#to be able to change of element

[reginrokkr]

Watch me vibrate on my seat about the incoming lore about dragons, more accurately speaking about the Dragonlord era most likely. Also me vibrating on my seat about Apep, about the apparent illness it has and about the fact that it has close ties with the gods of Sumeru (we know for a fact that Apep and Deshret were friends). I would love to see if Apep is one of the original dragons, as we don't know about their outcome other than the fact that they were defeated by Phanes and his Four Shining Shades.

[ruporas]

honeymoon phase! (ID in alt)

[infinite-infinite-stars]

Literally everything that WKM might have been trying to say about choice and lack thereof, ISWM explores as well, but better. Fight me.

[nostalgia-tblr]

Six Some Sentences Sunday Saturday

and also A MOODBOARD. I am not even sure what those are for but people on AO3 have them on multipart works so I assume they are essential to the craft.

I'm hiding it behind a cut because although I know how to Make Internet Arts I am not especially good at it - I know the keyboard shortcuts I just don't know how to use them well.

When Sylvie catches sight of her reflection in the long mirror behind the bar she can’t resist giving herself a victorious smile; she’s here to celebrate and she damn well deserves that celebration. Finally she has found a buyer for her latest piece of work, and if all goes well it’ll bring at least a few months of financial security before she has to start worrying about the bills again.  She knocks back the remainder of her margarita and orders another, and since the bartender keeps unsubtly staring at her chest she takes her time searching in her purse for the payment, just in case this prompts him to offer this one on the house.  He doesn’t (well, it was a bit of a long shot) but someone else does – a tall, pale, dark-haired man steps in to play Prince Charming instead, and on first impressions alone this unexpected understudy might be good for more than one free drink; she wishes she had ordered something more expensive.

(No prizes for guessing that her "latest piece of work" is in some way fraudulent, or for guessing who the buyer is.)

[askfallenroyalty]

ok so the "misunderstanding" plot line is currently dropped (I'm rewriting my outline rn) and in doing so, I removed a big aspect of the chapter in favor of just... avoiding that plot.

one result of this is the "pocket fire!" joke is now removed ),: as well as this form:

The draft I had earlier this week had Asriel going full Spy Mode (this chapter is intended to be a thriller) and flipping between identities and forms like crazy.

to be clear, there still WILL be an element of the shape-shifting coming into play in the story but it's not treated like the spy-thriller trope. It ends up being something completely different in the plot. Which, when typing it out, feels like the shape-shifting is over used, and its for the best to keep it simple.

Asriel would go so far as to steal Undyne's identity.

I REALLY LIKED THIS. I really pushed Asriel's shape-shifting to its limits and it was going to utterly shatter Undyne's trust in the royal family and believe that ANYONE could be a shapeshifter.

But uh, realizing now, maybe that's NOT what I want! It'd be interesting, sure! But it'd be really tough to convince Undyne to trust again. And like, the whole Asgore-giving-the-throne-to-a-literal-teenager is already pushing a lot of Undyne's feelings.

So yeah the plot line would be a bit convoluted and would have an end result that adds a layer of conflict that I don't really want anyway. So as much as it pains me, that whoooole plotline is dropped.

Sad cause we were going to have a cool Toriel and Undyne fight! But... again, the stakes are artificially built. While the family IS doing shady af things, they're not being looked into. They're being looked into something they're not even a part of and are blamed for. Which sucks ass.

I STILL want a confrontation between Undyne and the Dreemurr family, but it makes sense to come from a natural result of the family's true bullshit behavior rather than this forced into a problem caused by the fallen kid's behavior.

[clegfly]

Small thing I’m cooking for idksomethingclever99’s fic MITPP!! For some reason I’m having trouble tagging them but here’s the fic!!

This seemed fun to do… probably won’t get more done than this page though…

[nobodymitskigabriel]

I've gotten accustomed to reading Jack's childhood skip as a narrative hand wave so he can function on more or less the same level as the other characters and since he's not human and we're watching supernatural it feels permissible to take that leap in logic and go ahead and read him as a young adult. He is highly naive and inexperienced and there is a very large power imbalance involved with him and his caretakers and those are core aspects of his character that make him uniquely vulnerable to the abuse and trauma that he suffered, but those things don't necessarily make him an infant and I don't think that's how he's meant to be read.

[toastingpencils37]

Motherfucker. HOW DO I EVEN HAVE THAT MUCH NEGATIVE SPACE

I'VE NEVER EVEN UPLOADED CLOSE TO THAT MUCH SHIT, AND I'VE DELETED A SHIT TON TO TRY AND CLEAR UP WHAT I DID USE

Also.... I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH SHIT TO DELETE TO CLEAR ALL OF THAT

[swankpalanquin]

water cycle kendall: when you try to reach your father who died in the air by evaporating yourself into the sky

[quietwingsinthesky]

oh, yeah, another thing i noticed that was odd about s5 in comparison to earlier seasons was how much they relied on like. not the history of the doctor, exactly, but the image of that history. whether from little easter eggs of the first doctor’s picture popping up everywhere to i think the two(?) times in the season we get a montage of past doctors. and i honestly can’t remember anything like that happening earlier (with the exception of the time crash short, which felt more substantial to me and was also like. 7 straight minutes of david tennant being allowed to fangirl.)

and i say ‘the image’ because hell knows the RTD era was pulling from doctor who past left, right, and center, but it rarely felt like a moment of ‘look at this old thing, you remember old thing? old thing was cool and so are we for continuing it.’ and more like ‘here’s a species/character/etc from classic who. and here’s how they’ve changed and fit into the new world we’ve built for the show.’

I guess, the difference here for me is that. i haven’t watched classic who. s5 shows me a slideshow of doctors and to me, those are the guys i once ranked by how sexy i think they are. and not much else. i don’t have an emotional connection to an image. but take, say, school reunion? an episode that was my favorite even back when i was a kid specifically because i adored sarah jane? i had no idea who she was then, i only just figured out a little bit ago which doctor she traveled with, and exclusively all i’ve watched of her is that episode in s2 and the sarah jane adventures. and yet, that episode, without the context there for me, managed to make sense to me. i’m sure it was probably even more impactful to fans of sarah jane from classic who, but it didn’t lose its impact without that knowledge.

so, that’s a shift. i don’t want to say it’s a negative one, exactly, because maybe people who have seen classic who like these references and i’m missing something. but, to me, it feels a little more shallow.

[redysetdare]

I think i would like sci-fi a lot more if more stories took the evolution route to it. so many sci-fi stories focus so much on the technology side and "Let's go to space! let's see capitalist hell!" and like, yeahh those have their purpose and place in sci-fi. But personally i love when sci-fi gets speculative with biology. How will the earth change? what animals developed from changed ecosystems - which animals evolved and which ones went extinct? I want people to take the science part of science fiction and explore biology and ecology and how the planet and animals change with the world. I"m tired of it only focusing on technology and robots and being more cyber fantasy.

[glacialswordsman]

i did it... i designed my own icon banners...

i'm so unbelievably proud yall have no idea... AOUGH

[amplexadversary]

Ahh, tv shows where I can't tell apart the male leads, my beloathed.

Seriously either we need to go back to lighting our sets more, or long hair on men needs to come back into vogue, because I can't keep living like this.

I can't keep taking two seconds to try to determine who is who every shot because I miss what's going on in the scene!

Controversial opinion, but you need to follow the silhouette rule in live-action projects too, at least in regard to characters in the same show or movie! If you absolutely *can't* hire actors with different heights, hair, or builds, you need to work something out with the costuming department to get a distinct shape!

[h0u-h0u]

“All those things that you desire

You will find here in the fire…”

- Absolution

[whatudottu]

Something about Altered Loyalties CYLAS just really makes me want to include him in the first place but also makes me really really REALLY think that with the more supernatural elements of AL based off of the original TFP pilot (or just first episode/s?) that CYLAS as a ‘dead man walking’ would actually let him stay around longer AND also be a very significant contributing factor to Megatron’s downfall in Decepticon favour!

Of course it’s not as if I have the pieces of the TFP rewrite au firmly put into place, CYLAS in canon shows up just over halfway into season 2, and many of my most established changes occur in the first like… including all the parts of ‘Darkness Rising’ 8 episodes of season one; I have no idea if the environment CYLAS presents himself in is the same one canon CYLAS does.

But with the dubiousity between s1 e8 all the way to s2 e19, I’ll establish the basic context… I think in story mode maybe…

Looking at the general timeline for the Aligned Continuity, it says that the first contact of cybertronians on Earth is dated to about 500 years before the show, give or take a decade. I’ve been listing Skyquake’s little EHP pitstop to have existed at least 50 years before the war reached our planet, but what if I pushed it all the way back to 500; if a vorn is 83 years, that’d be about 6 years on an entirely different planet not knowing truly if your twin is going to make it, a planet which by the way presently has no established radio systems that it’s horrifically quiet for a terrestrial environment.

That means that Skyquake’s EHP Comms Array has been transmitting a signal long before humans had developed radio, which also means that what might’ve been blatantly an anomaly in the system if discovered 50 odd years previous to 2012 (which would’ve been in the 60s give or take which would not have been good in the literal middle of the cold war era) has been going for centuries because it had always been there, there is no anomaly because it is a signal that has existed ever since humans were able to manipulate radiowaves into sending messages and translate them into detectable noise. It helps that cybertronian language and code (both code lang and like literal programming code) is a system unknown to humans developing their own language.

And you may be asking, why did I divert this post from talking about CYLAS and how he’d outlast his canon alternate to radio shit? Well, if you were a paramilitary organisation who is pretty good at erasing signals and you discovered a signal that has been actively running for the entirety of human radio has suddenly been silenced, what would you begin to suspect at that?

Aliens may potentially be a stretch but MECH didn’t just name themselves after the cybertronians fighting war on their planet, and once the cybertronian conflict touched down on Earth, the Decepticons hadn’t a need for an intergalactic communications array and in fact was specifically instructed to switch it off in an effort to prevent the Autobots from using it. That would’ve been about maybe 6 years ago for the show (wow just enough equivalent time to match what Skyquake felt he spent grounded to one radio tower look at that) and though MECH would not encounter their first cybertronian until ‘Convoy’ (haha wait that’s s1 e9 the next ep to cover - if necessary - for Altered Loyalties lmao), they would’ve had 6 years to find that missing signal and stumble across some very definitely alien technology.

That is one of the reasons why the rewrite of ‘Masters and Students’ which is less masters and students focused - rather the point is Skyquake, a team of Nemesis stationed vehcions and Starscream investigate the comms array and set it up manually - why the radio tower wasn’t switching on from a remote position.

The other reason was because the Guardian unit stationed at the comms array - the very ones that had accompanied Skyquake all those stellar cycles ago - had gone missing. Why?

Because of Megatron’s flagrant use of Dark Energon.

Points 1 and 2 listed above leads to the explosion of the comms array, the death of Skyquake, and MECH either being alerted to the point of alien contact or just in general going to the site for more study only to find a dead specimen. After the discovery of the Autobots with the body of Skyquake, MECH begins their initial study and dissection of cybertronian physiology, though without a live subject they couldn’t exactly see what parts function in what way, especially the t-cog.

The discovery of Skyquake led to the discovery of terrorcons which lead to the discovery of how to take down a cybertron and how to take it apart without it screaming. MECH would learn the programming of a cybertronian through vehicon terrorcons since, even with DE corruption, their processors are still somewhat being maintained. While probably not able to access memories (they are fickle things, memory centres, easy to damage storage or to corrupt files) there are still systems responsible for pain and other more processor based responsibilities that aren’t centred in a physical organ that reads in fine print it’s function.

Breakdown being MECH’s first fully functional living mecha for their study is so exciting for them (even if Breakdown is very much less enthused) because they can put what knowledge they’ve pieced together to be far more efficient with their time and focus on the elements they could not decipher from either corpse or zombie and potentially try and prod at Breakdown’s brain for some cohesive coding. Good think Bulkhead still shows up when he does even with Breakdown walking away with the dreadful thought of ‘how the hell do these fleshies already know so much’ boring into his head… mainly through the optic that was still drilled out-

Whether or not MECH needs to get another living cybertronian to get caught up in their understanding of the biomechanics of them (aka would 'Operation: Bumblebee' take place as it does) or they skip right onto making a remote control Prime having gotten a headstart on their knowledge and scaring the scrap out of any bot unlucky enough to be unconscious around them, eventually Silas gets smooshed and MECH scientists are reliant on their alien dissections to get the human puree back to the land of the living.

I'd assume that this was the case in the original since if Silas' biomatter was able to be collected from a pile of robot drone induced rubble the RC truck would've been able to be recovered as well, but MECH discovers that using Nemesis Prime as a lifesupport system does not work given all it's functionality is focused on visually replicating another cybertronian, rather than using it to create life. There's a lot of parts and systems to a cybertronian's biological ecology that wasn't put into consideration for a mimic toy that prove detrimental to creating a suitable ah... skin suit essentially for Silas' blood pudding, but MECH has an abundance of corpses ready and raring to be used just so long as they piece them back together again.

Amid MECH's collection would no doubt be a mass of vehicon bodies - some untouched by energon others taken down explicitly by MECH because they were terrorcons - some terrorcons made up from the bodies of the previous conflict pre-show (and not just a hypothetical ancient war, but explicitly the conflict that culled a lot of Autobot and Decepticon officers amid the show expected vehicon death), and the very first cybertronian sample they started studying, Skyquake himself! Being at the origin of the blast at the EHP Comms Array he wasn't kept in perfect condition for one, the arm he loses as a terrorcon in the Shadowzone is still lost - it's been buried under rubble after being severed with radio tower pieces - and the monochromatic glass over his optics has long since been shattered so you can see the 'pupil' aka sensor, but seeing as how CYLAS makes Breakdown's corpse somehow look worse than what Airachnid left it as MECH probably has to suture that fucker back up because there's not way his organs have been left untouched!

And once CYLAS has been successfully integrated into his new cybertronian shell (some sort of arm, either being a loaner from another corpse or straight up just one MECH invented, it could even be a copy of the missing arm but where's the fun in that) instead of getting all high and mighty about 'being of a superior species' Silas actually bloody thinks on MECH's plans going forward. With a literal army of paramilitary personnel, from the scientists that melded human flesh with cybertronian wires to the average grunt soldier fighting between the battles of iron giants, CYLAS has something that Megatron (at least the Altered Loyalties Megatron I have written previously) has wanted from the start of the series...

An undying force.

For as large as cybertronians physically are their numbers can never match the scale of humanity, I can't remember if the books mentioned only thousands of the dead or up to a million over the course of like... a long fucking time but, that's not even the number of the human population if you're caught up with the number (nearly 8 billion alive today). And with the dead of previous battles already roaming the Earth, in a world where Megatron still being only like one dude can't command a planet wide population of zombies, the only reason he doesn't turn his blade to the weakest denominators of his forces in his plagued state is because their conscious decision to serve him is worth more than mindless servitude.

CYLAS introducing himself and MECH as a solution to this issue, and providing a show of bountiful body horror, makes not even the Decepticon high command quite as safe as they had been; not that it's been proven to be safe standing by Megatron's side given his track record of wanting his SiCs beaten or killed but...

The fact that CYLAS just so happened to have given and then promptly brutalised Dreadwing's hope that Skyquake may have been actually alive, just severely damaged (and, bond weakened from distance and prior injury, clinging to the last shreds of 'my spark didn't kill me with him' reasoning) and broke him out of the spell of blind loyalty to his once great leader.

CYLAS in this version has a little bit more longevity to his existence within the Decepticon forces, not actually a Decepticon soldier as the canon CYLAS pledged himself as but 'The Human Factor' the episode so calls itself akin to the way the American government and the human children are to the Autobots, but being able to physically go toe-to-toe with cybertronians. Megatron might be a little tired of dealing with independents after Airachnid's escapade (I do intend to make her more into a poacher/torturer type character than another Starscream so she might act out a little differently), but Silas isn't one for licking boots anytime soon and as CYLAS, Megatron is no different; you'd think he wouldn't have even done that in the first place given he's already an ex-military 'take-no-nonsense' bitch, but the Breakdown in him probably made him a lapdog...

Anyway that's a whole big post about Altered Loyalties CYLAS... or at least the in depth reasoning behind why he could still integrate himself into the story and why he'd probably have more opportunity to lasting- i prommy it's not bc i like torturing skyquake likers *wink*

I guess this is now a canon event or at least I'll try to make it canon ;)