#we've got one piece of living evidence

[brooklynisher]

Hi do you like have a source for your half claim that P.A. walter the VI Was confirmed ND because if you do I'd be so greatful

If not that's alright too

My headcannons are strong enough haha

Have a nice day :>

My source is blind faith (comment section)

Spent 3 hours hunting for proof and found NOTHING

If I had to guess, Isabella might've said something about this on one of her personal streams. I'm not subscribed to her and she streams on Twitch so I don't have access to her VODS. Even if I somehow managed to archive her streams, I doubt any are solely focused on Peter being ND, so it would require a lot of time and patience.

The other possibility is that the user misinterpreted information Bunny has publicly shared, but I don't really like that possibility so I'm just gonna pretend it doesn't exist

[sunvmars]

tart | s.r. [3]

pairing: steve rogers x afab/fem reader

↞ previous | next ↠

word count: 2.4k

warnings: very, very brief smut mention !

summary: steve confesses, bucky offers his help

a/n: another short but fast moving chapter for now, the next few will be much longer and explain/fill any plot holes or missing pieces :) I hardly proof read this so be warned

Bucky's eyebrow cocks up in confusion as he recalls the mission, "Yeah, what about it?"

Steve takes another deep breath, preparing himself to release the secret he's been keeping, "I found something during that mission."

Bucky narrows his eyes, his curiosity piqued as he leans forward. "Okay, spill it."

Steve leans forward too and rests his elbows on his knees. He knew that saying something was a risk, but keeping it a secret under the new circumstances was riskier. Steve's gaze fixates on the floor as he speaks.

"During that mission, when I was extracting the files we needed, I stumbled upon some classified files. They had information about a hidden experiment conducted years ago called 'Genesis,'" he explains.

Bucky leans forward, his curiosity getting the best of him, "What's that got to do with all of this?"

"It's got everything to do with it," Steve replies, "Genesis was made to create super soldiers and people with enhanced mental abilities like telekinesis, telepathy, everything in between. Their ultimate goal was to fuse DNA from both groups to create a new 'breed' of enhanced individuals."

"Steve, are you saying y/n is connected to this?"

"More than just connected, Buck," Steve admits. "Her father was one of their strongest super soldiers and her mother was an agent. Her mother was also the only successful recipient of the mental ability serum they curated. From what I read, her parents had a secret relationship. They disappeared when her mother became pregnant; likely to save her from whatever fate Hydra had for her."

A sigh leaves Steve's lips before he continues, "Essentially, y/n is the only living evidence that they existed- that this experiment existed."

Steve feels nothing short of horrible and shitty for keeping this from you. He wishes he hadn't done it, but now it was too late to take it back. All he could do now was fix it. And he will fix it.

Bucky's eyes widen as he starts to connect the pieces together. "Let me make sure I'm getting this right here... You're saying she's the only child of a super-soldier and a Hydra agent with mind blowing abilities, both of whom nobody has any knowledge of? And now she's carrying a baby who's a cesspool of these abilities?"

"Yes, but that's not all of it. I hired people to do some digging after that mission. Turns out that the man who conducted those experiments, the one who created her father, he's been searching for her parents ever since. I've had people looking for him, but he's been evading police for years too, changing locations frequently."

Bucky leans back and rubs a hand over his face. "And you think he's aware of her existence?"

"At first, I don't think he did. She had hardly any social media presence, she was homeschooled, her birthname had no relation to her parents. But now I know he knows she's alive. I got a pretty straightforward letter from him two days ago, and I'm not even sure how he found out she was with me. Figured that means he also knows that we've been following him."

"How do you know it was him? What did it say?"

"I know it was him because all it said was, 'I know who she is.'"

"Well, that's definitely straightforward," Bucky huffs, his heart feeling heavy with worry, "Is that why you told her you didn't want the baby?"

"I...I want her and that baby more than anything, but I can't put them in danger. He'll come for me first to get to her. He's probably been trying to find her for years. I'm afraid he's going to start taking more drastic measures if we don't find him soon."

Bucky tries to take in all the information thrown at him, but only finds himself able to focus on the part about you being in danger. "What does he know about her?"

"I don't know, and that's what scares me. I thought that if I got her away from me then he wouldn't have suspected she was ever here, but I guess I was wrong," Steve admits, guilt laced in his tone, "He wants her, Buck, and now he's gonna want our baby too."

"We'll figure something out, Steve. Don't worry." Bucky raises his eyebrows, still confused at what Steve's plan was. "How does her being alone protect her? What if he's already figured out where she is?"

"I wouldn't call it alone, she's just not with me. She's safe at the tower and I've been pulling strings to protect her."

"What kind of strings, Steve? Please don't tell me you've done something stupid."

"Haven't had to yet, just small stuff."

"Like?" Bucky urges, not taking the vague response.

"I stopped assigning her to missions. When I had to throw off suspicion, I made sure she would be with you or Tony. I've got people I trust watching over her when she leaves home alone too."

"That's a little creepy, Steve." Bucky chuckles briefly, shaking his head.

"I was doing everything possible to keep her from leaving a trace that he can pick up on. That's why she's not here and I'm in her chair, drinking this disgusting cocktail in this empty, lonely apartment."

The two of them sit in silence temporarily before Steve speaks again. "I even took down all our pictures and got rid of any trace of her in case he ever suspected me, just couldn't find it in myself to take those two pictures down," he says as he points at the only two remaining frames on the wall.

Bucky's eyes follow where he points and he finds himself smiling at the pictures. Steve smiles too, but because it's all he's got left of you at the moment even though everything in the house had you intertwined with it. Regret fills the holes in his heart and his eyes linger on the pictures for a little too long.

The photo taken at the beach with all three of you? You were in his favorite bikini and, unbeknownst to anyone else, he later fucked you in it in the kitchen while everyone else was outside swimming. Your first date photo? Well, that one's self explanatory. It was sentimental and he wasn't sure he'd ever take that one down, even if you decided you hated him forever.

"But I guess it was all this pain for nothing, huh?" Steve says, smiling weakly.

"You did what you could, just wish you would've came to me. You know I'm here for you and her."

Steve doesn't find it in himself to respond. Bucky was right, he shouldn't of tried to handle this by himself. Guilt pools in his stomach threatening to make him nauseous.

"Were you ever gonna tell her? She should know, Steve, this is her past we're talking about here. If she knows then she'll be prepared for whatever comes our way."

Steve taps his foot, his nerves slowly overwhelming him. "That's the woman I know and love, Bucky, and I know she'll go digging for answers. I can't let her get hurt, especially not now," he says.

Bucky knows there's some truth to this because he knows you almost as well as Steve does- you're relentless when something's important to you. However, he also knows that you deserve the truth- that's part of the whole reason he came to talk to Steve in the first place.

"You need to tell her," Bucky responds, his tone almost demanding. "I've been watching her hurt for the last few months over something that isn't even her fault."

"I know, and I'm gonna tell her..."

"It sounds like there's a 'but' coming after that, and I really don't wanna hear-"

"But I'm going to find him first."

For a moment he thinks to himself 'he can't be serious, can he?' Then he looks at his friend who has determination written all over his face. He sees a glimpse of that scrawny, nervous kid Steve used to be for a second, and that's what worries him; that's how he knows he won't stop until he finds this guy.

"I'll do whatever it takes to keep them safe. I'll take down all of Hydra if I have to, I'm not letting them get close to her."

"You don't even know where this guy is, Steve. As your best friend, I can't let you take a chance on getting hurt when you do find him. No matter how shitty you've been, she still loves you a lot. She needs you, and so will that baby."

"Buck, this is something I have to do-"

"Then I'll do it for you," Bucky interrupts, the words leaving his mouth before he gets the chance to second guess them. "Give me what you have on him and I'll handle it."

Steve is dumbfounded. He's got the same 'he can't be serious' look that Bucky had mere seconds ago.

"Absolutely not. With your history with them, that's not a risk I can let you take."

Bucky smiles sympathetically. "But I don't have a family like you will. Don't get me wrong, you and y/n are my family, but you've got a baby on the way, punk. I've got nothing to lose here, it's not up for debate."

Steve frowns at this. He looks torn, his emotions at war within him. On one hand, he wants to protect you and his baby at all costs. On the other hand, he can't bear to lose his best friend again.

"Bucky, you're like a brother to me; I don't think I can put you in harm's way and ask you to do this," Steve says, his voice filled with desperation, "But I can't risk y/n and the baby's safety either."

Bucky's expression softens as he places a reassuring hand on Steve's shoulder. "You're gonna be a father soon, Rogers. You need to be there for them. Just let me handle this, they can't get to me anymore. I've got more ties to Hydra than anyone, I can probably pull some strings of my own."

Steve sighs upon realizing that Bucky's decision is unshakable. "You promise me you'll be careful. You'll keep me updated on everything and if anything seems off, I want you to retreat immediately."

He laughs before saying, "You're gonna be a damn good dad, you know?"

Steve narrows his eyes at him. "I'm serious, Buck."

"Alright, alright. I promise, and I'll keep you updated, okay?" Bucky agrees, throwing his hands up in the air to show his compliance.

Steve then reaches for his phone and begins to compile all the information he's gathered about Zepher Hawthorne. He anonymously sends the files to Bucky who immediately starts to study them closely. Bucky glances up to give Steve a reassuring smile.

"I'll be as careful as they come, Steve. Don't worry about me."

With their roles now clearly defined, they continue to discuss their plan in detail. They agree on secure communication channels, establish a backup line for communication, and set up a timeline for Bucky's investigation into Hawthorne. It's a risky endeavor, and they know that, but they're both determined to protect you and the unborn child.

As Bucky prepares to leave, Steve can't help but feel a renewed sense of hope that he'd lost when you told him about the baby. He knows he has a difficult conversation ahead with you, but he's also more motivated than ever to show you his dedication to protecting your little family.

Right as Bucky's about to leave, he turns around to look at Steve. "I'll put it some vacation days and let you know once I have a lead; in the meantime, go talk to her. If you don't wanna tell her the full story until I find him, then you at least need to tell her that you want her and the baby. Sound good?"

"Works for me," Steve chuckles lightly before giving Bucky a tight hug. "See you around?"

"I always come back," Bucky jokes as the door shuts behind him.

With that, Bucky leaves to prepare. Steve, however, takes a deep breath and picks up his keys. He knows it's time to open up to you about everything that's been hidden for far too long. He stands in the empty apartment motionless for a moment, the weight of the impending conversation heavy on him. It's not that he doesn't want you to know, but he doesn't want you to worry. After taking a deep breath he leaves the apartment and locks the door behind him.

As he heads towards the apartment elevator, his mind races with thoughts of how to approach you. He knows this won't be easy, and he's prepared to take all your anger and confusion because he knows he deserves it. Yet he's also determined to help you understand that at first he did everything he did to keep you safe; now he's doing what he has to in order to keep his family safe.

You're in the Avengers Tower sleeping comfortably your warm bed. You're peacefully unaware of the bombshell revelation that has just been dropped, but it won't stay that way for much longer. As Steve walks through the hallways he finally reaches your room.

He hesitates briefly before knocking gently on the door. It's quiet in your room so he waits for a moment, but then...nothing. His worry grows and horrible thoughts swarm in his brain. He knocks again, a bit more urgently this time.

On the other side of the door, you slowly begin to stir. The knocking finally registers in your drowsy mind, and you groggily call out, "Who is it?"

"It's Steve," he answers, his voice riddled with worry.

His voice has you awake instantly, but your heart races at the seriousness in his tone. You slide out of bed and hurriedly make your way to the door. Your fingers fumble with the lock at first but you find it within seconds. The door opens to reveal Steve standing there, his expression tense.

"Steve?" you ask, worry etching into your features as you take in the look on his face, "Why are you here? Are you okay?"

He steps into your room and turns on the dim light before closing the door behind him. He sighs deeply, rubbing his hands together.

"We need to talk," he insists. "There's something I should've told you a long time ago."

taglist!

@oh-thats-cute @vicmc624 @blackhawkfanatic @tooruen

@athenabarnes @gh0stgurl @missing-loki @elizacusi-blog

@terry2227 @imyourbratzdoll @starksbabie @diannana

@flowers-and-fichte @ozwriterchick @kandis-mom @nouk1998

think I managed to add everyone, but if I forgot your tag, or you want to be added to or removed from the tag list for this series, leave a comment or message me :)

[jadedbirch]

In response to this post about War of Faith

@isilaie said

Finally someone expresses what I was thinking 🙄 I've got a huge problem with propaganda (from any side) and despite the superb directing and acting this one is so blatant that in another context (or country) it almost could be considered as parody. I love Yibo to pieces but ...I think it started with "faith makes great" that there is a kind of red thread (pun intended) in his choice of roles. His success proves him right of course but ...😔🤷‍♀️

I really wanted to address your comment @isilaie because I think it's important we are all aware of the things that are going on "under the surface" so to speak when we engage with this kind of content. Again, speaking as someone who used to live under a totalitarian communist regime, I'm very aware that whatever "choices" and "freedoms" that people like Yibo enjoy are completely illusory. Especially if we assume from the preponderance of evidence that he's queer - and therefore have to assume that whatever lifestyle he may enjoy is sanctioned by the government - then these choices are even more impacted. We've all seen how quickly c-ent can make someone's career disappear (i.e. Zhang Zhehan) and how quickly the CCP can make PEOPLE disappear (i.e. Fan Bingbing) for not toeing the party line or not sending the right message. The more high profile you are (like Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo), the more scrutinized you are for all your "choices." Plus, we also know that these days you can't get anything past the sensors w/o a healthy dose of Patriotism, and at the end of the day, the project that Yibo might sign up for can end up being something else entirely by the time it hits the screen.

So, the only thing I'm going to judge my beloved son on is making career moves that allow him to grow and develop as an artist - and War of Faith definitely gave him the opportunity to once again stretch his acting chops. And I think his success is due to his radiant talent that turns anything he touches into gold, and not so much due to his "patriotic" project choices, but shit, I'm only slightly biased because I gave birth to him LMAO.

As for War of Faith laying it on so thick that it's almost a parody - you're correct - and I actually said to a friend last night that it's ironic that as I watch the show, the Big Communist Heroes actually come off as fanatical terrorists to me. Hmmmm. Interesting.

(On a funnier note, people have pointed out how incredibly GAY this Comrade Drama is for such blatant propaganda, and that perhaps you needed a heavy dose of one to slip in the other. If that's the case even the tiniest bit, then kudos to Yibo for making another secret BL drama right in front of everyone's salad.)

[r-is-typing]

hi there! welcome back to tumblr!

could I please request a spencer reid x reader where the reader is the newest member of the bau but gets kidnapped on a case? thank you!

p.s. extra points if the reader loves puzzles and books!

decipher | s.r

summary: in which the newest member of the bau gets taken request: hi there! welcome back to tumblr! could I please request a spencer reid x reader where the reader is the newest member of the bau but gets kidnapped on a case? thank you! p.s. extra points if the reader loves puzzles and books! pairing: spencer reid x fem!reader category: angst with a happy ending content warnings: mentions of violence, kidnapping, really anything mentioned in criminal minds word count: 1.6k+ send in your requests here!

Y/N groaned, walking into the small room that the BAU was using in Delaware's local police station while they were there for a case. "What's wrong, pretty girl?" Derek raised a curious brow.

Y/N looked at the evidence board. "I just don't see what we're missing! It's been four days now, and we're no closer than when we got here to solving this."

Spencer looked up from his reading. "I've been reading for a while and can't decipher these puzzles." The tall man stood up, walking to a board they had with various puzzles tacked onto it. The Unsub had left pieces of paper at every crime scene with different variations of codes that seemed like coordinates of some kind. "43 11 51 15 44 23 15 32" "31 15 44 43 35 31 11 54" "23 15 31 35 32 15" Y/N stared intensely at the numbers, trying to get anything to tell her what they meant. "Okay, maybe we need to go over the profile again. What's the deal with this guy?" JJ started to speak. "Well, the guy's a narcissist first, but.. he could be devolving. He was skilled the first few kills, but this last one... we found mistakes, he slipped up. So, does that mean his clues will too?" Spencer stood next to Y/N. "It very well could, but until we figure out the code..." Hotch finished his sentence. "There's nothing we can do. The best thing to do right now is go back to the hotel and rest, we can come back tomorrow with fresh minds. That's an order." Y/N told the team she'd catch up, she was just going to go to the restroom, so they left and headed to the hotel. She watched them leave and as soon as they left her eye sight, she ran back into the boardroom. She needed to figure out this code. People's lives depended on it. Y/N began looking everywhere online possible to lead her to what kind of code this was. "Agent L/N?" An officer stuck their head into the room, making Y/N look up. "We've just received another note... There seems to have been one we missed in our initial sweep." Y/N jumped up quick taking the note from the officer. "Thank you."

Y/N opened the note and was met with something she wasn't expecting. Another code but at the bottom, it said "Tap tap tap". Y/N widened her eyes. Why didn't she think of tap code? It was brilliant. Y/N spent the next fifteen minutes solving each of the puzzles she got. She went to the board writing next to each decipher.

"43 11 51 15 44 23 15 32" -> "save them" "31 15 44 43 35 31 11 54" -> "let's play" "23 15 31 35 32 15" -> "help me" and then the newest cipher:

"11 12 11 33 14 34 33 15 14 23 34 45 43 15 31 24 12 42 11 42 54" -> "abandoned house library" Y/N gasped, running out of the police station and hopping into the vehicle the team left for her, heading to this abandoned house that they had thought they cleared the day before. "I knew it.." Y/N mumbled to herself, pulling in front of the house. Y/N quickly ran into the house, gun pointing in front of her. She swung to the right, hearing a noise but ultimately nothing. "I just knew you'd fall for my trap. The last note was just for you, Agent. Those girls aren't here, but you however..." A voice from behind her spoke, hitting her over the head with a chunk of wood before she could turn and shoot him. Y/N fell to the floor, knocking unconscious . The Unsub smirked, picking her up over his shoulder and carrying her out to his truck, driving away quickly before anyone would be able to find them.

The next day, the team arrived to the station early. "Anyone hear from Y/N? I didn't see her at the hotel this morning." Emily asked, looking around. This made the team share a look of confusion. "Excuse me? What time did Agent L/N leave last night?" JJ asked one of the officers. "Well, shortly after I gave her a note that was delivered here, she ran out of here quicker than I could even see with my own eyes. I figured she was just sick or somethin'." The officer told the team. "Guys..." Spencer looked at the board with the ciphers, noting a new one pinned, along with their deciphers right next to them. "I think the Unsub knew Y/N was here alone and lured her.. She was able to figure out the cipher. It's tap code."

Hotch looked at Reid. "Who would be smart enough to understand tap code?" Reid scrambled to get his phone out of his pocket. "Garcia," He started as she picked up the phone. "Out of the list of possible suspects we had, cross match those with anyone who recently got out of prison." Typing could be heard on the other end of the phone. "Uh, there's two. Robert Smart and Henry David. Henry got out just two weeks ago, and Robert got out two days ago."

Hotch begins to speak, but was interrupted by Penelope. "Sending Henry's address and work now to your cells. Her majesty out." A click was heard and Penelope's voice was gone.

The team ran out of the station, half of the team splitting up. "Well, he wouldn't take her to his work..." Derek called Garcia again, asking about any abandoned buildings, or anything in that area that would be the perfect spot to keep someone.

"It seems like his parents had owned a storage unit but the storage company itself went bankrupt last year, so there's just a whole bunch of abandoned storage units. His..." Penelope pauses, typing more. "is number 378."

Derek does a quick u-turn, speeding towards the storage unit. "Why would she go off without us?" Spencer looked at Derek and then Rossi. "Kid, she probably wasn't expecting this. I mean, it seemed perfect that we had just talked about him devolving and then he gives a precise location." Rossi puts a comforting hand on Reid's shoulder, comforting him as much as he could.

The three jumped out of the SUV as they arrived at the abandoned area. Spencer rushed ahead of them, his gun held steady, in case of any surprises as they walked slowly.

367, 371, 375 Finally, they found Unit 378 and looked at each other, nodding before lifting the storage and finding Henry and Y/N. Henry held a gun to her head as she stared directly at the three men ahead of her. "You take one more step, and she's dead!" Henry screams. Spencer tensed. "You don't want to do that, Henry." He raised his hands, putting his gun back in his holster. "We know what your mom did to you, okay? You shouldn't have had to go through that."

Henry's eyes flashed with anger as he cried. "She left me! Abandoned me as if I was nothing!" Y/N kept eye contact with Spencer. "Henry, it's alright, we're going to get you help. Just put down the gun, okay?" Spencer slowly took a step, seeing Henry's guard starting to come down. "If you put the gun down, we can help you. We can tell the judge you cooperated with us." Y/N spoke, not breaking eye contact with Spencer who stared at Henry.

Henry's hand dropped the gun as he dropped to the ground and cried. Derek ran over, cuffing him. "Henry David, you're being arrested for the murder of three women, kidnapping, and the assault of an FBI agent. You have the right to remain silent-" Morgan's voice cut off as he walked out of the storage, Rossi in tow.

Spencer rushed over to Y/N, untying her and helping her to her feet. Y/N was quick to hug him as she cried. "I'm so sorry. I really thought.." Spencer shushed her, walking her out of the storage unit where JJ, Hotch, and Emily stood waiting for her. "You're okay!" JJ ran over and embraced the girl.

"Hotch, I-"

Hotch shook his head. "As much as what you did was careless, you were smart with your actions. If it wasn't for your smart thinking and logic, we wouldn't have been able to decipher the code."

Y/N nodded to Hotch, then looked up at Spencer. "I didn't mean to worry everyone.." The girl pouted. Spencer just rubbed her shoulder. "I know, but you're okay now, that's what matters."

Y/N looked up at him. "I knew you guys would come for me once you saw the cipher, but I honestly thought I was going to die in there... which got me thinking."

Spencer looked at her in confusion. "Do you wanna do something when we get back to Quantico?" Y/N asked, a tint of red painted across her face.

"Like a..?"

"Yes, genius. Like a date. I've got to repay my knight in shining blue vest somehow as a token of my appreciation for saving me."

Spencer nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets. "I'd, uh, I"d like that." Y/N smiled. "Perfect." She quickly walked to JJ and Emily after. Spencer looked over to Derek who had clearly witnessed the exchange, a large smirk sprawled across his face.

"Shut up." Spencer mumbled to him, shuffling past him quickly. He then stopped, realizing what she had said. "Knight in shining blue vest?"

r is typing... thank you so much for the request and the warm welcome back! i hoep you enjoy, i loved writing this! :) r is signing off...

[pianokantzart]

I am very hyped for BrotherShip, and you seem like someone who is also hyped. Please vent about everything we know so far, so I can live vicariously through your rant.

Uuuh jeeze where do I begin.

Love how hard they're going with the "brotherly bonds" angle. I don't think I've seen a game synopsis that focused this hard on the bond they have. Then there's fact that their physical touch seems to literally generate some sort of interdimensional power!?

How? Why? What's going on? I want to know. I want to know so bad. The world they get teleported to is called "Concordia," which means harmony/agreement. There's also the fact that the aesthetic theme of the game is centered around electricity, so maybe all powers revolve around flow/connection, which would be in line with introducing a mystical power generated by the brothers' emotional bond.

Speaking of electricity! I've seen these goons for five seconds and I am intrigued:

It looks like they're going to be reoccurring foes. And while the allies are plug/socket themed, these three enemies are wire/plug themed. The purple guy at the front has a stereo plug for his hair piece and a jack for his hand, and their hands are designed based off of fork spade wire connector.

So I'm going with a theory that the friendly residents are generators/guardians of a strong source of magical energy, while the Extension Corps and their affiliates are out to harness/steal that energy.

Then there's who I'm presuming to be the big bad in this game:

He was in the trailer for half a second, so I assume Nintendo is trying to keep him mysterious for now, but from the little I saw of his design two things stuck out to me: He's equipped with what looks to be a stylized pair of electrician pliers, and his hat has a green and red wire sticking out of the top.

So THAT doesn't bode well

Bowser's going to be there too, but I'm not yet sure if he's going to be a hesitant ally, a small-scale villain, or a final boss who takes advantage of the new villain's failures like in Mario & Luigi Dream Team. At this point it could be anything.

I DO like that Princess Peach is having more of an active role! In the past few Mario & Luigi games she's either been captured to move the plot forward (as is tradition), or has been quietly pulling strings from the sidelines to help out, but it'll be fun seeing her running around and exploring with her own group of misfits.

Also!!! The Luigi "L!"!

My main theory is that, every so often, Luigi is going to come up with a new mechanic depending on what we've encountered over the course of the story, and these new mechanics will be used to overcome obstacles and get into secret areas.

Then there's the central hub world!!! Of all the Mario RPGs I've played (two of them) that's usually my favorite aspect: having a main area where you can hoard all the random nonsense you've stumbled across and get a few extra perks. Looks like we're going to have that same thing here, and they aren't going slouch on the "exploration" angle of this game

I'll stop now, but I've got one last quick theory I'm gonna scream about: Apparently "electrical bonding" is the process of connecting multiple conductive components that are not intended to carry a current to a grounding system, so that if something goes wrong (like an electrical surge or a lightning strike) there's a lower risk of someone getting electrocuted.

So maybe Mario and Luigi are NOT meant to be conduits of this sort of bond-power, but they're unwittingly connected to it in order to prevent tragedy and create stability? (I may be looking into it too closely. I am not an electrician, but that's my theory until I see evidence suggesting otherwise.)

[blu-ish]

Do u think Sonic has nightmares of the SA2 ending? do u think the s2 of Prime fall reinforced this fear or gave him some closure? the anxiety of shadow falling and Sonic not being there to catch him lingers? maybe that's why Sonic is very touch affectionative towards Shadow

It fuels my angst loving heart lmao.

That scene single handedly DESTROYED me. Along with all the fics and fanart that came right after it when that ep of S2 came out hsjshshshs. The parallels are so fuggin tragic, especially from Sonic pov.

This was someone he had met in little under 48 hours, or however long the span of SA2 was lol. He's someone who challenged him, someone who, sure, wasn't entirely a mobian hedgehog--but one nonetheless, a super powered one at that. Who went from threating to destroy the world for hurting him beyond Sonic's comprehension to defending it till his final breath beside him.

Sonic's return to the ark without him will never NOT bring me to tears (yes I'm a big baby sue me lmao), he's still holding his inhibitor ring like its the most precious thing in the now saved world.

His goodbye to him; his closure--his understanding that, that was it. Shadow was gone. I don't remember the time from SA2 until Hero's but it was sure to be a long damn time, only for Shadow to just, be alive. MAN IT HURTS LIKE SH-- (I have a headcanon Sonic got to keep the inhibitor ring when Rouge gives it him later, and he wore it under his glove cuff all this time.) You cannot tell me Shadow didn't have a major impact on Sonic's life come onnnnn. I completely agree with the nightmares headcanon btw, like you take a hero with a savior complex and give them a situation where they FAILED to save someone they love and your in for an ANGST FIELD DAY.

Prime Sonic is a lil different from the Sonic's we've been introduced too in the past. (No this is NOT a complaint I love him sm, all Sonic's are amazing to me that is a fact.) He's probably the most physically affectionate one outta all of them. We see him describe his relationship with Shadow as "complicated" lmao, and for anyone new to the Sonic Series watching it, they're basically just introduced as rivals that are so fucking BAD at communicating. But you can tell he cares about his friends, and he really cares about Shadow.

This is evident in his PANIC ATTACK, when Shadow gets knocked out while trying to enter one of the gateways and ends up almost falling into the void. And this is right after they were just at each others necks, fighting for the tech.

There is NO POSSIBLE WAY it's not supposed to be a parallel to SA2, and if this Sonic also went through the "Shadow fucking dies and loses his memories TM" there is also ZERO WAY he didn't get flashbacks while reaching out to save the only piece of home he had, but Shadow's more than that. He grounds Sonic throughout Prime, he keeps him focused, he CARES about him too. Even if he has trouble showing it.

When it was Shadow's turn to save Sonic when he was fading away. Like, I WAS DECEASED, I WAS SOBBING--- ahem, I was carefully analyzing the moment where we got to see Shadow return the favor. Where he was mere MOMENTS away from losing him. He was in Sonic's place, back in space near the Space Colony Ark. Holding the most precious part of his home. His friend. (HIS BOYFR-- *gets shot*)

I like to think they both get more affectionate and open with each other, it just works so naturally well in Prime because of everything they've been through. And how the show, shows their friendship develop over time, even when Shadow gets benched for the majority of it hjhghj. He lets Sonic in, he makes the effort to hear him out, they LEARN TO COMMUNICATE.

Sonic wants to be near Shadow, Shadow in turn lets him, lets him be affectionate. Because they both really DO realize how much they care and need/want each other in their lives. They make me ill.

[mickeys-malarkey]

Pt. 3/3: My BATDR Timeline & Plot Twist Theories!

First, I think both BATIM and BATDR take place sometime between 1978 and 1991. I already suspected BATDR was happening in the ‘80s based on the fact that card readers – which have featured in many of the environment screenshots we've seen – were invented in 1979...

…and Audrey's clothes and hairstyle look very 1980s.

Then they released the images of Audrey's office, where her chair and desk lamps also look very 1980s, and the wallpaper and flooring looks pretty 1970s…

…and @inkdemonapologist pointed out that the type of bankruptcy we see documents for in Joey's apartment didn't exist until 1978…

…and I remembered that Joey's apartment also had a newspaper whose headline took place in the future— Princess Diana's 30th birthday which, as TetraBitGaming on YouTube pointed out, would be in 1991 since Princess Diana was born in 1961. She should be two years old if BATIM were really taking place in 1963!

Maybe, at the time, they didn't mean for these two to be clues, since they seem to have rolled the date backwards a bit from the newspaper one; but at this point it feels pretty clear when BATDR takes place, to me. And I'm even more certain than I already was, after finding out that this image from the JDS website…

…is titled “museum” (good work yoinking it, @halfusek /gen 👍🏻), that we know the ink dimension's new home: Nathan Arch Sr.'s private Joey Drew Studios museum that he mentioned he was curating in TIOL (meaning it's existed since around 1972).

“Over the years, I have collected every single piece of the studio memorabilia I could find to restore it to its former glory, to create, in a sense, a private museum that gleamed with the true vision of Joey Drew…” ~ Nathan Arch, The Illusion of Living, pg. 2

Also, besides the fact the museum image has clearly aged, here's some more evidence that at least a few years have probably passed since Bendy was purchased: it generally takes a fair bit more time (years!!) to make movies/documentaries, as Archgate Pictures seems to have made about Joey, than it does to make shorts.

As for BATIM, I think that time has been moving as normal outside of the loop, we were just seeing a repeat of that significant day in 1963; Henry and Joey have been trapped in the ink dimension for somewhere between twenty and thirty years, and the bankruptcy paperwork and Princess Diana newspaper were pieces of the real world leaking into the memory. This explains how there seems to be evidence of Audrey in BATIM and how BATDR is still supposedly neither sequel nor prequel to BATIM despite all the evidence that it takes place long after 1963! They're happening at the same time!! I wonder if Audrey is the daughter of the little girl we hear at the end of BATIM? So, Henry's (great-)granddaughter or Joey's (great-)great-niece?

Now, onto my big theory: the plot twist.

If they handle it right, it would be really, really cool if “break the cycle” really doesn't just mean “end the time loop” but also “break the cycle of abuse/trauma” and a lot of the huge cast of not-so-innocent characters wind up with the potential to get redemption arcs. I have an idea of exactly how they might be planning on even providing the opportunity for Joey.

Victor McKnight commented this on his Artistic Hallowing music video and pinned it:

Those last two sentences. “Make sure you're watching every second! You don't want to miss any vital information. 😉” Does that not sound to anyone else like he's got insider information? Now, I want y'all to watch these music videos that either Victor himself or his brother Noah were suspiciously involved in all of (and one of which is supposedly a BATDS song but for some reason involves Audrey) and tell me if you notice any patterns.

This one seems to be a duet between Sammy and the Ink Demon, both singing to Audrey. Sammy mostly sings in the default sepiatone, asking us things like “Can you see me? Can you feel me?” (that feels so… sad… and desperate…) and telling us things like “make sense of the consequence we witnessed on that day” (Excuse me, you're telling me that there was a consequence for something on a specific, significant day that we witnessed?? 👀) The demon, on the other hand, mostly sings when the grayscale effect is on, and seems to just be playing a stereotypical villain roll until you notice “be forced to believe what I see” (why would we even give a crap about what you're seeing /srs? How the actual heck would we see what you're seeing /gen? You don't even have eyeballs, bro /j) and “be damned in this evil received” (how do you receive evil that damns you? Maybe by being abused and becoming an abuser in response?).

Two apparently-separate characters singing with the same voice but very different tones and outlooks on the situation, still both singing to Audrey, in this one. One mostly sings in the default sepiatone, again, at first seeming more hopeful, helpful, and friendly until you start noticing ominous comments like “you've made mistakes, accept the change. You will be punished too” (*incoherent noises* 🚨🚨) and “welcome to my dream . . . you still think you are safe in my dream.” The other mostly sings when the grayscale effect is on, again, and seems much more aggressive and seductive until you start noticing comments like “take up your weapons, just leave my friends be” (why is this stereotypically evil-seeming character both telling us to take up weapons, not just letting us have them, and asking us to leave his friends alone with them?).

More hints that the demon who will rise and presumably is most important to the story is linked to grayscale, in this one.

And, in this one, Sammy's asking if the grayscale-linked demon is the one who will set him free (as he claims to be in the first two videos).

Across all four of these first videos, there seems to be an overall “things change when we switch from the default sepiatone to grayscale” and “grayscale is dangerous and seems hopeless but it's important and linked to truth and freedom” theme…

…You're telling me that Sammy and his followers' past (BATIM?) selves were worshipping an imposter demon…? And the truth will be revealed in BATDR…?

Hum, hum, hum… fascinating. I'd noticed the sepiatone vs. grayscale split and imposter vs. true savior thing long before I read the books; for the longest time, I thought it meant we would be dealing with a Henry-Bendy and a Joey-Bendy, as I've been seeing people theorizing. But then I read TIOL, and discovered what I think is evidence that this info is indeed canon and was not left on the cutting room floor while BATDR was in development limbo.

Nathan makes a very strange note on Joey's story about the Sparkle Unicorn speakeasy…

“…I remember this night well. Though I remember it being at the Bee Room, gold and black, not silver as the main design aesthetic. Doesn't really make much of a difference though, I suppose.” ~ Nathan Arch, The Illusion of Living, pg. 44 (emphasis added)

Nathan remembers that night in sepiatone, Joey remembers it in grayscale.

Now, I've seen all kinds of theories all over about how Wilson actually “banished/killed the ink demon…” “Wilson took advantage of some sort of blip in Bendy's existence that happened when Joey died,” “Wilson got rid of him by purifying him and turning him into Dapper Bendy,” “Wilson got rid of him by fusing him with either Henry or Joey,” “Wilson got rid of him by trapping him in Henry's loop,” “he didn't, Wilson's just another liar manipulating everyone,” etc…

What if we're looking at this from the wrong angle? What if the point is that, whatever happened, neither of the BATDR Bendys is the original soulless monster we see in BATIM and the books? What if, whether they share a body or are separate, there are two human souls involved here? What if one of those souls is the “new evil” in the ink dimension, not Wilson, who may have been meddling in ink dimension affairs since 1963?

Going back to the time frame I propose BATDR is happening in… Joey was born in 1901, which means that if Nathan was 18 or 19 when Joey was just turning 16, then he was born in 1899 or 1898. So, in 1978, Nathan would've been 79 or 80, and in 1991 he would've been 92 or 93. Especially considering the clues that point towards Nathan having been a smoker, it wouldn't surprise me if he's straight-up already dead in BATDR. Mayhaps for 211 days? During Loop 414…? Could this be why the BATIM loop is different, with Henry apparently not remembering anything that previous versions of himself could? The now-previous owner of their prison has died of old age and/or lung cancer? And could that be why the JDS museum has fallen into bankruptcy? Has Nathan Jr. taken over and isn't as ruthless a businessman as his father?

Itsjustjord on YouTube pointed this out in his trailer reaction, which when he said it set my Clue Radar off so that I went to the trailer again to get a closer look. And… well… *clears throat*

…Do y'all see this weird effect over Dapper Bendy? Compared to every other character we see in the trailer as well as the environment around him, does it not look as if we're seeing him, specifically, through some sort of cartoony filter? Maybe it'll only be in circumstances like this (far away in weird lighting) that the edges of the illusion will fray in-game, based on the other teaser image we have of him, but it definitely looks off to me.

Especially with what I now suspect Allison and Susie's situations were in relation to Nathan, I think that the ink creatures’ perfection vs. imperfection has nothing to do with how pure/good vs. impure/evil their hearts are as we've been lead to believe/is the conventional surface-level reading, but instead how intact vs. broken their hearts are. I think that the more horrific the ink being's appearance, the more the soul inside was abused while it was alive. Allison isn't a perfect Alice because she's a better person, it's because she obeyed Nathan and wasn't made to suffer as severely as Susie, who Nathan chose to be his next Isabel. So, why is one new Bendy (apparently created after Joey lost everything, I suspect even being made to watch his Shoulder Angel's murder before being murdered himself) so much scarier than the original (created before Joey lost everything) and the other so goshdarn perfect, proportions and all?

Maybe the banning of everything related to Sammy's demon cult and Henry under Wilson's rule has to do with his decades-old mission to keep the Creators from joining forces, as well as everyone including himself feeling like they're finally free from The Great Puppet Master?

I love Dapper Bendy's design as much as everyone else!! He's positively adorable, and it would also be a nice outcome if the baby boy is exactly what he seems and just a precious lil friend to love forever; but I theorize that Dapper Bendy is the perfectly sane, untraumatized, and truly evil one, that (assuming we actually get choices in BATDR, unlike in BATIM) his route, no matter how things seem in the moment, is the wrong one, that he's Nathan. And I think Freaky Teeth Bendy (that's been my nickname for him since we first saw him and I'm sticking to it lolol) is the damaged as heck but able to be saved one, that his route is the correct one, that he's Joey. I also think that we won't get to see either demon for what they really are – won't be able to get the True, Broken Cycle, “Joey's Redeemed & Nathan Faces Justice” Ending – unless we somehow unlock Grayscale Mode like we could in BATIM and gain the ability to see Joey's truth. Until then, we'll be seeing the demons the way Nathan wants us to see them. Through Nathan's tainted, gaslighting, sepiatone filter.

If I'm right, the fact that they did choose these color palettes is so perfectly poetic~! Sepiatone is what happens when black-and-white images have been chemically altered for preservation purposes; Nathan's altered our perception of himself, Joey, and all the events surrounding them, and his version of events is much more resilient. Meanwhile, Joey's would be more pure and unaltered but easily destroyed— including by himself, with his Illusion of Living coping mechanism… The only thing that could make it more perfect is if not only do we get to see Henry in BATDR, but when we do he's an angelic toon… *Vibrates with excitement*

Please, please, please, JDS, let me be right about where you're going with this!! Cause this would genuinely be so freaking cool…!! 🙏🏻 I hope that we eventually get to “rejoice with our founders,” as Artistic Hallowing says, when they're reunited.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk, rofl. Congratulations on making it through the ramblings of a hyped AuDHD fangirl (though, I guess we already knew you were capable, if you've read TIOL. I could do a whole nother rant on evidence that Joey's basically confirmed canonically ADHD(+?), my freaking gosh). 😝

Read the Rest of the Original Analysis/Theory: Part One • Part Two • Unexpected Part Four

BATDR Analysis/Post-Playthrough Theory Revision: Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

[one-and-a-half-yikes]

Im gonna be honest i think we need to understand how oswald's and fanny's relationship REALLY was, because its clear that they both describe it with still personal very very strong feelings and they do run head first into that Unreliable narrator territory often enough to make me belive theres something big missing a invisible elephant in the room if you will

Fanny says oswald betrayed her

While oswald says she was extremly toxic and wants her away (yet he still pulled all that shit at the dance like bro she was litellary just having fun at an even that you just so happened to be at Then you walked up to her asked her for a dance and acted like she was the devil and started accusing her)

And while both these things could be true in sense we need to know HOW, how was fanny toxic? How did oswald betray her? We have a silloute of a picture but not the frame or the pieces

Also I do seriously wonder how was fanny toxic to oswald? It all was very very long ago and while fanny's personality could be mirroring her now but She didnt have all the experience she has now she had to be diffrent from how she's now

(Also I truly belive oswald definitley fucked up in some way too and we don't know it yet like she had multiple boyfriends but oswald stucks out and not only that but even the thought of him angers her, it could be because if we look at the timeline he could be her first boyfriend or alternativley her ticked out of bad home life like you said but I do think there has to be more to it especialy since again we don't know that much about how he was all that time ago...but we do know fanny likes to ignore neon red flags)

Sorry for the long ask oh my i didnt mean to write it so long I hope you don't mind my mid analisis in your ask box but you did say you wanna talk more about fanny so

ヾ (‘∀ `*)

Honestly I don't mind people hitting my askbox up with analyses or their own takes on certain parts of IM I live for this and I WOULD like to interact with the Inky Mystery fandom more on tumblr cause most of the time I'm hanging out with everyone on discord, but it's nice to talk on here too lol

I'm gonna guess you're asking for my opinion on this?

I don't know if I would describe them as both being unreliable narrators, because from my knowledge Oswald has never divulged to anyone about his relationship with Fanny so we don't really know what his whole perspective on the matter actually is. We don't know if he thinks he was innocent throughout the relationship or if he acknowledges that they were both toxic and bad for each other. What we know is that Oswald was the one who dumped Fanny not the other way around and that means something to me at least.

Fanny on the other hand...I would definitely call her an unreliable narrator when this is how she's describing the breakup:

If you were to only hear from Fanny's side of things you could be convinced that Oz was having an affair with Ortensia on the side during his relationship with Fanny. But this isn't the case, and there's nothing from Fanny's side to provide evidence that this was the case. Not to mention that she's implying that Ortensia seduced Oz into breaking up with her so she could replace her. Calling her an unreliable narrator here doesn't even cut it she's just outright lying about two people who haven't really done her wrong.

But this isn't the first time either. In another chapter she makes a bunch of accusations against Oswald again.

Accusations, that again, are not proven to be true. We got Oswald's perspective during the Far Far West arc and anything pertaining to Fanny never came up. He never talked to anyone about it. He never talked to Cuphead about it. Hell, he didn't even talk to Cuphead at the group date either.

We've only had Oswald make one real accusation against Fanny from when they were together and it was in response to an accusation that Fanny made about him. We have no idea whether Oz is telling the truth or not, but I also have no reason to see why he'd lie. I don't think Fanny is lying to cover up anything, I think she's so bitter about the break up it doesn't occur to her that Oz breaking up with her wasn't to spite her or anything. Yes it hurt and it sucks the way her life turned out after the break, but that's not Oz's fault. He's not responsible for that.

All in all, I think it's good to have an open mind about their relationship, but we also have to look at the facts and the facts show that it's not on equal ground. One person is spreading rumors or fabrications and the other hasn't said a word about the situation to anyone.

Hell, even at the group date situation, Oz approached Fanny to call her out on her behavior but he could have just as easily gone straight to Cuphead and warned him about Fanny and her past. Oswald keeps what happened between them to himself and those he knows best. Fanny has openly talked shit about both Ortensia and Ozzy in front of other people casually without consideration for privacy.

The whole thing regarding why Oswald angers her so much whenever she thinks about him. I have ideas, and I feel like I'm right on the money but I want to wait and see before making a big meta post about their relationship. M shared something juicy on the discord and I am very excited when we get to see it!!!

Also THANK YOU for the ask!! This was nice I'm glad I got to gush about these two some more because I often don't lol

[doumadono]

Hiiiii, sweetheart.

Emergency Request here...

As you may know I got stood up by a a person I considered... My friend. The person was my friend since junior high school, despite some "turbulence" in past I kept in touch with her.

I got stood up on New Year's eve. I prepared something warm to eat, snack, drinks... I even planned some nice movies to watch and games to play... And she didn't show up nor she picked her phone. I saw her being online but that's all...

Eh, I feel a little pathetic if I can be honest.

I just... I need some comfort from Erasermic... I just want my two fav men to cuddle me or something like this.

Proszę, dziękuję i pozdrawiam. 🐺💎

Our very own New Year's Eve - Erasermic x Reader

A/N: I'm still angry that you had to go through such a disappointing experience, especially from someone you considered a friend for so long (but I told you before what I think about her). Your effort to create a warm and welcoming New Year's Eve atmosphere speaks volumes about your kindness and thoughtfulness. It's completely understandable to feel hurt and disappointed. Please, don't waste you time on someone acting like a total jerk. I hope this little piece will cheer you up, even if a little bit ♥

EMERGENCY REQS MASTERLIST

As the early morning light streamed through the windows, Aizawa and Yamada returned home after celebrating the New Year's Eve with their fellow UA teachers. The sight that greeted them was unexpected - you curled up on the couch, a gentle sob escaping your lips as you cradled one of your cats on your lap.

Aizawa's brow furrowed with concern, his strict demeanor ready to address the situation, but Present Mic placed a calming hand on his shoulder, guiding him to the side. "Shota, let's figure out what's going on first." In a hushed tone, Present Mic whispered to Aizawa, "Our kitty is visibly upset, and the last thing she needs is us being stern. We need to show her love, not discipline."

Aizawa's usually stern expression softened, concern etching lines on his face.

Yamada, with his ever-present energy, approached cautiously. The sight of you in distress tugged at his heartstrings. "Hey, kitten, what happened?" Mic's voice was gentle as he sat beside you, his hand reaching out to stroke your hair.

You looked up, tear-stained eyes meeting his concerned gaze. "I-I got stood up by a friend," you managed to choke out, the hurt evident in your voice.

Aizawa's brows furrowed, a protective instinct rising within him. "Why didn't you call us? We would have come back immediately," he said, his voice tinged with a mix of anger and worry.

You sighed, a shaky breath escaping your lips. "I didn't want to ruin your night. You were having fun with your friends."

Aizawa's stern expression softened slightly at your words.

Mic was quick to intervene. "Babe, your happiness is our priority. You should've called. We're a team, remember?" Hizashi took your hand, squeezing it reassuringly, while Aizawa wrapped his arms around you in a protective embrace.

"We're here for you, always," Aizawa murmured, his usually gruff voice surprisingly gentle.

Mic planted a soft kiss on your forehead. "Let us make it up to you. How about a New Year's celebration of our own tonight? We'll have dinner, music, drinks — whatever you want."

You looked up, confusion evident in your eyes. "But New Year's Eve is already over."

Mic grinned, his infectious energy returning. "Who cares? It's our house, our rules. Besides, I'm declaring a second New Year's Eve celebration tonight. We're going to make it unforgettable."

Aizawa rolled his eyes but couldn't hide a small smile. "He's impossible, but he's right. We'll make sure you have a fantastic night to remember."

And so, the duo spent the morning turning your living room into a makeshift celebration space.

In a hushed conversation away from your earshot, Present Mic convinced Aizawa that showering you with affection was the best way to ease your pain. "Let's show her all the love we've got," he insisted.

Present Mic, determined to lift your spirits, took charge in the kitchen. He prepared a feast that would rival any high-end restaurant, showcasing his culinary prowess. The savory aroma filled the air as Aizawa joined in, silently supporting his friend's efforts. The dining table was adorned with an array of dishes, each one carefully crafted to appeal to your tastes.

As the evening progressed, Hizashi decided to add a sweet touch to the celebration. "Hey, sweetheart, how about we make those chocolate cupcakes you love?" he suggested, an optimistic glint in his eyes.

Despite your initial reluctance, the sadness pouring out of your existence, you found yourself nodding. Hizashi guided you through the process, his infectious enthusiasm turning the task into a shared experience. Mixing ingredients, laughter echoing in the kitchen, the cupcakes baked to perfection, their rich aroma adding to the ambiance.

After the delicious dinner and sweet treat, the three of you migrated to a cozy set of couches. Hizashi pulled you gently between them, his arm enveloping your shoulders. Aizawa's legs intertwined with yours, his rough hand tenderly caressing the curve of your hips.

Present Mic pressed a soft kiss to your forehead, whispering, "You mean the world to us, you know that, kitty?"

Aizawa added, "We're here for you, no matter what."

You felt a comforting warmth envelop you, surrounded by the two men you cherished. The presence of your cats, peacefully napping nearby, added to the serenity of the moment.

"Tonight's about leaving behind what hurt you and embracing what brings you joy," Hizashi murmured, his fingers tracing soothing patterns on your arm.

Aizawa, not one for excessive words, simply nodded in agreement, his gaze conveying a depth of understanding.

The ambiance in the room was a delicate blend of warmth, laughter, and the lingering scent of chocolate cupcakes. As you snuggled between Aizawa and Present Mic, the conversation continued, weaving an intricate tapestry of shared moments.

Hizashi, his voice gentle, broke the silence, "You know, those cupcakes taste even better with your smile."

Aizawa, offering a rare smile, added, "He's right. Seeing you happy makes everything worthwhile."

You couldn't help but smile, feeling a surge of gratitude for the two men who had orchestrated this evening of comfort and joy.

Yamada grabbed a throw blanket, covering the three of you as you leaned into his embrace. "Now, let's continue this night with some chill vibes," he suggested, grabbing the remote to cue up your favorite show.

As the opening notes of "Home Alone" filled the room, Hizashi's fingers tapped the tip of your nose. "One of the best holiday movies, right?" he mused, his eyes reflecting the flickering light of the TV.

Aizawa, arms still wrapped around you, chimed in, "Classic. The kid's resourcefulness is impressive. If my class was in charge there, those burglars would pray to be sent right into the Tartarus."

Shota's remark caused Hizashi to choke on the sip of his coke. "Shota, dear Lord, ease up on the kids. They're nice kiddos!"

"Yeah, I wish they could ease up on me, so I could get some damn rest," the black-haired man grumbled.

You giggled, resting your head on his chest, rising and falling slowly with each breath he took.

The movie played in the background, the familiar scenes casting a nostalgic glow over the room.

You released a contented sigh as the movie came to an end. "Boys… Thank you."

"That's not the end!" Hizashi grinned at you, leaping out from under the covers, leaving you exposed. You nuzzled closer to Aizawa, seeking warmth.

Aizawa's hands reached around to your back, rubbing it gently as he planted a tender kiss on your lips.

Just as Present Mic returned, he huffed a little, looking a tad offended. "I was gone for thirty seconds, and you're already claiming our girl yours, Shota?!" He presented you with three glasses and a bottle of champagne. "I was keeping this hidden for a nice occasion, and it arrived today! Shota, come here and open it for me. You know I'm a bit clumsy."

Aizawa efficiently opened the champagne, the cork popping with a satisfying sound. He poured the sparkling alcohol into the glasses, handing one to you as you gracefully got up.

Present Mic, raising his glass, declared, "To you, my loves! To my sweet, charming kitty." He reached his free hand out, rubbing your cheek, "And to my one and only, handsome as hell Eraserhead." He grinned at Aizawa.

Shota acknowledged with a nod. "To you guys. May this year be better than the last."

You raised your glass, a smile playing on your lips. "To my handsome pro heroes, always ready to serve and protect. To my two absolutely cute boys that can turn into wild tigers in the sheets!"

Aizawa scoffed a little, but Present Mic playfully pointed out, "Look at that, kitty, you made Aizawa blush!"

Shota downed his champagne and glared down at you, his thumb rubbing against your lips. "So how about we move to the other part of the celebration now, kitten?" His tone was low and seductive, causing a familiar tingling in your abdomen.

With a mischievous grin, you nodded. "Yes, please. Let's celebrate our very own New Year's Eve." You bit your lower lip, adding, "I can't wait."

[eroguron0nsense]

Marineford is basically just the really ambitious dark what-if bad ending for Water Seven/Enies Lobby (ONE PIECE SPOILERS)

Let's review: you've got two victims imprisoned and awaiting execution for supposed crimes against the world government. Their supposed offences are inextricably tied to the nature of their existence through absolutely no fault of their own. Neither of them think they particularly deserve to be alive and are horrified that the people they love–whose lives they value way more than their own–are facing near certain death to rescue them. Like, to the extent they're both begging to be abandoned and left for dead as they're chained up and helpless, watching good people struggling and falling one by one in the struggle to save them and the situation getting more and more dire. Both have a moment where they have a breakthrough and express that in spite of all their trauma and suicidal self hatred, they want to live and seek joy and meaning with Luffy and their respective crews as it becomes evident that their loved ones will take on the world to get them out.

The difference is just that in Water Seven, you have dozens of really hype moments and everything is cathartic and saving Robin is arguably the greatest moment of triumph in the series. Everyone you think might die gets saved by deus ex machinas (Sodom and Gomorrah, the Franky family, the Straw Hats themselves). In Marineford, we get to watch Ace's friends die in front of him and we watch him scream as the Whitebeards suffer for him; Oars is kind of a perfect microcosm of this who literally has his body trampled over in the effort to rescue him. The brief moment of catharsis you get when he's almost rescued gets shattered with his murder, and then we end on a desperate rush to get Luffy out alive because he's so exhausted and traumatized he can't fight any more. It's one of the biggest downer endings to any arc in fiction and it's made doubly so by all the parallels we've seen in which the Straw Hats are rewarded for their boundless love for each other and their fellow man, their "all for one, one for all" ethos that underscores the entire series, and their willingness to throw themselves against any enemy–and quite literally take on the world– for their friends in the face of horrible injustice against them.

And instead of "I want to live" we get this kinda subtly dark ending for his character because as beautiful as him dying for Luffy and the whole "thank you for loving me" speech is, it reaffirms that as much as Ace has found meaning in his existence, he'll never get to go through Robin's (ongoing) journey of self acceptance. He'll never realize that his friends love him for who he is and not in spite of it. He does't get to grow past the last of the trauma and self hatred and survivor's guilt holding him back as a person, or meet Rayleigh in the postwar and learn things about his parents and the real history of the world that could have given him the catharsis he always needed, or just that he has immense value and brings as much joy to the people he's devoted his life to as they do to him. His final words just make it really clear that as much as he wishes he could keep living with his friends and family, he still cannot fathom the concept that he personally was worth saving or sacrifice at all.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dinkclump Linkdump

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!

Some Saturday mornings, I look at the week's blogging and realize I have a lot more links saved up than I managed to write about this week, and then I do a linkdump. There've been 14 of these, and this is number 15:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Attentive readers will note that this isn't Saturday. You're right. But I'm on a book tour and every day is shatterday, because damn, it's grueling and I'm not the spry manchild who took Little Brother on the road in 2008 – I'm a 52 year old with two artificial hips. Hence: an out-of-cycle linkdump. Come see me on tour and marvel at my verticality!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour

Best thing I read this week, hands down, was Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day piece, "AI search is a doomsday cult":

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ai-search-doomsday-cult

Broderick makes so many excellent points in this piece. First among them: AI search sucks, but that's OK, because no one is asking for AI search. This only got more true later in the week when everyone's favorite spicy autocomplete accidentally loaded the James Joyce module:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/chatgpt-alarms-users-by-spitting-out-shakespearean-nonsense-and-rambling/

(As Matt Webb noted, Chatbots have slid rapidly from Star Trek (computers give you useful information in a timely fashion) to Douglas Adams (computers spout hostile, impenetrable nonsense at you):

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/21/adams

But beyond the unsuitability of AI for search results and beyond the public's yawning indifference to AI-infused search, Broderick makes a more important point: AI search is about summarizing web results so you don't have to click links and read the pages yourself.

If that's the future of the web, who the fuck is going to write those pages that the summarizer summarizes? What is the incentive, the business-model, the rational explanation for predicting a world in which millions of us go on writing web-pages, when the gatekeepers to the web have promised to rig the game so that no one will ever visit those pages, or read what we've written there, or even know it was us who wrote the underlying material the summarizer just summarized?

If we stop writing the web, AIs will have to summarize each other, forming an inhuman centipede of botshit-ingestion. This is bad news, because there's pretty solid mathematical evidence that training a bot on botshit makes it absolutely useless. Or, as the authors of the paper – including the eminent cryptographer Ross Anderson – put it, "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects":

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493

This is the mathematical evidence for Jathan Sadowski's "Hapsburg AI," or, as the mathematicians call it, "The Curse of Recursion" (new band-name just dropped).

But if you really have your heart set on living in a ruined dystopia dominated by hostile artificial life-forms, have no fear. As Hamilton Nolan writes in "Radical Capital," a rogues gallery of worker-maiming corporations have asked a court to rule that the NLRB can't punish them for violating labor law:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/radical-capital

Trader Joe’s, Amazon, Starbucks and SpaceX have all made this argument to various courts. If they prevail, then there will be no one in charge of enforcing federal labor law. Yes, this will let these companies go on ruining their workers' lives, but more importantly, it will give carte blanche to every other employer in the land. At one end of this process is a boss who doesn't want to recognize a union – and at the other end are farmers dying of heat-stroke.

The right wing coalition that has put this demand before the court has all sorts of demands, from forced birth to (I kid you not), the end of recreational sex:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/getting-rid-of-birth-control-is-a-key-gop-agenda-item-for-the-second-trump-term

That coalition is backed by ultra-rich monopolists who want wreck the nation that their rank-and-file useful idiots want to wreck your body. These are the monopoly cheerleaders who gave us the abomination that is the Pharmacy Benefit Manager – a useless intermediary that gets to screw patients and pharmacists – and then let PBMs consolidate and merge with pharmacy monopolists.

One such inbred colossus is Change Healthcare, a giant PBM that is, in turn, a mere tendril of United Healthcare, which merged the company with Optum. The resulting system – held together with spit and wishful thinking – has access to the health records of a third of Americans and processes 15 billion prescriptions per day.

Or rather, it did process that amount – until the all-your-eggs-in-one-badly-maintained basket strategy failed on Wednesday, and Change's systems went down due to an unspecified "cybersecurity incident." In the short term, this meant that tens of millions of Americans who tried to refill their prescriptions were told to either pay cash or come back later (if you don't die first). That was the first shoe dropping. The second shoe is the medical records of a third of the country.

Don't worry, I'm sure those records are fine. After all, nothing says security like "merging several disparate legacy IT systems together while simultaneously laying off half your IT staff as surplus to requirements and an impediment to extracting a special dividend for the private equity owners who are, of course, widely recognized as the world's greatest information security practitioners."

Look, not everything is terrible. Some computers are actually getting better. Framework's user-serviceable, super-rugged, easy-to-repair, powerful laptops are the most exciting computers I've ever owned – or broken:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

Now you can get one for $500!

https://frame.work/blog/first-framework-laptop-16-shipments-and-a-499-framework

And the next generation is turning our surprisingly well, despite all our worst efforts. My kid – now 16! – and I just launched our latest joint project, "The Sushi Chronicles," a small website recording our idiosyncratic scores for nearly every sushi restaurant in Burbank, Glendale, Studio City and North Hollywood:

https://sushichronicles.org/

This is the record of two years' worth of Daughter-Daddy sushi nights that started as a way to get my picky eater to try new things and has turned into the highlight of my week. If you're in the area and looking for a nice piece of fish, give it a spin (also, we belatedly realized that we've never reviewed our favorite place, Kuru Kuru in the CVS Plaza on North Hollywood Way – we'll be rectifying that soon).

And yes, we have a lavishly corrupt Supreme Court, but at least now everyone knows it. Glenn Haumann's even set up a Gofundme to raise money to bribe Clarence Thomas (now deleted, alas):

https://www.gofundme.com/f/pzhj4q-the-clarence-thomas-signing-bonus-fund-give-now

The funds are intended as a "signing bonus" in the event that Thomas takes up John Oliver on his offer of a $2.4m luxury RV and $1m/year for life if he'll resign from the court:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug

This is truly one of Oliver's greatest bits, showcasing his mastery over the increasingly vital art of turning abstruse technical issues into entertainment that negates the performative complexity used by today's greatest villains to hide their misdeeds behind a Shield of Boringness (h/t Dana Clare).

The Bezzle is my contribution to turning abstruse scams into a high-impact technothriller that pierces that Shield of Boringness. The key to this is to master exposition, ignoring the (vastly overrated) rule that one must "show, not tell." Good exposition is hard to do, but when it works, it's amazing (as anyone who's read Neal Stephenson's 1,600-word explanation of how to eat Cap'n Crunch cereal in Cryptonomicon can attest). I wrote about this for Mary Robinette Kowal's "My Favorite Bit" this week:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

Of course, an undisputed master of this form is Adam Conover, whose Adam Ruins Everything show helped invent it. Adam is joining me on stage in LA tomorrow night at Vroman's at 5:30PM, to host me in a book-tour event for my novel The Bezzle:

https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/23/gazeteer/#out-of-cycle

Image: Peter Craven (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aggregate_output_%287637833962%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[adventuretimeconspiracies]

Is Jake dead? Fionna and Cake ep.4

I think that the clear implication that the first four episodes of Fionna & Cake has given us is that yes, by this point in the story, Jake has died.

Our estimation based on Finn's current design is that it's been 15+ years since the finale.

Finn and TV talk about Jake's love for the Fionna and Cake books in the past tense. "He loved that series"

Bearded, depressed Prismo watches video of Finn and Jake, and Prismo tells Fionna and Cake that Ooo is special because it "had [his] favorite guy" (implied Jake)

F&C-era Finn has the Jake chest tattoo that was seen in Obsidian (which has been widely interpreted as an in memoriam gesture). But, importantly: Prismo's flashback at the beginning of F&C ep3 shows Jake and the chest tattoo coexisting simultaneously. So what gives? What do we know?

The circumstances of Jake's death are unknown--just, in Together Again it's confirmed that Jake's death preceded Finn's death, when Finn was an old, old man.

We're going to observe Finn's known designs in an attempt to narrow down at what point in the narrative Jake dies. Between Adventure Time and Obsidian? Between Obsidian and Fionna & Cake? After?

AT finale end credits montage: Finn and Jake welcome ships of humans to Ooo.

Obsidian: bearded but skinny Finn shows up to help out PB. The Jake tattoo is here.

Fionna & Cake flashback: medium beefiness, hair contained

Fionna & Cake modern age: buff boy fullbeard, full-Mertens mane.

And then there's Together Again, death-aged Finn.

With that established, let's return to what very little we know about Jake's death. The first scene of Together Again, features a monster-induced hallucination where Finn loses Jake "again". Curiously, Finn's design in this sequence is his familiar teenaged design from the main series.

So, with teenaged Finn losing Jake "again," should we conclude that Jake died while Finn was teenaged? No. It's a mistake to take Finn's appearance in this sequence at face value. For starters, Finn has both arms here. This is old Finn's nightmare, and in order for him to feel the pain of losing Jake again, it's required that he thinks he's experiencing a time in his life that he and Jake coexisted.

The "Not again" line is preceded by a quick flash to old Finn's actual face and surroundings. Old Finn is the one saying "not again", scrambling to hold onto the dream of hanging out with Jake in his youth. It doesn't mean that Finn was that age when Jake died. His arm is proof this sequence can't be taken at face value. Jake outlived Finn's arm. We know this.

Our next piece of evidence that Jake died before the events of Fionna & Cake is the existence of the Jake tattoo. But, again, Prismo's flashback at the beginning of F&C ep3 shows Jake and the tattoo coexisting.

Soooo........? Is the tattoo not actually a memorial tattoo? I'm pretty sure that events played on Prismo's screen are just straight up supposed to be taken at face value. The scenes are totally divorced from the linear timeline. In ep 4, when Prismo says Ooo is special because it "had" his favorite guy, we see this scene with Jake and teenaged Finn. This is clearly the past.

The evidence would seem to suggest that Jake dies somewhere before Obsidian. Finn got the memorial tattoo. He never appeared again. Everyone talks about him in the past tense.

But there's that one pesky scene on Prismo's screen where he's alive during Finn's 20-somethings, concurrent with the tattoo.

So I will posit a few theories to you:

No body, no death. Jake is alive. He's living in a different universe now and that's why Prismo says Ooo "had" his favorite guy. Now Jake lives in the Crystal Dimension with Lady Rainicorn but can return to Ooo from time to time. Remember: rainicorns are native to the Crystal Dimension. We've even pointed out previously a pretty undisputed fan theory that Crystal Dimension rainicorn pup descendants were featured in Graybles 1000+. It makes sense that Jake would seek a future there. And I don't think it's out of character that Finn would get that tattoo as a sign of devotion to Jake when Jake makes that big decision to set off on his own. Jake will die later.

Jake has become displaced from time and had an unspecified number of adventures in future eras. (i.e. Jake is extracted from the timeline before Obsidian and presumed dead, but then appears sporadically at other times throughout Finn's life, like in the scene shown on Prismo's screen). @uncivilizedelk posted a video analyzing the F&C intro and concludes that time shenanigans are probably incoming.

Theory 3 would be that Jake died via normal means after the scene on Prismo's screen but before the events of Fionna & Cake. And I'm sorry, but I don't buy it.

The whole thing screams red herrings and misdirections. I'd wager Jake appears alive at some point during this series in a large fan-pleaser moment.

Jake's death has been foreshadowed in this series for so long I just cannot imagine they'd let us off easy and have him die offscreen. We'll see it someday. Some way.

[theender36]

⚠️ Spoilers for Doctor Who: Empire of Death ⚠️

I liked this finale a lot and I just wanted to get my thoughts out while they're relatively fresh.

First off, so very glad to have one of the rare NuWho finales that doesn't involve the Daleks and/or the Cybermen and/or the Master. Nothing against those villains, it's just very common for the show to cram them in there.

I appreciate how any time in this new era that the Doctor faces off against a god, the stakes are appropriately high and we actually see the effects of their inteference (e.g. the Toymaker plunging the world into chaos, the gloomy and bleak atmosphere of a world without music and the devastation that it leads to, Sutekh's universe of dust and death).

I don't think the shot of Sutekh perching on the TARDIS in the time vortex was meant to be goofy but it kind of was. Anyway, they made up for it with the sequence of him being dragged and scraping along the edges of the vortex because that was pretty sick.

Felt super bad for Mel when she was being taken over by Sutekh. She held on for a good while though. Probably all the carrot juice.

That sequence where the Doctor meets that lone woman in order to find a piece of metal could be its own 2-minute short film.

It seems to me that there's still a lot left to find out about Ruby which hopefully they'll explore next season since Millie Gibson said she'll be returning. I think the main mysteries are A.) why does the snow follow her; B.) what exactly caused the events of 73 Yards? Because in my mind, I don't think her alternate timeline life was caused by breaking the fairy circle, I think it was something about Ruby herself.

I enjoyed Ruby's mum being just a normal person. If she was an existing character or someone very powerful and cosmicly important, it would never have lived up to audience expectations. And besides, we've had plenty of Impossible Girls, Timeless Children, and River Songs. It's much more fulfilling to Ruby that her mother is just a regular person who tried to keep her safe. And it's a lot easier for her to meet and form a fresh relationship with her mom if she's not an alien or a time traveller. However, I thought the explanation of why Sutekh was interested in her identity was kind of weak and made up of circular-logic. She's invisible to him because Ruby saving the universe relies on her because she's important because she's invisible to Sutekh. Maybe I got that wrong?

I'm very intrigued by who Mrs. Flood could be. I thought she was another servant of Sutekh because of how she started hyping up his return in the previous episode but it's evident that she's an unrelated party now. I think it's most likely she'll be an entirely new character, within the realm of possibility that she's a new form of Missy, slight chance she's River, no shot that she's the Rani. She doesn't seem like she's doing any heinous experiments, she's kind of just narrating and viking.

Looking forward to the Christmas special and any possible spinoffs in the meantime.

[tokiro07]

Is loop 101's Phil's biggest improvement on Unfeel actually the ability to retain all 4 of his remaining human senses (as in, the only major damage Unfeel caused was cutting off his human sense of "feel")? I don't think we've seen him eat or express any enhanced sense of smell in loop 100, and among loop 101's Phil's focus was that he can eat the food Sean gave him.

There's no indication that Phil couldn't see, hear, smell or taste in the first place, just that he couldn't speak (presumably because he can't physically feel his mouth to move it properly and speaking is a bit different from moving one's limbs) and most likely lacked tactile senses like texture, pressure, temperature, etc.

Honestly I have no idea how Unfeel was improved in L101 since we got so little indication of how it worked in L100. I've been waiting for Volume 18 to come stateside since I'd expect one of the extras there to go into detail on it

I imagine someone has already found that explanation from the Japanese version, but I haven't seen it yet, and even if I had I can't read it

If I had to guess, though, the main difference seems to stem from Phil's own ability to identify his feelings. We see in L101 that prior to meeting the Union, Phil didn't even believe he had feelings in the first place, so we can assume that was true in L100 too. While we don't know the nature of his L100 tragedy since the aliens didn't exist at the time, we can assume that the drive to save his mother disappeared at a key moment just like in L101

However, even without that feeling, L101 Phil still acted, and in fact still acknowledged the feeling even though the Emotion-Eaters (name pending) could no longer detect it. This suggests that Phil's realization that he had feelings altered his dynamic with Unfeel, and most likely with Entruster as well

We see in L100 that Phil pretty much never acted of his own accord, as he had no reaction when Andy fired his Finger Bullets at the Union and needed to be passively protected by Isshin. In L101, though, Phil is actively making decisions, actively protecting the lives of people he cares for even at the risk of his own life. He did do that at the end of L100 too, but there's no evidence to suggest he wasn't ordered to back then

I believe that what's happening here is that since L100 Phil didn't know he had feelings, he had nothing to give to Entruster and simply became a robot acting as directed by external operators. In L101, though, Phil does know what feelings are, and is able to feel them even briefly before they're negated by Unfeel; in that brief window, Phil entrusts those feelings to Entruster, giving it direction for how to operate, as it's only the feelings in Phil's soul that are negated, not the ones that have been communicated to the vessel he happens to be inhabiting

Like I said, this is all conjecture on my part as Tozuka didn't go into a ton of detail in the series proper, but I'm confident that I'm at least on the right track and the volume extras will clarify whatever piece I'm missing

[aviculor]

Another thought just popped into my head. What if all the wacky phenotypes in One Piece are because of devil fruit lineage factors? On top of all the nonhumans like minks and fishmen and mermaids, it's apparently normal for a full-blooded human to be 20+ feet tall or have horns. We've seen devil fruits that make you bigger (like the one San Juan Wolf ate for complete overkill). And as I said in my previous post, Saint Jay Garcia Saturn possibly just opened up a pandora's box for the existence of demon zoans which could explain the likes of Kaidou and Moriah.

What if the Void Century was what happened after devil fruits first came into existence? The original fruit users freely had children, passing on traits given to them by their fruits which caused said children to be born as mutants. The world government covered it all up. They made devil fruits restricted and controlled exclusively by them, and they banished all the mutants they could find to remote islands in the Grand Line. The ones who could never pass as human, that is. The ones that looked like animals, the ones too large to live in cities, the ones with extra body parts. They all had to go. But a pair of small horns here and there, some sharp teeth, growing only a few feet taller than normal...those flew under the radar and remained in the gene pool. That's how we got characters like Shoujou and Merry. What is the difference between Shoujou and an orangutan mink? Or Merry and a sheep mink? Their ancestors weren't Different enough to be banished to Zou 800 years ago. For those who weren't so lucky though, those centuries of isolation caused the inhuman traits to become endemic to their islands- cemented into the populations generation after generation until none of their offspring could ever be human-passing. They became known as the minks, the giants, the long-arms, the long-legs...yes, even the fishmen and mermaids since we know thanks to Kaidou that Fish Fish fruits exist. All of these "races" are freely able to interbreed with humans and eachother, showing that they are still fundamentally the same species. Which is best demonstrated by the Charlotte family where Big Mom basically has a bingo card she's filling out of races she's had children with. And it's no coincidence that so many pirates are people with physical abnormalities; while people like Kaidou and Big Mom and Moriah are Certified Human by pedigree, their differences have nonetheless alienated them from Polite Society (tm), essentially forcing them into lives of crime.

Which actually reminds me...while we all know Big Mom is a 28 foot tall cannibal that enters dissociative feeding frenzies, another unusual thing about her is that when you work out the timeline for her menagerie of children (which thankfully someone else did on the wiki), you'll notice she gave birth every year for 42 consecutive years. That is not just strange, it's so physically implausible that I would also consider that to be evidence of of devil fruit lineage. An invisible mutation from a paramecia user centuries ago in her family tree. This idea explains everything, all the superhuman feats from "ordinary" people we see in the series. Maybe even haki. And the world government doesn't want anyone to know.

[wwe-supernaturalxbands]

Spotted at Work

Summary: Dean cheated on Reader who is a Lightwood. They date Simon and eventually bump into Dean again

Trigger Warnings: cheating

Dean's P.O.V

I glanced down at the text for the 6th time, 'you're making a mistake and should be ashamed of yourself', of course Sammy wouldn't understand. Y/N is the love of my life and although we've only been together for a few months, I would love to spend the rest of my life with her. However, she doesn't know I'm a hunter, therefore I have to break her heart so she doesn't get sucked into this life, or worse. Killed. That's how I found myself on a Thursday evening, at a bar, the key to her little apartment in my pocket, feeling heavier than it should. She had texted me saying she'd be back by 9pm, which means I have about an hour to find someone to take back. Why? Because I need her to hate me and break up with me to save her life, she's not meant for the hunter life. Before I change my mind, I notice a woman checking me out. I finish my shot and head over to her, I know I need to get her back at the apartment way before Y/N arrives so she can find us in bed together, although I'm not even sure I'll be able to even get it up, Y/N has ruined me for everyone else.

Y/N's P.O.V.

I have to tell Dean about who I am. I have to tell him about not only the shadowworld but that I'm also a Shadowhunter, and not just any Shadowhunter, I'm a Lightwood. I can do this.  As I'm driving, I get a call from Jace, answering, "hello" I asked annoyed. "Are you coming back soon? Can't have you missing the wedding. Magnus and Alec want to have it by next week" he says all in one breath. "Yeah I'll be back, I need to go now" and I hang up, maybe I can bring Sam and Dean to the wedding. As I walk into the apartment I was renting, I felt something was very wrong. I took out my stele and drew on a stealth rune before putting it back away and taking out my seraph blade. I noticed the door was unlocked and walked in, wondering if Dean was home or if he was in danger. As I walked into the living room I heard it, Dean was grunting in pleasure, as well as another woman moaning, in that moment I also heard my heart shatter. I walked into my room and there he was, on top of her. All I could do was stand there, due to my rune activated, it took them about 3 minutes before the woman noticed me and screamed, Dean turning to look at me, unfazed. I unfroze and went to pack my small suitcase, "please don't stop on my account, let me just pack up and leave. Just make sure to leave by the end of the week when my lease is up" I tried to stay strong, the anger evident in my voice but no tears spilling. It wasn't until I was done packing, that I noticed the woman had pushed Dean off and got her clothes, apologizing, I could tell she felt bad because she didn't know he was taken, and Dean, he only sat on the bed. I turned to look at him, again he was unfazed, then I turned to the girl and simply nodded at her and walked out. It wasn't until I was in my car that I let the tears fall. I texted Sam asking if he knew and his only response was 'I'm sorry'. Well fuck.

6 months later

I had been honest with my siblings, they all wanted to go and find the Winchesters to give Dean a piece of their minds but I told them to leave it, that I was done trying to date, Alec and Jace were completely happy with that. Now though there was a knock on my bedroom door, assuming it was one of my siblings I opened it, it was the daylighter, Simon. "Hi Simon" I said smiling, he was adorkable. I had properly met him at the wedding as I was with my father and Max at the LA institute when him and Clary had first found out about the Shadow World. Then I studied mundanes up close and that was how I ended up spending a few months dating Dean. "Hi Y/N, I was hoping to ask you a question" he asked looking down and getting extremely shy, how cute. I nodded, "would you like to go on a date with me? I asked for Alec, Jace, and Izzy's permission before asking!! I even asked your mom" he quickly spills out, I can't help but giggle. Since mom was deruned, she had begun to grow as a person and even reconnected with us, I was more of the forgotten child growing up, with Alec being the perfect soldier, Jace being the perfect son, Izzy being the troublemaker and Max being the baby, I was simply average and lost to the shadows. "Of course!" I told Simon, he smiled, I could see his fangs poking out. I figured since it's been about 6 months since everything with Dean, I was ready to go back out into the world, plus Simon was afraid of all my siblings so I knew he wouldn't do anything to hurt me unless he wanted to get killed again. 

4 months later

Dating Simon for the past 4 months has been such an amazing experience. Clary eventually got her memories back, and was back with Jace, who has asked Luke for his permission to propose. As for Izzy, she finally got the courage to ask out Maia and they've been dating for about a month but I can sense that they're meant to be. 

"Jace are you sure this is the place?" I whisper as we walk towards an abandoned warehouse. There had been sightings of a few rogue vampires, about 5 of them but tonight we were all on patrol and meant to take them to Raphael's clan. It was Alec, Jace, Izzy, Clary and me. "Yes this is where Overbeck said they were spotted entering yesterday" he grumbles. We all begin to activate our stealth runes before getting any closer, I get out my sword, which is attachable to the gear I've got. I also double check my boots and ensure I have my seraph and stele. We all look at each other and notice everyone has their respective runes activated and their preferred weapons in hand. As we walk into the warehouse, the first thing I notice is the Winchesters tied up in the middle. They both turn and see us, confused to see me. As soon as they notice us, so do the vampires and we begin to work. 

As we finished and got them all down, Clary created a portal. "I'll take them and you guys figure out what to do with these guys" says Raphael when Alec came back from entering to let the Clan know we had the vampires. As him and a few others took the rogues, Jace and Izzy began to untie Sam and Dean. "Uhh guys, these are Sam and Dean, the ones I told you about like 10 months ago" I state, nervous my brothers and sister will actually kill the Winchesters. Izzy and Jace stop untying and quickly retie them, "we'll just leave them here" Izzy states and her and Jace walk away from them, "WHAT?" Sam asks confused. "Uh yeah my siblings are a little overprotective" I look at the brothers, not really caring if they do stay there, after all Dean did cheat and Sam did know and didn't tell me. Suddenly there's a portal and out walk Simon and Magnus, oh no. "What exactly did you see" Alec asks, always the diplomat, making sure mundanes aren't aware of the shadow world, that's why Mags and Si are here, to erase their memories. "They were vampires, we hunt them" Sam starts, getting ready to do the whole spiel, while Dean doesn't stop staring at me. "Oh they're mundane hunters, I wasn't aware there were still some existing" Magnus says, delighted. "Rogue downworlders can evade the clave for a while and sometimes in being too cautious of the Shadowhunters, they make themselves easy to be spotted by mundane hunters" Magnus explains to us. "Wait, you mean to tell us, we grow up training to protect the mundanes,  and yet there's mundanes stupid enough, that aren't born with the Sight, and go and look for rogue downworlders?" Jace asks, flabbergasted. "I've read about these I also know there's some who kill innocent downworlders, which then the clave does have to get because they know the downworld will fight and it could have broken the accords" Alec says. "You dated a mundane hunter and didn't know" Izzy finally asks me and I tell her I had no idea. "Wait you dated one of these guys" Simon asked, I could tell he was getting insecure, he felt the Winchesters were very good looking. "Unfortunately" is all I mutter and I can tell Dean looks heartbroken. "Ok well, Sherman, you're the vampire, encanto them into forgetting" Magnus tells Simon, who looks alarmed, he still struggles with the encanto. "Vampire? Y/N let us out and we can kill them and then take you to safety" Dean says, starting to struggle with how tight my siblings tied them. I can't help but laugh, "you want to kill my boyfriend and think I'll go with you?" I ask as I grab Si's hand and interlock our fingers together, I can sense the surprise in him, clearly thinking I'd want to be with Dean over him, this poor boy has serious self worth issues but it's ok I'll continue to love him enough for the both of us. The Winchesters look surprised, "Y/N he's a monster, are they all vampires? Did you get turned into one?" Sam begins to question. "One, how dare you call my boyfriend a monster! Simon is so fucking handsome, funny, intelligent, adorkable, and respectful. And he's not a fucking cheater! Also two, out of this group, he's the only vampire, we're all part of the shadow world, one is a warlock, and the rest of us are shadowhunters, we spend our entire lives dedicated to keeping mundanes such as yourselves safe so how about we let you go and you go on and live normal mundane lives while we do our jobs and actually protect you from demons and anyone else that goes rogue" I say, absolutely pissed that they would try to demean my family like that. I just squeeze Si's hand and look at my family, "let's just go home and leave them tied up". Magnus senses how hurt I am and opens a portal to straight to the institute and everyone walks through. As Simon and I are about to walk through I turn to look at the Winchesters one last time, I can sense that Sam managed to untie himself and before he begins to untie Dean, I tell them my final goodbye and to try not to look for us or there will be consequences.