distress.

She reminds herself those sparks are gone, now, bled away into nothing like the vivid green of Lloyd’s eyes had. The thought makes her sadder than she’d expected. She had a joke, about his eyes, she had wanted to make. Now that she has a body, and her own set of glowing green eyes, she’d — there was something he would’ve laughed at, she thought —

It doesn’t matter, now. Neither of them are likely to laugh anytime soon.

The coordinates blink brightly in her vision, and she’s almost surprised she managed to key them in. She’s running on autopilot, she supposes. It could be ironic — she’s been so desperate for control, it’s been so important that she’s the one feeling. Now, she’d give anything not to feel at all.

She lets out a shaky breath, dispelling the mist in her vision left from the rain. She leans forward, just over the edge of the building she’s crouched on, and her loose hair falls forward, silvery and synthetic and horribly tangled. Irritated, she reaches for another hair tie, and her hands falter around her wrist.

Lloyd had promised her a bracelet there. But he’d promised Kai would make the bracelet, hadn’t he, and Kai couldn’t make the bracelet if he was dead, could he.

Pixal blinks, her breath hitching. She’s been so numb to the pain of Zane’s loss, it hasn’t yet occurred to her that she’s losing Kai, too. And Jay, and Cole, and—

She sucks in the same shuddery kind of breath she’s seen Lloyd do, and carefully fists her hand in the area of her uniform above her chest. Her fingers dig in tightly, clutching in a hopeless attempt to feel some sort of comfort she knows she’ll never find.

But perhaps, for these few seconds, she can pretend the action is holding her together.

************

“It was inevitable,” Pixal tells Lloyd blankly, as he rasps out his third apology in the dark cover of their small hideout. “That one of us would fall, eventually. It had nothing to do with you.”

Lloyd swallows thickly. “It could’ve — it should’ve been—”

He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t need to. Pixal’s hand shoots out, clamping tightly around his wrist, and there’s a beat of gratitude that she doesn’t need to rely on her voice alone anymore.

“Don’t.” Her voice is strung tighter than the tension in their shoulders. “You cannot change anything. You can’t, Lloyd, and you should not wish to — to change it that way.”

Lloyd jerks his hand free, wiping miserably at his eyes. He sets it back down within her reach, though, and if Pixal were any different, she’d take it.

But Pixal isn’t that different from Lloyd at all in the end, and neither of them reach for the other’s hand, no matter how desperately they crave the contact. Fear is more familiar, and it’s easier to give into it than it is the clawing need for comfort in your chest, after all.

“Still,” Lloyd finally whispers. “Still.”

Pixal swallows. She doesn’t disagree. If one of them had to fall, she knows she gladly would have taken it upon herself. She knows the others care for her, certainly, but she also knows her place in the grand scheme of things. They were six before she came along, and even now she’s kept far too many secrets to be fully counted among them.

She listens to Lloyd’s quiet, cracked voice, and she wonders if he’s thinking that they were five before he came along, younger than Pixal got to know him as.

Now they’re three, hollow and heartbroken. Though counting herself as one whole feels like cheating, right now.

Pixal squeezes her eyes shut, and wonders what it’s like to cry. Perhaps it helps, though Lloyd doesn’t look any less miserable.

************

“I was thinking,” Lloyd tells her, during one of the precious few quiet moments they have while trying to overthrow Garmadon and Harumi. Pixal’s turning the tiny tea flower he’d given her over in her hands, a part of her mind already marking articles about flower-pressing, another part wondering if it’s already too late to save the blossom. “About that promise we made, before all this.”

Pixal finally tucks the flower into the pocket of her uniform, pressed close to her chest. If anything, it can be a reminder of the lives that are safe — the life that’s coming back to her, if she has to drag him back from another realm herself. “And?”

Lloyd’s hands twist together. “Maybe we should focus more on staying alive.”

Pixal coughs out a laugh, breathless and startled. Lloyd wrinkles his nose at her, but his eyes are amused, even with their light lost. “I mean, the emphasis would be on keeping everyone else alive, but it’s kinda hard to do that if we’re dead, so…yeah. Priorities.”

“Staying alive should always be a priority,” Pixal corrects him, but she tugs the edge of his armor out of place with a smile.

“Why didn’t you teach me how to graffiti?” she nods at the designs on the green leather. “Or was this another Darkley’s tradition.”

“This is a refined art, called whatever I had on me that showed up on dark green,” Lloyd grumbles, fixing his armor. “I’ll teach it to you when we get out of this.”

“Another reason why staying alive would be a more productive focus,” Pixal points out. “I’ve heard teaching is easier when you’re alive.”

“And I’ve heard you’re a real riot,” Lloyd mutters. “It’s a promise, okay? I promise to teach you how to do cool armor design if you promise not to disappear into another realm on me.”

Pixal nods, adjusting her own armor tighter as screams ring out from a street nearby. “A promise, then.”

She keeps both the promise and the flower, the tiny blossom dried and faded by the time she’s escaped from the prison, heart racing with leftover adrenaline as Zane sweeps her into his arms. She clutches back every bit as tight, listening to his breathless laughter as cheers rise from the streets behind them, the smoke drifting across the early morning sky above them pale against the lightening blue. Pixal buries her face in his shoulder and breathes, tucking the moment away in her heart where it won’t fade. There’s a future stretching out before her, and she’s got the limbs to walk her path on her own, but all she wants right now is the steady ground beneath her feet and the bright laughter of what she’s managed to keep.  

Lloyd meets them shortly after, his own promise kept as he tears his gaze from his father, handing him off to the authorities before sprinting for the others. Pixal barely snags a moment alone with him, and even then no one’s particularly keen on letting him out of their sights.

He meets her eyes as they pick their way through the wrecked streets, the city more alive around them than it’s been in weeks. In the dark of the early morning, Pixal’s eyes glow a bright green, reflecting oddly in the windows they pass. It’s always been her preferred color, in contrast to Zane’s bright blue. Lloyd glances at her, his own eerily green eyes glowing back. He bites his lip, but it’s to hold back real laughter this time.

“My eyes were green first,” she tells him.

“Sue me,” he shoots back, before Kai’s throwing an arm over his shoulders again, tucking Lloyd neatly in between him and Nya. Pixal smothers a laugh at the look on his face, and tightens her own arm further where it’s linked firmly in Zane’s.  

It’s going to be an easy promise to keep, she thinks.  

[hermitcraftheadcanons]

i feel like u mentioned having some kind of personal hc bout evil x at some point?? maybe it was another blog, just curious

Yeah, I do have one! It's a little bit hard to explain (and maybe a bit overboard with the lore), but I'll do my best:

TL;DR: Evil X is a past version of Xisuma who got consumed by the unlimited power of admin abilities. Due to timeline weirdness he developed differently than X did and never gained a moral compass.

Way, WAY too detailed analysis under the cut, if you're interested.

Disclaimer: I'm analyzing lore because I like to analyze lore, I am in no way trying to say anything about X as an actual person

So. The three main info sources we have on EX are his abilities, his characterization/personality, and the way X interacts with him. A lot of this stuff is pretty inconsistent in canon but if we're willing to overlook some bumpy patches we can get a few key points.

First of all, to me it seems like Evil X's power set is basically just admin abilities with a lack of moral limitations. He can summon other entities (minions, tnt, etc.), he can replace blocks with other blocks, he can summon lightening. These are all things you can do with commands: aka, things Xisuma himself could do but doesn’t (because self control and loving your friends and all that stuff)

Then, we have EX's characterization (which I'll be honest with you, isn't a lot). If we're going on purely canon information, he's usually portrayed as kind of immature. He does things seemingly on impulse with no backup for if plan A doesn't work, he tends to rely on brute force more so than strategy, and he doesn't really think ahead much. In my opinion, he's also portrayed as very lonely. On multiple occasions his plans relied on trusting an entity or entities (his minions, the voice in the Nether) that later betrayed him, and any time X has tried to be friendly to him he really seems to be in need of that connection and understanding. In general he just gives off the vibes of a lost and hurting younger person in need of some guidance and experience.

That brings us to how Xisuma interacts with him, which is very interesting. He's willing to do whatever it takes to stop EX if he's trying to destroy the server, but as soon as the immediate danger is no longer present, Xisuma shows kindness to EX startlingly easily. It's almost as if he knows somehow that the thing EX needs is just someone to understand him, to listen and help him see more constructive uses for the power he's found himself with. Or at least, he thinks he knows this. In the end X does seem to give up on that goal by banning him, but we'll get to that later.

Now, my own personal headcanon about admin powers is that they can be taught and learned, but some people are spawned in already having a natural affinity for them. I think that X was one of those people, and that Evil X is a version of him from way back when he was first exploring his abilities.

Imagine: having only just come into existence, and then having the power to create and destroy the very fundamentals of your world itself with a single typed command. In the beginning, the temptation to push that power more and more, to stretch it and see just how far you can go, just how effectively you can warp the universe to your will...it must have been overwhelming. (If you don't believe me, just look at the amount of tnt used by the average child in creative mode lol)

I think for the first few years of having his abilities Xisuma kind of let it go to his head. It's easy to distance yourself from every other living thing when you can destroy them so easily, easy to stop thinking of them as living.

Obviously in X's case he moved away from that stage. As much of a rush as this power was to use, he did not want a legacy of ashes. He eventually started learning new ways to use his power, ways that created instead of destroyed, and he found that he liked it much better. He started seeking out people he could connect with, trying to find his own humanity again. He built and protected and felt at home in the peace he'd made, for himself and the Hermits, his new found family. He swore he would never use his abilities like that again.

However at some point in the height of those early days of power madness, X did something that split the timeline. The universe fractured and created a parallel version of himself that never developed beyond that initial destructive stage. How and why Evil X crossed over to the main timeline is up to interpretation (I have a few ideas but this post is way too long already), but when he showed up X knew exactly who he was looking at.

Xisuma thought he knew how to save Evil X because he knew what he'd needed at that stage of his life: to find his humanity again. So, he tried to make a genuine human connection at every possible opportunity. He was always willing to fight if necessary to protect his friends, but whenever EX wasn’t posing an immediate physical threat, he would try his best to reach out, to give him a chance.

What he failed to realize, of course, was that by interacting with EX he'd just changed the timeline. Evil X is now not set on the same path as Xisuma: different events have happened to him, therefore he is turning into a different person. With that fatal flaw in mind, X realized it was not a guarantee that EX would ever move past the stage of power-drunk sabotage. I think Xisuma eventually decided that the risk to his friends and all they had built together wasn't worth the reward, and banned him. It wasn’t easy, but he finally had to accept that the person who’d been haunting him was no longer him.

Wow, that was a long post! I have to say I really do like the various brother or clone headcanons for EX, but I really like exploring the more original concept of an “evil self”.

Still, even my Evil Xisuma isn't necessarily "evil", or at least he doesn't have to be. He just spawned in with incredible power and no experience, and didn't really know what else to do with himself. It's awfully hard to know right from wrong when you have no moral frame of reference. However, if someone were to come along and offer him that frame of reference...say, a certain superhero... who's name starts with a W and ends with "ormman"...maybe he could still be redeemed :)

[aineirisha]

What I confessed while daydreaming

It all started that night, that dreadful night. It all started with their threatening voices of fake silk. It all started with their eyes on you ready to devour you, ready to take away what was rightfully yours. 

It all started with ignorance. 

Myths and legends and things that are not human.

It all started...

Or perhaps it started centuries ago, you couldn't tell. You never really knew...

Things that are not human...

Stories that don't belong to humans...

And yet... 

You were...

Human...

...frightened by their energy, by the way they looked at you.

You couldn't trust them. No matter how they tried to convince you, you wouldn't trust them, your instincts told you not to. All your senses screaming at you, 

"RUN!!" 

But you couldn't move. You didn't understand. 

Why were you so scared? Why weren't your legs responding? Why couldn't you stop quivering? Why were those men...?

"Do not worry Hime-sama, we will not hurt you"

"We are just here to please you"

"Let us please you, Hime-sama"

"We are just going to play a little game, shall we Hime-sama?"

But they did not carry toys with them. No dolls or balls, no wooden horses.

What were four men trying to play with a seven year old girl?

Why are these men trying to play...

... With me?

You raised your eyes to meet theirs and fear took over. Thirst for power dripping from their gaze, running through their veins. 

You shed no tear, you voiced no scream, you made no expression. 

The moment their hands were over you, your chakra unfolded, piercing their bodies, breaking their bones, and exploding their organs. 

A lot of blood was shed that night, not one single drop was yours.

It all started that night with that dreadful feeling. 

The power of destruction. The drunkness that comes with it. 

 It started with you, with all that you never really knew... 

Urging you to flee...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Working at that restaurant had turned out to be an excellent choice. It gave you enough money to sustain yourself and the opportunity to meet the daily life in the village. Every day you got the chance to practice all that you couldn't practice on the training grounds. Your power was about sensations and emotions. To recognize those emotions you had to be around living things, preferably humans, and what better place than a restaurant. 

Dozens of different chakras came into the restaurant daily. Each time they became easier to identify and distinguish. Bit by bit colors started to appear and, if you concentrated enough, you could even perceive each one of the 7 pools of chakra. 

It was very challenging at first. Allowing yourself to be affected by other people's energy was a burden really heavy to handle. Lots of emotions were mixed in that closed space. And it could hurt, to feel other people's feelings as if they were your own. It was overwhelming.

Some time ago you had found your peace extending your own chakra around you far enough so that other's energy couldn't reach your core, you strengthened your vibrations to a point they were stronger than everybody else's, preventing your energy and emotions from being polluted with those around you and prevailing over them. And now that you needed to move forward, that you wanted to learn about control, you had to make your peace aside to prioritize knowledge. Ironic. 

It was an exhausting exercise, way more exhausting than shinobi training. But it was rewarding, what for so many years you did by pure intuition, now you were doing consciously. 

Besides, it wasn't all dark and gloomy. Your power gave you the possibility to have things your way if the situation turned out to be more than you could handle. That usually meant, as a result, a feeling of tranquility, a feeling of certainty that it was all gonna be ok.  The power was way easier to bear when people's energy was bright, so it was kind of for selfish reasons but the results were convenient for everyone. If needed, making other people feel at ease was the easiest thing to do; it didn't hurt, it protected your core from other's pain or low-frequency emotions -usually negative- and it always ended up working in your favor.  All you had to do was extend your chakra and sync your vibrations to the ones of the human in question. Truth was, you didn't have to do it on purpose anymore, your vibrations were so strong everyone else just synced to them almost by accident. 

Lots of clients came to the place when you started working there for that exact reason. Unconsciously, everyone kept coming back to feel that lightness, that warmth.  

Nevertheless and despite everything, manipulating emotions wasn't your favorite thing to do even if it was for a good purpose. Life felt more real when you let others be honest. 

That and... maybe if you didn't fear your wounds that much you could... 

Maybe if you could let go of the past... 

Maybe if you weren't so scared of your own darkness...  

When it came to your power you were always careful. Perceiving chakra and observing its behavior was a safe zone and you found the way to work from there. It was like experimenting. Sometimes you'd try with certain words or phrases, other times facial expressions, and you awaited the reaction. It was particularly interesting when you found an energy that changed with the presence of another person, whether it was a loved one or a hated one. 

********

The afternoon was perfect. The sun was up, shining bright and warm, only cooled by the blowing of the wind. The sky was blue and eventual clouds floated miles above your head. The day went by at work without much to worry about. Megumi-san was kind of a weirdo and you two got along perfectly. She was teasing and playful. You were always joking and laughing. 

You took a deep breath and looked up to the sky. Some birds were flying by. You smiled. The sound of your steps on the ground made everything feel real. 

The buildings were all painted with messy patterns that seemed to have no order or purpose. Maybe there was going to be some kind of festival or something... 

No, the paintings were too messy to look good. That couldn't be for decoration. 

What happened here?

And then you bumped into him. Green goggles on his forehead, blonde spikey hair, evil giggles, with a bucket and a painting brush on his hand. 

 You had felt his energy a block ago. 

Was he trying to get revenge?

Was he just playing games? 

It felt like both. A dark type of amusement. A mischief. He knew he was doing wrong and he was enjoying it. 

As you approached him, the feeling of mischievousness increased. 

Intrigued by the kid, you walked towards him and stood by his side. With your hands in your pockets, you contemplated his painting. 

"Is that a hat?" you asked, tilting your head trying to get the shape of the drawing.

He turned around to see you with a defensive attitude, used to people scolding him for everything. 

"Maa maa, nee-chan, it's not a hat, it's a snake, see? It has an eye" he said while pointing at the spot on the lower edge.

"But why does it have a...That?" you were certain that you had never in your life seen a snake with a bulge, that looked more like a camel with no legs. 

Or a hat...

"It's fat cause it ate the entire bowl of ramen, dattebayo," the blonde said while nodding, a huge smile on his face. He seemed really proud of his creation. 

You laughed noisily, completely amused by the kid's imagination. 

A neighbor came out of the building, shouting.

"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING, LITTLE BEAST?!!" He threatened as he started walking towards the child furiously.

The blonde stared back at him for an instant and panicked. 

"RUUUN!!" He shouted at you as he sprinted to get as far away from there as possible. 

You did as told not giving it a thought. That man seemed terrifying. 

When you two finally stopped, you were safe, many streets away. You paused to catch your breath. He was already searching for his next victim with a malicious grin. 

He was punishing the people, you realized, and by doing so he was getting himself into so much trouble. 

Punishing them for what?

"Hey kid" you called him. "I know of a fence that is in desperate need of some painting" your house wasn't that far away. 

He followed you ready to attack, wielding the brush like a kunai. 

Your fence was wide enough to keep him entertained for a while. 

You took the lead, dipped your fingers in the bucket, and started doodling on the wood. His mesmerized gaze fell on you like a stray of sunshine. Finally, he had a partner in crime, and it wasn't Choji or Shikamaru, it was an adult. 

He didn't feel like the enemy anymore. 

You two started playing. Your clothes were probably going into the trash after this, the paint wouldn't wash off. 

"Too bad we don't have other colors," you sighed, enjoying your time with the kid. He had a nice laugh and three marks on each of his cheeks that made him look adorable. It had been a long time since you last played with a child.

"Maa, maa; when I become the Hokage I will have all the colors I want and people won't tell me what to do" he smiled satisfied. "You can come paint with me"

The Hokage?

"Why are you painting fences?... and walls?" 

That's not exactly something the Hokage would do... or maybe but not like this.

"I want everyone to acknowledge me," he said decisively.  

His energy amazed you. It felt like he was... broken?... but more than broken, cracked. It was like cracked glass refusing to shatter. His determination and wishes holding him together, helping him stand (like a tape or a band-aid). There was no nostalgia in him. Only the hopes that things would be better in the future. No, it wasn't hope... it was... 

Certainty.

You smiled to yourself with a lump in your throat and resisted the urge to hug him.  

What could have happened for a child to be so fractured?

And yet he seemed so brave, so strong. 

For a moment you forgot about his malicious shenanigans. His vibrations were so strong they were competing with yours. 

"You missed painting here" you teased him, passing your dirty fingers over his recent doodle. 

He pouted. "You need a little color too, nee-chan" his brush painted over your lines. "Now it's a clown" he giggled.

You burst in laughter. He looked at you surprised by your reaction. You hadn't scolded him or criticized him once. You were definitely a weirdo. 

He started laughing too. 

The game began, whoever covered most of the fence would win. He was already winning.

"That's not fair!! You have a brush!!" you complained. He stuck out his tongue to mock you in response.

"Naruto!!" you heard Iruka shout at the kid. "What do you think you are doing??!!!" he quickly grabbed the child's hand. 

You signaled Iruka to stop, your hands over your neck telling him to cut it. Naruto didn't know that was your house. As far as he was concerned you were manging a mischief together. 

Iruka looked at you startled and let go of Naruto's hand. 

"Iruka-sensei hi" you waved at him. It was time for your lesson. 

"You know each other?" Naruto was suddenly very confused. He stared at you and Iruka back and forth.

"Yeah, he's my sensei" you smiled. 

"You are a student?!" he was shocked.

You nodded. 

"But you look old"

"Hey! I'm not that old!" you put your fists on your waist, pouting.

Naruto thought about it. Maybe you weren't that much of an adult, not of the same kind as Iruka at least, or as the villagers. Old people don't do funny things and they don't paint fences. 

"Naruto go clean yourself" Iruka took the bucket and the brush away from him and sent him home. 

"YN-san I apologize for Naruto, he's just... I'll make it up for you" he said.

"Don't worry" You giggled "I bumped into him while he was using the village as his canvas and a man came out to beat the crap out of him so I thought it would be better if I just..."

 Teamed up with him. Take him out of there. Be friendly. 

"I'm sorry," he repeated while looking at your dirty fence.

"Don't be. It has potential. This right here looks like an eagle, and if I fix these, they could be mountains, and these right here..."

He just looked at you and smiled. You were kind and tender. Not ruled by people’s ideas of how things had to be done. You always... behaved unexpectedly. It was as if you could see beyond things. Whether it was a landscape behind the doodles or a friend behind a missbehaved boy, you never settled with appearences. 

 There is always more than meets the eye. There are always things we don’t really know.

But you wanted to know...

"Is he the student you always talk about?" Of course Iruka had told you about him. Sometimes you didn't even train and all you did was talk about your lives. Whenever any of you had a bad day you would always put support first. It was pretty comforting to have someone to talk to. Iruka's energy was one of the warmest, sweetest, most compassionate you've ever met, you admired that. It made you feel safe. 

"Yeah" he scratched his head.

"Oh, I get it now" you laughed as you got into your house. 

************

CH 4  CH 6

Masterlist

A/N: Ok, guys so first of all sorry for my grammar, spelling, syntaxis, and everything that has to do with writing structure. English is not my first language and boi this is harder than I thought (I'm better at writing in Spanish I promise)

Second: reader has been through a lot and I mean A LOT. She's been through so much I have enough material to write an entire ff about it like hell maybe even two who knows, so I'm struggling with how to tell you all that information. Maybe you won't get to know everything, just the important things. Bottom line she's had a rough time. (I'm actually a little bit scared to write that part cause it's pretty angsty, like right now she chooses peace and nice feelings but back then she didn't and turned her life into hell but I don't feel my writing is good enough to do justice to all that so... hope I get better) that doesn't mean there won't be angst i mean, there's no way to avoid angst when it comes to kakashi, so wish me luck.

And third: I suck at drawing so I can't show you what her power, energy and vibrations and all look like. I hope I was clear enough to give you a general idea (I'll probably get deeper into it later) but if I wasn't please let me know and I'll explain it better, it would be soooo helpful to know what you understood. 

And last but not least: THANKS FOR READING. let me know if you want to be added to the taglist :3 <3

@femboyneji @spnningtop @strawberrycakesstuff @cosplayartponypoli @ren-hatake

[yeoldontknow]

🖊writerly conversation tag

tagged by @j-pping to do this amazing interview/reflections tag. of course she put together one of the most amazing tags ever because she is brilliant. thank you for tagging me angel! 

questions below the cut!

2020

what was the most challenging part of writing this year?

gosh...i think for me the hardest bit was staying both motivated and inspired. a lot of my inspiration comes from being out in the world. im an introvert but i enjoy being out in the city around the noise and the people and the buildings on my own. the majority of my writing used to be done while riding the subway or on a weekend after id gone out somewhere. a lot of my fics are inspired by locations, and experiences within those locations. being inside for the majority of the year made it hard for me to remember how...people interact with or relate to the spaces around them. so i felt like a lot of the time staying inspired was coming from places within just me that felt inauthentic. i think my writing benefits from my ability to see multiple perspectives, so i felt like a lot of dialogue or writing itself was suffering just coming from me alone. it took a lot of work to ensure that it wasnt like that. 

and then, motivation was also so hard. the internet and the news and everything about america, the planet, the everything was unrelenting and draining. we as people were privy to so much trauma this year, to the collapse and fracture of communities, lives, governments. there were several weeks at the end of may and into june where i just...couldnt. i had no energy for anything. it happened again in november after the election and the windfall of it. energetic tensions were so high it just felt so hard to push out words when things were breaking everywhere. like there were more important things i needed to focus on, and healing was one of them.

what was the most enjoyable/rewarding part of writing this year?

i enjoyed the new community of writers/friends i found by writing for bts again. they challenged me and pushed me to better myself. @jamaisjoons is so inspirational in the way she generates community and encourages relationships between storytellers. doing the summer bucket list pushed me out of my hermit hole for camp nano, and i cranked out molotov cocktail and felt so proud of it. it mattered so much to me because it was the first long thing id written after a period of feeling deceased, and it was so enjoyable because there was a sense of community around it. its easy to forget how essential having a support system in your creative community is.

what piece has left the most impact on you and why?

probably ciperion. words cannot express how proud i am of that story and the direction its going in. i read it back sometimes and i realize that my writing was elevated because of that piece. tbh molotov was responsible for that lift, but ciperion was just a whole other tier. ive also never written anything like that story before and it felt so good exploring the themes of seafaring and pirates. 

what have you learned about yourself through the process of writing in the past year?

that i absolutely am someone who took for granted how inspiring the world is even if i see it as a stressor. but also that writing isnt necessarily about being inspired. its about pushing on when its hard. some of my best pieces came from that kind of push this year. 2020 felt like...a slog through most of it, but i kept pushing myself to write even when i was low and tired. i realized that some of my best writing comes from that push, when its not easy and when its difficult and i have to think harder. thats where i grow. 

how has your writing changed in the past year? how have you grown?

i think im more syntax and detailed focused than i used to be. lately ive been experimenting with making the act of reading feel like pleasure. my favourite books are the ones where i read a sentence, and im moved because it felt nice to read or it felt powerful. the sentence itself had power, not the image it was trying to convey. somehow separate, if that makes sense. theres a lot i need to learn before i could go off comfortably and try to write a book, and this is what ive been trying to master. my attention to detail has grown, and sometimes i think thats a detriment. i think sometimes im too detailed and i dont leave my reader enough power on their own. im still finding that balance, but i think im pleased right now with what im trying to push myself to master.

2021

ignoring your wips for a second, if you had all the time and energy in the world to write your magnum opus piece, what would it be about? why is that the dream story you’d write, all other things controlled for?

ive had two books in my mind forever. one was originally being written as a fanfic in a different fandom before i stopped and realized its too big and so much more important, and is worth being a book id like to write. if i wrote an opus like this it would actually be a book id submit to publishers but ~

- hundreds of years in the future, society has learned how to cure most diseases. for those we cannot, the sick person can be cryogenically frozen for a period of time until a cure is found. there is, however, a limit to the length of time they are frozen. no one has ever been frozen for over 100 years, and the main character is a scientist embarking on the experiment to do just that. it is, effectively, time travel. the main character is rash, selfish, sarcastic - not a very nice person; invested in their work and science and little else. they freeze themselves and wake up in the future. during their time in rehab they have to confront the horror theyve made of themselves, the horror people have made of the future, learn to be vulnerable. they end up falling in love with another scientist etc etc. theres so much more to this story and the world is enormous. one day ill revisit it

- a fictional play on orpheus in the underworld where a female main character’s brother was sold by their mother to the goddess of the underworld (helena instead of hades) for eternal youth. the gods all live in a hotel (the concept of this main thing is being used in elysian fields but its not remotely the same) after they were removed from the heavens. main character (ophelia) must gather several totems from the gods to prove her worth and survive her trip into the underworld to rescue him. id like to not focus on a woman finding romance, and instead a woman finding herself, her strength, her devotion to family, her power, and connecting with her history.

how do you want to grow in your writing this year?

this year id like to find balance, like i mentioned above, with my need for detail and my trust in my readers. the balance between detail and dialogue. i want to try to condense my writing again so not everything is a goddamn series. the ideas i have are huge and thats great but i need to remember how to parse things again, while still maintaining impact.

what’s one thing you’d wish to see in the fan-writing community this year?

i want more community, in general. as a multi fan, i see pockets in the kpop fandom where it exists and im well and truly aware that its recently become incredibly hard to foster on the exo side. ill just say that. maybe i dont witness it or its happening amongst blogs i havent found or have not found me. i want to see less dialogue about ‘popular blogs,’ whatever that means; less focus on notes; less worries about statistics. i want people to remember that fandom is not about numbers, and the moment you make it about that is the moment you stop having fun. i want less fear from writers regarding sharing work they read and liked, less shame around it. i want to see more vocal communication for the things people like and don’t like, more engagement and more interaction. the concept of popular blogs is so ridiculous to me, because no one has any control over the metrics. no one has control over who follows them or reads their work except the person doing the actual reading. i want people to realize they hold so much power - a person with 10k notes has as much power as a person with 2 notes because sharing is what fosters community. i want this fandom to remember to share again.

name one new thing you want to try doing in your writing this year.

gosh i really love postmodernism in writing. think like mark z danielewski, who plays with the shapes of words or the act of holding a book - the physicality of it. id like to maybe write a choose your own adventure, or do something that encompasses multiple platforms. or even, more importantly, finish as still as sound and time runner. those are more reasonable goals. time runner actually is done, i just need to stop pressuring myself about it and edit it to get it up. asas, too, is largely done i just need to get my ass together. i have so many other ideas no one has ever seen i need to finish what ive started. thats a real goal.

tagging: @yehet-me-up @jamaisjoons @kyungseokie @jenmyeons @luffles424 @yoonia @shadowsremedy @chillingkoo @onherwings @inkedtae @ninibears-erigom @imdifferentshadesofpurple @readyplayerhobi @ditzymax @sugaurora @snackhobi @yeojaa @sahmfanficbts @xjoonchildx @johobi and anyone else who wants to do this. as always please only do so if comfortable or you want to!

[inventors-fair]

Shareholders Meeting (Generosity Commentary)

This was absolutely new territory for me, 100%. I used to be a Sen Triplets player, for cryin’ out loud. Who would I give my opponents anything, ever, for any reason? But that’s the beauty of this, though. Being a Magic player and running design contests means I have to see beyond what I might want to play with right off the bat. And I do have my manipulative tactics from time to time. Has anyone seen that Modern deck that synergizes with Suture Priest/Blood Seeker, Hunted Phantasm, Forbidden Orchard, Sickness in the Ranks, and Blood Artist? It’s jank but I love it.

When talking about these cards, there are the usual questions about design and likes/dislikes, but there’s the most important question, and one that’s gonna come up a lot:

Is there any reason this card HAS to enter under an opponent’s control?

The main issue I saw with a lot of cards is that there wasn’t always a reason for them to be under an opponent’s control, instead of just having an effect that could exist on the card regularly. For this commentary, I’ll be calling that a “Control Factor.” Also, some cards that were potential winners/runners will be marked as Judge Picks.

Let’s take a look.

@aethernalstars​ — Labyrinthine Towershell

Likes/Dislikes: This is an oddball design first and foremost. I can see the inspiration from the art, and while I don’t play WoW I can get the gist of what that place is, what the world is, through your design, so that’s nice! Shroud being what it is, though, and considering an opponent gains control of it, I’m not sure why that was chosen over hexproof. Just so an opponent can’t get rid of it with targeting effects? I can see how this would slow them down. I’m not sure why blue/red are the colors for this card. It feels mostly blue/green. Is the red because of the control? Additionally, I feel that even with the color weight this card is severely undercosted; you made a powerful ability, which is good! Just needs balance.

Control Factor: I’m feel that this could have been a hexproof creature with “Whenever a creature an opponent controls” etc. to affect their board that way. What’s the flavor of an opponent gaining control of this? Why not just have the turtle as a kind of maze guardian? It’s a strong ability and contender.

Nitpicks: Second ability should probably be an “as” ability and not an ETB trigger, and needs “an opponent of your choice.” Or see Xantcha’s oracle.

~~~

@askkrenko​ — Maheer, Trusted Advisor (JUDGE PICK)

Likes/Dislikes: I had a headache trying to figure out what this card would do practically on the battlefield. And you know what? I had a field day and I loved it and wow, this card is a competitive player’s dream. The resource management, the potential loss, the incredible decisions to be made, the way that this has to be utilized for optimizing life loss and card advantage and deciding who gets what where... Wow. I can imagine this card being in some competitive cube and/or actually severely affecting eternal formats and/or limited. Impressive and difficult. For two mana I’d say it’s pushed, but pushed ain’t broken. Probably.

Control Factor: Yes, the switching of control for life loss and the flavor of a lying advisor traveling across the battlefield works both flavorfully and mechanically.

Nitpicks: “Activate this ability,” not “Use.”

~~~

@dabudder​ — Bounty Board

Likes/Dislikes: Fight is a difficult ability sometimes. And this card has repeatable fight, colorless fight, and ramping. I feel that that’s just enough to be a break. Arena and Triangle of War are old as butts, and nowadays I don’t know if there would be that much of a precedent at such a low cost. If you have a good enough board state even in limited, this card becomes a gold-giver in exchange for destruction at two mana. I do like the flavor, and the flavor text ain’t bad. Probably still too big a risk.

Control Factor: I like the flavor but I don’t understand it entirely. Who is on the bounty board? Your creatures, or your opponent’s creatures? If it’s yours, why are you playing a card that puts a bounty on them? If it’s your opponents, wouldn’t YOU get the reward for fulfilling the bounty?

Nitpicks: “Gold” should be capitalized, and probably be “Treasure.”

~~~

@deafeningsandwichpeach​ — Ancient Sea Gate

Likes/Dislikes: I feel that unfortunately this card is fundamentally broken, and not in your favor. Yeah, they skip a draw step, but now you’re giving an opponent a land that can activate a Emmessi Tome for two mana every turn. At that point you’ve lost a land drop, you’ve given them card advantage at the cost of a single draw step, and you are immediately and woefully behind. The mechanics of this card as they are now are interesting, absolutely interesting, and absolutely unplayable.

Control Factor: Mechanically I kind of see what you were trying to go for. Flavorfully I don’t understand at all.

Nitpicks: None. (Well, I mean, the border for lands that make colored mana should match, but that’s not your fault at all.)

~~~

@dimestoretajic​ — Xantcha, Enlightened Infiltrator

Likes/Dislikes: Once I could read this card, I understood its intentions. It’s a strong callback to Xantcha, so you know, kudos for that. And also, this card only works in multiplayer, which is a bit of a problem. If you only have one opponent, then you play this card, you activate the 0 and draw/lose life, and then you have to attack her until she gets to ten because that zero ability literally can’t be activated. If you’re the only opponent, then nobody can be targeted. Was that intentional? If so, kudos for making a complex card but un-kudos because that feels super unintuitive. “lowest numerical value” also doesn’t entirely make sense to me, because it’s not a “negative ten” ability, it’s “remove ten loyalty counters” as an activation cost. 

                         I feel that there could be a risk-reward potentially associated with this card, or you could add the must abilities into the activations themselves, but it’s hovering in between clunky and unplayable. Assuming the best, that you’re in a 3-4 player game, you have a insanely-difficult-to-remove clock for three mana that draws you a crapload of cards. Which, you know, some people could like! But it’s the kind of card that doesn’t make you friends.

Control Factor: Yep, checks out. See above notes on opponent targeting in 1v1, though.

Nitpicks: “0″ abilities don’t need a plus or minus. Was this a card creator limiting factor? If so, ignore my ignorance.

~~~

@emmypupcake — Volatile Mixture

Likes/Dislikes: It’s a cute bauble that swings around and hurts people, checks out. Colored artifact with a relevant ability, sure thing. How does it play? ... Well, I was doubtful and then I read it again. Wow, I really misread this card. So you’re playing hot potato for a whole lot of turns. Okay, that’s fun. That’s fun! Yeah, I totally messed up when I read this the first time. I think that this card is pretty interesting in concept. I think that it could kind of be just a tax, though, and it’s entirely possible that it just never goes off during a game and everyone is spending two mana to ensure that they don’t get stuck. Or, for three mana, you’ve made kind of a worse shock. It’s a perfectly fine card that probably needs a more volatile gimmick. What if it flipped coins or something? I don’t know, I’m spitballing. Hm, but no, ignore that, I’m liking the flavor of having to keep it under control. Shame that it just doesn’t have a guaranteed explosion.

Control Factor: Fun enough to use the wording, juggles well, forces decisions. Checks out!

Nitpicks: “Volatile Mixture enters the battlefield under target opponent’s control.” Could also Xantcha that wording.

~~~

@evscfa1​ — Contract of Peace

Likes/Dislikes: There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this card’s design, but it feels clunky to say the least. Four separate abilities that are tangentially connected, the weird activation, the static... I think, more than anything, I don’t get it. What’s the contract? What’s the peace of a one-sided battlefield? Is it ironic, with a bribery type of activation? What do the Treasures have to do with peace? This card could be printed but again, I don’t understand why it would exist, or the world around it, or what sort of set it would belong in. “Disjointed” is a good word for this card. A singular design that doesn’t feel like it meshes with any flavor or archetype. All cards are submitted without context, but the best cards imply context, and that’s where I feel the mark was missed.

Control Factor: Is an opponent being forced to sign a contract? Again, the “why” of this card feels obfuscated.

Nitpicks: “15” should be written out as “fifteen.”

~~~

@fractured-infinity​ — Sleeper Agent’s Gambit

Likes/Dislikes: I loved this card until I didn’t. On the surface, you have a fantastic flavorful design with great flavor text and a new, silly ability. And then, for three mana, you essentially ensure that your opponents are going to have the most frustrating time of their lives. In limited, this card is an early-game decimator, and that’s...well, it feels a little harsh. Two targets (creature you control + opponent) and the multicolored factor aren’t that hard to get around, and once you do, my gut says that this card is more frustrating than fun, especially when you consider some of the creatures that you can give to your opponent. How could it have been improved? Well, consider: what if it was an aura? It could be put on a creature then given to an opponent, and it had those abilities. “Gambits” are calculated but still have a risk, like a non-indefinite strategy. I want to like this idea but I’m still getting frustrating over fun. Look at Necrotic Plague, for example. In kind of the same vein, y’know?

Control Factor: Perfect.

Nitpicks: If all else fails and you wanna keep this card, the wording could be a little more streamlined: “Target opponent gains control of target creature you control. That creature gains ‘This permanent can’t be sacrificed’ and ‘At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice a creature.’” For your future, make sure “can’t” replaces “cannot,” and that punctuation goes inside quotes.

~~~

@fumblehawk​ — Gwafa, Monopolous Merchant

Likes/Dislikes: Out of all the things I expected, a different take on Gwafa “MF’in’” Hazid was not one of them. So the card itself! It’s cool. It’s a little weird, but it’s cool. I like the idea of drawing cards as payment for forcing gifts. The tax effect is something very interesting to consider with how much this card kind of wants to get rid of cards, and you can end up giving things that tax all players, and even make some kind of freaky Zedruu deck. I mean, this feels MADE for Zedruu and Grand Arbiter and all kinds of EDH decks. The thing is, this card doesn’t feel too different from the OG Gwafa, and I don’t know how to feel about that. There’s nothing wrong with revisiting legendary creatures, of course, but the effect... I don’t know, I’m iffy on it. This is a strong submission but I feel that there could have been a different method of execution.

Control Factor: Checks out!

Nitpicks: The “draw a card” should be a separate sentence, just like, “They do the thing. Draw a card.” Secondly, it’s “Spells your opponents CAST cost” etc. Small note, but...this card is really small. Consider downloading Magic Set Editor or finding a better way to export your cards, if you can? 

~~~

@gollumni​ — Gift of Humility

Likes/Dislikes: Don’t be humble, you finished your final! Congrationulations! So this card. It’s a’ight? So here’s the thing. Nine Lives + this card. HA. Hilarious! Delusions of Mediocrity! Illusions of Grandeur! Nefarious Lich! There’s a lot of mean and dumb and fun synergies with this card, and the thing is, well, I know you were in a place when you submitted this. So I’ll excuse the lack of flavor text and whatever and just say that, like Harmless Offering from Eldritch Moon, this card has potential and still nobody’s gonna want to open it from a booster pack. Unless it becomes massively competitive in some stupid Esper Lich Control deck.

Control Factor: Yep, that’s the point of the card!

Nitpicks: Get some sleep.

~~~

@hiygamer​ — Tibalt, Chaotic Menace

Likes/Dislikes: It’s interesting how many legendary cards people submitted for this contest. Hm, guess we did have three as example designs. Regardless! So the activated abilities are the best part of this card. I do like the tension between a random player and a random player who’s not Tibalt’s owner. In 1v1 this can get really tense. Ditch a card at random, flip a coin, aaaand... Nope, you’re stuck with him. My main complaint is the second trigger. “The number of loyalty counters that were on him as the turn began?” There are so many memory issues potentially associated with that. The more triggers that go off and the more factors that go into calculating that, the less reasonable that ability becomes. This card isn’t bad, and I know why you wanted that ability, but there has to be a better way of making that happen. I’d workshop that a bit. And also, if you’re using MSE? Consider changing individual text sizes because wow this card is hard to read. 

Control Factor: Yep, makes sense that he’s going around wrecking face, and the complexities are totally fine.

Nitpicks: I’m pretty sure the first ability should read “You must activate at least one of Tibalt’s abilities each turn if able.” Then “whenever” is just...weird and gets into Judge Tower territory.

~~~

@hypexion​ — Jenny Spellshare

Likes/Dislikes: So let’s start off with the fact that I like this card’s abilities a lot. That’s... Well, honestly, I don’t even have to qualify that. It’s a powerful Bant commander with crazy group-hug abilities and LOTS of token copies that, while powerful, can be mitigated into some nasty stuff. You got wheels, eggs, control cards, draw limiters—like, imagining setting up things like Hullbreacher and the ilk and going nuts with copies. So yeah, fun Commander card and could even be interesting in limited! My two minor complains that stop this from being really great: One, a faerie creature without flying hasn’t been printed in a non-supplemental set since 1995. Two... “Jenny?” “Judith” at least has Hebrew origins, but man, that name threw me off. I do have a friend named Jenny who plays Magic, funnily enough. Yeah, heh, just something to consider. Kinda takes me out of the world. Consider flavor text?

Control Factor: Perfect for what you want to do.

Nitpicks: What is UP with that line spacing? Did you hit shift+enter? I’m talking about between “cast” and “Whenever.” Or did that just go to a separate line. In any cast those should DEFINITELY be separated. ... Wow, don’t we all love nitpicks. This is probably the nit-picky-est one I’ve done in a while.

~~~

@i-am-the-one-who-wololoes​ — Xymik, Who Gifts Pain

Likes/Dislikes: So, yeah, Xymic is a name I want to hold me up against a brick wall and weight its body on me, midnight on Halstead street, neon blurs in the air. That is a sexy name. ... Cards? Cards. SO. It’s pretty good. I can see this being part of either a supplemental Commander set OR equally a standard Grixis-themed set, which we haven’t had in a while. Really sucks that Ikoria was both not great gameplay wise and also released in the middle of a pandemic. For this card, personally, I initially thought “well you can just merge them” but I see what you did, clever clogs! Donate a permanent, make ‘em chuck a card. Multiplayer, send a permanent around the table, make ‘em lose life! Huh, this is actually kind of awesome. Small personal factors: I would pump the P/T a little, perhaps, for a four-color card; this could be as much as a 5/3. This does feel more like a Demon than a Devil to me, too. And, a tiny bit of flavor text could go a long way. Could you also have the second ability read “spell or permanent?” It’s niche, but...

Control Factor: Perf-a-rooni.

Nitpicks: None!

~~~

@justincase-1012​ — Fire Ant Infestation

Likes/Dislikes: Conceptually, this is cool. Ant infestations done flavorfully are neat, and I like the aspect of you not having to continuously deal damage because you can hit once and then pseudo-populate. On second thought reviewing this card, I think that that’s surprisingly flavorful. Once the ants get in, the rest of the ants can just pump in more freakin’ ants. There are wording nitpicks I’ll get to later, but the gist of this card is that it’s very strong and requires a balance to also make the damage from attacking tokens not hit you too. You know what, I’ll give it a tentative seal of approval. I don’t really get why it’s a 1/3 and not, well, a 3/1, and I’m not sold on the flavor of an “infestation” being a creature. “Fire Ant Colony” could work? Not super flavorful, but it’s in progress. Also, MAJOR issue: There’s a card called Fire Ants with a different ability. Named tokens of previous cards absolutely exist, see Future Sight spellshapers, but this one is way too similar. “Fire Ant Drone” maybe.

Control Factor: Yup, does what it’s gotta do.

Nitpicks: Wording time: “...that player creates a 1/1 red and black Insect creature token named Fire Ant with “At the beginning of your upkeep, Fire Ant deals 1 damage to you.”” And see above notes on that token name.

~~~

@koth-of-the-hammerpants — Temporary Loan

Likes/Dislikes: There is a fundamental flaw in how this card works when you have two extra mana. So, you play this turn four, and now it’s turn five on your go. You drop a three-mana creature, then give it to an opponent, then they give you a random permanent, then you immediately pay UB and sacrifice what they gave you to get your card back. So this card effectively becomes “Whenever a permanent enters the battlefield under your control, you may pay UB. If you do, target opponent sacrifices a permanent” in the most roundabout way. In short, this card is not fun, especially with lands that you can tap for mana in response to entering. under your control.

Control Factor: Flavorfully understandable, see above mechanical notes. Not worth it.

Nitpicks: The “If you do” clause is a run-on sentence and should end with “...a permanent they control and you gain control of it.” “Sacrifice” and “Gain” should be capitalized. And, um... “Time’s up my friend” should definitely be “Time’s up, my friend.” with a period. Because otherwise it sounds like the friend is Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction.

~~~

@mardu-lesbian​ — Grift Horse (JUDGE PICK)

Likes/Dislikes: My eyes could not roll out of my head any harder at that name. Stellar work. So! This card! Wow. “Gimme the goods, then I’m gonna wreck shop.” For a four-mana potential fun removal gimmick and an indefinite steal, this is a surprisingly powerful card. “Gimme Ugin, aaaand...here’s a horse. AND BOLT THE HORSE.” Also, I had to double-check, but good wording on that second ability! Scab-Clan Giant, yeah? In short, this does sort of kind of become a rough removal card and more or less wrecks shop with an opponent’s bomb, but rares are supposed to be powerful, y’know? I can’t fault it for that. I’d love to see this in limited, I’d love to see some EDH bullcrap go down with making an indestructible horse or whatever, and hm, what would the art be? Maybe an Eldrazi horse, actually, with tentacles coming out of the mouth. Horse Horror? Yeah, this opens the question: “how powerful can red’s indefinite stealing be?”

Control Factor: Shifty Thrifty Grifty.

Nitpicks: If you’re using MSE, you can adjust the flavor bar offset. Also I’m officially challenging you to draw this horse.

~~~

@misterstingyjack​ — Mercenary Contract

Likes/Dislikes: So...okay, so you’re turning a creature you control into a mercenary for your opponents? Kind of? You’re getting gold for the things they’re doing, makes sense. I guess. This card’s kind of hard to work around. It’s a lot of text, too. So the thing is, I don’t really get why you’d have to give something to an opponent for this flavor to work. Enchant a creature you control, it gets a buff and has to attack, and whenever it attacks you get a Treasure. Spreading things around doesn’t make the most sense in the world, honestly. But I do get it, and I think I understand the gameplay prioritization you were shooting for. I’m being a little harsh on the card because I feel that in a printed set it could just be worded/printed differently. Fundamentally, it’s not the strangest thing in the world.

Control Factor: See above notes about flavor. Main problem is that why is your contract sending it to work for an opponent? Wouldn’t the opponent have to sign something? Contracts are hard.

Nitpicks: “Whenever enchanted creature attacks or an ability of enchanted creature is activated, if its owner does not control it, that player creates a Treasure token.” See Illusionist’s Bracers.

~~~

@nicolbolas96​ — Slimeknife,Mercenary Thallid

Likes/Dislikes: Step one: play Pandemonium/Warstorm Surge. Step two: get literally a 1/1 creature or token. Step three: infinite cards/ETB triggers. That last ability has a LOT of random infinite combos it can do, and I kind of like that, but it’s really asking to be abused. But that’s not a bad thing. Kind of. There are probably more ways to deal damage and whatnot. So the thing is, this card does give the tokens to your opponents, but...why? What major flavorful purpose does it serve? Dowsing Dagger created Plants because it symbolized the undergrowth that the creature had to cut through. Hunted creatures made tokens because they were, well, being hunted. What about Slimeknife? That ability really doesn’t feel like it needs to be on this card, and this card honestly could be a rare. It’s a GREAT deathtouch commander, probably one of the best if it existed. Doesn’t excuse that disconnect, though. ... And yes, “Fungus Assassin” is awesome.

Control Factor: Ultimately, not necessary. The card works better without it.

Nitpicks: “Creature tokens,” not “token creatures.” See Aven Wind Guide. Also, check the comma in the name?

~~~

@nine-effing-hells​ — Overeager Adjutant

Likes/Dislikes: I’m kind of worried about this card. A one-mana 3/3 with haste is pretty nasty. Goblin Guide and Monastery Swiftspear are already challenging enough, with Vexing Devil also thrown into the burn pile. The question is whether or not the drawback of 1/1s that can’t block and the card disadvantage will be good enough to stop an aggro build. In theory, there would come a point in limited where your opponents are drawing extra cards and playing creatures the Adjutant can’t get through, or you’re doing some nasty removal... But a strong aggro player running something like Burchett’s Gruul build or a devastating Human midrange build will use this card to their advantage. Questions of flavor come up, too. How is eagerness creating tokens? Drawing cards is a maybe, but the things that are being done don’t feel connected to, say, the attacking or you having creatures enter. 

Control Factor: I don’t understand flavorfully where the humans are coming from and why they can’t block this creature.

Nitpicks: None.

~~~

@real-aspen-hours​ — Gift // grift (JUDGE PICK)

Likes/Dislikes: Well, it’s a split card. And it’s a good split card. And it does good things. So, I won’t beat around the bush, the nitpicks are really what doomed this card. There’s just a lot that I had to excuse to make it a judge pick, which is kind of a bummer but against the other submissions, it stands out. So let’s leave that for that section and talk about the good things. I love the rhyming split card names. Frankly, I want to have a future split card contest just to see the weirdness that people come up with. “Gift” is a perfectly acceptable upshifted Harmless Offering, and wow, “grift” is one of the most powerful and frightening cards I’ve seen in a while. It’s reminiscent of Skyclave Apparition, but with the Treasure advantage. This card can 100% take over games and worth playing in nonred decks for that alone. It might need to be four mana, possibly even five, but I do like it a lot.

Control Factor: Yep, “Gift” does it, and actually “grift” too. Heh, it’s neat.

Nitpicks: 1) Grift needs to be capitalized. 2) Your submission was missing rarity. 3) I capitalized “Sorcery” for you but in your original submission both were lowercase. 4) Both rules texts were missing periods at the end. 5) “Nonland” is one word. 5) “Its,” not “it’s.” 6) “Treasure” needs to be capitalized.

~~~

@shakeszx — Alder Hahn, helpful recruiter

Likes/Dislikes: So this is pretty obviously a Commander-oriented card, and that’s alright. I was iffy about some of the flavor stuff, but actually, the “my men always collect” line aligns nicely with the Treasure token creation. Attacks OR blocks—that’s a good catch. Makes 1v1 matches not too overpowered, and you can get some awesome control in. Giving defender tokens to players, or forcing them to block bad attacks... This could be a pretty fun card, honestly. The more I think about it the more I’m down for it. It’s outside of my ordinary play style, but there are symmetrical effects and bribery fun stuff that could make this a funky little card. Not a fan of the name at all, though. “Helpful Recruiter” doesn’t tell me anything about, like, why he’s recruiting, or who his men are, or his motivations, or whatever. The flavor text is great but “helpful” is just...ech, I’m overthinking it. “Recruiter” too, though, like, is he forcing them to be recruited? It feels more like reconnaissance or Mafia-style forced brutality. 

Control Factor: Bingo, we’re gettin’ boys.

Nitpicks: Capitalize all important words in the name. Also, the second ability could be “Whenever a creature you own but don’t control attacks or blocks,” right?

~~~

@thedirtside — Burden of Parenthood

Likes/Dislikes: A mythic Nettlevine Blight-ish self-replicated token giver of awesome proportions that means players have to carefully strategize their creature interactions over time? Awesome. I like how if they get two of them, then... You... Oh, wait, it’s... Ha, um, there might be a lil’ flaw here. So, Opponent has a Squire, you play BoP. Their first upkeep, they get their Squire token. You do yours. Their second upkeep, they stack the triggers: “I’m going to have the Burden upkeep trigger resolve first, giving me a copy of my Squire. Then, the first token trigger will resolve, and I’ll sacrifice the second token I created this way.” So all this card does until you get rid of it is allow them to carefully make a token then sac a token each turn. Was that intentional? If so, well, why? Kinda falls apart when you take into consideration Magic’s #weirdness. Also. What does this have to do with parenthood. I’m genuinely stumped what the flavor is supposed to convey. Is this like...people being forced to give birth to putrescent goblins or something??

Control Factor: This part does check out, yeah. However, the contest specified that you weren’t supposed to use effects that gave each player something.

Nitpicks: There shouldn’t really be “target” there. “Nonland” is one word. The base power and toughness should be “1/1″ instead of “1.”

~~~

@walker-of-the-yellow-path​ — Questing Grail (JUDGE PICK)

Likes/Dislikes: ETB ability, fantastic, okay, we’re conveying that you’re giving someone a challenge your creatures are going to tackle. Attack trigger, fantastic, they’re getting the thrill of the hunt and the charge. Damage trigger, the blood is being spilled and the opponent is considering how much they want to then increase the damage all around and the risk of combat. This card makes combat so complicated, and so much more thrilling, and wowza this would make for some insane limited games. I have two issues. Firstly, this needs to be legendary for the love of God this needs to be legendary. It would fit the flavor, and then the three separate triggers wouldn’t be a pain. As much. Secondly, the last ability. So, are you supposed to get a blood counter on it for each creature that deals combat damage? Because unless something has first strike, it’s going to all happen at the same time. Multiple counters, or just when you get hit for the first time? The intentions are unclear. So I would phrase it to say “Whenever one or more creatures deal combat damage to you, put [a OR that many] blood counter[s] on Questing Grail and their controller gains control of Questing Grail.” Aside from that, this is some Eldraine-y Knight-y Bloody Greatness. 

Control Factor: 10/10. 

Nitpicks: None!

~~~

@whuh-oh​ — Gilded Egg // Prized Hatchling (JUDGE PICK)

Likes/Dislikes: This card is a pain in the butt. I love it! So, let’s see. The ways in which you have to ramp up to getting this card specifically under your control is really weird, and measured, and you have to take care of some careful calculation. The sorcery speed is super important, though, and I’m glad you added that in. And man, hatchling counters? Ludevic would be proud. On the flip side, a 2/4 flier in green is pretty rough. I don’t know entirely how I feel about that part specifically. The Food token, ha, that’s glorious. The mana generation, though? WOW. Alhammarret’s Archive makes a whole lot of cool infinite stuff possible, but it’s not easy, I’ll say that much. The mana with the food, like—Wow again. I am Wowed.

Control Factor: The tempting offer and the opportunity is really well-done. Plays nice with the flavor of the sought-after prize.

Nitpicks: Tsk, go back to Modern Masters (2013) witcha “is indestructible”-lookin’ self, CHUMP. ... Ahem. Sorry, I got possessed by the ghost of someone from 2013 elated to open a Vedalken Shackles.

~~~

@wolkemesser​ — Eden

Likes/Dislikes: Alright, there are...a few points to start from. 

Mechanically: if Eden’s controller is doing anything but adding a single mana with this card, then they are bad Magic player, or they have an exact and direct answer to the token being created, because poisonous 3 and a “lose the game” token (with evasion) are so utterly broken that there is no way you’d want an opponent to gain control of them. Even in a 3+ person game, what happens to you? Play Eden, give it to someone last in the order, they give your next opponent a skulking deathtoucher, and then you lose the game. This can happen as early as turn one. In 1v1 this card has no real purpose other than to be used once and basically never again unless someone is forced to use it. In multiplayer games it’s a death sentence. You’re losing a land drop from the deck for a card that won’t ever be used in a way that’s advantageous to your gameplan.

Contextually: In what set is this card supposed to exist? You use both Skulk and Poisonous, retired and unpopular mechanics that don’t appear on the same token even if they do have a possibility of being together. In what environment would this card be played?

Flavorfully: So this is the real, Biblical garden of Eden? Or at least it’s supposed to be? Why are there multiple snakes being made, then? Satan entered the body of a single snake, not a snake that grew more powerful, and the garden entirely was more than just that one tree, granting knowledge, not power. You’ve made a garden of temptation, not paradise.

As a final note after all that rambling, if it was indeed read: On the most technical level, and I hate to say it, the Bible is...Christian IP, basically. There is no Magic world in which Eden could exist because of that. Some religious symbols have also become fantasy tropes such as angels and demons, but the concept of angelic protectors and demonic lords have existed beyond specific religions. This is a specific and sacred religious place. From a strictly professional perspective, err on the side of caution when submitting in the future.

Control Factor: Technically fulfilling.

Nitpicks: The token should be “black and green,” not “green and black.” For the first ability, why strictly from the hand when Crucible of Worlds and whatnot exist?

Tune in next week, when... Well, did you see some of the synergies and combos that I mentioned above? Keep them in mind. Thank you all for your submissions.

—@abelzumi​

[flightofaqrow]

kiss with a fist

qrow + James ( @caeloservare​ )

“Let me remind you, how exactly I run my army is none of your business and you are not allowed to sniff around in Atlas.”

“what makes you think i care about how you run your army? i’m more worried about what you do with it. or is that just more guilt i hear?”

...qrow has a split second to dodge the punch.

everything about it is feral and raw, because that’s what happens when words don’t work.

They needed this.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Just cause that’s what I did doesn’t mean you have to accuse the others, Jimmy.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“Oh, shut up, I bet you all did!”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“yeah? and i bet you run background checks on alla your men, don’t you? this was just more of… an informal process.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“Let me remind you, how exactly I run my army is none of your business and you are not allowed to sniff around in Atlas.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“what makes you think i care about how you run your army? i’m more worried about what you do with it. or is that just more guilt i hear?”

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Qrow has a split second to dodge the punch. And to pray his cheek can take impact of metal prosthetics well enough, because crossing highly personal borders with shoes on is rewarded with this kind of greeting.

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qrow and Ironwood on similar grounds of skill, and yet even though qrow wins by leagues when it comes to speed versus strength, he never saw it coming. not from James, not from the barest of bait.

uses the tiny window to draw up aura while he takes it right on the cheek; iron-fisted by Ironwood in the most unpleasurable way. head knocked to the side, and body knocked back a few steps, he rubs a stinging pressure where metal knuckles landed and resets burning red vision.

“oh, ho ho ho…” a gutteral, rueful chuckle crawls up from his chest. so it’s come to this? of course it has. it always does.

…fine.

if there’s one lesson the tribe ever taught him too well, it’s that there are more ways to work out problems than with words.

qrow puts his fighting face on with a grin and glint in his eyes, and rocks back on his heel with the last of the energy sent at him before pushing off in a long-limbed lunge forward to return the sling; goes for the guts (the softer half) while Ironwood still has arms elevated.

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If anything, laughter and so confident, so pleased posture drives James even more angry. Not only this little shit dares to act like an absolute idiot and hit where he was trusted not to, but seems he has fun while doing it.

Sadly, Qrow is a little bit faster than James. He folds in half with a grunt, but that gives him a good position and little space to ram into Qrow, head first, push him out of closest proximity or maybe throw off balance.

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no one punches right to the face without intention to hurt, qrow knows better than anyone. especially with an opening declaration like that, if James expects him to play fair instead of dirty, taking whatever opening he can get, he knows him even less than how a spy’s job works.

a spy, allied under the same man as Ironwood, that’s supposed to be on the same side. a little trust would be nice.

partially metal forehead bashes against qrow’s shoulder eliciting a heave of air and pained groan. with the blood-colored web of his aura awake and glowing from the hit, he lets it wash across his chest and down his arms; falls backwards from the force, but grabs fistfuls of jacket and shirt with misfortune-laced hands to yank with him, turning lost balance into in a suplex.

Odds of escape not in the other man’s favor as entangled limbs crash into the floor loudly cracking beneath them, fractured and dented around their bodies, but not caved through - yet; windows rattle in the wake.

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Well, the training grounds would be a much better spot for an impromptu wrestling session, but it’s bit too late to relocate now. Pulled down, James tried to avoid landing on his head, as someone’s luck was apparently aiming to let him knock himself out. He meets the floor with a pained grunt, but rolls over right after hitting the ground. Not wasting any second, James springs forward to slam into Qrow, pin him down with his weight, lock him in a any lever hold if possible.

From all possible types of problem solving, they chose this - least pleasant way to tangle limbs on the floor.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

as James rolls away, qrow uses the space to roll out, knocking into a table leg which bumps the surface off kilter and send a lamp crashing to the ground; its bulb pops and fizzles out. a little less light in the apartment, now.

he scrambles to all fours just in time to take a charging clothesline right to the chest with a throaty wheeze. but lanky, loose legs accept the shockwave and recoil to keep him steady, pushing right back as pairs of shoulders lock. arms raise to grapple with the man; muscles strain and sweat starts to drip down his face - full of focus and surprisingly calm, considering - from dogged effort of trying to push James down or roll him over while qrow growls in rough cadence along with the entropic pulse of his semblance flashing, threatening to drag everything down with; framed artworks clatter against the walls and ornamental figures fall from shelves.

chaos to combat order.

and while qrow is resilient, determined to break through, and awfully good at breaking things, James is stubborn, more than any other person on Remnant, solid in ways beyond just metal flesh.

grit clenches qrow’s jaw and grounds his feet, braces the entire frame of his physique, prepared to hold out and lash out as long as it takes for James to burn out.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Looking from time perspective, James might think they shouldn’t have gone this feral. He might be wealthy, but most definitely doesn’t sleep on money and renovating most of his apartment’s main room was not in his spending plans for this year.

But at the moment he doesn’t think about it, assuming he thinks at all in between anger and adrenaline running through him in pulsing waves, getting lost in pure fighting instinct. Rarely he allows himself to dive into something this far, to lose head and his cool, analytical thinking and yet, here they are - engaged in punching, kicking, wrapping and pulling each other so far, that nothing else matters. No snapping, crumbling and crushing around is relevant. Whenever dark blue eyes meets pale red, it’s like a challenge is thrown anew and another round starts, even when more and more exhaust creeps into muscles. Fatigue is too slow to cool the raw determination down.

Thrown on his back, James lands hard again, but this time, something stabs him between the shoulders. He bites down his own pained whine as impact echoes through his entire spine and body. Only then he realizes that his aura is in fact gone. Must have been for a while. He stops, letting his weight slide him to side, a little away from whatever part of former coffee table tried to impale him. Still keeping his grip on Qrow, he finally notices large amount of aching all over and how heavily they both are breathing by now. Brothers, this is bad. Slowly, he just lets go, not moving from the spot. They’ve had enough, haven’t they… He’s not sure what got into him, but sure he’s glad it got out.

“Enough…” He breathes out quietly, squeezing eyes shut. Doesn’t dare to look around yet, he knows already that externalizing inner mess went all too well. Only now he feels various swelling and aching in way too many parts of his body, blood dripping from his nose and a cheek burning wildly. He doesn’t want to think what’s left of his shirt and jacket. Just hopes Qrow’s semblance didn’t use him as outlet to hurt its bearer to play a bigger number on him. “You okay..?”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

everything about it is feral and raw, because that’s what happens when words don’t work. people speak just as well with their bodies, the flesh and blood container of their heart, and beneath all the titles, despite all the metal, James understands that better than anyone. if qrow has to surround him with collateral damage to show him how little meaning all this wealth and power has in the end, if he has to rip and tear apart every bit of pomp to remind him how human James Ironwood really is, then so be it.

qrow’s quite practiced in being climbed on, brow-beaten, deceived, and shoved aside by the people who are supposed to be protecting him. and still he reaches out a hand and an extra leg to stand on; maybe in the form of a fist or boot to the head, but little else needs to be noted about his intentions than the fact that Harbinger still rests idle on the sidelines.

qrow, belittles himself so easy, doesn’t mind being beneath, has no need for reputation or glory or having all the right answers all the time.

the only follower left in the midst of too many frantic leaders, and meanwhile getting shit on and actively having his clothes and his skin and his soul torn apart for being just that. who he is. just like always.

but qrow can think for himself, and this he makes his own call on, refuses to back down from. if James cannot work within the gray, only sees black and white, then this is a time to push, to push to their absolute limits, until they’re too exhausted for anything but the messy truth.

and qrow comes out on top as the last dregs of misfortune summon piercing blows from broken parts, spent in the from of aura flickering away just before the other’s dissolves, and he can only close his eyes and grunt. down to the fibers of every firing muscle, he knows how to tense and relax to absorb the hits, roll with the punches that never really stop. he takes the final desperate flails of James’s blows on the chin.

qrow can do that for him. knows what it’s like to have a semblance get in the way of things.

somehow manages that the only twist of fate to come back on him is how Ironwood gets his chance to ruin a pretty face wearing a smile with an iron fist, just how it started, after all.

qrow steadies as James squeaks, down on one knee, aching, tired, and heaving breaths as if he resurfaces in the middle of an ocean after going about a thousand miles too deep, sees shimmering yellow stars as the ring of a black eye blooms on his cheek, and red oozes to pool across the white of sclera as he stares the man down. sharp eyebrow raises as if to say are we done here?

Enough

they’re finally on the same page, then.

“just fine,” he hisses, even though the act of answering sends an acrid metallic copper draining down the back of his throat, “passed up enough from the start of it, James.”

he wipes his mouth, pokes tenderly at the side of his head, and sniffs against the stinging all over his body; plops down to take a seat, a breather, right on the spot. no energy left to move an inch. perfect.

“…so i think the real question here is, are you okay?”

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James covers his eyes with a crook of an elbow, at least mechanical hand comes of use now. Much easier to move than the flesh one, significantly devoid of pain. Takes a longer moment, time just for the labored breathing, before peeking at Qrow from under the hand. Mess. Now the guilt is real and it stings fiercely.

“Ice’s in freezer.” Doesn’t seem either of them can move much anymore, but he had to offer. Good he had separate small kitchen, toilet and bedroom. At least something survived.

Awfully lot of mess.

“I don’t know.” The confession is quiet, not much louder than a whisper over sudden lump in throat. He hides in the hand again. Can’t face bare truth, can’t face Qrow nor mess they caused because of him. Because of him, his pride, his stubbornness and fear that he’s mistaken, that he can sacrifice everything, do his absolute best and more, and it won’t be enough. Because she found a way in before and was a step ahead all the time. He pulled every string he could to assure it won’t happen again, but somehow, sometimes, he just couldn’t be certain.

Time passes as James just grits teeth and lays there, trying to focus on slowing down breaths and just resting.

“Qrow..?” He tries once he’s sure his voice won’t tremble. “I’m sorry.”

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yeah.

qrow is a mess. James is a mess. it’s always a mess.

but sometimes upside down and inside out adds new perspective. and James finally sees what he started. created a nice picture of how he feels. meanwhile qrow looks towards the kitchen, the freezer, and while first aid is certainly called for, it’s so far. maybe in a few.

more important things right now.

James, suddenly small and quiet, knocked off his high horse. he mutters three words, so very hard for a leader to admit. last time qrow heard it was from Ozpin, and it wrecked his world. somehow hearing it now gives him hope. hope that James can still be reached.

he’s closer than the freezer.

qrow crawls on all fours, drags himself with slow movements and griping groans, but he gets there, and flops over on his back next to his friend, shoulders of flesh touching. and they don’t need to talk, qrow doesn’t need to pry painful thoughts from his mouth, doesn’t need to hear what James faces in his own shadows, or the realizations he finds in twisting colors on the back of his eyelids; a metal arm over his face reflective enough of his state of mind to prove qrow’s plan a success. satisfaction rushes over him and salves what stings. he doesn’t like talking until he’s blue in the face only to be ignored, but maybe James will see reason if most of the words come from himself.

“don’t be sorry,” qrow grounds out, turns his head to look at the other man, and so his burning cheek finds some relief against the cool floor, “be a better person. listen to your team and your friends. things don’t have to be as unilateral as you’re makin’ ‘em, James. …and for brother’s sake, get some sleep before i conk you out for real.”

soon enough actions will demonstrate whether all this was worthwhile or not, better than any heart to heart they could have here.

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James lets out a quiet relieved huff. The touch is strangely reassuring, much more than he’d expect it to be. It answers the question, he’ll probably never ask out loud. It’s good to not be alone, especially in a very rare moment when he can’t be the leader and protector, because he’s exhausted, frustrated and insecure, and finally let it out. When he can’t keep anyone else safe and sound, because he’s crumbling himself. And yet, he’s clearly wrong to think he’ll have to face everything on his own. Mistaken that serving as kingdom’s pillar, he’s not allowed to falter and can’t be supported without any higher purpose to it.

It’s so strangely good to be wrong.

It’s good to have a friend by his side, even when he wishes Qrow didn’t have to push him this far to prove a point. But same, he’s glad he did. All the thoughts slowly settle - being ready and having plans for the future is one thing, but worrying about it should come only once it’s present, not earlier.

Snort and a quiet chuckle raises in his aching chest, releasing remains of tension.

“Please do. I could use it from time to time.” The longer he thinks about it, the funnier vision of Qrow knocking him out seems, especially now, laying down in the wreckage they created in a quite long fight.

“Fine.” That’s not much, but it is a promise. He will try to be better. The hand is dropped to side, as he leaves mental hide out and turns to finally meet Qrow’s eyes. James was never fond of repeating himself, especially when he’s told not to, so he’s not going to apologize again, but the lack of accusations nor impeachment in the pale red gaze, makes him relax more, washes the guilt away.

Something right above catches his attention and he reaches to carefully get a wooden splinter out of Qrow’s hair.

“Hmm…” A bit of bright paint indicates it once was a bookcase. “You got me good, didn’t you.” He chuckles again, throwing the splinter away. “Please don’t do that again though. I don’t want to sell family estate to afford living.”

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deep chuckles roll from his throat as James agrees to the terms for a solid sock to the noggin for a solid sleep, without more broken noses. still qrow hears only the surface of thoughts, but he can dive deep as he likes into everything unspoken when dark blue eyes meet his own, a shine of honesty and gratitude beaming through otherwise exhausted features. and yet his whole body looks better this way, scuffed up clothes and broken down postures compared to rigid structures built on a grounding of false securities.

the bigger they are, the harder they fall. and qrow doesn’t wonder if James has made himself an empire too oversized to carry on one man’s shoulders. bound to collapse in a heap.

he already said his piece, and offered his shoulders to help, and alights with laugher anew as his face goes soft and cross-eyed to watch a strong hand which swung out at him not long ago, affectionately groom him, until it pinches swollen tissues forcing a release of focus, but he can’t help to think again, please see the signs around you.

“You got me good, didn’t you.”

he huffs while fluffing palms through graying black plumage to knock any more debris out.

qrow breathes; takes air into his lungs like he hasn’t in a long, long time, while the weight of misfortune is still lifted from his chest, even if his sore muscles groan from a stretch unaccustomed to. soon, aura will creep back in and bad luck will stick stubbornly to his skin in blood red tendrils, warping surrounding realities once more, but for now he takes the long shot gamble of still believing some can turn away from a path of self-destruction.

of all people, qrow has. so why not.

“did i, James?” he goads, goofy grin flashing as his head flops back down, and his fingers lace together to rest over his chest, mirth looking perhaps out of place with the rest of qrow so busted up, but since when was anything he ever did appropriate?

“it was good for me. was it good for you?”

a response all joke and no promise.

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“Yeah.” James chuckles and shrugs, only metal shoulder doing the full movement. “You definitely did and I take no complaints that I was the one to start the fight.” That’s half a lie - he knows he’s just as much to blame for the mess, i not more. He is the one who should know better than to let wounded pride and frustration get out like this.

“I’ll tell you once I’ll see the bill for repairs.” He huffs. There already was so much to do and now there’s even more. And the more he settled down after the fight, the more weary he felt. Can’t sleep on the floor though, however comfortable it was getting.

“I’ll fetch us the ice.” Relying mostly on his right side he sits up with a groan. Brothers, it aches. So he takes time for each movement before standing up and making way to the freezer.

They needed this. Time, vented mess, ice, all of it.

They also needed a shower and rest, but only one task at a time.

Takes some time to get back there and sit down by Qrow’s side. A bit ironic how fast can be destruction and how slow is the healing.

[patientfocusly]

headcanon + family !

@alnaari      [     meme     accepting !      ]

( sorry in advance because i kind of hijacked this ask to update my overall family headcanon for shiro instead of the tidbit that i intended for it to be adkfjgh )

tl;dr:  Shiro’s family are people he would not only die for, but people he has unwavering belief in and has given a part of who they are, to create who he is, and likewise, they contain a part of who he is, within them.    

Shiro is second generation American. I headcanon Voltron to be set roughly around 100 - 150 years into the future. Shiro’s parents were drawn out to America to join the rest of their extended family who also made the move throughout the years, though leaving behind Shiro’s grandparents on his father’s side. Shiro’s mother was pregnant with Shiro’s older sister, Toshiko, during their move. Shiro was born 3 years later, in Sacremento, where they’d settled down. ( I also imagine migration is a lot less of a hassle in this time ~ but I’ll make a post of how I imagine the VLD post-modern world would differ to our current reality later. )

The four of them were extremely close. Shiro grew up loved and supported and getting up to mischief with his big sister. Shiro was extremely close to his mother when he was young. His father was a little strict and slow to understand some Western constructs, but was overall open-minded if he could see that it was what was best for his children. Shiro could confide in his sister literally anything under the sun. This bond only began to fracture when Shiro was diagnosed with MND*1 at age 16, during his first year at GG.  

VLD doesn’t mention Shiro’s family at all. Not at the Kerberos launch, not in his visualisation during lion bonding, and not when the group return to Earth. These facts are what has prompted the headcanon that Shiro’s parents and sister are no longer alive.

~I haven’t hashed out the circumstances around this too much but here’s a brief timeline of the events -       He loses his mother at age 6 due to terminal illness -       He loses his father at age 20 due to a hit and run -       His sister is caught in the Galra cross-fire, leaving behind her husband and two year old son*2.

Shiro is no stranger to loss, starting with the fading memories of his mother. Life keeps taking and taking from him. Every moment of success or happiness, seems only to be rewarded with pain and more suffering. And this cycle continues for him as we are introduced to him in VLD i.e. reaching the edge of the solar system - only to be captured by the Galra, finally escaping and returning to Earth – only to be launched back into space and having to fight in an intergalactic war, finding a semblance of peace with new friends and new purpose – only to die, is brought back to life – only to live with the debilitating guilt and dysphoria of living in another’s body. And so on.

A year or so after his father’s death is when I headcanon that Adam proposed to Shiro. The accident was a reminder of how unguaranteed life really is, and they already felt like they didn’t have enough time with the imminent worsening of Shiro’s illness. Adam was Shiro’s family. Adam made Shiro happy. At this point, Shiro had begun to notice the pattern of happiness and loss, and a part of him was expecting to lose Adam. (This may or may not have played a minor part in Shiro’s decision to go on the mission. Just a minor part, but significant enough to mention, all the same).

Shiro always had a close friend in Keith. There was something in him that called out to Shiro, and his gut instinct turned out to be right. The fact that they both understood loss beyond their years must’ve helped the understanding they had with each other, though they never spoke about it beyond the conversation we saw in VLD about Keith’s father. Keith is Shiro’s family. While in space, this bond only strengthens as they face the hardships of war and hard decisions together. Keith becomes an irreplaceable part of Shiro’s life. 

Pidge, Hunk, Lance, Allura, and Coran are an unlikely group of people that are thrown into Shiro’s life path but find a place nestled in the twists and curves of it. Without a common cause to fight for, they may never have even met, let alone become a united front, an understanding forming between them that can come only from shared experience, impenetrable. But life isn’t about what doesn’t happen, or what could’ve happened; it’s about what does happen and it’s outside of your control. There’s a closeness he feels with them that can’t be manufactured by any other means apart from trusting someone with his life, and having them trust him of the same.

He feels a special closeness with Allura. She, too, has suffered and lost, in greater quantities than even Shiro can fathom. She, too, has had leadership placed upon her, based sheerly on the fact that there is no one else to carry the burden. Sometimes they butted heads, but they always believed in each other, and more importantly, they believed and wished wholeheartedly for the same future. Their bond strengthened when Shiro’s soul passed through Allura to enter his new body – something that also allowed him to receive Allura’s Altean crystal as the energy source for his cybernetic arm, and perhaps even pilot the Atlas as a mecha-tron. Allura was    is Shiro’s family. 

In summary, Shiro’s family are people he would not only die for, but people he has unwavering belief in and has given a part of who they are, to create who he is, and likewise, they contain a part of who he is, within them.    

*1 Please see Shiro’s illness headcanon *2 I didn’t want to stray too far from canon, but I’m also holding onto the headcanon of Shiro having a sister. So in my canon, he asks Commander Iverson about Toshiko when the crew return to Earth who informs him of her fate ~ he doesn’t find out about his nephew until later. In any non-canon AUs, Toshiko is alive.

[casually-inlove]

I'm a bit curious about the change in He Tian's attitude towards Mo in some earlier 2016 moments. He looked like he was playing around with Mo and even taunt him then, but the kiss came out of nowhere, and he is now having a crush on the boy. What do you think that makes him interested in Mo in the first place, and at which point did he start taking their friendship seriously, and started loving Mo?

Hey there, anon!

That’s a fabulous question actually. At some point, I also wondered what it was that made He Tian interested in Momo to begin with, or when this transition actually happened, and I was addling my head a lot over it, lol. I can only speculate here, but nonetheless here goes.

First of all, let’s take a look at how OX initially presented He Tian. We saw a wealthy, privileged and somewhat snobbish boy, who enjoyed top grades and enduring popularity among other students. Hell, even the teachers were fond of him, while girls flocked around He Tian every break. Whatever he said or mentioned was being met with giggles and bashful sighs. You get the picture. 

Unfortunately, it’s all but a pretty wrapping. In reality, none of those people knows who He Tian really is. We as readers know that in fact, He Tian suffers from profound loneliness. We know that despite all that money, he barely has any noteworthy personal possessions. That he still experiences the aftershocks of childhood traumas. That his relationships with his family are deeply fractured. People who surround He Tian on a daily basis could be described as sycophants. Their adoration towards him is pretty shallow. They are so crazy about him why exactly? Because he’s handsome, rich, popular, etc. Not saying that it’s a bad reason to like someone, but it’s not particularly meaningful either.

Anyway, this leads me to my main point. He Tian is used to that sort of shallow attention and plays along with it for his own reasons. He’s used to people nearly applauding him for whatever he does. He’s used to people wanting to be near him. If we think back to his childhood, we’ll see that instead of a mother he had been (apparently) surrounded by maids (?), who were hired to care for him (and that’s apparently why he’s so bad at house chores, haha). 

Case and point: he’s used to being in the center of attention and having people bend over to his whims.

And then… cue Mo Guan Shan, who gives zero fucks about He Tian. Who gives zero fucks about his popularity or his money, who has the balls to tell him to bugger off in the rudest ways possible. Momo doesn’t dance to his tune, and that’s something new to He Tian, something he hadn’t experienced before.

So… Momo comes off as belligerent, dirty-mouthed school bully who is contemptuous towards those rich and powerful (he has reasons for that, but still Momo’s view is tinted through his own childhood experiences). There’s raw honesty in Mo Guan Shan and that initially fascinates He Tian. Let’s admit it: He Tian comes off as being bored or somewhat indifferent towards life. The fact that there’s one person who doesn’t bow and kowtow before him is refreshing. That’s probably one of the reasons why He Tian hires Mo to cook and clean for him in the first place. He’s bored and Mo is the cure to his boredom. A cure that runs his mouth, threatens to knock his teeth out and outright calls him fake and dangerous, haha.

If I were to give a Tvtrope to this one, it would be “I love you because I can’t control you”. He Tian cannot approach MGS normally, like how he would have approached anyone else. Friendly attitude doesn’t work with him. Momo truly reminds me of a stray dog that is used to people treating it so badly that it would bite the hand that tried to pet it. There’s also a matter of MGS being very prideful. That raw honesty of his doesn’t fade away even when He Tian gives him beatings or pays him to do house chores. Sure, he takes the money but he never sugarcoats his attitude, never hides his distaste for He Tian and people like him. He makes it clear that he HATES every second of being near HT or in his apartment, yet he manages to put it aside when needed. 

Anyway, I digress. I believe that fascination on He Tian’s part had been rather instantaneous. It may have very well happened during the fight between XiXi and MGS. Momo has shown that he didn’t follow any rules, and literally had a savagely pragmatic side to him (when he used a stone to hit XiXi). That was probably the moment when HT’s curiosity was aroused. He’s not used to seeing people like that.

The kiss scene is also very telling. From the easiness with which He Tian invades personal bubbles of the others, we can surmise that he thinks it’s no big deal, and if it’s no big deal to him, he literally thinks it’s the same way for everyone else. As I mentioned before, he’s used to people being willing to “give in” to him, hence he seems to have a mindset that he can take whatever he wants (like a spoiled brat, haha) and that nobody ever would mind — precisely because they are willing to begin with. This fails with MGS. Not only he reacts violently, he begins crying. That’s absolutely not the kind of reaction He Tian was expecting; you can blatantly see it written all over his face. He even asks Momo if he finds HT disgusting. 

I believe that’s when He Tian actually felt a pang of guilt for his doings. The way Mo Guan Shan reacted is extremely human and understandable. Someone he DESPISED came up and forcefully pushed their tongue into his mouth, forced him into a kiss that is by all means just another taunt or a joke, not to mention that by the looks of it, it was his first kiss — something that in many cultures is considered to be nearly sacred. And He Tian probably for the first time in his life experienced a rejection. He wanted someone who didn’t want him, and there’s nothing his cool reputation or money could do about it. He also realized that he disgusted somebody — also something new to him. The novelty of it all, the unexpected guilt — these are the new feelings in his otherwise stale daily life. Mo Guan Shan made him experience something dramatically different.

Another point is that there are rather obvious parallels drawn between Momo and that puppy He Tian used to care for. He saved that puppy from a violent mountain torrent and nursed it back to health, just like he saved Mo from She Li and the angry mob later. He Tian’s failure to protect that puppy from “death” (like He Cheng made him believe) is one of the unresolved issues of his past, which he tries to rectify (or I should rather say, prevent from repeating itself) with Mo Guan Shan. Subconsciously he might be projecting that dog onto Mo Guan Shan, although he seems to be very much aware of his own associations, as he calls Momo his puppy.

During the time He Tian spends taunting and forcing Mo to do stuff, he learns things that make him admire Mo. Like Mo’s refusal to sugarcoat his attitude, the fact that he’s shouldering a heavy financial burden, that he’s actually extremely hardworking, that he has pride and doesn’t entertain shallow ideas of being someone’s monkey on a display even for a princely reward. He Tian discovers traits that he likes. He Tian discovers that under that hard-shell hides someone very honest and raw.

Lastly, if you think about it, Momo and He Tian are somewhat very similar: both of them have been marked by isolation. Mo has been ostracized because of his father’s imprisonment, and grew up being mistreated by likes of She Li and possibly looked down on due to his poverty. He’s withdrawn into a shell out of fear of being hurt, and he the way he views others is marked by suspicion and trust issues. He’s used to people acting nasty to him and, as sad as it sounds, to Mo this is a normal occurrence. What’s abnormal and suspicious is when somebody pulls a random act of kindness on him. And that’s what makes him think “why? what’s their agenda? what’s the catch?”. He Tian, on the other hand, is isolated because of his money and family influence. People who surround him are sycophants, those fangirls and fanboys, whereas in reality not only they don’t care for who he is, they probably wouldn’t even believe if he admitted to being a broken bird. Cause that’s unfathomable, right? Someone who has been born with a silver spoon in their mouth cannot be unhappy or hurting or alone. On top of that, he also has experienced his trust shattered, by his older brother, no less. He feels betrayed. He Tian is just as lonely — if not more — as Momo. So I guess that makes them — two coyotes from the same hill? Or how that Chinese “two peas in the pod/birds of a feather flock together” saying goes, haha. But even still, Momo has something that He Tian never had: someone to love and fight for (Mo’s mom), a home where he’s cherished. I think on subconscious level He Tian craves that, and Momo enables him to vicariously live that life he never had. Does it even make sense? xD

At which point He Tian’s playing around grew into something more serious? I think the kiss episode was akin to a bucket of cold water doused over He Tian’s head that made him reconsider some of his ways. What really triggered his desire to help MGS was probably the plot devised by She Li and the consequent fight. It may have made him suspect that MGS with his financial issues is far more vulnerable to shady vultures than he initially thought and that MGS is walking on an edge here. A little push to the wrong side and he would end up in deep shit. It’s after that fight that He Tian realizes how much Momo is shouldering by himself, and it’s then when we see him try helping him, like getting him a part-time job in that photography studio. Incidentally, it’s also when he’s started to find out Momo’s other sides. Like him being industrious, or unwilling to entertain an idle crowd of onlookers, etc.

Undoubtedly, He Tian’s feelings grew after the mob fight, where Momo got badly injured. We actually see him scared of losing MGS. Not to mention his consequent visit to his father — well they do say absence makes the heart grow fonder. It’s also clear to me that Momo’s display of care (during He Tian’s nightmare) had a big impact on HT. That’s when his violent tendencies of forcing Mo gradually fizzled out and became a lot more playful.

So all in all, He Tian probably started to gain feelings once he realized that Momo had his reasons to act like a delinquent, and that underneath it all there lay a person with integrity, who had been simply disenchanted by life and the circumstances that befell on his shoulders.

Whelp, that’s again a long-ass post. These are but my speculations and I don’t aspire for it to be 100% accurate, but I think I jammed in most of my ideas here.

[illegiblewords]

Eclipse

Nabriales cannot sense aether to the degree that his Unsundered brethren can. It is but one of the many ways he falls short.

He tried to convince himself, for a time, that he’d been happy before his reminder. Before being raised back to the grace of Lord Zodiark. Being made aware of all that was missing.

A phantom pain he hadn’t been conscious of previously. The realization in hindsight not only that something was lost but the shape it should have held. Senses stolen. A limb severed.

The heart that has yet to beat again.

He aches every day to feel, to move the pieces of him that are absent. And in their absence his early memories have grown hollow and bitter.

A fool’s life.

He cannot see or speak to sundered beings like they matter. Like they share anything in kind. They are only what he once was, what he has learned to despise.

No, he cannot sense aether as the Unsundered can.

But Nabriales knows to pay attention, to snap at opportunity like the dog they consider him. To hunt, to be silent, and to strike.

***

When Lahabrea falls into their shelter on the shores of the Lifestream, Nabriales hears him. Starless skies and gray, barren earth. A horizon that seems to stretch in all directions.

He goes. He offers no aid and keeps his presence hidden.

Emet-Selch may yet sleep, oblivious. As is his wont. Still, if one such as he heard then it is only a matter of time before the Emissary arrives.

And oh, how Lahabrea suffers while he waits. It is clear to see the places light has shorn holes through his aether. Were he any weaker it would not matter that he remains unbroken—he’d have shattered just the same. Ascians may cast no shadows but my, do they bleed from the Speaker now.

Lahabrea does not stir to raise himself. From the way his essence flickers on occasion—fast and frantic and straining beyond itself—Nabriales presumes he fades into awareness at points. Then it subsides, and the darkness slips a little farther, and the wounds gape for its absence.

An ordeal in scant more than a few minutes, but then time does stretch for those in misery.

***

They tried, in the beginning, to explain. The three who’d escaped Hydaelyn unscathed. Amaurot the beautiful, Amaurot the dead. Their failed, fallen city. What must come to breathe again at any cost.

Privately, Nabriales could not give a damn. How should he? These were empty words and abstract notions. Zodiark, on the other hand, showed sympathy for how his own soul had been butchered. Revealed the glory he had been, once, and should become again. The disfigurement of the world itself.

Zodiark wanted to help them. Zodiark wanted to raise them in glory.

The Unsundered wanted lackeys.

This had been clear from the start, in the division between their ranks. Elite Ascians would lean on one another, confide in one another. Shield weaknesses and mistakes from sight. To those below they delivered orders and listened patiently without so much as an onze of trust. Igeyorhm, certain now that her own misstep was caused by a fractured soul, guaranteed as much.

For each of his own successes, Nabriales burns with the knowledge that his natural form would be many times as great. That he has been dulled and diminished. The irreverence he receives is nothing he can correct in this iteration.

And so he obeys not for them, but the one true god.

***

Elidibus steps from a plume like tar, the white of his robes an insult to their surroundings.

His attention is on Lahabrea and Lahabrea only. Whether this oversight is due to distraction or Nabriales’ skill is impossible to say. Good fortune, regardless.

Elidibus wastes no words, races to his fallen colleague and kneels. Hesitates, gloved hands hovering. Seemingly concerned that moving the man might exacerbate his injuries.

He makes contact. Begins his own rare and complex process of healing.

Slowly, agonizingly, what shadows had pooled like ichor around Lahabrea begin to retract. To patch what had been pierced, little by little.

Eventually a gasp, torn and ugly, interrupts the silence.

One black glove, slick with himself, clutches at Elidibus’ forearm.

Frail. Pathetic. Unworthy. Nabriales finds his lips curling in disgust as Lahabrea struggles to find his breath on the ground.

Like a mortal.

“How did this happen?” demands Elidibus, unwavering in ministrations though his voice remains flat and hard.

Lahabrea coughs. Lifts his head. “Hydaelyn,” he rasps. Then, “Weak, in… inexcusable. My doing.“

Ah, so he’s aware after all.

But Elidibus catches Lahabrea’s jaw sharply, draws his gaze up. “He,” says the Emissary, “would not have you regard yourself thus. Only learn.”

The Speaker’s grip is tight. Despite distance, Nabriales notes his trembling reaches Elidibus’ shoulder.

“Whose fault,” says Lahabrea, a raw edge to his words, “would this be if not… if not my own? It should have worked, I had… I had…”

A sigh as Elidibus leans his brow gently, carefully, against the wounded man’s.

Lingers there.

For a time, neither of them says anything. Nabriales finds himself stunned by both the gesture and an innate understanding that it remains beyond what he will ever receive.

“We are all of us,” says Elidibus in a tone that brooks no argument, “instruments of Zodiark. You know better than most what His strength entails.”

Slowly, Lahabrea’s grip begins to loosen.

“The Ardor,” Elidibus continues more quietly, “is not yours alone. Be at peace.”

Another moment passes. After a brief fumble, Lahabrea’s hand slides free. What tension remains to signify consciousness soon follows.

It is with great care then that the Emissary shifts him onto his back. Gathers his colleague in arms and stands. Exits through a corridor once more.

Following some moments spent with his own silent reflection, Nabriales departs as well.

***

All the world knows when Allag’s eikons start to wake.

Scarce days from his retrieval, Lahabrea summons the Sundered in prayer and praise to Zodiark.

All of them present save Emet-Selch and Elidibus. It is a show, Nabriales understands now, meant to impress the little puppets who aspire to be like him. To soothe his own ego. Something his friends would catch in an instant.

But he does love Zodiark, and perhaps the god has seen fit to reward his observance with further insight.

So Nabriales attends to play his role with solemn grace and watchful eye.

Half-mended aether. Absent smile despite the news. Slow, careful movements in this dark chamber with its stone floors and unadorned columns.

No, Lahabrea has not forgotten at all.

***

It ends at Elidibus’ untimely arrival.

“Lord Zodiark,” he says, so smoothly that were he not searching for it that the anger would be undetectable, “appreciates your attentions.”  His gaze does not waver from Lahabrea as he speaks. “But there is work to be done and I’m afraid there are words I would have with your Speaker.”

They disperse.

Nabriales, careful and curious, folds himself out of sight beyond the chamber then makes his way back to its edge.

Lahabrea, farthest from the exit, attempts to steal some small dignity. Turns to face Elidibus.

The Emissary makes him wait. Expressionless red masks matched by those who wear them.

Then, with more speed and force than typical for his demeanor, the Emissary closes distance to trap his colleague against the wall.

“It was my error,” hisses Elidibus, leaning in, “to have stayed silent upon rescuing you. A mistake I will remedy now, so we can be on no uncertain terms.”

Lahabrea lowers his eyes. Nabriales notes that despite the dread they all share of such reprimands, the man does not brace.

“You know as well as I that these words offer less succor to our Lord than action,” continues Elidibus, his fury quiet and no less sharp for that, “just as we both know your thoughtless action is the cause of repeated missteps these past centuries. Make no mistake—for all the strides you’ve made, your fixation and your impatience have cost the rest of us considerable time.”

Silence.

“Do you truly think this is your best service to Him?” asks Elidibus. “To us? Compromising your ability to fill the hours? Even Emet-Selch agrees these displays are disgraceful. You have ever borne them poorly, but being a 'paragon among paragons' naturally you continue ignoring your own better judgment with ours to continue this exercise in futility. Idiot.”

A twitch of the head. Almost a flinch.

It is one of few moments Nabriales has seen the Emissary express his anger so openly. Even after the Thirteenth fell to Igeyorhm’s error, Elidibus allowed the Angel of Truth to lead and voiced his own reproach with a more typical icy demeanor. Scathing though it was.

“I can be of use,” says Lahabrea softly. “Only three of us remain, and I—“

“You,” Elidibus snaps, “cannot follow the most simple instructions for the good of us all. Not for Him, not for Amaurot, not even for yourself. Your pride has made you not simply an embarrassment but a liability.”

Neither man speaks for several moments after that.

And then, at length, Elidibus exhales.

Says the Speaker’s name.

Receives his attention.

“What would you have me do?” the Emissary asks. His tone now is almost weary. “Clearly it would be unreasonable to trust you’d simply listen. Must I mind you like a child?” This is what breaks Lahabrea’s composure.

Knowing the man’s temper, Nabriales had expected him to lash out. Even on the back foot their orator is perfectly capable of defending himself from insults.

Instead, he embraces Elidibus fiercely—face just within the bounds of his pauldrons. Jaw locked shut firmly enough to hurt. Expression downcast.

Elidibus remains perfectly still at first. In the absence of conversation it is possible to hear the rush of Lahabrea’s breathing. Only through the nose, withheld briefly between each inhale as if that offers some means to steady himself.

As if that would make it better.

Tentatively, Elidibus holds him back. Lahabrea's fingers contract, and though he remains upright when his knees begin to give it is the Emissary who helps him kneel.

“Easy,” he murmurs, and Lahabrea removes one hand to run it reflexively over his face—coming against the mask.

Nabriales finds himself staring, searching. A puzzle with missing pieces whose image he may yet divine

“It was not,” says Lahabrea roughly, “my intention to…”

Elidibus reaches beneath the other man’s cowl, finds the hair and skin beneath. Draws him in once more.

Naught that would be shared with or among the Sundered. Nothing so personal as that.

Nabriales has worn his own share of flesh. Bedded lovers, adopted companions and families of vessels to fulfill a purpose. Passable enough, perhaps, but never for him. Not in truth.

It’s as if he looks upon two strangers.

***

Afterward and alone, Nabriales offers his own prayer.

It is neither a request, nor a demand, nor an offering.

Only a promise.

Before His likeness, again and again through clenched teeth, he swears he will prove himself the worthier servant. Nabriales will not remain broken forever.

Despite his shattered form, the blurring and burning of his vision under a mask inherited rather than earned, Nabriales tells himself that indifference is a strength. To halt time, to summon the heavens themselves—before all this, he might have set this world right alone. Instead, crippled as She left him, he can only watch as his brothers-in-arms sabotage them all through sentiment.

Fragile, desperate creatures that they are.

How useless. Useless to Zodiark and to their situation and even so he…

For millenia, they made him doubt.

***

It seems Lahabrea has acquiesced to Elidibus’ demands. While he licks wounds dealt by Hydaelyn, the Speaker turns to the Sundered. Delegates.

Naturally, Nabriales volunteers for this position.

How better to begin than by succeeding where the unbroken could not?

***

Lahabrea is frustrated as he’s ever seen him. Confined to a sickbed, bereft of stationary projects. The Emissary has effectively limited his activity to sleep and amusements. This by itself might have been entertaining, but the man insists on dragging him into the same foul mood. Their briefing includes far more detail than could conceivably matter. Worse, Lahabrea questions him afterward to ensure naught has been missed.

Insufferable.

They are both glad to be rid of each other in the end. Even so, this does not prevent Lahabrea from calling him as he prepares to leave.

“What now?” says Nabriales, no longer bothering to mask his impatience.

Any humor at seeing the Speaker stripped of regalia has faded. Though the mask remains in place, being ordered about by this sandy-haired wreck in bedclothes has lost its charm. He likes not the notion of being instructed by such a dull figure. The chamber itself, outfitted by Elidibus in stone combinations of brown, gray, and gold, proves far more ornate than its occupant.

Lahabrea’s lips thin. When he continues, it is with a note of severity.

“See to it you don’t engage Her champion. Nor any associated parties, for that matter. It can be tempting to underestimate them but…” he trails off a moment. Choosing his words. “…they are not unpracticed.”

Nabriales smiles with his teeth. “Fear not for me, Lahabrea. I assure you that my track record is quite sound.”

And thus he departs.

***

The tasks are straightforward in themselves. Instruct beastfolk to transcend the mortal coil. Observe Hydaelyn’s chosen. Follow developments with the Isle of Val. Escalate primal summons as crystals permit.

Naught particularly taxing alone, his duties prove time consuming and numerous. Despite himself, Nabriales sees how one could become lost in the pile. His greatest obstacle, however, is that the Scions appear to have eyes and ears in every imaginable place. And they do so delight in thwarting his efforts.

Like tying a boot only to have imps undo it again the moment you’ve stood upright. Endearing at first, but this quickly shifts to exasperation and finally to true annoyance.

Killing them would be the efficient path. Alas, he has orders. Evidently Elidibus has intentions for their number as well. Nabriales does not mean to make himself a target for the man’s frustration, whatever other opinions he holds.

So for now, his performance is careful. Meticulous.

Obedient.

***

He wonders what a complete Warrior might have been.

He wonders if she would continue her course, knowing how she’d been cheated.

The Echo locks her mind shut.

Sadly, she will remain distant to him as any other.

***

In the wake of Ramuh and Leviathan, Elidibus calls them to the Chrysalis.

Once more, an Unsundered seeks lesser members of their order. Emet-Selch slumbers still. Lahabrea, over a month reprimanded, adheres to his recovery.

What intel they’ve gathered proves sound. The Warrior’s strength has reached worrisome proportions, of that there can be no doubt. She gorges, swells with the gifts of her mistress. Elidibus, however, argues such power costs the enemy dear. Hydaelyn lacks sufficient aether for these feats. In each successful Calamity, the dominion of Zodiark waxes toward completion. Those sundered inhabitants (rife though they are with potential) remain exhausted and wanting by comparison.

The end, he tells them, is in sight. Perhaps this is even true.

Perhaps it is only what he needs to hear.

And this is when Lahabrea can bear it no longer.

He takes his place, late but listening. His expression proves empty of typical bravado.

Though he proclaims to the room that this mission is why efforts must be ceaseless, his eyes remain fixed on the Emissary.

Elidibus, unimpressed, waits.

“Divine seeds were ever wont to quicken in Eorzea’s fertile soil,” the Speaker continues more quietly. “We need only lead men to the field, and by their eager hands shall a new deity arise.”

Although not quite an apology or an excuse, his justification nonetheless carries earmarks of both.

Duly shamed.

Whether Elidibus is moved by faith or pity is impossible to tell.

He is permitted to stay.

***

Though Lahabrea’s limitations have been reduced, he does remain barred from field. Both he and Nabriales were present for that conversation.

Throughout, the Speaker’s gaze remained fixed on the floor. Fingers flexing lightly. Reminding himself not to form a fist.

It was almost amusing. Might have been, once, had he not known Elidibus’ motive.

Nabriales continues in his function of errand boy either way.

***

Conflict escalates between the Warrior and Ysayle Dangoulin. The elezen who calls herself “Iceheart”.

Another of Hydaelyn’s disciples. Another possessed of Echo and Blessing both… though she lacks knowledge or inclination to fight Ascians.

Convenient.

Nabriales has, under the curt orders of Lahabrea, been urging her toward a unique aetherial experiment. Take advantage of the very qualities that allow her freedom from primals and shape her soul into one. Sacrifice to herself.

Ysayle, it seems, is not the issue. As tensions between her and Eorzea’s champion reach a head she plays her part to perfection. Survives, even. And (as Lahabrea hoped) she is not consumed in her own ritual but simply reverts at its close.

Admittedly, they are stunning together. Hardly the worst subjects to observe. Each tall and fair haired as per his preference. One, moonlight pale. The other hued in gold. Ysayle sheds her common beauty for a more revealing figure. Ice twisting through locks, long limbs summoning attacks with poise. It is as though she drifts through water—gravity has no hold on the Lady Shiva. And his Warrior, skirts and pages rippling in the wind, steps lightly to dodge the assault. Recites spells in a delicate tongue, gestures with slender fingers to hurl her own ruin beside those she commands. A dance for him to pay audience, curving and cold.

All told, a successful venture.

How much more rewarding if he did not need to report back.

***

Returned to an office he rarely has occasion to use, Lahabrea paces.

Idleness suits him not. Though the man’s aether approaches what it was before his misstep, it pales beside their colleagues. The torchlit interior is littered with reports and tomes. His own notes form a growing stack on the desk. If Pashtarot is to be believed, lack of hazard has only made him more insufferable.

Lahabrea cannot seem to keep still, cannot stick to a single project. Dabbles in how to heighten efficiency for their whole organization. Frets constantly.

His movements are quicker than they were. Jerky.

“The Scions are plotting something,” he mutters.

Nabriales, forced to endure such nervous energy without leave to attend his own affairs, scoffs. “Of course,” he replies. “We are none of us blind to the situation. They recognize our plans and form countermeasures.”

Lahabrea glances his way. “Does none of this trouble you?” he asks. “They have not even employed a fraction of their strength and resources. Our movements are duly noted. You might have been more discreet.”

Nabriales glares. “Do not,” he says, “presume to comment on my performance. Speaker.”

His tone, it seems, goes overlooked. Lahabrea only waves a hand dismissively, passing again across the room. “No, they know us better than we gave credit… might you monitor their current agendas more closely?”

This time, Nabriales snorts. Folds his arms. “With or without deference to improved subtlety?”

Lahabrea turns to him.

Pauses.

“…if it comes to a question,” he says slowly, “keep out of sight. Once your presence is revealed, it cannot be masked again with ease.”

This earns a laugh, hard and shameless. “Strange, such sentiments seem more aligned with our Emissary. Does this new, cowardly Lahabrea worry on my account or for himself?”

The Speaker stares, mouth just parted.

“Oh, don’t look surprised,” Nabriales adds with a shrug. “Surely after so long you know we all dislike you. You’ve ever placed higher value on feeling busy than contributing anything of worth. That it is only after losing you exercise care is absurd.”

“Nabriales,” says Lahabrea, his voice low.

A shake of the head. “Don’t bother,” he says. “You have never recognized me as worthy of the office. I am… a placeholder. But what does it say for you that one of my stature might seize the victory you spurn?”

This time, it is almost foreign. Mortal and filthy and yet another reminder of what he has never been.

Nabriales seizes the front of Lahabrea’s robes. Drags him close. “Do not,” he says quietly, tasting ozone as electricity burns across his teeth, “say that name in front of me again.”

***

Lahabrea lets him go. He doesn’t fight back, doesn’t argue.

Disappointing.

***

“Nabriales is no more.”

Fear not for me, Lahabrea. I assure you that my track record is quite sound.

“…The Ardor was not his to invoke. His demise was of his own making.”

Perhaps they all have things they need to hear.

“Nevertheless, it concerns me. They have…”

You have never recognized me as worthy of the office.

“…extinguished that which should rightly be eternal.”

Surely after so long you know we all dislike you.

“Mayhap he was not wholly mistaken. Greater haste may be warranted.”

Make no mistake—for all the strides you’ve made, your fixation and your impatience have cost the rest of us considerable time.

���We are of one mind.”

Does this new, cowardly Lahabrea worry on my account or for himself?

“…The northern lands, then?”

Your pride has made you not simply an embarrassment but a liability.

“The earth is fertile, and the seeds well sown. By my will they shall reap salvation unlike any the world has known.”

Only learn.

“By His will.”

We are all of us instruments of Zodiark.

“…By His will.”

[sleepyfan-blog]

Gentle beast, ds dreammare. Please

Fandom: Dreamswap by @onebizarrekai

Set in the same verse as this

Characters and pairing: DS Dream, DS Nightmare, DS Dreammare

Warnings: cursing

Word count: 1,658

Summary: No one has seen Dream in a week. Naturally Nightmare, as his mate, is the one enlisted to find him.

Nightmare has been staying in the headquarters of justice Reigns for a little over six months now. It’s very strange to see what Dream has done to their home timeline in the fifty years he’d been running from the other… At first he was very worried that the other would try to do something awful to him… But, Dream so far has been completely genuine about his desire to apologize for being a giant dick when he’d first consumed almost all of the apples after turning all but one of them positive. The other hadn’t asked where the single negative apple has gone - and hasn’t tried to do anything weird or awful to him…

The negative spirit is cautiously optimistic that Dream really does mean it. That he wants to help those less fortunate in the multiverse and while negativity should be minimized - as people don’t deserve to suffer - complete eradication is pointless and… Dream doesn’t want him dead. He never did, but had lost control of himself and the magic that he’d consumed had taken control of his mind temporarily. He’s been working at the orphanage for the past week - there’ve been quite a few new admits and most of them are from fell or other rough AUs, and he’s been gently pulling some of the aggression and bitterness that the poor kids have been suffering under for most of their lives, while also encouraging them to open up.

It’s a difficult process but… Nightmare finds it to be rewarding. And it’s really adorable how they all light up whenever he plays his violin for them. Some of them even sing alongside and it’s super, super cute. He can see a lot of the good that his other half has done, and hopes that what he’s been doing will help the other. It’ll take a while before he fully trusts Dream again, but… The positive spirit has been proving himself so far.

He’s smiling a little as he makes his way over to the main portion of Justice Reigns - intent on poking Dream out of his office in the tower - guessing that the other had decided that he didn’t need to sleep and work on paperwork and other really boring things (as Dream would have come to tell him he was going to go fight someone if he left their home to go bashing heads) for the week that he’d been working with the new kids.

A Random Minion (who’s name Nightmare cannot for the life of him remember) comes rushing up to him, their aura filled to the brim with worry “Lord Von Licht! I… Please come with me quickly…”

“Huh? No. Lord Von Licht has wings. I’m Nightmare, his spouse.” The negative spirit responded, a small smirk appearing on his face as he followed the other “What is it that you need?”

“I… I… I will answer your questions as soon as we are in a private location, sir.” The Minion answered back, their emotional aura spiking further with fear and anxiety.

Was this where everything went to hell? Should he try to make a break for it, or leave the AU entirely? No… Nightmare guessed that he should at least see what was going on before either running off or smacking Dream’s head on straight. As soon as they came to an empty room the minion actually dragged him into the room, shaking a little. “I… This needs to be kept quiet but… N-No one knows where L-Lord Dream is. No one’s seen him in a week, just after you left for the orphanage sir… I-It’s not common for him to vanish for a couple of days but… It’s been a week and none of us have any idea where he might be.”

“Great. Was he acting weird before he vanished?” Nightmare asked, frowning a little. Dream had seemed perfectly fine as they’d kissed goodbye, but… The other could be a cagey and unpredictable bastard.

“N-Not to anyone’s knowledge, sir… As far as any of us can tell, he’s still in this timeline, we just… We can’t find him. We were hoping since the two of you have… You two are mates, that you might know him well enough to find him?” The Minion explained in a rush “This has been kept quiet - only the highest ranked in Justice Reigns are aware that Lord Dream cannot be found.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t want to cause a panic. And yeah, I can track his feathery butt when we’re in the same timeline.” Outside of it too, if he really tried. Not that Nightmare was going to tell them that. Best not to spook the mortals after all. “My phone’s fully charged and I’ll call Champion when I find Dream.”

“I-If you would please check in every couple of hours with a text to… T-To make sure that we know that you at least, are able to be contacted, sir?” The Minion suggested timidly.

“Yeah, yeah, I will. Dream’s probably just gone off somewhere to brood. He does that sometimes. Or read. A week’s not a very long time to either one of us, though he’s a lot more responsible than I am in regards to time management than I am. Normally at least.” Nightmare responded, waving a hand dismissively as he turned off his eye lights and reached out with his senses… “Oh… I… I think I know where he is. Uhm. I’ll just - double check to be sure.”  

With that he teleported off, ignoring the frantic shouts from the minion for him to wait, or at least explain where it was he was going. There were only a couple of reasons why Dream would be there of all places, and none of them Nightmare thought were good ones. Certainly none that his other half would want his mortal minions to see him in a… Not so great mental state.

Sure enough, Dream was there. He was sitting in the top of the remains of the tree, his wings curled around him and leaning against the dead, withered trunk of the tree. Nightmare sighed a little before carefully climbing his way up to the other, and calling out “Dream…? Why are you here? How long have you been here?”

The other jerked a little before turning to look at him, his eye lights pale and somewhat fractured. Dream growled low in his throat before tackling him, causing Nightmare to overbalance and the both of them to fall out of the tree “Dream, what the fuck!” He flailed as he tried to grab onto the tree - but they were carried too far for him to save them from a fall.

Dream’s wings flared open and they landed safely on the yellowed grass of the meadow that both of them had long ago called home. The taller skeleton gently nuzzled one side of Nightmare’s neck and purred happily, his wings wrapping around the both of them as the other peppered his neck and face with little kisses, occasionally letting out some rather ridiculously endearing chirping noises.

“I… H-Hey! That tickles! Hahahaha… D-Dream stop that!” Nightmare flailed - the light kisses tickled and the other was acting very strangely. The other’s kisses were much warmer than normal. The negative spirit frowned a little and Checked his other half, sighing a little and frowning. “Okay… How the actual fuck did you get cursed?”

Dream just purred and chirped at him again, nuzzling into him more, unable to respond to anything other than what his basic instincts told him to do… And it was… Kind of endearing to see just how sweet his other half could be.

“I… Okay, I’m just going to teleport the two of us home, and then get you to the healers so they can break the curse… I wonder if you’ll remember anything like this…” Nightmare mused, gently petting the top of the other’s skull, as well as one of the other’s wings a little.

Dream just purred louder, clearly happy to be as close as possible to him. Nightmare snickered a little, unable to stop himself from taking a couple of pictures before calling Champion “Hey - I found Dream…” The other batted lightly at the phone before hugging Nightmare tightly, grumbling wordlessly.

“You did? Is he okay? What’s going on?” The dog monster prompted, concern in every syllable.

“He got cursed somehow.. Mgh! Dream stop it… Mph!” Nightmare tried to explain. Dream had started to kiss him, in an attempt to stop him from talking, as well as trying to grab the phone from him “He’s running on base instinct… Which was to go home and to kiss me apparently. I can try to bring him to the medical wing, but… It’ll probably be easier if you can bring a curse breaker to that giant dead tree in the middle of this timeline. That’s where we are.”

“I… Uhm… Okay. I will be right over with a doctor and a curse breaker immediately. Just try to keep him there, sir.” Champion asked “If you two move, please try to text me?”

“Yeah, I’ll try.. Ahaha! Dream stop tickling me! Oh… I… Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you… Please stop whimpering…” Nightmare murmured in low, soothing tones, wincing a little as the other stared down at him with large golden eye lights, tears gathering in the corners, distressed. He nuzzled into the other’s side, purring a little “See… I’m sorry…” He was glad that he ended the call, as that would be super embarrassing if anyone else heard that for the both of them.  

Dream carried him over to the base of the tree, before sitting down and cuddling him, purring loudly and occasionally giving him kisses. Nightmare leaned into the other’s touch, refusing to be lulled to sleep. Eventually Champion and the medics arrived. Thankfully Dream had fallen asleep before then, and they were able to undo the curse before the CEO did anything embarrassing.

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Kakegurui XX, Episodes 5-8

In which we get two very different showdowns, and I consider what makes one work while the other... doesn’t.

Spotlight’s Glare

This set of episodes is centered around two very different gambling matches as the election continues to chug onward, each one lasting two full episodes from setup to payoff. And they make a pretty good case study for Kakegurui as a whole, because while they’re both undeniably, well, Kakegurui, I didn’t care for one of them at all, while the other was a right good time by me. They represent this show’s strengths and weaknesses pretty well, and discussing them makes for a pretty efficient summary of everything this show does well, and everything it does poorly. So let’s break them down in more detail and figure out why one of these matches works while the other doesn’t.

First, the one that doesn’t work for me: Yumemi’s second team-up with Yumeko. I’ll confess that I’m not that fond of Yumemi as a character except when she’s undergoing substantial character growth; her put-on bubbly idol persona is admittedly supposed to be fake, but it gets kind of grating after a while. And her match against a Hollywood actress plays to none of the show’s strengths; it’s frustratingly clear that this actress only exists to give Yumemi a symbolic rival to fight against, not as a character in her own right (even the characters comment on how weird it is that they’re only just hearing about a Hollywood actress studying at the academy). But Kakegurui just doesn’t work if it’s not playing the intense, self-motivated ambitions of its characters against each other. It thrives on that interpersonal drama because it’s real damn good at harnessing the momentum of two different people putting their all into opposing goals. Yumemi’s opponent being a cardboard obstacle means that drive just isn’t there for her fight, and it only starts picking up when her loss of snaps Yumeko’s cold anger into focus again, because god damn is it always satisfying when Yumeko lets herself get pissed. And beyond that, there’s not even that much interesting psychology at play, which means we’re relying on the show’s still-awkward sense of tactics to drive the action, and that goes about as well as you’d expect; it feels like the answers everyone arrives at really kinda come out of nowhere. It’s not an outright disaster, but it’s frustratingly lifeless for a show that only works when it’s full of life.

Mutually Assured Survival

By contrast, the Greater Good coin-betting game that takes up episodes 7 and 8 was a damn entertaining ride for all the reasons the Talent Show wasn’t. Despite having far more characters in play, all of their motivations and driving principles had at least been touched on before, which means we’ve got some place to ground the action once those personalities start clashing. And the game itself is designed to facilitate that clash, relying on a classic prisoner’s dilemma to get tempers flaring and trust fracturing. Selfish betting shores up your own safety, but only selfless betting can increase your odds of surviving to the end. But that means if someone wants to turn traitor, they can freeload off everyone else’s desire to survive as well and come out on top for greater rewards. It’s a perfectly nasty little microcosm of capitalist society, facilitated by players who all have a reason to fight, and it’s damn satisfying watching those tensions play off each other. For the first time in a while, I legitimately didn’t know which way the game was gonna go; everyone’s motives were so complex and interconnected that it really was anybody’s game. Who was a traitor? Would someone gain from making everyone else lose? Who was really pulling the strings behind the whole thing? That’s a lot of questions to keep in the air, but these episodes pulled that off spectacularly.

And man was the payoff a blast. Dragging Manyuda back into the fray after his crushing loss last season was a great idea; it gives Sumeragi a strongly established interpersonal connection to keep the drama going strong, and it allows him to rediscover his own passion and goals after having them stamped out of him, adding another exciting pool ball to get knocked around the billiards table. But I what I really love is how they ended up flushing the traitors out: beating them at their own game by forcing cooperation. By lobbing a cherry bomb right into the middle of the game, Manyuda allying with Yumeko and promising to drag everyone down with them, they essentially forced everyone’s self-preservation instincts to kick in and make them work together, because doing so is the only way to guarantee they make it out alive. I’ve talked a lot about how the high-stakes faux-bootstrap mentality of this school is peak capitalism, to the point where even the actress character I lambasted a couple paragraphs ago recognizes it: ”And discrimination is encouraged on the pretext of skill. If the ends justify the means, then people use the only means available.” It doesn’t matter who wins or loses any individual match, playing the game is a losing move in and of itself. So the only way to break that system is to not play by its rules; by weaponizing its Randian pressure against it and forcing a situation where the good of one relies on the good of all. Greater Good tries to make players see each other as playing unfairly, but by recognizing that the game itself is what’s unfair, everyone’s able to overcome it and beat it at its own game. That’s the kind of social psychology that makes this show so damn entertaining at its best.

Odds and Ends

-”We’re not obligated to take part in this kind of gamble.” Someone with a somewhat sensible gambling head on his shoulders? Somebody pinch me.

-Dreaming Creaming Sisters still sounds so wrong.

-”And the risk of being publicly humiliated is perfectly exquisite!” lol

-”What was the point of the other two rounds?” Wasting time, I guess.

-ohSHIT REI’S MAKING HER MOVE

-”Do you have no remorse for the lives you destroy?” I mean, if you weren’t all sadistic capitalist pigs, maybe.

-I was promised lesbians and I am feeling very let down, god dammit.

-”To choose how you die is also to choose how you live.” I mean, you’re not wrong.

Hot damn, are we already just one more session to go? How time flies. See you next time for the end of Kakegurui!