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nevertherose · 4 years ago

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One Hundred Seconds to Midnight: Chapters 1-8

"All Roman wanted to do was take Logan on a Doctor Who LARP within the Imagination.

But with Thomas's Sides at their figurative breaking point after the disastrous wedding, the Imagination may just have a few ideas of her own..."

Hello, Tumblr fanders, it has been a while since I've poked around in here...mostly because, I've been writing another story!

Do you like Sanders Sides? Do you like Doctor Who? Do you like the idea of the Sides playing Doctor Who characters? If so, this story was written especially for you.

I found that the process of cross-posting Mahogany and Teakwood across three platforms, one chapter at a time, involved a lot of me spending too many hours squinting at html code. Not especially fun. This time around, I've only been posting on AO3 and Wattpad.

But I wanted it to exist here as well.

So! Today I'm going to post the first half (in two posts, because apparently Tumblr has a post size limit, who knew?), all the chapters that are up so far. Then, when the whole story is up on the other platforms, I'll post the other half.

Of course, you could head to either AO3 or Wattpad, if you want to read as the chapters go up.

But if you're like me, and like to read stories in nice, big, juicy chunks...here you go:

One Hundred Seconds to Midnight

Chapter 1- The Eleventh Hour

“Who are you?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m still cooking.”

Midnight.

The witching hour.

Or was that 3AM? Roman wondered. No, that’s the devil’s hour…damn it, Virgil! You had to get them all mixed up!

It was nearly midnight on the Imagination’s border.

Moonlight, pearlescent and brighter than it could ever shine in the real world, streamed feather-light through the tall windows on Roman’s side of the Dream Palace. It made patterns of light and shadow over the black marble floors, made nighttime caricatures of the white ivory statues that lined the corridor.

Roman’s heeled boots echoed in the silence; Logan’s dress shoes, in comparison, were whisper-quiet.

Logan himself had been uncharacteristically quiet since they entered this place, Roman noted, glancing back. Normally by now the logical Side would have asked a million questions, made a million plans, or be several bullet points into a lecture about palace construction or the history of measurement units or some other nerdy, obscure subject.

And Roman would either pretend to be annoyed, or would interject witty counterpoints to make Logan stop and bluster and…

But not tonight.

Maybe he’s nervous about being here, Roman told himself, smoothing a hand over his red sash. He’s only pointed out a million times that Logic and the Imagination are anathema to one another. Maybe I should have planned something else…

Or maybe he’s just annoyed at you for dragging him out of bed in the literal middle of the night, a more insidious inner voice whispered. When you know he likes to keep a consistent sleep schedule.

Roman pressed his lips together, lifted his chin…he might be a mere facet of a single personality, but he was also a Prince, and Princes do not listen to inner demons. However, he also looked back for the dozenth time to make sure Logan was actually still following.

That was the only reason Roman kept looking back.

It had nothing to do with the way the translucent moonlight caught the other Side’s dark, immaculately kept hair, or glinted off his glasses.

In the real world, of course, and whenever they manifested near their Source, the Sides all had precisely the same face and body as Thomas. But deep inside the mind, where physical appearance was an illusion anyway, the Sides exercised much more control.

Thomas remained their base template, but each Side also tended to portray himself with features that Thomas associated with their core function. Like Patton’s fluffy curls and childlike freckles, or Virgil’s anxious, ever-changing eyeshadow, or Remus’s abominable comic-book villain mustache.

Like Deceit’s…no, Janus’s very real scales.

Damn that snake. Why did I have think of him now?

Hopefully the lying bananaconda had better things to do than pop up and spoil things tonight. Because tonight, Roman was finally fulfilling a longtime promise to Logan, and taking him on a grand adventure.

The thought made his heart flutter in anticipation, and he looked back again.

Logan within the mindscape was leaner than Thomas, an inch or two taller, and his neatly trimmed hair and intelligent eyes were almost black in the low light. His face was narrow and intense, the nose more aquiline, and he had a habit of standing straighter than any of the rest of them.

(A habit which constantly showed off his trim waist and chest muscles…not that Roman paid any attention to that…)

Roman, by contrast, was a bit shorter, but his shoulders were broad and he was more muscular, due to all the questing and sword fighting he did here in the Imagination. He wore his hair in longish disarray that paired devastatingly with his clean, square jawline; hair that could be turned loose and wild on quests, or pulled neatly back as befitted royalty. His hands were strong; with long, artistic fingers, as skilled at wielding pens and paintbrushes as they were at wielding swords.

He liked to think he was handsome.

He was also painfully aware of how little it mattered when a certain someone…ehem…never seemed to notice.

“Roman, I confess to still being a bit lost as to the purpose of this journey,” Logan said at last, breaking the high-ceilinged silence. “You said you were taking us on a…’lark’? If so, why are we wandering around the Dream Palace?”

“LARP,” Roman corrected, flashing him a smile. “L-A-R-P. It stands for live action role play, Specs.”

Logan’s nose wrinkled at the words “role play”, and Roman’s stomach lurched. He hates it, he hates the very idea of it, you haven’t even started yet and you’ve already failed…

“Oh, don’t make the scrunchy face!” he added, a bit louder than necessary, and waved a hand. “At least wait until you’ve seen it.”

Roman had only been planning this for weeks.

“You know, when you promised to take me on one of your ‘adventures’,” Logan said, making finger quotes. “I was not expecting to be roused from bed in the middle of the night.”

“That’s because this isn’t your average adventure.” Roman gestured around them. “I constructed a special dreamscape to get all the details right, and we can only use the Dream Palace when Thomas is asleep.” He turned and dared a wink. “Only the best for you, my detail-oriented friend.”

Logan adjusted his glasses.

“Let it be known that I am indulging your antics right now because you have, on occasion, had some good ideas. You will, in turn, have to indulge my skepticism.”

“I have no idea what you just said, but I’m gonna pretend it was a compliment,” Roman said with a wink, which Logan rolled his eyes at.

“Ah ha, here we are!”

Roman stopped at a set of iconic blue doors, nearly vibrating in excitement as he waited for Logan to recognize them.

The nerd did not disappoint.

“Roman…” Logan murmured, stepping forward to touch the white PULL TO OPEN sign. “They look just like the doors to the TARDIS. The attention to detail is exquisite. But why?”

“Because I’m taking you on a Doctor Who LARP!” Roman exclaimed, flapping his hands. “All we have to do is step through, and the Imagination will make us Doctor and companion, and whisk us away through all of time and space!”

Logan’s face was a mixture of confusion and curiosity. “Again…why?”

“Because it will be fun?” Roman bit his lip, looking at his toes. “I…I know you aren’t into swords and sorcery and dragon-witches and whatnot. I wanted this to be something you might actually enjoy.”

Logan’s brow furrowed, as it often did when he tried to process something that didn’t fit neatly into his graphed, notated, logical worldview.

Usually, it was an emotion.

“But won’t us enacting such an intense scenario at this time of night negatively affect Thomas’s sleep?” Logan asked.

“That’s the genius of adventuring in the Dream Palace,” Roman explained. “You can do hyperreal, immersive stuff, and if Thomas does happen to remember anything, he’ll just think he had a weird dream. The worst that could happen is he might post about it on Twitter.”

“Hmm. I can see you’ve thought this through. I am…flattered that you went to all the trouble,” Logan said in a quiet voice.

Roman had to bite back an ecstatic giggle.

Not…not because of the way his nerves skittered below his skin when his gaze caught Logan’s black eyes and soft expression. No, Roman was merely…excited! That someone like Logan appreciated his hard work!

It wasn’t like he was trying to impress anyone, like some middle school boy with, you know, a crush or whatever. For the last, well…two years.

…and then some.

Ugh. There was little point in denying his feelings; he’d only accidentally summon Janus and his oily smirk, and if that happened, Roman would most certainly die of embarrassment and that was not a lie, thank you very much.

The truth was, ever since Thomas had placed that jar of Crofters into Logan’s hands and inspired him to sing…not just rap, or begrudgingly harmonize, but actually sing…Roman had fallen, and fallen hard.

How could he not?

Logan’s words and ideas had always challenged him, pushed him to be smarter, sharper, better, just to keep up. Logan was the grounding anchor to his sails, the clarity to his excess. It used to infuriate Roman, the way he and Logan always came at problems from opposite sides and fought, sometimes bitterly, over the best way to meet in the middle.

But now?

Now Roman relished the way they traded words in a good fight, like blades in the hands of expert swordsmen. Logan, despite his dislike for anything fanciful, was a natural wordsmith…and Roman was a great lover of poetry. Even better, it seemed like Logan was also starting to enjoy their verbal sparring matches…

And then these last few months had happened.

The Decision, and Deceit, and the way that snake had let Remus out of the shadows to wreck havoc, and then the disastrous wedding itself…and Roman knew that Logan, through all of it, had been feeling pushed aside.

Goodness knew the logical Side hadn’t deserved to be shoved to the back of a courtroom, or relegated to a pixel-y shadow of himself before being removed from the discussion entirely. Worse, in both of those scenarios, Roman had either done nothing…or actively made things worse.

Roman knew he was guilty of letting his mouth run wild in his zeal to solve Thomas’s dilemmas…or in desperately hiding his true feelings. He knew his nicknames often came with barbs, his insults sometimes hit too close to home, that he often ignored or dismissed Logan’s cool, much-needed perspective.

He knew he needed to be better.

I’ll make it up to him tonight, Roman told himself as he laid a hand on the rough wooden blue doors and glanced back at Logan. The logical Side nodded, giving Roman a tiny burst of confidence.

He’ll get to play his favorite character and be his best nerdy self. This is going to be great!

Roman took a breath, and shoved open the TARDIS doors.

Chapter 2- Human Nature

“It’s all becoming clear now. The Doctor is doing the things you’d like to be doing.”

The blaring of a dozen sirens burst in Logan’s ears.

He was yanked across the threshold, Roman’s hand practically a vice around his wrist. Logan inhaled the sharp scent of metal and warm electronics, and a million figurative lights went off in his brain.

Being the physical incarnation of Logic, this wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation.

The TARDIS shuddered…wait, TARDIS? We’re actually on the TARDIS?…under impact. Lights flashed; reds and greens over an ambiance of steely blue-gray, and Logan knew exactly what to do.

He shook free of Roman’s grip and strode to the center console…console, how do I know this is a console?…flipping several switches and turning the green dial to precisely 3.56 degrees to offset the radiation sheer from the M-class star they’d just spun past.

Because naturally they happened to be careening through an asteroid field.

The time rotor rose and dipped, Gallifreyan symbols whirling overhead; Logan adjusted shields and dodged rocks, striding confidently from station to station. He guided his TARDIS around the last large asteroid, one that easily could have smashed his beloved ship to bits, and then they were clear.

The TARDIS chimed reassuringly under his hands, relieved to be in empty space again.

Roman screamed.

The sound echoed off the metallic walls, causing Logan to whip around and nearly lose his balance.

“What happened?” he said sharply, leaving the console. The creative Side stood near the railing, staring down at himself in obvious dismay. “What’s wrong?”

“Look at me, Logan!” Roman said shrilly and gesturing at his body. “Just look!”

Logan examined his fellow Side. There were no obvious injuries he could see, no blood, no bruising, nothing that would merit a scream. There was just Roman, unfairly handsome as always.

(He still wasn’t sure how Roman managed that feat when they all literally, at least some of the time, had the same face.)

“I…don’t see a problem?” Logan asked slowly.

“I meant, look at what I’m wearing, Calculator Watch,” Roman snarled, and turned to yell nonsensically at the ceiling. “Am I a joke to you? When I said I wanted to be a companion, this is not what I meant!”

Logan focused on Roman’s clothing, which had shifted rather drastically since passing through those doors. His normal princely attire was replaced by a denim cutoff skirt, overalls, pink leggings, and a tight pink blouse that clung to his muscular chest and arms...

“I look ridiculous, don’t I?” Roman murmured, scuffing a combat boot against the metal grated floor. The motion drew Logan’s gaze again to the way the cutoffs hugged his hips and wow, that skirt was really short, wasn’t it?

And those tights, the way they accentuated Roman’s legs...

Logan frowned, his face feeling unusually warm. Why did he keep noticing these things? Of course Roman was more fit than the rest of them.

Perhaps it was simply that Logan didn’t usually see the evidence of it so…plainly.

Stop, Logan told himself sharply. You might be gay and allosexual, but that is no excuse to be disrespectful.

He cleared his throat.

“If I may, Roman?” he said, approaching, and made a closer examination of Roman’s outfit.

“I gather from your earlier ranting that you instructed the Imagination to cast you as one of the Doctor’s companions for the duration of this scenario?”

“Well, yeah,” Roman admitted, “but I was thinking someone like Jamie McCrimmon, or Rory Williams, or maybe even Jack Harkness!”

“You know there is some debate over whether Jack Harkness would be considered a proper ‘companion’, as he was never full time on the TARDIS,” Logan argued absently, still eying Roman’s ensemble.

It was attractive but also familiar; he just couldn’t quite place it…

“Neither was Clara Oswald at first, but nobody had a problem handing her that label from the start!” Roman folded his arms and Logan had to look away because wow, short sleeves and arms…

“Just because she was a girl and the writers obviously intended for her to be a love interest—”

“A girl, of course!” Logan snapped his fingers. “Roman, you are a companion. Specifically, you are Rose Tyler.”

“What?” Roman frowned, smoothing the overalls across his middle. “I…Hmm. You might actually be right.”

“Of course I am right.”

The creative Side scoffed at that, but continued to frown.

“I think it’s a good choice,” Logan added. “Rose is arguably one of the most beloved companions in new Who; bold, kind, and intelligent in her own way. She was pivotal to the Ninth, Tenth, and arguably the War Doctor’s character arcs.”

He laid a hand on Roman’s shoulder. (To convey reassurance, of course. Not because he suddenly wanted to touch…)

“Hers are not the worst shoes you could be given to fill,” Logan said, “idiomatically speaking.”

“Only you would drop a word like ‘idiomatically’ in everyday conversation,” Roman grumbled, but some of the spark returned to his caramel eyes.

“But look at you!” Roman said in a brighter voice, gesturing. “All proper and Doctor-ish. At least the Imagination let you keep your tie, or, whatever that thing is around your neck.”

Logan glanced down at himself for the first time.

His sensible polo and jeans had become a clean-cut black suit, with a warm grey waistcoat, a crisp white undershirt, and a silver pocket watch. A navy cravat was knotted around his throat.

His knee-length suit jacket was also black, with a striking cerulean lining.

He retrieved a slender, metallic something from the jacket’s inner pocket: of course, the Doctor’s signature sonic screwdriver. Specifically, the Tenth Doctor’s screwdriver.

Logan chuckled, remembering all the times he’d ranted to Roman about how impractical and flashy Eleven’s screwdriver became, and don’t even get him started on Twelve’s, it was practically a lightsaber…

“Interesting,” he murmured, stretching his arms to turn in a slow circle, letting the jacket flare. “Fashionably, I appear to be a cross between the Eighth and Twelfth Doctors, which I appreciate, as they are the two most sensible dressers of the bunch. And by the way, Roman, this is a called a cravat, not a tie…”

He’d lifted hands to his neck but the words died on his tongue.

Roman had summoned a mirror and was, quite literally, checking himself out. He swayed his hips, tilted one toward and then away from the mirror, pouted, did a tongue smile, and…and Logan realized he had been watching for more than a socially acceptable length of time.

He swallowed hard and cleared his throat again. But he was saved from having to speak by a loud crackling at the center console.

Both Sides rushed over, Logan seizing the TV screen and pulling it down. Gray static skittered over the polished surface. He flipped two switches and turned a dial, trying to zero in on the signal.

“I meant to ask earlier…how do you know what to do?” Roman asked, tilting his head. “You were piloting before I think you even realized we were on a TARDIS in the first place.”

Logan froze in the middle of winding one of the cranks.

“I…I really do not know.” In fact, the more he thought about it, the less sense any of the controls made. “Now that you’ve drawn my attention to it, you are correct: rationally, I should not know the function of any of these…gizmos.” He gestured at the crank he’d been winding.

“Yet somehow my hands just…know.”

Roman leaned casually onto the console.

“When I built this LARP, I gave the Imagination quite a bit of leeway in how it wanted to construct our characters,” he said. “I’m thinking it took things a step further than costume changes, like making me the companion it thinks I most resemble instead of the companion I wanted to be.”

Roman bit his lip as though troubled, then clearly shook himself out of it.

“And it must have imparted some of the Doctor’s knowledge upon me.” Logan added, not sure how he felt about the Imagination having such a direct influence over his mind. He supposed if it didn’t get too invasive, and was confined to this one night, he could deal with it.

It had proven useful so far, after all.

Roman shot Logan a fierce grin.

“Indeed! So engage that big Doctor brain and let’s see who’s trying to call us. Allons-y, adventure awaits!”

“You know ‘allons-y’ is my line, right?” Logan said dryly.

He had to use his screwdriver on the screen before the picture came clear. The stream of static acquired the cadence of a voice…and then a disturbingly familiar face stared back at his own, looking equally shocked.

Roman, for the second time since entering the TARDIS, let out a bloodcurdling scream.

Chapter 3- The Witch’s Familiar

“If you’re going to take my stick, do me the courtesy of actually killing me. Teamwork is all about respect.”

Janus had just settled into his favorite chair with a mug of chamomile tea and a political science book when he was yanked…rather rudely, he might add…onto the deck of a spaceship.

He sighed, and dismissed his drink.

When one lived in the same mindspace as the literal embodiment of chaos, one unfortunately learned to expect such interruptions.

“REMUS!” he roared, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Did I not specifically ask to be LEFT ALONE tonight?”

Silence.

Deeply annoyed now, Janus took a moment to look around himself. This was not a normal spaceship; no windows, for one, and it was laid out in levels around a translucent column at the very center. His mismatched eyes followed the center rotor up and down, his mind almost placing it…

Something clumsily rose up from the deck with a clatter, causing Janus to summon his crook with a yell.

Only…the object that dropped into his hand wasn’t smooth wood, but a slender metal instrument just barely longer than his hand. A…sonic screwdriver? What the actual heck?

Well. It was what he had.

“Get back!” He pointed the instrument at the…figure…who still slowly climbed to its feet. It was an android or robot of some sort; humanoid, and the same kind of weirdly familiar as the ship.

“Janus?” the robot said, tilting its head.

Janus froze, all the scales standing up on his body. That was…that was Patton’s voice. Flat, mechanical, but unmistakable.

After all, Patton was the only Side who consistently called Janus by name.

“Patton?” Janus whispered.

“Oh, that was so weird-feeling! Thank goodness I’m not all by myself,” Robot-Patton said, putting a hand over his…well, where his heart should have been…in obvious relief. “But why are we both suddenly on the TARDIS?”

Janus drew in a sharp breath.

Of course, he should have recognized the stupid time rotor immediately. He’d never admit it to any of them, but he was as much of a Doctor Who nerd as Logan or Roman, sometimes going so far as to spy on them when they argued over episodes together.

To learn their arguing styles, of course.

Not because he had any desire to join those discussions.

And now, looking at Patton with a sinking feeling in his stomach, Janus deduced exactly what he was: a Mondasian Cyberman. They were older and cruder in design than the reboot versions…no wonder he hadn’t put a finger on it right away.

That wasn’t really the issue.

“REMUS!” Janus shouted again, more angrily this time. Bad enough his pleasant evening of solitude had been interrupted by…whatever this was. But putting the sweetest, most emotional Side into a canonically unemotional shell, a robot?

That was cruel. That was insulting.

It was too far, even for Remus.

“Janus, is everything okay?” Patton asked, coming closer. Janus shivered at the sound of that warm voice coming from a blank metallic face with empty eyes.

“Do you…feel all right?” Janus said in a hesitant voice.

“I’m a little chilly, but otherwise I’m in ship shape!” the other quipped, giggling. “Get it? Cause we’re on a ship?”

Is it…is it possible that he doesn’t know?

“Hilarious,” Janus deadpanned, but inside his thoughts spun.

He sensed they were in a dream construct within the Imagination, which meant this had to be Remus’s doing. Remus, who reveled in gore, despair, disturbing imagery, angst, and who was in charge of Thomas’s nightmares.

Remus could…and would, given the chance…recreate the experience of being a Cyberman down to the Last. Grim. Detail.

Maybe he hadn’t meant to ensnare Patton specifically to fill this role…Remus didn’t generally pull other Sides in for nightmares, come to think of it…but meanwhile, Janus didn’t want to find out what this might do to Patton’s head.

Worse, it was becoming clear that Patton was somehow oblivious to the state of his own body; he’d used his metallic hands to clutch at his metallic chest and found nothing wrong with either. He couldn’t hear the electronic rasp in his own voice, or the heavy clanging of his steps on the grated floor.

Should Janus say something?

Would Patton believe him if he did?

Ever since Thomas’s near mental breakdown after the disastrous wedding, Patton and Janus had orbited around each other in a state of tenuous truce. They talked now, sometimes, and those talks didn’t always end in arguments. Patton began to leave space for him by Thomas’s blinds when he was called up, and he…and by extension Thomas…occasionally actually sought his input.

But Janus, well.

Janus was still a liar.

The others still called him Deceit, either by accident (Logan) or out of spite (Virgil). Then there was Roman, who invented a colorful, wounding ego-jab for him every day, and Remus, whose fond nicknames tended to double as sex jokes.

Having no other real allies in the mindscape, Janus really, really didn’t want to screw up his tenuous alliance with Patton. Why sabotage his figurative “seat at the table” over one of Remus’s stupid nightmares?

Patton would assume Janus was slipping back into his old ways, lying just because he could, and Janus would never be able to prove otherwise. And later Patton would make that sour, pinched face he always made when he was disappointed, the one that made Janus want to crawl into a hole…

So.

Best to keep his observations close to the chest, for now.

“Do you have any idea what we’re doing here?” Janus asked, striding to the center console. True to dream logic, the controls made no sense and simultaneously made perfect sense.

Patton shrugged; a strange, clanky motion of his shoulders.

Janus sighed. “Although Remus has dragged me into dreams before, even he generally understands the concept of consent.” He casually flapped a hand. “And he always leaves you ‘light sides’ alone.”

“Honestly, this doesn’t feel like a nightmare to me,” Patton said, nearly making Janus choke. The Cyberman clanked over to stand by the console.

“It’s too clean,” Patton added. “Roman let me glimpse Remus’s side of the Imagination once, not long after he showed himself to Thomas, and it was…”

Patton trailed off.

“Fragmented? Chaotic? Disturbing?” Janus supplied.

“Sure, we’ll go with that,” Patton said quietly. “This,” he waved a hand around, “feels more like Roman’s work.”

“I suppose you would know.” Janus ran a thoughtful thumb over his face, tracing the ridge that ran from the corner of his mouth to his ear.

“And I would almost have to agree,” he added slowly. “If this was a nightmare, surely something ghastly would have happened by now. But my being pulled into one of Roman’s creations makes even less sense. He literally cannot stand me.”

“Maybe this is one of those dreams Thomas has sometimes after binge watching a show?” Patton suggested. “When there’s enough material in short term memory that the twins don’t get much input? Did Thomas binge a season of Doctor Who yesterday or something?”

And to think the others still view you as stupid, or slow-witted.

Janus bit back a smile.

“It’s a good theory, Patton, but no,” he said. “Thomas hasn’t really binged on much of anything lately.”

Patton ducked his head.

“You don’t…you don’t have to rub it in, you know,” he said lowly, the metallic rasp grating on Janus’s ears. “You and Logan have both made it pretty clear that I’ve been too strict with Thomas’s time.”

Janus fought to keep his expression neutral, but his stomach twisted.

Damn it.

Leave it to Patton to find guilt where none was meant. Even if Janus claimed he hadn’t meant it like that, Patton would probably not believe him.

Patton tilted his metal head as he examined Janus’s face.

“Did you know you have a mustache now? And a little goatee?”

“I have a what?” Janus felt at his face and groaned, his gloved fingers tugging at hair that most certainly did not belong on his face; with the scales, it probably looked hideous.

His entire outfit had altered in subtle ways, he realized. His usual plum tunic and trousers were now a brown suit and waistcoat ensemble, crossed with yellow pinstripes, with a black collared undershirt. A brown, knee-length suit jacket replaced his caplet, with subtle gold trimming. His yellow gloves were unchanged, thank goodness, and his hat…?

His hands flew up to his head and found something perched over his hair, sitting at an angle. Janus yanked down a screen at the console and stared. His beloved bowler had shrunk into a tiny, flat, rakish thing with a wide brim, festooned with a cluster of yellow rosebuds and black beads.

“What on earth, Remus?” he grumbled, turning his head from side to side. Well, if he had to be honest, pinstripes and a hatinator weren’t a terrible look.

“Well, if we’re on a TARDIS, I guess you’re supposed to be the Doctor,” Patton pointed out. “Which would make me your companion.”

Janus stroked his goatee and examined their surroundings in more detail. But am I a Doctor? he wondered. And if so, which one?

And whose TARDIS is this?

Because while it was clear they were on a TARDIS…what other class of spaceship had a time rotor?…he wasn’t almost certain this was not the TARDIS.

Every corner of the Doctor’s ship, no matter which face it belonged to, tended to overflow with bright, shiny, eclectic whimsy. By contrast, this one was plain, stark, with exposed metal beams and sharp angles.

Too dark, too full of shadows.

An awful suspicion rose up in his mind.

He crossed to one of the bookshelves, ignoring Patton’s soft inquiry, and his jaw clenched. There was the Necronomicon, shelved between the Liber Inducens in Evangelium Aeternum and The Black Scrolls of Rassilon, Book of Vile and its Black Appendix, The Ambuehl Lores and the Insidium of Astrolabus.

Janus finally looked at the sonic device he’d been holding all this time; seeing now that it wasn’t a screwdriver at all, and thanked every god he knew that he hadn’t tried to use it on Patton earlier.

It was a sonic laser.

Once again, even in a stupid, nonsensical dream, Janus had been cast as the villain.

His fist had collided with the bookshelf before he even realized he was moving, books falling to the floor. He punched it again, and again, until a cool rigid hand closed around his wrist and yanked him back.

“Janus, Janus, stop!” Patton yelled in his ear.

Janus wrenched his arm away and stalked back to the console, running gloved fingers over his scales, pushing them up and smoothing them down. The familiar sensation grounded him.

“You were right, Patton,” he threw over his shoulder. “This is definitely one of Roman’s dreams, and he definitely fucking hates me.”

Patton’s heavy footsteps clattered behind him.

“Language. And how do you know that,” he asked. “…Doctor?”

Janus whirled, lips curled in a snarl.

“I am not the Doctor, Patton, and we are not on the TARDIS.” He spread his arms to encompass them both, gesturing to the dimly lit spaceship. “Look around. Look at me!”

He turned, slowly, and eyed his mustached visage in the dark view screen.

“Clearly, I am the Master.”

Chapter 4- Nightmare in Silver

“You think he knows what he’s doing?”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far.”

Patton rested his arms against the console and sighed.

Once again, someone I care about is upset, and I don’t know what to do. I guess I should be used to it by now.

It didn’t help that it was so cold in this TARDIS. He folded his arms around his middle, which felt strange and heavy, to combat the chill that seemed to have settled deep in his bones.

Janus stalked past again, grumbling to himself.

“Of course the Prince would pull me into one of his little ‘adventures’ without my consent. He probably needed an antagonist. And naturally the slippery snake would have been the first person to come to mind!”

Patton opened his mouth…though he had no idea what he was going to say…but Janus drowned him out.

“Come on, Roman!” he shouted, throwing his yellow-clad hands up. “You’ve had your fun. Yes, I’m evil, I’m the villain, I’m the bad guy, blah blah. Let’s have our epic confrontation or whatever nonsense you have planned, as I would very much like to get back to my reading sometime tonight.”

Silence.

Patton didn’t know what Janus was expecting.

“Look, maybe we should just play along for now?” Patton said aloud, wincing when Janus turned his murderous expression on him. The deceptive Side had such deep, cutting golden eyes, the human one so much darker than the other…cynical eyes that were, ironically, almost impossible to lie to.

They’d see straight through it.

“It takes a liar to know a liar.”

The glare quickly softened, though, which in Patton’s opinion said a lot about how far Janus had come.

“And how do you propossse we ‘play along’?” Janus said, hissing his s’s in frustration.

“Well, we’ve kinda decided this is Roman’s dream, right? And since we’re in his part of the Imagination, we know he won’t let anything bad happen to us…”

Patton trailed off at Janus’s pained expression, reminded of just how badly Janus and Roman’s last encounter had gone.

“What are you, a middle school librarian?”

“Thank god you don’t have a mustache.”

And I just stood there and did nothing…no, I can’t dwell on that right now. Patton shook himself out of the memory.

It was surprisingly easy; even his emotions felt a little heavy and muted. He supposed he wasn’t used to being in a dreamscape; unlike Roman, who played in them all the time.

I know Roman, Patton reasoned. He might hold a grudge for a while, but he wouldn’t actually be out to hurt Janus.

Right?

“So, if we’re on a time ship, on some kind of adventure leading up to a confrontation like you said, the first thing we’d have to do is figure out where we need to go,” Patton finished, shrugging.

Janus pursed his lips…which looked downright weird with a mustache and goatee, almost making Patton giggle…and began pushing buttons on the console.

“You are definitely incorrect, Patton,” he said, pulling up another screen and flipping a few switches. “If I have been cast as the villain in this ridiculous charade, that means Roman is likely prancing around as the Doctor right now, on the proper TARDIS. Which, as the Doctor’s nemesis, I should be able to contact…ha!”

The screen burst into static.

“Doctor, oh Doctor, do you read me?” Janus crooned, and if Patton hadn’t known just how angry he was in that moment…well, he would have never known.

Janus had tucked it away entirely, in half a second's time.

That’s the scary thing about him, Patton realized uneasily. He’s smart, nearly as smart as Logan. Smart enough to run circles around me, that’s for sure. And he’s easily as good an actor as Roman.

Those attributes, combined with his naturally manipulative nature, made it difficult to trust him.

Patton was trying.

He’d been trying since the wedding, and well, since everything else that had happened. (Patton still cringed when Thomas encountered even a picture of a frog.) He’d done a lot of thinking and growing that day (in more ways than one!), and he’d come to a disturbing, but inevitable conclusion.

Janus wasn’t evil.

He never had been.

Just like Virgil had never been evil. Mean, sure; and sarcastic, and spiteful…but at his core, Virgil had wanted what was best for Thomas.

They all did.

And then there was the uncomfortable corollary to that: Patton, despite his best efforts, despite his core Purpose…Patton wasn’t entirely and automatically good.

Two weeks ago, Janus had proven beyond a doubt that Thomas needed him…ruthlessly, cuttingly, but no one could say he hadn’t made his point. It had been Patton who’d inadvertently pushed Thomas to the brink of a breakdown, and Janus who had to pull them all back.

Despite Patton’s unease, and the little voice in his head telling him that Deceit couldn’t be trusted, could never truly be trusted because it was in his nature to deceive…Patton remembered how they’d pushed Virgil so hard he decided to duck out, and how much of a tragedy that could have been if they hadn’t all intervened to bring him back.

With a pang of guilt, he pictured Thomas lying on the floor, crushed under the metaphorical weight of everything Patton needed him to do to keep from being a bad person…

He would not make those mistakes again.

If Virgil could learn to work with them instead of against them, so could Janus. If Patton could learn to recognize when his own Purpose did more harm than good, so could Janus.

Patton had to believe that.

He’d made too many mistakes lately to believe otherwise.

The screen in Janus’s hands cleared to reveal…

“What? Logan??” Janus exclaimed, as a scream echoed somewhere in the background.

“D—Janus?” Logan countered, then looked over his shoulder. “Roman, for the love of Archimedes, will you stop shrieking? I cannot hear.”

The screaming cut off and Roman’s fuming face squished into the frame with Logan.

“Deceit! I should have known you would show up to ruin this!” he managed to shout before Logan shoved him away.

“Ruin…I’m sorry, what?” Janus glanced at Patton, looking honestly confused. “Is he roleplaying right now? We assumed this scenario was Roman’s creation.”

Onscreen, Logan placed his whole hand against Roman’s mouth to prevent him from interrupting.

“It is. But to my understanding, it was only supposed to involve myself and Roman, and…wait. You said ’we’.” Logan peered around. “Who else is with you?”

Patton started to wave, but his view was blocked by Janus bending close to the screen to whisper something. Suspicion flared in Patton’s stomach; old, familiar, but after the talk he’d just given himself, he purposefully pushed it down.

I won’t assume he’s being shifty unless he actually gives me a reason to.

Lifting his chin, he crept forward until he was next to Janus’s shoulder.

“Hey, Logan,” he said brightly, waving.

“Ah…hello, Patton,” Logan squeaked after a moment, his eyes still wide.

“Wait, Patton’s there? With the snake?” Roman’s voice yelled from the background, and then there was Roman’s face again.

“Patton?” Roman said, narrowing his eyes. “But why are you—?”

Both faces disappeared for a moment as Logan yanked Roman out of frame. Patton thought he heard a rapid, hushed conversation. He glanced at Janus, who only shrugged, looking at puzzled as Patton felt.

Roman’s face reappeared, solemn and deeply annoyed.

“Patton,” he said, and hesitated. “D—Janus. You two…well, you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Very reassuring,” Janus quipped.

“This was only supposed to be a two-person adventure: Doctor plus companion. I have no idea why the Imagination brought you both in as well; I certainly didn’t tell it to.”

“Aw, that’s okay, kiddo,” Patton started gently. “It’s not your fault—”

“Oh, sweetie.” Janus folded his arms. “I’m sorry, but that’s bull. Putting me in the Master’s shoes? Are we seriously going to pretend the Side who unashamedly hates me had nothing to do with that?”

“I didn’t!” Roman argued, his voice going high. “You really think I wanted you here, in any capacity?”

“Deceit…er, Janus, you are being unnecessarily antagonistic, and as such, unhelpful,” Logan cut in with his low, reassuring voice. “But Roman, it might behoove us to consider the role of subconscious influence. You may not have intended to pull the others in, and yet here they are.”

Roman looked at Logan, aghast, and Patton almost flinched at the raw hurt in his caramel eyes. The creative Side backed out of frame.

“So you’re on his side, too,” his voice said quietly. “Is that how it is?”

“I am not on anyone’s side,” Logan argued, raising his hands. “We are all currently in this situation together, and as such—”

Whatever he’d been about to say was cut off by another garbled transmission, taking over the screen and blocking out Logan’s face with crackly, purple static. A gray, snarling face flashed out of the haze, making Patton shriek in surprise and even Janus took a step back.

Then it was gone, dissolving back to static…and the sound of someone laughing filled the connection.

“Hellooooo, nurse,” a familiar sing-song voice crooned. “Did you miss me?”

Chapter 5- The Long Game

“You can’t just read the guide book, you’ve got to throw yourself in. Eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers. Or is that just me?”

Logan sighed.

He knew that voice; they all did. Even Thomas, unfortunately.

“Remus,” Roman hissed.

The mustached Side filled the screen, grinning madly. “Boo!”

“Get out of my scenario,” Roman said, his eyes flashing. “If you know what’s good for you.”

“Your scenario?” Remus echoed, faux-outrage in his expression. “Yours? The Dream Palace is my domain, too, brother, whether you like it or not.” He leaned closer, letting his nostrils and a single radioactive green eye fill the screen. “Did you really think you could keep me out?”

Roman made a sound of disgust deep in his throat.

“Am I to assume, then, that you are responsible for bringing in the other Sides?” Logan asked, careful to keep his voice even. Remus thrived on getting a rise out of people.

“Of course he is!” Roman snapped, throwing up his hands. “He loves to ruin things, especially my things.”

��Now why would having the others here ruin anything, brother?” Remus asked in a sickly sweet voice, propping his head on his hand. “Unless you intended for this nighttime romp between you and Logan to be private?”

Roman sputtered and glanced at Logan, red-faced, as Remus giggled.

“It was meant to be so, yes,” Logan supplied, unsure why Remus would find that funny…or why Roman would find it embarrassing.

“As amusing as this all is—” Janus’s crooning voice cut through the speaker.

“Great. You’re still here, snake?” Roman snarked, his arms folded around himself.

“We’re all listening, kiddo,” Patton’s metallic voice said.

Roman’s lips always curl into a pout when he is angry, Logan thought, eyeing him without turning his head, and he gets a little wrinkle between his eyebrows. Why…why am I noticing such things all of a sudden?

Maybe it was the stress, or the unfamiliar environment.

Or maybe it was the Rose Tyler outfit.

That skirt ought to be illegal.

Logan deliberately focused on the screen, his cheeks warm.

“So this is kinda new,” Patton went on, “all of us actually talking—”

“If Remus is responsible,” Janus cut in again, “then perhaps he would be so kind as to explain the objective of this late night group therapy session?”

Despite the biting sarcasm, Logan did appreciate Janus’s insistence that they get to the point, even if it did mean talking over Patton…

Speaking of, why would Remus have paired Patton with Janus?

Surely he should have grouped Patton with Logan and Roman, and put Virgil with Janus? Or…maybe not, given how Virgil hisses if Janus so much as enters the same room.

Ugh. Interpersonal drama. Logan was thoroughly sick of trying to keep track of who carried a grudge against whom, especially when it seemed to change from day to day.

And on top of that, why would Remus make Patton a Cyberman? None of these decisions make any sense…

“Right?” Roman agreed softly next to him, and Logan realized he’d said that last bit out loud.

“If anything, I should have been the unfeeling killer robot,” Logan murmured.

“You don’t give yourself enough credit, Specs.” Roman shot him a strange look, both warm and troubled. “And frankly I don’t give a stinky rat’s ass about my stinky rat brother’s sick thought process. What I want to know is why Deceit doesn’t want us to mention it around Patton?”

Logan, who was still mentally stuck on rodents and donkeys…Roman’s metaphors were always something else…shook his head slightly.

“There’s no logical way Patton is unaware of his condition,” Logan pointed out. “So I can only guess he wishes to protect Patton’s feelings on the matter, by not allowing us to talk about it in front of him.” He shrugged when Roman’s frown deepened. “Those two have been getting along much better these last few weeks.”

“I think you’re giving the snake too much credit,” Roman muttered. “Even after he impersonated you, Logan? C’mon. It has to be something else.”

Logan bit back a sigh.

He doesn’t understand, he thought guiltily. Because he doesn’t know what really happened…

“This is unacceptable, Deceit,” Logan snapped, flinging the crook away from his body. “I was in the middle of a discussion—”

“He won’t listen to you,” Deceit had said, and there was no sarcasm or snark in his voice.

“Patton asked for my opinion!”

“And he dismissed you from the conversation the moment that opinion went against his preconceived notions!” Deceit snapped back.

Silence.

Logan could hear the others still talking, out in the real world…without him…as the misty dregs of subconscious curled around their feet.

“You tricked him.” Logan folded his arms. “He was scared and off balance and you gave him an out.”

“I didn’t make him take it!”

Deceit sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Logan. You know he is wrong on this. You know what this is doing to Thomas. His unquestioning, black-and-white, juvenile morality; it’s not working anymore. Thomas needs to grow up, and Patton is not letting him.”

Logan bit his lip.

“Logan.” Deceit moved closer, dismissing his crook into mist and setting both gloved hands on Logan’s shoulders. Logan stiffened.

“Logic. Please. I am…no good at this.” Deceit dropped his head, his hat obscuring his eyes. “I operate through deceit because that is the only way I can make them acknowledge me.”

“They don’t acknowledge you because you operate through deceit,” Logan pointed out.

“A perfect catch 22.” Deceit let out a bitter laugh. “But a snake cannot change its scales and I don’t…I have tried everything I know. I cannot fix this from the shadows. I am out of ideas.”

A strange thought entered Logan’s mind.

“You care. You care what happens to Thomas.”

Deceit looked up, his mismatched eyes glittering with stinging intensity. “I am the literal representation of selfishness. Why the hell else would I go to all this trouble if I didn’t care?”

“Well…” Logan trailed off, troubled.

He’d let the others get to him, he realized in that moment. He’d let Roman get to him, with his talk of evil and Dark Sides and how they were always trying to tempt Thomas off the right path.

But…they were all part of Thomas, even the so-called “dark sides”.

Of course they wanted what was best for him…well, what Remus wanted at any given moment was debatable…even if they didn’t always go about it in the healthiest of ways.

Deceit had laughed then, high pitched and bitter.

“Really? Really? Even you think so low of me?”

“You are manipulating me right now.” Logan frowned. “You are using my concern for Thomas to make me trust you.”

“Yes! I am!” Deceit got in his face, fangs flashing. “I am a manipulative bastard because that is the lens through which my Source perceives me. But that doesn’t matter because you, Logic; you see through me, always have. And you know perfectly well that logically, any objection you have to my personality or my methods does not change the fact that I. Am. Right.”

He punctuated each word with a poke to Logan’s chest.

“Deceit—” Logan started.

“Janus.”

“What?”

Deceit sighed. “My name. My…real name. It’s Janus.”

Logan blinked. He knew the mythology, of course: Janus, keeper of doorways and thresholds, looking simultaneously to the past and future. Two faces. Seeing things from every angle.

Self-preservation.

“It suits you,” Logan said quietly.

Tension bled out of Janus’s shoulders, a stiffness Logan hadn’t even realized was there until it was gone.

“Thank you.”

“Why am I here…Janus?” Logan asked, glancing away. “What do you need from me?”

Janus looked at him intently.

“Let me speak to them as you.”

Logan raised an eyebrow, and Janus sighed, waving a hand.

“I know, I know, more deceit, more lies, but—”

“No, it’s…” Logan pressed his lips together. “You already pointed it out. They don’t listen to me, either.”

The bitter twist that accompanied those words was becoming an all too familiar sensation in Logan’s chest.

Janus snorted.

“Oh, they do. Eventually. They heeded your advice on how to deal with Remus.”

Logan shrugged uncomfortably.

“Look,” Janus added, “honest people know how to tell the truth, but liars…” he smirked, not especially nicely. “We know how to wield the truth to accomplish an end. I can pull Thomas and the others out of this rut, but they have to be receptive to my tugging on the reins.”

Logan pursed his lips.

“You won’t fool them. If you recall, you tried to impersonate me once already and barely lasted two minutes.”

“I didn’t have your blessing.”

Janus fixed Logan with his intense mismatched eyes again, and held out a hand.

Logan stared at it, torn.

This was Deceit, the master liar: Thomas’s entire capacity for deception condensed into a single, snake-faced Side. How could Logan possibly trust him to not make things worse, after all the falsehoods, the impersonations, how he’d manipulated them all in one way or another to get his way?

But…as much as Logan, personally, didn’t understand why that callback had been so important to Thomas…he could not dismiss the fallout Thomas had suffered as a result of missing it. The decision to attend the wedding had turned out to be a bad one.

Patton had been wrong to insist upon it over Janus’s objections, and over Roman’s.

Those were just the facts.

Janus sighed.

“I’ll unmask myself when an opportunity arises, if that would help,” he offered, and to Logan’s shock, slowly tugged off a glove. “I won’t…I won’t let it go on as long as it did with Patton.”

He offered his now bare hand to Logan again.

Out in the real world, Logan could hear Patton’s increasingly desperate and ridiculous responses to Thomas’s and Roman’s questions, and winced. Janus did the same.

“Please,” was all he said.

Logan sighed…it really couldn’t get any worse, could it?…and shook Janus’s hand.

In his TARDIS, Logan let out the sigh he was holding back.

He might have personal, concrete evidence that Janus wasn’t evil, but he also knew Janus had wounded Roman, badly, that day. The creative Side was simply not currently capable of viewing any situation involving Janus with any sort of objectivity.

Passionate, sensitive people like Roman tended to have an unfortunate habit of hanging onto grudges.

As Logic, Logan needed to remember that.

“Oh, all right,” Remus said, his voice crackling over the connection. “Since you’re all here—”

“Actually, Remus, we’re not all here,” Patton’s voice pointed out. “You all know perfectly well who we’re missing; we’ve done this before.”

Logan’s eyes widened. “‘Where is Anxiety?’” he quoted.

“You mean Tickle Me Emo isn’t with one of you?” Remus asked, looking delighted. “Oh dear, oh dear. Is he lost?”

“I mean, TARDISes are huge,” Roman pointed out. “He could be somewhere on one of our ships.” His voice dropped again. “I’ll bet Deceit stashed him away, because we all know how he hates Virgil.”

“Excuse you,” Janus’s voice interrupted, annoyed. “It is Virgil who hates me, not the other way around.”

“Let’s both scan our ships,” Logan suggested, hoping to head off an argument. Honestly, if Roman and Janus didn’t stop picking fights with one another, he was going to lose his marbles.

The scans pulled up nothing.

“Oh well,” Remus said with a shrug. “Guess the emo gets to miss out.”

Janus grumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “lucky”.

“All right, here’s what’s going to happen.” Remus leaned close to the screen. “I’ve crash landed on a lovely snowbound planet that’s crawling with psychotic tin cans who like to roll around yelling ‘exterminate’.”

“Daleks? A snowbound planet, so not Skarro, but where else…” Logan narrowed his eyes.

“He’s on the Dalek asylum,” Roman said lowly. “That was one of the episodes I had in mind when I plotted this adventure.”

“Very good, brother.” Remus clapped his hands. “And up there in orbit is a ship full of people who’d really like to blow up the whole planet. Oh, woe is me, whatever shall I—”

“Save it,” Roman snapped. “You’d probably enjoy getting blown up.”

“Hmm, true.” Remus’s green eyes sharpened. “Think of the mess! Little bits of intestines floating through space, long pink ropey—”

“Or?” Logan interjected, before Remus gave Patton nightmares.

“Or you have to come rescue me!” Remus’s teeth flashed as he grinned. “Because otherwise it’s nighty-night for me and all the other aliens in the asylum.”

There was a beat of silence.

“As terrible as that sounds,” Janus drawled, sounding anything but worried, “given that none of this is real, and at least one of us would very much rather not be here at all…why exactly should your plight concern us?”

Logan secretly agreed, but felt his stomach clench when he glanced at Roman’s troubled face. None of this was real…right? Would something concretely bad happen to Remus if the planet he inhabited was blown up?

Surely not.

This was only a dream. Perhaps, then, Roman was merely upset that his twin had usurped his adventure for the night?

“Also.” Remus buffed his fingernails. “You should know that the Imagination will only release us if we complete the objective. In other words,” and he sneered, purple-shadowed eyes glittering, “we’re all stuck in this scenario until we’re all reunited.”

Remus giggled as Logan exchanged a shocked look with Roman.

“I don’t believe you. This was my dream,” Roman said darkly. “And I’ve just about had enough of all this!”

He stepped back and snapped his fingers with a flourish. Frowning, he did it again, and again, his face growing paler with each try.

“Roman, what—” Logan started.

“I can’t end it,” Roman whispered, still snapping. “He’s right. He’s…he’s sealed off the dream’s boundaries somehow. Remus!”

This he roared at the screen.

“Keeping Thomas trapped in a dream state is going too far, Remus!” he yelled. “I don’t care what kind of demented game you want to play with us, but we don’t bring Thomas into it.”

“Oh, you think I created an unbreakable dreamscape?” Remus snapped. “You let the Imagination have too much reign, my dear brother, and now neither of us have the power to end the dream ourselves. I estimate we have about ten hours before Thomas wakes up.”

For a moment, all Logan could hear was the soft whoosh of the time rotor, and Roman’s shallow, angry breathing at his shoulder.

“So I suggest you all pilot your ships to these coordinates,” Remus added, and a series of numbers and strange symbols flashed up on one of the smaller console screens. “And get started.”

The main screen blipped, and Remus’s face was replaced by an expressionless Cyberman and a snake-faced Side who looked extremely pale under his scales.

“Well,” Logan stated. “This is a problem.”

Chapter 6- Asylum of the Daleks

“You’re going to fire me at a planet? That’s your plan? I get fired at a planet and expected to fix it?”

“In fairness, that is slightly your M.O.”

“Don’t be fair to the Daleks when they’re firing me at a planet.”

The familiar wheeze of the TARDIS materializing filled Roman’s ears as he waited by the doors. Logan joined him a moment later.

“Ready?” he asked, smoothing a hand over his cravat.

He looks good as the Doctor, Roman thought, eying the slimming black and navy, the graceful arc that hand made as it adjusted a pair of glasses…

He shook himself out of his distraction. “Let’s do this, nerd.”

Logan opened the doors and the two stepped out…not onto the asylum, but onto a spaceship. Shiny copper terraces lined the vast walls in curving rows, leading the eye up to a domed ceiling with a clear view of black, star-studded space. Like a huge amphitheater, or stadium. Even Roman had to admit, the Imagination had really outdone itself on the realism.

Of course, given that the ship was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of Daleks calling for violence…realism wasn’t exactly comforting at the moment.

“Surprise, surprise, I don’t see my stupid brother,” Roman commented over the dull roar of the crowd.

“No. But I recognize where we are.” Logan waved a hand. “You were right about Remus’s location; this ship is from the episode ‘Asylum of the Daleks’, in Season 7. If we are following the basic plotline, Remus is likely somewhere down on the planet below, and we will be sent to him in due course. However…I am curious as to why all the other aliens are here.”

Roman looked around again, seeing that Logan was right. Daleks formed the majority of the crowd, but he also spotted Zygons, Sontarans, Silurians, other Cybermen, Ice Warriors…and quite a few aliens from older seasons he couldn’t remember the names of.

(Logan probably could.)

A second TARDIS materialized near their familiar blue box: plain, gray; a squat column of a ship. Janus emerged first, a silver instrument gripped in one gloved hand, followed by an old-school Cyberman…Patton. Roman frowned. Seeing that metal…being…and having to remember it was actually his friend was going to be difficult now that there wasn’t a screen separating them.

“Nice work, Roman,” Janus said, sidling up next to him and faux-clapping his hands. “A ship full of aliens who want us dead; always an excellent starting point for an adventure.”

“This is how the episode starts, Mr. Oh-I’m-Such-an-Expert-in-Doctor-Who,” Roman retorted. “Accuracy is important.”

“But this isn’t accurate,” Logan pointed out. “There should only be Daleks here.”

Roman folded his arms, stung.

Damn Logan and his damned need to be right all the time.

“I…well, I didn’t model this adventure after just one particular episode,” Roman admitted. “I wanted it to be a challenge, and it wouldn’t be if Logan and I already knew the ending. So no, I can’t exactly explain why all the other aliens are here, okay?”

Logan sighed.

“I was not criticizing you, Roman,” he said in a gentler voice. “As this has apparently become as much Remus’s and the Imagination’s handiwork as it is yours, it would be unreasonable to expect you to know what comes next.”

“THE DOCTOR AND THE MASTER WILL APPROACH THE SUPREME DALEK,” a grating robotic voice boomed across the ship, making them all whip around. A large white Dalek with an antenna on its shell loomed on a raised stage near the center of the amphitheater.

“They were expecting me, too?” Janus raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”

The lights on the Dalek’s head flashed as it spoke again.

“THE DOCTOR AND THE MASTER WILL APPROACH WITH THEIR COMPANIONS.”

The four Sides exchanged a glance, and weaved through the assembled Daleks to the raised stage. The White Supreme Dalek was not the only occupant; it was flanked by an Ice Warrior, an Emojibot (which made Patton giggle), and…

“Look, a Janus,” Roman chortled, nudging the snake-faced Side in the ribs and pointing out the two-faced alien.

“You are all nerds and my logo is a two-headed snake,” Janus complained, rolling his eyes. “I literally do not know how all of you missed that obvious clue to my name.”

“DOCTOR,” the White Dalek said as they climbed the dais. “MASTER. WHAT DO YOU KNOW OF THE DALEK ASYLUM?”

“I’m just impressed my rat-faced brother wasn’t lying about his location,” Roman grumbled, and sputtered when Logan placed a hand over his mouth.

“According to legend,” Logan said, “you have a dumping ground, a planet where you lock up all the Daleks that go wrong.”

“The battle-scarred, the insane. The ones even you can’t control,” Janus clarified. His voice dropped to a hiss. “No wonder they ssstuck Remus there.”

Roman covered his mouth to keep from snorting.

The snake would not make him laugh.

“CORRECT.” The Dalek pushed a button and a hole opened in the middle of the floor. A snow-covered planet lay below them, pristine from this high up.

“Ooh, that’s,” Patton started, and let out a metallic gulp. “That’s quite a drop. Do we, ah, have to go down the same way? Cause I remember that part, and—”

“How many Daleks are down there?” Logan asked.

“A COUNT HAS NOT BEEN MADE,” the white Dalek said.

“Millions, certainly,” a new voice chimed in. The tall, robed, dark-skinned Janus stepped forward, their front face addressing them. “But they will not be your only concern. The population of the planet consists of more than just Daleks.”

Roman exchanged a suspicious glance with Logan. This wasn’t in the episode. This is new.

“What do you mean?” Janus, their Janus, asked.

The alien Janus turned to a nearby monitor, pulling up some information. The backward-facing face continued to address them.

“Some time ago, the Daleks began noticing a curious phenomenon,” they said. “Random people, from all different races and species, started turning up on various planets in this quadrant of space, including the asylum. No ships, no technology, and no knowledge of how they’d gotten there. At first the imprisoned Daleks on the asylum simply killed them off as they appeared—”

Patton visibly winced, even with his metal body, and Logan’s eyes grew flinty.

“—but the new arrivals eventually became too many to exterminate,” the alien Janus went on, unconcerned. “By now we suspect the planet has a population of over a billion, far too many for its automated systems to handle.”

They turned their forward face to the four again.

“THE ASYLUM IS COMPROMISED,” the Dalek Supreme proclaimed. “IT MUST BE CLEANSED.”

“Hang on, you’re still going to blow the whole planet up?” Roman protested. “A billion people?”

“To be fair, that is what they did in the original episode,” Logan pointed out quietly.

“But that was just Daleks!”

Janus rolled his eyes. “Ah, so genocide is fine when it’s only the evil aliens getting blown up?”

“You know, somehow I’m not surprised to hear you defending the bad guys!” Roman snapped.

“That is enough!” Patton snapped in his robotic voice, stepping between them and raising both his hands. Laser pistols popped out of both of them, making both Roman and Janus step back in alarm.

After a tense moment, Patton lowered his arms again; the guns clicked and vanished into their casings.

“Uh, sorry kiddos, I don’t know what came over me,” he said in a sheepish, more Patton-y voice. “Can we please not fight? It…it kinda makes me feel weird and jittery when you do.”

Roman stared at Patton’s blank Cyberman face and armored Cyberman body and swallowed, hard.

Their Patton would never deliberately aim a gun at anyone, let alone his family. But Cybermen were created to eliminate…or rather, delete…anyone who got in their way.

Did Patton even realize what he’d almost done?

What would happen, if and when he was forced to confront the reality of his body in this realm? What if he didn’t figure it out until he accidentally did something terrible? It wouldn’t be real, of course, but to Patton…that wouldn’t matter.

If his Cyberman programming forced or tricked him into hurting someone, the guilt of it would devastate him.

All I wanted to do was take Logan on an adventure, Roman thought bitterly. A fun little dream adventure where he could play one of his heroes. Was that too much to ask, Imagination?

He folded his arms and glared around the Dalek ship, anywhere but at his fellow Sides.

Whatever the hell this has turned into, I want no part of it anymore.

“In order for us to destroy the planet, we will need you to disable the planet’s forcefield—” The alien Janus started, but Logan held up a finger.

“Excuse you,” he said sharply. “We have not agreed to do anything, least of all help you murder a billion people whose only crime is to have accidentally turned up in your prison. Have you even attempted to solve that mystery?"

"And why do you care what happens down there?" Roman added, sneering. "If the insane Daleks are armed—”

“DALEKS ARE ALWAYS ARMED,” the white Dalek proclaimed.

“—then why can’t they defend themselves?” Logan finished, shooting Roman a questioning glance.

Roman huffed, and looked away.

“At first they did,” the Janus explained. “But as I said, the automated systems cannot keep up with the influx. Wars are being fought over food and other resources as we speak. A starliner crashed on the surface mere days ago, and—”

“Ah,” Logan said slowly. “You’re afraid, with all the shifting alliances and new activity, that the mad Daleks will escape in the confusion.”

“We do not know who or what is behind the influx,” the Janus said. “But eventually, they will start coming with ships, or they will build them on the surface, or reach out to those who could attempt a rescue.”

“‘If sssomeone can get in, everything can get out’,” their Janus quoted darkly.

The other Janus nodded. “Even the Daleks agree, their mad brethren cannot be allowed to escape. We, of this assembly—”

They waved to the assembled crowd of aliens, who observed in eerie silence.

“—have decided that one planet must be sacrificed for the greater good of the universe.”

Roman slowly and deliberately drew his sword (which the Imagination had kindly left as part of his outfit). It rasped as it emerged, the sound hair-raising in the sudden lull.

Instantly every Dalek gunstick and alien weapon on the ship was primed and pointed at the four Sides.

“And if we refuse?” Roman said evenly.

“THE DOCTOR AND THE MASTER WILL COOPERATE,” the Supreme Dalek warned, its lights flashing balefully.

“COOPERATE! COOPERATE!” the cry was echoed by the other Daleks, filling the ship with a cacophony of robot voices.

The alien Janus shrugged, spreading their hands.

“You don’t really have a choice. If you want to live, that is.”

“Is that so.”

Roman tensed and sprang at the white Dalek, not giving himself time to think. He dodged a blast from its gunstick and leaped, bringing his sword down hard. This being the Imagination, the katana cut through the Dalek’s metal armor like butter, and it clattered to the deck in two pieces.

There was a shocked silence…but no retaliation.

“Well?” Roman shouted, spreading his arms and turning in a slow circle. “This is me, not cooperating. What are you waiting for? Are you really going to shoot us?”

If they all died on this spaceship…the worst that would happen is they’d be kicked from the Imagination, and that was what they wanted, anyway.

“Roman,” Logan warned quietly, pointing.

Roman looked.

The white Dalek’s shell was…laughing?

“Oh, Roman,” Remus’s crackly voice emerged from the fallen Dalek’s casing. “Roman, Roman, Roman. My poor brave brother who thinks he can solve all his problems with steel and bravado. Did you really think it would be that easy?”

Each word bit like sandpaper against Roman’s ears.

He growled, and stalked to the Dalek’s top half, snatching it up and quickly locating a tiny speaker.

“C’mon, Remus. End this stupid charade,” he said quietly, holding the casing to his face so he could speak quietly. “You’ve had your fun at my expense. Go back to your pile of severed limbs and gloat if you must, but end this. For Patton’s sake, if nothing else.”

“I’ve already told you, it’s out of my hands,” Remus responded; typically, annoyingly casual. “If you want to end the game, you have to come down here and find me.”

Roman exhaled, resting his head against the cold, bumpy metal for a moment. His eyes burned, but he was Prince; he wouldn’t cry, not here.

“Why must you make everything difficult?”

“Roman, in all seriousness,” Remus’s voice dropped. “I didn’t know you were taking Logan on a date tonight—”

“It’s not a date,” Roman hissed, glancing at the other Sides…one in particular.

“The Imagination brought me into this without asking, just like it pulled the others in,” Remus went on. “I am aware of what has to happen, but I did not cause this.”

“You’re lying,” Roman said tonelessly.

Remus’s whiny voice grew hard.

“I don’t lie, and you despise that about me. You hide so much shit from yourself that it baffles you when I refuse to do the same.”

“Look,” Remus added when Roman didn’t respond. “The Imagination is clearly trying to get our attention. Sure, it usually goes through one of us first, but it doesn’t have to. When it comes down to it, Thomas’s mind answers only to Thomas. ”

“How are you so sure?” Roman frowned.

Was Remus seriously suggesting the Imagination they both oversaw had gone rogue somehow?

“Because I don’t curate my side as meticulously as you do, brother.” Remus chuckled. “I listen. I let the Imagination do as she pleases, free from all those pesky ethics and morals and other boring boxes you always force her into, so that our sweet Thomas doesn’t fear the contents of his own head.”

“You expect me to believe that you know what’s going on because,” Roman let every ounce of disdain seep into his voice, “the Imagination talks to you, and not me…because you don’t make her behave?”

“You should try letting her loose sometimes,” Remus drawled, “or you’ll end up with a cane up your butt like Nerdy Wolverine over there.”

“Don’t call him that,” Roman spat.

“What you so-called ‘light sides’ always get wrong,” Remus went on, “is that the juicy stuff, the gruesome and grim, the ‘bad’ thoughts that filter up from the subconscious; they can’t all be locked away and ignored.” His voice dropped ominously. “Repression can be very bad indeed, you know.”

Roman’s reasonable nature knew that his brother, despite his infuriating attitude, was actually making some good points. Thomas had been dealing with a lot lately; the tension in the mindspace felt like a ticking clock, counting down to the next disaster.

But at that moment, Roman had no desire to humor his twin.

All he wanted to do was lock himself into his own room in the Dream Palace and spend the rest of the night writing sad poetry about love, or listing his mistakes to himself until he fell asleep.

“I just wanted to show Logan a good time,” he said aloud.

“And oh dear, apparently you couldn’t even manage that correctly,” Remus said, implacably. “So maybe you should use this opportunity to get your head out of your poopy ass, and reevaluate yourself.”

Roman slammed the Dalek shell against the floor.

It cracked upon impact, the wiring inside sparking and finally flickering down to darkness. He ran his hands through his hair, reminded, once again, why he hated talking to his brother.

Like looking in a funhouse mirror…

“Roman…” Patton sidled up behind him, laying a cold hand on his back. Roman shoved the metal arm away and stalked back to the others.

“Let’s just get this done,” he said in a low voice.

“You will need these,” the alien Janus said, pushing a button on a nearby console. A translucent vertical tube rose from a gap in the floor, holding three bulky black bracelets.

“Ah yes, I remember this,” Logan said, striding forward and taking a bracelet.

“They will prevent—” the Janus started.

“The nano cloud from converting us into Dalek puppets, yes?” Logan interrupted, snapping the bracelet onto his wrist and handing another to Roman.

The nerd is getting into this, Roman thought as he put it on. I guess that’s something.

“The cloud is only active in certain areas of the asylum,” the Janus warned them again. “And those change as different factions seize control of different areas and weaponize them.”

Patton hesitantly raised a hand.

“Um, Mx. Alien, I can’t help but notice that there are only three bracelets, and four of us?”

Logan frowned. “But Patton, why would you—?”

“I’m sure it’s because I’m part snake, Patton,” Janus interrupted smoothly, swooping in to grab the last bracelet and snapping it onto Patton’s arm.

Roman exchanged an alarmed look with Logan; that was the last bit of confirmation he needed. Patton really was unaware that he was a Cyberman.

But why on earth would Janus go to such lengths to keep him in the dark about it? Even leaving aside the fact that Patton was a walking weapon; being a machine, he didn’t need protection from the nano cloud at all.

Whereas Janus…probably did.

But when Roman opened his mouth, Janus shot him a look full of daggers and promises of pain, and shook his head. Roman rolled his eyes and mentally washed his hands of the situation.

Typical Deceit. Protecting his lies.

At least Patton would be twice-protected. If the snake wanted to risk his life for a lie, let him.

“The gravity beam will convey you close to the crashed starliner,” the alien Janus said, and then there were Dalek blasters being shoved into their backs, propelling them toward the hole in the floor.

“Oi,” Roman protested, “get your freaky little eggbeater appendages away from me, you AAAAHHHH!”

There was a push, and they were falling.

Chapter 7- Oxygen

“Look at this. Classic design. Pressure seals. Hinges. None of that ‘shuk shuk’ nonsense.”

“Space doors are supposed to go shuk shuk.”

“Are you gonna be like this all day?”

Janus was done.

He sat up with a groan, brushing snow from his jacket and vest, making sure his hat and gloves were still in place. Everything ached. Bad enough he never wanted to be part this stupid dream game in the first place; now he was probably going to literally turn into a Dalek.

All because the Imagination is being a dick and Patton doesn’t know he’s a killer robot.

Wind gusted around him, making Janus glad that the Master, like the Doctor, usually preferred long sleeves and a coat. He stood, turning in a slow circle as he took in the lay of the land. Nothing but snow and rocks; true to the episode, still.

The gravity beam had split into four as it hurled them at the planet, but Janus was reasonably sure at least one of the others had landed nearby.

He hoped it was Patton.

Not because he was concerned or anything. It was just that either of the others would be absolutely insufferable company, that’s all.

“Janus!” a metallic voice called, and Janus breathed a sigh of relief.

Patton’s Cyberman body clattered awkwardly down a nearby snowbank, sliding the last few feet to land in a heap.

“It is all kinds of chilly down here.” Patton stood, and waved rather nonsensically. “Hullo there, Janus, so ice to see you.”

Janus rolled his eyes. (He would deny to his dying day that the corner of his mouth twitched at the ridiculous pun.)

“If this scenario is consistent with its source material,” he said, gesturing to the closest ridge, “there should be an escape pod from that crashed ship nearby. Come on.”

He set off across the snow, Patton following in his wake.

“Say, what do snowmen call their offspring?”

Janus exhaled carefully. Hoo, boy, maybe Logan wouldn’t have been so bad…

“I haven’t the faintest.”

“Chill-dren!” Patton chortled at Janus’s grimace. “What did one snowman say to another?”

“St. Genesius spare me,” Janus grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose. “What, pray tell, did one snowman say to another?”

“‘Do you smell carrots?’”

Janus quickly covered his mouth.

“You smiled,” Patton crooned.

“I most certainly did not.”

“Okay, okay, one more.” Patton scurried ahead and turned around, so that he was walking backwards. “Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?” Janus said flatly.

“Snow.” Patton hooked his thumbs into the metal rim at waist, like one might on a pair of pants. Janus swallowed and looked away.

“Snow who?”

“Snow laughing matter, Janus, I don’t know why you’re smiling.”

Janus snorted before he could hide it, and cleared his throat.

“I am not smiling, how dare you.”

“That’s twice now!” Patton cackled, the sound coming out all distorted. “Admit it.”

“I refuse,” Janus said, drawing himself up. “You won’t make a liar out of….”

Liar.

He felt the joke fall flat and cringed. Even though Patton’s metal face couldn’t react, those metal shoulders visibly stiffened.

Too soon.

Liar.

Too much history between them.

Besides, you are a liar, his mind whispered. Lies of omission are still lies, Deceit, and you’re doing that right now.

Janus gritted his teeth. They topped a ridge; the expected escaped pod lay half-buried near another ridge, across a flat stretch of snow. The two Sides glanced at each other and continued their journey in silence.

Patton seemed disinclined to continue his little pun war.

Janus badly wanted to say he hadn’t minded the punning, but truthfully, keeping silent was easier. Patton’s baffling ignorance over the state of his own “flesh” was starting to wear on Janus’s conscience. He knew the longer he kept it secret, the worse the fallout would be when Patton finally learned the truth.

The urge to come clean was an unfamiliar one for him, and extremely uncomfortable.

Ironic, the master liar, conflicted about maintaining a lie.

The old him would have laughed, but…the old him hadn’t heard the sincerity in Patton’s voice, when he’d spoken Janus’s true name aloud for the first time. The old him had assumed Thomas would reject him forever…because of Patton.

And then, with Janus still smarting from the sting of Roman’s mockery, Patton had said his name.

Patton had trusted him to take care of Thomas in his stead, when the moral Side knew he had failed at it. The memory still made all Janus’s scales tingle and his heart beat a little sideways.

The new him…this him…couldn’t find it in his small, shriveled, but very much present heart to risk pushing Patton away.

They reached the pod.

Muffled shouts and something that sounded like blaster fire filtered up from inside, making them exchange another glance.

Janus set a hand on the ice-crusted latch.

“Remember, we’ll have to fight our way through a bunch of dead Dalek puppets,” he reminded Patton.

“That’s a lot of noise for just a few puppets,” Patton said softly. “That canonically shouldn’t even be awake yet.”

“I know, and that is strange,” Janus agreed. “Maybe someone got here before us. But we won’t know exactly what to expect until we get down there.”

Patton sighed, a cloud of frost puffing out of his small, rectangular mouth.

Janus pushed the latch, popped his head in, and was met with a scene of utter chaos.

About six or seven human-Dalek puppets, with stalks sticking out of their heads and blasters sticking out of their hands, were locked in a fire fight with a horde of robotic humanoids that looked like they came from the Fourth Doctor’s era, if Janus remembered correctly. Round, bulky shoulders and faces that looked like metal sunbursts.

Both puppets and robots were using the seats as cover, blaster fire zinging back and forth and exploding against the walls in little showers of sparks. Janus and Patton would be directly in the blast zone when they jumped down, a little closer to the robot side.

“Well, someone definitely got here before us,” Janus muttered.

He withdrew his head and studied Patton. Honestly, with his metal body he’d be in far less danger, and those guns in his arms would actually be useful in this situation…but telling Patton he was a walking weapon, now, would definitely not go over well.

“The hatch down into the asylum should be in the cockpit of this thing,” he informed Patton. “There’s a lot of blaster fire, though, so—”

“—don’t get cold feet and hesitate?” Patton finished.

Something in Janus’s heart twisted…something he didn’t dare examine too closely.

“Say, Patton,” he said softly, looking away.

“Yes?”

“What did the hat say to the scarf?”

Patton turned his black Cyberman eyes on Janus.

“What?”

“‘You hang around, and I’ll go a-head’.” Janus let a smirk curl his lips.

Patton was silent for a moment, but then he began to giggle, covering his mouth.

Janus pulled out his sonic laser.

He dropped into the pod with a swing of his legs, catching one of the robots in its metal chest. It fell with a screech, careening into another of its kind, but by then Janus had gained his feet and ducked behind a seat. Patton clattered down behind, with less grace and far more noise…and a random Tivolian tumbled in directly after him.

Patton caught the rodent-faced alien with a startled shout, immediately dropping them again when they screamed and struggled. Janus blinked; where the hell did they come from?

The Tivolian tumbled across the pod’s floor, only making it a few feet before getting cut down with blaster bolts. Janus saw Patton cry out, and caught the Side before he could leap out and draw more hostile fire.

“It’s too late!” he shouted over the noise.

“I should have hung on!” Patton, if he’d had a proper face, would probably be in tears. He hated death. “I don’t know why they were so scared of me!”

Janus could answer that…

“I’m more curious about where they came from,” he said instead, frowning. “They surely weren’t up on the surface with us. It’s like they just teleported in, but Tivolians don’t teleport. They don’t have the technology—”

A blaster bolt exploded across the top of the seat they were hiding behind, showering them in sparks and forcing them both to duck.

“Janus!” Patton snapped. “We need to get out of here!”

“Right.” Janus brandished his sonic. “We’ll just have to run for it.”

He leaped out, activating his weapon, and discovered that a sonic laser had a very satisfying range and kickback. Forget the Doctor’s screwdriver, he thought, blasting a Dalek puppet aside and ducking another gun blast. I wonder if the Imagination will let me keep this…

A cold, dead hand seized the collar of his jacket, yanking him back.

Then there was a yell, a clatter, and Janus turned in time to see Patton blast a puppet with a fire extinguisher. The moral Side chuckled at Janus’s shocked expression.

“I’ve seen this episode too, you know,” he pointed out.

Janus huffed.

The two dodged and fought their way to the cockpit; Janus used his laser to seal the door behind them. For a moment they simply stood there, catching their breath.

(Well, Janus caught his. Did Patton even breathe, in that form?)

“Unauthorized personnel may not enter the cockpit.” Remus’s high-pitched voice came over the speaker system. “Unless it’s an actual pit full of cocks, in which case, where’s my invitation?”

Janus was going to need something a lot stronger than tea, once they finally got out of this mess.

“Remus, for god’s sake,” he grumbled.

“God has nothing to do with my cock, but if that’s how you want to roll…” One of the cockpit screens flickered to life, and there was Remus in all his ruffly, sparkly, mustached glory. Clara’s warm, messy cove spread out behind him, reds and yellows clashing horribly with the green of his sash.

Janus moved so that his chest and shoulders blocked the screen, to prevent Remus from catching sight of Patton. If Remus saw Patton as a Cyberman, Janus would never be able to convince him to keep his mouth shut.

“All right then, where do we find you?” Janus said. “And where did the others land? Not to mention our dear missing ball of anxiety.” He leaned forward, putting on his trademark smirk. “Come on, Re. You must know. One Other to another, you can tell me.”

“Aww, Jan Jan,” Remus crooned, also leaning forward. “You care.”

“I most certainly do not!” Janus sputtered, and cleared his throat. “Patton was worried about Virgil, that’s all.”

“I was?” Patton asked from the other side of the space. “I mean, of course I am, but—”

“But surely you can at least tell us why this scenario isn’t playing out quite like the episode it comes from,” Janus interjected smoothly. He didn’t want Remus to notice the metallic quality of Patton’s voice.

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’ve already told you everything that I know.” Remus shrugged. “Roman really did give the Imagination too much freedom.”

Janus frowned.

“Then how do you know the scenario will end when we find you?”

“I actually don’t! Isn’t it great?” Remus crowed, clapping his hands. “I love stories where anything could happen. We could all get vaporized, or have our flesh eaten by—”

“Remus, focus.” Janus pitched the bridge of his nose. “So, given what we know of this particular episode, you’re assuming that our main tasks are to come get you, and to drop the forcefield on the planet so the Daleks can blow it up.”

“That’s the idea, Double Dee!”

Behind him, Janus heard Patton make a weird, choked noise, and grimaced.

“By the way, Roman and Logan are already inside the asylum.” Remus grinned, the whites of his eyes flashing. “So if you want to catch up, you’d better scute those scaly asscheeks along. Check the floor for a breach; that will be your way out. A breach, ha! Like a butth—”

Janus pointed his laser and fired on the screen, cutting the transmission and sending sparks flying all over the cockpit. An awkward silence fell in which he turned to face Patton, who of course wore no visible expression.

This, and all the reasons for it, annoyed him further.

“I swear if you ask one question about scutes or scales,” he warned, holding up a finger.

“I wasn’t…going to.” Patton held up his hands. “Logan kind of taught us how to tune out the more, er, naughty things Remus says. But I am wondering,” he added hesitantly. “Are you…feeling okay?”

“Fabulous. Peachy,” Janus said flatly, kneeling to feel around on the floor. “Fantastic, allons-y, geronimo, what have you.”

“It’s just, you seem a little angry,” Patton went on. “And you remember, that’s, that’s the first step in being converted. Maybe you should wear the bracelet for a while? We can trade on and off…”

Patton’s fingers went to his wrist, but Janus stopped him with a gloved hand on top.

Tell him, an inner voice whispered. Tell him now, before this gets any more awkward.

“That’s sweet of you, but no, I’m merely frustrated,” Janus admitted. “I would very much like to get out of here, so I can return to the pleasant evening I was having before all thisss.”

He gestured irritatedly around them.

Patton joined him on the floor and together they found a person-sized hole, with a rope ladder hanging down.

“Hey, Janus,” Patton murmured, as they were about to start the long climb down. “Can I ask you something?”

“Why do I have a feeling you’re going to ask no matter what I say?” Janus said wryly.

“Do you remember when that puppet attacked you in the main part of the ship, and I fought it off with the fire extinguisher?” Patton ducked his head.

Janus raised an eyebrow.

“They hesitated, when they saw me.” Patton’s unnaturally black eyes met Janus’s. “That’s why I had time to grab the extinguisher.”

Janus swallowed, his heart starting to pound.

“Well, I’m sure they aren’t used to anyone fighting back—”

“No, they hesitated like…like I scared them or something,” Patton pressed. “It was weird, Janus. Please. If there’s something you need to tell me…you know you can.”

Janus’s mouth compressed into a flat line and he looked away, bitterness welling up inside him.

“Can I, Patton?” he asked softly, holding up a gloved hand. A yellow indictment of everything he was. “Can I really?”

Patton sighed, long and deep.

“Touché.”

Chapter 8- Extremis

“Something’s coming. And I’m blind. How can I see them when I’m lost in the dark?”

Logan awoke to someone shaking him.

He opened his eyes to an expanse of blurry blobs and color splotches, and Roman’s sharp, frantic face very close to his. His eyes have amber flecks, his brain noted inanely. But why is he clear when nothing else is…?

Roman threw his head back and exhaled in obvious relief when Logan groaned, blinking rapidly to clear his vision.

“Singing chimeras, Specs, I was starting to worry.”

Logan sat up and touched his bare face. Ah, there’s the problem.

“Where are my glasses?”

Roman was quiet.

Logan leaned closer to the other Side, squinting. Bad eyesight was such an annoyance. If only Thomas’s developing brain hadn’t decided early on that “smart and logical” also meant “stereotypically nerdy”, and pigeonholed his own sense of Logic into actually requiring corrective eyewear.

“Roman?” Logan tried again.

“Um. About that.”

Roman bit his lip, and handed over a smashed set of frames. Logan’s stomach sank as he examined them; the lenses were shattered beyond repair.

“I found them next to you like that, when I woke up,” Roman explained. “I’ve been trying to summon another pair, but for some reason the Imagination won’t let me!”

Logan pushed down a growing sense of dread, that he’d have to navigate the rest of this adventure half-blind.

“My glasses getting broken is obviously not your fault. We did fall down a rather deep hole,” he pointed out. “But what do you mean, the Imagination isn’t letting you?”

“I mean it’s not letting me!” Roman threw up his hands. “I could summon things on the TARDIS just fine, but now…” He sighed. “I am Creativity, right?”

Logan tilted his head and frowned.

“Is that…Roman, that is a nonsensical question. Of course you are.”

“So summoning a tiny object in my own dream scenario should be easy.” Roman hung his head.

“How long have you been trying?”

“Twenty minutes, maybe?” Roman shrugged, still not looking at him. “All that time, and yet still I fail.”

Logan resisted the urge to point out that twenty minutes should be long enough to realize a thing might be outside of one’s control, and to start brainstorming other options.

Stubborn fool.

“Maybe it’s just as well we picked the wedding over the callback,” Roman added darkly, an uncharacteristic glower twisting his face. “When Thomas’s Creativity apparently can’t even control his own dreams.”

Oh…this isn’t about glasses at all, is it? Logan swallowed around an achy sensation in his chest; the one he always got when something was wrong and Roman made that face and he just…needed to fix it.

Native English speakers have a passive vocabulary of around forty thousand words, he thought, frustrated. So why, in situations like this, am I constantly struggling to find the right thing to say?

The resigned set to Roman’s jaw prompted Logan to try.

“Your inability to summon things may not be your doing,” Logan said, laying a hand on Roman’s knee. “Perhaps the Imagination is attempting to impose a sense of realism on this adventure.”

“Realism,” Roman echoed flatly. “In Doctor Who.”

Logan huffed. “You must admit, summoning objects out of thin air does defy even time-traveling alien logic.”

Roman’s face twitched in the tiniest of smiles. “So why did it work before, Teach?”

“Maybe it only worked on the TARDIS because the ship already defies every known rule of physics.” Logan shrugged. “I admit I cannot possibly intuit the inner workings of the Imagination; I can only theorize from what I have observed thus far.”

Roman chuckled softly to himself, and bumped Logan’s shoulder.

“Aww, Nerd, I’m touched. You’re trying to logic me into feeling better.”

“Is it…working?” Logan asked.

“Kind of?” An unreadable expression flitted over Roman’s face. “At least one of us is still grounded in reality.”

“Where else could one possibly be grounded?”

Roman laughed outright at this.

“Oh, Logan. Never change, okay?”

He stood up, and pulled Logan to his feet as well.

“Where are we?” Logan asked, squinting.

He could tell they were in some large, open space; all blacks and browns and dull grays. Blurry domes of copper were scattered amongst what could be bits of fallen scaffolding or machinery.

Logan was also hyperaware of Roman’s warm arm pressed against his, and his own hand clasped tightly within the Prince’s larger grip. With everything else blurry, physical sensations were all the more distracting.

“Don’t panic, okay?” Roman started.

Logan scoffed.

“You are fortunate that I am not Virgil,” he commented wryly. “Because starting a sentence like that would almost certainly have caused him to panic.”

“Well, it’s just, do you remember that scene in the Dalek asylum episode where Rory wakes up in the hanger full of dead Daleks who turn out to be not actually dead?” Roman said in a rush. “Because…yeah.”

Oh. Logan swallowed.

“So, I am guessing that those copper domes are actually Daleks?” he said softly.

Roman snorted.

“Copper domes? Jeesh, your eyesight sucks.”

“I am aware,” Logan said flatly. “Which means you will have to guide us out. If I remember correctly, as long as we are quiet and don’t kick any pipes on the ground, we won’t wake them up.”

Roman let go of Logan’s hand… and replaced it with an arm wrapped around his waist. Logan only held back a squeak because it would have been extremely undignified.

“Hey, relax, I got you, Specs.” Roman’s breath ghosted over Logan’s ear. The Prince’s shorter stature allowed him to fit snugly against Logan’s side; if Roman turned his head, he could comfortably tuck his face into the crook of Logan’s neck.

Not…not that Logan imagined him doing any such thing.

Roman drew his sword with a metallic rasp, prompting Logan to pull out his screwdriver, and they set off across the floor.

It was a strange, vulnerable sensation, Logan thought, being this close to another, being forced to rely on him for direction…or maybe it was just that Roman’s Rose Tyler outfit left so much more skin on display than his usual royal attire…

To be fair, Roman’s bare arms and short skirt and leggings were the only non-blurry things in Logan’s line of sight at the moment.

“You know, I am not sure how much good a sword will do against a Dalek now,” Logan said dryly (to distract himself). “Since it would seem that the Imagination is now attempting to be realistic.”

“It’ll be a lot more useful than a screwdriver,” Roman retorted. “Honestly, the War Doctor had a point. The later seasons really do start to treat the sonic like a weapon, and it looks ridiculous. There’s an oily-looking puddle to your left.”

They dodged around it.

“The sonic screwdriver is an ingenious, multipurpose tool,” Logan argued. “Fitting for a character who is, at heart, a pacifist. In the right hands, it most certainly could serve as a weapon. For example one could scramble a Cyberman’s circuits, short out fuses, or calculate the precise amount of blunt force needed to take down an enemy.” Logan waved the hand with the screwdriver around them. “All things that a sword could not accomplish.”

“Sure,” Roman drawled, leading them around one of the still, silent Daleks, “but you don’t point a sonic at an oncoming Dalek and expect to survive. Even the Doctor had more sense than to try that. At least a sword could cut off its blaster arm.”

“We don’t know how strong Dalek amor is down here,” Logan pointed out. “You could end up breaking your sword and then where would we be?”

“Better off than we’d be while you assembled a cabinet at them!”

Logan’s foot collided with a metallic something that made an awful CLANG and went skittering across the floor. Roman pulled them up short, his face going pale.

All around them, round blue lights began to flicker on, one by one.

“I kicked the pipe, didn’t I?” Logan said, his heart starting to pound.

“You kicked the pipe,” Roman confirmed in a sick voice.

“EGGS…!” a crackly Dalek voice next to them stuttered, making them jump. “EG-EG-EG-EGGS…!” Its twin lights flashed erratically as it spoke.

“Roman,” Logan started.

“‘Eggs, you may laugh and that’s great…’” Roman sang in a wavering voice. “‘Your smiles are what make my day’…”

The Dalek rolled toward them creakily. “EEEEEGGS!”

Logan’s breathing sped up. Another Dalek rolled in from the other side, causing him to stumble. All around them, mechanical creaks and groans and a chorus of digitized voices rose up…

“EG…EG-EGGS…TERM…”

“Roman, I believe we need to run.” Logan could see the Dalek almost clearly now, its eyestalk glowing, its gunstick rising up.

“…IN…ATE…”

Blurry, flashing lights closed in.

“‘My self-worth’s fragile like an egg,’” Roman sang. The hand gripping Logan’s middle tightened painfully. “‘When it breaks it’s tough to put together again…’”

“EX…TERM…IN…ATE!”

“Roman!” Logan shouted. “Get us out of here!”

“EXTERMINATE!”

A blaster bolt warbled past and exploded over their heads.

Roman shuddered and seemed to snap out of it, seizing Logan’s arm and pulling him so hard he nearly fell. Logan staggered, hanging onto Roman’s hand for dear life as they ran, and ran, and blaster bolts burst at their feet and shattered around them.

“This way, boys and boys,” Remus’s voice sing-singed across the room. Roman yanked them hard in that direction.

“REMUS!” Roman shouted as they ran, and Logan was impressed he had the breath for it. “Remus, you better open that door like you’re supposed to or we are DEAD!”

“Oh, keep your pants on, brother,” Remus snarked, sounding a little closer. “Although maybe Logan would prefer that you didn’t—”

Whatever else he said wasn’t audible over a hanger full of jabbering Daleks and firing blasters.

They reached a wall and Roman shoved Logan down.

“Straight ahead, crawl. Go, go, go!” he said, turning and brandishing his sword.

Bless that Prince and his stupid, stupid bravery.

Logan went, nearly tripping over his coat as he crawled under the barely lifted hatch door. Once he was past the threshold Roman flung himself under and through, knocking into Logan and sending them both sliding across the floor.

There was a hiss and a heavy thud that Logan hoped was the door shutting behind them, and finally, blessed silence. They both leaned against the wall for a moment, catching their breath.

Roman thunked his head back.

“Jesus Christ Superstar,” he muttered.

“Your welcome.”

Remus’s voice crackled through the hallway. Roman growled and sat up straighter, looking around as if his brother would magically appear.

“I did just save your lives,” Remus added. From the direction of the sound, Logan guessed he was talking through a speaker somewhere on the far wall.

“Yeah, and I’m still gonna whip your butt when this is all over,” Roman groused.

“Oooh, do I get to choose the instrument?”

Roman sputtered, but Logan grabbed his arm before he could yell back.

“You know he just likes to get under your skin,” he murmured, and raised his voice. “Thank you for opening the door, Remus. We are grateful for your help.”

There was a silence on the other end, with a quality that Logan would have described as shocked.

“Well. You two lovebirds better move along,” Remus drawled finally, shrill as ever. “Before the Silurian army shows up.”

“Excuse me, the WHAT?” Logan exclaimed.

No answer.

“Remus!” Roman clambered to his feet and helped Logan up.

Nothing.

Except now that Logan was listening for it, he definitely heard approaching footsteps and murmuring, heavily-accented voices. And they were getting closer.

“That dick,” Roman grumbled through gritted teeth.

“To be fair, I think he is trying to help,” Logan pointed out. “In his own way.”

“Don’t be fair to my brother when he’s just led us out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

“We are neither in a pan nor on fire, Roman; I have never understood that saying—”

The lights dimmed and flashed an eerie purple; Roman silenced him with a hand over his mouth. There was a voice…not Remus’s, not alien, not like anything Logan had ever heard. It chanted something, over and over again, before fading out.

The lights flared back to normal.

Logan waited, counting Roman’s shallow breaths against his neck.

Nothing.

“What was that?” he asked softly.

“Beats the hell out of me,” Roman responded. “But I guess that’s our cue to go. Stay close, Mr. Magoo.”

Logan grumbled, but allowed Roman to recapture his hand and lead them in the opposite direction of the approaching footsteps…which had resumed the moment the purple light vanished.

Next time Roman asked him to come on an adventure, he was bringing a spare set of glasses.

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flowered-mp3 · 4 years ago

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hi can i ask for tips on how to start posting my fics on tumblr?

of course u can!!!!

ok first, i am so incredibly flattered that you would come to me for advice lmao. this blog is only around 5 months old so i’m still learning the ins and outs myself!

second, i'll just put my hopefully good, 100% subjective advice below (long af, i apologize in advance):

writing fics:

write what you want to write. this is why i don't take requests, because i find it difficult to write anything that doesn't inspire me. no offense to anyone that takes requests, it's just that my brain doesn't work like that unfortunately :(

for posting your first fic, i personally like including the summary, warnings (very important if there are any!), genre, and pairing (if any), at the minimum. anything that is over like... 200-300 words or so, i place the "read more" thing, just so it's easier for the reader to navigate and scroll through your blog.

it's ok if your first fic isn't perfect! tbh i went back and reread the first thing that i posted (distraction) and my tenses are all over the fuckin place and the continuity was weird, like lol i need to edit it alkdfj. but it's ok because writing is a learning curve!

as for tagging, i looked at what other writers tagged their stuff as. it’s helpful as a starting point.

when i have muliple wips, or even just one fic, i find it helpful to keep them as drafts before you actually post them. usually, i put the fic in my drafts, go to bed, wake up the next day and read over it. more ofen than not, i catch more spelling mistakes/grammar stuff/continuity issues/pacing issues when i edit with a fresh mind. it makes editing alot faster and easier.

once you post enough fics, i would recommend applying to be a part of a writers net. it’s super helpful to get advice from other writers, you get great blog growth, and collabing is really fun as well! for example, if you want to add banners to your fics (tbh i don’t even bother, but that’s just me lol) there may be people in the net that have photoshop experience, and they can help u out! (just a disclaimer, most if not all nets use discord as their primary source of communication, so i would recommend getting a discord if you don’t currently have one lol)

i personally don’t use page breaks in my fics, i just use symbols to separate scenes in longer fics. i just think that it’s easier than going into the html to add page breaks.

put a copyright statement on your work. you can take my statement as a template if u want. just like. do it. plagarism is v sucky and i don’t wish it on my worst enemy.

not sure if this is advice but... i was personally really concerned with having a specific style of writing. in my personal life, i write lab reports and scientific papers alot, so i was afraid that my writing would be too sterile? too specific? too wordy? i guess? just like. idk. fuck that. just write however you want to write and readers who are drawn to your style will come to your blog eventually. just don’t get hung up on it like i did lol.

blog organization:

look around on your fav authors' pages and try to see how they organize their fics. i took a lot of inspo from other writers, and took what i liked from how they organized their blog/masterlist. as a reader, i like seeing the description of the fic beside the title in the masterlist, so that's what i did.

at the very least, i would also include warnings for explicit content within your masterlist as well. just go with what you think makes sense for what you want to write.

as for learning how to make a masterlist and how to link your masterlist in your bio, i just searched up internet advice lmao, including this and this

tbh, i make a masterlist type thing for almost everything on my blog (about me tab, fic favs, networks, wips, etc.). it keeps it organized and it’s helpful to me as the writer and for the readers.

for picking a blog theme, i just picked the one that is most favourable for on screen reading. i try to ensure that my links and text are of the contrasting colour to the background, as it makes it much easier for the reader. just as a reference, i use the lilac theme.

general “being a writer on tumblr” advice

growth is slow, but steady as a writer on this platform. don't be discouraged by note count because tbh, i've found that note count is not correlated with fic interest at all. example, i had no idea that people liked releve so much because the note count is pretty low, but i have readers in my asks saying how much they love it so... don't be discouraged by low note count!

don’t be afraid to rb your own stuff. it does alot for engagment on your writing.

don’t plagarize. it’s not cool.

try to interact and rb fics that you personally love on your blog! it’s a great way to interact with other writers and i love it when i get shout outs, so i try to return the favour as much as i can.

don’t be an asshole? idk?

being a writer on this platform is super personalized. how i write and organize my blog is super different from the next writer, so just go with what you want to do and what makes sense for your writing.

#asks #anon #writing advice #this is very long sorry i just wanted to be thorough #i hope this helps anon!!!#good luck!!!

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sonicfrontiers · 5 years ago

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feels fucking weird saying “tumblr is my favorite social media site” after years of making jokes like “haha tumblr sucks why are we all still on it” but. it’s true now. no other site offers the functions tumblr has, no other site feels as wild and homey and free as tumblr does, no other site can give me the content tumblr does.

twitter is full of racists and celebrities and brands and it’s never quiet and every other tweet is from an account you don’t follow because the site loves to automatically switch you back to its non-chronological view of your home page without warning and show you tweets just because someone you follow liked it, even if it’s something you’re not interested in at all. there’s verification and public following/followers view counts and all your likes are visible and it’s got a character limit and doesn’t offer anything close to the amount of post format options/customization tumblr does, and every time i even glance at that site i either get sad or angry or some form of upset in a matter of seconds because even when there is a tweet i’m interested in, the replies are full of meaningless spam because somebody wanted views on a video or wanted likes on a meme they stole from another account that also stole that meme and it’s like what i imagine being trapped in a small room packed with several people all shouting at you for different reasons all at once is like.

tumblr is buggy and broken and the mobile and desktop versions might as well be made by two different companies they’re so incompatible, yet it’s “the bottom of the barrel” for advertisers and so easy to find content i actually want. the tagging system alone is broken as hell yet the sole reason i can never ever use another social media; being able to add silent comments to posts you reblog that don’t annoy the original poster AND allow you to categorize shit on your own blog so people can blacklist stuff they don’t want to see or go through specific tags of yours for things they explicitly want to see makes the tagging system here practically essential for me. it’s got a built-in ask and submit system, your blog is basically your own fucking website you can customize however you want with a custom html theme, you can post without an insanely small character limit, and the best fucking part is we’re all anonymous. no verified accounts, no public follower viewcounts, your likes aren’t public by default, any brands or celebrities that even attempt to use this site are run off or give up in no time because we collectively don’t give a shit about them. no prospective job is ever going to look you up on tumblr. it’s fucking paradise.

for fuck’s sake your dashboard is fucking chronological and jesus christ it’s sad that these are the things i’m happy about because every other site fails to meet tumblr in this regard. sure the ban on adult content is shitty and i wish it wasn’t here but seriously it’s not horrible enough to make me want to give up on every other thing i genuinely love about this site. i’m in here for the long haul now. it’s gonna take something fucking abysmal to make me leave at this point. and after all that’s happened recently i’m finally at the point where i can say without a shred of irony or embarassment that yes, tumblr is my favorite social media site, yes i love it here and i don’t plan on ever leaving.

#lin.txt #christ this got a lot longer than i wanted it to. sorry for filling your dash with this #but uh. i sorta needed to get this all out.#that was cathartic. anyway i’m gonna go take a shower now

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paladin-lynx · 5 years ago

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Prompt: “What’s so funny?” with your Human SQUIP AU

I’m sorry this took me for-freaking-ever to get to. Life has gotten in the way lately and my motivation has been low, but I’ve been thinking a lot about BMC lately so here’s the piece! I decided to go with this prompt instead of “Can you forgive me?” since I used that one for another piece. Hope you enjoy! I feel like I’m a bit out of practice at the moment with writing, heh.

Send me a character/ship/fandom and a prompt and I’ll write something!

Fandom: Be More Chill (musical)

Ships: None

Setting: Post-musical AU where the SQUIP somehow returned as a human and was redeemed/rehabilitated by Jeremy (with the help of the rest of the squad), and lives with him having had nowhere else to go. He looks pretty similar to how he looked in Jeremy’s head, and physically he looks to be around college age.

There were a lot of characteristics that Squip still had that carried over from his supercomputer self, but the most noticeable one was his constant need for order.

Jeremy had a feeling it was because of how perfectionist the SQUIP had been, wanting to convert everyone’s emotions into neat little lines of code. That, and now that Squip had his own emotions to deal with, he desperately needed to feel in control of something as he adjusted to being a plain old human. Now that he was actually out in the real world instead of tucked away in Jeremy’s head just seeing everything through the boy’s eyes, it was no doubt everything seemed so much louder and more intimidating. And it was obvious that Squip didn’t like the fact that he could no longer just glance into the future and see the most plausible outcomes, even if he was starting to accept it as his new reality.

After all these months, Jeremy had learned that Squip would be doing one of a handful of things when he got back to the house after school: 1) sleeping, 2) hiding away in his room on his computer, or 3) cleaning. The Heere household hadn’t been this clean since Jeremy’s mother had left, and even then she had never been this much of a neat freak. Jeremy was half-convinced that one day Squip would run out of things to clean and he’d end up on a ladder just scrubbing the ceiling or something ridiculous like that. Jeremy had on many occasions wanted to joke to Squip about how absurd such an action would be, but he was worried Squip would do that thing where he would chuckle and then suddenly stop, get a thoughtful look in his eyes, rub his chin, and then wonder aloud if that was perhaps a good idea. Jeremy’s father had a habit of doing it, and Jeremy knew that he’d inherited it from him, and unfortunately it seemed Squip had fallen victim to the trend, as well.

Squip often got into a ‘zone’ when he was cleaning. Jeremy knew that it had a calming effect for him, and in a way he understood. It was something that allowed Squip to not have to acknowledge anything else happening around him and even the physical aspect of forcing the dirt off of something could act as stress relief. Jeremy likened it to how he and Michael used video games to escape reality for a little while, and when something was on their minds, maybe sometimes they pressed the buttons on their controllers a bit harder than usual or jerked this way and that more sporadically as they moved their characters across the screen. Actually, as of late, Jeremy also had that experience of going into the ‘zone’ when he coded. It was definitely a weird aftereffect of having had a supercomputer wedged into his brain, since he had never in his life even touched any coding language – except for maybe when he and Michael played around with the HTML on their Tumblr blog themes, but even then it had just been messing around and they’d joked that they had absolutely no idea what they were doing. But on a whim a little while after the SQUIPcident, Jeremy had installed an IDE and just messed around and somehow just knew what to do. He wasn’t an expert by any means, but he definitely knew more than anyone who’d never touched a programming textbook or even a simple tutorial online had any right to know.

Much like how Jeremy sometimes had to nudge Squip’s shoulder and tell him that hours had passed since he’d started cleaning, Squip often had to poke his head into Jeremy’s room and tell him that he’d been hunched over his computer – “even if I’m not shocking you anymore, I’d still recommend fixing your posture” – for God only knew how long.

When one was in the ‘zone’, though, it was easy to not really be aware of what people were saying to you. Jeremy and Michael found it hilarious that for someone who had once had the entire Internet at his figurative fingertips, Squip could be adorably oblivious sometimes. He fell for jokes, got confused at metaphors that he took literally, and oftentimes references flew right over his head until he took a moment. But when he was in the ‘zone’, it took even longer for him to realize he hadn’t caught on to something.

Michael, of course, was oft the one to take advantage of this and would nearly piss himself laughing as a result.

It was spring break, so Michael was over at Jeremy’s house more than normal. It was also the week of Passover, so the Heeres were doing their best to keep kosher for the holiday. Michael every year always incredulously asked how anyone could go a full seven days without bread, and every year Jeremy always just snickered at him. Squip had also been doing his best to uphold the restrictions for the holiday, but considering he was picky enough as it was when it came to food, Jeremy and his father were giving him a pass if he decided to ‘cheat’ – which Jeremy usually ended up doing a couple of times during the week each year anyway. But Jeremy wouldn’t forget how excited Squip had been to participate in the seders.

But because of the holiday and the rules about food, Mr. Heere had rearranged where they had everything in the kitchen, including Squip’s precious cleaning supplies. In hindsight, he and Jeremy probably should’ve realized that this would cause Squip to throw something of a fit, but they were so used to their routine every year that they hadn’t really thought of it.

In the midst of one of their hours-long video gaming sessions, Jeremy and Michael finally emerged from Jeremy’s room to pad downstairs and grab a snack. As much as Michael liked to tease Jeremy about not being able to eat a decent amount of his go-tos during Passover, Jeremy knew that Michael was a complete sucker for his father’s homemade desserts, just like on all the other holidays.

“Rich told me we should try a Nuzlocke one day,” Jeremy was saying as they made their way towards the kitchen.

Michael winced at the suggestion. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t be able to handle the stress of it. And I damn-well know I’d cry if we lost any of our Pokémon.”

Jeremy smiled. “Then we’d just have to work extra carefully to make sure that doesn’t happen. And then we can rub it in Rich’s face.”

“You act as if he wouldn’t cry if one of his team died. Or you, for that matter!”

They snickered to themselves before halting as they got into the kitchen and saw Squip already in there, rummaging through the cabinets and muttering rapidly under his breath, switching between English and Japanese. Jeremy could only understand bits and pieces between how quickly Squip was speaking and also because he only knew so much anyway – another really weird side effect of having the SQUIP in his mind, and Jeremy had been told on multiple occasions that he himself sometimes randomly switched to Japanese when he was upset – but he definitely picked up on a few swears.

“Uh, hey, S,” Jeremy greeted carefully. He blinked when Squip didn’t even acknowledge him, closing the cabinet he was riffling through to open and scrounge through another.

Michael rolled his eyes, leaning on the kitchen island. “Yo, Squip-ster. What are you doing?”

Still no response. Michael thought for a moment. “What’s 24 times 83?”

“1,992,” Squip replied without missing a beat. That seemed to drag him back to reality and he paused, blinking, before he raised an eyebrow over his shoulder at the two boys. “Do you need something?”

“We were getting something to eat, but now we’re wondering what you’re up to,” Jeremy told him, tilting his head. “Are you okay? Are you…looking for something?”

“I can’t find my cleaners and sponges.” Squip turned away from them to continue looking through the cabinet. Jeremy had to smile a little as Squip referred to the supplies as his, considering Jeremy and Mr. Heere weren’t exactly known for keeping the house squeaky-clean. Jeremy’s room had never been cleaner than when he’d had his SQUIP, since it made him clean up the mess pretty much on day one. “I know your father moved some things around to hide all your chametz”—Jeremy couldn’t believe how natural Hebrew sounded coming from Squip when Jeremy had been learning it for years and still only sounded half-decent, but then again he supposed SQUIPs were programmed to be able to speak any language—“but I didn’t think he’d rearranged them to the point I wouldn’t be able to find anything…”

Jeremy would’ve loved to help, but truth be told, he only knew where the Passover foods were. In previous years, he’d just open a random cabinet if he needed to sneak a cookie or the like and hope he found something good. His father had some sort of system for hiding all the unkosher stuff and presumably for moving everything else to make room, but Jeremy had no idea what it was. He hardly knew where the cleaning supplies other than the dish soap were, and the dish soap was out in the open next to the sink.

Jeremy opened his mouth to apologize or maybe offer to help, but Michael suddenly tapped his arm and looked at him with a grin, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. Jeremy immediately knew this wasn’t going to end well – you learned a thing or two when you knew someone for over twelve years – but he also knew just as well he was powerless to stop it from happening.

“Did you check under there?” Michael asked, biting back snickers. Jeremy rolled his eyes as he leaned on the island beside his friend and watched Squip rummage. As easy to trick as he could be, there was absolutely no way Squip would fall for that, especially not after Rich and Jake had gotten him with ‘updog’ just a few weeks earlier.

Squip peeked over at them again, brow furrowed when he didn’t see Michael gesturing to anything, and he quickly turned back to his task. “Under where?”

Jeremy’s jaw nearly dropped and his gaze snapped to Michael, who had pressed his hands over his own mouth to try and muffle his cackling. It was just a stupid and admittedly childish joke, but somehow the fact that Squip – witty, clever, intelligent Squip – hadn’t caught himself made it so much better. Jeremy quickly ducked his head to try and stifle his own giggling.

Squip, however, somehow still not realizing what had happened, just looked over at them again. Even if they weren’t laughing out loud, it was painfully obvious they were nearly choking in their attempts to keep quiet. “What’s so funny?”

They both just looked at him, grinning, Michael nearly with tears in his eyes, before realization seemed to dawn on Squip and he rolled his eyes, huffing. “Oh. Are you proud of yourselves?”

That seemed to break both boys and they burst out laughing, having to brace themselves on the island to keep themselves from falling over. Jeremy peeked over to find Squip leaning against the counter across from them, arms crossed loosely against his chest in that ‘chill’ way of his, a little smile on his face despite Jeremy and Michael laughing at his expense. Squip had always been good-humored about these kinds of things. Maybe a little embarrassed, but never upset. Just teasing in return with a promise he wouldn’t fall for it again. Seeing the people he cared about so happy seemed to be worth the slight humiliation.

It took a few minutes, but the two boys finally collected themselves, gasping for breath. Michael even had to pull off his glasses to rub his eyes and flashed Squip a smirk as he pushed them back on. “Sorry, dude,” he said, not sounding even a tiny bit sorry. “It was just too good an opportunity to pass up.”

Squip shook his head, chuckling softly. “I should’ve known better with you.” He let out a sigh, peeling himself away from the counter and putting one hand on his hip. “Well, if you’re feeling so sorry, you two can help me search.”

Jeremy sighed in turn, glancing at Michael. “I guess we owe him that, at least.”

Michael whined, lolling his head back. “Do we?”

“You do,” Squip insisted, waving them over. “Come on, enough with the drama. I’m not asking you to solve world hunger.”

Michael groaned once more but ultimately gave in as Squip cooed at them again in that ever-persuasive way of his. Even as a human, Squip had retained his ability to be rather convincing. It didn’t take more than a few minutes between the three of them to locate the cabinet that Mr. Heere had stuffed the cleaning supplies into, hiding behind a few boxes of forbidden candies that Jeremy had to keep himself from digging into.

“There, done and done!” Michael declared, wiping his hands clean of nonexistent dirt. “Come on, Jere, let’s grab something to eat and get back to our gaming sesh.”

Jeremy nodded, but before he could go anywhere, Squip draped his arms around the boys’ shoulders, pulling them over. He smirked at them. “Not so fast, sluggers,” he nearly purred. “I think you still owe me, so now you can help me clean.”

“What?!” Michael protested. “S, come on!”

“There’s probably nothing left to clean anyway,” Jeremy added. “If you clean the house any more than you already have, you’re gonna end up scrubbing away the paint or whatever.”

“Then there won’t be much you have to do before I let you run back to your games.” Squip gave them a little squeeze before releasing them. He handed Michael a sponge and Jeremy a bottle of spray. “Come on, then. Consider it a life lesson, courtesy of me.”

Jeremy scoffed. “How generous.”

Squip smiled, grabbing a rag for himself. “It’ll do you good. And it’ll be nice to spend time with me instead of in front of a TV screen, won’t it?”

(Author’s Note: I got the idea for the stupid “under where” joke from this comic)

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awkward-and-fluffy · 6 years ago

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Important little post for those who are still following me and wondering where I’ve gone...

I’ve obviously lost interest in Tumblr over these past couple of years. I’m not that active here anymore and a lot has been going on in my life anyhow.

If anyone wants to keep up with me on social media, I’m on Twitter the most! And I’ve actually gotten myself comfortable with doing Twitch streams as of May 2018. It feels like a great accomplishment for me to overcome most of my public speech fears through that!

Aside from getting into streaming, I managed to finish enough of my website for it to be hosted! I put a lot of money into that, but it’ll last about 2 years. :’D

Sooo...

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/WolfKat777

My Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/wolfkat7

My Website: https://wolfkatworks.com/

Sometime soon I’ll be able to complete the HTML/CSS tutorial pages for my website, but it wasn’t possible to get it launched ASAP when those pages take the longest to put together. I’m not sure when I can get them done yet, but I hope it’ll be before Tumblr completely crashes and burns... I need my old tutorials on this blog to reference back to for how I organized everything. There are lots of mistakes to fix and new screenshots to take for better lesson examples, etc.

But yeah, a lot’s been going on. I’ve been trying to search for a new job (with no luck yet), managed to reach Affiliate on Twitch by some miracle, various family issues took place, my dad had to get heart surgery, etc.

Before going to a read more, if you don’t quite want to read a big wall of text or are scared of reading any medical topics (I get that), I’ll provide my thanks and more right here.

It’s been awesome to meet all the people I have on here - mostly through Gravity Falls! Writing and replying to theories was such a freakin blast, no matter how ridiculous things would get at times. Granted, I don’t like Tumblr itself as a social media platform and community if I’m brutally honest... However, I still had a little good come from this regardless of my bitterness from my old account before this one.

To you old mutuals of mine, and some of you old pals, keep being awesome! I hope you’re doing well in life; and if not, I hope for things to improve. Fight a good fight, but be careful in picking those fights. Life’s worth living and all that cliche junk that may or may not have much affect on you as motivating advice.

This all goes to my general base of followers too if any of them come across this post. Thank you guys for following this dumb blog and enjoying and sharing so many of my fun posts for Gravity Falls! The show is still super important to me, and my all time favorite cartoon to exist. Whether you sent asks, replied, reblogged, or simply liked, all of that was awesome in its own way. Having discussions on the series is one of the best memories I’ll have on this most often unbearable website! (I hope that doesn’t sound too insulting or generalizing about this site...)

And thank you for anyone who enjoyed the rest of my content here, and bearing with any personal ramblings I may have had on some bad days.

It’d be cool to come across anyone here again in the near future, but at some other online platform. I’ve provided my active links above, so feel free to find me elsewhere if you want.

Goodbye to you all, and have a great rest of 2019 and beyond!

This new year is also already off to a very... Surreal and terrifying start. In case you haven’t already checked my Twitter from the time of this post to see what I wrote there, I got a severe case of my rapid heartrate and ended up hospitalized rather than stuck in Urgent Care on its own. Just 3 weeks ago, I was in UC from a less severe but still terrifying rapid heart rate that woke me up at 5am and wouldn’t calm the heck down.

I know it seems weird to include this following story for my “farewell, Tumblr” post, but I think it’ll help give some interesting record of closure here. I’ve had personal posts and ramblings on this blog about my cardiac terrors and fears. I don’t recall exactly what I’ve written here, but maybe it’d be interesting for me to search for any of those posts again to kinda look back on those thoughts...

It’s been a few years since I’ve had a bad case of rapid heartrate... In fact, I remember writing about that experience back then here on my blog too. I was put on a heart monitor for only 3 days and yeah. Of course 3 days wasn’t enough to catch anything significant... So my heart issue was still freakin shrouded in mystery and only ever connected to my anxiety/panic disorder.

Welp, I was put on a heart monitor again just last week and I requested for it to last 30 days. Lo and behold, about 8 days later, my most severe case occurred and my monitor recorded a 250bpm max rate... This monitor is linked to cellular wifi thankfully, so the company got alerted of it and called my local UC to take me in and then called the house for my mom to answer and help drive me there. (Some moments before leaving home, my heartrate went back down to the 140′s or so, but still really bad and wouldn’t return to normal.)

In UC, I had to get X-Rays as well, but I have no idea what they found from ‘em? I wasn’t really told what they resulted with... I’ll have to ask sometime.

However, with everything going on and not even medication getting my heartrate back to normal, I was moved into a hospital shortly after my stay in UC. That was my first time ever being in an ambulance.

At the hospital, I got more blood tests done, more EKGs, all that stuff. There was also talk of me needing a uh... An ablation procedure. Then later that night, a cardiologist visited me and explained that I FINALLY got a confirmation on my issue. I’ve waited 10 years for answers on why my heart would be like this... Ugh. I’m relieved, but also frustrated it took that long to figure it out, y’know?

At this point, I didn’t have the name of the condition, but I was feeling more at peace when the cardiologist mentioned this condition isn’t life-threatening and doesn’t increase my risks of heart disease. The most common issue of it is how disruptive it is, and some other symptoms it can induce (dizziness,fatigue, etc.) Gosh, that cleared away so many worries and questions I had throughout these years.

But yeah, it’s something that people are just born with and it causes a faulty circuit or two in the heart giving it weird signals at times. Stuff like that. Those with the condition have a chance to never have symptoms of it, while others start showing symptoms between 11 - 50 years old. Mine started showing when I was 13, so that was... Great.

The only way to most likely treat it, is through an ablation... And that’s where things get really scary. I’ve always had nightmares about needing heart surgery, or my heart getting shot by bullets, etc. Like, that’s how bad I felt from never knowing what’s wrong with my vital organ.

My other option was medication, but it wouldn’t be guaranteed to help by itself. Afterall, I’ve had a few times in UC throughout my life where these meds didn’t help much if at all. They also figured it’d be good to get this procedure done the earlier the better, since it can be much more complicated if I were to have it done at an older age.

-big siiigh- After spending my first night there, yep, I’ve had that done. I don’t want to describe it ‘cause it was a terrifying experience, but I hope it helps in the end. I indeed had a faulty circuit they found, and they uh... Did what had to be done.

After I was sent back to my room, the cadiologist returned and gave me the name of my condition. Of ALL THINGS, it’s “Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome” or “WPW Syndrome” for short. Despite all the straight-up trauma I’ve had, I guess in a way I can kinda thank God for the bit of humor?? (For context, I developed an interest in wolves and werewolves during my teens and loving them about as much as cats...)

I was keeping my closest friends up to date on this through my phone during all this too. I kinda knew what I’d get myself into when revealing the name of my diagnosis to them... But the friendly teasing (such as “wow, so you DO have a wolf’s heart!”) cheered me up. I’m just really thankful for my friends for keeping me company even if only possible through online chat. And despite my conflicts with my mom, she stayed by me and helped me, spending nights in the hospital with me and all that stuff. I would’ve been so much more terrified and - errgh, for lack of better words - heart broken. Being all alone without someone I know being nearby during these types of things, regardless of how much I like being alone, is stressful. I would’ve otherwise only had doctors and nurses, but they’d come in and out and not always be in the room.

So, my heart needs to adjust to this, and the recovery is a little scary at times too. I’m pulling through the best I can, using guidance from my doctors. They had me stay one more night, and as of yesterday, I’ve been able to return home. Gotta spend a week relaxing and healing up, keeping up with certain medications to help, and so on.

With all that said, and for those who read this entire mess of a thing, see you all elsewhere!

#fluffy rambles #fluffy speaks #final post

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veliseraptor · 7 years ago

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more money talk from last night’s stuff, replying to some folks, etc. etc.

first off: thanks you guys for your sympathy, and your generosity (some folks dropped money in my ko-fi last night and I’m so fucking grateful) and generally just being...awesome people. I really appreciate it.

more specifically:

pennie-dreadful replied to your post “money talk nonsense under the read more[[MOR] so today I might have...”

Just thought you should know the link to your kofi is missing from your mobile header.

augh. does anyone know if there’s a good way to add it in? is it an issue with html? because...yeah that would be a nice thing to have there but I guess yeah the button isn’t showing up (also for some reason the “fic tag” link doesn’t work, what the eff is up with mobile)

not-poignant replied to your post “money talk nonsense under the read more[[MOR] so today I might have...”

I'm all for Patreon, but if you mention it once on AO3 (same with Ko-Fi) in the comments/author's notes/wherever, it will - at best - mean you get warned, but it can also lead to account deletion (I've seen it happen many times now). While donations do circumvent copyright law, Patreon does not consider itself a 'donation site' and nor does AO3 consider it a donation site. So it's...a tricky thing to do (trickier than with fanart unfortunately).

But I def think people would sign up for a Patreon. And not everyone offers extra. Ursulav didn't for years. You're not obligated to do a reward based system, and certainly not obligated to start out with one that eats all your resources. But yeah, AO3 + ever mentioning Patreon is a total no-go. I've talked to AO3 about this myself (since I have a Patreon for my AO3 original fiction) - and they have a SUPER hard line against it.

(The best way to circumvent that is to just mention that you have a Tumblr on the regular, and have your Ko-Fi / Patreon links be part of your fic posts there. I mean I still do okay on Patreon for original fic on AO3 despite never having mentioned it once on AO3? But I'm not comfortable setting up a Patreon for fanfiction, because I know peeps who've had their Patreon accounts deleted/banned for it - some folks do fine, some don't. It depends a lot on content too.)

(Antis LOVE reporting that crap).

(And one more quick side note: I would also totally throw in for a Patreon for your *articles* and comic/media meta as well?)

Thank you for all this. And yeah - I did know that about Patreon/Ko-fi and AO3 - that it’s a very dangerous area. I’d stick to mentioning it here on the blog. But yeah, I have...thought of the legal issues (and my frustration about the fact that fanart doesn’t have the same issues, sigh) and I don’t know exactly how that works?

I could hypothetically do it, like you said, for the articles and media meta and stuff, but I don’t feel like I write enough of that to really make it worthwhile. Like...maybe I’m underselling myself (it’s definitely possible that I am) but I feel like what most people are here for...is the fic, and that’s what I do most of. (The analytical stuff just doesn’t come quite as easy or as fast.)

I should be adding the link to my fic posts, though. Just haven’t because...again, weird shame about asking for money for fic, which I think is maybe kind of an old fandom thing? but also given all the legal issues around fic and money...ehhhh.

(When I was poking around this yesterday I thought of a few things I could hypothetically offer - early chapters, excerpts, extra meta/commentary maybe? - but yeah, the whole legal issue is so sticky and scary and I just don’t even know.

Probably what this means is that I should try to work more on writing nonfiction, since that’s the stuff I can actually get paid for doing (once I figure out how to do that) but...odds are that’s going to continue to be slow.)

mostfacinorous replied to your post “money talk nonsense under the read more[[MOR] so today I might have...”

If you need help figuring out those forms, hit me up. I swear that's my stupid mutant power. And... is there any chance of asking for a raise at work? If your cost of living is going up, that seems like the first stop in trying to make ends meet.

I am...soldiering up and trying again today (and possibly just walking into the offices of the people in question, after checking with someone else who writes for the website and knows who those people are) so...will let you know? but thank you.

unfortunately asking for a raise is...something that only happens yearly and isn’t under control of my boss (but rather corporate). it’s another thing I might have to suck up and actually...say something to my boss about, though, just on the off chance there’s something she can do. my understanding is no? but...maybe I’m wrong, and I probably should try to find out.

#conversating #not poignant #mostfacinorous #pennie dreadful #money talk cw

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sauriany · 7 years ago

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My first booth experience

First of all, I want to thank the people who came to my booth buying my merchandise and came by to say hello! I really appreciated it and make it possible to keep doing this. I really wanted to make this journal way more sooner, but I guess I totally forgot about it like usual. I'll be attending next year again at FACTS, so i'll be making new prints and new merchandise, like stickers and magnets. I have to say I had underestimated the pressure and stress that came with it. The first day when I arrived early in the morning I started crying because I started to panic nobody would even look or buy anything from me. Luckily my dad was there for a little while, so I was able to pull through. However I did still felt the anxiety and stress during the whole convention, my legs where shaking and it was hard to make eye contact sometimes. I should have also slept more, because i was very tired and said stupid things to my costumers like for example: Somebody asked my for a Pinkie pie button and I said 'Aah you want Twinkie?' haha that was pretty embarrassing. But it was worth for the experience and the people I met. My neighbors where pretty nice as well, offering me food and giving me some courage. One of my friends stayed with me at my booth, which i'm very grateful for! I had a great time and I hope to see you guys next year! I also have been learning some HTML and CSS to make my own website and online store where I could sell my stuff for the people who can't come to the conventions or are interested in buying my stuff. I'm really excited to open my own shop, but it will take me a lot of time to make it. Commissions will be opened next week and I will be updating my social medias. I still need to add a lot artworks on Tumblr especially that i completely forgot about. I was going to make an artist valley vlog, but I don't made any footage sadly, so my next video is going to be some story times with a speedpaint. Last but not least, I'm planning on changing my usernames to something shorter and more personal. First I thought mixing my name and art together, making it: Lizart. But that username already existed so my second one was Lizarto, which already excited as well. So my final name i'm gonna pick is Lizartos, but not 100 procent sure yet. It is going to be weird not being called Yellowfeatherbolt, which I just didn't like anymore. Because YFB is not me, but my mascot and my original character and it felt a bit weird after a while being called as one of my characters. But it's still fine if you still associated me with that name. The name change however is going take a long time since it will be after the next convention. I hope you have a great day and thanks for reading!

#personal

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ace-of-spades-ezreal · 8 years ago

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ALL OF THEM.

SHAKES FIST AT SKY

TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

♦ What was a mildly annoying thing that has happened to you rp wise?Like everything. Nah, but like mildly annoying stuff happens all the time. Like people that still ask me to RP and then never get back to me, and people still steal art for icons. Yada Yada blah blah blah♢ Has anyone ever tried to steal your blog? Your headcanons? Icons? All that jazz?FUCK YEAH THEY HAVE! Haha, there’s been a couple Ezreals that have blatantly taken some stuff from me. One even straight up took Ace’s birthday (which only has a very significant meaning between DL and I)! That was actually hilarious.

♚ How many people don't like you?Probably a lot. Oh fucking well.⚜ How many people do you not like?Also a lot. Well, nah there’s not that many around any more. Most of them have shown their true colors and been ousted. There’s not even double digits around anymore.✮ Have you managed to stay away from drama?Nope.☄ Have you ever been in the middle of drama?Yep.☯ Have you ever tried to bring peace to a situation?Yep!☼ How long do you stay mad?Forever and a day. I always remember slights against me. Whether or not I bring them back up depends on if said offender continues to be an asshole or not. I believe in redemption and that the ignorant can be learned. ☁ Have you ever forgiven a partner when you shouldn't have?Yep.☂ Have you ever been forgiven when you knew you shouldn't have been?Yeah. I’m not infallible. I don’t deserve most of the friends I have for some of the shit I’ve done.☢ What fads/trends are you so over?Stealing art for butchered icons and bad photoshop jobs and not crediting artists for people’s crappy 10 x 10 icons.☣ Have you ever rp'd with someone you knew for a fact was abusive but tried to give them a chance/to make up your own opinion on the roleplayer? Did they change or did you understand what people were talking about? Sure have! They weren’t as bad as I was told, and we ended up being okay friends, honestly. I’ve found many slights can be imagined on this sight.♨ Have you ever made a public call out post?Sure have. Don’t regret it one bit. They 100% deserved it.❀ What has made you completely lose your chill?People defending pedophilia ships. Good god I lost my gottdamn mind✿ What do you think about public call out posts?Depends. Sometimes they’re necessary if the severity warrants it. If it’s for ‘wahh this person won’t rp with me wahhh’ no absolutely not. But actual issues dealing with minors or abuse or actual issues? Yeah, call them out. ✦ Thoughts on duplicates following you? I don’t think there any other Ace of Spades Ezreals, but I do like my other Ezreal variants and enjoy them most of the time!!✧ Do you agree with reblog karma or is it forced interaction?Yeah, I agree with it on most things. Some stuff I get it just doesn’t work like sentence starters and such. But I don’t think there’s any excuse for things like this like sending symbols. I 100% uphold it on my end, and have actually apologized to muns for not sending something say if all had been answered or whatever. It’s in my rules that you don’t have to do the same for me. But I sure do take note of people that send and people that don’t. ❥ Has someone ever ruined an FC or character for you?Yep! Please see all the cute characters in Undertale that fits tons of my aesthetics (coughs Mettaton coughs) and now mean shit to me. A couple hetalia characters too. ❦ Has someone been jealous of you?Yep, but y’know what, we actually talked about it, and it’s worked out alright since then. I’m sure there are other silent brooders, but oh well.✖ How has Tumblr RP changed since you started?This weird thing with aesthetic blogs and not sourcing and tiny font and just general very poor writing covered up by HTML was definitely not as big as it was when I first joined.♒ Thoughts on the fandom you're currently rping in?It has it’s ups and downs. I enjoy it though. It could be sooooo much worse let me tell you. I still consider my extended time between Hetalia, Superwholock and Homestuck the absolute worst.❣ How salty are you feeling right now?Right now? Did you mean always? ‘Cause my blood is pure sodium.

#choream--virtute

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ruveluarna-blog · 8 years ago

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Development, Process, Collaboration

(This is our entire Facebook chat group, which shows our process of thought and elimination).

Hey gals! Alrighty, we need to get this project underway! Let's all post our ideas on here and we can throughout the week decide on an idea we really like? MarleenaYeah that sounds like a good idea i will get back to u guys with an idea tomorrowMAR 31ST, 11:20AMMarleenaOkay, so there's a work in week 4's powerpoints (topic: responsibility) called "Rythm 0" by Marina Abramovic. Basically, Abramovic lay out a bunch of props and allowed museum goers to manipulate her body, with or without the props, for six hours. Yoko Ono did a reinterpretation of the idea, but allowed the audience to take turns snipping pieces of cloth from her clothes.MarleenaI think it'd be really interesting to take these ideas and spin them in a more positive and constructive way. (The Rythm 0 artwork ended pretty "violently" - someone used the provided loaded gun to position it against her forehead, and then there was a fight in the audience to make them stop etc)ImmiYes will have a look into this later today !MAR 31ST, 1:19PMYes I really liked that one, I checked it out on YouTube!I'm down for thisMaybe we can even do an installation type thing and record itSo many ideas! Where do you live Marlena?*marleenaI'm thinking we should all get together sometime before class next week if we can, if not we can prepare it all over here MarleenaI live near liverpool, western suburbs Im still trying to brainstorm ideas on how we could reinterpret the work tho Hmm okay that's like a 55 minute drive MarleenaLOL we can try meet up at uniI reckon if we all agree on this artwork, let's each brainstorm ideas on any sort of way in which we could reinterpret it, then just post ideas here. Maybe on Sunday we can try and decide on what we like best?Yeah I think so hahahMarleenaokay lets do that, sunday we'll make a decision on what idea to pursue Im not too familar with "time-based work" sooo gotta do some researchMAR 31ST, 6:09PMImmiAPR 1ST, 9:37PMHaha all good!APR 1ST, 11:19PMHere are some very rudimentary ideas so far!Oh I just had an idea, we could go up to randoms on campus and out in the city and get them to write one word and hold it in front of them and we can film them holding it up. We can get them to write down whatever; what they think life is, beauty is, what is real, what dreams are, what they are labelled, whatever you want!Just an idea APR 2ND, 9:31AMMarleenahey just finished reading your ideas! looking good so far i think right now though the ideas as they are dont really link to responsibility clearly or are resolved enoughim looking at some of the stuff u written and trying to think of ways to push them furtheri think the idea of taking something that is meant to shed light on the negative parts of being human, and flipping it to show positivity is something really interesting relating to responsibilityi think that idea of asking people a personal question, like what life is etc, that u suggested touches on that and has potential reminds me of that artist who let people write on a wall what they want to do before they diesorry if the stuff im saying sounds kinda disjointed or weird, cos i just woke up and im just writing what i think as it goes in my head hahaMarleenaan idea i had about transforming marina's work, is maybe laying out a table of items like she did but including "caring" items instead, like bandaids and spa stuff and chocolates. we can put out a chair and a camera, and people are allowed to use the stuff as long as they sit in the chairMarleenahey about that idea with recording people's smiles, itd be kinda cool to expand it and do it about human's relationship with others, not just smiling but hugging talking and high fiving etc. itd be interesting how it relates to physicality, and itd probs contrast really well with the marina workImmiHey guys! Soz for being a little MIA I was going to have a good look this morning and see if I can workshop some of the ideas we've got too so I'll let ya know :)) awesome job so far teamMarleenano worries ive been supa swamped with stuff too hahaAPR 2ND, 11:22AMImmiok so i was having a look at some of the work in the lecture slides from the documentation and editing week and this work i thought was pretty interesting-- we could have a wall where we get people to collaborate by writing ideas or or drawings on like sticky notes or scrap paper and then organise them on a wall and then the time based aspect could be a sped up video of people writing and adding to the wall? http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/c/crisis-of-capitalism/crisis-of-capitalism-ayreen-anastas-rene-gabri.htmlCrisis of Capitalism | Ayreen Anastas, René GabriCrisis of Capitalism | Ayreen Anastas, René Gabrimonumenttotransformation.orgImmicould be like a question related to stuff going on in the world and how they would fix it? or invent something? and get people to draw sketches or write ideas?i don't know just thinking :))APR 2ND, 6:19PMMarleenai think thats an interesting take on documentation... like, it relates to the idea of a kinda "communal" documentation?its pretty interesting to create a public forum for documentation, kinda like designated grafitti walls or online forumsImmiYeah nice!APR 2ND, 7:58PMMarleenahi everyone, dunno bout u guys but im still kinda conflicted about this assignment hahai think all the major ideas we came up with so far have been pretty interesting and im having trouble deciding which one i like the mostwhat are your opinions on this assignment?? is there anything u guys r super keen on so far?or anything u rly wanna do?for me, i definitely wanna do something that's hyper creative and outside the box - for this assignment im a little afraid of doing something thats been done or reminds me of a facebook or youtube vid i watchedi think no matter what idea we pick i definitely want to push it to its limits Yeah Marlena in response to your first response I agree, they were all heaps rudimentary ideas that I quickly wrote down before bed and definitely need expansion - they were just an idea to kick us off I like the smile/high 5/hug ideas. I definitely want to do something "fresh" as well so I'm with you on that! No body likes the same old same. I'm still conflicted about the assignment too haha. The only thing is we have to think about the readability of it all - we don't really want to spend money buying items, etc, and we have to think about how we can record it and where we will do it MarleenaThanks for brainstorming so much im definitely also keen on saving money too - doing something performance-y like suggested or just paper and pen like immi's idea seem like practical ideas to keep costs lowYep I like!MarleenaThe idea i suggested about the "caring" items would probs be no good for thatHaha maybe not Good thought butOkay let's keep brainstorming then and maybe decide by Tuesday night?MarleenaHaha yeah lets see how it goesWorse comes to worse we can talk it through with the tutor on wednesdayYeah, I'm sure we will figure it out but!MarleenaI will try make a list of ideas like u did No probs. We could even make a Pinterest board or whatever MarleenaOohh high tech hahaAPR 3RD, 1:09PMOkay so let's decide tonight on something solid so we can each conduct rudimentary experiments tomorrow on our own and document on TumblrMarleenaOk understood Immiyep nice.. i think maybe doing a time lapse or something could be interestingand maybe doing a trial of that? could get audience involved through drawing? I'm happy to do that at college?MarleenaIm looking at that email again and i think that tutor is only talking about her class, not ours, so i doubt when we rick up to class our tutor is going to expect us to have anything prepared (she will probs even send us an email herself)Immiok coolMarleenaBut doing a little experiment for tumblr ourselves actually sounds like a good idea to get us started, practice-led research and suchImmianother random idea hahah could be to record sound? and say have a story where each person hears the previous story and then adds to it?MarleenaThat sounds like a fun experiment to try im down for that Immiawesome! just not sure which artist it would relate to?i guess we could just say we used "so and so" as a starting point and then developed our own idea?MarleenaUr documentation one defsImmiok cooland then could focus on sound/ voice documentationMarleenaThe idea is to deform and experiment anywaysImminice!MarleenaHow bout for our first experiment, immi u can make a voice recording of the beginning of a story, u can send it to me and i will send my bit to ruve So its kinda like chinese whispers hahaImminice!! so just do it ourselves? or with other people?MarleenaAfter ruve we can keep sending it along and in the end we can compile itImmiyep sounds goodMarleenaImmiwill havd to do it later this arvo though once I've finished work hahaMarleenaAll good Immiawesome! nice work teamMarleenaWhat's the concept of this voice thingy? Soz I'll be at work for the next few hours so I won't respond ehahahMarleenaSo basically one person makes a voice recording of the beginning of a story and passes it along, and the next person continues the story with their own recording and passes that along kinda like chinese whispersOkay, how do we get ransoms to do that though? Also I'm keen to try some experiments with people where I live tonight/tomorrowImmiI recon just ask people if they want to be apart of it hahaJust a trialMarleenaWe were just going to start with our group and maybe we can ask our friends to volunteer? HahaImmiAnd we can build on itYeah coolImmiMarleenaWhat kinda live experiments were u thinking of ruve??Another idea - photograph people's shoes, and get them to describe them self in one word. Show the pic to someone else and get them to describe whose shoes they see in one wordOr something like thatI don't knowMarleenaThats kinda interesting its kinda like that saying "if u were in their shoes" APR 3RD, 7:31PMHahah APR 4TH, 10:43AMMarleenaHey guys this is just a compilation of the total ideas we made up so far! Feel free to add it to ur tumbr as documentation I brainstormed some more ideas and such and added them to the list, too responsibility – marina abramovik, rhythm 0 Sit in a busy location with a sign explaining what to do – one of us filming place cameras on campus that people can draw on create an instagram page like ‘humans of UNSW’ where people take selfies and talk about themselves get randoms in the city to write one word and hold it in front of them and we can film them holding it up – the prompt can be: what life is, beauty is, what is real, etc recording people interacting affectionately with their friends/other people – smiles, hugging, high fiving ask a question and get people to write their answers and stick them on us ask them to write one sentence if that was all they had left to say documentation – ayreen anastas & rene gabri, crisis of capitalism have a wall where people collaborate by writing ideas or drawings on sticky notes or scrap paper and then organise them on a wall – time-based aspect would be a sped up video of people writing and adding to the wall – could be a question related to stuff going on in the world and how to fix it, maybe just sketching or writing ideas recording sound – have a story where each person hears a previous story and then adds to it (currently experimenting with this idea since it’s low effort and cost effective) wouldn’t it be sick if we could make a kinda song and beat out of every person’s clip of audio? Haha would definitely be interesting photograph people’s shoes and get them to describe themselves in one word – show the pic to someone else and get them to describe whose shoes they see in one word some of the ideas we have here would definitely relate to both responsibility and documentation artworks – I think both topics just both naturally overlap really well PS: in the above ideas I left out ideas which would be too expensive or unrealistic to carry outMarleenaoh god i just realised the formatting is really wack hahaanyways I JUST HAD AN EXPLOSION OF INSPIRATIONim excited to hear what u guys think of it!! i will type it up. i kinda tried to continue upon what u both already thought of (just uhh typing it up)ImmiAwesome Marleena!! Killing it with the ideas I recon they are all good starting points- we can discuss in class tomorrow and I think next step will be about pushing the ideas so they are more interesting and unexpected and perhaps considering time based and getting creative with how we approach it, so we aren't just creating a 5min film or audioMarleenayeah i definitely agree with interesting and unexpected ImmiImmiWe'll have lots to discuss in class :))Marleenaso uhh here's that exposion of inspiration i was talking about. reading it again, some of the logistics dont make any sense like how the projection is going to work but i will share it here anyway in the spirit of experimentation MarleenaGet a large sheet of blue cellophane and draw a picture of a crying person. Draw exactly the same picture but instead on a sheet of paper of the same size. (In faint pencil instead) Have people draw/write on the sheet of paper what they would do to cheer the crying person up. Record the entire process of people drawing/writing on the paper. Turn the video into a time lapse. Hang the sheet of cellophane in front of a projector. Play the video on the projector, align the pictures of the crying person. Result: get a cool time lapse video of people drawing, be left with awesome looking artworkImmiMarleenaHahahaHey guys, you're both awesome! I have to go to work again now but I'll check this all out later and post something to Tumblr!ImmiNice yeah I've got classes pretty much till 5 now so will check back in laterMarleenaAg ttyl APR 4TH, 9:52PMAlright, so I'm going to update my tumblr with our ideas, I really like what we've got so far!And I'm going to pinterest ideas too. Then tomorrow in class maybe we can discuss with Anna our inability to choose an idea because we like them all hahahAPR 6TH, 1:51PMImmihttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1U8dukQ49_29jkB9ViKhWvooZRMLgVwbAOS3aFafhOuU/edit?usp=sharing hey guys I've made a group doc here which i recon will be easy to post info on and share ideas APR 6TH, 7:17PMMarleenathanks immi! checking it out now ImmiNot much info now haha just added a tiny bit before will some more tomorrow Add what you want and we can start formulating and idea to pursue Cool! Love what you've written so far - I've never used google docs though so I may take a little to get used to it APR 7TH, 12:28PMMarleenahi immi! would u be able to give me edit access for the doc? i sent a request, ty ImmiYeah I'll do it when I'm back at uni APR 8TH, 4:39PMImmihttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1U8dukQ49_29jkB9ViKhWvooZRMLgVwbAOS3aFafhOuU/edit?usp=sharing sox guys had it wrong setting should work now!APR 8TH, 6:40PMCool I'll try to figure it out ImmiAPR 9TH, 9:36PMYeah I'm liking these ideas guys maybe we should do some experiments around these concepts?MarleenaIMMI i just read your comments and i think you're right about just picking something and pushing through with itdoing some experiments around this would be an excellent ideaim thinking of just trying out some basic things on my family haha like instructing them on things, and seeing their reaction when ive told them what theyve done is the artwork lolYeah I like the instructions and the audience creating the artwork through their perspectiveBut I love film too so I'm keen for eitherBut yeah if we pick one then we can each do experiments around that and see what worksMarleenamaybe in one of ur experiments u can try think of a way to incorporate more film elements??im not too sure how to do that cos i dont think im creatively inclined that way but it could be rly cool like... maybe you can play a film with realy different sound from whats actually being played, and have the audience watch it once blindfolded but then reveal the actual footage afterYEAAAAHThat's cool!MarleenahahaAPR 13TH, 6:27PMMarleenahi guys! im just checking in to see how you are all feeling about the assignment i did some stuff and put it in the google doc, and i kinda have a vision for what i think would be goodAPR 14TH, 11:24PMHeya girl, I literally haven't thought any about it this week as I've been so busy, it's due first or second week back? Also I'm keen to try whatever MarleenaHaha no worries due wk 8 first week backLel we should probs get on it then Let's decide on it and run with itMarleenaI was continuing our asmr video idea and writing a script for the instructions and voice - some is in the google doc If u wanna continue that idea, could u look into ways we could get a voice to say the instructions? How to record it, and maybe possibility of having music to it too?I dont think this idea will be too hard to accomplish with the little time we have leftAlso help and ideas on the script would be amazing Sorry if it seems im just pushing watevs i wanna do lol its just an idea if u guys wanna get the thing over and done with lolNo totally cool, we've only got about 12 days so all good I'm keen to look into music and voice recording, I could get my brother to say it? He has a nice audio voice. I can do some recording for experiments and send them through and post on Tumblr?I'll send you through an example here too0:09This was for another assessmentJust a thought hahaMarleenaThats a gr8 idea! Itd be awesome if ur brother could do it thatd be way better than a text to speech robot lmaoId love to see some experiments and stuff 2 on the tunblrIll try get the script done asap too hopefully by early next weekIm a total noob at voice recording and stuff like that so uhh might need to rely on u guys for that lolHaha cool, I'm down! I'm with my family this weekend so I'll record my brother doing some experiments and I'll post to tumblr Any ideas on what you want him to say?I'm going to check the google doc nowMarleenaYeah its all there its kinda unpolished but just what u want with it Have fun with ur family!!!Yeah cool, I like what you've written so far, I think it could be really cool! I'll get my brother to read out the script so far, and I'll play around with some rad sound effects to go with it! Are we still getting the audience to close their eyes?Also I reckon we could even do just the one piece, but have parts slowed down, made faster, toned up or down, with different 'music' or sounds to it to create different emotions?Maybe instead of having three different ones, show how we can create the atmosphere just through exploration with tone, etc?MarleenaThe stuff I've written i intended to just be one piece, its just i wrote different versions and wanted to include in thr doc as documentation the second script is the latest draft. Sorry should have clarified. I rly like the idea of using music and tone to create emotion and atmosphere! Pushes the limits of what audio can be MarleenaI think getting the audience to close their eyes would be good for immersion Oooh i just reread the docYeah rad, all good! Alrighty, so do we want the instructions to go for like 2.5 mins or so with their eyes closed, and then they have 2.5 mins to create the artwork? or do we actually want them to just sit an listen the whole time?hahahaMarleenaYeah those three paragraphs at the end r supposed to be part of the same script Making them sit there for 2.5 mins thinking of the artwork sounds sadistic but totally marina-esque xDI say we do ithahaahah okay!MarleenaItd probs be 3 parts audio 2 parts thinking instead thoHahahaso say we provide them with the artistic tools needed, they sit there eyes closed, then produce the work in the dark still with music/sounds still playing?MarleenaThis is the kinda thing which makes normal think arti d ts are crazy lmaoahahhahahlove it but!so trueMarleenaI reckon including the actual creating if the artwork by the audience would be interesting! We wouldnt even have to have them blindfolded for that bit. Would be rly interesting to see wat they imagined Hand out pieces of paper and set up pencils etcmaybe in keeping with marina's style, we could give them a bunch of mediums to choose from, i.e. giving the audience even more controlyeah definitely not blindfolded, but maybe keep the lights lowish?are we going to blindfold them?that could be funMarleenaI was thinking of blindfolds during the audio instructions but probably not for the creating part yeah agreedMarleenaYay! This is exciting This is gonna be fun hahaYeah I'm keen!what sort of mood are we thinking? because the sound effects will create the mood and toneor are we trying to evoke more than one emotion?MarleenaIm thinking a calming and compelling moodIf we're going to evoke an emotion itd be inspiration?Or enlightenmentalrightyso maybe some intense parts to make them really think, but sort of calming as well?MarleenaYeah! radI'll get to work MarleenaA+Since we're including a creating part, maybe the length of the script we have is enough?Do u reckon u'd be able test that in ur experiment?I just realized the time lmao. Goodnight all! Im off to bedYeah no props haha night!APR 15TH, 9:46AMImmiNice guys!! I will have a read of the script and stuff today Awesome I was checking out some awesome social vids on YouTube last night and they were really inspiring! I'll some the links through and you guys can check em, maybe we can use some of the ideas for experiments or whatever. Also for the actual product, maybe we can include some more personally encouraging words, like starting with, 'you... are amazing... beautiful ..." etc and continue with the script?Just an idea ImmiCool I'll have a read of the script and let you guys know what I think :)) so far seems v v good hahaRadddd I'll have to post the links later on as I'm out and don't have them hahahttp://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=Hzgzim5m7oU&vq=mediumThe Power of WordsHarness the power of words to grow your business today: http://tinyurl.com/phokf69 For personal transformation order Andrea Gardner's book 'Change Your Words...youtube.comCheck this out!ImmiI think itd be more interesting to have the audience create the artwork at the same time as the recording so maybe we could do a trial using this script.. I can do it with my brother and have hie draw at the same time and if one of you wants to do the script and have someone draw after? And then we can discuss the implications and results of each?Marleenaok sure i will test out having someone draw the thingo afterwards ImmiAwesome :))APR 15TH, 6:29PMyeah great idea, that can be one of our experiments I'm getting my brother to record it tonight so once it'd done I'll send it through and start playing with sound effects )ImmiQuestion, do either of you play an instrument?also I've added the youtube vids to google doc if you wanna check them out Marleenaunfortunately i dont haha all good, was just wondering for the soundtrack alright, here is my first edit!Play-5:01Unmutelet me know what you do/don't likeI added a few words to your script Marleenahope that's okay!APR 16TH, 10:13AMImmiokki so just did this with my brother and feedback is: that if we are drawing at the same time as the audio then it should be a littler more instructional.. not telling you what to do explicitly but perhaps having some words like "draw" or "translate this thought to the page" so that the audience knows to communicate the image they have in their head on the page. However, also good to draw after so having say 1-2 minutes of straight talking about imagining different things and then 1-2 mins after to drawMarleenai listened to the audio and i think the words u added helped out the script a lot ruve enhanced it moreso i just tested out the audio and i definitely agree, the way it is designed now is best suited to having the drawing/creating component after the audioi think if we want to create a more "immersive" and ASMR-like experience, keep the drawing and audio separateMarleenai really enjoyed the music of the audio, i think it fits the tone of the piece well my only thoughts are to add longer pauses between certain lines (like the one which says "i'll give u a minute" - this will help with immersion and give the audience space to think) and also refining the script more (tho i think it's pretty alright now)Marleenaother than that, only the final details are left. for the drawing/creating component, we can hand out A4 pieces of paper and any other materials to let people use (im sure the class will have stuff they can use to draw lmao) and for the audio part, i was thinking of just tearing up old rags and such for blindfolds we could probably also get bedsheets to block out the window light as well, if u guys wanted ImmiI agree with the audience closing their eyes but it might be enough for them to just close their eyes? As then they have to conscious of not seeing and focusing on imaging? Also it could be good to leave the drawing up to the audience where they either draw during or after?Like if they have an idea they can jot it down but then have time after to drawAPR 16TH, 12:36PMMarleenai agree blindfolds might not be necessary, i just thought it might be good for immersion if its completely dark for them (and if their eyes open up a little bit, they still cant see) - i think for the sake of being immersed in the audio, it would better to have drawing afterwards so they can concentrate on thinking of what they will drawMarleenaim a bit worried if we leave it up to the audience they will chit chat during the audio lolAPR 16TH, 6:26PMImmiTrue pointAPR 16TH, 10:55PMRad! Glad you guys like it yeah I definitely think I need to make some pauses longer, my brother said it pretty quickly. So you think the songs good to keep then? Yeah I reckon just to really immerse the audience we should blindfold them, and get them to draw once the voice says "open". The music will still be playing and I reckon keep it dark to keep the mood. Do you want to add anything else to the script? Also I reckon we should provide the art materials so we can point to that being the "responsibility" of us as the artist's APR 17TH, 9:45AMImmiYeah and I think discuss, in linking to marinas work, responsibility in terms of the 'creator' and whether the artist has to be the creator or whether the audience can be the creator etcYeah APR 17TH, 11:24AMMarleenaok, i will look over the script thing again soon - u guys can go over it again and add what u want as well umm im not really too sure what to add and i guess adding too much might be bad for time limit reasonsglad things are coming along!! feeling less stressed already lolOkay no props, I'll work on it later today all good! don't stressAPR 18TH, 9:52AMMarleenai just checked over the script again added a few things here and there! looking good guysTUE 8:34PMOkay cool, let's have it finalised by tomorrow night then? And I'll get my brother to say it again Marleenasure thing! im fine with it if everyones ok with this deadline ImmiYep cool! I'll have a look in the morn sorry I've been trying to get a science report done ahh haha tomorrow night is good though WED 9:16AMImmiokki cool i re-listened to the audio and left a couple of comments on the google doc in regards to specific parts. If you guys want to have a look and then we can workshop the ideas into the final piece? :)) keen to do it in class and see what results we get hahaMarleenahullo ur up early!! hahai just checked ur comments and took ur advice into account and removed+added things i think its pretty much done!! i think its pretty interesting how u felt super relaxed and didnt feel like making art afterwards listening to it am also keen to see what everyone else things - for me, its more like it inspires me rather than gives me great ideas etcWED 1:38PMImmiNice ! Yeah I think everyone will respond to it differently which is cool THU 1:11AMRad! I'll send the script again to my bro and then put together the piece, did you want me to keep the same musical soundtrack? Anything else you want me to add to it? We could even get the audience to just simply write one word about it or whatever as well THU 8:25AMMarleenaI think the same music is gr8, the only thing i rly wanna add is dramatic pauses xDFRI 12:04AMYeah great, I'll do it!FRI 9:37AMMarleenaso about the drawing bit, did any of youse have a4 paper and other drawing supplies at home that you could bring in for next wednesday?ImmiI've got A4 cartridge paperI've got pencils and heaps of mediums they can useAlso, what are we as the artist's going to do during this process?Are we going to do it too, or sit there as an object, watch and take notes, what?FRI 12:53PMImmimaybe we could also do it?then there isn't an 'us' and 'them' its just everyone responding to the audio?Marleenai think we might need to explain things a bit (like telling everyone to remain seated in the beginning and relax, and afterwards explaining we're going to give them to tools to draw what they want afterwards) because the audio isn't extremely explicit about thisso we might not be able to participate because we need to keep things running hahaImmitrueMarleenajust trying to think of the logistics because our class is pretty chatty/distracted sometimesImmior we could explain at the start everything and then the audio goes and once its finished we just have time to draw?haha true marleenaMarleenahahahayeah thats a good ideagive a little explanation at the beginning, prepare the art stuff, and then we can all participate togetherImminice :)) and then if we have to just stop and explain thats fine toowe won't really know how its going to pan out until we've done it any way! so will just have to see eee!Marleenayeah no worries at allid appreciate if u guys could bring in the art stuff you have, i will too, i dont thing we'll need much paper just one sheet for everyone (like 20-30pcs), will only need pencils and other basic stuff as well, not to mention everyone in class probs has their own stuff tooImmiyeah for sure! i don't have a whole heap of stuff just cos I'm at not living at home but I've got some acrylic paint that i could bring ? and ill bring what ever i can find :))FRI 6:12PMMarleenanice! thanks FRI 9:04PMYeah man I have heaps I'll bring it all! What if I get my brother to say all of that, so we don't have to even talk at all? That could be kind of cool - like we remove ourselves so that we become part of the artwork, instead of having to explain ourselves? And then we can participate too?MarleenaYou know, that could work! We'd have to figure out the timing etc but itd be awesome!! Okay, I'll tweak the script a bit and get it done!FRI 10:51PMMarleenathanks i will also tweak a little to help, if its not too lateYeah go ahead! I'll get him to do it tomorrowSAT 1:22AMImmiNice!!I'm happy to record stuff too if you need but otherwise it's looking v goodSAT 2:52AMSure, if you like just for continuity though do you think we should have just one voice? We could both record people tomorrow and compare the sound before I edit it if you like? SAT 8:14AMImmiHmm true, maybe it would work better with just one person? I guess depends if we want the instructions and audio to be connected or separate, what do you guys think?Marleenai think connected would be less jarring ImmiYeah true, ok in that case ruve are you ok in recording both parts?Marleenait should be ok, i just checked the script again and added in more instruction-type phrases and there's not much extra ImmiOk cool :))Marleenaso i read the script a dozen times lol, i was thinking instead of adding in the script "please use the materials at hand to create your artwork", we could have a slide on the projector instead say it? so that it kinda doesnt break the narrator's character as "our conscience"so that when everyone opens their eyes, they see the instructions on the projector to begin creating their artwork etcImmiYeah that could be good! We would just have to make sure that everyone stays on task I guess cos it could be easy for people to just stop thinking once the audio is over?Or we just have in the introduction that after the audio we will be drawingAnd then have the slide up? So that the audience is already thinking about creating a work from the audio and then once the audio is over they can go straight into it?Marleenai tried adding that bit to the audio but i think it breaks the atmosphere and also "ruins the surprise"cos i was thinking of our intentions and it might be better to have an authentic "first impression" by the audience?ImmiYeah trueMarleenaits kinda like, the intrigue plus if they knew theyd have to draw stuff, it might spoil the effect of the audioImmiYeah nice and then I guess linking to responsibility too and that they don't know before hand they are drawingMarleenayeah!ImmiYep I agree, will take away from the meditative aspectOk cool maybe we have the slideMarleenaalso about staying on task, the music will still be going during the drawing, and they're not drawing for too long, so it shouldnt get too crazyuhh hopefully LOLImmiHahaMarleenacos audio is what, 2 or 3 minsImmiYeah about thatI think 2 mins plus Intro?Marleenayeah i reckon it will be ok ImmiMaybe we can record the audio at the end of ruves brother saying the bit about drawing and then we can cut it out later if it interferes too muchBut at least we then have the option Marleenagood idea, doesnt hurt to try it outnice!! glad everything's coming along!! SAT 10:49AMYep cool, I'll get him to say it all then I'll do two recordings (we can use one for an experiment for Tumblr). If we have a slide, do you think the light of it will be too distracting? Or maybe we could have a really dark slide, almost like an artwork in itself, and have the words almost hidden there so they have to concentrate on reading it? Also, if we place paper in front of them they'll know they have to draw, so for an element of surprise we could perhaps place maybe a box with things in it secretly when they are listening (but then we can't listen) or we could just put the materials out front and let them choose? But that could take too longThoughts?MarleenaWhile their eyes r closed and theyre listening to the recording, we can just put on the slide and set up the art things we can make the slide have a black background with white textI think the light will be ok like that - also btw i dont think i will end up making blindfolds because it doesn't seem too necessaryI think it will be fine just asking them to close their eyes - simplicity is bestIts a shame if we do it this way we wont be able to participate, but it sounds like it will run most smoothly if we handle the behind the scenesIm not too sure wat u mean about placing a box with things in it, putting all the stuff out front sounds good and simple and i dont actually think it will take too longIm worried having the text be too unreadable will take focus away from the limited time they have to draw Yeah no not so unreadable they can't read it, just dark enough so the light isn't too much, but yeah a black background what I mean by a box is just having all the same materials placed inside maybe a box, one for each table, so they don't have to get up which should take less time?I know, what if we do the audio after we finish making it before class, and include it in our final product and compare ours as the artist's with the audience?That way we still get to do it and it could be more of a comparison?MarleenaThat would be pretty interesting do u mean doing it alone or meeting up?I think its a little l8 to meet up but i can try it out defsImmiYeah we could do it separately or before class if there's time?No we wouldn't have to meet up, I mean each of us do it respectively at home ImmiOk yeahMarleenaYeah defs!ImmiAnd we could also compare doing it by yourself vs with other peopleJust so it adds another element to it?Yeah!ExperimentsLolMarleenaI think the box idea for each table is gr8, you dont even have to get a box u can just evenly spread it out on each tableSo we could bring ours in and maybe even display them nicely whilst everyone has eyes closed? But maybe have them flipped so they can't see them until we reveal them at the end after they've drawn something?Yep okay cool MarleenaHahaha i like thatAlso, we don't want them to talk or look at each other's work right?What can we do to stop them doing this?MarleenaSlap their wrists with a rulerAlso don't forget the lights can't turn off, so are we blocking out the windows?Hahahah Hahahah#marinaMarleenaHahaAlso is there anything else that needs to be added to the script before I record?MarleenaWe could block them out, only thing wed need is sheets white is ok but still lets light in, black would be betterIts not entirely necessary but might be coolAlso ye done with the script, the blue writing is the instruction bits I think having the calming music playing moderately loud will make them not talk as much - should keep them in the moment for 2-3 minsSo maybe in the audio u could raise the volume of the music just a little during the creating phase? We could include on the slide that they shouldnt talk etc but i think that's the extent of our power Yeah great idea I can do that Okay I'm not sure I have any black sheets but let's see what we can findAnd good idea having the instructions in blue!I'm keenMarleenaBlue font! Good idea No stress, the sheets arent entirely necessaryRadMarleenaOH i thought u meant have the instructions in blue font xDLike on the slideHahah that's okay, what colour do you want them?MarleenaAhh it doesnt really matter as long as the background is black - i was thinking dark grey, white or calm blueYep coolSAT 9:42PMOkay so they are going to have about 40 seconds to get down their ideas lolBut that could be coolSAT 10:46PMOkay! I've done the edit, I'll send it through once it's uploaded and you can see what you think Also we should definitely give it a title Should we make note of the fact they don't have long and say that it was for a specific purpose?MarleenaSounds good! Good for reflectionAlso once I send it through, do you reckon we should get 3 people each to do it, and then we can compile these pieces together, maybe make a collage to post on Tumblr, and can display them on Wednesday as well?Just to add even more depth?https://www.youtube.com/uploadYouTubeShare your videos with friends, family, and the world.accounts.google.comhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNIUppJHQTYRUMINATION (audio artwork)This audio piece was a collaboration with two other art students. We have created an audio set of 'guidelines' in the contemplative stage, or the conceptual ...youtube.comsoz ignore the first one!I've called it Rumination for my youtube account, but if you don't like that we can change it! let me know what you guys think of it and if you want something changedAlso we can't forget to write our 300 words SUN 1:52AMImmi awesome! And thankyouu Haha would have likely forgotten about thatSUN 9:23AMMarleenaomg not gonna lie i completely forgot that as wellalso i think testing the audio out on ppl and displaying them is a nifty idea not entirely necessary tho so dont have to stress about itMarleenaso just listened to the audio... having a mixture of putting the instructions on the screen and having ur brother read them out worked surprisingly well! that was a good touch. i think we can actually afford to cut out some of the audio to make more time for the creating process at the endMarleenahmm ohh actually, i think a minute is alright, i just went over the audio againi went to the google doc and i underlined the chunk we could cut out if we wanted to extend the creating time, lemme know what u guys think im pretty happy with what we have so far btw, i think we did a gr8 jobSUN 9:58PMCool! I think I actually don't mind the monologue taking up most of the time, because for me personally, I see the work as something that stimulates the conceptual stage rather than focus on the production of a piece, so I reckon a minute is okay. But I can edit it again if you both like if we had a little extra time at the end we could possibly gather the pieces and display them out the front, but that may take too long anyway. Also, shall we all just write 100 words each about the project? Say we allocate a dot point each? Or would you prefer to do it a different way?Marleena100 words each sounds good Immiyeah i agree i think the drawing doesn't need to be too long as it is mostly about creating an image mentallyMarleenaYeah, im ok with not cutting much out tooImmiand yep 100 words sounds goodAlrighty, leave it as is then? Okay great, let's look at the rubric then decide what we shall each write?Also, do you mind if I post the vid to Facebook? I wanted people to do it and send me pics of their work, just to see what they created MarleenaLol no worries at all go ahead!Rad!I'm just looking up the assessment now Immiyes for sure!MarleenaYeah same Ahh sweetImmiim going to bed now cos I've got my stats exam tomorrow :// so will be able to do my 100 words tomorrow afternoon/ evening after the exmaMarleenaNo worries, good luck with ur exam Immiahhh thanks! hahaAll good! Good luck!!I think I need to make the music a bit louder during the drawing process?Just listened to itMON 8:35AMMarleenathat sounds like a good idea considering we're going to be playing it in a large room, which might make the music sound even softerso i checked what the 300 word statement has to be about, and it basically needs to include: the original artwork chosen, the relevant weekly topic, and the process of productionso yeah! we can just pick a subject each, and write 100 words on that if u guys dont mind, i will get started on "the original artwork"Yep cool! Immi want me to do the process of production so I can talk about the editing process?ImmiAwesome so I'll do weekly topic and how it links to responsibility?Marleenayup. woohoo! ImmiMarleenaso i just put mine in the end of our google doc for convenience MON 12:14PMImmiMON 7:25PMAwesome! Let's all put them there and then collate it so we can put it on our tumblrs MON 10:24PMHey girls! I've done my piece too, so I'm just editing them all together now, I hope that's okay how'd you go today Immi?ImmiGood exams all done and I've put up my 100 words to the docWill do the audio tomorrow and drawing etc tooI'm happy to edit them if you want ruve! You've done heaps of work already :))Awesome! Yeah I know, I'm stitching the three together It's okay I'm almost done! I'll post it and then you can change it if you like ImmiOkki cool :)) awesomeOh yes I'll do the audio tonight too! Though it's hard with us because we already know what to expectOk it's up so you can check and change if you like Chat Conversation EndSeen by everyone Type a message, @name...

#adad1001

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and-his-name-is-rouge-crimson · 8 years ago

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1-100 or whichever you care to tell me... I would like to know everything though :3

Well here goes the rest of my night :3 1-100 here we go.

1. When you have cereal, do you have more milk than cereal, or more cereal than milk?

Answer: It honestly depends on the cereal. If it’s anything from the CheeryO’s family, I’ll eat that milk-less. If it’s Cookie Crisp, or Cinnamon Toast Crunch, I had better have some damn milk.

2. Do you like the feeling of cold air on your cheeks on a cold wintery day?

Answer: FUCK NO!! WINTER SUCKS!!

3. What random objects do you use to bookmark your books?

Answer: I just remember the page number. Despite my crap memory, I somehow manage to remember what page I was on when I’m reading.

4. How do you take your coffee/tea?

Answer: I’ll take an energy drink instead.

5. Are you self-conscious of your smile?

Answer: Admittedly yes, I don’t like giving toothy smiles whenever I or someone else takes a picture.

6. Do you keep plants?

Answer: No, plants=bees. I hate bees. I’m not allergic or anything, I’ve just been stung one too many times for me to feel comfortable around bees. Hell if anything buzzes past my ear, I reflexively flinch even if it’s just a house fly. So no plants for me.

7. Do I name my plants?

Answer: *skips*

8. What artistic medium do you use to express your feelings?

Answer: I write. A lot, though I’m a little self-conscious to post a lot of it

9. Do you like singing/humming to yourself?

Answer: Oh hell yes, I’ll do this all the time. At home, in the car, at work, with my friends … I’ve said too much.

10. Do you sleep on your back, side, or stomach?

Answer: I answered this one already, but since you asked me to do 1-100 (and like a fool who clearly does not value what he does with what is left of his evening) I’ll answer this one again. I’ll fall asleep on my stomach or back, and somehow find myself awake on my sides.

11. What’s an inner joke you have with your friends?

Answer: Ohhh there are several, all with an interesting story behind it. Anyone reading this feel free to ask about said stories of said inside jokes. However, the two best ones I can think of at the moment are: “White-face Mexican Jesus,” and “I’m trying to send a donkey to someone for their birthday, but customs is being a bitch!”

12. What is your favorite planet?

Answer: Pluto (”Ohhh but that’s not a planet anymore” fuck off it’s a planet if I say it’s a planet. And that’s the bottom line, because Stone Cold said so!)

13. What is something that made you smile today?

Answer: Listening to Neon by Jeff and Casey Lee Williams.

14. If you were to live with your best friend in an old flat in a big city, what would it look like?

Answer: Shit. I’m still figuring Tumblr out, so I have NO idea how to link stuff (embed or html or whatever the fuck it is) so… for a base idea, probably something like 221b Baker Street from BBC’s Sherlock.

15. Go Google a weird space fact and tell us what it is.

Answer: *skips*

16. What is your favorite pasta dish?

Answer: Just give me spaghetti and meatballs.

17. What color do you really want to dye your hair?

Answer: Purple. It’s my favorite color, but I seem to have a distinct lack of purple in my wardrobe. But if I was to dye my hair, it would have to be a real dark purple.

18. Tell something dumb/funny that has since gone down in history between you and your friends that is always brought up.

Answer: *deep breath* No.

19. Do you keep a journal? And what do you write/draw in it?

Answer: I do not keep or have ever kept a journal.

20. What is your favorite eye color?

Answer: Dark brown, kind of like my own.

21. Talk about your favorite bag. One that has been to hell and back, and that you love to pieces.

Answer: Okay, well I still use this backpack. I’ve had it since my freshman year in high school. Its right strap is worn down, because I only ever wore it over my right shoulder, and still only ever wear it over my right shoulder. There’s also a Wings of Freedom button on the right strap, despite my dislike for the Attack on Titan anime (I liked the manga better). That backpack has been through high school, survived college, and gone to every single anime convention I’ve gone to since I’ve had it.

22. Are you a morning person?

Answer: No, I’m more of a crack of noon person. But high school has ingrained it into my brain that I need to wake up at the ass crack of dawn.

23. What’s your favorite thing to do on lazy days when you have 0 obligations?

Answer: Oh so everyday I don’t have work? Okay then. I either write or play video games, I’m currently playing Mass Effect Andromeda and loving it (despite the issue with the character customization).

24. Is there someone out there that you would trust with every single one of your secrets?

Answer: Yes, and they know who they are.

25. What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever broken into?

Answer: My friend Neil and I once had to break into his own house because he forgot his keys, and nobody else was home. There was a ladder under the balcony of his parents bedroom, we set it up, and Neil held the thing in place while I climbed up and over the ladder and over the balcony (thank god the sliding glass door was unlocked).

26. What shoes have you had forever and wear with every single outfit?

Answer: Normally my shoes don’t last that long.

27. What’s your favorite bubblegum flavor?

Answer: Ummmm… I don’t have a preference to bubble gum flavors. :3

28. Sunrise or sunset?

Answer: Sunset. Sleep is good.

29. What is something really cute one of your friends does, and is really endearing?

Answer: One of them is our designated group mom, and she cares for all of us. Love you Panda!

30. Think of it: Have you ever been truly scared?

Answer: Yes. There is a local haunted place close to where I live. It was an old rock crusher/munitions factory back in WWII, before it exploded and covered nearly all of it’s workers in acid. Since then the place has been haunted by the spirits of the workers who have died there. And then some idiots attempted to perform some ritual to summon some sort of demon … And it fucking worked. Anyways, my friend Neil and I go up there a few years ago on Halloween. In reality I allowed myself to be talked into it, but I was so freaked out the whole time we were up there, and I could have sworn I was seeing shit move just past the range of my vision. Anyways we are about to head back to his house, and we are right in front of the old rock crusher, when I become aware that Neil is not walking beside me. When I turn around, I see him passed out in front of the old structure … Then I hear this horrible voice in my ear: “Leave him, he belongs to us now.”

31. What is your opinion of socks? Do you sleep with socks? Do you confine yourself to white sock hell? Really, just talk about socks.

Answer: *skips*

32. Tell a story that happened at 3am while you were with friends.

Answer: Ummmm there are no stories like that. Even if we’re at cons, we’re asleep before midnight.

33. What’s your favorite pastry?

Answer: Cinnamon covered doughnuts. So good~

34. Tell us about the stuffed animal you kept as a child.

Answer: I had/have 3. A lamb, and 2 teddy bears. I don’t remember what happened to the lamb. I know it’s in the house somewhere, I just don’t know where. But as for the teddy’s: One is a standard-size teddy bear named *drumroll* Teddy. I was adopted when I was 4 days old, and Teddy is the only thing that I have from my birth mother. The second one is larger, kinda like the size of a carnaval prize. He was given to my by my Uncle Desmond “Dezzy” Caine (I really miss Uncle Dezzy), so he’s named the Dezzy Bear. I still sleep with both and I’ll be 25 in like 9 days. Dezzy still props up my pillows.

35. Do you like stationary and pretty pens?

Answer: Meh, they’re not so bad. I have really bad handwriting so I’m kinda divided 50/50

36. Which band’s sound would suit your mood right now?

Answer: Nightwish. Oh their lead singer’s voice is beautiful~

37. Do you like keeping your room messy or clean?

Answer: Messy, definately messy. Sure it looks disorganized, but I know where everything is in the mess.

38 Talk about your pet peeves.

Answer: No, it’s too late at night for that shit.

39. What color do you wear the most?

Answer: White. Undershirts mostly. I would wear more purple, but there is a distinct lack of purple in my wardrobe, and not a lot of purple clothing in the stores I shop at (mostly Hot Topic) that fit/I would wear.

40.Think of a piece of jewelry you own. What’s it’s story? Does it have any meaning to you?

Answer: Ummmm admittedly, I have a lot of jewelry pieces. Mostly necklaces that I rarely wear. My favorite by far, is a pewter dragon with it’s body wrapped around a blue crystal. I bought it at the county fair a few years back, and it was the last one that was ever sold from that vendor, because I havent seen his stall in the past few years.

41. What is the last book you really, really remember loving?

Answer: Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge. It’s a new book in the Monster Hunter series by Larry Correia.

42. Do you have a favorite coffee shop?

Answer: No, I don’t like coffee ever since I made the mistake of drinking the swill on an empty stomach.

43. Who was the last person you gazed at the stars with?

Answer: My friend Neil, and that was years ago when we decided to head up to a local haunted area.

44.When was the last time you remember feeling completely serene and at peace with everything?

Answer: This morning in the shower :3

45. Do you trust your instincts a lot?

Answer: Yes. Going back to when Neil and I were up at the rock crusher, and I heard that voice in my ear. Something told me: “Neil is your brother, get his ass out of there!” I grabbed him, and ran for it.

46. Tell us of the worst pun you can think of.

Answer: Is this some sort of pun-ishment? Well I guess you can call me the Pun-isher (hate myself).

47. What food do you think should be banned from the universe?

Answer: …shit I had something for this, and now I can’t remember…

48. What was your biggest fear as a kid? Is it the same today?

Answer: I was afraid of the dark as a kid (mostly due to my brother being an ass), and that fear carried through. I still have to sleep with a light on.

49. Do you like buying CDs and records? What was the last one you bought?

Answer: I haven’t bought a CD or a record since I had my first iPod. The last one I bought was Disturbed’s Indestructible album.

50. What is an odd thing you collect?

Answer: I answered this one before, but I’ll do it again. I collect and assemble Gundam models. I have 8 currently. And I have yet to finish/start the assembly on the last 3.

51. Think of a person, what song do you affiliate with them?

Answer: I think The Animal by Disturbed would suit Neil just fine.

52. What are your favorite memes of the year so far?

Answer: *skips*

53. Have you ever watched the rocky horror picture show? Beetlejuice ect. What do you think of them?

Answer: Nope.

54. Who is the last person you saw with a genuine look of sadness on their face?

Answer: That would be my cousin who had to recently put her elderly golden retriever to sleep. Something like that is never easy, and I know how bad the pain of losing a pet you have had for years feels.

55. What is the most dramatic thing you have done to prove a point?

Answer: Ummm that’ll be the time when *skips*

56. What are some things you find endearing in people?

Answer: When I find something, I’ll let you know.

57. Go listen to bohemian rhapsody. did you reenact the lyrics?

Answer: Um whoever doesn’t needs to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

58. Who is the wine mom, and who is the vodka aunt in your group of friends?

Answer: Me on both occasions.

59. What are some of your favorite myths?

Answer: Mostly the ones involving the 80′s horror movie villians.

60. Do you like poetry?

Answer: Meh.

61. What is the stupidest gift you have ever given/received?

Answer: I gave my mom trick candles to use on my brothers cake a few years ago … And they found their way on to MY cake. Does that count?

62. Do you drink juice in the morning?

Answer: Very rarely, and when I do it’s cranberry.

63. Are you fussy about your books and music? Do you keep them organized or leave them be?

Answer: I leave them be. It goes back to the question of how I like to keep my room.

64. What color is the sky where you are right now?

Answer: It’s steely grey. It’s in the transition of seasons. Winter to Spring.

65. Is there anyone you haven’t seen in a long time that you’d love to hang out with?

Answer: Yeah, my friend Neil.

66. What would your ideal flower crown look like?

Answer: *skips*

67. How do gloomy days make you feel?

Answer: Yep skipping that one too. *skips*

68. What is winter like where you live?

Answer: Hoth

69. What are your favorite board games?

Answer: Risk … and I cannot think of any other ones of the top of my head.

70. Have you ever used a ouji board?

Answer: Fuck no! I am not stupid enough to do that! Especially after what happened after the rock crusher.

71. What is your favorite kind of tea?

Answer: I don’t drink tea.

72. Are you a person who needs to note down everything you need to do or else you’ll forget it?

Answer: Only when I am at work, and even then I rarely note things down.

73. What are some of your worst habits?

Answer: *skips*

74. Describe a good friend of yours without using their names or gendered pronouns.

Answer: Hmmmm… Long and lanky, unkempt and scraggly hair and beard. Quick wit, sharp tongue, but with a big heart.

75. Tell us about your pets!

Answer: I had two white Siberian Huskies. Tundra and her brother Topaz were born on the same day I was, and we had 18 great years together.

76. Is there anything you should be doing right now but aren’t?

Answer: Nope.

77. Pink or yellow lemonade?

Answer: Why not both?

78. Are in the minion fanclub or hateclub?

Answer: I’m in the “I don’t give a fuck” club.

79. What is one of the cutest things anyone has ever done for you?

Answer: They wouldn’t want me telling that story.

80. What color are your bedroom walls? Did you chose that color? If so why?

Answer: They’re white, but if I could paint them, they’d be purple.

81. Describe on of your friend’s eyes using the most abstract imagery you can think of.

Answer: *skips*

82. Are/were you good in school?

Answer: I was decent. Not good, not bad, but decent.

83.what is some of your favorite album art?

Answer: I care more about the songs rather than the artwork.

84. Are you planning on getting any tattoos?

Answer: Yes, I’m planning on getting either the enochian sigil from Supernatural, or a full back tattoo of a set of angel wings with the words: “Angels on our shoulders” above them.

85. Do you read comics?

Answer: Not really

86. Do you like concept albums?

Answer: The hell are those?

87. What are some movies you think everyone should watch at least once in their lives?

Answer: All the James Bond movies, Star Wars including the prequils, and the 3 original Indiana Jones movies.

88. Are there any artistic movements you enjoy?

Answer: The only one I can think of (and I’m not sure it even counts) is the Renaissance

89. Are you close with your parents?

Answer: Yes very close, although they drive me crazy at times I still love them.

90. Talk about one of your favorite cities.

Answer: *skips*

91. Where do you plan on traveling this year?

Answer: Well my group is planning on heading to Washington DC for Ota-con this year.

92. Are you a person who drowns their pasta in cheese? Or do you barely sprinkle a pinch?

Answer: The cheese. Give me all the cheese!

93. What is the hairstyle you wear the most?

Answer: Short and very unkempt.

94. Who was the last person you know to have a birthday?

Answer: My girlfriend. :3

95. What are your plans for this weekend?

Answer: The same thing I do every night. Try to take over the world.

96. Do you install your computer updates quickly? or do you take forever?

Answer: Yes. :3

97. Myer briggs type, zodiac sign, and Hoggwarts house.

Answer: What the hell is the first one? But I’m an Ares, and a Gryffindor.

98. When was the last time you went hiking? And did you enjoy it?

Answer: it was years ago, and no I hate nature.

99. List some songs that resonate with your soul every time you hear them.

Answer: I have 220+ songs on my iPod that attest to that very question.

100. If you were presented with two buttons, one that allows you to go 5 years into the past, and one that allows you to go 5 years into the future, which would you press and why?

Answer: I’d go into the future. Past is past and that’s where it belongs. Plus when I go back to when I pressed said button, I would have an advantage over everyone else *evil smile*

#theangstygrad25 #asks #ask promp #holy shit that took forever #and that is the last time I ever do a 1-100 answer prompt again

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fine-feathered-fiend · 6 years ago

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Oh I bet, I’ve set up exactly zero tools in my life, so I have no idea what’s headed my way ;_; Although I do have a good amount of practice in modularized programming, so I’m comfortable passing variables in and out of things and at least trying to be efficient about shit. I think the most complicated thing I made was a random bingo number generator? (EDIT: I meant lotto number generator omg, although I did want to write a program that would randomly generate a bingo card for you, but I forgot I was trying that until literally this exact moment so... oops?)(In my defense, I coded it so there was a powerball, none of the numbers were repeats, and so they were sorted lowest to highest. Also I had a “run again? Y/N” option, which I know is easy af but for someone who was still figuring out while loops this made me wanna die. Anyway I’m sure all of this sounds obvious I’m sure but this was my first semester of real coding so I was v proud of myself lol)

I don’t usually tell people my HTML origin story because it’s embarrassing af, but what actually happened was that I was super into this online cat showing/breeding website (it’s called Pure Felinity and it dominated my life for a good bit lol) but unfortunately you had to be 13 to be allowed on the website... and I was 11. I managed to hide it for some time until my 11yo dumbass let it slip and obviously got booted. I was so fuckin mad that I started learning HTML out of spite so I could “make my own version of the website”, which I obviously never did, but apparently I did learn all of HTML because when I went back to learn it at 13... I already knew it? So that was something...

That’s so cool that you code for a job!!! How long have you been doing it, and what stuff specifically do you work on? I have sooo much respect for people who actually know wtf they’re doing with coding. So much background knowledge goes into even just the process of learning how to think about programming (holla at Intro to Algorithm Design!) and while you obvious get better as you go along idk if it ever truly stops being a difficult subject. It’s so similar to a human language, but it lacks all of the subtleties and syntactical nuances of human language and is just a tad too logically oriented to be naturally and intuitively understood as a human language. (Guess who’s probably getting a minor in Linguistics lol) I know literally just enough to kiiinda understand the process of coding, but that’s pretty much it. Not to talk myself up or anything but I actually ended up taking to it pretty quickly (something about not giving a fuck and finding alternative solutions really helps with coding) but that’s not even remotely helpful when you only know 5% of the concept 😅 So any help is very much appreciated, but again, please don’t feel pressured. I have no idea if what I’m asking/aiming for is realistic or not (not that that’s ever stopped me) so at this point I’m just kidnapping any willing programmer who knows more than I do (which, frankly, is almost all of them.)

Yes that’s the one!!! Apparently they updated it super frickin recently which is awesome, but it actually doesn’t run as is (or at least it hasn’t for me.) Honest to god I am literally walking into this shit blind, like I have zero (and I mean zero) PHP experience and don’t even know how the language really works, so I would absolutely frickin love some help!! (If it’s not too much trouble, of course.)

Ah yes, I did notice that problem (that Tumblr hasn’t really provided any info on calling instant chat messages), so it’s good to have that confirmed. Again, I know fuckall about coding in relation to preexisting websites, so I had it at a 50/50 shot that they either didn’t provide the info or that I was too dumb to find it lol. I do have Firefox and that weird ass “inspect element” tool (the uncle I mentioned— the programmer— downloaded all that shit for me off a strong recommendation, but I’ve never had a real reason to check it out and admittedly do not know how to actually use it other than clicking aimlessly, which did actually give me a decent amount of info so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) but that just showed me that Tumblr is made up of about sixty thousand <div> subsections, which is to be expected ofc but also endlessly tedious to take apart.

I can definitely see that drJeckyll had pretty much negative zero intentions for anyone to use their code: there was no internal documentation (BAD CODING PROCEDURE DRJECKYLL!!! EVEN IF ITS JUST FOR YOU YOURE SUPPOSED TO USE INTERNAL DOCUMENTATION COME ON MAN EVEN I KNOW THAT), the whole thing runs via Command Prompt (so I downloaded and configured Apache to PHP for nothing I guess that’s FINE), and the process of inputting login info is a little shady for an externally created program (it took me some heavy inspection before I determined that there was pretty much zero way this guy could get my login info from me trying the code. Also I determined that it’s only my tumblr account, so ultimately I do not care.) So carefully line tracing and this person’s code in the assumption that it actually does run, and then recreating my/our own version that is actually understandable really does seem like the most clear cut option.

I’ll definitely keep chipping away at the page! If you don’t mind me asking, how do I know what to look for? I definitely saw that the program is simulating a user logging in and finding the chat pages themselves, but considering how Tumblr is completely inaccessible without an account/login I don’t see a way around that (although there’s plenty of ways to modularize that process so the user doesn’t have to be dragged along through the whole process and/or run the whole thing again.) As of right now, I’ve only been able to find the code for whatever page is open at the moment (like it’ll show me the specific code for the exact blog post at the top of my dash, and so on and so forth) which is explicitly not helpful, but I don’t think they could completely hide the coding for the instant chat messages, right?

Ideally, I would like to make this into an “app” of some sorts (not a phone app but like a website that other people can input their data to and use? I don’t know what things are called) so that way anyone can just pull it up and find their chat logs and download them. There’s a lot of shit I don’t know about this process, but between the couple algorithm design textbooks I have, W3Schools’ info on PHP7, and painstaking trial and error, I’m fairly certain that this is all very very possible. Difficult? Yeah, definitely. But honest to god the only real problem I’m seeing is finding the fuckin chat elements I need to access. Everything past that is absolutely doable.

Also if you’re wondering the real reason I initially got interested in this: I’ve had this idea for a mid to full length fic for a couple years now and recently decided that I’m finally ready to write it. I distinctly remember ranting extensively about the whole ass idea (like to the point that everything is planned out) to a couple different people, only when I went into my GoogleDocs to find my notes... they weren’t there. And thus it tragically occurred to me that I must’ve only planned this stupid fic in my chat messages (like an idiot) and now all of that precious highly detailed info is stuck in there. So the info exists, but it’s trapped somewhere up in Tumblr’s pitifully buggy chat logs that take a billion years to load and freeze/crash dramatically if you go back too far. Which is a goddamn shame, because I’m fairly certain that the info is stuck in one of several chat logs to one of a few friends that I’ve been very actively messaging for roughly three years. So yeah no I decided: “hey let’s just download this shit, someone has to have come up with something that lets you do that by now, right??” And then I found drJeckyll’s program and thought “perfect!!” And then I tried to run it and it didn’t work and I thought “okay no big deal, I just have to find and fix the error.” And then I realized (after hours of attempted debugging) that it’d likely just be easier to rewrite the whole thing.

So now I guess I’m just making the fucking program myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, as always, sorry for the giant ass rant, but I appreciate the info!! I did not know what APIs were (yeah, I’m that screwed) so that’ll be very helpful. Unfortunately/fortunately, summer classes start for me today (I’m taking General Chemistry from 5:00pm-9:35pm on M-Th for the next eight weeks. I stg I’m gonna be so fuckin good at chemistry once this summer is over 😭; English starts in a couple weeks and is an online class and honestly I will worry about that when I get to it (which is what I said about Chemistry and now it starts today and I haven’t thought about it for more than 30 seconds at a time, so idk maybe I should start worrying about it slightly sooner than when I get there??)) which means that I’ll be slightly busy, but also that I’ll be more productive. So I’ll actually probably work on this a good amount.

A n y w a y. Thank you as always!!! Your comments/reblogs/messages are always so kind and very much appreciated :) I was very happy to see that you were still active on Tumblr when I finally came back after a year off this site.

i stg it is somehow more frustrating trying to figure out the code for something when you know a little bit of coding vs knowing absolutely no coding. i’m gonna throw myself out a window djkasdjaksdjfk

#im so oddly determined to complete this that it might ACTUALLY get done??#the project is pretty on brand for me though:#(1) difficult; (2) something i’m not completely qualified for; (3) literally no one asked for it; (4) i am not required to do this #and (5) i face literally zero consequences if i DON’T do it #sounds like a Lauren Special™️! 😵#actually though a couple of my friends have expressed interest in being able to download their chat logs #and im sure that interest would extend to most tumblr users who chat heavily #humans are inherently curious lol #also when i discovered that you can search your WhatsApp messages via key word i literally lost HOURS down that bunny trail #so if i could do so with tumblr i would probably literally die of a combination of happiness and information overload #(which is honest to god THE WAY i want to go)#anyway enjoy this tag rant lol #lauren attempts coding #heavy emphasis on the word ‘’attempts’’#fuck though im glad i bitched about this on tumblr lol

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dragonfly756 · 4 years ago

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Tagged by the lovely @the-golden-ghost!

Why did you choose your URL? I used to play this old online game that I've forgotten the name of, and this was the randomly generated dragon related username! I've stuck with it ever since, though it does seem.... Nondescript by Tumblr standards. (I've been thinking of changing it, just not sure to WHAT yet.)

Any side-blogs? If you have them, name them and why you have them. Not really, I do have a private blog for testing out a theme I'm trying to make. My HTML is super rusty and I didn't want to turn my main blog into some graphic-design-is-my-passion experiment. Yet.

How long have you been on tumblr? I'm genuinely not sure at this point, probably 2015?

Do you have a queue tag? No way, I don't even have a queue!

Why did you start your blog in the first place? Maybe this isn't the Good Tumblr User thing to say, but I just genuinely like the vibe of this place, as someone who worries about annoying people if I talk about my interests too much, it's nice to know that people can either A: Block me if it gets on their nerves, or B: Have the same interests and not block me!

Why did you choose your icon/pfp? I like jellyfish :D

Why did you choose your header? I don't have a header right now, it's to symbolize my lack of a head, and sometimes brain.

What’s your post with the most notes? The "No middle sliders in Monster Factory" one, I'm not very involved in larger fandoms so it was an honor to see it take off so much, I whipped out MS paint for it and everything.

How many followers do you have? 54!

How many blogs do you follow? 94, I could've sworn I followed more people

Have you ever made a shitpost? Other than meta posts that's basically all my *original content* dude.

How often do you use Tumblr every day? Hard to say, if I'm in front of a computer I usually have it open, but I'm usually doing other stuff and only check it occasionally. A bit like a morning paper that you carry around all day that also has people in it!

Did you have a fight/argument with a blog once? Nah, I'm too boring for that, which is good, because I'm also conflict-averse and extremely petty.

How do you feel about “you need to reblog this post”? I understand why people reblog them, but I often feel posts like that don't have A: Concrete ways to help with a situation. (Donation links, actions you can take.) B: News/Perspectives that you can't find elsewhere.

Bottom Line, I don't want to reblog something just to make myself feel like a good person, especially since it often comes at the expense of talking over those effected. Plus I think my followers are smart people and can read the news without being guilt-tripped.

Do you like tag games? I do! It's nice to see a friend thinking of you. I've forgotten one about my favorite fictional characters by accident and now it's been a year and it would be weird to fill it out now, though, (Sorry guys! it wasn't meant as a snub!)

Do you like ask games? I haven't done any before, it might be fun though!

Which of your mutuals do you think is Tumblr famous? I'm not sure, maybe secretly all of them?

Do you have a crush on a mutual? Fun answer: "A Lady never kisses and tells, Gordon."

Realistic answer: I'm not of a strictly romantic persuasion, so no exciting secrets on that front, sorry!

Tagging: @oceans-foundfamily @theinconspicuouscaterpillar @korzoff and anyone else who’d like to try!

#tag games #long post #feel free to disregard if you wouldn't like to as well!

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colorfulsuitdestiny-blog · 7 years ago

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How good is USAA auto insurance?

"How good is USAA auto insurance?

I heard about a company called USAA for auto insurance yesterday. I think it's a website for military officers, and ex-officers or enlisted people. My dad was in the Air Force and I think that qualifies, but I dont know how good this company is or how well they deal with claims. Please tell me about your experiences with them.

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://freecarinsurance.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr