#and Of Course this is going off of their Physical Puppet heights and not their character heights | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lin-nin · 3 years

Note

Headcanons for maybe they cause the reader's death? Like in an accident / generally not on purpose. Maybe they're in the middle of a battle and when they try to strike their opponent, their s/o is shoved in front and is the one that they hit instead? I just want angst :DD. Maybe for Techno, Schlatt, Dream, and Bad? Thanks!

heaOOOH ANON, YOU KNOW ME SO WELL. I LOVE WRITING ANGST ITS CHEFS KISS MWAH. I WILL GLADLY WRITE YOU SOME ANGST LOVIE. THESE ALSO CAME OUT MORE LIKE MINI ONE-SHOTS Warnings: Death, Gore, Coerced Suicide (BadBoyHalo)

Techno accidentally killing his S/O

Techno was always so easily caught up in battle. The way the voices chanted and demanded blood, he was quick to give in in the heat of the moment. Doomsday was no different, truly. Hell, he was eager for doomsday, and you had been too. You wanted to cause the chaos. It was only when you were off of the obsidian grid, moving to take down whoever you could with your axe. You and Techno didn’t always keep an eye on each other in the field. You just checked in on one another after, tending to the other as needed. He mainly checked in on you, as you often suffered the worst injuries in battle. You hadn’t heard his rocket launcher fire, ears full of the ringing and chaos and explosions of battle. No, you didn’t realize it until you had moved towards his target, the firework hitting you square in the back.

Techno swore everything was in slow motion then. The way your body flung into Tommy, slipping onto his sword that he had raised in the process to counter you. It impaled you, and he couldn’t see the look on your face. The voices in his head screamed and he was moving without thought, your name spilling from his lips, barely audible over the roar of battle. Tommy looked stunned, letting himself get shoved away once the older man came over, cradling you. You were covered in blood, seeping through your wound and shirt. He didn’t realize he was crying until you shushed him, reaching up to cradle his face.

“Don’t worry,” you had reassured, wiping at his tears and only managing to smear blood over the fur there. “This isn’t my last life. We have plenty of time together, just wait a few days. I’ll be back.” You would cough, making blood spurt from your lips as it bubbled into your throat. Techno could only helplessly watch as the remnants of you life drained from your eyes. This would put you on your final life.

The rest of doomsday was spent relentlessly slaughtering everyone who even looked at him wrong. He was inconsolable. When he returned to his cabin, and you finally came back- with new scars from both the firework and Tommy’s sword, he quickly deteriorated again. He struggled to voice how he felt- that it was his fault that you had been tossed into the blade and killed. He did, however, become fiercely protective of you. He would constantly give you armor and repair it, making sure you were fed and your weapons were the best. For whenever he would allow you back into battle and chaos.

Schlatt accidentally killing his S/O

Schlatt never had many on his side. You, though? You were always there for him. Originally a body guard he had hired, only to find a best friend and lover in you. A confidante. You may not have approved of each of his decisions, but you still protected him. He wasn’t necessarily a fighter, preferring to play the role of puppet master. You acknowledged that when it came to battle, you were a puppet.

It inevitably had already cost you two of your lives. You had no idea if it was intentional or not.

It was when Pogtopia came to attack that you were worried. Schlatt hadn’t been looking good. He had been drinking so much, seeming distant. Withdrawn. Even though you loved him, you struggled to get through to him. You stood at his side as you watched the chaos, gripping the hilt of your sword. Prepared to deflect at any given moment.

Tommy had found the pair of you first, and you easily preoccupied yourself with countering him. Only to feel yourself get whipped around, Schlatt’s hand familiar on your arm. Just for an arrow to lodge itself into your windpipe. You choked and gasped, feeling the blood invade your throat. Had you been warned, you could have put up your shield. Which had clattered to the ground with your sword. You had expected him to be pulling you from danger. Not putting you into it.

“No, no, no, stop it. Don’t you fucking die on me. Don’t you dare!” His voice rung in your ears. It was denial. So full of denial. As if the arrow in your windpipe had sobered him entirely. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. Stop! Fucking stop, you can’t leave. You aren’t allowed!” You gazed up to him with a weak smile, resting one hand on top of his.

“I won’t.... leave without you.... Don’t.... leave me waiting,” Your words were choked, interrupted by bubbling gasps. You would pause to cough up blood, gagging and choking on it with each breath and word. He dropped your body when you stopped breathing, standing up with his jaw set and an ache in his chest he didn’t want to identify. He didn’t keep you waiting, surrendering in the battle before succumbing to his failing health. The afterlife, though cold, was a little warmer and more humorous with him there.

Dream accidentally killing his S/O

Dream loved you with a passion so fierce it felt like the flames from the fire of it would often engulf you. The protection he gave to you, the way he often spoke to you or held you. It wasn’t bad, it was just always much fiercer than you ever anticipated. This translated to everything, too. He fiercely encouraged you to fight with him, but not to the point of getting yourself killed.

You weren’t always too good at following those words.

You had lost your first life fighting against L’Manberg. Not a direct cause from Dream, though. Just carelessness on your behalf. After that, he hovered near you during fights. Making sure you didn’t die. You didn’t mind. It at least showed how much he loved you, right?

Of course, he said all he cared about was the discs. When questioned about you, despite his hesitance, he had insisted you meant nothing to him with the same ferocity as before. It had hurt, cutting deeper than any blade before. You left, with Sapnap and George. You didn’t know where that had left the two of you, but you knew you couldn’t be near him and his delusions.

It’s how you ended up against him on Doomsday, staring him down atop the grid. The wind whipped at you and he pointed his crossbow at you. You didn’t blink, even as it loosed and shot the bolt into your leg. You had lost your balance, tumbling off of the grid with encouragement from the wind. You had narrowly missed the edge of the growing crater, thankful for the protection of your armor.

Only for the explosives raining down to knock the land from beneath you. You were sent tumbling down into the crater, landing on your neck. You had no recollection of it, no understanding of the horror he felt at watching you fall from such a height. He didn’t need to be told it was fatal. He hated himself for it. For what he had caused. Because, despite his words, he did still love you.

It wasn’t until you visited him in the prison, a nervous twitch in your hands as result from the fall, staring him down, it came crashing down on him. He had ruined you. “I wish he killed you. I wish I could kill you.” Your voice was cold, and you raised your hand to demonstrate the constant tremor caused by the neurological damage. You couldn’t kill him if you tried. You could barely hold a sword.

“I would deserve it.”

Bad accidentally killing his S/O

(Warning for suicide coercion)

You absolutely adored Bad. And He, you. That much was obvious. Life with him was fairly good, too. Mostly peaceful, and pleasant. The occasional bits of chaos, but so long as it didn’t directly affect you, you didn’t care. It usually didn’t, and you were content with that. Content to help others and stay neutral as needed. Until the appearance of the egg, of course.

You hated it. It made you uncomfortable, in a way that had your head ringing and chest feeling tight. You would avoid it as much as possible. You only came to dislike it more as it affected Bad. The way he didn’t make himself seem so small anymore, towering to his full height. The way he would kill a person over the egg, if it told him to. It was all so much.

Yet at the end of the day, he always came back to you and seemed almost like your Bad. Almost.

“Cupcake, give it a chance,” Bad had insisted one day, pulling you towards where the egg was. Even if you wanted to fight him on it, you couldn’t. Not physically.

“Bad, I told you. I don’t like it, it makes me feel... wrong.” This hadn’t been the first time the two of you spoke of this. Yet he insisted. The two of you had bickered until he tugged you into the building, unceremoniously pushing you towards the drop. Despite your protests, you fell in. Everything immediately felt wrong as you came close to it, the whispers of it not new. You had heard them before.

Yet it was vile as always, causing you to claw at the room in attempt to leave. Until it was all too much. There was one way out of this that you could see, even if it would cost you dearly. You sought out the vines of the egg, using them to rid yourself of your current life, much to the egg’s encouragement.

When you were free, you were different, the patterning of the vine clearly visible on your neck. You had packed up all of your important things, leaving Bad a note and going as far away from the influence of the egg as possible. Bad was clearly distraught upon finding the note. He looked for you for a long while, but always came back to the egg. At least, if the egg helped him bring peace to the entire place, he could get you back. Right? That was the newest goal. Bring peace and bring you back to him.

#Anonymous #badboyhalo #dream #schlatt #technoblade #technoblade x reader #schlatt x reader #dream x reader #badboyhalo x reader #tw suicide #tw death #tw gore #headcanon

755 notes · View notes

spotsupstuff · 3 years

Text

old short thing, but like... had a convo with friend n got reminded of this lil bitch

Warnings: discussion of incmoning death, helplessness, discussion of failing organs (kinda sorta, but yes??)

"I think I’m dying."

Those words scared them more than anything else. They've faced open jaws of lizards three times their size, they've climbed impossible heights with spears stuck in their flesh. They've seen hell. They've gone through hell themself. And yet the thing that makes something get stuck in their throat are those words.

"I think I’m not going to last as long as I thought I would..." The way the green iterator says it sends chills down their spine. It's so calm and collected. It makes their head spin.

"I am falling apart from the inside, my hearts are stopping, the rain is no longer coming as strongly as once before." The hunter thinks they might throw up.

Instead of doing that, they scratch at the mechanical arm suspending the puppet way above them, letting out a low whine. The other looks down to them. His face emptier than anything they've seen before. It's a careful, planned out sort of nothingness.

The machine lowers himself down to them. Falling onto his knees weakly. Shoulders squared, eyes looking somewhere away, fists clenched.

It's scary. It's so so scary. The hunter is shaking as deep as their core goes, mouth agape, own eyes open wide.

They are somewhat bigger than the puppet. They are stronger, when it comes to physicality. But it's been an age since they've learned that the something sitting in front of them is not all that is to their... adoptive parent. There's meters and then kilometers, there's tons upon tons, impossibilities stacked on top of each other. That's him. That's all entirely him and they are just a little speck of dust lingering in his chamber way more than anything else ever has.

It's laughable, it's so ridiculous that the hunter matters at all. But they do and they love the machine that took them away from the edge of death, that let them cling onto him when they were little and still terrified of the world.

The hunter loves the iterator. The hunter loves him more than the cosmos, than the stars, than the earth. The hunter knows that the iterator feels the same, that he harbors love for them in a way his kind wasn't designed to do. That he loves them as his child, as something more precious than the golds of life.

Which is why they reach out.

A scarred hand, wickedly sharp claws rest on the others shoulder. Slowly they slide up to his cheek, because that's what he used to do to them back when they were still trying to achieve better control of their limbs. Black eyes stare into pure purple ones and that's when the dam breaks. That's when he crumbles, shoulders falling down.

He won't cry, but the hunter still pulls him against themself. They let him wrap his arms around them tightly. They hold each other oh so dearly.

"You are dying. Faster than me."

Of course they are. He's ancient, he's meant to last even when his brain parts are scattering through his body.

"You are dying so quickly-" he says, panic filling his face, brows shooting high. The disbelief in his voice is what gets them the most. How...... how come he didn't see this outcome? How come he couldn't predict-

"No- no no no no- you are- you are just- just like her," the panic rises, his breath quickens and their stops for a while as if they were diving deep underwater. "You are- you are going to end up just like her, I-"

That is known to them both. There's something ugly inside of them, something disgusting festering their insides that doesnt let them become something more.

Of course the iterator has not seen this coming. He didn't want to look.

The hunter curls up tighter on the floor, hugging their own tail closely as their muscles spasm, as they think their heart will stop beating, their lungs rupture. His metallic feet clink against the chamber’s floor as he lowers to them again.

The sash around his waist comes off and he puts it over them, just like he did when they shivered in the cold of night embosomed by walls of steel when they were smaller and more pathetic. It brings them comfort, it makes their pulse calm down.

Then he pulls them into his lap, settles their head comfortably onto his thigh. Things become easier like that. Things become more certain. That he's got them. He has his hands in their fur, his systems buzzing all around them. The sound of safety encompassing them, lulling them into something like sleep, so he can think of a solution and a new way.

They don't want to be let go of again... he won't let go...

#Rain World #rw #rw no significant harassment #rw nsh #rw the hunter #my writing #augh short but yknow i actually wrote this on a whim in my personal discord server #so like. the fact that its Almost 800 is astounding to me jsdglks

90 notes · View notes

starkerforlife6969 · 4 years

Text

To Be a Widow Part 2

starker, winter spider thanks again to the wonderful @wandering-night19

Peter’s past three husbands have all died under suspicious circumstances. Detective Stark was convinced that pretty Peter had something to do with it, but more and more lately, Peter’s dangerously loyal butler Bucky has become his prime suspect..read the OG post here and my part 1 to this here

The ropes binding him are impeccably knotted. No doubt, then, that Barnes has done this before.

It doesn’t stop him from testing them, from flexing his wrists and seeing if there’s any give at all, any sort of slack, any sign from God that he’s looking out for the loveable genius that is Detective Tony-

“Stark’s a liability.” Barnes hisses, voice tight and furious, even as his hands wrap bandaging over Peter’s wrist. Tony had barely even scratched him in his attempt to flee, but Bucky trails his fingers over Peter’s skin like he’s handling some precious gem, some delicate flower.

Peter sits on the edge of his bed, swinging his feet and humming. “I think we can reign him in.”

Bucky kisses Peter’s now bandaged wrist, slipping down onto one knee like a knight before his King. “He hurt you.” He beseeches quietly, almost a whine, an attack dog, a wolf, desperate to avenge his master.

Peter strokes his fingers through Barnes’ hair, soothing, the same move he used on Tony. “James...”

“Just let me-” he cuts off, a shuddering whimper, and Tony frowns, straining to see and- ah. Peter’s slipper clad foot is pressed into Bucky’s groin.

Tony feels hot under the collar, and he pulls hard on the restraints once more. Something creaks at the back of the chair and he freezes, but those honey eyes are on him. Peter smiles.

“James wants to hurt you, Tony,” Peter sighs, fingers tugging at Bucky’s hair, loving but firm. “He’s very protective of me, you know.”

“Yeah,” Tony pants, “I guessed as much.” There’s no getting out of his through brute force. Even if he managed to get out of the rope, Barnes has got a few feet on him, and Peter’s spry and nimble and surprisingly strong. “So,” if in doubt, talk it out, “you two are...”

“It’s not so much about us,” Peter drawls, “it’s much more about me. I’m trying to expand my business, Detective.”

“What business?”

“B Enterprises.”

“Never heard of them.”

Peter beams at that, getting to his feet, long silk robe of red trailing after him. He heads over to his desk, covered in important looking documents and lethal, heavy paper weights. He pours himself some scotch and toasts Tony. “Exactly. We operate in a...” Peter muses for a moment, “in a less than official capacity, I’ll admit. But we needed money. I got us some.”

“You’ve killed three people-”

“I haven’t killed anyone, Tony.” He hums sweetly. “But of course, all that aside, we do have a bit of problem now, don’t we?”

Tony swallows hard. “You gonna kill me?”

“Nonsense.” Peter waves him off, “I propose we all sleep on it. James?”

Tony barely has a second to register the grin on Bucky’s face, before he’s being hit by something blunt.

***

In the morning, sunlight trickles in.

It appears the cold spring has left then, and the beginning a of new summer threatens.

Tony blinks the black spots out of his vision, body aching. He’s still in Peter’s bedroom, still bound to a chair in the corner of the lavishly furnished master suite. Peter’s fast asleep, chest rising and falling, the height of comfort, no fear or concern creased into his angelic face.

Tony jerks when he realises Bucky is standing no less than two feet away from him: watching.

“Jeez,” Tony mutters into the quiet, trying to slow his pulse, “do you not sleep?”

“I will rip you apart.” Bucky whispers, looking like a spring about to burst.

Okay, maybe another way out. Not brute force, but finding a groove and digging. He can do that. “Sure,” he nods, “except pretty boy won’t let you. Keeps that leash on pretty tight, huh?”

Bucky says nothing to that, but his eyes are ice blue. Piercing.

Tony prods a little more. “You know, just because he didn’t have a physical hand in the killings doesn’t mean we can’t convict. We can still-”

He words are cut off suddenly when Bucky’s hand wraps around his throat, air immediately deprived, he starts to panic, can barely hear Bucky hissing into his ear. “You ever even dare hurt him I will rip you into pieces, I will-”

“Oh, James,” comes a sleepy sigh, and Tony’s dropped like he burns Bucky’s hands, gasping, choking for air, looking over to see Peter sitting up, curls a mess, adorable and defenceless. He looks like a kitten. “What did I say? I said: try not to kill our guest.”

Barnes looks like he wants to do nothing more than rip Tony’s head right off his shoulders.

Peter holds out his arms, wiggling his fingers, and Bucky goes, led by a siren, into Peter’s warm embrace.

***

Breakfast is a very dignified affair.

Tony’s unbound, but Bucky stands in front of the only door, a gun at his waist.

Peter is in black satin, shoes like polished opals, lips cherry red. The table is laden with food: bright, vibrant pieces of fruit, pinks to oranges to ocean-blues, and Tony doesn’t dare move to serve himself, so sits with an empty plate, watching Peter place a few blueberries into his own bowl.

“Please, Tony,” Peter purrs, “help yourself.”

There’s no trembling now. Peter’s completely at ease. Certain. The frailness from yesterday is gone. He’s strong, nimble, elegant. Tony pokes at a piece of pear, but doesn’t eat it.

“I’d hoped we could speak openly today, Detective. About a constructive way forward for all of us.”

Tony lifts his eyebrows. “I thought there was only one way out. You threaten to have your lackey over there kill me if I ever tell the truth.”

“Well, there’s no need for that,” Peter murmurs, popping a strawberry into his mouth. “You can tell anyone you like. Stories are just that, after all. From what I can tell, you haven’t a shred of evidence against me.”

“The books-”

“Gone now. An oversight. Thank you for alerting me.”

Tony smiles without humour. “Fine. So I have no proof. You’ll just let me go?”

“Well, I’d rather we left things on a more friendly note,” Peter pouts, long lashes batting oh-so-sweetly. “After all, Detective, I thought your desire for me was overwhelming you. A kind of madness, didn’t you call it?”

Tony can feel his cheeks heat, but he refuses to be ruffled. “A momentary lapse in judgement.”

“Really?” Peter sighs, reaching under the table, touching Tony’s knee. “That’s disappointing. I feel there’s a lot I could offer you.”

He refuses to get aroused. Refuses to react. “No, thank you.” He says curtly. “There’s nothing you have that I want.”

At that, Peter laughs. Melodic and triumphant. “Well now, I don’t think that’s quite true. I’m sure you’re used to being the smartest person in the room, Detective, but I’m afraid with me around, you might have to settle for second place. You can read people? As can I. You crave control. I can give you that- or, at least the allusion of it.”

He hates how he feels intrigued. Like a puppet with an invisible master.

Peter’s voice drops into a whisper. “I could submit to you so sweetly. All yours for you to take whenever, however you want. In return....perhaps you don’t spread those nasty, baseless rumours about me. Perhaps you leave my tragic case alone. Along with any other tragedies that might befall me.”

Tony wants to laugh. Wants to mock Peter at using his body as his bargaining chip but he wants. He wants that. Wants to feel that body beneath him, he wants-

“I could play love with you, Detective,” Peter offers, more gentle, and he reaches out to take Tony’s hand, twining their fingers together. “I could be a widow, shaken, unsure if love is for me after all, but then you...you change that.” His honey eyes fill with tears. “Oh, Detective Stark. Thank you for keeping me safe, I’m so-so grateful.” Peter grins, and Tony realises he’s leaned in, holding hands tightly. “You could hold me. Play house with me, from time to time. I’ll make dinner, dance with you, I’m very good at playing pretend, Tony.”

Tony gapes, words stuck in his throat. The kid’s a master. An actor. Sliding into each role.

But he can feel danger along the back of his neck, and he turns to see Bucky, barely contained in his jealousy.

Peter takes Tony’s chin and guides his eyes back to him. “James won’t hurt you, Tony,” he promises, “he’s just protective, that’s all.”

“You play pretend with him too?”

Peter’s mouth lifts into a smile, and Tony hates the audible jealousy in his own voice. “No, Tony,” he murmurs, a beautiful lie, “I only play pretend with you.”

***

Bucky grits his teeth watching as Tony walks down the drive and gets into his car. As soon as he’s gone, he hurries upstairs to the master bedroom.

Peter is stretched out on the bed like a pleased cat, naked, covered in red marks.

Bucky wants to howl. He immediately gets a wash cloth and some warm water, cleaning Peter up.

Peter spreads his lily-white thighs further apart, and Bucky groans at the sight.

“He was rough with you.” Bucky whimpers, swiping in gentle strokes, fumbling to soothe any aches.

“Only because I let him be,” Peter reminds, looking at Bucky over his shoulder, pink lips curving into a smile. “We can take him out whenever we like, sweetheart.”

“But you won’t.” Bucky mutters, two fingers sliding into Peter’s little hole. Gentle and soothing. “You like him.” It’s an accusation.

Peter rolls his eyes. “I like being adored, James. That’s hardly a surprise, is it?”

“But...”

“Are you feeling left out?” Peter pouts, teasing. “You want to be the one to rule me, is that it? No,” he looks him up and down, and Bucky bares himself to the gaze. Wants to be seen. “No,” Peter nods again, “you want to wrap me up in cotton wool. Keep me safe, don’t you?”

Yes. Bucky thinks desperately, nodding hard. Yes, that’s what he wants.

“He was so rough with me,” Peter hiccups, going pliant and soft into the bed sheets, slipping into Bucky’s favourite role. “Hurt me, Buck, he hurt me. Will you make it better?” He cants his hips up invitingly. “Please?”

Bucky leans down, eager, kissing down Peter’s spine, tongue finding-

“Oh!” Peter gasps, clutching at the bed sheets, “that feels-”

Yes. Bucky thinks, holding the boy’s hips, making him feel good. This is what he wants. This is what he’ll always want.

And he’ll do anything to keep it.

Tagging: @plueschpop @thestarkerisobvious @fogdog1738 @icandoakickflip @starker-stories @yeehawmyoatmeal @starker-prompt-dump @goldenmogar @everyonelovespetey @starkerintheparker @prettieststarker @itsrachael @silkystark @deliciousflapbanditfarm @prettyboy-parker @starkerrifics @angelstarker @firefandoming

#starker #winterspider #manipulative peter #widow peter #detective tony #butler bucky

254 notes · View notes

princess-of-the-corner · 4 years

Note

Could you please do more headcanons for the Beetle and Tomcat au or it's variant Red Velvet and Tuxedo? Gabe with the earrings sounds like a trip. Also this could be an au with Régalien in it (what I've taken to calling Peacock!Adrien)

Okay! So! I can't find the original post, but I remember it was Tom vs. Gabriel with the Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculous.

I think I prefer Red Velvet vs. Tuxedo just for Kwami shenanigans alone. Because Tikki living in a bakery is great. And Plagg would spend his free time fucking with Gabriel.

So, plotwise here's how it starts:

The Black Cat Miraculous is lost when the Peacock and Butterfly are. So Gabriel has all three. The Peacock is still broken, Emilie goes into her Magic Coma, and Gabriel becomes Tuxedo to lure out the Guardian and get the Ladybug Miraculous.

Fu still tries to give the Ladybug to Marinette. However, Tom comes up to Mari's room and finds the box on her desk. Curious, he opens it and finds Tikki. After finding out that Mari is supposed to be a Hero, Tom's like "no she is a child i am not putting her in danger like that!!!" And decides to be a Hero himself, becoming Red Velvet.

Despite the usual 'secret identities' rule, Tom does tell Sabine. Because you don't hide things from Sabine. Marinette does find out too. She does get a bit of a confidence boost from hearing that some mystical guardian guy had believed she was the right person for the job, even if her dad said no.

Meanwhile, school drama is pretty similar. Though without the Lovesquare. Which means Mari and Adrien have mutual crushes and it doesn't take long for them to get together.

As for the Peacock: while Peacock!Adrien could be fun…. I have a different idea for both the Peacock and the Butterfly.

As I said, Plagg does whatever he can to fuck with Gabriel. This includes hiding the other Miraculous. Now, Plagg can't stray too far from Gabriel. But he can go anywhere in the mansion as long as Adrien and any staff don't see him.

So if the other Miraculous happen to end up in Adrien's room, well, it's the last place Gabriel would look when he goes to look for them.

Adrien finds the brooches and is a little confused. They don't look familiar, and this happens after his birthday so they're not gifts. Shrugging it off, he thinks the brooches arent really his style and decides to gift them.

Which two girls are close enough to him for him to give gifts? Marinette, his crush, and Chloé, his childhood friend.

Marinette gets the Peacock, Chloé gets the Butterfly. I'll focus on Chloé a little later. For now, Mari and the Peacock!

Marinette brings the brooch home, and Tikki immediately recognizes it. She also realizes it's damaged. As the Ladybug Miraculous is supposed to fix the others, they quickly fix it and talk to Duusu to ask her where she's been and if she knows who Tuxedo is or where the Butterfly is.

Unfortunately, Duusu has no idea. Her Miraculous being broken affected her memory of that time. She remembers someone using her Miraculous, and that that person was hurt by it, but she can't remember who or even when that happened.

They decide to try and work backwards. Marinette knows that Adrien gave her the brooch. Well, Adrien's obviously not Tuxedo. Even if the Miraculous could change his height and build like that, Tuxedo uses Cataclysm multiple times in battle and is therefore an adult. Next best suspect is Gabriel.

Marinette gets up the courage to partner with Adrien on a school assignment so that she can snoop. She feels bad using him like that but this is important!!

Unfortunately, Gabriel is already working on faking his alibis, and Marinette is the perfect kind of person to be a witness. While Tuxedo shows up and is destroying stuff, Nathalie uses hologram!Gabriel to check on Adrien and Marinette, insisting that Marinette stay until the danger has past and ordering dinner for them. To Marinette, it looks like Gabriel is here while Tuxedo is in a fight, proving they're not the same person.

Believing this to be a dead end, they assume that the missing Miraculous probably got separated over the years.

Marinette makes another decision. The Peacock is the second Miraculous to be gifted to her. Clearly the Universe wants her to be in this fight. Tom and Sabine say no, but she has an idea.

Marinette uses the Peacock Miraculous and creates a Sentimonster of herself. As she's holding both the Peacock and the Amokized item, she can essentially astral-project and puppet the Sentimonster. Therefore, she can fight while also remaining safe.

The catch is powers. On one hand, Marinette can make the Sentimonster have any power. But if she wants to have a different power she needs to remake the Sentimonster. She ends up basing the various powers on other Miraculous, changing the Sentimonster's costume to reflect that. So theres a Senti!Multimouse, a Senti!Fennette, a Senti!Bee, etc.

Gabriel assumes that Red Velvet's "sidekick" is just using the other Miraculous, not that she's a Sentimonster.

I want to give her a single name because the public would realize that it's the same girl and not "Red Velvet's 15 identical daughters". I'm thinking Mockingbird. A bird reference for the Peacock, and a reference to her imitating other Miraculous powers.

Now for Chloé and the Butterfly Miraculous!

Chloé puts on the brooch at home and meets Nooroo. On one hand she would like to be a Hero, but she hesitates. This is early on when they don't know how dangerous Tuxedo is, and Cataclysm is kind of terrifying.

Unlike Duusu, Nooroo does remember what happened before. Unfortunately, he's been forbidden from talking about it without being asked directly, and Chloé doesn't know enough background to ask.

So Chloé plays it safe. Mostly just keeping Nooroo as a friend no one knows about. Sometimes though, Monarch wanders the rooftops at night. Occasionally stopping petty crime if she runs across it. She becomes a little bit of an urban legend. Paris's little Cryptid.

As a civilian though…. Chloé's having an interesting time.

Obviously she doesn't have the same relationship toward Red Velvet as she has toward Ladybug. Though she does gain a little bit of a hero crush on Mockingbird when she shows up.

However, Chloé's feeling toward Red Velvet is more "oh? Is this what genuine parental affection is like?". Because yeah even though Tom and Mari know what Chloé is like, she's different with Red Velvet and Mockingbird. Also Tom just radiates dad energy.

The biggest thing with Chloé though is that, because she's wearing the Butterfly Miraculous, she can feel everyone's emotions.

This means that when she's mean to someone, she can feel what they're feeling. And honestly she doesn't like that. So she kinda… stops going out of her way to hurt them.

Then it becomes 'okay, someone is upset and if you're upset I have to feel it so fuck you we're going to fix your problems!!' Which confuses the hell out of everyone else.

This leads to her realizing that okay yeah making others feel happy is kinda nice? Even if it's from a selfish 'I don't want to feel your bad vibes' way.

No one's really sure why she's doing this. The class comes to the agreement that Chloé probably reevaluated her priorities after a near-death experience with Tuxedo.

The biggest nail in the coffin though is when Audrey comes back, and Chloé can physically feel the lack of love from her. Like, some small part of Chloé always knew Audrey might not truly love her. But just. There's no real way around it with Magic Empathy Powers.

This is probably when Monarch becomes known to the people as more than 'local Cryptid'. Because she goes for a rooftop run during the day to avoid Audrey. And of course both sides are interested in a new Hero.

Monarch bumps into Tuxedo first, but she runs because YIKES. Red Velvet and Mockingbird show up next. Red Velvet fights Tuxedo while Mockingbird chases down Monarch.

Red Velvet and Mockingbird get to talk to Monarch after Tuxedo disappears. They ask her about her powers, and she admits that it's the Butterfly Miraculous, and she got it because a friend gave her a brooch that happened to be Magic.

Monarch also kinda rambles about how she usually goes out at night because that's when she feels restless and sad, but she's out now because the Butterfly's Empathy powers let her know that her mother doesn't love her so you know how it be.

Red Velvet and Mockingbird are like "okay you're family now we're adopting you!". They don’t want to let her in on the fight, and Monarch points out that technically she doesn’t have to be, she can just power them up when necessary.

Meanwhile, Gabriel believes that Monarch has joined the Heroes, and decides "hey, let's give Nathalie the Butterfly because this is starting to get difficult". Except he can't find the Butterfly. Or the Peacock. He finds out that Plagg hid them months ago and 'doesn't remember where'. Gabriel goes through the mansion looking for them but can't find them.

He doesn't immediately connect Mockingbird and Monarch to the Peacock and Butterfly. Partly because he doesn't think the Miraculous could leave the house. Partly because Monarch has yet to display her powers and Mockingbird has always been a different miraculous-themed sentimonster.

Lets take a break to check in on other characters like the classmates and especially Adrien!

Alya still runs a blog dedicated to the Heroes, but after the earlier dangerous activity, Red Velvet sat her down and explained why her actions were dangerous. So she's less invasive.

The class is doing fairly well since Chloé has decided to be nicer. I already said that they assume she decided to turn her life around after a near-death experience.

A lot of their plots and drama are still the same, but altered since there are no Akumas to shake things up. They are better at talking things out though. Ironically, they're also better at voicing when they're upset because Chloé can always tell who's feeling bad, no matter how much they try and hide it. And after a few rounds of her deciding to fix things they know to speak up first.

Adrien is blissfully unaware that everyone around him is a Hero or Villain. He has a mini hero crush on Mockingbird, but doesn't know it's technically Marinette. Doesn't know he gave away Magic jewelry. Doesn't know Gabriel is Tuxedo. Etc.

Adrien does, however, think his house is haunted. Because even though Plagg has been banned from letting Adrien see him, he wasn’t banned from talking! So Adrien thinks that Plagg is a friendly-ish ghost hanging around.

That’s what I have for now.

#ml red velvet au

72 notes · View notes

luminescentlyricist · 3 years

Note

VD: y⊙ur turn, buddy :o)8 (if y⊙u want t⊙, that is)

VD: n⊙ full ⊙n pr⊙mpt, but h⊙w ab⊙ut just s⊙me b⊙nding? maybe putting my makeup ⊙n ⊙r fixing up my hair, y⊙u kn⊙w, getting int⊙ the r⊙utine. can g⊙ any directi⊙n y⊙u want, ⊙r y⊙u can use an entire different pr⊙mpt. i just want t⊙ hear y⊙ur take ⊙n me :o)8

;; Gotcha!! Hope you like this :o)

🃏A Road To Recovery ⊙

Being the newest troll in the circus troupe, as unintentional as it was, Jezakk often stood out like a sore thumb when it came to showcasing his skillsets. He was unbearably graceless, even though he had never adorned the classical shoes that the clowns seemed so fond of. He left trails in his wake, whether or not it was a physical presence. Scent trails, more often than not, that were unbearably easy for a certain other troll to pick up on. While the tinkerer had never established himself as a sociable troll, he kept himself silent despite his yearnings for interaction of any kind. It was a strange fear that helped him maintain his otherwise unassuming nature, though it did nothing to deter one Othamo Oculus. If anything, the smaller of the two had the feeling he was being watched around a corner more often than not, regardless of Othamo’s lack of sight.

Then, there was always the heaviness. Although noticeably thinner and smaller in stature when compared to the other purplebloods around him, there was an uneasy leadening feeling that occasionally swept him, and it was nothing that he could yet explain. Of course, there were quite a lot of things that he had failed to glean from his short time in the facility, when he was conscious. The only conclusion he could draw was that it was a power-based backlash from his time as Othamo’s chucklevoodoo puppet. Jezakk felt there were also things that he had been told then, critically, that his amnesia - as a result of the unfortunate puppetry - had made him forget.

This was one of those times that he didn’t want to forget. Jezakk sat out in the hallways leading to one room of the Mordant King, the ringmaster of the whole group and undisputed Lord of the Circus. Panton Magnic was his name, but that title had been long since forgotten in favour of raw greed and want to establish his power with a title. Sometimes, his tinkerer mused that Othamo was no longer the main puppeteer of the troupe. He fidgeted restlessly with the small golden pendant he had been given on his first day, twisting it around in his claws and glancing downwards to catch the Capries as it flashed in the light of the windows. These windows, Jezakk thought, were unnecessarily large, and depicted circus acts in manners more suited to scenes of the Sufferer’s preaching than entertainments.

He looked around himself, heart beginning to pound in his chest. Panton’s name was the only memory he had retained from the many-sweep-long amnesia, and he wasn’t sure why. It barely mattered. If he shared it with anyone, he feared being exiled from the troupe and never seeing Sealdad again. And the healing of his father’s injury was exactly what landed him in the troupe in the first place. It was strange how desperate he had once been to get into the area, because all he wanted now was to escape. But there was a moral dilemma to deal with, and that was the fact that he would have to choose between his friend and his father if he wanted to get out. As much as Othamo gave Jezakk the creeps, he remained one of the lucky few that held his attention for long enough.

There were vaguely familiar voices behind the door, those of Ferrum and Mierle, two of the other purplebloods that he often crossed paths with. They were friendly enough, but he was wary nonetheless. Tilting his head and standing, he realised that there was no way he was going to hear the conversation. After a few moments, they exited together, looking quite shaken. Laughing dryly to himself, Jezakk shivered in anticipation and dread. He’d not been looking forward to any sort of meeting with the ringmaster, and the unnaturally hesitant appearances of the other trolls did nothing to reassure him. Smiling at them as they passed, he forced his hands to his sides and entered the room without waiting for Panton to call him through.

First mistake.

There was something unnerving about the way that Panton swivelled on his heel to greet the other, and the calm smile that he wore did nothing to soften the sharpness in his gaze. Something told Jezakk silently to turn tail - literally, as it squeezed around his waist tight enough to hurt - and get out of there before he was sliced into. Instead, the tinkerer bowed his head to show his respect, stepping forward. Despite his acquaintances’ nervousness, the naive tinkerer saw next-to-nothing that he should have been concerned about until the ringmaster raised an eyebrow, clasping his hands in front of his body neatly and beginning to speak. His tone was soft and disarming, made to rekindle a false sense of security. Although the smaller knew this, he couldn’t help but begin to let his guard down.

“Y/o\)u( KN/o\W, JEZAKK, I’VE BEEN THINKING AB/o\)u(t Y/o\)u( RECENTLY.”

This caused Jezakk’s eyebrows to raise in alarm, but he was otherwise still. He’d had to work on suppressing his fidgeting in fear of irritating the other troupe members, which had also caused him to unintentionally become skilled in preventing general movements and emotional displays. Raising his head to look at Panton, he remained silent.

“THERE’S A SMALL J/o\B I WANT Y/o\)u( T/o\ D/o\ F/o\R ME, AND THERE IS N/o\ /o\NE ELSE Q)u(ITE S)u(ITED F)o(R IT. Y/o\)u( ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE BEES, I TR)u(ST? I HAVE SPENT AN ADMITTEDLY L/o\NG TIME SEARCHING F/o\R S/o\ME/o\NE WILLING T/o\ C)u(LTIVATE THEIR H/o\NEY, AND I HAVE N/o\W C/o\ME T/o\ A RECENT F/o\REG/o\NE C/o\NCLUSI/o\N THAT Y/o\)u( MAY J)u(ST BE THE PERFECT CANDIDATE.”

Jezakk often spoke without foreseeing consequence, and lacked much of a social filter. It proved itself a dire slip to make more often than not.

“I’Ll do IT, sir.”

Panton’s smile widened, showing off rows of teeth more suited to a shark than any troll. It was less comforting than it was menacing, and the ringmaster’s next words sent a chill through his subordinate’s whole body for no clear reason.

“AH, GOOD! I AM S/o\ GLAD I F/o\UND Y/o\)u(, JEZAKK. Y/o\)u( START IMMEDIATELY, N/o\ Q)u(ESTI/o\NS ASKED. ASK /o\C)u(L)u(S F/o\R ASSISTANCE IF Y/o\)u( M)u(ST AND BEAR IN MIND THE AM/o\)u(NT /o\f FAITH I AM PLACING HERE. D/o\ N/o\T BREAK IT, F/o\R THE C/o\NSEQ)u(ENCES WILL BE DIRE.”

And with that, Panton Magnic returned to his work. Jezakk shifted in his stance. There was a creak as the door was leaned against by another from the outside, and the man only looked up once more from his work before smiling - almost threateningly, despite the lack of teeth - and waving to dismiss the troll in front of him.

Leaving the room, the little tinkerer never expected to see Othamo already there and waiting for him to follow. Placing a hand on the blind troll’s shoulder to indicate where he stood, he looked towards his companion.“WElL shIt. DIDn’T expEcT TO hEar thaT. UH… wEll. I KNoW yoU caN gENERaLlY SMEll yoUr waY AROuNd pRettY weLL, oThAMO, Sir, BUt I thINK I’ll LEAve THe hEAvY LIfTin tO VIZeRA aNd LUmIra WHen I CAn GeT THeM to LIsTen ENOugH.”

Othamo raised an eyebrow, waving to Jezakk as if trying to snap him out of some kind of daze. There, on the palm of his hand, was a carefully drawn eye. Jezakk looked dumbly at it, placing his hand over the one seemingly offered to him. This caused the other to flinch back, curling his nose in disgust. The scent of lemons was heavy in the air, which made him smile despite the distaste he’d show moments prior. He treated those inferior to him as they should have been treated, and never once considered that the tinkerer - a newbie, fresh meat, the perfect little puppet for his games - would be any different, regardless of the time he had in an uncomfortably close proximity and seeing through his eyes. Although it was normally an unpleasant, sharp scent, the undertones of fruitiness unique to the other made fear smell inviting.

“i can see a little bit, y⊙u kn⊙w. en⊙ugh t⊙ want t⊙ c⊙mment ⊙n h⊙w idi⊙tic that was t⊙ assume.”

He murmured, pointing towards the eye on his palm and inadvertently causing Jezakk to look down towards it, even though he had nervously averted his gaze prior. The lemon still hung in the air between them, and the smaller’s appreension was unrelenting. Tension ran through his every movement, and the stiffness was what caused him to fumble and almost trip over. He likely would have, had Othamo not reached out to steady him, unintentionally knocking their bodies a little closer than was comfortable. The taller chuckled, letting his arms fall from around Jezakk and noting how powerful his lemon scent was after that, enough to make his head spin.

“i can generally see thr⊙ugh eye shapes as well, n⊙t just y⊙ur eyes. thatd be selfish, d⊙nt y⊙u think? als⊙, the legends are true. y⊙u smell ⊙f blackberries and fear.”

Jezakk nodded silently, seeing that Othamo would notice the gesture without shifting his arm. He couldn’t help but laugh in fear, even though his words were stuck in his throat, making it near impossible to muster any vocal reply. There was something disarming about the puppeteer, but he was entirely aware of what he was doing. It was making Jezakk on edge, constantly, and he hated it. As such, he sped up his walking, attempting to get as far away from his companion as possible. Due to his dismal height difference, it only took a few rapid strides for Othamo to catch up.

He still intended for the others to help, however, so he continued on his merry way while periodically checking whether or not his ‘friend’ remained at a safe distance from him. There was really no use bothering him further. The first section of the journey to his practice room - as it was in an entirely separate tent to the Ringmaster’s quarters - was filled with a tense silence, which at least one of the pair seemed to heavily regret. The tinkerer was spinning his Capries necklace about in his fingers as an anxious fidget once again, something he performed under stress frequently enough that he took no notice of the action more often than not. Attempting to break the silence, Othamo spoke. It was more of a private mumble than anything directed towards Jezakk, despite that he was wrongly addressed.

“i have n⊙ idea why that jerk th⊙ught it was a g◎︶◉d idea t⊙ put me in charge ⊙f the bees, jazakk.“

“JazAkK? I’M jEzAkk.”

To this, the puppeteer simply shrugged, giving his companion a toothy smile. There was no true joy in the action, and it was unnervingly similar to the Ringmaster’s in that it was more threatening than anything else. Othamo never appeared to drop his grin, which was one of the other reasons Jezakk found it hard to detect whether or not he was being genuine about his expressions. Reaching to place a hand on Jezakk’s shoulder in a mimicry, his claws dug deeper than necessary. He spoke in a hiss, though there was some lightness to it that was reassuring. As if he never meant to threaten, but it was habitual.

“well, y⊙ure n⊙t t⊙ me. y⊙ur ⊙fficial nickname is jazzy n⊙w.”

“I- fiNE. BuT You cAn’T LEt anyONe eLsE knoW… Ah, hERE we aRe. WaNnA CoMe in fOr a BIT? I dOn’t miNd thE cOMpAnY. NObOdy elSe mUch PUTs UP wIth me THeSe daYs. SoRRy… Uh, sOrRY AbOUt thE mEss. I’VE bEen tiNKerINg QUItE a BIT. sEcreT PRoJect.”

The tinkerer, still fidgeting restlessly, rubbed at the back of his neck.

“I SHoUld proBabLY gO anD sOrt ouT the BEE buSINess foR a Bit. NOw thAt I knoW yoU don’T wannA dEal WITh thEm. FeEL frEe to LOOk arOunD, i guEss.”

With that, he left his friend to his own devices for a moment, which likely wasn’t a good idea. There were things scattered all over the place in a frantic manner, as if there had been a fight or something had occurred very quickly. Otherwise, the room seemed relatively empty on the ground, instead hosting shelves that lined the walls filled with boxes of all shapes and sizes. These were Jezakk’s pride and joy; the jack-in-the-boxes were what he was known for among his friends, and rightfully so. He’d definitely honed his craft, making them with an unprecedented love and precision.

Luckily enough, certain trolls - such as Othamo himself, and Jezakk - had been born with tails, according to whether or not their lusus had one, although it was rare. This enabled Othamo to better navigate the room, sweeping objects aside and out of his path to sit and wait for his friend’s return. Closing his eyes, the troll noticed soon enough that there was a strangely printed pair of leggings discarded across a chair, and his grin widened. Perfect. Their ocular design - unnerving to some, and even more so to Othamo himself because of his phobia - would enable him to see properly, though significantly blurred. He had chosen to sit on Jezakk’s recuperacoon, which had been fitted with a cover. It seemed nearly unused.

Activating the chucklevoodoos he was so adept at using, feeling about for the eyes and latching onto them, he made sure to keep his own closed. He wouldn’t need them. Observing the room through his ’new’ sight made his head spin, more than it ever had before. But the fruity scents were like a comforting punch in the nose, so to speak, and it helped him relax slightly and disregard the strangeness of it. There was nothing he could see that would possibly reveal the secret Jezakk had mentioned beforehand, or so he thought. The truth was that he wished to sell his jack-in-the-boxes to help him gather enough Caegars and ensure a safer escape from the troupe.

Meanwhile, Jezakk had located one of the two trolls he wished for help, and he was glad to find that ze was pleasant enough for him to avoid losing his composure. Vizera was slightly too loud for his tastes, and he kept his distance from the acrobat beside him, recalling the enthusiasm with which she had accepted his comparatively gentle plea for assistance. It was not exactly his ideal bottle of Faygo.

“LuMira? YEs, hElLo. It’S… JEzAkk, AND i Don’t THiNk we’VE reaLLy spOken, bUT i wAS WOndeRIN if I couLd HavE soMe heLp mOVIn thEse BeEhOUsEs inTo mY roOm.”

“YEAH, LLLLLUMIIIIIRA! HELLLP THE KIIIID OUT, WON’TCHA? HE’S A NEWBIIIE, AND YOU KNOW HOW THE RIIINGMASTER GETS IIIIF NEWBIIIES GET THIINGS WRONG!”

The troll at the door wore a pleasant smile, directing zir gaze towards Vizera and nodding before looking back towards the little tinkerer, who was significantly shorter than both of them.

“oh!! of course i’ll helP you, jezakk!! i suPPose i have enough time, and i wouldn’t wish for you to get in trouble with the ringmaster!!”

With a small sigh of relief, Jezakk smiled towards Lumira - still, unfortunately, finding it rather difficult to speak because of the new people around him - and led the two through the task, eventually saying his shaky goodbyes to the two and returning behind the safely closed doors of his room. His heart was pounding in his chest, and there was nothing that could have possibly prepared him for the sight that greeted him in that moment. It was an absolute mess. Everything that was scattered on the floor beforehand had been shoved to the side messily. The fact that a few of the jack-in-the-boxes had fallen from their shelves had just established itself as the second most distressing sight there.

The first, of course, was Othamo.

Immediately, the smaller’s hands retrieved his card deck, and he began to rapidly shuffle them as a reaction to his nerves. There was nothing else he could think of except the boy on the floor, but his body completely refused to move in a way he wanted it to. It was hard to decipher what had happened, exactly, but Othamo was laid out on the floor, staring blankly towards the tapering ceiling with eyes weakly flickering purple. He looked as if he’d been almost paralysed. Tears dripped their way down his cheeks, an even paler lavender than his eyes themselves. The only sound in the room - that Jezakk could hear - was the beating of his own heart, so loud and panicked that it drowned everything else.

Jezakk wasn’t used to this at all. His claws were trembling as he shuffled his cards around, silken gloves at risk of unravelling from where they were pulled high to his shoulders. He wasn’t truly expecting anyone to be with him within his practice room, let alone when he returned to it after Othamo had scheduled a busy day at the shows. Because he was new to the troupe, everyone else tended to have more performances than he did, which left him lonely. But here Othamo was, finally giving him the company he so craved, and he had no idea what to do. Everything was just a little bit too wrong, and no amount of physical messing around could fix it. So he distracted himself first, because his thinkpan wasn’t letting him make any lateral solution to the problem yet.

Tiptoeing around so that he didn’t disturb anyone else, Jezakk let his mind drift away from his friend for a moment. He placed his cards away, attempting and failing to regulate his breathing. How could he, when his pan was being wild? Instead, he walked around and picked up all of his boxes that had fallen, softly humming a show tune under his breath that he was fairly sure Panton himself had composed. He wasn’t sure why his pan had strayed to it, but he didn’t like it much. There was a funny taste in his mouth about it, because it meant that something about that suave, manipulative asshole was genuinely likeable. Shaking his head physically in an attempt to clear it, Jezakk placed the last box upon the shelves and redirected his attention to his friend.

Clearing a space to sit next to Othamo, he crossed his legs and began to sing a little louder. Even though his voice was croaky and awful because of the tears that had begun to greet his eyes and blur his vision, he continued, hoping that his voice would at least rouse the one on the floor. There wasn’t much else he was able to do, because he couldn’t properly attend to someone who was unconscious. Othamo was practically a dead weight as it stood, so manipulation would prove difficult for Jezakk. Nonetheless, he continued to sing to his friend, the frown lifting from his lips into a smile.

However negative, he enjoyed the time he spent with the puppeteer, and hoped Othamo felt the same. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, the clown gently wiped the tears away from his friend’s cheeks and eyes, which caused them to flutter and Othamo to stir. He flinched back, seeing the purple sparks that licked at his fingers, and shuffled his position so that he could give him some space to properly orientate himself.

“Ah, SHit, sORRy otH. DidN’T, UH, didN’t meAN tO hUrT YOu or ANytHIn…”

Othamo’s unseeing gaze followed Jezakk’s voice when he struggled into a sitting position, and he shrugged, not having gathered enough composure to vocalise his thoughts. Everything was spinning, and he felt dizzy even though there was no visual indication of it.

Although there was no longer a smile upon the tinkerer’s face, he was relieved beyond expression that Othamo had actually stirred. His fears often caught up with him, and he’d panicked about leaving the other troll to get into a bigger accident. Observing the smudging face paint smeared across his puppeteer’s cheeks in blackened tear trails, he pursed his lips. Softly telling Othamo to wait - as if he could do anything else - Jezakk left the room, locating Othamo’s own and entering it. It was cluttered, sure enough, but he was soon able to locate some liquorice-scented face paint among the jars of scenting strings and return to his friend.

“HOLd on. I thInk YOu smUdGed, mAn. LEmMe heLp yoU.”

He murmured, lifting the puppeteer into his arms with a groan and placing him on top of his recuperacoon once more, back against the wall. He hopped onto the cover himself, settling beside Othamo with his supplies. Taking a makeup brush and some remover, he began to gently brush away the crust of old makeup and remove the rest. After he was mostly clean, Jezakk preceded to wash his friend’s face of the smears with warm water on a cloth, all the while mumbling rapid-fire apologies whether or not he’d actually hurt the troll. He didn’t know how long it’d been since the blind troll had been able to reapply it himself or bothered to, but it couldn’t have been good.

He wrinkled his nose upon twisting the paint’s cap off, the scent making him almost vomit. Why Othamo liked liquorice was something he’d never understand, but he dipped the brush into the pot and began to carefully outline the boy’s ‘mask’ nonetheless. Subconsciously, he found his singing beginning again as he worked but reducing itself to a vague hum. It was a habit he’d suppressed, like many others, but Othamo made him feel safer about expressing himself. Filling it in gently, with slow and rhythmic strokes, he was pleased to find that the paint was drying rather quickly.

“YOu shOuLd gET soMe reST, BRoTHer. I CAn’T be sURE hoW loNg yOu weRe ouT FOr, buT yoU SEEm tiRed AS alL hEll. I hoPe I DId yoUr FACe PaInt WELl enOugH. I guEss I’M prEttY LucKy THaT YOu cAm’T SEE it… I’LL chEck On yoU LAtER, but I SHouLd go DEaL witH acTaLLy geTTin ThE bees FOr thE hOuseS. YOu caN usE mY reCUPerAcoON toDaY, lOokin IN no RIgHT sTaTe tO BE MOvIN.”

Once again using his unprecedented, caste-granted strength, the boy moved Othamo enough to slip the cover away from under him and help him ease into the slime underneath. Jezakk remembered how warm and relieving the sopor was, especially for physical pain. He’d installed a special heating apparatus underneath it so he - or another recipient - wouldn’t get cold in the harsher Alternian months. Turning this on and walking towards the door, Jezakk flashed Othamo an equally warm smile that would go unseen, but was nice regardless. Feeling a deeper sense of satisfaction than he had in sweeps, the tinkerer flicked the lights off and partially drew the door closed.

“HAve A gOOd rEsT, BRoTHer. yoU dEsERvE it. I’m pROuD oF yoU.”

#🏠 stuck at home 🏠#fantroll #jezakk imetat #othamo oculus #❤️ a world of our own ❤️

12 notes · View notes

hermitcraftheadcanons · 4 years

Text

The first thing you notice is the bite. It stings, throbs, bleeds. It's not a clean wound, not like a minor bite from a dog or cat. Not a few neat little punctures, or some gashes that would at least stitch up neatly. No. It's an ugly rip, the torn flesh from blunt teeth that are not and never were designed for biting. It's still startling how the human's muscles are powerful enough to bite through skin like that anyway. Strong enough to rip out a chunk, if you got snagged in a soft, tender place.

The next thing you notice is the infection. If you're lucky, you can use some precious water to wash off the bite and some gauze to wrap it, but most people aren't so lucky. Most have to rely on strips of acceptably dirty, sweaty fabric from old clothes, if they can even spare that much. Most don't want to "waste" a resource as precious as clean, drinkable water. So infection sets in fast and hard. Within a few days, your wound is a stinking, oozing mess. It's painful. Painful to look at, painful to touch, painful to move. It's swollen as your body desperately tries to fight the concoction of bacteria introduced from being bitten by a decomposing mouth. Then it itches. It itches madly. It itches so much you won't be able to sleep. It itches so bad that if you stop focusing on it, you'll find a surge of new pain as you've absently scratched it and started to bleed again, so you have to keep thinking about how badly you should never scratch the itch. Maybe you'll have a raw spot, where you've been tricking your mind into relief by scratching just above the wound. You might even have dug new cuts into your flesh, more wounds to host infection, more places to sting with pain.

The itching is the virus taking hold, but you don't know that.

All you know is that you have a swollen, itchy, stinking bite.

Next comes from the infection. You'll start to get a fever. Your bite will swell more, and feel hot. But mostly, you get a fever. Nobody feels good then. You'll switch between being far too hot to freezing cold, you'll sweat in a tank top in the middle of the night or you'll shiver under as many layers as you could possibly procure. You'll get nauseous, so you won't want to eat or drink, leading to more nausea as you dehydrate. As it progresses, you'll feel weaker. It might be harder to breathe normally, you might even feel your heart racing as you sit still. Even just a ten minute walk will exhaust you, but your group has to keep moving. As it goes on, you'll find it harder to keep your grasp on reality. The pain, the nausea, the smell, the weakness, it all blends into one as the virus takes its hold in your mind.

Oh, yeah. It's now when the virus kicks into action, having made it to your brain. Maybe you were taking care of yourself, and the infection actually hadn't gotten that bad through sheer luck and winning the biological lottery. But now the virus has made it to its destination. The first thing it does is impair your immune system. After all, it can't have you fighting it off. It doesn't want you healthy. If you're healthy, things get complicated. That natural system has to go, so away it goes. If you were sick, you'll suddenly find yourself getting sicker.

Next, it overrides your appetite. Maybe you were just craving crackers and water, maybe you didn't want anything, maybe you ate through the nausea just fine. It changes that. Subtly, day by day, it makes you feel hungrier and hungrier. The kind of hunger that sits in your belly and gnaws at your bones from the inside. It's also an unnatural craving for meat. Fresh meat, red, straight from the bone. Still warm, still flowing with life. You'll be able to smell your friends now, or the recent tracks of others if you're alone. Of course, you've always been able to smell them, but it got filed away into your subconscious. But now you're aware of it, because that virus tells you it's important. And they will smell decadent.

It's all the virus, scrambling your neurons to connect hunger and appetite to humans instead of a plate of cookies, cake, fruit, veggies and juicy steak, mashed potatoes and meaty stew, anything you used to enjoy. It will change how you taste. Sweets will stick to your throat, bitters are more bitter, and if you're lucky to have a nice plate of steak, that fresh-grilled meat will taste rotten. What you crave is no longer any real sustenance, your mind has been altered. Now, you won't see a warm hand to hold, because the sight of bare, moving skin activates your salivary glands. The urge to sink your teeth into the soft flesh on a wrist or neck will be overwhelming in the blur of sickness from the infection. And if you do actually bite, especially if you taste blood, the virus will reward you. It'll flood your system with dopamine, and afterwards, for just a few moments, the edge of that hunger will release. It hopes you'll get addicted. It wants you to crave more biting, more flesh, because it feels right, because maybe, just maybe, if you eat enough the hunger will finally go away.

Finally, it'll change your sense of fear as well. Dangerous situations that instinctively make humans nervous won't affect you. If anything, you'll crave the rush that deadly moments give you, the rush of feeling real and grounded in the midst of the foggy world from the mess in your system. Just fourteen days, and the virus is fully mature and ready to spread. Now, it needs you to die. So it makes you reckless. It does its best to turn a regular, self-preserving person into an actual train wreck. It will actually give you dopamine and serotonin when you get an injury, in a ratio equal to the wound. So, you'll die the happiest you could possibly be from something like a knife through the heart, or a shot through the gut. Some people are driven to jump from heights and impale themselves on something below, or even just hit the pavement and let themselves die wrapped in the gentle hands of joy. Some will just injure themselves, without the help of gravity. Some will aggressively antagonize other humans, hoping they'll eg them into a violent, deadly fight. But generally those people were already jerks in the first place.

Once you've died, however you died, the virus can take over. Because, this whole time, it wasn't really a virus. It was a worm, which starts so tiny you would never stand a chance of noticing it. Tinier even than those little red bugs you might see crawling over paper when you're out in the woods, so small that if you brush your hand over them they become nothing more than a smear of coppery brown. So small and fragile, they couldn't possibly survive outside of a host. But inside a host, they grow. They grow and grow, so thoroughly burying themselves in your brain they may as well have always been in it. When you die, they can finally take control of your muscles, no longer held back by the complexities of the human mind. This is why zombies shuffle and jerk around so awkwardly. They're merely puppets, meaty sacks of flesh controlled from inside by a worm that's found the strings. It knows just which ones to pull which way to make motion happen. It doesn't breathe, not really, all it might use is that sense of smell it learned while you were alive. It will use hearing, because those little organs in your ear won't stop feeling sound just because your body is dead. All those other systems aren't essential for a worm that's single purpose in life is now to find hosts for its own horrible offspring. Because that worm isn't alone.

It's not one worm. It's dozens of them, all now breeding and gathering their safely hatched larvae on the cold teeth and tongue of the corpse within which they reside. And yes, they might have been able to spread before now, if your environment was just right to keep your mouth the right temperature for this breeding. Yes, you might have infected others while you still lived and breathed in your own skin.

You see, those adults can't reproduce at the natural body temperature of a human, let alone the temperatures they can reach during the height of a fever. So they need that host to die and cool off. It just takes a day. Just one day for enough eggs, enough larvae to let that monstrous parasite begin searching for a new host. Those larvae can't grow in the cold, decomposing bodies of the dead. Although, the adults are surprisingly resilient, uncharacteristically long-lived, for a parasite. And so, the zombie rises, shuffling after any hint of breathing humans to continue their cycle of life and death.

If you crack open a zombie's skull without blasting the contents within into oblivion, you might be able to find dozens of these foot-long worms wiggling in distaste at their unexpected situation.

Of course, all of this depends on the physical and mental toll that getting a severe infection does. Ideally, the parasite doesn't even get to the stage where it has to drive you to seek death, because septic shock has already come and destroyed you from the inside out. So, in theory, it is survivable. If you aren't wracked with sickness, if you have a strong will, you might be able to fight the parasites long enough for them to die. You might just be able to recover.

But that's never happened. Besides, would you even want to survive? How permanent, how treatable are the alterations these parasitic worms cause? No one knows.

Here it is, the zombie "virus" and how it works written in a weirdly disassociated perspective, specifically for the few bitten!hermit headcanons. Feel free to ask questions and write stories! Please tag me in them @basaltdragon, I wanna hear it all •v•

I'm sorry if this triggers anybody (including mod) in any way, it is... a Lot.

#tw gore #gore #tw #worms #tw worms #hcraft #hermitcraftheadcanons #zombie apocalypse au #auheadcanon #posted 18.05.20 #my word! you wrote a novel!#this makes so much sense too! you definetly did your medical research!#also I love how you didn't overlook how bites actually work #because funfact #an average human male has a bite force so strong if they bit through the front of the neck they could pull out the trachea #scary stuff #but yeah this is super good!#submission

57 notes · View notes

secret-engima · 4 years

Text

Finds and Feathers Drabble: Drautos

*throws this on here* Ow, my hands. This is over 2.5k words when it was meant to be maybe 1k but its done now so enjoy it. I hereby blame @oliverslewty @yudu097 and @faeconstellation for this. XDD Look at what got resurrected and merged with Fangs and Feathers verse.

BEHOLD the thing that y’all did the vote for *waggles eyebrows*.

...

-Titus has several reasons to hate the royal family. King Mors pulled back the Wall, which allowed his parents and uncles to be murdered when Niflheim invaded, leaving only him and his older sister alive (and even then, Titus was only alive because of Regis and his sister was only alive because she had moved to Lestallum three years prior). Regis had promised Titus aid and vengeance, but as the years went by, Titus’s homeland was never reclaimed.

-Then there was the Glauca suit.

-Titus had not wanted the thing now sitting under his skin, he had fought every step of the way through his capture and experimentation and their attempts to TURN him, make him betray Lucis in favor of the people who had burned his home.

-If he hadn’t had a sister to go home to, he thinks he would have listened to them.

-If he hadn’t had a sister who Titus had learned was with child right before his capture, he thinks he might have listened anyway, or at least not been as desperately reckless to escape. He would have taken his time to plot a way out, played obedient puppet to lower their guard rather than fighting his way out using the THING they had burrowed under his skin, even if it almost killed him.

-The Crownsguard hadn’t even noticed he was gone, and of course, what the Crownsguard didn’t report, Regis was too busy to notice.

-Worthless king. Spineless king. Selfish lying king who deserved to WAtCh hIs KInGdOm BUrN-

-It was only his sister’s horrified intervention in the height of his vitriol that clued him in on the fact that his thoughts were no longer completely his own. The suit, the armor, the thing that breathed and hungered and hated under his skin was connected to his mind so that he could command it at will, but that connection was two way, and its hate kept trying to bleed over into his own thoughts.

-Titus made a point to twist his spite and direct it at Niflheim whenever his thoughts strayed. True, he might hate the royal line for their failures, but he hated Niflheim MORE. Regis might not be the warrior king Lucis needed but at least he wasn’t the Emperor (at least he was a good man, even if good men made bad kings). On and on his thoughts spun in endless circles, a tug of war between two different kinds of spite and anger in the background of his everyday life that frankly made every day exhausting. It would have been so much easier to let the two thought processes combine and carry him away into a secret, righteous crusade against Lucis. So much easier to claim the power Niflheim had burrowed under his skin.

-He didn’t. Because of his sister. More than her…

-Because of his nephew. Because his nephew had no father figure to speak of (his sister had looked so worried when she told him of her one night stand with a nameless, pretty-eyed stranger that had made her pregnant despite protection) and had been born with fury under his skin, branded into his being just like the birthmarks that stretched across his face and body like jagged scars. SOMEONE had to teach his nephew to control the fury that seemed to have been molded into the boy’s soul from the womb, and Titus was the only one around to do that.

-Then one day when his nephew was seven years old and throwing a tantrum, the apartment shook and his nephew froze in astonishment at the bright, red-amber fire licking over his hands. In the stunned silence that had followed, his nephew had looked up at him with blood red eyes (his nephew’s eyes were washed out blue like his, not red, not RED-) and Titus had one more reason to hate Lucis Caelums.

-He never told Regis. Never dared. Regis was a man who loved children, and even in his blackest moments Titus would never suspect the man of being capable of harming a child, but Regis was married. Married to a wife he adored, a wife who had just recently had a son of her own. The scandal it would cause if Titus’s nephew was known, the strife that would erupt between Regis, Aulea, and Titus’s sister-. He couldn’t risk it.

-He had never been so glad that Regis had given him magic as a trusted member of his Retinue. A way to teach his nephew how to hide the magic burning under his skin and how to temper the wrath that threatened to shake the walls at any given moment (because his nephew was always angry, even when he was content and smiling and laughing with his mother, there was a tiny spark of anger lurking there, like the world had wronged him and he hated it).

-He still kept the secret even after Aulea died. Because Regis was grieving, and for all the bitterness that was both his and the suit’s, he wouldn’t inflict that kind of drama on the man while he was grieving.

-When his nephew was ten, Titus got a call from his sister, frantic and confused over her nephew, who had been watching a broadcast about the Oracle’s children when he suddenly passed out with a fever. Titus claimed a sick day and rushed to Lestallum to check on his nephew, found him already up and about a day after his mysterious collapse.

-His eyes were red and there was bitterness there.

-They didn’t stop being red even after Titus held him close and calmed the buzzing rage he could feel under his nephew’s skin.

-“I’m King Regis’s spawn, aren’t I?”

-Titus stiffened at the wording, glanced up at his sister as she pet her son’s hair and breathed, “You are my beloved son. Who your father is doesn’t matter to us.”

-His nephew laughed and the sound was broken. Then he pulled away and summoned fire to his hands so he could stare at his magic. When he looked up at his mother, his eyes were still the color of fresh blood, “I don’t like my name. I want to change it.”

-Titus and his sister had exchanged worried looks, but out of fear of a magic-fueled tantrum, Titus asked, “What name do you want?”

-A sharp, bitter sort of smile more at home on the face of a soldier than a child, “Xanxus. My name is Xanxus.”

-And that was that. His nephew stopped responding to his given name, only answered to the one he had given himself. He was different now, from whatever had happened, and Titus wished he could ask Regis about magic without raising suspicions, because was this normal for Lucis Caelums? This sudden change in name and development of a too-old (too bloodthirsty) personality?

-Xanxus’s eyes never did turn back to blue. Titus suspected there was too much anger there, lurking just beneath the surface as his nephew went out and picked fights with the street rats of Lestallum, as he ran off to join the Hunters at fifteen, adding yet another concern to Titus’s life in between his duties as Captain of the Kingsglaive, the suit constantly prodding his thoughts, and Prince Noctis (who had taken to trailing him around with big blue eyes that made it impossible to hate the brat) and his crazy pet Galahdian who had apparently taken a shine to him because he wasn’t “a useless herbivore” (whatever that meant).

-Titus should have known something would break someday. The tenuous secrecy and balance couldn’t last forever. Not with Xanxus’s temper and Titus’s terrible luck in regards to Lucis Caelums.

-Four months after Xanxus turned sixteen, Titus got a report from the front lines. A base of Kingsglaive had nearly been overrun by a Niflheim assault until an unknown teenager with magic had intervened and shot down the gunships with a combination of over-powered, red-tinted fire spells and guns that seemed to fire bullets of pure magic.

-Titus could do nothing to stop the report from reaching Regis, because several Crownsguard had been at the base at the time to refuel their truck on the way back to Insomnia and they had already reported the incident to the Marshal.

-Titus stood at a twitching Regis’s side, face frozen in neutrality that he didn’t feel as the throne room doors got flung open and his nephew was escorted inside by several glaives. Xanxus eyed Regis with contempt, his magic swirling openly around him like biting embers of anger and King Regis flinched at the feel of it before stepped forward, “You are-”

-“Your illegitimate spawn,” sneered Titus’s nephew and Titus inwardly groaned, “so what? Gonna try to lock me in your pretty Citadel so I don’t go around shaming your line?”

-Regis recoiled like he’d been physically punched and Titus openly winced and resisted the urge to tell Xanxus to do his breathing exercises, “No!” Sputtered the king Titus had a constant loyalty-hate relationship with, “I would never hold you here against your will!”

-“So you’ll just offer a lot of incentives for me to stay and more incentives for me to not dare leave.” Retorted Titus’s living headache, “Don’t try the playing the nice sham you old b-.”

-That was enough of that, “Xanxus Certus Drautos, watch your tongue. I can still hold you down and wash that mouth of yours out with soap.”

-All eyes snapped to Titus while Xanxus made a face and a rude gesture and Titus sighed at the unspoken, panicky question in Regis’s eyes, “He’s my nephew. Yes, I’ve known about his magic for a long time.”

-Regis’s expression was so genuinely wounded Titus felt bad, “Then why did you never…?”

-Titus looked away, unable to withstand the hurt in the eyes of the man Titus thought was a bad king but knew was a good man (which was what made him a bad king), “We didn’t find out until the year Prince Noctis was born. I didn’t want my sister or nephew … or you … to suffer the scandal it would cause if he became known. And after the Queen died … there was never a good time.”

-Xanxus snorted, “Whatever, just scrub the reports and he can keep his precious reputation untarnished and I can go back to Hunting. Say one of your pet glaives used a new magic spell or something.” The glaives bristled at the “pet” comment, but Titus was just glad he wasn’t slinging his favorite word around yet (he doubted Cor or anyone in the room would react well to Xanxus calling the king “trash”)

-Regis turned back to Xanxus, reached out a hesitant hand, “You don’t have to leave. I will not stop you if … if you truly wish to go but I would … I would be honored to get to know my son-.”

-Magic rippled out like blood and fury and Titus instinctively put himself between Regis and Xanxus as his nephew snarled “I don’t belong to you, Trash King. I’m not your son, I’m your mistake and I will not be caged just so you can pat yourself on the back and feel better about ‘repenting’ for your ‘mistakes’.” Xanxus shook off the glaives that reached for him, fire burning dangerously up his arms and shoulders as he leaned around Titus so he could bare his teeth at a shaking Regis, his armiger flickering in and out of existence in red-amber as he spat, “You leave me and my mother the pyre alone or so help me I’m gonna-.”

-From the doors of the throne room, another magic signature spiked and Titus swallowed his spit in dread.

-What was Prince Noctis doing down here?

-Xanxus’s eyes went wild and he spun on his heel and Titus had a horrifying mental image of either his nephew or his crown prince dead on the throne room floor and half-dived for his nephew. He slammed against the red-tinted magic shield that formed and pushed outward, knocking aside everyone that might have stopped him as Prince Noctis, with no self-preservation whatsoever, ran up to Xanxus and smiled, “Xanxus, you’re here!”

-Wait. How did Prince Noctis know Xanxus’s name?

-Xanxus stared down at the nine year old prince with a cocked head, confusion in the set of his shoulders for a moment before he … relaxed, “Small Trash?” There was genuine confusion, disbelief, as if he wasn’t expecting to see Prince Noctis here, but that made no sense because Xanxus had only ever been to Insomnia in his life ONCE before now and there was no way he’d met Prince Noctis then. … Right?

-Prince Noctis stared around them at the shield hemming them in, then fearlessly smiled and hugged Titus’s nephew, “I missed you!”

-Titus prepared to batter down the shield in hopes of preventing regicide.

-Xanxus just patted Prince Noctis’s hair, armiger fading out of existence and magic settling to something slightly below screaming wrath, “Figures you’d be here, Small Trash.”

-“My name is Noctis.”

-“Xanxus. Xanxus Drautos.”

-Prince Noctis leaned briefly around Xanxus to blink at Titus, then resumed smiling up at the half-brother he shouldn’t know existed, “Titus’s…?”

-“Nephew, Small Trash. I don’t have a father.”

-Regis made a strangled noise, tentatively resting a hand on the shield keeping him away from his two sons, “Noctis…”

-Prince Noctis looked at his father, blinked with that unique, far-off stare he got when his seer magic kicked in and Titus felt his teeth grind as the boy looked up at Xanxus, “…You’re my half-brother.”

-Xanxus’s shoulders tensed, “Small Trash…”

-Prince Noctis turned and hugged Xanxus again, “It’s okay. He’s a good dad, I promise. He’ll love you. Please stay.”

-A shaking breath that felt … vulnerable. More vulnerable than his nephew had been since he was ten and claimed a new name, “I’m illegitimate, Small Trash. We both know what that means to royalty.”

-Slender arms hugged tighter and Titus watched in awe as his volatile nephew did nothing to throw the boy away, “Dad is different. I love him, and he loves me. He loves you too already. I promise. And I never break my promises.”

-Xanxus sagged in place, muttered a few scathing curses Titus had never been able to train out of him, then reached down and effortlessly picked Prince Noctis up and propped him on his hip like the boy was three and not nine, “Fine, Small Trash. I’ll give him three months. If I don’t like him by then I’m gone.”

-The shield dissolved as Xanxus turned around, “You got that, Trash King? You want to prove you’re interested in me as family and not a tool, you got three months to do it. After that I’m gone and none of your men better try to stop me unless they want to be dead.”

-Regis agreed even as the Marshal growled at Xanxus’s wording, but Titus didn’t care to listen. Couldn’t really think past his surprise because … because…

-As his nephew looked down at the half-brother he apparently already knew in his arms, angry but in a more tired and indulgent way, for the first time in years…

-Xanxus’s eyes were their natural washed out blue again.

-Oh, thought Titus quietly as Prince Noctis beamed up at Xanxus with amber eyes, magic curling effortlessly around Xanxus’s in a way that filled in and smoothed over all the screaming, jagged edges.

-Oh.

#Melodies and Manuscripts #Secret Engima Rambles #Fangs and Feathers verse #BEHOLD #khr #xanxus #ffxv #in this au #tsuna and xanxus were actually very close friends before they died #especially after tsuna #firmly told nono to put his prejudice against xanxus #where the son didn't shine #and let the varia have way more freedom #than nono ever had #there is trust between these two #and xanxus actually missed him #but thought that yuni and byakuran were the only other reincarnations #until he sensed noctis's magic

164 notes · View notes

aliceslantern · 3 years

Text

Give/Take, a Kingdom Hearts fanfic, chapter 9

Ienzo has been too busy since the war to be overwhelmed by the past. But with little progress to be made in his work with Kairi, old nightmares start to invade.

Riku is a glorified housesitter. Lonely and faced with no choice but to wait for a way to find his friends, he eagerly accepts when Ienzo asks him to help do repairs around the castle. Before long, the two strike up an unlikely friendship, united by their dark pasts and their attempts to be better people.

But just as they begin to consider something more... Kairi wakes up.

Ienzoku (Ienzo/Riku), post-Melody of Memory, slow burn. Updates Thursdays until it's done.

Chapter summary: On different worlds, Ienzo and Riku write each other letters.

Read it on FF.net/on AO3

---

Ienzo,

Sorry for the radio silence over the past few days, but things have literally been so insane I haven’t had a minute to myself to write this note. My mom is barely letting me out of her sight--not that I can blame her. She goes between being outraged to dropping everything and hugging me. She wants to know everything, and I’m trying to tell her as much as I can, but still editing the most… incriminating parts until she’s ready. You understand. Even when I was home before we never got into it.

I haven’t even really had time to enjoy being home. I’ve had to see family, friends, and they all want to know where I’ve disappeared to. People all over town, too, want to know what happened and where I went. A lot of people assumed that I’d gotten myself killed.

Including my parents. That was, and still is, the hardest thing I’ve had to accept. Starting to grieve someone and just beginning to make progress only to learn they’re alive… I feel so guilty. Now I wish I’d gone back home during Kairi’s year of sleep, even for a little while.

I’ll tell you more about what happened, but I just wanted to… start to get a status update. “Any news?” How are you? How have you been? What are you and the guys up to?

Write soon,

Riku

Dear Riku,

Thanks for your text. Of course I understand how overwhelming everything must be, and this was an unusual homecoming. I just hope it’s been more joyful than bittersweet, though I fear it’s the latter. I’m hoping this transition becomes less of a traumatic one for you. And even if it is… well. I am an impartial ear.

Correction--a somewhat impartial ear. I will yell at, and/or make fun of, anyone who gives you grief.

Do tell me about Sora and Kairi. Things must be dazzling for Sora especially--I can only imagine what sort of journey he’s gone through, and I’m probably wrong. Hopefully the three of you get to spend some time together, just relaxing and being friends. It’s the least of what you deserve.

I, on the other hand, don’t have much worth reporting. I’m continuing to work with Aeleus and Dilan on the repairs, helping Even with his various little experiments. I’m trying to figure out where I would be most helpful, but that has been somewhat difficult. I’m sure you can sympathize. It’s finally starting to get warm again here.

If I ever quit faffing about and find something worth writing about I’ll let you know…

Yours,

Ienzo

---

Ienzo,

Ha ha. For some reason I don’t believe you’ve been as lazy as you said you’ve been. Though part of me hopes you have. You deserve a little rest too.

On the topic of rest…

Right after I got your letter the puppet strings that have been keeping me awake since I got home snapped. I fell asleep on the living room couch and didn’t wake up for thirty-six hours. Mom was hysterical; she thought something was really wrong with me and took me to the doctor (which, considering how long it’s been since I’ve been home for any length of time, was my pediatrician. Awkward.). But the doctor just said what I told her, that I just needed to sleep . And sleep, and sleep… maybe it’s my turn to sleep for a year. Ha ha.

Yeah, yeah. Spare me your lectures. I’ve been so wired that even when I tried, I couldn’t sleep.

Sora and Kairi are doing as okay as they can. Of the three of us, I think Kairi’s bounced back the quickest. She’s already talking about re-enrolling in school to catch up. Considering she’s the mayor’s daughter, it made the news when she got back. She’s like a celebrity, though because she’s Kairi and she’s perfect, she’s got it under control. I mean that with no sarcasm whatsoever.

Sora…

As you can probably tell by me skirting around the subject, Sora… isn’t completely okay. Physically, he’s fine. Healthy. But it’s… between the Keyblade War, and what he experienced alone while we were all, very briefly, dead (which, remind me to tell you about that if I haven’t, because it is a trip.). He’s been ALONE for so long. I’ve never seen him so shaken, and he’s so quiet . Talk to him and he tries to be all smiles, of course, but a few of us were at the beach and instead of being all up in the middle of it like he usually is, he was sitting aside… alone. Kairi’s been trying to gently pry, but he keeps saying he’s okay. A tired act I think all of us know well by now. Honestly, I’m not sure what to do. What kind of therapist here would get what he’s gone through, anyway? The most we can do is be there, and keep on top of him, and hope he heals and processes over time. Makes me feel like a shitty best friend, but the emotional stuff was never my forte.

Sleepily yours,

Riku

---

My sleepyhead,

Hopefully by the time you get this you’re actually conscious. You had a long ordeal. Physically, emotionally, of course you’re exhausted. I hope you’re actually listening to it instead of pushing through. Been there. Done that. It is not worth it. You’re probably also still growing, believe it or not. The human male keeps growing and developing until twenty-five, and unless my knowledge of Destiny Island’s time stream is way off, you’re not exactly there yet.

I’m glad Kairi is doing well, and taking all of that in stride. If it were me I would’ve thrown in the towel long ago. I think school would be good. A taste of normalcy. You three deserve to get back to your lives… whatever that means. Or at least rest a while before finding greener pastures elsewhere.

It’s disheartening, but not surprising, that Sora feels the way he does. Like I said, I can only imagine what he might have gone through. Though I don’t like it when you say you’re a shitty friend when I watched you struggle to save your friends for a literal year. You’re too hard on yourself, Riku. Being there, after everything else you did for him, is enough. Make sure to take time for yourself too. Though if Sora’s condition deteriorates, do let me know. I’ll see if I have any sort of psychological resource which might help him more than just a standard therapist with no notion of the greater World outside. Hopefully he’ll start to feel more himself once he settles back down.

This… very brief death occurrence you were referring to intrigues me. What was all that about? Fortunately it seems to not have stuck, but regardless, I felt my heart jump into my throat when I read it.

The others have been asking after you, Ansem especially. He says to “send his regards” and I promise it’s friendlier than it sounds.

I wonder, do you have sea salt ice cream where you are? It’s the height of summer and Scrooge McDuck is out. None of my cohorts here are willing to share. It’s been war.

Craving sea salt,

Ienzo

---

To the insatiable sweet tooth--

No, as a matter of fact, we do not have that particular sea salt ice cream here. If we want it, we have to go off-world. There are other, more native flavors which you might like, like dragon fruit or star fruit. (It’s mostly fruit. Sorry, we’re islanders.)

Sora seems to be doing a little bit better. Roxas, Xion, and them came to visit, which seemed to brighten his spirits, or at least distract him. Sometimes he still stares off into the distance and he’s not quite as chatty. This is going to take a long time.

As for the death thing… well, part of why Sora disappeared was because he went back in time to save us after the dark prophecy was fulfilled and the Demon Tide killed us… apparently. Even I can’t keep it all straight in my head, and it happened to me. He changed the flow of time to save us, and “abusing” the power of waking to save Kairi was the final straw. I… don’t like thinking about it much. It makes me feel sick.

Mundane life feels weird. I do chores around the house, and I mow lawns for some pocket change. Can you imagine it? The magic would make it easy, but it also unsettles people, so I do it with a mower. I had to go to social services to get an ID and we waited in line for two. Hours. I almost went insane. But at least it no longer has the awful picture it did when I started high school.

Speaking of, mom wants me to re-enroll right away, and dad wants me to do night school and speed through a general high school degree. I’m not sure how I feel about it, honestly. Kairi and Sora are excited, and I think it’ll be good for them. Maybe I’ll take a year, or do it online, or something. Though I’m sad to say my computer literacy isn’t nearly as good as yours.

How are you feeling in the castle? It must be summer for you guys there, too, though I imagine there aren’t beaches or anything. I didn’t see any. Do you have any summer activities? Or do you just sit in the library with a moldering old paperback all day?

Gainfully employed,

Riku

---

Dear Riku,

Thank you for satisfying my curiosity about that experience. I knew time travel was a factor in Sora’s disappearance--but I didn’t think it went like that for all of you. Terrifying. Awful.

A fantastic way to start a correspondence.

To answer the question… no, there are no “beaches” in terms of ocean beaches, but when I was a boy Radiant Garden did have springs on the far edges of town, as well as public pools. I was not allowed to go to them much--Even was rather neurotic--but yes, they do exist. Did exist. The restoration committee has it on their very, very long list. The paths down to the springs probably need some maintenance.

That is to say, when not in the lab I am sweating and thinking of cooler days. Though I know this might feel borderline chilly for you. Indifference to temperature is one of the few things on my waning list of what I miss from being a Nobody.

I’m glad you have some way to fill your days… that, and the idea of you working outside appeals to me. I imagine it must bore you.

I don’t spend ALL of my days in the library. Just most of them, lately, as am still trying to get this place even the slightest bit organized. If I had the resources I’d digitize everything. It’d make life so much easier. But I am one person with one computer and there are thousands upon thousands of books here. As a boy I used to have the fantasy of reading all of them before I turned eighteen. But, alas, that has not happened, and some of the texts are too boring, or in another language, or are too fragile to be handled. I clearly had very interesting ideas of leisure.

I still have not been able to get my hands on any decent ice cream.

Unsatisfied,

Ienzo

---

Ienzo,

I wanted to talk about this earlier but I had to get things settled in terms of my room. (Long story. Not a fun story.) Would you ever consider visiting? I could come get you. My parents are okay with it. In fact, they for some reason link you with me coming home, which I guess is true. You did help us get the clue Kairi needed. Either way, you’ve already made a good impression.

(If it’s not clear, I miss you.)

I can take you to a real beach. Show you around, not that there’s a whole lot to see. A change of scenery might be nice. Sora and Kairi want to hang out, too. Sora says hi.

If you’re busy, of course, I can come to you. But I know you’ve been there a long time, and there’s not always good memory there.

No pressure. Let me know.

Riku

---

Riku,

I think you may be on the right track with a change of scenery. I’m afraid what little wit I had left me, and when I was explaining to the others I’d like to visit, it became clear very quickly that our relationship is more than surface level. For that, I’m sorry.

However… the more I think about it, the more appealing it is. Even doing nothing--with you--is better than sitting here doing nothing by myself.

That is to say I miss you too.

I can be ready whenever is most convenient. I’m sorry for making you come all this way, though.

Ienzo

---

Ienzo,

Please, the flight will give me a few hours’ of peace and quiet. It’s been great spending all this time with friends and family, but… I feel kind of suffocated sometimes. Besides, I better keep my piloting skills in tip-top shape. Sora’s mad that I’m better at it than him. What can I say, it’s one of my many natural talents. Along with gardening, apparently.

Bring light clothes; it’s HOT here. And sunscreen. I mean it.

Looking forward to seeing you, and talking to you, in person.

Yours, Riku

#give/take #ienzoku #ienzo/riku #ienzo #riku #ienzo is trans

2 notes · View notes

ardenttheories · 5 years

Text

And onto that odd little meta piece I was talking about. It’s really more of a fandom observation.

Despite not knowing what Bro looks like, the entire fandom seemed to gravitate towards two ideas: Twunk, or Hunk. Every piece of fanart I’ve seen usually has him thickly built, trim down the waist but broad shouldered and coiled with muscle, or at the very least with some sort of defined musculature that usually isn’t present on other characters. E.g. x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x

You’ll also typically find a theme with the artist’s choice of expression or facial features; strong jaw, sharp nose, often frowning.

And this all comes from...

This sprite. A sprite, mind you, that’s exactly the same as this:

And yet the expression of this character is wholly different.

He’s often drawn slimmer, with slanted shoulders and either a thin dorito-waistline or a relatively similar shoulder to hip ratio. He often has more curved features - his jawline, his nose - and his expression almost always determined or soft. E.g. x, x, x, x, x, x

And for emphasis: this is how two artists chose to draw them side by side. E.g. x, x

It’s also very rare to see people draw Alpha Dave the same height as Bro. From memory - and I got into Homestuck roughly during the height of the Alpha kids’ popularity - most of the fanart I saw with any instance of Bro and A!Dave in the same image had a pretty fair height difference.

Again: this comes from the exact same sprite. When you layer Bro’s sprite over A!Dave’s, you’ll be able to fit them together pixel to pixel (except, of course, the arm - A!Dave’s got his arm up holding the sword, unlike Bro - and the jawline - which is much more curved than Bro’s, but when we actually see Alpha Dave’s sprite in canon, it isn’t really long enough to focus on this tiny feature [especially when you consider that Grandpa Harley has the same face shape, but people still draw him with a defined jawline]).

So, why so different? Why would people draw these two characters so wildly different when, for instance...

Both Moms are drawn almost exactly the same.

It’s pretty obvious when you think about it, but it’s also an incredibly important thing to note if you ever plan on creating your own characters.

Character interactions define how we view characters that have yet to be introduced or do not have a wholly set image.

When we think of Bro, we have to be realistic: we know absolutely nothing about who he is as a person, or what he looks like, besides the information that we get from Dave. So, when we get the information that he’s physically abusive, that he has cameras around the entire apartment, partakes in puppet snuff for the sake of a pornographic website, leaves such pornographic paraphenalia around the apartment for a young Dave to see, and that he’s emotionally closed off and distant, we immediately start to form an image of him in our minds that’s based on what we can define as an amalgamation of toxic masculinity and male abusers.

It’s not exactly hard to imagine why the most common fanart of him circulates as a tall, imposing, broad figure who barely smiles and would be incredibly hard to get around in a small, dark alley.

We also need to remember, of course, that Dave is a child while he describes Bro. An adult is almost always going to be tall and imposing to a child - is always going to be stronger and physically more capable than a child.

Bro could be the most average joe you’ve ever met, but because we learn about him from the viewpoint of a child who quite literally cannot fight back, the image of him becomes tilted to the buff end of the spectrum.

He becomes someone we would fear seeing. Someone who could overpower us, and not just a child under his care. He is big and strong because that is how Dave sees him, and that is how we come to understand him as a character.

Big, strong, violent, with sexual overtness and a lack of emotion. It’s pretty much the only way you can imagine him, even when his sprite is incredibly lacking in detail.

So, why the softness for Alpha Dave?

Pretty simply, because we already know who Dave is by the time Alpha Dave is introduced. People already had an idea of what Dave looked like, who he’d be when he grew up. People had already decided that Dave, being so different from Bro, being such a hero, would never be able to achieve the same sort of toxic masculinity that Bro did - would never have the same shape, the same musculature, that comes with that toxic imagery.

We also got told about him by a young teen who absolutely idolised him. Who emphasised his good traits and spoke about how absolutely badass he was.

The connotations with Alpha Dave are so much more positive than with Bro. That in and of itself would have changed how people drew him. But when you combine him with the concept that he’s Dave, the Dave that went through all that abuse and came out the other side hating everything that Bro stood for, it’s hard not to draw him as Bro’s nigh complete opposite.

So, he’s smaller. He’s got less of that musculature that people associate with toxic masculinity (the ability to overpower someone smaller), and he has a much closer shoulder-to-hip ratio (something that makes him take up less space, and come across as less imposing). He smiles more, he emotes more, he’s much more emotionally open - and even when he’s meant to be “cool”, it’s often with some sort of smug or determined look, not the ever-present blankness or snarl that we see from Bro.

He loses all of the traits that we’d associate with an abuser. Instead, he becomes a pretty ordinary hero - someone who can stand up and fight back, but isn’t overly heroic or powerful. Someone who might still struggle, but can handle things.

This is despite the fact, of course, that we know nothing about Alpha Dave’s upbringing or life besides what Dirk tells us - and Brain Ghost Dirk, at that. Unreliable narrators are not a good place to find valuable information, and, once again, the in-comic sprite is literally the exact same as Bro’s.

Fandom perception is an incredibly powerful thing.

So, what about Dirk? How does he fare in all of this?

Dirk’s actually a weird figure in everything, and this comes down to a very simple yet paradoxical concept:

We already had ideas on who Bro was, yet we actively get to see who Dirk is.

It’s very hard to go into something expecting one person and getting another. We can see all those notes in Dirk that we saw in Bro - the toxic tendencies, the hyper masculinity, the divorced note from people and emotions - but we see them within the specific framework of a teenager with mental illness.

This isn’t just an asshole, abusive adult. This is that adult’s younger self in a better mindset to try and do good by the people he loves. We see this time and time again - when he says how much he cares about Roxy, when he expresses his guilt that he couldn’t be romantically invested in her, when he shares the fears he holds of his splinters, when he admits that Bro is exactly what he could be and is genuinely scared of being - that he is the foundation of Bro, but not Bro in a very important way.

It’s also needless to say that people connected with Dirk in the exact same way that people connected with Dave. When you look at a lot of vent art involving him, it’s almost always about mental illness - anxiety, impulsive or intrusive thoughts, a desperate need for control in life, self harm or a dislike for oneself - and a fair bit of generic art revolving around Dirk includes some sort of deeper mental struggle.

He’s a victim, in a similar way that Dave is, but he’s also just far enough that he could be a villain.

You find that a lot of fanart therefore shows this paradoxical nature.

In some, he’s softer. The ratio between his hips and his shoulders is narrower, his jawline is more curved. E.g. x, x, x, x

In others, he’s sharper. He’s drawn with more defined muscle, with a stronger jawline and broader shoulders, and though he’s definitely slim you can definitely see just how close he is to becoming the same figure as Bro. E.g. x, x, x, x, x

And in others, he’s an odd mix of both. A brooding figure with a softer jawline, but still imposing and sharp in his own right - or even the complete opposite, with sharp features and defined shapes, but slimmer and smaller, much less imposing. E.g. x, x, x, x, x,

So, I think we can make a pretty firm observation that the way Dirk is drawn reflects how the artist views his journey and his struggles. Whether he’s his own person, closer to Bro, or somewhere stuck in between.

As you can see from most of this art, there’s a few ways that people draw Dirk; raring to fight and smug/confident, fairly sombre and down, almost tired, or standoffish and closed off. Even this is somewhere in between the way people view Bro and Alpha Dave.

So, it’s then interesting to take a look at the Epilogues.

New art of Dirk was produced in line with the Meat Epilogue. And while I really only know of one piece that catches my eye every time I see it, I think it’s important to point out that, in almost all of these images, one of two body types appear for Dirk:

1) Broad, muscular, tall. He takes up space and commands attention. Sharp features, wider shoulders.

2) Smaller, less imposing, yet somehow intimidating in just the expressions he makes and the way he holds himself. If you can imagine any fuckboy you’d be scared of being cornered by at a party, you’ve got a good idea of this style of fanart.

In other words, either tipped way more to looking like Bro, or so close to looking like something you’d be scared of IRL - which perfectly reflects how uncomfortable he feels within the narration of the Epilogue, and some of the more questionable things he has happen in it.

I also want to just add in as a side note: almost all of the links I added about Dirk go to Pinterest for sake of ease for people to find other images for reference, since I’m really just collecting the art I like most. On most of the Dirk ones, scrolling down will reveal the aforementioned vent art; on most of the Dave ones, scrolling down will reveal much softer, sweeter pieces of art involving him and people he’s loved throughout the comic. Just something interesting to add into this discussion - think about what that means for how people view either Strider.

So, what was all of this about?

Honestly, it’s me just pointing out how important character opinions and preconceived ideas are to the way people view other characters. So much of the way we see Bro is influenced by how Dave sees him and our cultural understanding of what toxic, hypermasculine male abusers look like. So much of the way we see Alpha Dave is based around our understanding of Dave, and what little we can fill in from Brain Ghost Dirk, rather than on who he actually is as a person (and we could be wrong; we could be very, very wrong). So much of the way of the way we see Dirk is influenced by Bro, and yet by what we see in canon.

If we had different ideas and different opinions from different characters, we might draw each of them wildly different. But it is this specific combination of lack of physical description and cultural association/character perception that ensures we draw them the way they are.

#ardenttheories #long post//#homestuck meta #character analysis #homestuck

299 notes · View notes

itsomgitsgreenblogging · 4 years

Text

It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You): A Critical Role Fanfic

Guess who’s back? Honestly, I have to thank the Essek Fanclub Server for this. You guys are awesome, and an amazing inspiration. 2019 was a pretty bad year in terms of my writing, but, it ended amazingly because of the Critical Role Fandom. Here’s to 2020! Have some hot wizard yearning and sexy dream sequences inspired by my favorite song by the 1975.

Enjoy!

Warning: Explicit Sexual Content

Read it on AO3

Preview:

This was all because he hadn’t seen the Mighty Nein in a month. He was...getting all confused and acting like some sort of lovelorn maiden from one of the trashy Empire smut novels that he definitely didn’t read after he confiscated them.

“By the Luxon, let them come back soon, or else I might really go mad,” Essek muttered to himself.

“Where are they?” asked a courtier. The question was hissed at Essek as he paused in the Lucid Bastion, the green-lantern glow washing his face out to a pallid hue.

“I do not know,” Essek said simply, with a smile, finding it better than lying.

____

“Where are they?” Professor Waccoh grumbled at Essek, over the tops of the papers she had stacked on her desk. Reports, ideas, and death machines all found their place there, scattered like snowflakes or ashes amongst the heap.

“I do not know,” Essek responded, still smiling.

____

“Where are they?” the Bright Queen demanded, hand dripping with jewels glinting like knives in the light as she slammed it upon the table.

Essek smiled, and shook his head.

____

“Where are you?” Essek asked the empty house, but the windows remained darkened. It stared back into him, searching, and he didn’t have a response.

____

“Will you be long, Shadowhand?”

“Not too long, but I do wish for some privacy,” Essek told his shadow with a sidelong look. In the next moment, the shadow disappeared. For a moment he remained outside the temple, just relishing the stolen moments of being alone, before slipping inside the building without any further delay. Really, it was better to get this over with.

The Temple of the Lord of Light that was closest to the Bright Queen’s abode was a lavish affair. The ceilings were crowded with rows of geometrically patterned lanterns that cast a glow that could be hard for Essek’s eyes to handle. Carved into the walls were the sculptures depicting the mythology of the Lord of Light, His Glorious creation, the Vanquishing of the Spider Queen, and the Ascension of the Bright Queen. Along that were prayer altars that various drow and other citizens of the Dynasty huddled by, to light their own candle and pray. Often when one saw Essek float by, they bowed their heads out of respect for him.

He approached the private praying rooms, and as he did so he apparently caught the eye of one of the clerics. Essek recognized her as Derise, one of the head clerics of the Lord of Light. Though he loathed to do so, he dispelled his levitation magic. His heels clicked as they touched the floor. Clerics could be touchy about the appearance of power in their sacred spaces, and many of those with power among the clergy did not like him for a litany of reasons. He was young, not of one of the storied bloodlines, rather recently adopted in comparison to others, and yet he had gained remarkable power within his first life. They didn’t like him because he wasn’t one of their little puppets and he knew all their secrets in a way that perhaps only the Luxon might, and that made them afraid of him.

(Though he didn’t wish to think of them, it was part of the reason he had found certain members of the Mighty Nein so refreshing. Religion without certain pretenses had its own charms.)

“Lord Shadowhand,” Derise said, pointedly not bowing her head. She held her head up high instead, as if issuing him a challenge. Essek, instead, smiled as he usually did. He curled his fingers behind his back in a display of complete openness.

“Lady Derise, I pray the Light finds you well on this day,” Essek said, not bowing because he was certainly still wearing his back brace. Instead he inclined his head an inch. A vein jumped at her jaw. Amatuer, Essek thought derisively.

“And may it find you well, too. It is a lovely surprise to see you haunt these halls,” Derise said, with a tight smile. “I am sure the Bright Queen will be pleased to hear you are working on your religious studies today.”

“Matters of security tend to keep me from my spiritual needs. A bad habit of mine, unfortunately. The Bright Queen understands, of course, being the leader she is.”

“The Bright Queen is certainly accommodating with her favorites,” Lady Derise said, looking down at him from her nose.

“I am afraid that I am far too stubborn to be accomodated,” Essek laughed lightly as he walked forward only pausing to look back at her. “Your daughter, however, is a very accommodating creature. I know she was so pleased about her cousin’s engagement to General Dozall, that is how she ended up at his house at the witching hour.”

“That--it was---” Derise sucked on the air like it had been punched out of her chest. she coughed hastily, like being caught on her own deceit was physically painful. Really it was pitiful when those older than him were so easily tangled in the web. He almost felt bad for her. Almost. But it wasn’t in his nature to pardon stupidity.

“Hm? Well, all’s well that ends well,” Essek said evenly. “You really ought to go to a healer. I can always have one of my shadows escort you, just like they did for your daughter. It wouldn’t do to have you in trouble, my lady.”

“I am too busy to entertain bad jokes, Lord Shadowhand,” Derise said, her tone clipped and icy. “May the Light keep you.”

“And may it keep you as well.”

Derise stormed off. Essek found the royal prayer chamber, which he was allowed to use due to his position as Shadowhand, off of the main cathedral. It was a beautiful chamber with lofted roof painted with images of the constellations and the sun and the moon. In the center was a large fountain, portraying one of the first lives of the Bright Queen holding her arms aloft with the dodecahedron, about her were creatures of the forest and behind her was the fountain styled as a waterfall. It was popular among artist renderings of the queen to have her placed like that, though the fountain of youth iconography was a bit on the nose for him. Essek enjoyed the arts, but hadn’t had time to properly commission something since he had his portrait painted.

He cleaned his fingers within the blessed waters, before kneeling before the altar. He cleared his mind, closed his eyes, and prayed in Undercommon,

“Oh Glorious Lord of Light, You who were first in the Universe and Master of All Creation. Keep me and bless me, in this life and my future lives. Let Your glow illuminate the darkness inside, so that I may reach new heights. Show me the way as you did Our Most Righteous Queen, so that I may never be led astray. Let me pray for ascension, for consecution…”

There was the sound of delicate footsteps upon the marble and rustling fabric. Essek opened his eyes and looked to see the Bright Queen. As always she was arresting to look at, today fashioned more like a river-bathed-in-moonlight. She was without the armor she tended to wear at court, but adorned with a necklace made of platinum and blue topaz that clasped high at her throat and spilled across her skin like the tide. He began to stand, but she lifted her hand and he remained where he was.

“Your recitation of the Book of Madark is quite beautiful,” the Bright Queen remarked, looking towards the altar with the deeply fervent expression she always did. “I always did prefer Madark. He made me sound quite grand.”

“He never overstated your glory, your majesty,” Essek said honestly, bowing his head slowly.

“Madark was quite in love with me, I’m afraid,” the Bright Queen sighed, smoothing out her dress that shimmered like the scales of a fish. “Quite boorish about it too. I do not like men who overstay their welcome.”

“Or women who flirt and swoon,” Essek added before clearing his throat, “And the glorious star herself, may She guide us forever. Our Eternal Blessed Queen, who Heralded the Truth. Beauty Incarnate, who sets the heart ablaze with a single look-- ”

“Oh, the Book of Terawane. Ghastly stuff. I always told her that she was much better suited to singing than to writing. So melodramatic,” the Bright Queen said with a long-suffering hum. “I can bear it when you recite it, Essek. But do not make me listen to the High Priest give his lecture of how my breasts are twin fawns and my lips are a violet ribbon one more time.”

“Are you asking me to sanction his disposal?” Essek asked, taking a seat beside her.

“Nothing so dire,” the Bright Queen laughed, her voice silvered bells upon the marble and high ceiling. She looked into the fire of the candlelight thoughtfully. “No…”

Looking upon her, he often wondered what she felt. She had achieved perfection, she was the umavi. And yet as the firelight danced across her cheek, Essek wondered if she ever tired. She broke his revelry with a tap of her fingers against the stone bench.

“I’m sure you need no news,” the Bright Queen said. “The Mighty Nein have met with King Dwendal after being missing for so many weeks.”

“I was aware.”

“What do your shadows tell you that the human arcanist did not? Was it right to pull back the assault do you think?”

“Yes, it was. It was the cultists who were utilizing our assault to better their aims, we have confirmed reports of a Priestess of the Dawnfather being in cahoots with the conspiracy, and the Mighty Nein dispatched her. Now they work to broker peace. They are being asked to coordinate a parlay between Empire and Dynasty, by giving us back one of the beacons. In their private talks, they are anxious about finding a neutral location, but have not seemed to betray us. Though, Beauregard did state she infiltrated us to get closer to the enemy.”

This was all really just a formality. She knew what he knew, and he knew what She knew. Just another part of the game, Essek thought. The game in which they would all be winners or they would all be losers. It would be up to the Mighty Nein, and the prospect was somewhat terrifying.

“Just that claim is enough for me to have them killed on sight,” the Bright Queen warned him.

“Considering the slipshod job they did of infiltrating us, I find it very likely and compelling that they are just saying what they need to say to retrieve the beacon. That was the assignment given, and that seems to be what they are doing. Besides, they did not hinder our operatives while in the Empire.”

“One of the reasons you amuse me so is you are such a delightful pacifist,” the Bright Queen said.

“So long as it amuses you, your majesty.”

“You would be all I wish you to be, then? Have you no thoughts of your own?” the Bright Queen dared.

“All I have ever done, and will ever do, I do to serve at your leisure. I am just one of the voices you allow to fill up your ear. However, considering you chose and continue to choose to fill it with mine, it gives me some hope about where your opinion lies.”

“And where is that?”

“The long game, your majesty. It would do the Dynasty no good to rip the Empire out by the throat, utterly decimating their population and society. It would only serve to prove the Empire’s propaganda right, and move the masses against us. Instead, we take the high road. We show the Empire citizens we are not the monsters they claim us to be. And then, slowly, we can...improve upon their society,” Essek said simply.

“You care for the masses.”

“I must admit my bias for the common people, no matter their country of origin. At my core, I am still very much the street rat Skysybil yanked off the street.”

“And does it not concern you that they haven’t messaged?”

“I’m sure they are just busy, saving the world and all that,” Essek stated.

"Are you sure you are not just lonely for your wizard pet?" The Bright Queen's asked.

"This is far more amusing," Essek promised with a smile.

The Bright Queen's considered him. She reached out to cup his face and turn it up towards the candlelight. Essek blinked rapidly, but was docile and allowed her to do what she wished.

"Tell me something that no one else knows, Essek," she commanded him.

"I have no secrets from you, your majesty," Essek said, unable to help the way his head tipped to the side in curiosity. "What would you have me tell you?"

"I would have you look at me, unhindered by the mask you wear," she bid him, her fingers running in his hair. "And tell me your feelings, uninhibited. Do you believe that I am in the right?"

"With all of my heart," Essek said without hesitation, "I believe in you, for you are my sovereign."

"And you live to serve me, of course. But do you trust in my judgement?"

"I do, but I do not trust those who may seek to influence your decisions. You are divine, my queen, but not infallible. Though I am devoted to you with all of my heart, I will do my best to change your mind should I think you wrong.”

"With most of your heart," the Bright Queen's corrected, releasing him. "I hope you don’t take me for a sentimental idiot. You are a mortal, and your desires are that of a wild young foolish creature."

“I’m sure it seems that way.”

“They cannot be changed, my dear Shadowhand,” the Bright Queen said mournfully. “My nation will only ever be safe when the Empire has been decimated. It is within their nature to expand and conquer, and even if we broker a peace now it will not last.”

“If you believed that, I would be out of the job,” Essek informed her.

“Perhaps,” the Bright Queen stated. “But for now, what can we do besides pray?”

Between that breath and the next she was gone, leaving him in the prayer chamber alone.

_____

"Will you require anything else, my Lord?"

Essek looked up from his reading to see one of his servants. Essek smiled at him, and watched as the servant relaxed minutely and settled the tray with tea by the bedside table. This one was a newer hire, an assistant to the cook when he wasn’t completing general housekeeping tasks though Essek had the sneaking suspicion he would prove to be a better cook with time. It was important, to know and cultivate your assets.

“No, Amald, you are dismissed for the night,” Essek said. “Tell your wife I send my regards and well wishes to her health. She is with her third, yes?”

“And ready for the end of it, I’m afraid,” Amald said, tusks showing with his smile. “This pregnancy has not been easy on her. Our Denmother believes the birth will be difficult too.”

“Well, I shall send for my personal healer then,” Essek said, closing his book. He held up his hand at Amald’s immediate attempt at response. “Do not worry about the cost, I shall take care of it. Consider it my gift to you and your wife, and a favor I may ask repaid.”

“Of course,” Amald said his voice rich with feeling and gratefulness, bowing so deeply that Essek was worried he would topple over. “You are most kind, my lord.”

Essek blinked at the sight, fighting off his frown easily. Essek often enjoyed compliments. He was handsome, talented, shrewd, powerful, generous any number of things. Kind though? Not one of the usual ones.

“Until tomorrow,” Essek said, and Amald took off.

Essek enjoyed the remainder of his tea, a wonderful blend of ginger, licorice root, peppermint, and chamomile. He always found going into a trance so much more pleasant on the tail-end of nice tea and a good book. He could almost hear his Denmother lecturing him about the importance of trance, after collapsing with exhaustion during his first year of his education.

Essek slipped into bed, laying down among the sheets and pillows. It was always easier to trance when he wasn’t sitting, or his back would protest. He listened to his heart beat, to the breath in his lungs, felt the way his ribs moved beneath his skin, fell deeper...deeper…

He was in his Denmother’s salon. Not his Denmother yet...at least not on paper. Mathulsda Theylss was frowning at him severely, looking him up and down as if all his faults were written upon his features and could be categorized accordingly.

“Smile in a way that doesn’t make you look like you swallowed a frog,” his Denmother scolded. Essek’s reflection looked back at him. A sixteen year old Essek looked annoyed at best, contemptuous at worst. “Smile.”

“I don’t want to smile,” Essek snapped at her.

“You are lucky you were born in this era, boy,” his Denmother scoffed, leaving his side for a moment to take a sip at some wine. “Or you wouldn’t have a choice about what was done with your pretty face. You were the one complaining about the way they treat you, listen to my advice or don’t bother to complain.”

“How is smiling better going to help me? They hate me because they think me common,” Essek demanded, and was given a pinched cheek for his question. She released him and he held his cheek, glaring at her.

“No, they hate you because they know you are anything but common,” she said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She looked at herself in the mirror, and Essek looked at her reflection and saw the transformation. She was truly arresting, in the way she smiled and turned her head just so. “It is easy then, to change hatred to love. You suss out those who hate you, and then you go to their friends. You find their weaknesses and can exploit them easily, because there is nothing for them to hate about you. Your professors will adore you, and will teach you all you wish to know. The noble dens will look at you and say, what a wonderful boy. The Bright Queen will favor you. Forget how to frown, Essek. That horrid little street urchin you were doesn’t exist. You are pretty, pleasant, considerate, and you smile. It is no longer a mask you can slip on and slip off when you play your childish little games with Skysybil. It is who you are now, forever.”

“I’m not like that, that’s not who I am,” Essek said, staring at himself. “I’m…”

“Essek Theylss is,” she said softly, as if it were a mercy. Her hands were upon his shoulders. “If you wish to be Essek Theylss, it’s who you will become. If you cannot get along with them, if you cannot make allies and cannot play the game, we have no use for you. There are other children with talent, though maybe not as talented as you, but they can become far more useful to us if you will not. So? Are you willing?”

Essek watched his own reflection as he schooled his face into a soft smile. It fit onto his face cleanly, naturally, as if this were the way he was always meant to look. Maybe it was the way he was meant to look. Maybe she was right. If this was what everyone wanted then this was for the best. The Denmother patted his shoulder, in a mockery of fondness that tore that thought out by the root.

“Very good, Essek,” she praised, standing in front of him to fix the collar of his uniform. She was taller than him, looking down at him with cruel delight. “Isn’t that so much better? We must always look our best, don’t we--?”

Wake up!

Essek tore himself out of that trance, jerking up so fast that his back twinged. He pressed his hands to his face, taking a few moments to just breathe. He knew better than this, Essek thought, thoroughly annoyed at himself as he lay back down with a huff. A trance was a fluid state, a visitation of memories or dreams affected by waking emotions and thoughts. Bad thoughts led to bad memories or dreams which led to bad trances.

“All I have are bad thoughts,” Essek said as he breathed out to the ceiling, resigned to his fate. There was just too much jumbled together in his mind, too much worry.

Something you don’t know? Essek thought crossly. I miss the Mighty Nein, their shenanigans and their quirks that make me feel like I am not altogether that odd and that I have my life in a workable order. I don’t believe that I have a mask anymore, there is only this. I don’t know how to be without a smile. I don’t even know what it’s like to be that person anymore, but I feel as close to it as I ever have when I am with Caleb Widogast of all people. I want them to like me. I want him to want me, whoever that is.

Essek continued to breathe, though he felt that it was a struggle. He needed to rest. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be as sharp as he needed to be.

Rest, Essek told himself, forcing his eyes closed. Rest.

Entering into a trance again, he was greeted with a dark space. It wasn't unpleasant, but it was a comforting absence. It was a night sky without stars, the inside of your eyelids, the feeling of being underwater, in the warmth, in the bath--

"Essek," Caleb murmured.

Essek was in bed, somewhere comfortable and soft. A weight on the bed next to him, a body pressed deliciously to his as if searching for warmth. This wasn’t what he wanted, Essek thought dizzily. He wouldn’t be able to rest like this, not when his body suddenly felt so alive.

“Essek,” Caleb called again. There was a dip in the bed, the sensation of being straddled, a press of a kiss to his neck. Essek shuddered at the soft touch, the way he was being kissed like he was precious. Like he would shatter at a harsher touch. He gasped as his eyes fluttered open.

“Oh,” he sighed, reaching up to touch Caleb’s face, brushing across his cheek with the back of his hand. Caleb leaned into the touch as if he chased it. His eyes were the powdery blue flowers painted in the mural on their barbarian's wall, regarding him with a tender, searching expression. The emotional whiplash almost took Essek right out of this, but he was anchored by the feeling of Caleb’s body against his.

“Will you stay with me?” Caleb asked him, catching his hand. He nuzzled it sweetly, causing goosebumps to ripple across Essek’s skin, before cradling Essek's face in his hands. Caleb didn’t smile as much as he should, in fact, Essek had gotten the distinct impression that Caleb had long since gotten out of the practice of smiling. But he would look so lovely, if given the opportunity. Essek’s traitorous heart told him that perhaps he would be the one to offer those opportunities, if Caleb would let him.

"Yes," Essek said, managing to get the word out from his heavy tongue. Caleb managed to remedy that problem by dipping his head down and catching Essek in a kiss. Essek tipped his head, to deepen the kiss, to let it linger as long as he could. To feel the imprint of teeth and the stroke of the tongue that left him tingling all over. Essek trailed his fingers over Caleb's bare arms, feeling the hair there, the rough criss-cross of scars against sun-worn freckled skin.

They kissed and explored each other without worry or haste, until Essek lay breathless beneath Caleb, allowing Caleb to pamper his skin with attention, to lavish him with his desire in a way that had him shivering. Essek couldn’t untangle himself from Caleb, from his legs or his arms, and he didn’t want to. Essek was caught there and he never wanted to escape from Caleb’s arms.

"You are so beautiful," Caleb whispered, nipping his collarbone. Essek's breath caught in his throat.

Essek regarded Caleb through a half-lidded gaze, memorizing the exact way Caleb’s hair escaped his tie, and the constellation of freckles dusted across his nose. The adorable little human curve of his ear, the human thickness of his body. Essek had seen the way that others looked at Caleb, with a desire that soaked in one’s skin like a warm summer rain. It made Essek covetous and proud, because Caleb had eyes for him. They were a well-matched pair, in Essek’s opinion.

"Please, do tell me what you find so beautiful about me," Essek bid him.

“Smug,” Caleb chuckled.

“I am merely asking for the facts of the matter,” Essek told him, sitting up. He climbed into Caleb’s lap, something very bold and daring for him, but it was nice to be somewhat taller than Caleb in that moment. Essek found the shell of Caleb’s ear he had previously admired, tracing it with his lips and the barest brush of his canine, letting Caleb shudder under his touch. He curled his arms around Caleb’s neck, looking deep into Caleb’s eyes as he pulled his head back with the softest tug. Caleb bared his neck to him easily, so easily submitting to the touch, and it set upon Essek the fire of desire “Tell me, be a clever boy and tell me what I want to hear.”

“You are the most powerful and beautiful man I’ve ever laid my eyes upon,” Caleb groaned, moving their hips together in a way that made Essek shudder. “I need you. No one else could ever compare to you, Essek.”

“Yes,” Essek gasped, feeling Caleb hot and hard and longing against him. It was driving him crazy. He had spent so long without a lover, without sampling the pleasures of flesh. He hadn’t needed it, and he hadn’t missed the few and sparse flings of his youth. They had been bare-boned things that couldn’t even be called romance, a simple almost instinctual satisfying of urges, a useful distraction, a way to utilize his pretty face to get what he needed. Knowledge, power, the game of politics had been so much more entertaining, and intellectual curiosity being quenched was so much more satisfying. People were easy to manipulate when they were kept at an arm’s length, it was so much easier to smile when there was nothing at stake.

But this? This was something else entirely. He couldn’t even control his body, couldn’t think through the haze of desire. He resurfaced and had to have pushed Caleb underneath him, because suddenly his hands were digging into his shoulders and his hips were moving desperately to the staccato rhythm of his heart as Caleb dragged him harder and more deliciously against him. Pleasure tore him open, it filled him up, it was so good--!

“Look at you,” Caleb moaned, pressing his flame-hot hands against Essek’s belly. “So lovely, so beautiful wrung out like this, just for me. What a treasure you are…”

“More,” Essek demanded, not sure how much longer he could last but wanting to wring out this moment as long as he could. Everything was on fire, on a pin-needle edge, but he wanted to be greedy. He wanted all the things he couldn’t allow himself, all the things that Caleb could give him and that he could give to Caleb in equal measure.

Oh by the Light, they were making love. The realization made Essek lightheaded, it made his back arch with the intensity of the sensation, it sent his teeth on edge. He would be ruined for everything else, Caleb would ruin him, but he had to give in.

“You are exquisite,” Caleb gasped, reverently, desperately--lovingly and then he gave in to the pleasure, forcing Essek over the edge with the intensity. Essek wilted upon him, no more strength in his limbs to hold him. Caleb stroked him through it, with him. For a few blissful moments, there was nothing else in his mind.

Slowly though, he emerged. Essek peppered Caleb’s face with kisses, curling his leg around him, burying his face into Caleb’s shoulder and his soft, fragrant hair. Caleb’s fingers scratched the back of his head, in a way that made him sigh with sated pleasure.

“It is time to wake, Essek,” Caleb chuckled, voice amused and hazy with warm gentle lovemaking.

“No,” Essek grumbled, more firmly pressing himself to Caleb. It was a stubborn childish thing that well in his chest, but he didn’t care. In that moment, completely divulged of his mask, he just wanted to be selfish.

“Yes, it is,” Caleb said wistfully, and as Caleb gently stroked Essek’s back in soft comforting waves that drew him deeper, further...softer…

Essek resurfaced having drooled into his pillow. He sat up and looked at himself in the mirror, at his mussed bed-head and very inelegant splotches across his cheek and--his dream!

His face burst into heat, he grabbed the closest pillow, buried his face into it, and bit into it hard to stifle his scream. Oh by the Light! Had he reverted back into his second decade? He thanked the Luxon and all the Gods above and below for the gift of living alone. He didn’t think he had ever been so mortified in his entire life.

“I’ll never be able to look at him again,” Essek said mournfully, spitting out feathers he had managed to rip out with his fangs. He brought his blessedly cool fingers up to press to his hot cheeks.

“By the Luxon, let them come back soon, or else I might really go mad,” Essek muttered to himself.

His reflection in the mirror seemed to agree.

#Critical Role #Critical Role Fanfic #shadowgast #essek theylss #caleb widogast

57 notes · View notes

haberdashing · 4 years

Text

No Puppet Strings Can Hold Me Down (9/?)

The Magnus Archives fanfic. An AU that diverges from canon between episodes 159 and 160, in which Peter Lukas’ statement that “he got you” takes on a different meaning.

on AO3

Breakfast... dinner... brinner was quiet and uneventful, after that. It would be easy to assume that it was meant to be a comfortable silence, that they had said all the things that really mattered back in the Lonely, but was that really true, or was there more to it than that? Jon thought it was the latter. Or perhaps Jon simply hoped it was the latter, hoped that this silence might be a sign that Martin knew more than he was sharing and didn’t much care to make small talk with Jonah Magnus regardless of whose body he was wearing. It was hard to tell for sure.

After they both were done, though, the silence got heavier. There was no clear activity for them to do next, after all. There was only them, them and an unkempt but cozy safehouse and time that needed to be spent within it or around it until they needed food or sleep once more.

Jon had dreamed of a life filled with nothing but leisure time like that, once.

Jon had dreamed of an awful lot of things that seemed to be coming true now in the worst way possible, like his subconscious had gotten hold of a monkey’s paw and milked it for all it was worth.

Martin was the one to finally break the silence between them. “Are you good now?”

Jon felt his face wrinkle and contort in a semblance of confusion. “That’s an awfully broad question. What do you mean?”

Martin hesitated, blinking a few times before responding. “I just meant, er...” His voice trailed off a bit as he looked pointedly at one of the stray piles of newly-brought belongings strewn across the place, though what made that particular pile special Jon couldn’t tell at a glance. “You’re not still hungry?”

“Martin, we just ate.”

“Not- not that kind of hungry.” Another semi-furtive glance directed towards the same pile of unorganized necessities. “Just, you know, I brought them along for you and all, but I don’t know how often you, well, need one-”

Jon put together the pieces a moment before Martin made his meaning even more plain, though Jonah just raised his eyebrow in response.

“The, the statements. Do you need to go read a statement, Jon?”

Even though he knew he had no control over the actual response to Martin’s question, Jon thought about what his response would be just the same. He’d started to practically take the statement reading for granted, these past few months, which probably wasn’t a great sign in hindsight; honestly, he’d grown better at tending to that need than making sure he ate actual food, if only because he’d learned the hard way what happened when that sort of hunger went unchecked. Now that he thought about it, though, he felt fine, at least physically. No hunger, no weakness, none of the symptoms he’d once mistaken for an illness before he’d known better.

Had it just not been long enough since the last statement for it to set in, or was his current situation enough to override that need, at least for the time being?

Jon’s train of thought was unexpectedly derailed by the sound of his own voice speaking up.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt.”

“Alright, well, they’re all ready for you. Got a bunch over there-” Martin waved a hand in the direction of the pile he’d been staring at before. “-though I didn’t look too close at what I was grabbing, they might be ones you’ve read already, or, or even fake ones, I don’t know-”

“I’m sure it will be just fine. Thank you, Martin.” Jon felt his lips curl into a smile he didn’t really feel.

“Don’t mention it. Just, er, while you’re busy with that...” Martin scratched the back of his neck nervously. “Mind if I take a nap?”

A brief moment of hesitation, in which Martin’s face grew more and more pink by the second.

“Not that I don’t like hearing you monologue, but I figure hey, if the bed’s not being used...”

“Oh, of course. Go right ahead.”

“Thanks.”

Martin went off to curl up in the bed, and Jon hoped that he slept well, that maybe they could keep making arrangements like this so Martin could at least spend some time sleeping somewhere more comfortable and height-appropriate than the sofa.

Jon couldn’t tell if Jonah was looking for something specific in the statements, but he did glance at a couple before deciding on one and pulling it out from the stack, giving Jon a bit of a paper cut in the process, though he knew from experience the sting wouldn’t last and the cut would likely be gone in minutes if not seconds. A small blessing, there, one minor upside of an otherwise horrible situation. Lose your humanity, heal faster from paper cuts. Not Jon’s idea of an ideal trade-off.

“Statement of Isaac Kaufmann, regarding the aftermath of an attempted mugging. Original statement given August 13th, 2009. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Statement begins...”

It was a bizarre feeling for Jon, reading out loud a statement without being drawn into it, going through the motions without any of the emotions he usually associated with the act. He felt bad for the guy, sure, but that was just basic human sympathy (or basic inhuman sympathy perhaps), not literally feeling everything this Mr. Kaufmann felt upon almost being mugged and surviving only by way of encountering something stranger and no less dangerous than the man who had tried to mug him initially. Jon had wondered from time to time how odd his reading statements must look from an outside perspective; now, it seemed, he was as close to getting an answer to that question as he was likely ever to get.

The words pouring out of his mouth sounded like a passable imitation of his usual statement voice, at least, and if Jonah faltered once or twice, well, Martin wasn’t exactly hanging on his every word, napping as he was in the cabin’s lone bed...

Though that gave Jon an idea.

Jon couldn’t do much now, but he could still Know things--he’d learned that already, had done it without even trying to back in the car.

When he’d tried too hard to Know what Peter Lukas was planning some time ago, he’d made himself sick, even blacked out for a moment afterwards before getting what had to be the supernatural equivalent of the world’s worst hangover.

What would happen, then, if he tried to Know what Jonah Magnus was planning now?

At best, he’d get some answers, know exactly what was in store for him, though Jon wasn’t holding his breath on getting the best possible outcome here; life never seemed to be that generous towards him.

Maybe it’d do to his body what it’d done before, disorientate him, weaken him, and weakening him meant weakening Jonah Magnus now, so that was a price Jon was very much willing to pay.

At worst... well. Not much could be worse than the present scenario. Worst case would likely be his attempt at Knowing failing utterly, and Jon still would know nothing and Jonah Magnus would still be running around unhindered in his body, and it still wouldn’t actually be any worse than if he hadn’t tried at all.

Jon didn’t hesitate.

What is Jonah Magnus’ plan?

The information poured into Jon’s mind all at once.

Ignaz Semmelweis, the first doctor to successfully prevent most postpartum infections by encouraging doctors to wash their hands, was roundly ignored by his contemporaries and died in obscurity. The tallest body Jonah Magnus has ever inhabited, one by the name of Mark Matthews, stood at six feet, three inches tall. The Admiral has a half-sister that lives nine blocks away from Georgie’s flat. Hydrophobia is a historic name for the disease of rabies due to late-stage symptoms in which the infected person cannot swallow liquids, cannot quench their thirst, and shows fear or panic when presented with liquids to drink. Liz Culvert, who dated Elias Bouchard when both were attending uni, wrote a short poem about Elias’ eyes while they were dating. The rhyme “Red touch yellow, kills a fellow; red touch black, friend of Jack” does successfully distinguish between venomous coral snakes and nonvenomous scarlet king snakes, but is only entirely accurate when applied to snake species native to the southeastern United States...

The information keeps coming rapid-fire, the details of each seemingly-random factoid soon blurring together in Jon’s mind, his senses overpowered by the sheer weight of Knowledge within his head. The world faded away, replaced by static and words, and still the information kept coming and there was nothing he could do about it-

The next thing Jon knew (lower-case), he was sprawled out on the floor, head pounding, back smarting, every part of him hurting like hell--still unable to move a muscle of his own accord, though he did give it a try just in case--and the only good thing Jon could think of was that Jonah Magnus must be feeling this pain as acutely as he was.

If he had actually learned anything about Jonah Magnus’ current plans it was lost to him now, a drop within a sea of more or less useless information, a needle buried deep within a haystack.

Did Jonah Magnus feel as disoriented as Jon did? The only way to know for sure was to engage him in conversation, Jon supposed, but... he’d rather pass on that, thanks, especially since that’d probably manage to make his headache even worse somehow.

His hands were shaking as he sat up, though, and as Jon wasn’t the one controlling them, wasn’t the one in charge of their shaking or lack thereof, he figured that meant his little stunt must have had some effect on his mental captor.

“Jon?”

Jon looked over as Martin rushed over to his side. Jon had assumed that Martin wouldn’t have noticed any results of what he’d done, that he’d be too lost in sleep to wake up for something so relatively minor, but evidently that assumption had been a faulty one.

“Jon, what happened? Are you alright?”

Jon tried not to read too much into the questions Martin asked, tried not to search them for even the slightest signs of understanding, but to no avail. He’d thought that he’d given up on false, useless hope already, and yet...

“I’m fine, don’t worry. Just a... a bit of a dizzy spell, I suppose.”

“Do you know what brought it on? You didn’t hit your head on the way down, did you?”

“I don’t believe so, no. And... hard to say. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

As Martin looked down at Jon, a hint of a smile crept onto his face. “No, no, I couldn’t sleep anyway. Wasn’t your doing. Now, d’you need a hand up?”

“Er...”

“Sounds like a yes to me.”

Martin extended his hand, and Jonah took it for him, and Martin was still cold to the touch but his manner was still warm as anything, and it didn’t matter what temperature his hand was, just that it was big and soft and embracing Jon’s own hand in turn, supporting him both physically and metaphorically a-

Don’t try to pull that little stunt again.

And Jon’s train of thought was disrupted in the most awkward of fashions by Jonah Magnus’ butting in just before Martin released his grip as Jon stood upright once more.

His arms were still shaking, though, and Jon doubted that Jonah was putting that on for show, not when his head still ached from too much knowledge filling it all at once.

So he could do something, then. He could do at least one thing that would affect the world around him, not just the worlds within his own mind. Granted, that thing was basically eldritch self-sabotage, but it was something at least. That had to be a good sign. That had to be better than nothing.

And if Jonah Magnus was warning him against it, that meant that Jon now had some form of leverage against him, something he could threaten Jonah with that was clearer and more tangible than any of Jonah’s own vague yet ominous threats.

Jonah said something to Martin, but Jon didn’t hear it, busy as he was laughing to himself, hoping that his laughter would be loud enough for Jonah Magnus to hear.

#tma #tma au #tma fic #tma fanfic #the magnus archives #the magnus archives au #the magnus archives fic #the magnus archives fanfic #personal #my writing

6 notes · View notes

diamondnokouzai · 4 years

Text

talking abt the visual novel characters under the cut <3

mayhart player character. red-haired human commoner, youngest child of her family, last child born of her mother before mother died and father remarried. shorter than average (5′2″ as female, 5′5″ as male) named mayhart because she was born on the fourth of may. wild & uncontrollable, bearing a rage that she herself doesn’t even understand. grew up a commoner alongside her childhood friend yerick. widely rumored in town to be a changeling- she doesn’t act the way a normal human should, never knowing when to leave well enough alone or how to calm down and settle for her lot in life (the number of times when she, accompanied with yerick, has been chased back to town by some beast she provoked in the woods is uncountable). was recently conscripted into the army and adopted by the duchess koballe after her latent magic appeared. one of very few people who can use offensive magic and not purely reconnaissance/traveling magic. finally has an outlet for her rage, and somewhat hates the things she does. wears standard military uniform but badly- doesnt entirely understand how all the straps & bindings work and will not learn :) as the player character, she can be male or female. as a male, his rage turns inward, and as a result he is less open with his own emotions and keeps all his feelings hidden within himself. openly contemptuous of the war, but far more polite than his female counterpart. neither version holds any respect for anyone who hurts the weak. neither can hold their liquor either. 21 in human years

demavieve eldest princess of the draconic realm- as such, the future sovereign. the draconic realm is the only country allied with perine in this war which makes several people very nervous (its like if the us allied with luxembourg in a war against belgium france germany & the uk excep the us was the only country with nukes). demavieve has a very strong sense of honor though so constrains herself to a human form along with swordplay. this is less dangerous than it seems because if demavieves human form dies then she just turns back into her draconic form. her human form also has red hair, but its far more tameable than mayhart’s. she wears it tied back in a ponytail in general. she wears a perine knight’s uniform with vestments from the draconic realm to signify that she is (a) a foreign-lent soldier and (b) a commander. her human form is muscular and about 6′6″. hot and well aware of it.arrogant but also very friendly about it- ‘you love me? haha, of course you are! you seem great too!’. kind of sees this whole thing as a game- dragons live a lot longer than humans, and something like this is just a blip on her radar. very low empathy until someone she cares about is hurt at which point everything goes out the window (and she cares about pretty much all the perine soldiers- not in a very respectful way, but she loves them all and she goes apeshit sometimes). very friendly with serenina. can absolutely hold her liquor. only romanceable as f!mayhart. 23 in human years, ~150 in real time.

serenina the only princess of the former emperor and empress. i spoke about her in more detail in another post so this is gonna mostly be glossed over. wears her hair in afropuffs cause she does her own hair and shes proud of it. temporal (reconnaissance) magic. desperate to please. legally only friends with demavieve, although also friendly with yerick. about 5′0″ although she desperately wants to grow taller (unlikely). her eyes look like theyre black but if you look closely (which she probably wont let you do) theyre actually purple/indigo. is completely out of touch with the rest of the world because shes a princess but she is also very sincere and tries her best to be helpful when she can. very expressionless and sensible. not very well-liked as the former princess of the warmongering emperor and empress. actually very touch starved. does not wear standard military uniform outside of mage’s robes, which she wears over tea dresses (which is another reason some soldiers dislike her) is kept away from alcohol as much as grayson can and as such will get drunk off half a cup of wine. sleepy drunk. 18 in human years.

grayson the bastard son of the former emperor, sereninas older half-brother. grew up as a commoner in the same area as serenina & yerick until he was brought into the royal castle at age 9. fiercely protective of serenina. faux affable- you know the ‘expressionless smile’ princes from otome games/manga always have? thats graysons face pretty much always. legally not eligible to the crown (due to some religious issues with committing patricide & stepmatricide) but like. like hes already doing everything? yk how it is. highest commander of his troops attempting to broker peace with the other countries perine was at war with (most noticeably alloue, nawolem, & farik in order to attack caledonia, which was the puppeteer behind the former reign) but is not above underhanded methods/tactics including attacking noncombatant targets (they dont even have geneva). very intelligent & very calculating- consistently calculates highest reward/lowest risk maneuvers and has them executed flawlessly. his own cunning scares him on occasion, but he mostly locks that away- theres no time for those kinds of feelings in war. a foil to f!mayhart- she is wild, he is restrained; she shows her true feelings regardless, he always acts at a happy neutral; mayhart confronts her uncomfortable feelings, grayson hides them from everyone. about 5′11″, has long dreads that he keeps tied back. dressed in perfect military regalia, including commander’s cape & military crown (basically just a circlet). also cant hold his liquor- hes nearly as bad as serenina. 25 in human years.

izyn the son of count dau claire, the only noble house in perine that has been loyal to grayson since before the deaths of the former emperor and empress. very quiet because he has social anxiety. completely brainless. very friendly but his height (6′4″) and imposing aura (he gets nervous) means that the only people who can easily communicate with him are yerick and grayson. black hair, cropped short, and green eyes. skilled swordsman, mid-commander. will get trapped in an unwinnable situation which yerick needs to save him from. wears his military uniform right but...........not really? he wears the base uniform right but always forgets his commander’s cape. has a dedicated fanbase that came about when he did his training shirtless. literally doesnt think that any of his problems are that deep (honestly doesnt think anything is that deep). suffice to say, theres a reason why count dau claire never shows up and doesnt seem to be involved in any of the decision making of the count’s matters. very protective of yerick (younger brother). is the most visibly affected by the war- as the one who is usually in the center of the violence and doesnt have a survival cheat like demavieve, he has pretty bad ptsd which coupled with his anxiety issues make him a hot mess. his hobbies include hiding in dark rooms that have been reinforced to the point where literally only yerick can get in. despite his size he gets drunk very easily- not as bad as grayson & serenina, but 1-2 mugs of beer puts him out. 26 in human years. only romanceable as m!mayhart

yerick adopted son of count dau clarie. childhood friend of mayhart. born an orphan, an old woman took care of him til he was 4 and she died. stuck around mayharts town cause their family would give him food whenever he stopped by. still ended up fairly malnourished. small but vicious- hes screamed at mayhart lots of times for the stupid shit they would get him into and is not afraid to smack some sense into them. however he is not a good fighter because hes physically very weak- most of his energy in developing went to his magical capabilities, which came to fruition when he was 6. about a year after that (with a great deal more shunning from the townsfolk besides mayhart), he was adopted by count dau claire. was sealed with a subordination seal (used in order to ensure compliance with reasonable requests as long as a reasonable argument is made) for a year to ensure that he wouldnt run away. izyn liked him right away, but it took about 18 months for yerick to not be completely vicious whenever he was approached. as of the modern day of the vn, yerick is as protective over izyn as izyn is him- yerick has seen some of the worst of the world, and in his opinion izyn has not (this is despite the fact that izyn helped overthrow the royal family at age 15 but in fairness to him izyn told yerick none of this) so he wants to make sure his big brother stays happy. yerick holds absolutely no loyalty towards count dau claire or even to grayson- he is loyal to his own needs first, with a decent second being izyn and an even further distant third being mayhart & their family. very prickly & well acquainted with the fact that most people are inherently selfish and would turn away from an orphan on the streets. abandonment issues. his spatial magic is mostly used on rescue ops (mostly mostly getting izyn out of situations where hes surrounded by enemy soldiers but this extends to other perine soldiers). wears his uniform properly, including mage’s robes & commander’s cape over the standard perine uniform. hates to ever appear weak ever, so when he has to go to the medical tent izyn has to either force him there or pretend to be tsundere and throw bandages at him. izyn desperately wants to dote on him but that is one of yericks Hard Boundaries. theres like ONE time when yerick falls asleep because of arcane overexertion and izyn piggybacks him back to camp and yerick acts like its the most shameful secret in the world. foil to m!mayhart- very open with his anger & feelings and shows when he is angry and accepts that part of himself, open with his loyalties and doesnt give a fuck about it, doesnt like the war but does respect it. despite his size, it takes easily 3 barrels of alcohol to even get him tipsy, izyns lack of alcohol tolerance pisses him off cause he has to walk him back to his tent. 5′4″ and wants to grow taller but has accepted his fate. 19 in human years.

eliya legally not a combatant. former princess of caledonia, was discovered at 12 to hold the power of the divine will and so was sent away from her mother and father (who she perceived as loving) to be raised within the church as a holy sacrifice (those who hold the power of the divine will release a huge psychic shockwave when theyre killed, so she was basically raised to be a holy tyke bomb). has a lot of religious obsession, prays 3x a day and has been brainwashed into believing in the power of holy judgement- essentially, her church handler (aka the deacon of the church where she was raised) has raised her to believe that if she commits a sin she’ll be killed so she has a LOT of anxiety over doing the right thing.at the same time shes been brainwashed into believing that doing anything in the service of the throne of caledonia is morally & theologically correct. shes also had occasional contact with her parents (like a yearly dinner or smth) and so still has a lot of loyalty to them due to how they manipulated her and her relationship with her little siblings (7 yrs younger x 2, 2 yrs younger, 13 yrs younger). completely devoted to her church, would gladly martyr herself for them (however this wouldnt trigger the shockwave needed by the army). is loyal to her parents, the deacon, and then the church. is captured by the perine army after a raid on a noncombatant area and spends a lot of time figuring herself out. foil to serenina (esp in terms of loyalty & parents/siblings, emotions (eliya has a lot of them and shows them, serenina is the opposite), their royal treatment, their relationship with trust (serenina doesnt, eliya does and worringly easily). long golden hair, light blue eyes. wears neither a military uniform nor a priests’ uniform, instead wears a one-piece white ‘dress’ (really more a tunic/oversized shirt) & is barefoot. desperate for attention, praise, love, etc. widely disliked due to her POW status but she really thinks shes making all these friends. has quite literally not been able to make her own choices since she was 12 years old. above average alcohol tolerance but nowhere near yerick. 19 in human years.

#.din #.txt #my ocs #im warming up to the title smile⭐smile⭐smile also but it also kind of seems stupid? idk #anyways. eliya was originally a male character but i hate hate hate when one gender has more characters than the other #also yes demavieve & izyn are both gay but all the other characters are bisexual.#also yerick & demavieve are both trans but im allowed to wog that because im also trans.#i also see both mayharts as trans but like it wont come up in the vn again im allowed to do this because im trans #also my favorite characters are yerick & eliya. grayson & serenina are close seconds followed by the mayharts.#after that would be demavieve and then izyn sadly comes in last i still like him but its like i can trust him alone yknow #like leaving a 10 year old home alone while i run errands i dont think izyn would blow up the house. all the others would immediately.

3 notes · View notes

telesthisia · 4 years

Text

(No reblogs! Make a new post please!)

|| The Basics ||

Name: Zelda of Hyrule Nickname(s): Zel, Zellie, Elle, Ellie Age: 19 Species: Human or well Hylian

|| Personal ||

Religious Belief: The three golden goddess + Hylia but... she’s known as the forgotten goddess in her timeline since certain legends faded away from the public’s knowledge but not at all the royal family’s. Sins: Lust / Greed / Gluttony / Sloth / Pride / Envy / Wrath Virtues: Chastity / Charity / Diligence / Humility / Kindness / Patience /Justice Primary Goals In Life: To create a brighter future for her people for generations on end, leading to the eventually famed Golden Age before the Hero of Time’s downfall... though Hyrule has recovered once she’s born there are still remnants of ruin from that era as such she wants to protect her people as well as make Hyrule safer, while she doesn’t do it within her lifetime because limited lifespan her dream does still come true years later aka LOZ and LOZ 2 don’t be fooled by the plot, Hyrule was in its prime during those games! Languages Known: Hylian Secrets: Well... it’s no secret among her staff but outside the castle, she keeps her poor health (heart condition and undiagnosed rare anemia problem) and near lack of magical stamina a secret since that can put her at a pretty bad disadvantage. She has plenty of enemies, namely those who align themselves with Ganon and the resurrection of him is still possible provided the person is a powerful mage with knowledge of doing that sort of stuff in the first place. And then there’s also court drama she has to worry about but that’s for another long lengthy headcanon post I should have out... soon... ish. Also while obvious with partners and in a meta sense and if you’re super observant but her guise Elle is, in fact, her, the princess of Hyrule so... ye... Quirks: Her birthmark of the Triforce is... certainly unique. But if we’re talking mannerism rather than physical then allow me to just ramble because hoo boy! When nervous or worked up, she often tucks her stray hairs behind her ears, even when she’s not feeling those emotions she’s always fiddling around with it (in her royal wear) often flipping it out of her face or trying to make it look a little neater. She has the Pendant of Courage, a gift from Link and often clutches on it when she feels the need to summon her courage if she’s feeling not that brave, often trying to recall Link’s courage during his many adventures. When using any of her PSI powers she tends to have a nose bleed, as such, she often carries around a handkerchief and tries to cover it up before going off somewhere to stop the bleeding. When laughing, she likes to hold her smile behind her hand... and when yawning she tries to cover her mouth. SHE IS THE WORST COOK TO EVER EXIST holy crap but can make mean cookies. When flirting (more like embarrassed flirting pft) she looks away to the side and twirls her hair around her finger trying to hide her red cheeks. Her romantic out view on life stems from the fact that she was constantly surrounded by death and history and art so there’s morbid beauty in the melancholy... this girl gets excited over Friday the 13th and samhain ok like... there’s a lot to unpack with that. THERE’S MORE BUT I’VE RAMBLED FAR ENOUGH!!! Savvies: Well... she bakes pretty good cookies BUT UH!!! YEAH she’s pretty proficient with her light magic! While she can’t do the amazing things other Zeldas can do because of limitations she’s not someone you would want to mess around with. She’s learned to work around those limitations and has great control over her powers. On top of that, she somehow knows how to use a crossbow so :’) while not the light arrows (she’s too weak to wield a bow) and it was a lucky shot she at least knows enough about how it works to fire it in the first place. She reads a lot, even as a kid she’d sneak off to the library to read the history about Hyrule or read maps and well she’s pretty knowledgable about her nation as a whole! And thanks to sneaking out she knows how to sneak past the guards and knows all of the secret passages in her castle like the back of her hand! Can’t forget her amazing political insight and ability to think outside the box! She has pretty innovative ideas for her times esp when concerning the common folk, but sometimes they don’t always go through because well... nobles.

|| Physical ||

Height: 5′0″ Weight: you never ask a lady her weight! >:0 Scars/Birthmarks: Has a cat scratch scar on her right palm which is also where the triforce is located! Abilities/Powers: Light magic, as the descendant of the mortal goddess she has been blessed with the Light Force. On top of that she’s come from a line of sages and has the Triforce of Wisdom so as you expect she has so much magic. She can heal, bless your weapons, smite away darkness, sense darkness (As a matter of fact she’s pretty sensitive to it and it makes her lowkey sick if it’s too much) and then there’s her PSI abilities which includes clairvoyance and telepathy! And then... her connection to the spirit realm. Restrictions: AHAHAHA SO MUCH, she’s a glass cannon which is why she’s so, so, so easy to kidnap in the first place. She may put up a fight but not for long, as such her tactics are always to make a distraction and then escape. But she has poor stamina and just a poor heart, she can’t really overexert herself without a) causing pain and b) passing the hell out which was common in her younger days. Using magic takes up a lot of stamina as shown in ALTTP esp with the more powerful spells, you need an amazing reserve to cast all of that and sadly while she has good control she doesn’t have good reserves. SOOOOOOO to fix this she always has to take medicine of magic. Mana blockage is a thing that can happen, more often than she’d like to admit which causes pain once again and makes using magic pretty hard. Now onto her telepathy and clairvoyance. While they sound useful there are restrictions on those as well, for one with telepathy while she can contact anyone so long as she finds their signature subconscious she doesn’t have to worry about distance too much so long as they are within her range which is... maybe more than 200 meters? I need to think about the range more because there are certain places where she can reach you and cannot but there’s def a range limit. She tends to get nosebleeds and headaches from using telepathy. Her clairvoyance is where she can see bits of the future, but they are very vague and hard to decipher and there’s always a chance of the future changing or not changing. As for her connection to the spirit realm, pretty much she can see dead people... in her dreams and there’s no way of shutting this power off she’s gotta deal with the horrors that is this realm. Now seeing spirits isn’t anything new in LOZ but contact to the spirit realm is something that’s implied that only royal family members can do... as implied by Zelda’s words in BOTW where she said her mom (or grandma??) could hear the voices of the spirit realm.

|| Favorites ||

Favourite Drink: Rose tea Favourite Pizza Topping: Basil... Favourite Color: Blue! Favourite Music Genre: She pretty much likes slow and relaxing music, piano comes to mind but *kayne shrug* Favourite Book Genre: Romance aHEM as a princess she doesn’t have time to read cheesy romance novels and fantasize about the day where someone riding on a white horse will sweep her off her feet and they ride off into the sunset never having to bear the burden of her heritage and responsibilities hahaha..... but history and folklore. She likes tragic stories that have bittersweet endings. Favourite Movie Genre: Fantasy, tragic tales, suspense, romance flicks Favourite Season: Spring Favourite Butt Type:

Favourite Swear Word: "Goodness me!” Favourite Scent: Forest scent, the fields, that ancient scent you smell when visiting old places, the smell of book pages Favourite Quote: “Time has stopped for me long ago.”

|| Fun Stuff ||

Bottom or Top:

Sings In The Shower: Yes!!! Well... rose soaked bathwater because she’s spoiled stupid by her castle staff and Impa but she’ll hum a tune here and there! Likes Bad Puns: Of course! She has the playfully innocent attitude so puns is right up her alley! Morality: Lawful / Neutral / Chaotic / Good / Gray / Evil Build: Slender / Scrawny / Bony / Fit / Athletic / Herculean / Babyfat / Pudgy / Obese / Other. Favourite Food: APPLES!!! Namely baked apples and more importantly apple strudel! Her nation is famous for having delicious apples that can help cure fatigue and even rise up stamina a bit! She’s very much a follower of “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” esp if that doctor keeps giving her bitter medicines. “Boss” Theme Music : Excuse me for using a sad track... but... sAD MUSIC HONESTLY SHE’S DEPRESSION PERSONIFIED!! It reflects her hidden melancholy for like everything. I feel like if you have to fight her as a boss it’ll be more of a beautifully sad moment than something epic like that boss fight with puppet zelda which slaps honestly. Their Opinion On The Mun: “Does she thrive on my pain?”

Was tagged by: no one

Tag 15 People: wHO EVER WANTS TO DO THIS

#OK THIS TOOK LONGER THAN IT SHOULD HAVE #because i ramble so much listen i have a lot of headcanons #dash games.#about.

3 notes · View notes

garden-uprooted · 5 years

Note

“One body, two souls” (( god I can't imagine there being any personality that'd be worse to fuse Spinel's with than Dom's and vice versa and I MUST hear what your take on what that Hell Fusion would be like is omfggggggggggg ))

Send “One body, two souls” to see what I think the fusion of our muses would be like // Still Accepting!

Gemstone Name & Reasoning: Mookaite (yes I KNOW there’s no reason the gem would change since Spinel’s the only Gem in the fusion, but finding the gemstone for the fusion is half the fun, shut up-)

Okay so I KNOW the name sounds weird, but I NEEDED a specific feel for the fusion to fully WORK, y’know? Their fusion would lack ANY sort of Spinel’s typical restraint; a completely wild free spirit. I needed a gemstone that encouraged the release of inhibitions and made you set your sights on things that you’d previously held yourself back from.

“Embrace your wanderlust and let Mookaite be your spiritual compass, pointing you in the direction of adventure. Awaken your true potential with the energy of this stone, and pursue the passions you’ve put on hold. The willpower that mookaite stimulates in your solar plexus and root chakras will rouse in you a desire to explore new activities. Its exciting, yet comforting energy makes for a great travel companion for those on a solo journey.”

I would go into more detail, but in order to properly do that, I’d need to jump onto the next section uwu…

Personality:

OKAY. I HAVE SO MANY FUCKIN’ THOUGHTS ON THIS MESS WHOM I ALREADY IMMEDIATELY ADORE

Okay okay okay, SO. Obviously they’re a pretty toxic fusion. This should go without saying- two chaotic energies in ONE body??

… But it ISN’T because Spinel and Lord D DON’T get along, oh no..

It’s BECAUSE they get along so SWIMMINGLY.

Spinel is naturally impulsive and reckless, sometimes, due to Trauma TM, and also just because she’s Like That, but she HAS self-restraint. She can tell (most of the time) when she’s gone too far with something. And Lord D, while not nearly AS hyperactive as Spinel (but ABSOLUTELY is also an ADHD mess), has undoubted patience and self-control, as well.

They’re “bouncing off of the walls” off the shits chaos lesbians, but they both know how to reign themselves in.

While fused as Mookaite, however?

That ALL goes out of the window.

They FEED into each other’s boundless thoughts- they ENCOURAGE each other’s deepest darkest carnal desires ALL in the name of

FUN.

Spinel is a people-pleaser, above all. She’s LITERALLY an entertainer, and she ADORES her job/”life purpose”. She won’t hesitate to change herself or mold herself into what others want/expect her to be so long as she looks up to and wants to impress said person.

And DING DING DING, Lord Dominator fits that criteria. Spinel gladly falls into the more submissive role in their fusion- letting Lord D pull the strings from the back (AKA, the Front).

A little confusing? Don’t worry, I’ll clear that up a little later down the line.

For now, let’s just say that Mookaite is THE definition of discord and madness. She practically BATHES in the tears of others- RELISHES in pained cries as she tramples over (or SLASHES through) people. Jokes? Japes? Cruel pranks? Snarky remarks? Low blows to people’s self-esteem via honing in on their weaknesses and using it against them?

You want it, Mookaite’s got it all! There are absolutely NO remnants of Spinel’s kindness or compassion to be had. It’s all overshadowed by the desire to be ACTIVE and to MOVE and to spend all of her child-like ENERGY (that has practically no limit to it, so long as they’re fused together).

She’s INTELLIGENT, though. SCARILY so. A force that you DO. NOT. WANT. To reckon with. If she WANTS something, she GETS it. There is no escape, so don’t even bother hiding or running.

A MASTER manipulator and strategist, as well as wild party animal and unrestrained force of destruction. She’ll gladly restrain herself long enough to string people along- only for the SWEET sweet eventual payment of said person’s bitter tears as they either have their heart, or their spine broken.

…However… I WILL say that, SHOULD Mookaite ever encounter someone that Spinel KNOWS (and thus most likely automatically CARES about), and the Dom part of them goes “OH, someone to hurt/”prank”!!!”, Spinel WILL go “Wait wait wait, but- but they’re my FRIEND, I’m not gonna-??”

It’s SO MUCH more DIFFICULT for Spinel to vent our her feelings/frustrations on someone who ISN’T a complete stranger to her. All of that empathy and WANT to be somebody’s very best friend never VANISHED. It just got restrained.

The SECOND Mookaite tries to/decides to ATTACK/HURT, say, someone like STEVEN, Spinel takes full control and unfuses at once.

Physical Appearance:

Oh, they want to make sure they can at LEAST tower over most humans they encounter. I’d IMAGINE Dom is around 5′7″, and Spinel just barely naturally reaches 5′3″ in her current form (I headcanon she WAS 5′0″ or so before Pink left her- height is intimidating), and so Mookaite is looking to be around 6′5″ to possibly JUST shy of being 7′0″. Of course, they can stretch, still, so their natural standing height isn’t all THAT important.

Remember how I described their personality earlier, though? What with Spinel playing the more subservient role while Dom takes the reigns? Yeah, that’s coming back into play here, baybey!!!

While Mookaite takes on Dom’s slender and athletic physique and generally uses her body as a base, their face resembles Spinel’s the most. At first glance, SPINEL would seem like the dominant in the fusion, actually.

However, in spite of that, Spinel’s loud and proud presence in Mookaite is only representative of her and Dom’s RELATIONSHIP. Dominator is Spinel’s enabler- turning her from a loose canon to one fully loaded and ready to fire; the consequences be damned.

So, in actuality, Dom is still, naturally, the dominant. Spinel is just her willing (?) puppet to enact out their obscene horrors.

Their hair is styled almost exactly like Dom’s- except it’s colored like Spinel’s, and it’s an absolute jagged frizzy mess. It kinda looks like they took a pair of scissors and tried to style it themselves, to be honest; but it’s stylish in the “manic pixie dream girl” way, if you know what I mean?

Dom’s white hair shows in white streaks throughout. Mooktaite’s entire color scheme is themed around blacks, dark magentas/reds, deep browns, oranges, and yellows, to boot; drawing inspiration from the gemstone, Mookaite, itself, and Dominator’s attire.

They keep Spinel’s poofy bottom, but it acts more like short shorts that flow seamlessly into Dom’s split dress; which is masterfully torn and tattered just at the knees. They also keep Spinel’s gloves- they just gain a more ragged look, as well, and are styled after Dom’s elbow-length ones.

Say bye bye to Spinel’s fuckign clown shoes, tho, they’re Dom’s sneakers, now. RIP clown shoes. Ye shall be missed.

Mookaite’s eyes are Forever Swirly And Crazed. It makes her look like she downed ten espresso shots in one sitting and went back to the coffee shop for more. Her mascara is also There, but it’s X2.

It’s ALWAYS running down her face- yes, actually running down her chin and dripping right off. An endless supply of messy, drippy mascara that LOOKS like they’ve been crying in it for five hours, but

HAHA!

Mookaite doesn’t CRY!

On the outside.

Oh, also, did I mention the fact that they have extra limbs? Typically it’s only just two arms and two legs, but as an extra “HEY, WATCH THIS, AND ALSO FUCK YOU!!!” they can sprout another pair of arms from their back at will. And yes it makes sickening cracking sounds, because Dominator has bones that CAN make those sounds.

Does it ACTUALLY hurt her to do, though?

Eh. Your choice.

Oh oh oh and NATURALLY they have sharp, shark-like teeth. Why??? Would they NOT???? Bruh they’re fuckin off the wall, they’re demonic as all hell and so basically I Love Them

…. Oh, and uh…. Sarah Stiles’ Spinel’s New Yorker accent that tends to be more of an undertone, than anything..?

It’s fully pronounced in Mookaite. High pitched, squeaky, psychotic Betty Boop hours, folks.

Combat:

My fingers hurt but you know how Spinel has her scythe, Suzie? And Dom can control magma and ice/frost? AND you know how they BOTH can stretch and extend their limbs/Dom is super flexible?

Now, I’m not saying crazy fast contortionist that can wreck you from like twenty feet away, but- okay I totally am.

Something tells me Mookaite would be MUCH more a fan of hands-on fighting, though. Sure she COULD either suit up or use Dom’s powers and Spinel’s elasticity to one-hit KO their opponent, but where’s the FUN in THAT?

And thus where Suzie comes in.

Mookaite is a brick POWERHOUSE- chaotic demented laughter all the while while she SLASHES through her enemies; twirling through the air and jumping on top of/off of their shoulders or heads. She’s a bratty gamer girl about it the whole time, too; mocking her adversaries for being “too slow” or “not putting up enough of a fight/challenge”.

She’s ALWAYS looking for fights and worthy opponents- swinging Suzie around like the huge scythe is a baton and not a VERY deadly weapon. She treats her like a prized cane half the time; preferring to have her fully activated and ready to go at the drop of a hat.

#[LONG Post]#[Out Of Laughter]#[Question Answered]#[Ask Meme]#thegreatestinthegalaxy

17 notes · View notes