*"A TEST OF YOUR REFLEXES" followed by the sound a dodgeball makes when it hits you*

Last line written

"I'm not strong," she whispers. "I'm not strong at all."

Tagged by @endangered-liaison and @sergiusreports way, waaaaay back. Whoops. Not tagging anyone specifically since All The Shit Ever is about to hit the fan in about two hours RPwise, but whoever wants to do it, knock yourself out.

Dawn of the Final Day

how grateful i am to not be a teenager during the era of tiktok

oh no!!!

one of my favorite glados gags is she keeps pretending she went places. she's like i went outside today. girl you did not go anywhere.

be sure to leave out milk and cookies for brutus tonight

this is the pinnacle of humanity nobody will EVER be able to top this

Prompt #21: Crunch

They had time to prepare for the assault on Imperatoris. That still didn’t mean they were ready for it, when it came.

They’re understrength, spread too thin. Even as they retreated from castrums and castellums, their forces being brought together - too much of their legion was in Doma. They won’t have enough forces brought together until they reach Ala Mhigo, and by then they’ll have lost too many to hold out.

Max looses an arrow, striking a Lominsan soldier in the abdomen. He drops, and she looses the next at his Ala Mhigan pal. It hits her shoulder, and she follows it up with a third shot.

To her 7 o'clock, she hears the crack of oen DeMeer’s rifle again, and one of the more heavily-armoured adventurers who was attacking Cato goes down. That was a pretty good shot.

Not that she’d tell him that.

She clicks on her vox. “Meer, relocate.”

He’s on a catwalk of one of the supporting legs of Imperatoris, hunkered down.

In reply, he fires another two shots, dropping two more Alliance troops.

She spots a thaumaturge on the black lines, channelling something big. Her eyes widen and she aims in on them, loosing an arrow. It bounces from their barrier, cracking it and breaking it apart…but not stopping their cast.

“DeMeer, move, NOW!”

She slips her bow on to her back and leaps from her own vantage point. One of her feet lands on a fallen shield, and she stumbles slightly on the landing.

The thaumaturge casts, and the size of the blast knocks her to the floor.

She feels lightheaded as she lifts herself and looks towards the sniper nest. “DeMeer?”

No response. The nest has been totally annihilated by a Flare.

Fuck.

She staggers her way to her feet, drawing her combat knife. “Status report.”

“Bunch of Resistance arseholes made it into the tower from the west side! We’re holding north, barely!” one of the twins gives the response; Max doesn’t pay attention to which one.

Max curses and spins the blade in her hands, moving towards the north of Specula Imperatoris’s grounds, by the gate.

One of the recent conscripts - she doesn’t even remember his name, the poor bastard - gets hit by a greatsword. She charges the blade’s owner, leaping at them and jamming her knife into their chest. They fall to the floor from her weight and momentum, and she stabs a few more times before climbing to her feet.

There’s too many. They’re spread too thin.

Always spread too thin.

She sheathes the blade and draws her bow again, quickly nocking an arrow and launching it into a charging Lalafell’s neck. Another shot. Another.

“III! Pull back to Imperatoris proper! Hold the narrower ground!” Max yells over the din of battle, shooting again and again.

She’ll cover their retreat.

Another shot.

Another.

Another.

A Limsan slips through her overwatch, swinging an axe at her head.

“ARTILLERY! INCOMIIIING!”

Then the heavens weep.

_

((Placing the rest under a readmore - trigger warnings for gore, blood, descriptions of severe injury/death, and vomiting.))

Keep reading

Specula Imperatoris

A tower comes falling down.  Parts: 1 [2] 3

2 - Floor 36

Set during events of Stormblood - CW: Strong language, war, loss

“Oh fuck,” Oliver says.

The elevator’s blocked. Troops have priority, and they’re packing down.

“Oh fuck,” he repeats.

Papers are scattered everywhere. A spilled cup of coffee rolls across the floor, staining the rug brown.

“Oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck.”

Keep reading

would you still love me if you untied the green ribbon wrapped around my neck

Specula Imperatoris

A tower comes falling down. Parts: [1] 2 3

1 - Smoke Break

Set during events of Stormblood - CW: Strong language, war, loss

The cloudless skies stretch on, near-infinite over Gyr Abania’s natural splendor. Specula Imperatoris mars it.

The monstrous watchtower spindles over the skyline and casts a constant shadow over the land, as black as the metal it’s made out of, and today, a pair of slackers goof off at its peak. Only specially authorized employees are allowed to be up this high, but Oliver Jen Luti has his ways. With the outside breeze blowing strongly against their cheeks, he and his guest enjoy the view while idiotically trying to get a cigarette to catch in the wind.

Keep reading

Clue: The Movie’s multiple endings are fucking classic and i will stand by that fact until the day that i die, but hearing that they only played one ending each in the theatrical release is the funniest fucking thing ever. imagine seeing a great movie and going to talk about it with your friends/family/coworkers but none of you can agree on how it ended. and they did this in 1985, the absolute madmen

Let's see some fluff between Victoria and her dad! :D

[Late evening on Starlight Day, in a battered industrial town to the east of the Imperial capital, where the mills have moved on but the residents have lingered.] Titus hasn't put up decorations in the last few years. It's just such a production, you see. You wrangle the tree into the house. You dig the boxes out of whatever crammed-full closet you've stashed them in. You dig through the boxes, through a great Gordian knot of tangled string lights and shedding tinsel. You carefully extricate the ornaments and drape the tree full of glittery baubles and cheerful snowmen and kindergarten popsicle-stick snowflakes and a miraculously intact glass pickle, given as a bachelor-party joke before your short and abortive marriage. You sit down to wrap, run out of tape, nick yourself somehow on the kitchen scissors, and scramble not to bleed on what you're wrapping, like a fantasy anthology, or goofy fluffy slippers shaped like dogs, or two tickets to Madama Butterfly since pricing gave you one of two choices and you figured Tosca was slightly more inappropriate for a ten-year-old, maybe. Titus cen Castellus hasn't put up decorations since the letter from the XIIth that said they regret to inform him. Titus cen Castellus hasn't bothered wrapping gifts since then either. His daughter will never come home to open them. So he puts on a smile and goes to work and makes sure the equipment is in good condition and the broadcast is loud and clear and no one's been stripping copper for scrap and all day through his mind screams and screams and screams behind the charm and wit and bonhomie. And then he goes home and drinks and the smoking, melting, hurting-whimpering-broken-animal parts of his brain gutter out for as long as he can keep up the buzz, and that makes it a little bit better, if he doesn't go up in her room or look at the pictures on the mantel or the handful of trophies on a shelf nearby. Much better then. Starlights and birthdays and deathdays he has to work a little harder, but that's what his sick days are for. He makes it work, or he did before the war. Now he just sits and waits, bottles empty and shotgun close at hand, clawing panic just barely beaten down, because just because everything hurts doesn't mean he wants to die yet. He can't handle looking at the idea of dying, or twisting broken-jointed into a beast of despair, or losing himself in blind service to their monstrous, rotting emperor-eikon. Titus has to be around. Titus has to remember her. No one else will. Titus just sits and waits and rigs the cans and wires and bottle rockets and bear mace and pipe bombs. No matter how perverse and pointless, no one will be his end except himself. The taut twing of a broken wire and clatter of cans interrupts his slow circling of the mental drain. Too close to the house. There are at least four layers of tripwires or alarms or potentially lethal booby traps between their his house and the nearest little cluster of two-beds-and-1.5-baths and one of them has just been dealt with. Twing-clatter. Who broke it? Or what? What is out there waiting for him? Man or monster or worse or-- Titus is calmly (not calm he's never calm you spineless trembling fuck so bloody useless) loading the second shell into his grandfather's 12-gauge when the thing that broke the wire knocks hesitantly on his door. Hesitantly. Adverb. In a manner suggesting shut up brain shut up shut up shut UP-- Knock knock. He racks the shotgun. Silence at the door. Maybe it's gone. Maybe he wasn't worth it (he was never worth it ha ha ha) maybe he's fucking alone again with the windows boarded and the house dark dark too dark. Knock... ...knock. "Fuck off," hisses Titus, his voice small and raspy-reedy from isolation and the thin spiny skin of anger that he drapes sloppily over fear. Nothing but the smell of gun oil and his own ragged panic-breathing and the creak of wood under shifting boots on the porch outside before the mind-rotted telofilth on his doorstep knocks again oh-so-gently.

Nothing but the gun and the fear and the beast and the little wisps of smoke he swears he's been seeing in all the rooms he won't smoke in (smoking in the house is gross, Dad) and it doesn't matter. Not a fucking bit. Not now with the sky on fire and the Empire shattered and his daughter gonegonegonegone so he cradles the shotgun in one arm and yanks the door open. Maybe it's Jules, he thinks at first, with the strong nose and jawline and sort of honed steeliness he lacks. Or maybe a tempered, with the half-gone ear and the scars and the too-dead haunted look. Or maybe it's his own face he's seeing, with the trembling lip and too-bright blue-grey eyes and the slouch in the shoulders that means that the tears will come, they just need a nudge that doesn't care if it's cruelty or compassion. "Dad," says the monster on his porch, in a halting voice he knows - five years dead, now five years deeper. Grown. Not sixteen and cracking with anxiety at every moment of attention.Still right, still her-- Titus lets the shotgun's barrel drift down to point floorwards, his finger slipping off the trigger, and his lips part to form a name-- "Dad," says Victoria again, pained and guilty, and whatever careful explanation for her alleged death she might make crumples with her self-control at whatever she sees in his face. "Dad, I'm sorry--" Titus cen Castellus sets his gun on the side table and wraps his daughter in a hug as she breaks down in tears. The questions, he decides as the wave of relief crushes him into racking sobs, can come later. Right now, everything else can wait.

Hey, can y’all rb this if it’s okay to send you messages asking about your ocs, cause on god I wanna interact with y’all but I am terrified of being annoying lol

On the Street Where You Live

[Done in response to this prompt by @tea-and-conspiracy.] Julija pauses in shoveling the snow from her doorstep to fumble for the lighter in her coat pocket with hands numb from cold even through her gloves, cigarette already dangling loosely from her chapped lips. The stoop's only half-clear and filling in as she watches. This is Garlemald, after all: land of snow, smog, and bitter disappointments. The groceries are in the icebox. Masha can wait for her walk another few minutes. What's a quick break? The snow won't wait for her. She'll clear it when she's fucking done and it’ll come back anyway. She's not above being petty, though, so her break can be under Mercius's window and his infuriatingly loud radio. Let him bitch about the smoke if he's home. No one will care, least of all not her. A curse, a stiff-fingered hand flexed into compliance, a few flicks of the lighter, a deep breath in, and a long plume blown into the cracked window. Always the fucking radio. Home Beyond the Horizon, over and over, the same way it's been since everything fell apart (again). Fucking perpetual. Incessant. Like he's doing it on purpose, just to piss her off. He probably is. He hates her. Gods know she hates him too, the son of a bitch. Julija takes a last long drag, spews a draconic gout of smoke through the window, and grinds the butt of her cigarette underfoot alongside one of Mercius's precious fucking rhododendrons. Let him throw a fit when he spots it. He can't prove a damn thing, or do anything if he could conjure up proof. A sharp, savage little flick of satisfaction warms her for a moment, and with it comes a flutter of fleeting maybes. Maybe she should try to go finish the degree deferred when the Royal College of Law burned during the shelling. Maybe she should find that foolish boy on the motorbike if he's not dead or too broken to remember her. Maybe she should find her-- And what could you do at a Garlean university? A Bozjan with no transcript, no dignity, no respect? Mop the floors? What’s the point? There's no chance you'll finish and they're better off without you. Both of them are. If they weren't then, they damn well are n-- The scream comes from outside and in, from the tower lancing into the sky and from her own burned-bitter brain, digging in with sickle talons and a command  - KNEELSERVEOBEY - that cleaves her mind into wet quivering slices until she's leaning on her shovel for support, shaking as though she's been dragged from a freezing lake. The radio plays on, even as she heaves for breath too hard and too fast and her thoughts bleed sludgelike back together and her jackass neighbor lurches up the street, home too early. "Hey," she pants, as he turns slowly to face her. "Hey--" Hey, what the fuck was that? What the fuck just happened to me? Where the fuck were you, asshole? "Hey," she manages again, and his blank blue-glowing eyes don't register until Masha goes berserk behind her, frenzied throaty snarls and claws gouging wood and a heavy whump as her silly lazy dog hurls herself bodily at the closed front door and that makes it finally click that this whole thing is wrongwrongwrong-- "Glory be to Garlemald," slurs Mercius, booze heavy on his breath, and lunges with both work-hardened hands towards her throat. Julija clamps her shaking fingers around the haft of the shovel and swings. The blade catches Mercius across the face with a heavy iron crunch, and even as he drops to all fours, dribbling blood and bits of teeth from slack lips, he's still hurling himself single-minded towards her like an animal, eyes nothing but blind blue burning. Julija swings again and again and again until he's a still lump in the snow and her face and coat are spattered red. The radio plays on. Masha's enraged snarling trails away into a whine as Julija fumbles for the keys. Too slow, too slow, her brain's not working, her fingers aren't working, she wasn't too slow beating a man to death with a shovel so where are her keys where are her fucking keys-- And she's inside, shovel clutched in one hand as she crumples on her welcome mat, back pressed to the door as Masha whines again, smearing Julija’s glasses with a wet tongue as she licks Gnaeus bas Mercius's blood from her face. Take the dog with you, says her father, thirty years and half a world ago, standing in the yard with the high stone fence and the crooked apple tree as Imperial guns thunder in the distance, before they rounded him up as Resistance and threw him in a pit with a bullet in his head outside a village whose name she never managed to learn. Go. Before they get here. Three wars and the howl of a newborn god later, the eyes of the risen faithful turning to burning blue pinpricks in the dark on every street in every town in all of Garlemald, she listens one last time. With Masha’s leash in one hand and her bloodied shovel gripped tight in the other, Julija aan Vukovic slips away into the winter night.