Lucid Dreamer (2/2)
part 1
Gepard stalls almost a week before he finally goes out to the safehouse, and it takes him a couple days to find it because Sampo didn't have the time left to be wasn't super specific about the location. But he does find it.
It's pretty bare bones, really. Gepard knows that was probably to be expected, but… It feels crushing, when he realizes there are so few personal things here. It's nothing specific to Sampo. Just some food, some medical supplies. A cot and a heater and a lot of mismatched blankets. Nothing to remember someone by.
But he does find the letters, in a metal box stashed away under the bed.
There are two for him. Three for Natasha, and two for Seele. One for Hook, one for Serval, one for Pela, one for Bronya.
Bronya's is mostly business. They knew each other from the whole Stellaron incident, but not much beyond that, and the incoming catastrophe is a more pressing matter. Seele's is actually two copies of the same letter, and Gepard realizes why when Seele is so angry she rips the first one up without reading it. He gives her the copy a couple days later, and she slinks off without a word.
Pela seems completely normal after hers is delivered, but Gepard knows better than to trust that. The next day, he finds her asleep in bed with Serval, bottles abandoned on the floor, both their eye makeup smeared and running and Pela's glasses horribly smudged and crooked on her face. Serval doesn't read hers in front of him, but she's clingy with Gepard, Pela, and Lynx for quite a while after. She throws herself into her work a lot. She insists the heater from the safehouse is busted and she needs to keep it. It's too dangerous for use by someone who's not an engineer. Might burn their house down or something. Gepard doesn't argue.
Hook's letter is short, with easy to read words. The rest of it is actually a treasure map, and she and the moles spend the next several days running through the Underground, finding hidden candy and toys. Hook asks them when Sampo is coming back, because one of the marbles she found from his map looks green, just like his eyes, and she wants to give it to him. Natasha shoos Gepard out of the clinic before he can even begin to think of an answer.
Natasha refuses to let him see what's in her letters, which ok, fine, he'll respect that. He hears from Bronya who heard from Seele who heard from Natasha herself though that one of the letters was a map and the other a catalogue, with all of Sampo's hidden "warehouses." Gepard promptly marches himself back out to the frontlines, where he can turn a blind eye. If a ton of stolen goods suddenly enters the black market, and if the orphanage and the clinic suddenly have new supplies, well, technically that's none of his business.
Gepard goes to bed, curls up under mismatched blankets and closes his eyes.
He doesn't dream.
One of Gepard's letters was also business, like Bronya's and Natasha's. He and Bronya follow everything meticulously, down to the letter, because there has to be some good to get out of all this, there has to be. Gepard can't let it all be for nothing, it would bury him.
And so the catastrophe passes. Not without casualties, and not without a lot of damage and destruction. But Belobog survives.
And after that, time just kind of…goes on. Gepard has been a part of the Silvermanes since he was old enough to enlist. The Fragmentum had gotten so much worse in the years before Welt sealed the Stellaron. He knows the statistics, it is literally his and Pela's jobs to keep track. He knows when he sees a face everyday in the camps and then it's suddenly gone. He's not unfamiliar with things like grief and loss.
He still catches himself checking the trashcans and the supply crates and soldiers' footprints sometimes, though.
But there comes a night where Gepard goes to bed, holding the mismatched blankets to his face, and he dreams. And it's strange, it's off, it sticks with him. Sampo doesn't look the same. He's thinner. His muscles have atrophied. He looks like how Gepard has seen soldiers after months in the hospital.
The most unsettling difference is there's a scar across the left side of his head, Gepard can see it over his ear, peeking out past his hairline, carving towards his cheek. Sampo is always careful about his face. Gepard once saw him dodge a Fragmentum monster and literally let it cut across his neck just to keep his face clear. He wouldn't let that happen for nothing.
Their actions in the dream itself aren't new. Sampo seems tired, run down and worn out, but he announces his presence with aplomb by lobbing a bunch of smoke bombs off the rooftops and sending his soldiers scrambling. Same shit, different day.
The new part is what he says when Gepard chases him out to the edges of the camp, tackles him into the snow. Gepard pins him to the frozen ground to detain him and Sampo doesn't even fight it, just looks up at him like he's seeing sunrise for the first time in months.
"I'll be home in one week."
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Pov : Youre just a guy from delivery trying to do your job. But this man, this tiny (yet oddly threatening) man has been shouting at you for the past 30 min, because 《what do you mean there's only 30 packs of fertilizer, I specifically asked for 35, how can you be so incompetent and-》 and honestly you're too scared to interrupt at this point.
Also there's this weird, freakinshly tall guy who's been following around in the background, giving heart eyes to the blond asshole this.whole.damn.time.
You cannot wait to be done with the day and return home.
Close up of Derek's completely whipped face ⬇️🤭
I can NOT stop myself from drawing them this is getting worrying /j
I feel like i drifted a LOT from the source material, this is like 2 whole news characters at this point oops-
But yeah, Derek loves Titchs bitchiness. Everyone in a 50 meter radius can see it, except ofc Titch himself, this oblivious fool !
Likes are cool, reblogs are cooler btw, it keeps tumblr alive !
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your ocs!!!!! please ramble about them!!!!
i love your art so much
(GRABS YOU) H. CAN DO BOSS.
So ! My ocs. I guess I'll do an overall explainer for the overall groups. If you check out my Toyhouse (LINK!) there's a bunch of folders up top that are how I categorise them. It's primarily by universe except for the folders that are just "misc."
So folder 1: Blatant favouritism:
These are silly little guys that don't fit in any specific wider universe, but I really really like. So I'll spotlight the two important ones before i get real in the weeds with my main universe.
In here are notably, my Fursona (self explanatory), Ali and Pittsburgh Cincinnati. There's also Hauntkit and Clearpelt who are warriorcats ocs that *is dragged away by airport security*
... So, Pittsburgh, lovingly sometimes called pissbug, is a weird little Thing who I made as like, an homage to characters like happy bunny and Sweetypuss. She (and her weird dog) exist to stand next to strange and offputting captions. I love her. No further context. She's just silly. and violent.
Now. Ali.
Ali Alighieri has thoroughly stolen the show, and also ties into the next folder along, Making Your MK.
With over a hundred extra images compared to second place (Sorry, Tabitha). Ali is my fucked up little scrunkly. My little baby guy. They're a shared character of mine and @samhainian's, and is from their Creature Feature setting (A modern fantasy setting wherein Cryptids and Magic are real but in our modern world.) They are as such, a modern human young adult... Who is also a demon + magic user.
Strange little pansexual altersex genderqueer poetry-nerd that they are... The modern setting also means they are literally just a tumblr user. A fellow countryman, so to speak.
HOWEVER.... Ali's true origin was in *Purrgatorio*, a scrapped visual novel of mine set in the MYMK universe! They were simply retrofitted into CF as the joke with Purrgatorio was that a regular human had mysteriously just shown up in MYMK's pure-furry setting.... And then when we scrapped the project we got all attatched to our little not-so-blank-slate protagonist. But I'll put a pin in Purrgatorio for later.
Making Your MK.
(Guest of honour: My super unfinished website <3)
Okay so here's the big one. The setting with.... (looks at spreadsheet) 109 characters not including so-called incidentals. At time of writing.
MYMK is home to... Multiple stories. As you would hope when a setting has 100+ characters. I'd wager each story has about 10-20 relevant characters tops but with a big shared universe like this there gets to be overlap between casts!!! Yay !!! 😊😊😊
MYMK is the name of the main story in the setting. Pronounced "Making your Mark", it is centered around Markus Felidae (The purple one) and their family. It's very action-adventure-y. It's also the plot I'm most secretive about the backend of since I WILL!!!!! Turn it into a nice prose story with pictures SOMEDAY!!!!! But for now tee hee hee secrets secrets. Markus' family is strange and ragtag and is keeping something from them... I can't ramble on too long here unless further prompted in asks about specifics but!!! Everyone in the MYMK folder has a fully furbished little profile with a blurb about them. So if you're curious....
But yeah, I tend to think of the MYMK setting more in terms of its Locations than its Casts, due to the overlapping nature of them all. The Malbranche may be the villains of the main plot, but they're also major players in relation to The Palsgrave who are the antagonists of Moraine, etc etc,
The country everything in MYMK is set in is called New Orphidian, Southern hemisphere little thing, here's a very cartoony map of it.
Um. Cliffside!
Since it's the best map I have... Here's an exclusive sneak peek of a Zine I'll be getting back to once the fandom brain cools down a bit.... :3c
(... I REALLY NEED TO DO A TOUR AROUND THE MINECRAFT CLIFFSIDE SAM AND I BUILT..... IT'S SO CUTE....)
Cliffside is situated on a big ol' Cliff.
A tiny hamlet of a place, it used to have reason to exist, and now does not. It's not even a good tourist locale, as the cliff is much too dangerous compared to the nicer tourist spot of Welkin just a little north. Not to mention nearby Moraine's allure as a tax haven with no labour laws place where a bunch of TV and Movies are filmed!
It's where most of MYMK's main cast reside (except the antagonists from the Big City Varmonte), and is as such a location I have a lot of tiny little worldbuilding thoughts about :)
I won't go into the other locations here just because then this post will SUPER get away from me but... I think most importantly for Cliffside right now...
Is that it's where Purrgatorio is set. Yes, that VN I said got scrapped. It's not dead. It is in fact serving it's original intended purpose as "A (mostly) noncanon exploration of character voice and setting"
It's back and its prose babeyyyyyyy!!! (A BUNCH OF THE EARLY STUFF IS ME BEING SUPER RUSTY ... BE WARNED)
Purrgatorio is currently the most publicly available coherent work I have out of my ocs! It's very low-stakes and serves mostly to bash my toys together and see what character dynamics come out, but you can look if you want to!
(There's also a whole THING on the meta of its Canonicity... It's not canon, but it's also not NOT canon. But if I talk about Metanarrative Timeline Collapse in my normal mundane non-magic setting im gonna sound bonkers ✌)
Ali's dynamics with the MYMK cast are so goddamn funny to me. Like I literally just handed my OCs some ET shit but ET is a sexually repressed tumblr user with a mood disorder.
But yeah I don't think I can coherently string together much more about MYMK without just actually explaining THE WHOLE PLOT.... Though I will absolutely elaborate on any given character's Whole Deal if i'm prompted. (OH MY GOD I DIDNT EVEN TALK ABOUT CHROME AND TABITHA. WAIT. OKAY THERE'S. OK NO IF I TALKED ABOUT THEM IT'D JUST END UP AN ESSAY ,SORRY..)
So here's some bonafide classic images for the road.
(IF TUMBLR BREAKS THE FORMATTING AND JUST PUTS THESE ONE AFTER THE OTHER INSTEAD OF IN A GRID IM SO SORRY LMAOOOOO)
... And as for the other folders on my toyhouse!
Misc and Fandom are what they sound like. Self explanatory,
Then, Ysden is @samhainian's fantasy setting. It's where our DnD games happen to be set but it's also a general fantasy setting :)
and Monster of the Week... Is currently being revamped! It used to be a modern world setting with hidden magic, now it's going to be more... Adventure Time-y. Fantasy world get iphone. Yknow. It has a lower Age Rating than MYMK's "anything goes", as it started as a Pitch Bible Project in my animation class. They're a little neglected but I still love them :) The revamp is extemely recent and not reflected in any of the art/writing yet but I'm workin on it. It still doesn't have a proper title..... OTL
So yeah!! Uh. This wasn't as comprehensive as I was hoping but it turns out I have way, WAY too many thoughts on my guys. And no idea what to do when im actually asked about them so !!!! This was not a very coherent ramble but it was a ramble !
There's things like essays on Chrome and Tabitha (Link) and also The Queer Gender Identities Of The Whole Cast (Link) hiding around on my toyhouse, and once again, Purrgatorio (Link) serves as my sandbox for playing with how these characters act in situations.
But..... ! I did try to make my toyhouse approachable for the average layman. Every character in the MYMK folder (Link) has a *blurb* of information, rather than a giant wall of text explaining everything about them. I want people to be able to understand their general vibe at a glance rather than be overwhelmed.
In any case ???? Uh. Fun game for everyone: If you know your homestuck classpect, every single MYMK character has a classpect and lunar sway. and a birthday. Try and find your andrew-hussie assigned kin! As a Prospitian Witch of Heart, I share my classpect and lunar sway with Chrome. No I don't know what this means. It worries me honestly he's kind of an asshole.
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Limited life.
Ooh, how spooky. Imagine! Only 24 hours to live! Imagine, that time just ticking away, being forced to watch it go, until your inevitable gristly end! Pieces of it being ripped away from you along the way, unexpectedly! The horror! The inevitability! The drama!
Cleo never understood the hype. After all, it was better than anything she got, all those years ago before she turned zombie. At least this time she could see it coming. Frankly, the idea was almost relaxing.
To her, anyway. She idly picked at a splinter on the handle of her axe as she watched Bdubs and Skizz circle each other in the matted grass ring. Of course there had been posturing - it was Bdubs and Skizz, after all - but when it came down to it neither of them seemed especially inclined to take the first shot. Skizz jittered forward, teeth bared in a snarl, but he skirted to the side last minute. Bdubs laughed and taunted, but he showed no signs of doing any better in the initiation department. Cleo smirked. Men. Boys, really.
They'd regret this, in the end. As the clock wore down and 00:00:00 became less of a vague idea and more a thing they could see bearing down on them, they'd curse their past selves for throwing away precious seconds for the sake of a grudge. Or maybe, they'd just be consumed by more bloodlust, scrambling to regain a fragment of the time they'd lost. It's fear, either way. And they'd come to it way too late to end up where Cleo already was, undead and long past seeing a ticking clock as any kind of worry. They'll all have wasted too much time on processing by then to see what's on the other side of that fear.
Freedom.
Imagine. You know when you're going to die. By exclusion, that means you know when you're not going to die. You know it's not tomorrow, or today, and those are guarantees you don't get anywhere else. So - what do you do? You burn a mansion. Hell, two if you feel like it. You bait Jimmy, you poke fun at Joel, you make alliances with everyone you can so they'll betray you sooner so you can get that out of the way so you can have more stuff to burn - it's fun, if you shake the nerves early. Ignorance is not bliss. Make friends with the idea that death is inevitable and give yourself the luxury of a farewell party you'll enjoy.
All the things she wished she'd done, when she was still alive. All the things she still probably wouldn't have done if she'd known.
Instead, she'd have just done this. Squander life on recklessness early on. Squander it on fear later.
Skizz circled Jimmy. Jimmy circled Skizz. The others looked on and cheered, while their clocks ticked silently on. Finally the two leapt at each other, shields thumping and armour sparking as diamond and metal and shouts rang loud. Cleo rolled her eyes.
She turned to dispatch a skeleton that crept up while the others were distracted. By the time she'd reduced the bones to dust, the fight was over. Skizz gloated. Bdubs grumbled. Cleo made all the right sympathetic sounds and faces.
She'd missed the end. It didn't matter. She'd already seen it.
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