#why yes. i AM stretching this out a whole bunch to cover multiple posts so i can slowly make up the missed week and have some back logged.

[morning-frost-daily]

Day 48

It's gonna be an oil painting

[raisans-art]

Been going through tonight's Chimera!Emmet posts, and I have a couple thoughts. First of all, your example of "If you chopped up a bunch of brains and sewed them together, you'd get a new consciosness" honestly might not be that accurate. Assuming someone did have the technology to make a functioning brain out of that, not only are brains kinda cracked on how much bullshit they' can they're capable of, it's surprisingly common for people to live almost completely normal lives with upwards of half their brains flat out missing; but having multiple identities sharing a brain space is a thing, as seem with Dissasociative Identity Disorder, though you might only know it as the outdated name of Multiple Personality Disorder. Ofcourse, none of that is accounting for how much psychological trauma such an operation would result in. And is completely powerless to the point of it being your AU, you can do whatever the hell you want. Other than that, I think it's sort of confusing to call this AU "Chimera Emmet AU" If Emmet's dead. It's not wrong per se, given that Emmet was used as part of the Chimera. But I feel the name implies that calling it "Chimera Emmet" implies that Emmet would still be in there somewhere. Sorry if all that came off as negative by the by. I mostly just wanted to talk about how damn weird our brains are, and why people might be confused about the relationship between Agee and what they used to be.

On your points:

1: this is pokemon so people's ability to do shit is significantly heightened. The idea is that just about every brain from every being in Agee contributed a part of each major sector of the brain therefore no real "ruling" on which part would (in an instance where all entities are conscious during activity) have greater standing.

Also, chopping up brains and sewing them together is not how the scientists literally made Agee. It's an example. In my little think-piece world (and please mind that I am working on limited knowledge and stretching a lot because none of this can actually happen), each brain was dissected, tested for certain responses, broken down, had their DNA sequences altered to a spliced and edited sequence via a man-made virus while the bodies were under immunosuppressants, and collected into a vat with some sciency goo that is full of embryonic stem cells that are stimulated to take the bits of the brain already provided and stitch all the necessary bits together using new cells. Is it unrealistic? Hell fucking yes it is but shshshshshsh don't worry. I monsterfied him. It's all gucci.

2: I'm fully aware DID's existence, don't get it twisted. And you are right, my story specifically involves Agee being their own being and not multiple personalities. It kinda ruins what I'm going for. I didn't make claim that multiple personalities can't exist in the same brain, just that it's certainly not happening here and definitely not happening solely in part to 4 different brains being frankensteined together, seeing as DID is a trauma response primarily and the majority of Agee's memory of what happened before consciousness is not really there.

3: Chimera Emmet AU is kinda grandfathered in at this point. The au started a whole lot differently. I even had an og name for Agee- Galemartross- that got totally scrapped in favor for Agee. Chimera Emmet AU is just meant to encapsulate the premise of the AU in an easily understandable way. Emmet. He's a Chimera now. Read more to find out what the fuck is going on. I just started with Chimera Emmet Au when I first drafted concepts and I'm not changing it now

Hope that covered everything =w=

[proherostories]

A Dragon for a Hotblooded Blond

AO3 LINK

WC - 1648

Archive Warnings - Rated T & No Archive Warnings apply. 

Pairing - BakuKiri/Poprocks

Summary -  After chaperoning his drunk friends the week prior, Bakugo decides to go back to the tattoo parlor they'd gone to all because a redhead caught his eye.

Notes - Red eyes don't exist in real life [sadly] so the use of a) contacts and b) tricks of the light were implemented

Written for "#writersmonth2020" from THIS POST

Day 1 Prompt = tattoo artist/flower shop AU

BTW - Never written Bakugo before so plz be gentle DX

To say Kirishima was surprised to see the hotblooded blond from last weekend was a severe understatement. 

He’d come in with a rowdy group of drunks, and while he had appeared to be the most sober of the bunch, he had a peachy tint to his face that he kept denying was the alcohol since he was supposedly the ‘designated driver’. Kirishima had doubted it, but he wasn’t about to push. He himself had driven home tipsy before, as stupid as it was and he would never condone it.

The blond had kept shouting at his friends to either ‘be quiet’ or he was telling them how dumb their tattoo choices were. It’d been hella funny, to watch them all go to the guy for approval and then cheer when all he said was ‘whatever’ or grunt. Calling back to the manga he had in his teenage years, Kirishima would’ve called him the ‘tsundere’ type hands down.

“Hey man,” Kirishima called to him, waving from the desk. It was a slow day so he was spending it organizing stuff. His co-workers Mina and Jiro were out after he’d told them to go home. No need for all three of them to be there when it was stupidly boring. Besides, he wanted Jiro to have all the time in the world to get ready for her date with a girl named Momo. Good on Jiro for landing a lady like that, hella.

‘Blond dude’ grunted back at him, and Kirishima only kept a passive eye on him. With how he’d kept his drunk friends in line he wasn’t worried about him being a thief or anything. “Something catch your eye last time? Didn’t peg ya for a tattoo sort of guy.”

“What makes you say that?” ‘blond dude’ sneered at him, his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket.

Kirishima only arched a brow at him and then shrugged, “Dunno. Guess it was how you seemed to give zero fucks, is all. What can I call ya?”

“The name’s Bakugo. What about you? Can’t keep callin’ ya ‘shitty hair’.”

A snort-laugh escaped the redhead, “Rude, I at least just referred to you as ‘blond dude’. My name’s Kirishima.” he flashed him a smirk and leaned back. His eyes, black hidden by red contacts, flicked up and down as he looked the other over. "So, I still gotta beg the question- you looking for a tat?"

That was where...Bakugo's demeanor seemed to change. Shifting and glancing around again with his lips pulled into a scowl. "What if I am? Anything you'd suggest, shitty hair?" 

"I gave you my name and ya still call me that? I'm hurt, Bakugo," he did a mock press of his hand to his chest but he stood up and stretched, sighing when there were a few pops. Sauntering over to an end table he found the binder that had all of his work and brought it to Bakugo, "Here, take a look at-" he cut off as he met the other man's eyes. Whoa, wicked! With the sun coming in from the window, it was catching on Bakugo's eyes, which were like a cinnamon brown and they were shining orange or a particular shade of red. 

It made Kirishima's breath catch even further when that peachy blush he remembered appeared, but he looked a mix of angry and flustered, brows pulled down and teeth bared, "What?! What were ya gunna say?!"

"Whoa, whoa, chill out," Kirishima put his hands up in defense, looking sheepish, "Your eyes looked really cool there for a sec, is all. I was going to say, have a look at what is in that binder. There's three people that do art here, so if nothing catches your attention then I'll give you another portfolio." 

"Where's yours?" Bakugo was looking less like he was going to bite his head off and he opened the portfolio.

"In your hands," Kirishima smirked before going back to his desk, adding a pop to his step. He was hoping he'd pick something from the first one, and had a feeling it was a challenge now to do so anyway. 

He had reached his destination when he was stopped, “Wait.” Bakugo was staring intently at a page in the binder, “You drew this?” he held it up with one hand and pointed at the drawing in question with the other. It was concept art rather than a finished tattoo piece, but it was a detailed Chinese-style dragon with a rendered head, horns and scales until it reached halfway down the body. That was where it started having curved cuts and breaks in a tribal style, the color of the scales fading out into the black simplicity tribal was supposed to be.

“I sure did. No one’s wanted it yet, it’s supposed to go on the arm to accommodate the winding of its body. People who come in wanting dragons tend to have different ideas in mind.” Kirishima tilted his head, curious but also his heart was suddenly pounding. It’d been in that portfolio so long, he’d contemplated taking out multiple times. He’d done it with other pieces that never got attention, but something always held him back from removing that one. The orange of it with tints of red and flecks of yellow always made him melt. He was a sucker for fire, and while yellow was hard to do in tattoos [something he learned along the way] he knew it wasn’t impossible.

“Can you do it, Kirishima?” Bakugo’s intensity hadn’t faded and Kirishima almost had a heart attack. Wow, was he crushing on this customer? He thought the banter was just good fun, but now he found he really wanted to try and make a good impression. “Even if you’ve never actually done it before, do you think you can now?”

He paused and looked between the drawing and back at Bakugo a few times. With a deep breath through his nose, he nodded, “Yes.” The confidence and the fact he hadn’t answered right away seemed to satisfy the blond, “When I first drew it a few years ago, maybe not. Now? Yes. I have the skills and the know-how, I can definitely do that piece justice.”

“How much? How does this work?” Bakugo joined him at his desk and set the portfolio down, then startled Kirishima by taking off his black jacket.

“Haha, well, I’d like to do a few touchups, and I’d have to solidify at least the outline so I can print and place it on your arm. This’ll give you time to think it-”

“I won’t change my mind, and we’ll do it on my right arm,” Bakugo was firm, holding out the length of his arm for him, “How big will it be?”

“Back to price real fast, the shop goes by time rather than how big or small a tattoo is. 75 dollars for half an hour as a baseline.” Kirishima laughed again but softer as he soaked in the sight. “Damn, man, you’re ripped. Do you have a heavy lifting job or do you just work out?” His touch was light as he took Bakugo’s wrist in his hand and pushed up the short sleeve. Glancing at the image then back at his arm he hummed thoughtfully.

Bakugo gave him a scoff with a smirk attached to it, “I do work out. I have a home gym. An actual one is too damn distracting and paying for a stupid pass is fucking useless with how busy I get.”

Kirishima snorted, “I getcha. I tend to go to a gym between here and my house.” He didn’t catch Bakugo holding his breath when he started tracing where he’d place the tattoo. The muscles were firm and nice to feel. He didn’t know why he was so aware of the other, but he was. Sure he’d had sexy guys and gals in his shop, but Bakugo was different somehow. “So I’d put the head of it here...go around like this, keep it out of the crease of your elbow of course...end it about here? I try and keep sleeve tattoos to the point where they can be covered by long shirts.”

Bakugo humphed, “Do whatever. I don’t care.”

“It’s going to take a lot of work, maybe two or three sessions. I’d suggest bringing a soda or a bag of chocolate, anything that’ll help keep your blood sugar up. Depending on your job and schedule, we can space it to accommodate. I’d do the whole outline first of course. Maybe black fill in next, and lastly the color.”

“Fine.” Bakugo put his sleeve down and moved to put his jacket back on, “I got the time to stay for now. You said you needed to make changes, so I’ll wait and see if I even like what you change.” He pulled his phone out, “You need my number for scheduling, right?”

“Sure do,” Kirishima was amused again and he walked around his desk to his computer, “Lemme bring up my calendar and we’ll get you set up, Bakubro.” He paused, “Ah, can I call ya that? It just slipped out, so-”

“Call me what you want.” Bakugo scoffed again, finding a chair to bring nearby so he could watch what Kirishima was doing, “Let me know when you’re done and I can look at it. Artists are picky about that sort of thing, aren’t they?”

“I don’t mind so much unless I’m embarrassed about it or keeping it a surprise,” Kirishima chuckled, booting up his programs after he put down Bakugo’s appointments and number, “I’m also glad you stayed. I like the company on a boring day like this.”

He noted that Bakugo didn’t respond besides a grunt, but he smiled anyway. Giddy and inspired, he pulled the tattoo design from the portfolio and got to work.

[flowing-paint]

Myth the boardgame. A review.

This post is going to be my very first review on the blog and it’s about a board game that in my opinion deserves way more attention. I am talking about the dreaded “Myth” designed and published by Megacon Games. This is also the first post of a small series because the subject is vast (at best) and I would like to cover it in the details. One thing that I would really like to point out is that I have no affiliation with Megacon Games (although I have many of their products) nor I took part in this game’s Kickstarter so all you will read is just my personal unbiased opinion. 

Well, enough said for the introduction, let’s move to the actual game review.

Myth, the board game.

All the reviews I’ve seen for this game almost always seem to agree on the fact that Myth is a cooperative dungeon delving kind of board game. However, I see this game from a slightly different perspective and I think calling Myth “a board game” is reductive. Yes, it comes with a lot of boards, tons of tokens and a whole bunch of cards in a big cardboard box but in that very same box there is more than meets the eye. You know..,? Many games happen to stand right in between the classic board game and a tabletop miniatures war game like, let’s say, Warhammer40k. They are usually called gateway games and Myth is definitely a kind of gateway game even though it elevates the concept to a totally different level. After diving into the game mechanics and starting to grasp the philosophy behind the game you will surely realize that this is a hybrid gateway game that stands on the vertex where board gaming, tabletop wargaming and role playing meet. And then it mixes all of them together creating a kind of experience that is very hard to reproduce with other games. But let’s try to analyze this game point by point.

What is it about

As I said, it’s a game where players cooperate to fight against grim hordes of minions manipulated by the evil will of the Darkness. How do you do that? Of course with you stereotypical fantasy heroes. But don’t let this turn you down: what you have in your hands is definitely a unique incarnation of said stereotype. In fact, each hero gets to draw from a special and unique set of hero cards that represent the limited actions available in the present turn and players must ensure they pull off the best combos to kill as many Darkness minions as possible. There is no “IgoUgo and then we throw a bunch of dice and count casualties”; people really need to sit down in a circle and try to figure out the best approach to the fight. It is therefore a cooperative game with a strong built-in strategic approach that will make your group thinking for the whole game. The heroes featured in the base game are the following:

Soldier: the tank in the game. Can deal massive damage to single or multiple targets

Acolyte: the healer of the group. He can also smash the enemies with his big hammer.

Archer: ranged attacks allow her (or him) to move around avoiding melee fights.

Apprentice: the magician of the group. He can manipulate the elements at will and deal a lot of damage.

Brigand: the Myth version of the thief. He can lurk in the shadows and strike hard and repeatedly. Probably the deadliest character.

The game comes with a dynamically sculpted miniature specific for each hero: if you go online and do an image search you can find some gorgeous paint jobs so that you can have an idea of the quality of the minis. If you are lucky enough you may also find the alternate gender heroes that came as a stretch goal in the Kickstarter… here is a combo picture of the original KS images where you can see a couple of the models.

According to all the stuff I covered up to this point, this is the part of the game that is closer to the board game spirit hence, a lot of people make their final decisions at this point: 5 players, tiles, cards, tons of tokens, a bunch of hero miniatures fighting random villains? This means “board game”. In my opinion, this is short sighted and you will understand why as we move further into game mechanics.

Darkness Mechanics

Myth puts you in control of your heroes but, unlike other games like Descent, there is no “evil player”. Instead, you have a sort of randomized AI mechanic that takes control of the bad guys for you. Basically what happens is that when you play a hero card it comes with a small cross-like icon in the bottom right corner that tells you how dangerous that action is (in terms of the so called Action Points) and if it puts you on the Darkness’ radar. If the total amount of AP you generated reaches 6, the darkness will activate and will do its thing. This does not immediately result in monsters attacking you as they may be too far away to notice your shenanigans. You have probably seen this in many video games if that’s your thing: just imagine you enter a big room in a dungeon and have some monsters minding their business on the other side. They don’t mind if you jump around or even cast spells on the distance as long as you avoid them. However, throw them a fireball and when they see some of their friends on fire, they will come at you. Pretty hard. And it’s not over: when you kill a bunch of bad dudes, your threat level rises and you will become more and more dangerous for the Darkness up to a point where the more intelligent enemies will start targeting you before other less dangerous heroes. If you keep with your bloodbath (threat level 10), the Darkness will eventually get really mad and throw top tier countermeasures at you, like mini-bosses or agents. That is something you do not really want to do.

I find this to be one of the most interesting and innovative mechanics in the game because it leaves you the freedom to decide how to approach the enemy. You can either go berserk (and get tons of Darkness activations and maybe a mini boss) or have a more stealth-like approach to keep the Darkness at bay more easily. You can dive straight into the battle or flank your enemies from the side if they haven’t noticed you to better coordinate with your team mates. It’s completely up to you to choose the strategy you think may fit better. These kind of things usually belong more to the miniature wargaming realm where on the contrary, board games tend to slightly limit your freedom to somewhat limit the game length. Myth leaves you with all the decisions and that’s why, in my opinion, it is a great gateway game.

Word exploration and tile population

Another aspect that puts Myth in a different category from your standard dungeon delving game is how the exploration of the dungeon itself is carried out. Usually when you start a dungeon delving game, you get a sort of preset scenario with enemy, token and treasure locations already fixed on the dungeon tiles. And again, probably the tiles themselves will probably have some fixed arrangement that will drastically limit your choices. In Myth you don’t even have a real reason to go out and fight the Darkness (unless you play modules. More on that later) as nobody tells you where to go and what to do. As a result all of these exploration/game setup matters needed a totally different approach and the guys at Megacon Games came up with the idea of legends on the world tiles.

This is a screenshot from the 2.0 Rulebook where you can see all the symbols you may find on world tiles. I won’t go into the details as you can look for them in the rulebook but as you can see they basically tell you how many treasures are available on the tile, if there’s a trap, monster hunting packs and so on. So, how do these come into play? Let’s imagine you and your friends heroes are having some mead in a tavern and then somebody comes up with an idea like: Guys! You know what? We should definitely go out and find some adventure where we can smash some critter and get some gold ー The dude is probably drunk but so are all of your team members so you just decide to head outside the town to look for adventure! Here’s the deal, you have to design your own adventure from this point on: you have to decide where you are heading in your quest for adventure so what you do is going through your reserve of world tiles and choose the one you think is appropriate as your first step. Here is where the icons come into play. If you have a quest symbol in your tile, this means you can decide to draw a quest card that would kickstart your adventure or maybe you decide that you just stumbled upon a grubbers camp that you then proceed to destroy. Whatever your decision regarding the world tile setup, none of the the icon is mandatory so it is you and your friends decision only. You can go as hardcore as you want. Or just loiter around the empty tile. Well, the loitering option is not good for you as you get affected by a penalty that lowers the total amount of available treasures for the rest of the campaign. But you get the idea: you get to write your own story with your own rules while still obeying to the global system rules. This is practically what happens when you play a role-playing game. You don’t need a dungeon master to drop monsters and events on you but instead you get to decide as a whole group what you guys want to do. I may be wrong but I have never seen this kind of mechanic in a board game and this makes Myth even more fascinating to me.

As I was expecting this post is growing pretty big so I just stop writing for now and split the post into two parts to avoid overloading this one. In the next post I will cover the aspects of the more boardgamy game mode (Modules) and the aspects of the campaign mode (the way your hero evolves) as well. Ah, and don’t forget the miniatures! I will also give a brief description of the two expansions belonging to Myth Journeyman and probably conclude with some final thoughts. So I guess I’ll see you next week! In the meantime,

... game on!