No more tears.

AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER (1957) dir. Leo McCarey

phantylia sketch to warm up bc she (and blade) is the only one in hsr who matters to me rn and i have to listen to her boss theme at least once a day 😔✌️

blade stelle haha

oh hey girl nice cage imagery you’ve got going on. anything you wanna talk abt??

Whumptober Alt No.5 - Body Modification

Honestly the fact that Sampo's not MORE BEAT UP speaks to either how lucky he is or how good he is at getting out of Nasty situations. But ya know. Maybe that luck runs out sometimes :)

-NO ROMANCE INCLUDED-

Today's mental image: Aventurine playing poker like he always does, but the real challenge is enduring the match with Ratio calculating probabilities in a stack of napkins while mumbling like a madman at his left and Stelle yelling "ALL IN! ALL IN! ALL IN!" at his right.

i need a fic abt kafka railing your brains out while she answers a call from blade talking abt missions n stuff while she covers your mouth w her hand to prevent you from making suspicious noises..

bonus points if blade gets kinda traumatized after realizing what his fellow hunter was doing at the moment (you)

(idk if this has alr been made so plz tag me when u see a fic like this <33)

robin and boothill should be besties. everyone thinks robin’s the soft, innocent one that needs to be protected but in actuality boothill’s the softie and robin is the one who is willing to kill for him

Okay so now that the Black Swan story quest has officially dropped the lore that Sampo IS in fact a part of the Masked Fools, I think now is the best time for me to present to you my thoughts on what Sampo's fool's mask should be.

Bear with me now, this is going to sound stereotypical, but I have my reasons. I think Sampo's mask should be that of a black cat.

Aesthetically? Flawless. It will make his green eyes pop, go great with the blue hair, and gives the designers an opportunity to give in to the slutty punk goth aesthetic they were kind of already cultivating.

Thematically, I think this is very appropriate because black cats, while nowadays mostly considered to be "bad luck" were initially more about the change of luck. If a black cat crossed your path, your luck would be fated to change, whether for better or worse. As he says, where there is business, there is Sampo. People with cash will suffer because he will sell them junk. People in a bad situation can be taken right out of it by Sampo, but may have to pay a price. He brings luck and he takes it away with a clever word and a flick of the wrist. To a certain degree, encountering Sampo in the story has consistently been in line with this notion! We were having a good time exploring when we found him in the snow, and he got us into an altercation with the Silvermane Guards. Later when we were in a really bad pinch trying to escape Bronya and the guards, he whisked us away (along with Bronya, changing her luck in the process too). When we were in need of a guide to the surface willing to get us in touch with Serval? Sampo to the rescue. Trouble with stolen artifacts during the museum event? Sampo was at the source. Still need help at the museum? Sampo is your man. One can even argue that our luck turning sour on Penacony only started happening after encountering Sparkle disguised as Sampo which can count if you want. Either way, Sampo is a tricksy little creature and luck follows silently in his invisible footsteps.

Therefore I think black cat imagery suits him very nicely, especially with his whole slinking around through dark alleys and knowing the ins and outs of places and always carefully eluding situations that could end poorly. Probably has nine lives and claws to deal with anything he can't wiggle out of. Just as willing to steal scraps as he is to indulge in given treats. Terribly charming in that same way that cats who know they've caused you trouble are, making huge innocent eyes at you until you shoo them off with a sigh. Always capable of appearing when you least expect it and turning the whole situation on its head.

Point is, in my humble opinion, they need to give Sampo a black cat aesthetic for his Fool form because I think it is classic and fits him.

yaoi and yuri all at once

back view

YUKONG Helm Master of the Xianzhou Alliance's Sky-Faring Commission

She likes licking her!!

ONE CHANCE PLEASE IM ON MY HANDS AND KNEES

pov: you lost 50/50

Connecting dots tonight (didn't connect shit, I've connected them, etc) because of this post about item descriptions to do with Sampo I saw a few days ago and! I feel like there are so many interesting things that could be implied from this!! Because the recipe for the High-Tech Protective Gear is given to you by Bronya (before the IPC invaded Belobog!), who says this little interesting tidbit about it:

This is an item from before the Eternal Freeze, 700 years ago. Even to the rest of the universe, it would be SORELY outdated. It cannot be made in Belobog anymore due to the loss of entire eras. It is effectively useless; this recipe had to be somewhere gathering dust, kept around solely for archival purposes. There is no reason for Sampo to know about this item or have any idea how it works and yet. AND YET. He's just running around selling knock offs!!

He shouldn't even know how to make these, but the fact that he does means Sampo either

had the blueprints from off-world before he came to Belobog (most likely but also most boring answer)

broke into Qlipoth Fort and copied down the blueprints (completely plausible - he's possibly shown doing exactly that in his splash art)

found another copy out in the ruins of the old world (also completely plausible - Sampo is astoundingly resilient against both the Fragmentum and the cold, as noted by Lynx haha)

Meanwhile, the Inferior Protective Gear recipe comes from an NPC in the underground, and when she gives it to you, she talks about building robots and the robot fighting scene sorry about the quality I didn't have screenshots for her dialogue so I had to use wiki

Which makes me feel like it's safe to say that the inferior gear is mostly being used in the underground, especially by the vagrants and their robots for fights, because...well, who else would use it? Cocolia has made it illegal to explore too far into the Snow Plains, and besides, it's way too dangerous for most civilians even WITH gear. The Silvermane Guards are funded by official sources, they have no reason to rely on Sampo for armor. So it makes sense for an underground mechanic to know the recipe; there's probably not as much market for it up in the overworld.

And if you look at the descriptions, you can see why this probably wasn't something that could be made in Belobog anymore; it requires a charging system of some sort.

We know it's not a problem with the basic materials because all three ingredients can be found right in the administrative district. But the underground only has two of them; somehow, despite being in the planet's crust, and literally crawling with robots...there is no metal down there. It isn't found anywhere, sold by anyone, or dropped by anything. And metal just so happens to be the one ingredient Sampo replaces in his knock off version.

The Inferior Gear uses trash instead, something which, going by the words of that same mechanic, is MORE than abundant in the underground- any good quality parts are extremely difficult to come by down there.

Anyway, all his shadiness aside, I love the implication that Sampo is smart enough to be able to take this item that no one else on the planet probably knows anything about, and was able to figure out what he could replace, and how, and with what, in order to make it easily accessible to the people of the underground, even without access to overworld resources. Because his version DOES work! It literally gives you the exact same amount of defense boost as the IPC one!

Someone should absolutely still knock him around for it, though, world's most slappable face fr fjkdsjfdkjafk