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my-writings-and-musings · 3 years

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Idea, a group of young human liaisons (late teen/young adult) join the lost light crew and the different crew members essentially adopts them (any bots of your choice)

That's adorable so absolutely yes! I chose the bots I thought most likely to adopt in any capacity.

Tailgate

·Being amongst the tiniest bots on the ship, and having loved human culture whilst never meeting a human, compounds his excitement at their arrival to nearly critical levels. They're so tiny! They can answer all his earth questions! They can go on missions together and he can show them around the galaxy! His first step is to learn how to tell humans apart and to memorize all their names, as well as anything they find important about themselves, so that way they'll feel welcome.

·During this introduction it's revealed these humans are on the younger side, and his reaction immediately becomes one of shock. You're all still little ones?! Not done growing even?! The explanations that human development is quite different fall on deaf audials; he knows what it's like to be small and new in the galaxy, and he won't let anything hurt these protoforms!

·The liaison team now has a permanent guardian, and they quickly learn that his size doesn't tell his full story. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he's still twice the height of the average human, so calling him "tiny" doesn't make much sense to any of them. Being so much taller is something he absolutely adores experiencing for a change, and that combined with his super strength leads to a lot of piggy back rides for the whole crew.

·If anyone, bot or con or whatever, says a mean word to even one of them he's on the warpath. Think you're a big tough guy, huh?! Picking on his little buddies?! Well, he's not gonna give you a chance to pick on somebody your own size! Unless you offer a heartfelt apology, and if the human in question accepts that, then everything is just fine! But he will punch you if he hears this is recurring!

·The various liaisons start referring to him as their "big brother" and once the meaning of that is explained he's absolutely touched. Him? A part of their family? Movie nights henceforth involve him being surrounded by a group of young humans, just chilling around their adoptive older sibling who happens to be six million years old, and should anyone glance at his visor they'll find it absolutely shining in the dim light.

Ratchet

·Having worked with and studied humans of this age group in the past, he's far less upset and far more worried by their arrival, but he pretends he's merely the former. The truth is that he knows their species is especially vulnerable at this age, and getting the rest of the crew to understand that will be an impossible task, even if he asks them to imagine a delicate protoform taking nearly two decades to mature instead of a few hours and to try and comprehend how much trouble that would be.

·His first step is to establish that he's their doctor, one fully capable of handling human medicine, and he quickly catches the rest of his team up to speed. Every medic needs to be able to meet the needs of every crewmember, and these juvenile humans are part of the crew now, as well as their responsibility for the sake of diplomatic relations... Somehow that last part doesn't stress him out in the slightest.

·These humans will quickly find his gruff to be little more than a personality trait. When he's with a patient, specifically one who's a little frightened, his demeanor rapidly softens just as his touch becomes gentle even to a being quite soft and tiny by comparison. For a species not necessarily accustomed to medical care just... whenever they need it, the young liaisons can't help but like him. His reaction to the fact that most humans can't afford medical care is... a very long sigh.

·His attention to these new patients extends well beyond appointment hours, though he does try not to be overbearing. But he just needs to be certain; are they exercising enough? Does the atmosphere of the ship upset their respiratory systems in any way? Is there any chance the modification to the lighting system was ineffective and they're not getting enough vitamin D? Are they eating all their vegetables?!

·It's impossible for the group to ignore the gigantic alien robot very obviously fretting over them like a mother hen, and thus he often gets a "Yes, mom" in response to his queries from them, but in a good natured way. He huffs at first but their genuine appreciation for his efforts is... well, he'd be lying if he said his actions weren't driven by something more than medical duty. Maybe he's the first Cybertronian with a kind of maternal instinct, who knows? What matters is that his "children" are all safe and healthy, and he certainly doesn't start smiling when "Dr. Mom" becomes what he's listed as in their communication contact list.

Ultra Magnus/Minimus Ambus

·Rodimus agreed to this diplomatic mission despite all his warnings (and pleadings) to say no and find some other way to encourage a good relationship between the species. He has experience with humans, specifically of this exact age range, and while that relationship is one he treasures he's not looking to put any humans in potential danger again. He is, of course, duly ignored and the group is brought on board.

·For the sake of fostering a welcoming and structured environment, he memorizes their names in advance and has them all come to his office for an abridged two hour orientation on the ship and its rules. Knowing they have to be on the move often for neurological development is the only reason he doesn't keep them for a proper five hour orientation. It goes relatively well, but he's less distressed by their lack of attention than he is by how intimidating they seem to find him.

·For some reason this bothers him, no matter how fine he is with bots finding him to be frightening, seeing humans flinch from his presence actually hurts him. So he endeavors to be... friendly! If he earned the nickname "Uncle Magnus" with one human, he can do it again! The best strategy he can think of isn't actually that off base; he'll try to mentor them in their individual pursuits. Dropping down in height whenever he can, typically by getting on a knee to ensure he doesn't tower over them, also proves to be a big help.

·Initially he's determined to keep his Minimus self hidden from them completely, down to the very existence of his split identity. It's less about size, as even his most base form still stands well above the tallest liason, than it is about respect. He wants to be an inspiration to these little ones, and Ultra Magnus is obviously the more impressive of the two. It's only once one particularly affectionate liaison gives him a hug, or more accurately an attempt at one around his offered hand, that he feels compelled to reconsider.

·It makes him nervous for weeks, contemplating the potential fallout of being honest with them, and how it could ruin everything... In the end he blames his own moral compass for forcing him to be honest. He gathers the liaisons together and explains the entirety of his identity in detail, taking all of their questions and praying he won't see any kind of disappointment, before finally removing his armor and "introducing" them to Minimus. The reaction is far from negative. There are exclamations of "botception" and "nesting dolls" in the wild surprise that follows, but nothing that could even be interpreted as dissapoint, and in fact the young humans are only that much more amazed by their "Uncle Minimags". It takes everything he is not to cry.

Swerve

·He knows enough about human culture to have seen that this particular age group tends to party, and is also way more likely to enjoy pop culture, so he's delighted when they join up. Of course he introduces himself, but he doesn't need to mention much more than his bar before he has their full attention and fascination. The Manhattan sized spaceship run by giant alien robots has a bar?! They're all begging to see it and he's so thrilled he forgets he can transform and runs there with them.

·Their amazement only doubles when night comes and they get to see the place in full swing, but he makes sure they're safely seated on the bar itself, to avoid squishing. As always he's able to chat endlessly to these new arrivals, and his knowledge of human culture quite surprises them. Even if there's a fair amount he doesn't know, the fact that he's aware of anything at all shocks them.

·The rush to get him caught up is a shared effort between the liaisons. Does he know what social media is? Would he like to have an account? For once he's the overwhelmed one and he has to work to keep up with everything they give him, but the attention and genuine interest these little humans have in his thoughts and experiences is... it's a good thing he's got some help around the bar to help him stay caught up. Because these little sort of protoforms have convinced him to get Twitter.

·Movie nights become so massive they actually have to consider expanding the bar. Not only are old movies watched, but all the latest releases as well, some as soon as they're in theaters because look they know it's not technically legal but it's promoting good diplomacy so... However, even when he starts serving and mixing human alcohol, he's quite firm on requiring the humans who drink it to be of age. There's still fun drinks for the younger ones though.

·The humans bond with other bots, but as their first contact on the ship and the most fun he's always got a few of them by his side. Maybe he's just better with other species? He doesn't really know or care, but somehow when there's a little moment and they all take a selfie together he just... he just feels not alone. It's something he keeps a little on the down low, but he's a bit too easy to read for the humans not to notice, and since they're good kids they pretend it's a secret that they mean the world to him. On especially rowdy nights they even help clean up, and each human develops their own little nickname for him, making it less like he adopts them and much more like they adopt him.

Whirl

·Humans come in fun size too? Neat! But he's admittedly a tad curious when their age is explained and he realizes that, in their own super weird alien way, these are still protoforms. Something almost akin to worry flashes in his spark for an instant. Still, he plays it cool when they're brought on board, pretending to be no more interested than any other bot they're introduced to.

·Before he meets them, he's told quite firmly that these humans are to be protected at all costs, and that any behavior seen as antagonizing in the slightest will be punished. He ensures the top bots he's no Decepticon and that squishies aren't on his radar. But he's admittedly a little concerned that they'll notice his... peculiarities. His own species recoils at his appearance, and while he can handle that, getting it from aliens would be unpleasant.

·But there's no such reaction. They ask him his name, share theirs, and react with the same enthusiasm they do to every bot and even ask the same questions. It's pleasantly surprising, until they all get excited upon his description of his alt mode, at which point it's freaking fantastic. It's with pride that he confirms he's the only flying bot on the crew, and when he's immediately corrected by a random passerby, he explains that he meant the only one who could fly worth a damn. He's greeted by a chorus of laughter for his amazing joke and he vows that he'd die for each and every one of these little squishies.

·All it takes is one hint of a request and he's offering to take them all for a lift through the hangar. This is just the beginning of an impossibly interesting friendship. Eventually he just carries them all around in his cockpit whenever they're walking anywhere, or on his shoulders if they won't all fit, and either way there's a row of humans sitting across him. This friendship is why he's so mortified when his identity of an Empurata is accidentally revealed and the questions begin.

·He reluctantly answers and braces for the impending disgust or revulsion to realize he's been mutilated. But it never comes. Instead, there's genuine sympathy and anger on his behalf, and their little hands reach out to comfort him. Initially he can only be awed. How are these little, fragile, and oh so very young protoforms better than so many members of his species?! Does it matter? They shall be called; "The Whirl Scouts", trademark pending. They'll all have to be trained in combat for their own safety, and he will be their mom now, because he won't just die for them he'll kill for them. They're his kids and his family.

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sou-ver-2-0 · 4 years

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What do you think of the Push Fake Reko(Save Reko) or Spare her(Save Alice) choice as it relates to the themes of logic vs. emotion? My one friend views Reko as the more emotion leaning one since thats the only why she and Alice can potentially make up. But I think it's more logical since to do that you push Fake!Reko to her death because she's obly a doll, even though she's begging for her life.

Why pushing Fake Reko is logical and sparing her is emotional

This is a fantastic question. I was thinking about it for days after you sent it in, going back and forth. The "push or spare Fake Reko" choice feels a bit messier than other logic/emotion choices, such as "kill Kai (logic) or kill Sou (emotion)" in the First Main Game, or "kill Kanna (logic) or kill Sou (emotion)" in the Second Main Game. That's partially because, as you mentioned, this choice ends up determining the fates of the real Yabusame siblings rather than Fake Reko and Gin, whose fates are sealed. Unlike other choices, Sara can't anticipate the consequences. This makes it tricky to analyze in hindsight, since we're influenced by the unexpected outcomes. That's what your friend was doing by looking at the emotional results of pushing Fake Reko. I sympathize with your friend because I also want to analyze the complete story, but I still think it's most important to analyze Sara's mindset in the moment of the choice itself. That's why I argued that killing Kanna was logical for Sara, even though a genre-savvy player might logically assume that killing a child could lead to a bad ending. We need to be able to set aside our greater knowledge as players, and put ourselves in Sara's shoes.

Another reason this choice feels different from other choices in YTTD is because it has almost nothing to do with Sara's self-preservation. Instead, this choice is based on a more philosophical question: how do we measure the humanity of a robot doll? And there's another question baked into this choice as well: are we willing to become a murderer to save a human child? Can we rationally justify this murder?

I recently played through this choice, and after reviewing the narrative, I came to the same conclusion as you did: I think it's logical to push Fake Reko, and emotional to spare her.

Fake Reko makes an emotional appeal to save her life. She says that she has suffered. She says that she considered Sara a real friend. She sings a beautiful song full of emotion. Even though Sara can logically trap Fake Reko by pointing out that the real Reko wouldn't have sung that song, that only proves that Real Reko and Fake Reko are different people. It's much more difficult to prove that Fake Reko doesn't have a right to live, because Fake Reko's robotic heart still feels real. Even if we rationalize that she's "only a doll," my heart still wants to save Fake Reko.

When Fake Reko sings, the game's dialogue reinforces that Sara is being swayed emotionally to save Fake Reko. Sara's heart connects with Fake Reko's song, even as her mind reels to prove that she's different from Real Reko.

(I've never heard a song from Reko's band, so I can't compare her singing with the real deal...)

(Even so... Could a doll perform vocals so full of emotion...?!)

However, what fully sold me on my interpretation of this choice was hearing from Mr. Emotion and Mr. Logic themselves. This is how Sou and Keiji react to Fake Reko's emotional defense of her own life.

Sou: ...Doesn't feel good. Why is she able to cry, too...? She's basically a human at this point.

Keiji: Is this...part of the emotion program, too?

Notice that Sou talks about his feelings. He says out loud that killing Fake Reko "doesn't feel good." He connects with Fake Reko's ability to cry, and he ends by affirming her humanity. Sou's sprite is also clearly distressed.

Meanwhile, Keiji asks a logical question that would affirm Fake Reko's robotic nature. Yes, she may feel like a human, but we can still rationalize that she's not. Even though Keiji looks bothered, his expression is more muted than Sou's.

We also have Kanna's emotional outburst.

Kanna: Awful... Awful! Isn't this just too cruel...? If she has a heart... and feelings... then she's no different from a human!!

Kanna is an emotional character like Sou. I believe that Kanna is the character most like young Shin Tsukimi. The meaning of Kanna's words is the same as Sou's words, but expressed more strongly. Additionally, Kanna's expression is even more despairing than Sou's face, with tears streaming down her face.

When I pictured Kanna, Sou, and Keiji in Sara's place, it became clear to me that sparing Fake Reko was emotional while pushing her was logical.

If Kanna was there, I don't think she could do it. Killing Fake Reko would be too heavy a burden on her young heart. She knows it's wrong and her heart screams at the injustice. All Kanna can do is offer up her own life in the event that Gin is about to be executed. She asks Ranger to take her instead. That's extremely brave of her, but ultimately ineffective since it's against the rules.

If Sou was there, I think he could do it, but he would hesitate for a long time, and he would probably cry. Sou is capable of making difficult choices and doing what needs to be done, but he would still connect emotionally with Fake Reko. Sou and Fake Reko actually parallel each other as "the harsh part of yourself who would kill the kind part of yourself to survive." When Nao calls out Fake Reko's threats against her and Sara as a bluff--Nao states that Fake Reko couldn't kill anyone she considers a friend--I believe that statement applies to Sou as well. Both Sou and Fake Reko are less tough than they appear; they'd rather kill themselves than someone they love. (Sou metaphorically kills himself and Fake Reko literally kills her other self, but Sou won't hurt Kanna, and Fake Reko won't hurt Nao or Sara.) Killing Fake Reko would be difficult for Sou, but I think he would still make the same hard choices as Nao. Especially if he was motivated to preserve Kanna's innocence, much like Nao was motivated to preserve Sara's innocence.

If Keiji was there, I think he would bury his guilt and he wouldn't hesitate for long. Keiji is the most jaded character with a heavily burdened heart. He's already killed his childhood hero and his ex-coworker, so shouldn't killing a robot woman be easier to justify than either of those? Keiji is the best at rationalizing and prioritizing the greater good. In this case, the greater good means killing a robot doll to save a human child. I also think that Keiji is a responsible, brave sort who would prefer to take on this burden himself, rather than let somebody more innocent suffer through this choice. I imagine such logical thoughts would spur on Keiji to be the quickest to push Fake Reko to her death.

That's why I believe pushing Fake Reko is logical while sparing her is emotional. You need to be able to set aside your feelings in order to kill Fake Reko. You need to be able to rationalize and think of the greater good. Emotional characters would struggle more with this choice because our hearts insist that Fake Reko deserves to live, even if she's different. Recognizing our common humanity with "different" people, especially vulnerable people, is a good moral instinct. She still feels "basically a human." Can we ignore that injustice in order to rescue Gin?

I'll share a few final thoughts about this choice.

Another tragedy at the heart of this puzzle is that it was designed by a doll, Rio Ranger. Rio Ranger is a doll with an inferiority complex who feels jealous of humans. His own solution to this puzzle--the humans have to kill a doll to save one of their own--feels like a way of justifying his own hatred of humans. Obviously the nicest solution to this puzzle would be if we could convince Rio Ranger that we recognize dolls' humanity, but Rio Ranger is an unfinished doll who can't feel compassion, so we can't reach him.

Finally, I want to discuss the cathartic reunion scene between Real Reko and Alice in the event that Alice dies. Since the only way to get a cathartic scene after the Sou-Kanna choice is to choose "emotion," I understand why your friend would think that pushing Reko must be the emotional choice. However, I think the parallel between these cathartic scenes is more complex than simply choosing logic or emotion. Both cathartic scenes reward you for two things:

Sara chooses to save a child, the most vulnerable among us. Either Gin or Kanna.

Sara helps a guilty man along the path of redemption. In the first case, she must help Alice try to reconcile with Reko in his bongos sidequest, which is the only way to trigger the bittersweet reunion scene. In the second case, she helps Shin save a little girl and become himself again.

Protecting the most vulnerable and giving the guilty a second chance are what really matter here. Even though pushing Fake Reko is logical and killing Shin/Sou is emotional, Sara is still making the same kind of moral decisions.

Thank you for the stellar question, Anon.

#your turn to die #yttd #kimi ga shine #reko yabusame #alice yabusame #your turn to die spoilers #sou hiyori #keiji shinogi #kanna kizuchi #shin tsukimi #rio ranger #fake reko #mine #meta #asks #I'm really proud of this one :)

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the-final-sif · 4 years

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Actually, now that I’ve talked about my headcanon that Katsuki was kidnapped several times as a child, let me talk about a complete random scene/story arc inspired by that and the fact that Katsuki + Izuku + Shouto are all interning with Endeavor now.

Overhaul breaks out of jail and gets his arms back somehow. He’s gone quite a bit nuts. A lot nuts. He’s surpassed ‘focused villain trying to do one thing that he sees as right’ to more of a ‘just want to watch the world burn’. To that end, he sets about getting a team together to catch a certain group of meddling heroes, and to rekidnap a certain child.

A second hideout raid of sorts is planned and goes down, only this time, it was a trap. Izuku/Shouto/Endeavor/Hawks/Kirishima/Tamaki/Fatgum/Tsuyu/Ryuko/Ochako were on the raid team and were caught. Aizawa who was watching over Eri while she had a playdate with Tsuyu’s younger sister, Satsuki, are all also captured. Overhaul had a very specific team set up, knew about them in advance and planned out counters for each person. Alongside that, he used his quirk to create a giant beast like robot that’s made of metal able to withstand even Deku’s punches and Shouto/Endeavor’s flames. Said robot is roughly modeled/made to take on the LOV’s nomu, but non-organic. Notably, Katsuki wasn’t on the hideout raid team (or aware of the raid), because he had a Obligatory Family Trip planned on the same day and so wasn’t at the internship then.

Izuku had managed to put in a distress call before he was taken down, but all the heroes + victims were moved to a different location afterwards in an old long abandoned hideout in the middle of the woods, and there’s about no chance of anyone tracking them down any time soon.

So that leads us into the main scene. The heroes are all captured/restrained up near Overhaul whose ranting on about using Eri to destroy the world/destroy quirks once and for all and then rule over it with a robotic army which is the only thing he considers “clean” anymore. Meanwhile, Eri and Satsuki are down in a different location in a cell of their own (to prevent the heroes from comforting the children), and there’s a camera system in place so the heroes can see the helpless children.

Overhaul demands Eri be brought to whatever Evil Machine he’s devised, and one of his goons goes to get her, but Satsuki fights back against the goon and actually does a pretty damn good job of it. Which leads to Overhaul demanding that the goon kill her.

There’s nothing any of the heroes can do. Satsuki fights back as best she can, as does Eri, but they’re both only 6 years old and Eri’s quirk isn’t working. They struggle, but it’s looking hopeless, and Aizawa tries to tell Tsuyu to close her eyes because he knows what’s about to happen next.

And then the entire dungeon the two girls are in shatters.

Everything is chaos for the next minute as Overhaul tries to figure out what the hell just happened, getting his cameras back in order until finally he gets a visual and contact with one of his goons just before they get taken down and it’s Katsuki.

He’s in a flannel, regular pants and his combat gloves, very clearly confused/pissed off/not prepared for whatever the hell is going on here, and it takes them awhile to figure out what’s going on.

As it turns out, Katsuki has been hiking a trail near this hideout since he was 4 years old. His family drags him up to a nearby location to visit some extended family, he has 0 interest in doing that, so he goes and hikes/camps along a trial instead. Every year he hikes this fairly long trail, and every year he sees this weird abandoned building that he’s gone to explore a few times, and every year the first thought in his mind is ‘Man, that place looks exactly like a villain hideout’.

Then this year, he comes up on it, minding his own business with his headphones in, and he sees the building active again with people with weird masks running around in it, and he’s got a super bad feeling in his gut that just slams into him and he goes ‘Alright, fuck it.’

So now Katsuki is here, he grabs the kids and gets them to a semi-safe location, getting info from them and trying to understand what’s going on. Once he gets it, this turns into a game of him keeping the kids safe from Overhaul, taking down his goons as he goes and working his way towards where the other heroes are. Only, we’re going with the aforementioned headcanon that Katsuki has been kidnapped a bunch of times as a child and never realized that wasn’t normal. This leads to the heroes watching him on the cameras with an increasingly pissed off Overhaul as he walks the two children through how deal with being kidnapped as if these are normal everyday life skills.

Overhaul really, really wants him dead, but unfortunately his team was handpicked to counter the heroes who he’s already captured, and he wasn’t counting on Katsuki showing up. Katsuki’s quirk is flexible and very destructive + Katsuki’s combat skills means he’s pretty much a worst case scenario for Overhaul. Even worse, Katsuki successfully took down the com lines so there’s no communication through the scattered goons, and Katsuki played in this abandoned hideout as a child so he knows his way around it.

Ideal things happening during all of this:

Aizawa torn between being overjoyed that Katsuki saved Eri and then horrified/so done with this child as he walks Eri and Satsuki through how to use knives and grenades.

Katsuki being confused that neither Eri nor Satsuki know how to use a knife.

“Okay, did I have a weird childhood or did you two have a weird childhood. I can’t tell.”

Katsuki gives both children knives, and gives Eri a second knife when she loses her first one (and by loses I mean it ends up embedded in a bad guy’s shoulder)

Izuku keeps pulling notebooks and pencils out of seemingly thin air since Katsuki is openly discussing his quirk/aspects of it with the kids as they make their way through the base and by god he needs to write it down. Overhaul keeps taking his notebooks/pencils but the moment he looks away Izuku somehow has another set.

Katsuki keeps mentioning offhandly things from his childhood and the more things he mentions the more all the other heroes are like “????????”

Finally, Overhaul realizes there’s no chance of his guys taking down Katsuki as Katsuki finishes off the last or second to last one, and so he unleashes The Robot.

By this point, Katsuki already called for backup, but it’s at least half and hour out. He sees the robot and he’s like “Ah fuck.”. Eri and Satsuki already told him a little bit about it and particularly that it’s built to withstand anything short of a nuclear weapon. Not to mention it’s decently fast/agile.

And then when Eri is hurriedly relaying all this to Katsuki, she mentions that Overhaul built it himself.

Katsuki: “Wait like, he actually designed and built it. Overhaul’s the guy with the weird purity/evolution obsession right? He made this? Not somebody smarter?”

She confirms and Katsuki is suddenly No Longer Worried: “Okay, you two chill here, I got this.”

So then he goes to fight the weird beast robot, and nobody’s really sure what he’s planning. As he starts fighting it, he seems to be blasting it’s head into stuff a lot/slamming it around, but that’s not doing any actual damage, right?

Wrong.

See, Overhaul’s somewhat of a moron who put all of the robot’s processing/”brain” into the head area, because that’s how things are supposed to be in his mind. Katsuki figured the guy would probably pull something like this, and so he gives the robot a bunch of repeated strikes to the head area/knocking it around. Because even if the outside is super tough, that kinetic energy still travels through and can do damage to delicate circuit boards.

In layman’s terms, he gives the robot a series of minor concussions until it adds up.

The robot starts to malfunction, going somewhat rouge/pausing/getting stuck places/etc. But it’s still not destroyed and the heroes aren’t sure what Katsuki’s planning next. Katsuki is quite sure of what he’s planning next though. He lures the robot outside and then traps it in place with some large rocks or some rope or something. It’s not going to hold it for very long, but it’s enough to keep the weakened robot in place.

Then he takes aim with one arm as if he was doing an AP shot.

Everyone (heroes and Overhaul included) are kinda like ‘okay what the heck’ because even Katsuki’s strong blasts aren’t enough to really damage the robot’s exterior. Why would trapping it change that?

Then blue starts to spread up Katsuki’s arm along his veins, his hand starts to crackle and there’s 1-2 seconds of “wait WHAT” before Katsuki unleashes a blast on par with that of a small nuclear weapon. The explosion is bright blue, narrowed down to a fine point like Katsuki’s regular AP spot, but once it hits it’s target, it explodes outwards disintegrating the robot and taking out a good chunk of the surrounding land. The whole hideout is shaken to it’s foundation. Windows shatter, some cameras crack, and when the dust clears, Katsuki’s standing tall.

His left arm is still covered by that spiderweb blue though, and it’s hanging limply at his side.

Okay, so this is 90% me making up science but shhhh

So as the heroes quickly learn as an exhausted/barely on his feet Katsuki stumbles back to the kids who of course have questions, this is apparently something Katsuki has been able to do since he was 6.

He calls it “Blue Core”, and it makes his explosions super powerful by pulling nitrogen from the rest of his arm/blood stream/flesh and stocking it all up.

However, he basically never uses it because it comes at a really high cost, namely it takes several seconds of charging, does a ton of collateral damage, and by using it it takes whichever arm he used out of commission for at least the next 24 hours. He can still use his quirk a little with the other one, but it’s heavily weakened.

Obviously he can’t use this in training either, so he never thought to mention it to his teachers.

The heroes + Overhaul just watch stunned for like a solid minute as he starts making his way towards where the heroes are being held hostage with the kids because what the fuck.

Finally though, Overhaul snaps out of it and goes to fight the weakened Katsuki. The kids hide when Overhaul comes out and he throws Katsuki against a wall or something b/c he’s heavily weakened and can’t really fight with his quirk anymore, and then he struts over to him monolouging and ready to claim victory as Katsuki is laying there, slumped over and barely breathing.

And then the moment Overhaul gets close to him, Katsuki is up in a flash and the heroes can hardly even see what happened, but the next thing they know Overhaul is on the ground screaming bloody murder clutching his eyes and Katsuki is holding a blood stained knife. Then he gives Overhaul a curb stomp and he is OUT.

It should be noted, this is not any of the knives that he gave to Eri/Satsuki.

Someone, maybe Aizawa: “How many knives does he have???? I thought he was hiking????”

Shouto: “Oh yeah, at one point during the remedial courses we were babysitting kids together and he mentioned to me that he had 7 knives that day, and I honestly couldn’t tell if he brought more or less knives than he normally carried because of the children. Still not sure actually.”

Izuku: “I know he usually carried around 4 knives when we were kids but part of that was he had limited areas to hide them back then.”

Fatgum and Tamaki are both completely baffled and trying to fit this guy they’ve just been watching with the person that Kirishima described Katsuki to them as.

Anyways, so then Eri & Satsuki get the keys and go to free the heroes which are fairly close by while Katsuki guards Overhaul to prevent him from pulling a ‘gotcha’ on them. And also because the heroes are up a flight of stairs and Katsuki physically cannot walk up them right now.

It’s very emotional as Eri rushes to Aizawa and Satsuki rushes to her big sister who is now crying. And then the group heres a noise and all eyes go back up to the camera screens which are still somewhat up and running, currently focused on where Katsuki and Overhaul’s battle went down.

Turns out, before this whole mess started, the LOV sent Dabi to go take care of Overhaul because He Cannot Be Allowed To Have Arms, Goddamnit We Were Making A Point With That.

But then Katsuki went ahead and did Dabi's job for him, so Dabi radioed back to Tomura and Tomura changed his objective to "You know, while you're there anyways and he's weak, might as well grab the kid."

There’s two endings to this:

The door to the room Katsuki is in swings open and fucking Dabi waltzes in probably saying something like

"So, is this a bad time?"

Katsuki turns to look at him and in the most done, tired, angry, voice: "You asshole."

After drugging Katsuki somehow (because unlike Overhaul, Dabi is not stupid and isn't getting with 10 feet of Katsuki without being damn sure he's down for the count), Dabi kidnaps Katsuki for the second time and the two of them are teleported out of the area about 10 seconds before Aizawa/the other heroes are freed just barely too late to do anything about it.

This ending would mostly be because I'd want Dabi and Katsuki to have back and forth banter of Katsuki being so 110% done with everything and Dabi being like:

"Yeah, I'll admit, this is kinda a dick move and the universe definitely has it out for you today."

"You don't get to say 'the universe has it out for me' when you're the one kidnapping me asshole"

And also because it sets up some serious hurt/comfort.

or, ending 2)

Katsuki stumbles his way over to a doorway on the other side of the room to go grab some rope so he can tie Overhaul up. He opens the door, and Dabi's just standing there, having been about to open the door so he could capture Katsuki.

They just stare at each other wide eyed for several long seconds before

"Is now a bad time-"

And Katsuki slam's the door shut.

"N o !"

He takes five seconds to just stare at the door being pissed and then is like "No, fuck this, I have dealt with enough today." Then he proceeds to barricade the door as he goes through various forms of the words 'No, nope, fuck that, not happening', still exhausted and beaten up and done but 100% N O T H A V I N G T H I S.

The heroes get down there to help and and they search for Dabi only to discover on the camera footage that after Katsuki slammed the door on him, he apparently thought it was so funny that he just kinda shrugged, turned around and actually fucking left. Because, you know, his main objective was already completed, and he didn’t really feel like going the extra mile today.

All of this is on camera too, so it quickly spreads as a meme, along with other choice moments from the whole hideout fight including several ‘vibe checks’, one of Satsuki throwing a grenade into the face of on of the goons that was harassing her before, and also ‘knife check’ becoming a thing.

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howtohero · 3 years

Text

#300.1: Saving the World Part 1

Prologue

The Haberdashery

“Hi, my name is Murk. I am a mud monster and a product of mad science, but I am also an accountant and a lover of classical music. For most of my existence I have tried to simply live a regular life in an increasingly strange world.”

The conference room in Hatman’s Haberdashery was filled with all manner of colorfully clad, or just plain colorful, superheroes, super-trainees, monsters, vampires, werewolves, sewer-mutants, Da Vincis and even a smattering of regular civilians who looked tired, angry, but overall fearless. According to Leonardo Da Vinci II, an android duplicate of the original from the far future, there had never been such an eclectic gathering of people in all of history. They had gathered — or been gathered — because the world, and life as they all knew it, hung in the balance. The world’s supervillains, led by a formerly low rate smuggler named Smuggles, had managed to do the unthinkable, they’d taken over the world, and in doing so they’d imprisoned most of the world’s heroes, world leaders, and superhero bloggers, in a secret prison. The oddball assembly was the Resistance, and at the moment each of them had their eyes on Murk. Some looked at him with confusion, he was by far the most eloquent mud monster they’d ever heard. Some looked at him in awe, over the past several weeks, Murk had rescued many of them from danger and had inspired them to join him in his fight. A few looked at him with pride, they knew him from before you see, and as far as they were concerned, that made his heroics their heroics.

(“I know that guy from before,”) Parenthetical Guy whispered to the warthog-mask wearing man sitting to his left. (“And as far as I’m concerned, that makes his heroics my heroics.)

{“I work with that guy, he does my taxes,”} Curly whispered, nudging Hatman who was looking forlornly toward the room’s exit. There were far too many people between him and it, and it was causing him no shortage of distress.

“When the heroes fell,” Murk continued. “It immediately became apparent that I, and many others like me, could no longer afford the luxury of standing to the side. For a long time I, and many of my ‘monstrous’ ilk have been more than happy to allow superheroes to handle the world’s problems for us. Whenever our homes, our lives, our world came under threat we all said to one another, ‘well, that looks like a job for superheroes,’ and we declined to act. When the heroes fell I saw how selfish I had been. And so I would like to be the first to extend my heartfelt thanks, and my sincerest apologies to the brave heroes who have gathered here today. I, along with my partner and friend, Lawyer Guy have gathered as many civilians as we could. Regular monsters and people who have cowered from or turned a blind eye to the acts of the villains who have dared to subjugate us, and we have come here to offer our assistance. If you’ll have us, we would like to help in any way we can.”

His speech concluded, Murk quickly sat down next to Lawyer Guy who smiled warmly at him. A few people sitting near him muttered polite words of affirmation toward the hulking mud man but everyone quickly became silent once more as somebody else strode to the head of the table.

Everybody in the room, everybody in the world, recognized the gold and white costume, the chiseled, stony features, and the piercing blue eyes of Ultiman. He was the superhero par excellence and when he clapped Murk on the shoulder and smiled widely, Murk’s ragtag civilian crew let out a collective sigh of relief.

“Thank you Murk,” Ultiman said. “Thank you everyone. As I’m sure you can see, our numbers are small but our members are dedicated and we are thrilled to be able to count each of you among us. I’m confident that, working together, we can depose Smuggles and his entire Consortium of Crime.”

***

Smuggles’s Secret Prison

My name is Zachary Schechter and I’d been locked up for a while by the time anybody had made any noise about breaking out. You may know me as the creator, author, and only functioning brain behind How To Hero. Actually you definitely know me as that. It’s a very popular blog. Just take my word on this ok? I was in a secret prison because I allowed my subordinates to talk me into hiring a known supervillain to, let’s see, live in our basement and interject unwanted comments into my blog. As it would happen, this supervillain, Smuggles, took the job as part of some kind of protracted and complicated plan to take over the world. I should have seen that coming of course. That’s basically the only reason any supervillain does anything. For a few weeks I was alone there. Just sitting in a cell twiddling my thumbs. Trying to make conversation with the drones they had guarding the place. The only thing they’d given me to eat is fish. I imagine Chuck the Fish Whisperer had something to do with that. Frikkin supervillains and their sycophantic dedication to their own themes. But then a ton of superheroes ended up there with me, and I knew things on the outside had taken a decisive turn for the worse. The heroes were all stripped of their costumes and gear, and were given supervillain costumes instead. It’s all spikes, horns, and red contact lenses now. It’s a bit silly, but I think the idea is that if the heroes are dressed like villains and forced to do things like play evil charades and watch movies about heroes turning bad, then some of them might actually turn evil. Actually, I know that’s the idea, but I’ll get to that later. Eventually Cowboy Rockstar, the coolest hero of all time, decided to stage some kind of jailbreak. Which was great. And he wanted me to help him plan it, probably because of my proven expertise in all manner of superhero related topics. I bet it was my treatise on the many superheroic uses of drills that got his attention. There was just one teeny tiny problem though...

“So what do you think?” Cowboy Rockstar whispered.

“I think… I think that I designed this prison,” I whispered dejectedly.

“I beg your pardon?”

It was recreation time once again, and Giorgio the Evil Mime had selected an assortment of clips of superheroes becoming evil from various films and TV shows. It’s really shocking how many times Hollywood has returned to the well of “a superhero clad in red, white, and blue murders a person.” We must’ve watched like thirty different clips already.

“Look, Mr. Rockstar, I appreciate you coming to me and all. It’s an honor to meet you and plot in hushed voices with you and everything. But I’m like 90% certain that I designed this prison. And I don’t know about you but Iitalics certainly wouldn’t have designed a prison that people could break outitalics of.”

Cowboy Rockstar furrowed his brow, “Ah, you’re saying this prison is… from your blog?”

I held up my hands defensively. “Hey, I know how it sounds but look around you. The costumes, the robots, the charades. It’s literally ripped straight from my post about running your own unsanctioned prison.”

“You wrote a guide to running an off the books blacksite for housing criminals?” Cowboy Rockstar arched an immaculate eyebrow. “That’s not really a very superheroic activity.”

“Huh. When you put it like that it’s really no wonder that the only person who seems to have implemented any of it is a supervillain who seems to have taken over the world.”

“He had help,” I heard somebody grumble from Cowboy Rockstar’s other side.

Helm Lady was one of the only Hatman proteges to both survive to adulthood and continue her career as a superhero, so it was hardly surprising that she’d been able to sneak up on us.

“Helm Lady, good of you to join us!” Cowboy Rockstar said. “Zach over here was just telling me about how he designed this prison to be unescapable! Isn’t that exciting.”

“Hardly,” Helm Lady said glumly.

“I gotta agree with her on this one,” I said.

“Are you kidding me? You’ve been given a rare opportunity to outdo yourself in a grandiose and practical way! You’ve been here longer than anybody. It seems like Smuggles has some kind of vendetta against you specifically, and so he’s used your own tactics against you! Now, with our help of course, you can show everybody that you’re smarter than you!” Cowboy Rockstar was gesticulating wildly at this point drawing a sharp and reproachful glare from warden Giorgio.

“Hm,” I said, I had already written a guide to escapology. Maybe I’d already unwittingly outwitted myself. Besides, Smuggles’s prison wasn’t actually an exact copy of the one I’d designed on the blog. He’d had to make some changes to prevent it from having any real rehabilitative value. Dressing the prisoners like villains instead of heroes for instance. And villain costumes are very different from hero costumes. They’re like eighty percent sharp edges. I looked Cowboy Rockstar up and down. The costume they had him in had spikes up and down his arms. Maybe we could use them to pick the locks on our cell? We’d still have to deal with the robot guards and who knows what else. But maybe that was a place to start.

“Ok,” I said after a moment. “I’m sure we can come up with something, after all, as I say

on my blog, when you’re in a locked room, anything can be a key.”

Cowboy Rockstar grinned and gestured around the room at the assorted superheroes that were locked in with us, “And we’ve certainly got an eclectic bunch of keys here haven’t we.”

I smiled and looked around the room, maybe this could actually work.

***

“If I had an iPod and a busted time machine we could do this in a snappy montage and be out in no time,” I grumbled to Cowboy Rockstar.

It was the next day, and our recreation activity was something called “evil baseball.” There’s no batters, no outfield, and the only umpire was a deranged mime. The only real resemblance it had to regular “non-evil” baseball, was the fact that there were four bases, and players could steal bases. In fact, the game was pretty much just stealing bases. Because stealing is a crime get it? Ugh, the sooner we got out of there and stopped Smuggles the better. Cowboy Rockstar was manning first base for his team, and I’d just stolen first. I suspected it was because Helm Lady, the “pitcher” for Cowboy Rockstar’s team, had allowed me to get to first so we could chat. It might have been because I’m really athletic though. It’s hard to say.

“I don’t think that’s how anything works,” Cowboy Rockstar said.

“Oh what do you know?”

“A lot, I’ve unknotted several time paradoxes you know. Some experts even say that I ‘invented’ the current iteration of this timeline.”

“Ah, so this is all your fault.”

“Nice try, I didn’t give Smuggles access to an interdimensional warp gate so he could free his fish whispering friend from his prison.”

“Touche.”

“What have you got?”

“I was thinking, we know that Smuggles has everybody’s powers neutralized inside this prison right?”

“Yes.”

“Well not every hero has powers to begin with,” I started. “And there are few people here with relevant talents that Smuggles can’t turn off.”

“Talents such as?”

Giorgio blew his whistle. Apparently I’d spent too long dawdling at first base without even trying to steal second.

“I guess whistling doesn’t go against the mime code of silence,” I grumbled as I started to edge off of first base.

“Talents such as?” Cowboy Rockstar repeated before I took off.

I nodded towards his team’s second baseman.

“Being a giant rock monster with seven hands,” I said before racing off toward Rockblock.

***

The next night I laid awake, staring up at the ceiling of my cell, going over what was slowly starting to look like a plan again and again. If Cowboy Rockstar could use the many razor sharp spikes on his villain costume to pick the locks on his cell, — and he’d assured me that he could, upside down, in his sleep — and then get to the others, Rockblock could probably serve as our muscle until we got out and the other heroes got their powers back. He’d need to fight off dozens of battle drones though. No, that wasn’t much of a plan. Muscle was great, but we’d need some other way to guarantee the drones would stay off of us until we got outside. I consulted the scrap of paper I had hidden in the palm of my hand, directed away from any prying eyes or cameras. The scrap had been discretely slipped into the pocket of my hoodie by Helm Lady. She’d managed to steal a pencil during Evil Mad Libs, and had taken the liberty of jotting down everybody who we knew was imprisoned here. “Our list of keys,” as Cowboy Rockstar had called it. We needed to keep the circle of people who knew that we were planning a breakout small for now. That way there’d be less of a chance of any villains or drones getting wind of it. So Cowboy Rockstar wanted me to identify anybody who might be especially useful in the actual breakout, whereupon we’d obviously free the rest of the prisoners. I consulted the list again, mentally sorting the manifest into those who had powers, and thus were less likely to be especially useful without the use of them, and those who didn’t have powers, and therefore were pretty much operating at 100% effectiveness. There’s another thing I didn’t account for in my own designs, sucks to be you Smuggles. That’s what happens when you build your top secret superhero prison based on the musings of a comedy blog instead of doing your own work you frikkin goon. I circled a couple of names on my illicit scrap of paper and was just about ready to smugly smile myself to sleep when I noticed a faint buzzing. My first thought was wall bees. You wouldn’t believe how often strange buzzing sounds in the How To Hero office ended up being bees in the wall. But this buzzing was more mechanical and well, I guess it must have been there since I was first thrown into this dump. I had managed to sublimate it into the background noise of my time here but now in the dead of the night I was able to really listen to it finally. I tentatively got off of my threadbare cot and walked the length of my small cell. The buzzing was, as I’d feared, strongest by the door. Which could only mean one thing. Door bees! No, I’m kidding, it meant that the old fashioned deadbolt lock was either just for show, or just one part of the cell doors’ security systems. There was some kind of electronic component as well. One that probably wouldn’t be able to be thwarted with some evil-looking spikes. I looked at my scrap once more, I’d have to have a conversation with one of the other prisoners tomorrow.

***

“Professor Flay,” I whispered as I took a seat next to a glasses-wearing black man decked out in a purple jumpsuit with a skull belt buckle.

“Yes?” the man said, clearly startled, “I’m sorry I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“My name’s Zach, and I’m a fan of your Big Book of Fake Science.”

“Um, are you referring to my Complete Compendium of Improbable Science,” Professor Lucius Flay replied.

“Shoot, is that what it’s called? I knew it was something like that, only my buddy lost the cover and title page in a bet with a supervillain we knew who needed them to power his cover and title page powered doomsday device,” I explained quickly.

Professor Flay flared his nostrils, “And you have the nerve to insinuate that my science is fake. Is there a point to this, I don’t want to miss this performance.”

Our villainous rehabilitation activity for the day was “evil karaoke” only songs with the word “bad” in the title were allowed to be performed. Cowboy Rockstar was currently belting out an honestly breathtaking rendition of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”. It was an especially loud and especially drawn out version of the song, so that Professor Flay and I could converse in relative peace.

“What kind of scientist would you say you are Professor?”

“If you must know, I consider myself to be more or less omnidisciplinary,” Professor Flay said.

“That means you dabble in a little bit of everything right?”

“Everything scientific.”

“And that’s not a superpower thing right? You came by all that knowledge on your own?”

Professor Flay waved a dismissive hand at me, “Of course I did. I studied for years to get to where I am today. Sure I may have had to break a few time travel regulations to do it, but otherwise, I come by my intellect fair and square.”

“Excellent!” I shouted a little too loudly. “This is the best version of ‘Bad Romance’ I’ve ever heard!” I quickly added, to cover myself.

“Yeah it’s so good that they should call it ‘Good Romance!’” Rockblock shouted, no doubt trying to help me out.

Unfortunately though, that was the wrong thing to say. Giorgio the Mime certainly couldn’t allow anything gooditalics to happen in this evil facility, so he quickly put the kibosh on Cowboy Rockstar’s performance, much to the chagrin of everyone else in the room. I thought I even saw a drone flash a frowny face. The drones then started ferrying us out of the room and back to our individual cells.

“How much do you know about electronic locks?” I quickly asked as I pressed my scrap of paper in between Professor Flay’s belt and jumpsuit.

Realization flashed across Professor Flay’s face.

“Ah,” he said. “Enough.”

I hoped he was right.

***

The next day our recreational activity was evil baking. There were several different stations set up in the auditorium, each with ingredients set up to make different evil foods. I ambled past “exploding pies”, “sentient food that will actively beg for its life as you eat it”, and “kale cookies” before taking a seat next to Cowboy Rockstar at the “general poisons” table. Helm Lady and Rockblock were already there, and I noticed Helm Lady was taking special care not to touch any of the ingredients on the table. Rockblock, being made entirely out of stone and cando spirit, began handling the various herbs and toxins and following the recipe. I guess they’d decided that somebody at our table had to be doing something to avoid attracting any unwanted attention.

“Where’s Professor Flay?” I asked.

“He just walked in,” Cowboy Rockstar said, nodding toward the door, where a contingent of drones were herding in another batch of prisoners.

“Over here!” Rockblock bellowed, waving three of his giant hands while the other four mixed and mashed various ingredients.

“Quiet,” Helm Lady snarled. I was beginning to regret bringing Rockblock in on our plans so early.

Still, Professor Flay managed to get the message and made his way over to our table.

“Hello everybody,” he said as he sat down next to Helm Lady. He wrinkled his nose as he caught a whiff of what Rockblock was mixing in his bowl. “What are we making?”

“Sulfide sausages,” Rockblock replied.

“Lovely.”

“So?” I asked, raising my eyebrow inquisitively at the professor.

Professor Flay glanced around and, confident that there were no drones within listening distance, leaned in conspiratorially.

“I can build the device you described but-”

“Hey guys, sorry I didn’t come right away. I wanted to do a lap to see if there were any other cooler tables,” a pale skinned man clad in black chainmail and sporting thick rimmed glasses said as he sat down at our table.

“Er… what?” I asked.

“I know Rockblock called me over, but I’m not just going to sit down at the first table that offers me a spot, am I?” the other man replied as if that were a perfectly normal thing to say.

“Uh, I was actually talking to Professor Flay,” Rockblock said.

The bespectacled man laughed, “Oh Rockblock, I’d heard your sense of humor was legendary.”

Rockblock looked confused but Helm Lady put a hand on one of his arms.

“What do you want Glassesman?”

“Helm Lady! Great to see you. How’s the old man?”

“We don’t talk.”

“Oh, is that right? Poor Hats never could keep a protege.”

“Glassesman.” I said, interjecting before things escalated. “You weren’t on the list. When did you get here?”

“Oh, just recently. I wasn’t captured with the rest of you in the first wave.”

Cowboy Rockstar ignored the jab and leaned forward. “Are you saying that Smuggles has found whatever resistance there is? Where’s Ultiman?”

“Keep your ten-gallon hat on buckaroo, the resistance is fine such as it is. I was deep undercover in Smuggles’ operation, but I got found out.”

“No surprise there. You probably started handing out promotional sunglasses to all the villains as soon as you got in there,” Helm Lady muttered.

“Hey, supervillains are a market I have yet to break into. This was a rare networking opportunity for me!”

What a tool.

“Enough,” Cowboy Rockstar said, making sure to keep his voice even.

“What’s with all the hushed tones,” Glassesman said, looking us all up and down.

“Ah,” he said when he’d completed his appraisal. “You’re planning a break out.”

“No we’re n-” Helm Lady started but Glassesman held up his hand.

“Oh please, you’ve got a scientist, a jack-of-all-trades, a bruiser, a non-powered combatant and a…” he faltered when he got to me.

“Blogger,” I said curtly.

Glassesman raised an eyebrow but kept going, “So don’t try to keep me out of this, I’m non-powered too, and I can fight better than a Hatb- sorry exitalics-Hatboy any day of the week.”

Cowboy Rockstar looked as though he was going to say something to get rid of Glassesman but he just sighed and gestured to Professor Flay.

“Fine, sure. Professor you were saying?”

“Um, well, yes. I can build the… device, you asked for but I can’t do it from thin air. I need something to work from.”

We all sat in silence for a moment. I guess it was too much to ask for an omni-disciplinaryitalics super-scientist to be able to whip up an EMP device out of whatever he could find in his prison cell. I’d be sure to inform whatever board certifies omni-disciplinary scientists to amend an asterisk to Professor Flay’s credentials when we got out of here.

“Could you build it out of whatever those things are made of?” Glassesman said, jerking a thumb towards one of the drones.

Professor Flay appraised it, “It appears to run on a lithioplasmic core with a carbon-electrum chassis. Assuming there’s a terrakon multispacial chip rattling around in or near its processor… Yes, I wouldn’t even need too much of it. Just a chunk from the chest if I had to guess.”

“Excellent,” Glassesman said before he stood up and flipped over our table. “And you can tell that cap clad crank that I’m twice the hero he ever was!”

Helm Lady smirked and wordlessly lunged at him, wrapping her long fingers around his neck. Professor Flay and I quickly took cover behind the table. Flay because he was a nerd and wasn’t about to get involved in a fist fight between two highly trained combatants. And me to protect Flay naturally. We needed him fit enough to build us the EMP, I couldn’t exactly leave him. Cowboy Rockstar jumped on Glassesman’s back and tried to pull him away while Rockblock scrambled to gather up the ingredients from his poison. A stray pellet of congealed arsenic bounced over to me and I scooped it up into my hoodie. You never know, right?

In a minute several drones were trundling over to our little group trying to break up the fight. They’d just about managed to pry Cowboy Rockstar, Glassesman and Helm Lady apart when Rockblock let out a deafening roar and joined the fray, sending a handful of drones flying as he growled something incoherent about how hard he’d been working on perfecting his recipe. By this time the other assembled heroes were all looking toward us, but before anybody else could get any ideas about joining the riot, more drones than I’d even realized were in the prison poured into the auditorium and surrounded my friends. Finally managing to pull them apart.

The rest of the heroes, myself and Professor Flay included, were now being rounded up by some of the drones while most of them were being engaged by six of Rockblock’s giant fists. As we walked by though, I noticed his seventh appendage experly flick a chunk of metal in our direction. I stumbled slightly, bending over quickly to grab the robot chunk. And then discretely passed it to Professor Flay before we were split off to return to our own cells.

“I’ll have it done before tonight,” he said to me as he palmed the misshapen blob of metal and wiring.

I nodded and smiled, by that time tomorrow we’d be out of that forsaken prison and saving the world.

***

Night fell, and I paced anxiously around the length of my cell. Assuming Professor Flay was able to work as quickly as he claimed he was able to. And assuming Rockblock had gotten him exactly what he needed. And assuming Cowboy Rockstar and Glassesman and Helm Lady were able to pick the locks on their cells when the time came. And assuming Rockblock could keep any guards off of us. And assuming- Well, there were a lot of assumptions before I’d be tasting fresh air. Our plan was hardly fool proof, and we had at least two or three fools on our team, depending on who you asked. We were making a few too many assumptions for my liking. But it was the best we had, so I guess that was that. There was nothing I could do except wait for something to happen.

And when something happened, everything happened.

First there was a deafening boom, followed by a shockwave that traveled quickly throughout the cell block. If I hadn’t been deafened by the explosion, I would have noticed that the electronic buzzing I’d heard had gone silent. Professor Flay’s homebrewed EMP had worked. I ran to the door and saw several guard drones collapsed on the ground. Their cybernetic features were blank.

Seconds later three cell doors swung open and Cowboy Rockstar, Helm Lady, and Glassesman strode out. Glassesman looked especially smug, even though he was the last one out. The other two were such pros, they decided to let it slide. They quickly started working on picking the locks on the other cells. Helm Lady sprung Rockblock first, just in case there were any drones outside the EMP’s radius that might’ve been trundling our way. Professor Flay’s EMP was a one-shot kind of deal so we’d have to fight or evade any other drones we encountered.

“So far so good eh?” Cowboy Rockstar grinned as he unlocked the door to my cell.

“So far, yeah,” I said anxiously. “We’re pretty much flying blind from here on out th- Woah!”

I took a step back into my cell as Cowboy Rockstar became enveloped in a brilliant white light. I stood agape as he began hovering a few inches off the ground and the light faded into his body.

“What was that?” I asked.

Cowboy Rockstar landed adroitly on the ground and checked his pulse with two of his fingers.

“It’s… I think the EMP must have shorted out whatever device was neutralizing our powers in here,” Cowboy Rockstar said. His fists began crackling with energy.

I looked up and down the hall of cells. Powerful glows or crumpled cell doors told me that many of the other heroes were starting to regain access to their powers.

“Well that certainly changes the game,” I said as I began taking stock of all of the new keys we’d just acquired.

***

We quickly divided into a few teams:

Team One: Nightron, Foresight P. Jones, and Intangi-Bill. None of us had been outside since we’d arrived in the prison and so none of us actually knew where the exit was. Team one would use their respective speed, supervision and intangibility in concert to find a way out.

Team Two: Cowboy Rockstar, Rockblock, and Cannonballer: Baller of Cannons. Our heavy hitters. If anybody could break straight through the walls that surrounded us to the outside it was them.

Team Three: Professor Flay, Electrobug, Digitalized, Psionica. They set about trying to cobble together weapons and gear from the broken husks of the drones that we had at our disposal.

Team Four: Captain Patriot, Brad the Radioactive Man, Amphin, Glassesman, Helm Lady and the Human Wall. The best offense is a strong defense, and if any of our other teams were going to have any hope of doing what they needed to do, they’d need somebody keeping Giorgio and whatever drones he could scrounge together off of their backs.

Team Five: Dr. Hemer, Knife Knurse, and Super Surgeon. A lot of heroes were suffering painful side-effects either from the sudden reemergence of their superpowers or the power-deprivation they’d been suffering since they’d gotten here. Anybody who had any sort of medical knowledge would tend to them until we get help on the outside.

Team Six: Just me. My job was to come up with the team names and I’m not ashamed to admit that I totally phoned it in.

I was sitting back and taking stock of the other teams’ progress when a gust of wind informed me of Nightron’s return.

“We’re not the only prisoners here,” he said panting, parts of his supervillain costume were singed, he must have encountered other guards elsewhere in the facility.

“You’re sure?” I asked frantically. I’m not sure why it had never occurred to me that there might be other prisoners somewhere in this facility. But I had only ever seen the heroes that were in that corridor at communal recreational events.

“Positive, there are maybe five or six other cell blocks just like this one. They’ve got dozens of other superheroes here. But that’s not all. World leaders, para-folk, some civilians. I think I even saw some sort of zoo,” Nightron said.

“Probably for animal sidekicks and the like,” I mused aloud. “Were you followed back here?”

“No, but they saw who I was. I’m sure they know where I’m supposed to be. It won’t be long before we have company here.”

“You’re right. Professor, how are those weapons coming!” I shouted towards where Team Three was working.

“My EMP seems to have worked a little too well, there’s no resteoring powers to these machines, but Psionica has managed to use her telekinetic abilities to reform some chunks of metal into clubs.”

“That’ll have to do,” I said. “Nightron, grab a few of those clubs, if anybody comes you’ll join Team Four. Hit them hard and hit them fast.”

“But what about the other prisoners?” Nightron protested.

“We need to break ourselves out before we can worry about anybody else,” Glassesman said.

“I hate to admit it but he’s right,” Helm Lady agreed.

“Yeah but-” and then, in a whoosh he was gone, because it was at that moment that a platoon of drones filed into our hallway. Two of them hit the ground, their CPUs bashed in by Nightron, before the rest of us even registered what was happening but once we did, the rest of Team Four, sprung into action.

“Zach, over here,” Professor Flay called.

I ran over to him, he passed me a makeshift club and we formed a defensive ring around our medics and the wounded along with the rest of Team Three.

“We are through!” Cannonballer: Baller of Cannons cried.

We helped Team Five get to the large gap in the wall that Team Two had formed as Rockblock and Cowboy Rockstar went to join the fray in the corridor.

“We may have problem,” Cannonballer: Baller of Cannons muttered to us as we joined her outside.

Problem was an understatement. For one thing, the sky was a murky blend of purples, oranges, and reds, and I know I haven’t been doing a ton of “world-building” in this dramatic account of my escape from a supervillain run supermax, but the sky we were all used to seeing was definitely blue. The ground we were standing on was somehow both dusty and crumbly. Every step we took sent a cloud of dust and ground flakes into the air. And we couldn’t see any other signs of life or civilization anywhere at all. I had always assumed that we would be somewhere inconspicuous but local, so that Smuggles could keep an eye on us, but it appeared as though we were in the middle of nowhere with no way of getting to the middle of anywhere.

“What… What is this place?” Professor Flay said.

“Beats me,” I said with a shrug. When I designed this prison for How To Hero I recommended finding a large unused building with reinforced walls that was situated in a place that no cops would ever be caught dead anywhere near. There are literally four or five places like that within a twenty block radius of How To Hero headquarters so where the hell were we. Unless… crap.

“Atomspace,” I said. “We’ve been shrunken down and sent to a prison in Atomspace.”

“Well,” Professor Flay said, taking in our otherworldly surroundings. “That creates a wrinkle in our plans doesn’t it.”

“It certainly does,” I agreed.

And that’s when everything went black.

***

I awoke, chained to a chair, in what may very well have been the most garishly decorated room I had ever seen. And Parenthetical Guy once painted our office neon green and creamsicle orange so that was saying something. The walls were all a deep blood red and there were various supervillainous accoutrements mounted all over the walls. Scary looking masks, futuristic blasters, esoteric looking staffs. A giant serpent’s head wearing oversized sunglasses was mounted on the wall directly opposite me. Below the serpent head sat an ornate, obsidian desk with a high backed leather chair behind it. The carpet was the color of rotting bones, which made a lot of sense when I realized that it wasn’t really a carpet at all, but rather a mat made entirely of very thin bone fragments. Bone fragments that were incredibly sharp at the ends.

“Ouch!” I yelped as I lifted my feet slightly off of the ground.

“Well look who’s finally awake,” a snide voice to my left said.

I turned my head and my heart dropped. Joining me in this chilling chamber were the rest of my friends: Cowboy Rockstar, Helm Lady, Professor Flay and Glassesman were chained to chairs like mine while Rockblock’s hulking form was chained to the wall on the far side of the room. The humans in the chairs also had their feet up in various positions. Rockblock was stuck standing on the bone floor, but at least he didn’t seem to mind.

“What happened?” I asked groggily.

“We were all knocked unconscious after we broke through the prison walls,” Professor Flay explained. “Cerebral implants I’d guess.”

“You’re saying we were all chipped?” I said, bewildered. “That’s crazy. Why weren’t we all knocked out as soon as we broke out of our cells?”

“Because I wanted to see the look on your face when you realized you were in Atomspace.”

All of our heads snapped towards the door where a man wearing a dark gray catsuit, a bright orange domino mask, and heavy metal boots strode into the room. “Do you like how I’ve decorated? Greg the Skeleton King referred me to his interior design guy.”

“That explains the bones,” Helm Lady muttered.

“And the hellfire!” Cowboy Rockstar proclaimed. “From right before we were captured, I’d been wondering about that.”

“Smuggles,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Zachary,” he said curtly. “Mr. How To Hero himself, how does it feel to be so utterly defeated by someone you’ve spent years ridiculing on your infantile blog?”

“I’ll let you know when it happens,” I said.

“Always with the clever little jokes,” Smuggles said as he took a seat in the leather chair and steepled his fingers. “You have been utterly defeated though. I’ve been following your little escape attempt from the very beginning. My people are not idiots you know. We’ve been listening to every conversation, watching your every move. The riot in the cafeteria was especially amusing.” He nodded at Rockblock who just grunted in response. “Quite frankly, you got further than I expected you to. But I’m glad you did, because now you have to admit that I’ve completely bested you. You’ve been thoroughly trounced Zachary. Who’s the laughingstock now?”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to think of a way out of this for myself and my friends, when Glassesman burst out laughing. Smuggles’s eye flashed with rage and he slammed a hand down on his desk.

“I’m sorry, is something amusing here?”

“No no… Well yeah, sorry, it’s just… You got every supervillain to band together, captured most of the superheroes, and basically took over the entire world just to get back at some low rate blogger?”

“Hey, uncalled for!” I shouted.

“I’m sorry it’s just a bit ridiculous don’t you think?”

“Honestly, I kind of agree with him,” Helm Lady said sheepishly.

“I legitimately thought this whole thing was about me,” Cowboy Rockstar admitted. “I’m kind of a big deal you know, being a semigod and all that.”

“Don’t you mean demigod?” Professor Flay asked, doing a little wiggle shake to get his chair facing Cowboy Rockstar.

“Oh, I’m that too. But I’m talking about the cult I inadvertently inspired that has deified me,” Cowboy Rockstar explained.

Smuggles banged his fist down on his desk again.

“Enough!” he shouted, before cradling his fist in his other hand. “Now that your merry band has been epically thwarted and humiliated, I must decide on your punishment. I’m not about to risk you lot plotting another breakout.”

My mind started racing for a way out. This was the first time I had come face to face with Smuggles since he’d unleashed Chuck the Fish Whisperer in the How To Hero basement. Until now I hadn’t realized just how much of what was happening revolved around me. I didn’t even realize Smuggles had been familiar with my blog before we hired him. Maybe I could work with that.

“Do your worst Smuggles. I guarantee you it won’t be anything worse than what actual villains have done to me,” I said, affixing my most smug expression on my features.

“What are you talking about?” Smuggles said, clearly thrown.

“I mean come on. I lived with a real supervillain before. Remember Dr. Brainwave?”

“Wait, what?” Helm Lady said. “You lived with Dr. Brainwave? We’ve been looking for him for years!”

“Yeah well I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.

“Brainwave was a sentimental hack. Killing him was child’s play.” Smuggles said through mounting anger.

I faltered for a moment. So Smuggles had been the one who had mailed that bomb to our office? He was the reason Dr. Brainwave was dead? Sure the guy was a supervillain, but at the end of the day he had been my… my friend. And he’d sacrificed his life to save mine and my friends’. The fact that I was sitting less than three feet away from his murderer was almost too much to bear. Still, there’d be plenty of time to deal with him later. Assuming my plan worked.

“Still before you killed him he made my life miserable. You’ve read my blog, I’m sure you know all about it. So I honestly doubt that anything you plan to do can compare.”

Smuggles literally shook with rage, “I can… I can killitalics you! You ever think about that?”

Cowboy Rockstar grinned, “Good luck with that.”

Ok, honestly I’m not sure what thatitalics was about. Is Cowboy Rockstar immortal? Has anybody ever checked that? Regardless, I decided to just roll with it.

“Do your worst.” I said.

“Guys!” Glassesman shouted exasperated. “I love taunting a bad guy as much as the next guy, but maybe we should all ease up a bit!”

“Oh relax,” I said. “Smuggles is a Z-lister trying to kick it with the big kids. He can’t just shoot us or something. If he wants to be a world-dominating evil monster he’s going to have to come up with a suitably ostentatious way to kill us and honestly, he doesn’t have the imagination. Just look at his face, this is clearly eating at him.”

It was as though a lightbulb went off over Smuggles’s head. His face warped from grimace to grin and he strode around to the other side of his desk.

“I’ve already succeeded in taking over the world and routing your beloved superheroes. I hardly need to prove myself to the likes of you. You can expect to be executed in a ‘suitable ostentatious manner’ shortly.”

I was all read to shoot back a witty retort when everything went black again.

***

I awoke to the sound of cheering, which made me feel pretty good. I don’t often get cheered for waking up. I’m sure Cowboy Rockstar was feeling pretty regular though, people cheer for everything that guy does. I was in the center of a gladiatorial arena, the stands were packed with guard drones and more than a few supervillains. The presence of so many of them here sent a shiver down my spine. Had Smuggles really been able to recruit and control so many supervillains? Next to me, my friends laid in a rumpled heap, all of them still unconscious with the exception of…

“Now look what you’ve done,” Professor Flay said sternly.

I turned to look at him and saw the abject fear sketched across his features.

“Relax Prof, everything’s going to be ok.”

“How can you say that! Look at us! We’re in an arena surrounded by bloodthirsty supervillains for god’s sake!”

“It’s not the supervillains you should be worrying about, it’s whatever’s going to come out of that gate,” I said, pointing to a massive (well, massive relative to our shrunken selves) gate directly opposite us.

Professor Flay shuddered, “I imagine the others are still unconscious to prevent them from being able to do anything against whatever that might be.”

I nodded, “It makes sense, Smuggles doesn’t want to risk anything going wrong.”

“But I still want the satisfaction of watching at least some of you soil yourselves in fear,” Smuggles said as his smug visage appeared on a floating jumbotron that was hovering over the arena.

“You’ll never get away with this you knave!” Professor Flay shouted.

“Oh Professor, I already have. I think I’ll make today an international holiday going forward,” Smuggles said as he leaned back from the camera so we could see his entire upper body on the screen. He was sitting on a golden throne and his fingers were hovering above a big red button. I assumed whatever was waiting behind the gate would be released at the press of that button. And why prolong the inevitable.

“Why don’t you come down here so I can wipe that smug expression off of your face, you absolute goober!” I called up to Smuggles.

Smuggles frowned, “Goodbye Zach, you will not be missed.”

His finger pressed the button. The gate started to ascend. Professor Flay sighed and rolled up his sleeves. I had to admire him, he wasn’t planning on going down without some sort of fight. As the gate rose the cheers of the crowd grew even more fevered. I think I even saw a sign that said “Cowboy Suckstar.” Rude. After what seemed like an eternity the gate was finally fully open and a ferocious roar shook the stadium as a massive beast lumbered into the arena. The ginormous monster truly had it all. Dozens of eyes, face tentacles, spikes, a flaming tail. I had to admit this would certainly be a suitably ostentatious way to die. Of course, I wasn’t about to let Smuggles get his way was I?

“Good god what is that thing?” Professor Flay said as he backed away from the giant monster.

“It’s our way out,” I said calmly as I climbed on top of Rockblock’s comatose body, put two fingers in my mouth and whistled sharply.

“What are you doing?” Professor Flay shouted at me as the monster began galloping towards us on all fours.

I looked down at Professor Flay and smiled, “See you on the other side Prof.”

And then the monster ate me.

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blackfemmecharacterdependency · 4 years

Text

19. What They Deserve

5336 Words, No triggers detected.

People loved to hear about the trials and tribulations of others. That was the core of half of the entertainment sites. Grace didn’t like to put her hurt on display, but she did want to reintroduce herself, or rather, debut the new Grace to the world and she realized that would entail people bringing up her past and/or intruding on her private life.

For instance, people would ask her how her relationship with her parents is…

Grace’s first day out, her mother was in the car whenever she got in. They were driven, in silence back to the estate, where guards were posted for the occasion, in case someone noticed or tried to get in, as they sometimes did. Her room was still the same, but there was someone there to help her pack up her essentials and her pleasures. She was going to be moved to a secure location that people didn’t know about, because her parents didn’t want the family house to be any more of a sideshow that it had been following her institutionalization.

Her mother still had not said anything to her and it took hours for her to go through her personals and decide what she couldn’t live without and see the things that she could live without go into a donations box or a trash bin. “Where are all of my pictures of me and Simon?” she asked, when she opened the designated box for those.

“Surely, you’re joking,” was the first thing her mother said. She tossed the box into the donations. Her father didn’t even show up during this time frame. By the time she was moved into her new home, she had only gotten one word from her mother and none from her father. So, whenever someone asked about them, she would say, “How is everybody’s relationship with their parents? It’s personal. It’s a relationship between one and one or two more people, and their dynamic and their emotions are fluid. The three of us have very different wavelengths and concerns, so my relationship with them is something between me and them and then, my relationship with you all is what’s between me and you.” She’d laugh a little, but after a few times, people got the message.

People would ask her about her mental health - if she was better, what happened in the first place, does she think it could happen again, etc.

Hazel wound up in another facility after a few months with her new foster family (mere weeks before Grace was released). The charm bracelet was sent back to her and for several days, she didn’t know what that meant for Hazel. If she was okay, if she was hurt or worse. They had only told her that they thought that she should have it back, then failed to communicate anything else about Hazel, for legal purposes. Grace was in shambles, until FINALLY she was told that Hazel was fine, but she had a relapse and was “in turtle form” for several days, making them have to take her to a doctor and seeing her file, they committed her for 72 hours. She was fine and heading back home.

When Grace got out and looked her up, she was no longer at the same home. She had been redirected elsewhere… They couldn’t give Grace that information at the time. She thought she would lose her mind trying to contact someone who would be willing to help her out with this information, but most of them informed her that such information was secure for the safety of the child, and she understood it and couldn’t argue with it or convince them that she was more concerned for the safety of this child than anyone. It remained at the forefront of her thoughts.

“I went somewhere to get help. I got help. A lot of people just get bounced around in life and never truly get the help that they need or deserve. I’ve been very fortunate, so I try to focus on that. Some days, I succeed. Some days, I do not succeed. I feel good today.”

They would ask her about new music, what beauty products she used now that she was no longer associated with her old brands, and if she would be dancing again. All things that she still wasn’t completely certain of yet, but lighthearted enough that she didn’t get too stressed out about that line of questioning.

The questions that brought her the most visible displeasure and clear distress were the ones about Simon. What about your relationship with Simon Laurent? Nobody has heard your side of the story. Have you seen or talked to Simon? Are things well between you? Has he forgiven you?…

“I don’t speak about Simon. The most that I can tell you is that I hope he has what he needs and gets everything that he deserves.” They might try to make jokes to prod about what she thinks he deserves, but she generally redirected the conversation. “He deserves what he deserves, and that’s what I hope he gets.” She would smile and nod, but her eyes would be sad. Eventually, people stopped asking her about him. She began posting dance videos, remixes, and songs again. This time, being confident in herself and away from her parents. It was no longer an escape from her life, because her life was lonely, but she was happy with it. There was freedom in her world that she hadn’t imagined in the past. She had more followers than ever before. Some people still called her Apex, but she never put that into any of her bios or captions, herself.

She had a routine that worked for her wellbeing, from the time that she spent in the center, and she still had very regular sessions with her therapist, not to mention a medication regimen that assisted in her wellness.

Anyone who wanted to contact her did so through someone else who would be the go-between, just in case. She moved out of the house that her parents placed her in and found something more suitable for her style, and closer to Julliard, because she still wanted to try to go, if she could make it in. In the meantime, she enjoyed the music scene in New York, branched out to finding new artists that she hadn’t heard of, made a few new friends in the industry, got hired for music videos and song demos. Some days, she expected to wake up and discover that her life had all been a dream. She would wonder if she actually did spend over a year in a mental facility, if she had gotten into some trouble with Simon, if she ever actually had met Simon… He seemed so far away, so long ago and so unfamiliar sometimes. But, whenever he did come back to her, he came flooding back.

Like if somebody casually asked, “You got kids?” and she remembered that while the answer was no, she had gotten pregnant at 16 and was so stressed out, that she hadn’t noticed for several weeks that her body was behaving differently, and that she spent several more trying to figure out what she would say, what she would do, how she would handle this. “No, no kids. But, I did have to make a decision to terminate a pregnancy when I was younger.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. There’s a stigma about it, but it was something that was best for me and I don’t harbor anger or disgust with myself about it.” Then, she could remember Simon’s eyes, his hands, other parts of him, the way that he held her, the things he had said to her. She would have to try not to cry and if she did, be totally honest, “Sorry. I haven’t really thought about the guy in a while, and I’m just in my feelings, Don’t mind me.” She didn’t like to lie, if she could help it. She tried to be as honest as she could these days, without saying too much. But, she had a pretty good crew in NY. They always were understanding and if someone said something, they’d gather them up pretty quickly. Her therapist told her that friends do things like that. It made her feel bad. She thought that friends shared everything, and since she was still very closed off to these people, she didn’t really consider them to be friends of hers, just associates that she really liked.

“That can be considered friendship, too. You don’t have to tell every friend that you have your life story and every person who you share mutual connection and kindness with isn’t going to be your lifetime bestie. Just enjoy the company of people who make you feel good and let the people who you make feel good enjoy your company.” That’s what she did.

She got into Julliard when she was 20 and she was pretty known in the music scene by the time she was 21. Grateful that she had been able to finish high school in the institution and happy that she hadn’t gotten so comfortable that she was afraid to get better and leave there. Because, she was living a life that she had always wanted, and whether or not she deserved to, she told herself that she did and she was sure to enjoy it.

That bitch was trying to ruin him! Simon could hardly catch his breath as he paced outside of the hearing for his academic integrity. She’s just mad that you’ve done BETTER than she has, with her work!

It was one thing when she was taking her bitterness out on you, telling you that your weapon failed to meet the requirements of the assignment, even though it was theoretically FLAWLESS. The CIA spoke with you about your plans for this weapon! But her? She told you to stick to something that your “childlike little mind” could actually comprehend the endgame of. “How about your little robot figures?” she’d taunted.

Other students had laughed. LAUGHED! His project was miles ahead of everyone in that class, and her tone was disrespectful and condescending! “I haven’t had a childlike thought in my mind since I was 10, you old bitch!” It just stumbled from his lips. She frowned at him and demanded an apology to her and to the rest of the class. He snatched his presentation supplies and stormed off. He’d be damned if he apologized for her antagonizing him! He heard a few more laughs and he knocked the items off of her podium on his way out. He knew that couldn’t work out well… at least in hindsight, he did. In the moment, all he knew was rage.

He even sent her an email apologizing to her and the class and offering to replace anything that he damaged in his outburst. She had only replied to him not to return to her class until further notice. But… he needed her class. It would throw off his entire educational trajectory not to be able to come to her class! Even for a few days!! He was almost ready to grovel. Almost. That would be too much like showing weakness. He apologized, what more could she want.

So, Simon filed a complaint on her, accusing her of being combative, rude, and making her classes toxic environments. Now, the Committee on Discipline was meeting to look over all of the details of her complaint.

“I truly wanted to give young Mr. Laurent a moment to think about his actions in the classroom and to realize the err of his ways. His complaint against me during this time, being both unfounded and untrue, caused me to have to rethink my decision. I don’t think that Simon Laurent is capable of the behavioral status that we require of students here. I don’t think that he has the temperance for all of the criticisms his flights of fancy are sure to get over the course of his career. I gave him the option to try another avenue for the assignment, as his assignment, while a very significant project did. Not. meet. The. requirements. Of. the. Assignment. He needed to be able to give us a small demonstration. His project was a weapon. He could only grant me a simulation and that is not what I asked for. Telling him this incited him to rage in which he disrespected myself and his peers, disrupting the classroom with his antics. Like a child, throwing a tantrum.”

Even then, his face was looking like all he wanted was to murder her right then and there. When the committee allowed him to speak, he changed his tune. He was calm and even voiced. “Professor Hughes made a lot of points about me and my particular struggles when it comes to being disregarded. I did respond angrily and I know that it was wrong of me to react the way that I did. That’s why I sent her an apology after I had the chance to cool down. But, she didn’t decide to turn me into the committee until after I filed a complaint on her for even bringing me to the point that I had such a meltdown in her classroom in the first place!” Amelia frowned and members of the committee shared various facial expressions.

Simon looked directly at her and said, “I’ve been a long time fan of your work and your accomplishments. I specifically fought to be in your classroom because of the way that I regard everything that you’ve done throughout your career and I just wanted the privilege to be able to learn from you. But, you’re very unkind. You make people feel bad. You don’t think about the things that you say to people and how those things might affect them. You didn’t even care about my psychological makeup until you could use it against me in these proceedings. You humiliate people in front of others and you don’t even break a sweat.”

“This is not my hearing, Mr. Laurent.”

“But, it matters to this hearing, because I never would have reacted that way if you weren’t being so abrasive.”

“That is a word that men like to use against me whenever I meet them with the very same energy that they put out. I’ve been called worse. By professors, colleagues, and for over 30 years my own psychological settings came into play whenever a discussion was to be had about me. This isn’t about your mental disposition. It’s about your behavior. Your angry and hostile behavior at any old sign of criticism!”

“Professor Hughes,” one of the committee members said. She went silent.

Simon proceeded, “I know that I’m not good at handling criticism, especially coming from a woman. My mother was… difficult to communicate with and the only other woman I was close to…” His eyes grew damp. “I’m sorry. My education means a lot to me and I’ll do anything to stay here.” He rushed out of the chambers, covering his face as he did. Amelia pulled herself up to go check on him. He was in the waiting section, in a seat in the corner with his back to the wall, still covering his crying face. She took a deep breath, grabbed a seat and sat next to him.

“There’s not a person in that room who isn’t familiar with the hardships you had to face in order to get here. We know about your family. We know about your abuse.” He wiped his face and glared at nothing in particular. “We also know how smart you are. You were able to get into this school based upon your intelligence. Nobody is doubting that you are capable of doing great work. I wasn’t even implying that I hated your work that day. But, it wasn’t the proper assignment, Simon. I needed you to give me one thing, you not only gave me another, but you refused to even consider that what you were trying to give me was impossible to meet my requirements. Then, you got angry because you had refused to listen to me in the first place. Now, I admit… I’m not the most courteous member of staff at this institute. I can be…”

“Bitchy.”

“Unapologetic.” She chuckled. “Let me tell you, I know how it is to be in a room full of people who underestimate you and make you feel like you shouldn’t be in the room. There wasn’t much respect for female engineers in my day and there’s not a proper amount even now if you ask me. Half of this staff is composed of pretentious, pompous, puffed up paragons, and it takes next to nothing for anybody outside of their ideals to be met with disdain. What you did, by reporting me was to make me a target. I disagree with your evaluation of me and I can’t tell if it came from a place of genuine thought or retaliation, but you can’t be trusted to continue your education here unless you are willing to listen to others, especially those of us who are trying to help to teach you!”

He wiped his eyes with his sleeves. “They’re gonna kick me out. It’ll look bad on me, and all of my research and work from the past two years might not even matter anymore…”

“That doesn’t have to happen, Simon. Listen… I think you’re brilliant. I am willing to vouch for you this time, under the circumstances that you see someone about getting professional help for your responses to adversity.”

“You… want me to see a shrink.?”

“I think you could benefit from getting mental healthcare and I don’t want you in any classroom of mine unless you do.”

He shivered. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. She went back in to explain this to the committee and he went through the campus counselors, hating most of them whenever he met with them, switching every time he didn’t like something about one of them, making very little progress, but still fulfilling the deal he made with the committee, for a time. He and Professor Hughes bickered a lot, but he had kept his temper in check whenever she aggravated him, and he eventually settled on a counselor that he didn’t completely hate, too.

He’d always come in, not at all wanting to speak to them. He tossed some books on the table and said, “That’s my dream journal, my intrusive thoughts notebook, and the standard journal. Look through them and then tell me whatever you need to tell me for me to get my paperwork signed off on.”

The man pushed the books back to him and said, “I’m not going to read those, but you’re free to talk about anything that you’ve written in them to me. Let’s start there.”

Simon flopped into the seat and rolled his eyes, “There’s nothing in these that I want to talk about. That’s why I wrote them in here. You’re the brain person. The information gets to you whether you read it or I say it.”

“Okay. Well, let’s see what the first entry is in this one…” He picked up the standard journal and read out loud, “I saw that they let the void out into the world again… What’s the void, Simon?”

Simon turned red and didn’t answer. After a while, the man continued reading, “It didn’t look like Grace. It was beautiful like her, but it looked older, which makes sense, because it was gone a while, and now it’s back…”

Simon snatched the book from his hand and stuffed it into his backpack. “This was a bad idea. I’m not here to talk about or hear about the void.”

“I don’t know what the void is, but you wrote about it, so I’m inclined to believe that you think about it.”

“I’ve seen it!” Simon snapped pounding his fist on the desk. He took a deep breath. “I had a vision, at least I thought it was a vision. Whenever I was 16, when I was with my ex… we weren’t together for a long time, not that way. We were friends, first. We were friends for a long time, but I always loved her. I loved her before she even knew herself. I loved her with all of my heart.” He picked at his forearms where his tally marks were. “She just saw me as a friend, even though it was obvious that we should be together. Maybe I pushed too hard. Should’ve just left well enough alone. I had to have her and what I got was something else. She wasn’t the same. That wasn’t the girl I loved and I didn’t know it until I saw this… vision that I call the void. It came out of her, it engulfed her and consumed her and it took her place.”

“In a dream?”

“I’m not crazy.”

“I would never use that word to describe anyone.”

“I’m not whatever word you would use for crazy people! I know that it wasn’t real. But, I saw it and I knew that it was what replaced my friend. I hated it for taking her away, and I hated her for letting it. The void was just a way of dealing with the separation. I omitted everything connected to it from my life.”

“You voided her out.”

“Yeah. The person who looks like my friend got out of a mental institution a while back. That’s what that entry was about.”

“Do you honestly feel like the person who you saw is a different person than the one that you used to love? Do you believe that this void that you saw replaced her and that the entity you refer to as the void is now existing in the form of your friend?”

“What? No. I’m not crazy!”

“I’m asking you if when you refer to your ex as The Void, is that because you don’t see them as the human that you knew or because you have purposefully reduced them to something subhuman?”

“What difference does that make?”

“One would be purposeful dehumanization of someone you didn’t like and the other would be out of your control.”

“Nothing is out of my control,” Simon said.

“Some things have to be, Simon. Like the fact that you don’t want to be here, but the school is making you in order for you to remain enrolled. You can’t control everything, not even everything in your life. But, just because you can’t control everything, that doesn’t mean that you don’t control anything. So… Did you force this dehumanized version of this girl into your mind, or was it something out of your control?”

“I… I created it. I didn’t want to see the person that I needed turn away from me, so I imagined her as something else.” The man just nodded. “But, she made me do it! She was going to…” he shook his head. He couldn’t think of what it was that Grace had done that was so wrong. He needed to think back, remember the pain she caused him. Remember the damage she was willing to inflict… but, he felt like he was grasping. There had to be some reason. He couldn’t believe that he spent close to what 4 years now hating her for something that she didn’t actually do… No! She definitely was going to hurt him more than anyone ever had. “You had to know her. You had to know who she was to know what she could do to me.”

“I looked her up. She recently gave an interview about you. I can send you the link, if you haven’t seen it and are interested.”

“Grace did an interview about me?” He shook his head, “Whatever she said, she’s lying! It didn’t happen that way!”

“Simon… why don’t you do this… See if you can handle what she has to say and we can speak about how it made you feel next time."

Simon left pretty upset. An interview? She hadn’t had anything to say all of this time. Why now? Was this some sort of reckoning against him? He waited until he got home, glanced around him at all of the destruction he’d caused in the past but few weeks. He had been enraged so frequently that he couldn’t even see his floor.

But, he couldn’t rush into this. First, he picked up his mess, put things away, discarded what needed to be thrown out thanks to his destructive anger, and washed up for the night. No working on any projects or hobbies. Nothing that he loved or cared about in the event that this interview pissed him off. He let his hair fall and grabbed his phone. They were easier to replace than laptops. You could STOP raging when you get mad… Yeah right. And risk doing it at school again? They’d put me out for sure.

He opened the link and the first thing he saw was Shana’s face. "This is already a bad start."

"Hey Shady Kindred! Welcome to Shady Shana’s Dish, where we partake of both relevant and ratchet news. I’m your host, Shady Shana and today, I have a very special guest. My… frenemy turned… friendly associate?"

Grace laughed. It sounded like music to Simon, even though he glared at her. "Let’s.. just say associate.”

“OOF. Shade. Okay, well… classmates, former classmates, at the very least. This is Grace Monroe. I think my audience would definitely know you. From your videos and songs and stuff. But, let me dish this out, I saw homegirl perform live in NYC, and this bitch had a cello. Okay? A cello! She was singing some opera stuff.”

“I don’t sing opera!”

“She was hitting high notes, this kinda alluring witch noise… you sounded like those tuning things, but like high-pitched… you had to be there. Just… check out her page. I’ll have her links in the description. She’s working on music, putting stuff out all of the time and also attending Julliard. Many talents, very beautiful, sweet, when she wants to be… But, we’re actually here to dish about something that Girlfriend hasn’t talked to anybody about in a long time. Mr. Simon Laurent.” Shana exaggerated how French she said his name and had a look of disgust when she did.

He rewound to see Grace’s reaction. She nodded. She had prepared herself for this. She didn’t look angry or grossed out. Faking. Lies…

“Yes. I agreed to sit down with you in your really nice little studio here and talk about how I feel about Simon.”

“And just to let you messy ones at home know, we will not be speaking about the old school stuff. Grace was nice enough to give me an exclusive about her current day, so if you came to see what she wanted to say about the old stuff, this will not be the place. What he did do, didn’t do, how he done it, naw! None of that! So, I guess, my first question about it is how would you describe your current feelings about Simon Laurent?”

Grace laughed nervously, licked her teeth, sputtered out air (Simon hadn’t heard that sound in so long), and she shook her head, “It’s a loaded question. Ummm… I can’t say that I really have feelings about Simon. I have memories. I know that we were virtually inseparable for a long time. I know in my mind who I thought he was to me when we were younger, but, none of that has had any real bearing on my life in a while.”

“You don’t think about him or nothin?"

"I mean… I’ve thought about him, but no, not like actively. It’s not a part of my day. It’s more like an occasional experience, when something triggers it or… even sometimes, it’ll be put of nowhere, but just not often. I don’t even know what Simon looks like right now. If you were to trick me and have him backstage or whatever and he came out here right now, Girl - it might take me a moment to recognize him.” Simon felt himself trembling. She didn’t even check up on him? She didn’t want to know? Of course she didn’t! She didn’t care about him..

Shana laughed. “Well, not to be messy…” was her trademark line for when she was about to say something really messy, “Sounds like he’s basically become, what did you two used to call those mediocre types? Non-essential!” Grace’s lip dropped and she titled her head and squinched her face, “Well…” she said in a high pitch, “I… he’s not present. He isn’t part of my life. He detached himself from my life, and I had to learn to move on and now, there’s simply no attachments. Like, if I ran into him, no, I might not know him right away, but the moment I realize, I’m sure I’d be overcome with emotions. I couldn’t tell you how I’d react.”

“Would you uppercut his ass?” Grace cackled and covered her face. “I mean.. if anybody deserves it…”

“I don’t think I’d uppercut his ass, as you so eloquently put it. I think… I’d check to see how he’s feeling. How he’s doing. If he’s found his peace now that I’m not there to affect anything. If he’s better off without me, like he figured he’d be.”

“Sooo… if I can get you two in a room, you wouldn’t even lay hands on him?”

“I… remember what happened. I remember how it felt. I remember pain. But, since then, I’ve learned empathy. I’ve learned pacifism. I’ve learned healing. So, it’s not that I’ve forgotten how hard that time was, but I’ve forgiven everything and I’d just be curious if he had forgiven things too.”

“Whooooooooooo,” Shana let our a long deep breath, “You are better than me. Because if I see him, it’s hands on sight. He’d better not have his head turned. I’ll bust him right in his neck vein."

Grace laughed and shook her head, waving her hands, "I do not share in this sentiment. If you are a Simon stan, do NOT message me. I didn’t say anything bad about this man.”

“Which surprises me, because I know YOU won’t say anything about this, but I’ll say this and I’ve said this to him, as well… I still think that a lot of the things said about you were not true and a lot of the things done to you were just something that basically the lowest form of scum would do to someone. Something a… girl, I’m reaching back for this terminology… it was some… null type shit. Somebody less than zero would do that kind of thing, to anyone, much less someone that they cared about.”

“Well… I can’t speak for him, but you know… maybe he didn’t care about me as much as he seemed to… maybe these things are things you do to people you hate and maybe that’s what it was always gonna be with us. That’s why I would ask him how he’s doing. Maybe he was tired of being stuck around somebody he resented. I don’t know. But, I’ll always value any type of growth that I have. And if nothing else, Simon was definitely a harbinger of growth in my life.”

Simon didn’t realize that he was crying. Shana and Grace wrapped up the show and it went off with some music video that they worked on with a little girl. He didn’t watch it… his vision was too blurry. But he heard the song asking “Where would you be, without me?” And he couldn’t help but feel attacked. But, he closed out the video. If she wanted to see him and ask him how he was doing, sure… he could make that happen…

#If They Didn't Get on the Train #AU Infinity Train #Infinity Train #Nesha Fanfiction #Infinity Train Fanfiction #fics

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rubykgrant · 4 years

Text

Ah, to heck with it; have some “Simon Survives Scenarios”. Various ideas that have been rolling around in my head, I can’t be bothered to actually DO anything with them myself, but perhaps others will have fun! Or angst. Or both. You can use these in a “and then everything was OK, the end” kinda way... OR “and then he felt BAD, because he made US feel bad, you get what you give dude” kinda way. Either way, enjoy~

Scenario 1- starting from the point of Grace still being trapped in her video memories, what finally snaps her out of the trance is somebody knocking the projector out of the way... it is Samantha. She started feeling anxious (and perhaps a bit guilty) about giving this to Simon, and worried about what he’d do with it. Samantha and Grace talk for a moment, concluding with Samantha lamenting that she should have taken better care of the boy when he was younger, and Grace pointing out that he’s a big boy now, his actions are his own choice. Grace continues on while Samantha stays behind. Things proceed basically the same as they did originally, until the Ghom attacks Simon. It seems that he’s really going to die, the thing that he’d been running from since he was a child finally caught him, he wasn’t able to stop himself from becoming somebody terrible and now he was going to be stopped forever... and suddenly, something lunges at the Ghom. It is Samantha, still dressed in her very classy vest, but now she’s got her fur raised, claws out, hissing and ready to bite. She lunges again, grabbing the Ghom and rolling, swiping and swatting at it the shole time. Simon is still out of sorts... he just tried to kill his best friend, then she was OK, and then the Ghom was on him, and he could feel himself dying, and then Samantha was there, and he feels tiny and afraid again. Grace takes a step forward, not sure if she can do anything, but wanting to try. Samantha is pinned down by the Ghom, looks up at the children, and manages to shout “GET BACK IN THE CAR!” before she pulls herself free, rounding on the Ghom. Grace grabs Simon by the arm and pulls him back toward the doors of the Mall Car, the kids rushing in ahead of them. Grace pulls the doors shut, and Simon finally reacts. Sitting on his knees in front of the door, he slams his hands against it. For a few seconds, everybody is just trying to ceatch their breath and process what just happened. Simon looks down at his arms, both covered with numbers. He turns around, sitting against the door, and off to the side he turns and looks into a reflective surface of some window the kids broke years ago. He sees his face, and then quickly looks away. Grace speaks to the kids as she did in the original, her number going down, her new little origami companions with her. Simon is silent for now, he doesn’t even want to hear his own voice (you can take that wherever you want from there. maybe he still keeps being a jerk and eventually bites it in a whole other way, maybe they find Samantha again later, maybe whatever)

Scenario 2- The well-being of the passengers was the most important thing... and that was why One-One jsut couldn’t leave this alone. Before... before Amelia, before a lot of things, there had been very specific safety measures that made sure, no matter WHAT, a passenger wouldn’t die. It hadn’t been all Amelia’s fault, not entirely, but when she took the train, she removed several safety measures, and others fell into dis-repair as she was only concerned with her personal project. There was also other problems, things that had nothing to do with Amelia, things One-One should have anitcipated and fixed before anything bad happened... but he hadn’t, and then he’d been so invested in getting things “back on track” (so to speak) after becoming the Conductor once again, he missed this. Now a passenger was dead, and that was simply not acceptable. Even Sad-One couldn’t find the right words to describe how devastating this fact was. Amelia was a little reluctant to mention that One-One was so concerned with the whole Simon Incident, that he was ignoring other issues. After all, passengers weren’t in danger before she started taking over the train, and she’d been RIGHT THERE, right in front of the boy, she could clearly see how troubled he had been, how narrow-minded and head-strong, how very much like herself when she’d been at her worst... and she had only antagonized him, then left. Finaly, Amelia forced herself to speak with One (being more honest and direct was something she needed to work on. her number spun down as she took a deep breath and walked up to the little robot). She talked about how this was unfortunate, and very sad indeed, but warned One not get so obsessed. That was what had hurt the boy. It was also what had hurt her. She’d been so obsessed with bringing back Alrick, she’d tried all kinds of things, now obviously nonsensical; cloning him, holograms, once she’d even tried using her memory tape and a particular car to create some sort of time travel. “Oh? Which car was that?” One asked, in an off-handed way. Amelia explained it had been a car that was now currently glitching, but the original purpose was to go into “history books”, like some after-school special where children time travel and learn a history lesson. The car couldn’t let you change or alter the past, just re-visit and re-live it. Until Amelia started adjusting it... oh, she’d gotten CLOSE with that thing. However, after some experiments, she decided it was a bad option. Pulling something out through the machine from the past almost never lasted. Most of the time, whatever she brought back deteriorated. She had only chosen random objects, things like house plants or fruit, too afraid to actually put Alrick through all that. Going through the machine yourself also wasn’t practical, you also got pulled back to where you had been after a certain period of time had passed. You could bring things with you (she’d been able to grab a chair), but that still held the same problem of the past object possibly falling apart. She also found that you couldn’t be very accurate with where and when. She often was a few minutes and several feet off where she was “aiming”. Finally, she noticed that she also became more unstable after trying to go back. Not only had she not even been able to see Alrick (what with being an hour later than she wanted and also two hole miles away), she had nearly destoyed herself. Amelia had intended to share this story to hopefully help One understand that he couldn’t keep dwelling on Simon. Instead, she had given him an idea

Scenario 3- The Ghom doesn’t suck out Simon’s soul... it turns him into ANOTHER Ghom. Grace quickly rushes the kids back into the Mall Car as the thing that used to be her best friend tries to attack her. Again. Any hope she had of reasoning with him, helping him, sotpping him... all that is gone. Inside the car, Grace tries to comfort the kids and explain to them that they need to change. In the days that follow, instead of going out on raids, Grace goes out on little trips with the kids. Now that they know what they are supposed to do, learn lessons and get their numbers DOWN, they really seem to be making progess. Sometimes she head out with a group of 7 kids, and come back with 3. At first they were afraid of getting to 0 and suddenly facing an exit door, but Grace helps them understand that it will be OK. They’re going home. The kids still don’t want to be alone, and that’s why Grace still uses the Mall Car as a base. If nothing else, they can still come back here to rest. Some kids find their true companions, and Grace says good-bye. She knows she should try to get her own number down (although, it seems to do it just fine without much effort), but she doesn’t want to leave just yet... for one thing, she’s been on this train for... what? 10 years? 11? She wasn’t totally sure, but she did know this had been her life for a long time, and she wasn’t ready for “the real world” yet. She also still wanted to find Hazel. If nothing else, to apologize and make sure the little girl was alright. Why lie, she also kept thinking about Simon. She knew it was impossible to even think she could find him, or tell him apart from the other Ghoms, or help him if she DID find him. She kept thinking about him though. One day, while exploring some cars with her little origami companions, Grace hears somebody yelling; she can’t believe it, but it is Hazel! A group of Ghoms have gotten into the car, and they’re chasing her. Grace runs as fast ashe she can, but the car is designed to be like a giant jungle-gym in a fast-food place. Everything is all twisted together, an obstacle course in bright colors. Grace gets stuck, and calls out to her friend. Hazel tries to get to her, but 3 Ghoms advance on her. Hazel crouches down, her turtle shell appearing as a last line of defense... and suddenly a fourth Ghom slams into the others. It chases them off, then turns and walks toward Hazel. Grace finally finds a way through, runs over, and wraps her arms around the tiny girl to protect her. The Ghom stops. It seems distressed, which isn’t unusual for Ghoms, but it also isn’t attacking. It keeps pacing around them, growling and crying. Hazel slowly relaxes in Graces arms, and Grace finally asks “Simon? Is that you?”

Potential Follow-Up to Scenario 3 and 4- Simon is returned to his normal form, still covered with numbers and still not in his right mind. After first panicking when he sees who he still considers to be the “false conductor”, he then starts to remember what he did, and asks “Wait, what happened to Grace? Did I hurt her? I... I thought I did, but I didn’t really WANT to, but I still DID... no, did I kill her? I didn’t, right? Something saved her... Din’t it?”. Finally Amelia comes in, and taking a softer tone than the one she used when they first met, she explains that yes, he did indeed try to kill Grace, and yes, she was saved by denizens of the train. Now, he has been saved as well. Still trying not to be too harsh with him, Amelia explains that he has been wrong about the numbers and how the train works. Simon still doesn’t want to listen to that... because if he was wrong about that, then EVERYTHING he did was wrong. After some time passes, Amelia manages to locate his former friends, as they’ve been concerned about him (he has trouble understanding why they even still care). Samantha comes to see him, and after looking at his face she says “Oh, Simon... what have you done to yourself? What did you do to everybody else?”. Grace comes to see him as well, and she’s a mess “I should be HAPPY to see you alive, we should both be happy, but we can’t be, I don’t know HOW to feel about this, we saved each other so many times Simon, until the very end I was still trying to save you, and you... YOU...” she can’t finish. He knows. He tried to kill her. Shame doesn’t seem like a strong enough word for what he feels. Hazel is somewhere nearby, but she refuses to come near him. He can’t blame her. On his own, Simon looks at himself in a mirror, seeing all the numbers on his face. Like brands of his mistakes and bad choices. When Amelia finds him, he’s crying and scratching at his face “I don’t want them anymore, I don’t want these numbers, get them off, GET THEM OFF!”. She runs toward him, grabbing his arms “Simon, stop! Stop it! Hurting yourself is just making your number go UP!”. He colapses against her, crying, and Amelia has to do something she’s not very good at; comfort him. She also tells him “Sometimes... the hardest thing we can do is live with the consequences of our actions”. In the days that pass, Simon finds himself constantly thinking about how this isn’t fair, why should HE get to be here? He doesn’t deserve this. If he could come back, why couldn’t... Simon starts asking about how the denizens of the train work, how they are “alive”. He learns about the “cores”, how they can be repaired and thus possibly heal a denizen that has been hurt or destroyed. If the core itself is broken, then nothing can be done. If Simon could just find Tuba, then he could fix this (this could be wither him traveling way back to the spot where he cause her to tall, searching the wasteland in the area. or, him using the time machine, which is potentially dangerous to him as going back and forth might cause him to fall apart)

#long post #text #infinity train #infinity train book 3 #my thoughts #simon laurent

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marshmallowprotection · 4 years

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TUT thank you! Then could i request Saeran, Saeyoung, and Vanderwood reacting to meeting a scared child alter? Theyre scared of saying whats going on without being asked, but they have a hard time acting normal, and any "adult" situations theyre used to mc being okay with scare them. Like flirting, or substances like alcohol or smoking? Maybe the child alter can still feel kind of comfortable with them though, like theyre okay with being held so long as its obviously not romantic or sexual?

Warning for those who are triggered by mentions of DID, alters, systems, or any of the sort.

Saeran

Saeran knew that you had very similar struggles to him, he saw it when he was looking for the perfect candidate. He saw something in your eyes that felt akin to him and once he picked you there was no going back. He empathizes greatly with people who had gone through something not so great, and he finds a sense of comradery and comfort in the notion that you understand him unlike anyone else.

That’s just why he latched on so hard. It started to become more frequent, your switches, after you had left Magenta. It wasn’t much of a surprise, that place was very stressful and could make anyone uneasy and unsure of themselves. He knew it all too well.

One morning, in particular, he got up and left the room to go and check on the status of work with C&R, but when he came back, something seemed off about the situation. By now, it would have been routine for you to get up with him and start breakfast. Instead, your body was turned away from him on the couch and your knees were tucked close to your body.

He tried to prompt you, by calling your name, but you didn’t look back at him or say anything. That seems really out of the ordinary. He tried once again, but shoulders only seemed to tense and the tension grew. Now, he knew that from personal experience that this might have been another member of your system that he hadn’t met.

Saeran gives some physical space to the child alter and makes sure that he’s not invading their comfort zone.

So, he takes a seat a bit away from them because hey, if you didn’t know where you were or if you don’t know who somebody was, of course, it would be scary! He’s incredibly gentle, and he doesn’t rush them to answer him, he slowly starts to prompt them with questions about what’s bothering them, and if they feel okay.

The child opens up, but only after Saeran has diffused some of their fears for the moment. They were really struggling with everything that you were dealing with, too, and they really don’t have the capacity to keep up any charade that they’re you.

Ray is a lot like this child during his moments of dread and panic, so, Saeran knows how Ray would want to be treated, so he acts with that thought in mind. First and foremost, he makes a point of trying to empathize with the child and discern how they can make things better.

He doesn’t rush them to like him, that’s not what he’s worried about, he wants them to know that they’re safe and that he’s a trustworthy person that they can ask for help if they need help. They’re a kid, and kids have their own comfort levels. All he does is offer to try activities or help them procure things that can make them more comfortable... if they need a blanket, a plush, or anything of that regard, he’ll be the first to offer to go and get it. He asks with the same urgency that he would have hoped to receive when he was a kid.

Y’know, thank goodness that he’s so good at baking because there’s nothing that kids want more than something sweet.

He usually tries to lift the child’s spirit by offering them something that he’s made. Saeran is very doting and sincere, and he pushes everything aside to ensure that they’re feeling okay. He asks a lot of questions to ensure that they’re comfortable, and he never does anything without asking first. Whatever they want, he’ll do what he can. If they feel comfortable enough with him to ask for a hug, he’ll be happy to provide it.

Saeran really wants your system to trust him, but he knows that it’s going to take time, and he wants to understand how to help not only you but your alters, your littles, so on and so forth.

Saeyoung

Saeyoung knew after going through your medical records that you had a lot going on, he didn’t read too far into it, he just skimmed a bit briefly to see since the file was rather large compared to some of your other information. He never brought It up himself, he waited for you to feel comfortable enough with him or even the others to talk about it. Being with the RFA wasn’t always the easiest thing in the world, and he figured that you had to settle into this weird new normal of yours.

It isn’t really until later after you’ve started being around each other more often in person that he meets more of your system, but he understands that not all of them will be approving of him or like him at first, and he’s got to work with them too since they’re with you and anything they’re struggling with, your entire system is going to have a hard time with.

He’s working on something, tinkering away at his desk on some pieces parts for one of his robots.

You’re supposed to be behind him or in the other room playing on your phone or speaking with the rest of the RFA in the chatroom since it’s the peak time of day for everyone to be online. He gets a text from one of the others that you had stopped responding in the chat after something was brought up and the others were a bit concerned.

Saeyoung set his things aside and went to go and check on you just in case something was really wrong and you just hadn’t gotten distracted making lunch or something. He found your body sitting on the kitchen floor, your lips pursed and hands nervously fiddled with the fabric of your hoodie. It seems a bit odd, but he can’t be sure what’s up unless you say something to him.

His instinct is to ask you what’s wrong and after a brief moment of silence, in a quiet voice, the child alter speaks up and tells him that they’re upset. He doesn’t know what upset them, but he knows that it must have been something big for them because their body is tense. It’s clearly not you right now but he’s not sure who they are, he still makes a point of sitting down next to them, not too close as to not startle them.

After some gentle probing here and there, he discerns that the conversation in the chat had bordered on something that really wasn’t comfortable for them, and they got overwhelmed and had to leave. He does his best to make them feel better once he’s got a better grasp on what happened to them back there, and he plays up his goofy persona since it seems to make them laugh a little bit and perk up.

Saeyoung understands that they’re just a child, and they have different comforts than you do. They need a different kind of reassurance to feel like they’re safe and everything. He takes to them like he did with Saeran, and he does with them what he would do with his little brother, he would try to make them laugh, try to remind them that things are okay even when they feel scary, and just generally all-around try to ensure their safety.

His approach is to act goofy and make them smile, what he would do with any other upset child, honestly. He does his best to make them feel better when they’re afraid, and although he may make a few boundary mistakes every now and again on accident, Saeyoung is trying. With the child, he’s guilty of trying to spoil them with presents and things that make them feel more at home in his bunker.

He would make any changes and do whatever it took to ensure that all of your system felt safe with him, especially the more vulnerable alters that need a bit of extra care.

Vanderwood

Vanderwood has been around countless people in their life and there’s nothing that they aren’t surprised about.

They’ve seen that, they’ve done this, and there is nothing that they can’t handle. Well, that’s what they think until you come into their life and make a whirlwind of sorts that they find themself juxtaposed into a life change unlike any other. One minute they’re forever stuck being an agent until somebody came around and took care of them, and the next, they’re free from that life forever.

You’re always a surprise to them. There’s just so much about you that they can’t read or truly understand. That’s a good thing, they’re used to being able to read anybody, but you’re special, you’re that puzzle that takes forever to be solved because it’s so tricky. They’re not the best person to know what to do all of the time, though, they’re prone to mistakes, they’re human too.

Vanderwood is pretty much used to being around you but not around your system. They haven’t come out much when they're around and if they have, Vanderwood hasn’t noticed per se. They know that it’s likely that it’s happened but they haven’t made themselves known to Vanderwood yet, so, the agent hasn’t yet directly spoken to any.

At least, until today that is.

So much had been happening lately to not only them but you as well, and it was increasingly obvious that it was not only distressing you but others in your system as well.

Your actions as of the last hour or so had let them know that something was a miss. Now, Vanderwood isn’t known for being soft or reassuring, when they see that your body’s eyes are covered in tears, that’s about all that it takes for them to want to help.

Vanderwood first takes the steps to understand what the problem was and their tone was a little brash which may not help things at first but after the child understands that Vanderwood is just like that, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

Vanderwood tries to adjust accordingly to what is comfortable for the child but hey, it’s not always like they do the right thing, but they’re doing their best to mind what you may have mentioned to them in the past when in regards to helping your system feel safe. The easiest thing that they know how to do is hand them their plush or their comfort device to try and make things seem less disorienting.

The child is treated with care and respect, very unlike the way that they treated Seven if that’s something you may have been worried about. Vanderwood may be a little rough around the edges but that doesn’t mean they can’t be nice to children. It’s kind of goofy when you come back from the switch and haven’t been close enough to front to know what’s been happening and the child has gotten Vanderwood to do something that they wouldn’t have done otherwise, like, tea.

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mst3kproject · 4 years

Photo

The Star Wars Holiday Special

Happy Holidays, MSTies! Your present is Episodes that Never Were are back! Remember last year, when I said Elves was so bad I wished I’d watched the Star Wars Holiday Special instead? Let’s find out what those words taste like.

The galaxy may be in the midst of a rebellion, but Chewbacca promised his family he will be back for Life Day, and god damn it, he’s gonna get there! He and Han Solo dodge Imperial forces and asteroid fields on the way, but the real danger may be waiting for them at home, as Stormtroopers do a treehouse-to-treehouse search for rebel sympathizers. It won’t be much of a holiday if Chewie arrives home only to be immediately arrested!

That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? It even sounds like it could be made to mean something. There is perhaps a point here about inter-ethnic empathy – Life Day may be a Wookiee holiday, but Chewbacca’s alien friends still know how important it is to him and they’re gonna help him keep his promise. We could also compare it to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. In that movie, the Martians want to celebrate Christmas but aren’t particularly interested in what it means. They get all their information about it from pirated television and from children who don’t understand anything much more than ‘free stuff’. We didn’t give Christmas to them, they literally stole it by kidnapping Santa. In the Holiday Special, the Wookiees are sharing their cultural traditions with outsiders who have become part of their family – Leia’s speech at the ends notes the humans’ respect for this.

But none of that’s relevant, because this is just a bad 70’s variety hour in a Star Wars costume. We don’t get to see claustrophobic scenes of our brave heroes hiding from the Storm Troopers. We don’t get sweeping space battles or bickering robots or weird new planets… we don’t get anything we go to see Star Wars for. Instead, we mostly watch the Wookiees sitting around their house passing the time as they wait helplessly for Chewbacca to get home. This could have been neat in itself if Wookiees had an interesting culture, but they live in a Mod 70’s Treehouse and seem to spend most of their time watching television. The brief opening sequence, in which Solo and Chewie outrun their pursuers in the Millennium Falcon, is just a tantalizing offer of chocolate on the tip of a giant turd.

The actual point of the show, as far as the people who produced it were concerned, was the various little musical numbers and comedy sequences along the way, some of which are more Star Wars-themed than others. Most of these are presented as one or other of the characters watching them on some form of television, which often doesn’t make any sense. The sequences themselves are usually not very well-presented and a lot of them are just downright boring, so let’s go through them one by one. Top up your eggnog, folks. We may be here a while.

Our first setpiece is a holographic circus featuring jugglers and acrobats, which the adults use to distract Lumpy so he’ll stop bothering them – like parents at the mall letting their kids watch Paw Patrol on a tablet while they shop. When you see televised circus acts, they’re usually filmed up close and at interesting angles, to heighten the sense of danger, and give you a good look at what’s going on. The Star Wars Holiday Special presents it as tiny figures on a table, always shot from far away and looking down, which removes all the drama from the stunts. Lumpy enlarges a figure, but it’s only the ringmaster. The others remain tiny, all while this little Wookiee looms over them like a kaiju that will start stomping if it isn’t entertained.

Then we get Mark Hamill’s cameo (in which he looks weirdly like one of the puppets from Invaders from the Deep), followed by Malla’s attempt to cook Bantha Surprise by following the directions on a tv show. I’m not very interested in cooking shows anyway, but I have a hard time imagining anybody being interested in a fake cooking show featuring fictional ingredients from other planets. What we see on Malla’s screen comes across as a sort of parody, but not actually a funny one. I’m tempted to think Harvey Korman must have been making fun of some particular 70’s cooking show maven but I don’t begin to know who that might be.

The ‘humour’ of the sequence is supposed to come from Malla’s attempt to follow the directions even though the cook on the show has four arms and Malla only two. I could pull some commentary on ableism in cooking and cooking shows out of this, but it would be a stretch, and nobody on the writing end was thinking about it that hard. It’s just stupid, and so is Korman’s plastic wig. Malla eventually turns it off in frustration, long after we’re tired of listening to it.

By the way, if you’re wondering whose stupid idea it was to set the whole thing on Kashyyyk (or, as a guy in the Special calls it, Kazook) and not have any subtitles to the Wookiee’s dialogue? That was apparently 100% George Lucas. The actual script and everything was in the hands of the television producers, but Lucas would not budge on the premise being Wookiee-centric. At least he exorcised that particular demon here, instead of subjecting us to it on the big screen.

Anyway, next Art Carney drops by to deliver some Life Day presents, among which is the source of our next setpiece: a VR machine which reads Itchy’s mind to present a personalized fantasy! This takes the form of Diahann Carroll in a sparkly feather wig, singing a song and saying things like “I am your fantasy, experience me!” The song is okay, I guess, and Carroll has a lovely voice, but what we’re seeing is basically a boring music video. She’s just standing there on a glittery black background, and we can’t forget that she’s singing to a geriatric Wookiee who is doing the Wookiee equivalent of jacking off to this (emphasized by the appearance of literal little swimmers in part of the sequence!). The fact that it’s a personal fantasy plucked from his subconscious makes it feel like this was something we weren’t supposed to be privy to, like we’re looking through somebody else’s computer at his girlfriend’s nudes.

Princess Leia (also looking disturbingly puppet-like… are we sure the actual actors appeared in this, and not look-a-likes in heavy makeup?) and C3P0 get their cameo, and then there’s the single actually effective moment in the Special. This is when we think Han Solo and Chewie are about to arrive home, ending our torment a full hour early, but no, it’s the Storm Troopers! This bit isn’t fantastic, but it does work. Then, sadly, we’re on to the next variety act.

This is a holographic music video which Carney shows to the Imperial troops as a demonstration that the device he has brought Malla for Life Day is harmless. It’s Jefferson Starship moaning out a rock song, in which I can understand at best one word in three. The visuals are in intense soft-focus that’s probably supposed to be artsy. The costumes (what I can see of them) aren’t any more Star-Wars-y than anything else bands wore in the 70’s. And the song sounds like something you’d find in the ‘easy’ setting on Rock Band. Why does Black Helmet sit there and watch the whole thing when he’s supposed to be searching every house on Kashyyyk/Kazook for rebel sympathizers?

The version of the Special currently available on YouTube, which tragically lacks the commercials, has a lot of comments along the lines of this is what you hallucinate after buying Death Sticks from that guy on Coruscant.

To drive the point home, the next thing we see is Lumpy watching a cartoon about Han Solo and Chewbacca crash-landing on an ocean planet while searching for a mystical talisman that makes things invisible (I wish they hadn’t actually shown this object – then I could have made jokes about it being the One Ring). This sequence is generally regarded as the best thing in the Special, and it introduced Boba Fett and provided some characterization for him. It is definitely true that this is the only segment with a plot, and with its weird aliens and grubby outposts it feels a lot more like Star Wars than anything else going on here.

The main thing that keeps me from enjoying this segment is that it just looks weird. The animators use exaggerated squash-and-stretch on the droids, even more so than on the living characters, which makes them look like they’re made out of jell-o. Princess Leia looks like something out of a cheap 60’s manga and Luke like he was drawn by a twelve-year-old based on an action figure that wasn’t actually of Luke Skywalker. Luke has no pupils, which is very distressing, but not as distressing as when C3P0 blinks. Even worse, as far as I can tell Han Solo has no eyes at all.

The design of the alien planet in this sequence is pretty cool, though. It appears to be entirely covered in a kind of goopy ocean and the creatures that live in it are neat-looking, even if not terribly plausible. Animation is really a great medium for fantasy and science fiction, because it levels the playing field: we’re not thinking about the special effects because everything on screen looks equally unreal. This is something Disney, who used it to such beautiful effect in Lilo and Stitch, totally forgot at just about the same time as they acquired the rights to Star Wars. Oh, for what could have been.

I want to note here that the average review on this blog is about as long as what you’ve read so far. We’re only about two thirds of the way through the Special, though, and I can’t really divide a holiday review up into two weeks. Therefore, consider this your permission to take a break and go snag another latke or whatever you’re snacking on, and then we’ll continue.

There’s one fun bit of background social commentary in the animated sequence, too: the only way for humans to survive the virus is to hang them upside-down so their brains will get enough oxygen despite their weakened hearts. In the city there’s an advertisement for the cure – and the upside-down human pictured in the ad is, of course, a woman in her underwear. The image isn’t detailed and it’s not the focus of the shot, so I don’t think it’s an actual piece of gratuitous cheesecake. Apparently somebody at Nelvana Ltd was just salty about the advertising industry.

The self-contained story in the cartoon makes sense within itself. It justifies Fett’s fearsome reputation far better than anything in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, and the characters seem to be in-character even when they’re off-model. The problem is with it as a part of the framing story about the Imperial troops searching Chewbacca’s house! The Special is very explicit that this is not something that’s actually happening in the real world at the same time as the other events – it is a cartoon Lumpy is watching on TV. Why, in a galaxy controlled by the Empire, would there be cartoons using the real names of real rebel operatives and presenting them as the heroes? If nobody’s supposed to know Boba Fett is connected with the Empire, why does the show blow his cover?

More importantly, where can I get one of those awesome giant stuffed Banthas Lumpy has in his room? I don’t know if that’s a real toy that was available in the late 70’s, but Comic Images does make something similar and you can buy them at Wal-Mart or Toys R Us.

While cleaning up the mess the Stormtroopers made of his room, Lumpy watches an instructional video of how to put together some kind of radio. This features Harvey Korman as an android who keeps getting jammed. Like cooking shows, instructional videos aren’t very interesting unless you’re trying to follow the directions – since we can’t follow the directions, this one is pointless to begin with. The ‘joke’ is not funny, and lines like “every one of the ten thousand terminals on your circuit breaker module is a different colour” might be amusing when written down but they just don’t work when somebody says them aloud. Fortunately, it doesn’t last long.

Then we get on to what’s probably the second-best thing in the Special, the bit where we learn that the Mos Eisley cantina is owned by Bea Arthur. It would be easily the most expensive thing in the Special were it not made up of b-roll footage and re-used puppets from Episode IV. It’s also kind of got a plot, in that a guy with a baking soda volcano on top of his head (this is certainly an efficient way to get the alcohol directly to your brain) is trying to confess his love to Bea while she just wants to get on with running her business. Eventually he gets his heart broken and leaves, and then the Empire shuts the bar down, so Bea throws everybody out with a song.

I have to admit, in The Force Awakens when Han Solo mentioned a female friend who ran a ‘watering hole’… there was a moment there when I was half-expecting it to be Bea Arthur’s character. I’m relieved that it wasn’t, but also just the slightest bit disappointed. We had to wait for The Mandalorian to get a proper Holiday Special callback.

This bit almost had a chance to say something with its ‘thwarted romance’ plot. Usually such a thing in a tv show would get what the male character would consider a happy ending. He would prove to his love interest that being cared for is important, she would realize that love is better than money, and they would metaphorically ride off into the sunset. What it looks like we’re going to get here instead is something more like the episode of South Park where Butters fell in love with the Hooters waitress. Harvey Korman’s character (yes, he plays three different characters in this Special and this was apparently supposed to be a selling point) realizes his crush is based on a misunderstanding, and while it makes him sad, he’s not going to be an asshole about it.

Nor is Bea’s character vilified for rejecting him, which she does tactfully but firmly, as if she’s gone through this many times before. He’s just a minor annoyance in her day before she goes on to worry about bigger problems, like getting everybody to obey that Imperial curfew. Then, however, at the last second he pops up from behind the counter after everybody has left – and that’s where the segment ends. I think we’re supposed to assume they got together after all, but I kind of hope she just threw him out with the rest of them. No means no, damn it.

Bea Arthur’s Go Home Song is to the tune the Cantina Band was playing in Episode IV, so it pretty much goes without saying it’s the catchiest piece in the Special.

Then, finally, it’s time to celebrate Life Day! The Wookiees hold up some glowing Christmas balls, then dress in red robes and walk through outer space into a, uh, wormhole, I guess, that takes them to the base of the giant tree from Avatar. There it’s time for our final setpiece, the culmination of this whole ninety-minute ordeal… Princess Leia sings! The Life Day Carol is to the tune of the main Star Wars theme, and the lyrics sound like something from a generic Christmas album you get free if you buy three cards at Hallmark. Carrie Fisher is a decent singer but she looks like she’s as glad this is over as we are.

Much like Howard the Duck, The Star Wars Holiday Special is a production in which they made all the worst decisions they possibly could. Focusing on the Wookiees at home rather than following Han Solo and Chewbacca through the action killed the whole thing at the starting gate. Then that plot is nothing but a frame on which they can hang the various variety acts, and none of those are very good. It’s only towards the end of the sequence that what we’re seeing even has anything to do with Star Wars. Watching it is an ordeal on the order of an un-riffed Coleman Francis film. It’s so bad, it’s not even something people get together and watch like they do Manos or The Room.

So why do we still have it? The Holiday Special was only broadcast once, and was met by fathomless loathing from critics, Star Wars fans, and ordinary people alike. It has never been released in any other format (Andrew Borntreger of badmovies.org has a story about how Lucas had him thrown out of a Q&A panel for asking if it were getting a DVD release), so the fact that you can find it on YouTube today is down to some nameless hero who recorded it on their newfangled VCR back in 1978. That person then showed it to friends, apparently on the basis of oh my god, you guys, this is so bad, you have to see it, and then because misery loves company they copied it to show to their friends. What we have today is copies of copies of copies of copies, like fragments of Sappho only with VHS artefacts instead of holes in the papyrus (and without the artistic vision).

Humans like to preserve remarkable things. Sappho we’ve preserved because it’s remarkably good, but the Star Wars Holiday Special we preserve because it’s remarkably bad. Lucasfilm has tried very hard to stamp it out. George Lucas himself has said that if he could he would gather up every copy that exists and smash them with a sledgehammer… but we won’t let him do it. We keep copying the Special and passing it along, in a way that’s very familiar to MSTies in particular. We’re circulating the tapes! Why this tape in particular?

I don’t claim to know, but my working theory is that it keeps us humble. We are a species that can produce great things when we put our minds to it. We landed on the moon. We eradicated smallpox. We built the Taj Mahal and the Sagrada Familia. We wrote The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Einstein Field Equations and the aforementioned works of Sappho. But for all that, we are also capable of throwing the same kind of effort into creating utter disasters – and the Star Wars Holiday Special is the rare example of an unmitigated disaster that didn’t actually hurt anybody. It reminds us to take a step back and look at what we’re doing without getting too invested in it, but does so while being harmless and at times humorous.

Would I still rather watch this than Elves? You bet your shaggy Wookiee ass I would. The Star Wars Holiday Special may be longer, but it doesn’t leave nearly such a bad taste in my mouth.

I will leave you with this: the Special was, as I mentioned, only broadcast once, in 1978 – that means its signal is now forty-one light years from Earth and still going. There are several hundred stars within that bubble, around two dozen of which are known to have planets. Somewhere out there, aliens might be getting their first signal from humanity right now and it’s the Star Wars Holiday Special.

#mst3k #reviews #the star wars holiday special #episodes that never were #holiday reviews #70s

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ashantesstuff · 5 years

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Two Sides of A Coin (Detroit: Become Human Fanfiction)

A/N: Previously had posted this on my other account @sadnesstastessweet but decided to move it here instead. Hope you enjoy it :)

Summary: Emelia has joined Hank and Connor to discover why Detroit's androids are becoming deviants. During the mission, Emelia is finding herself having to put aside her resentment for androids, to work peacefully with Connor. She is also discovering more about her family and more about Connor. How far will they get to uncover Cyberlife's secrets? How far will Connor get before he reaches his breaking point?

Chapter One: Compatibility

Mum? Dad? Anyone?! Smoke was filling up in her room fast. She was frozen in place on her bed for a moment, unsure of what to do as she was shocked and afraid that with opening the door, she would be faced with the burning flames behind it. “Emelia!” a voice snapped her back from her frozen state, and she ran to the door yelling.

“I’m in here! Please help!” she began violently coughing. The smoke was growing thicker now, and she was struggling to breathe. All she wanted was to see her parents and know that everything would be alright…

Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! Her phone blared and without opening her eyes, she searched for it and switched it off. She rose from the bed, curls in a frizzy mess and signs of little sleep evident under her eyes. She let out an exaggerated yawn as she stretched, before getting up to open the curtains to the sight of heavy rain and with the city lights illuminating in the darkness. “Goodnight, Detroit.” She said in a sarcastic tone. Turning the news on, she headed for the bathroom to get ready for work, as there was nobody else that would call her at such a time.

“Breaking News! Detroit City Police Department has discovered a body at a residence on Pine Street,” Emelia entered her bedroom, toothbrush in hand, watching the news. “The victim is said to be Carlos Ortiz, there has been no further information other than he is thought to be killed by his android that is missing.” Emelia let out a frustrated growl and throwing her head back in a dramatic act to show her annoyance.

Emelia had a hatred for Androids and hearing that Cyberlife was having issues with their robot toys and that the DCPD was involved in it, made her want to rethink her job for once. She felt a storm brewing and knew that the paperwork would be loaded for this case with one of the world biggest companies. As if on cue, her phone rang. She quickly finished getting ready, tying her long curls into a ponytail and putting on a plain white shirt and ankle-length black trousers. Before the last ring, she ran to her phone answering, “Hello?” Even though it came out as a question she knew what was going to be said.

“Dammit! How long does it take to answer a God damn phone?” she rolled her eyes. Fowler sounded aggressive, as per usual. Emelia knew that it probably had something to do with Hank or Cyberlife…most likely both. “I need to you at the scene ASAP for a briefing and to get straight to work. If you’ve seen the news, you know that we’ve got another android situation.” The moment she saw it on the news, she had a feeling that the department would put her on the case.

Emelia was staring out, watching the rain fall heavily and the sky look so gloomy. She had a strange feeling in her gut about this...and that was rare for her. “Who am I taking the case with?” She was quite well suited to take it by herself. She was one of the best on the force, despite being 25 years of age, as she was one of the few dedicated to her job and the department needed as many hands as possible.

After hearing the question, Fowler let out a deep sigh that sounded like he had something to say that she wouldn’t be pleased with. “No, you’ll be taking the case with Hank, who I’ve been struggling to contact, and somebody else” No surprise there, Emelia thought to herself. “The rest will be explained to you by Collins.” And with that, he ended the call. Emelia stared at the phone for a few moments, before rolling eyes and grabbing her things to leave.

The drive to Ortiz’s house was short and Emelia was surprised to find Hank’s car, already parked outside, after trying to find him for the last 20 minutes. Emelia walked past the press, barely acknowledging them and went inside to immediately be greeted by Collins. “Hey, nice to see you could make it.” He smiled and you gave him a slight nod.

“So, what do we have here?” Emelia walked up to body crouching and trying to hold the urge to gag. She didn’t freak out at the sight of bodies but the smell they made when decomposing, always made her rethink her department…sometimes. “Shit! Smells like he’s been dead for months.” Immediately after, she got up preferring to keep a distance, even though the stench was engulfing the whole house.

“Actually, the victim had been dead for less than 3 weeks. Assumed time of death is October 17th at 11:30 pm.” Emelia rolled her eyes. Nobody asked for a smart mouth. She turned and was about to sarcastically thank the asshole until she got a good look at who he was. Or rather what it was. It smiled at her and extended its hand. “Hello, my name is Connor. I’m the android sent by-“

“What the fuck?!” She didn’t give it time to finish, before yelling out. It had been a hot topic around the station about when androids were taking over police roles and Emelia always thought that the day would never come and if it would she was hoping to be long dead. Now she was stood face to face with oddly realistic piece metal smiling at her.

She heard a low chuckle come from behind the android. “Ha! I knew you would react like that,” Hank began laughing harder as Emelia was still processing the situation. “Em, meet our new partner from Cyberlife. He’s here only to help out with our android problem…hopefully.” Hank explained after he was able to compose himself. Emelia looked at Hank then back at the android to Hank again; she folded her arms and shook her head.

“Let’s get this shit over with,” her anger was heavily implied in her tone. “I’m going to be needing a word with Fowler when we’re done with this case.” And with that, she glared at the android and began searching for evidence.

They looked around for at least an hour, uncovering nothing new about Ortiz’s android’s whereabouts. Everything that thing said about what occurred, could’ve been done by a junior detective and Emelia was growing more and more impatient, the longer she stood in the room with it. “Hey! Hey! Hey! What are you doin' with that chair?” Emelia headed back to the kitchen to see what Hank was fussing about.

As she walked in, she saw the ‘detective’ android carrying a chair heading straight for the door for the attic. “I'm going to check something,” It said with wonder. Androids replicating human behaviour always made Emelia chill. They had so much realism to them that sometimes it was hard for her to remember that they weren’t living beings.

Emelia followed the android to the attic. It had effortlessly been able to get up and reached out its hand for Emelia to climb up. Reluctantly, she took it and she began to feel the hairs stand up at the back of her neck after feeling the warmth in its hand. The attic was dark and creepy. There was junk everywhere that made the house look even more like a horror show which was seamlessly fitting with the gloomy atmosphere.

As they both manoeuvred through the crap, they heard rustling from the back of the attic. The android quickly stood in front of Emelia like it was protecting her as if she didn’t have a gun ready. Suddenly, Ortiz’s android ran up to them clearly in distress. Emelia was about to grab her gun “Wait! We need it alive.” She glared at it before looking back at the android in front of her.

She sighed at turned back to let the others know. “Hank! We’ve got it.” She shouted down and heard him gathering up the other officers. Emelia sat down near the attic door and let her legs dangle. She looked back at the two androids and mixture of disgust and fascination written on her face. She still couldn’t get over the realism of the two androids and she couldn’t get over this feeling that she had seen Connor somewhere before.

The journey to the police station, though short, felt like forever. Having the android, ‘Connor’, sat behind her sent shivers down her spine and what made everything worse is that not long after finding Ortiz’s android, she started to experience hot flushes and intense migraines. Something about that android seemed off and the more she thought about it the more her head hurt and she kept thinking about the events of that night her parents died. “Looks like we’re finally here.” Hank sighed, breaking Emelia out of her thoughts. She hated thinking about her parents. She hated thinking about that little girl she was.

They all piled out of the car, giving nods and polite gestures to the familiar faces surrounding them, before heading to the interrogation room. “So, the old man has himself an android.” The sound of Gavin’s voice made Emelia want to punch a wall. She hated androids, yes, but her hatred for Gavin was much stronger. They had dated. Briefly. It wasn’t until Gavin had tried to worm his way into her bed that she decided to break it off. Emelia still had a hard time with getting close to people and Gavin just didn’t seem to understand that, or rather, he chose to ignore it.

Emelia pushed past him to get ready to watch the interrogation from the observation room. She didn’t so much as glance at him because the last thing she needed to see was his constantly smug grin. “Shut the fuck up, Reed.” She mumbled as she took a seat, watching as Hank went in to question the android. Despite all the space in the room, Gavin was still able to find himself a spot right next to Emelia to the point that she could feel his body heat radiating off him. The “Connor” android was stood further away behind watching the interview with intense concentration. She thought the thing was probably recording the interview of something or overanalysing the body language of the other android or Hank.

Regardless of all the questions, Hank was giving the thing, it didn’t even so much as flinch. It felt like they weren’t getting anyway with the investigation and that was making Emelia grumpier. Her deep browns grew tired with every passing second and she began slowly rocking back and forth in patiently. “Why d'you kill him? What happened before you took that knife? How long were ya in the attic? Why didn't you even try to run away?” Hank’s anger and frustration were rising, and Emelia couldn’t blame him. “Say something, goddamnit! Fuck it, I'm outta here...” and with that he stormed out, coming into the observation room a few seconds later.

Emelia leaned back in her chair arms crossed as she watched Hank visibly pissed. It felt like Cyberlife was giving them a pointless job that they shouldn’t be figuring out on their own since it was their precious toys. “'Could always try roughing it up a little. After all, it's not human...” Gavin suggested, and Emelia rolled her eyes looking at him as if he was an idiot…which he was.

In unison, the “detective” android and Emelia said together “androids don’t feel pain.” She glanced at the android already finding him looking back at her with a small smile. She looked away and continued staring at Ortiz’s android across of her, not so much as to smile. “So, what’s the plan? It’s late and I want to sleep.” She said to nobody in particular.

“I could try questioning it.” Everyone turned to thing in surprise. Gavin scoffed and Hank frowned. Emelia felt a mixture of amusement and shock at the suggestion. She couldn’t imagine what the android would do that Hank couldn’t, but they weren’t getting anyway so it didn’t seem like a completely bad idea.

After the few moments of silence, Hank finally said “What do we have to lose? Go ahead, the suspect's all yours.” She couldn’t believe that he would agree to hand over this job to a fucking android. Emelia could see that Hank was warming up to the android and the shocked and confused her more than anything.

Only five minutes had passed, and Emelia was shocked that the detective android was able to get a confession out of the other. “He tortured me every day... I did whatever he told me, but there was always something wrong...” The fell unusually silent. It was like everybody was holding their breath, even Emelia was leaning over listening to what Ortiz’s android had to say. She found it strange how the android was able to mimic so much emotion. “For the first time, I felt scared... Scared he might destroy me, scared I might die...” Fear? She couldn’t believe that she was hearing this. Turning, she even saw a look of surprise on Hank’s face.

After getting the full confession, the RK800 got up to leave looking solemn and sympathetic at the other android. “I’m not gonna lie,” Emelia began. “I didn’t think the thing would actually get the android to speak.” She was stood up now, clearly ready to go home after spending a few hours working with and against androids. She watched as the RK800 was about to leave but her attention was then on Ortiz’s android that was banging its head against the interrogation table.

“What the fuck is it doing?” Gavin spat. Everybody rushed into the interrogation room, but they were all frozen in place at the door, unsure of what to do. Chris moved to try and stop it, but he was up against scrap metal and was forced back by the android. With one last slam against the table, the android was “dead”. “Well, that was something…Chris, you alright?” Chris nodded, getting up and rubbing the back of his head.

Emelia turned to the RK800 which was just staring at the android’s body with a readable expression. “Well, we were able to get the confession so guess that’s that,” Emelia said turning to leave the room and finally continue that nap. The whole ordeal made her a bit hungry as well.

As she was leaving, she heard Hank speaking to the RK800. “You alright, Connor?” the question shocked her. With all the ranting about how much he hated androids, she was surprised to see him show so kind of emotion other than aggression towards the RK800.

“I’m fine, Lieutenant” he replied with confusion. “I just wished it ended differently.”

#detroit become human #dbh #connor x oc #connor x reader #dbh connor #dbh fanficition #detroit become human fanfiction #hank anderson #connor rk800 #rk800 #dbh hank

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nadziejastar · 5 years

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My boy Saix was plotting to betray Xemnas for years. He was forced to work for his "superior" since he was a kid under threats of mutilation, death, and being turned into a Dusk. And somehow people still ship them, and not even with the understanding of "this is an inherently messed up and abusive relationship," a lot of the shippers seem to want it to be a healthy love, completely ignoring their canon dynamic.

Thoughts on the saix/xemnas ship?

Short answer: it’s disgusting? Like, it’s one thing if you think they look good together and recognize it as a fucked upfetish ship. Not my cup of tea, but whatever. But how do people think Xemnas can have a healthy relationship with anyone? Especially as he is using the body of Terra, a boy he possessed. Let alone with another Nort using the body of another boy he also possessed? The saddest fact to me is that the ship is so popular. It’s sad that more people ship Isa’s possessed self with Xemnas instead of seeing that he was a victim in need of saving from Xemnas. And then in all seriousness they pair Lea/Axel with Roxas, a ship with pedophile undertones. Geez, what the hell?I always felt sorry for Saïx because despite him being another Nort, he didn’t know it. He had all of Isa’s memories of being a victim of abuse.

“Did it break again? That didn’t take long.”

Only Saïx would make such a callous remark. Rage surged up in Roxas, and he spun around. “Don’t call her an ‘it’!”

I think that’s why he is so much more…unpleasant than all the others, despite actually wanting a heart. He’s a Nort. He has the heart of Xehanort, so he has all the values that entails.

I love Roxas and Axel. I’m sure Saïx would scoff at that.

But…he has the memories of being an innocent, gentle boy who was severely victimized and most likely sacrificed himself out of love for his friend. He’s affected by these memories, and hates it. His past self who valued love and friendship represents weakness and abuse. Oh yeah, and he’s also a victim of Xemnas’ mind control. That makes the whole ship even more nauseating.

Multiple Personality Disorder, or Dissociative Identity Disorder, is often described as a defense mechanism that occurs when a person goes through intense trauma. It is the mind’s way of dealing with distressing events. The original MK ULTRA programming exploited this defense mechanism and used hypnotism, electroconvulsive therapy, food/water/sleep/sensory deprivation, drugs, and pleasure/pain reversals to induce ‘splitting’.

Once the split has occurred, two or more personalities can live within the same body, each one completely unaware that the others exist. In symbolism, this is seen in the fractured mirror, the duality of checkerboards, masks, and mannequins/dolls.

This whole concept is why 0.5 was going to be called “A Fragmentary Passage”. Terranort had fragmented alters. It’s why he doesn’t remember opening the Keyhole, and why the Ansem Reports in KH1 show him not having a clue what darkness or the Keyblade was, or even that there were other worlds.

Axel: Roxas… Xion is like a mirror that reflects you.

Roxas: What?

Axel: The Organization made her to duplicate your powers. She’s a puppet.

Roxas: Have you gone nuts? Xion’s a person, not a puppet.

Axel: She’s smoke and mirrors, Roxas. And when I looked in the mirror… It wasn’t you I saw.

Roxas: I don’t know what you’re talking about, but Xion is Xion. You can’t expect her to be me.

Axel: That’s not what I mean, Roxas. It was only a matter of time before somebody had to break the mirror.

I don’t care about KH3′s B.S. retconning. Lea and Isa were victims of mind control. It’s why he has an X-shaped scar (meaning death) on his forehead where the “mind’s eye” is located. And it just so happens that he cannot “see” Xion, who is only visible in the person’s mind. Isa renounced his sense of self after severe trauma and became a vessel. I just played through this part of the game yesterday actually. Axel was upset that Roxs wouldn’t understand what he was trying to tell him about Xion. I found it funny because, who is going to understand you when you phrase it like that? Why don’t you just say that she’s a robot installed with data memories that mimic real humans, and she’s absorbing your powers and abilities? Why talk in riddles and bring up mirrors?

–Xigbar calls Xion ‘Puu-chan’, coming from the French word meaning doll (poupée). Nomura: I requested to Mr. Ishida, “I want him to call her by a nickname that parodied ‘doll’”, and this is what we came up with. Xigbar is hinting at Xion’s true nature from the beginning.

Of course, the reason is that the wording wasn’t chosen just so Axel could give an accurate description of Xion to Roxas. The mirror imagery was symbolically meaningful. Along with dolls/mannequins, broken mirrors are mind control symbols. They are specifically symbols of mental fragmentation. There was a lot more to Xion and the Replica Program than we’ll ever get to learn, I’m convinced of it.

“Get up.”

“Just five more minutes…,” Axel mumbled.

“No. Get up—now.” The voice was distinctly annoyed.

Axel relented and opened his eyes. “What are you even doing in here?”

Saïx was standing next to his bed, as irritated as one might have guessed from his voice. Axel hadn’t been so rudely awakened since before turning into a Nobody.

Axel had been rudely awakened as a human. Probably sleep deprivation as part of the experiments.

Every time he tried to wake up, all Axel could think was how badly he wanted to go back to sleep—although he was getting enough rest.

He just wished he could have a day to himself and do nothing but sleep. It was probably some remnant of his human memories.

He still sleep issues as a Nobody.

Am I alive? I awoke in a cell, alone until the researchers came with their tests and their prodding to uncover my identity. I had no answer to offer them. Four friends, and a key…that is the sum total of my memory. I could not even recall my name. I was simply called “X” there. My only solace was the time I spent talking with the two boys who would visit from time to time. One day, a man came to take me from the prison. I could not see him for the darkness, save that he wore an eyepatch. Even now, years on, I feel no closer to understanding who or what I am. May my heart be my guiding key.

Subject X had sensory deprivation and dehumanization. These are tactics of mind control, not memory restoration. And they qualify as experiments on the “darkness of the heart” quite well.

It’s all about undermining the sense of self. Lea may have been forced to fight other subjects, as an assassin in training. I think that Isa was subjected to isolation, belittling and humiliation as a part of this process. I think Saïx has memories of verbal abuse and this is related to Xigbar. These memories influenced his opinion of Xion. But that would require its own post. But yeah, anyone who thinks Saïx and Xemnas make a cute and healthy ship has issues.

#kh meta #kh saix #kh xemnas

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marypsue · 6 years

Text

dubsdeedubs said: lich + ford ´･ᴗ･ `

Once upon a time, I asked for prompts of a character and a monster, for which I would write a hundred-word drabble. This is...more than a hundred words, as you may be able to tell. Featuring major character undeath, Bill Cipher being Bill Cipher, a TAZ: Balance crossover, Greek mythology references, the Power of Mabel, and many many more words than I expected to write.

I’m also on AO3 as MaryPSue!

...

It takes barely any voltage at all to set Fordsy’s hair on fire.

It’s honestly a little disappointing. Keratin has no heat tolerance! And sheesh, does it ever whiff when it burns! It’s really inconsiderate of Fordsy, to stink up the place. Bill’s gonna have to punish him for that. As soon as he regains consciousness, of course. No fun in electrocuting somebody who isn’t awake to hate it!

Speaking of ‘being awake’, Sixer’s been hanging there with his head down for an ominously long time now. Bill gives his belly a poke, but the momentum just swings him limply back and forth, the chains giving a faint, pathetic clink-clink.

“You, uh, sure you didn’t break him there, boss?” Kryptos whines from somewhere behind Bill, and Bill can feel his faces heating up with rage. How dare that – that polygon question him? Bill Cipher?

“OF COURSE NOT!” he snaps. “I KNOW THIS HUMAN’S LIMITS BETTER THAN HE DOES! TESTED MOST OF ‘EM MYSELF!”

“Okay, but, he’s not doing a whole lot of screaming anymore.” Kryptos points one cautious finger around Bill, in Ford’s direction. “Or, um, moving.”

“KRYPTOS?” Bill says, cheerfully.

“Uh, yes, boss?”

“IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP I’LL FEED YOU TO PYRONICA,” Bill says, still cheerful, turning back to his favourite pet human.

Unfortunately, Kryptos is right about one thing – Sixer isn’t doing a whole lot of moving anymore. More just kind of…hanging there and smoking slightly.

Boooo-ring.

Bill snaps his fingers, and a crackling blue arc of electricity leaps out of his pointed index finger to earth itself in Ford’s chest. Ford gives a pretty lame reprisal of the old kicking-and-screaming routine, his legs wobbling feebly against thin air, his ‘scream’ more of a tortured groan. It’s like he isn’t even trying.

“C’MON, SIXER, PUT SOME OOMPH INTO IT!” Bill complains, cutting the lightshow short. “THIS IS GETTING OLD! HAHA! JUST LIKE YOU!”

The only response he gets is the faint hiss of the little fires still going in Fordsy’s hair. He’s gonna have a constellation of bald spots when this is over.

“AW, COME ON,” Bill coos, tucking one finger under Ford’s tiny chin and gently lifting it from his chest. “DON’T TELL ME YOU’RE STILL SULKING ABOUT THE WHOLE ME-LYING-TO-GET-YOU-TO-DESTROY-YOUR-ENTIRE-DIMENSION THING!”

Ford’s eyes, which had been half-closed and downturned like he was ignoring Bill, suddenly flick up to stare directly into Bill’s pupil. Bill nearly drops Ford’s bristly little face in surprise at the ring of flickering red wrapped around each iris.

“OOH, SIXER, YOU’VE BEEN HOLDING OUT ON ME!” Bill crows, delighted. “SHOULDA KNOWN YOU HAD ONE LAST TRICK UP YOUR SLEEVE! THAT’S WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU, HOW THAT FUNNY LITTLE MEAT BRAIN OF YOURS NEVER STOPS TICKING!”

“Get your hands off me, Cipher,” Ford growls, under his breath, and it seems to Bill to have harmonics that it could only have picked up by echoing through some of the more Escherian corners of the Fearamid. “Or I can’t be responsible for what happens next.”

“OH, I’M SO SCARED!” Bill laughs, rolling his eye. “WHAT’RE YOU GONNA DO TO ME, FORDSY, BITE MY KNEES OFF?”

When Ford’s eyes narrow, spitting red sparks, Bill can’t help but laugh again. “NO, SERIOUSLY, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GONNA DO HERE? I’M ALREADY HERE! THIS DIMENSION’S AS GOOD AS MINE!” He throws his arms wide, gesturing to the whole of the Fearamid and his crew, the carnage outside, the enormous rift that dominates the yellow sky. “AND IF IT WAS THE MAIN COURSE, THEN YOUR LAWS OF PHYSICS MADE A NICE AFTER-DINNER MINT! A LITTLE BLACK MAGIC’LL BE THE PERFECT TOOTHPICK! BUT GO AHEAD! LAY IT ON ME!”

Ford starts to open his big mouth, probably to make some stupid speech about the power of friendship or something, and Bill zaps him again. Whatever he was about to say vanishes in a strangled half-scream as his whole body jerks, jittering like a marionette with its strings caught in a high-voltage power line.

Oh, wait. That’s exactly what he is!

“WELL?” Bill demands, in between zaps and the hoarse, exhausted noises of distress Ford keeps making. “DO YOUR WORST! REALLY LET ME HAVE IT, SIXER! SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT! DON’T – HOLD – BACK!”

Ford’s body gives one final, enormous spasm, and then falls limp, his voice cutting out as his head falls backwards. One boot twitches, one shoulder jumps, but there’s no intelligence, no intention behind the movements. Just leftover electricity sparking frazzled nerves and jerking Ford’s limbs around like the puppet he is.

Bill twirls to face the audience of Henchmaniacs who’ve assembled to watch the fun, blowing across the tip of his pointed finger like he’s blowing smoke away from the barrel of a pistol. He quickly considers a variety of clever one-liners, discards them all just as quickly as not clever enough. “WELL, THAT WAS DISAPPOINTING! SOMEBODY GET ME ANOTHER MARTINI.”

Nobody laughs. Nobody cheers. Nobody raises a glass. They all just stare, with these stupefied expressions.

“WHAT? YOU’VE NEVER SEEN ME CRISPY-FRY A GUY ALIVE BEFORE?” Bill asks, looking over the assembled crew of nightmares and monsters.

“Uh, boss?” Kryptos quavers, slowly raising one hand, and that’s when Bill realises that those expressions of awe mingled with horrified respect aren’t aimed at him, but at something slightly behind him.

“OH, SH-” he starts.

...

It was about a decade into his thirty years of wandering the multiverse that Ford had first stumbled across the crew of the Starblaster.

It wouldn’t be the last time their paths would cross. Over those thirty years, Ford thinks he’d encountered the IPRE no fewer than seventeen times. Whether or not they were the same IPRE every time is a matter he prefers not to think about. It raises entirely too many questions that he isn’t certain he even wants the answers to.

He doesn’t remember exactly when the seed of an idea was planted. Doesn’t remember exactly when he realised the parallels between their situation and his. Both running from a world-devouring horror, both the only ones able to end its reign of terror. But, unlike the crew of the Starblaster, if Ford loses his life in his travels, he doesn’t get another at the end of a year. And there’s no one else who can stop Bill Cipher if he falls.

Ford’s always known that Bill Cipher would kill him, one day. He’d dared to hope that they would go down together, Holmes and Moriarty locked in deadly struggle over the edge of the Reichenbach Falls. But he’s always known, in the back of his mind, that it might come to this. That he might die before he has a chance to defeat Bill Cipher.

Thankfully, he thinks, before the electrical charge stops his heart and short-circuits his brain for good, he’s made sure that’s not a problem anymore.

...

The Shacktron’s almost within punching distance of the ominous floating black pyramid when the pyramid suddenly shudders in the sky.

“What -” Dipper starts, peering up through the Shacktron’s window. He doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence, though, because the pyramid gives another heaving shudder and then – explodes.

Well, okay, only one side of it explodes, with a sound like extremely distant and extremely loud fireworks, a burst of rainbow-edged black rubble, and ropes of crackling red lightning. Dipper has to blink a couple times to be sure he’s seeing right, but – yep, that’s the gigantic, hateful yellow face of Bill Cipher flying at top speed out of the middle of the pyramid wall in a shower of rubble, looking extremely surprised.

He’s followed by –

Dipper’s first, slightly crazy thought is that it’s a ball of red neon yarn, halfway through unravelling, like the ones Mabel’s always got three or four of hidden somewhere under her sweater. Then he thinks it’s ball lightning, like they’re always trying to use to explain away UFO sightings. But it’s more like…a ball of yarn, only the yarn is lightning. And wearing…a ratty old tan trenchcoat?

“Oh no,” Dipper mutters.

Bill whirls in midair, rounding on the crackling ball of electricity that Dipper’s somehow sure is his Great-Uncle Ford. Somehow. The last time he’d seen Ford, Ford had admittedly not been an amorphous mass – okay, more of a very rough, gigantic, skeletal humanoid figure, now – made of red lightning. But then again, the last time Ford had seen Dipper, Dipper wasn’t helping pilot a giant robot. It’s the end of the world. His great-uncle turning into a lightning-monster…skeleton?...isn’t the weirdest thing Dipper’s seen in the last twenty-four hours.

Although, he has to admit, it’s up there.

Bill’s voice reverberates through the air, rattling the Shacktron’s windows. “WELL THEN! THANKS FOR THE NEW PICTURE WINDOW, BUT I CAN’T SAY YOU’VE GOT MUCH OF A FUTURE IN INTERIOR DESIGN, SIXER!”

He raises one monstrous, noodly black fist, and Dipper feels something cold slither down his spine.

“CAN’T SAY YOU’VE GOT MUCH OF A FUTURE AT ALL!” Bill crows, before swinging that fist, like the hand of Fate, at the sparking figure that is Ford –

- and right through him.

“WHAT?!” Bill screeches, a feedback whine that forces Dipper to clap both hands over his ears if he wants to keep his eardrums.

Despite the fact that the thing that was Ford doesn’t really have any clear facial features, Dipper can still tell, somehow, that he’s smiling.

Bill’s eye narrows, going flame-blue, and Dipper throws out an arm, like he can reach across the mile or more between them and stop Bill in his tracks. But before Bill can do whatever he’s planning to do, two bolts of crimson lightning arc out from Ford’s trenchcoat, blowing it back in some eldritch wind, and earth themselves in the centre of Bill’s eye.

Bill doesn’t move, for a moment, and Dipper realises he’s holding his breath.

And then red lightning erupts, from between each and every one of Bill’s bricks, forcing them apart. Bill shakes, for a second, like the black pyramid had, his body straining to hold together even as lightning lashes through and between his bricks, pushing them apart. Dipper can see daylight through the cracks in Bill’s form.

And then –

Dipper has to throw up an arm to protect his eyes from the burst of red light as Bill – explodes, like he’s been stuffed full of dynamite and it’s all going off in a string, bricks flying in all directions and shattering into pieces as they fly apart. The roar is deafening.

The Shacktron erupts into cheers, almost drowning out the patter of smoking chunks of yellow triangle raining down around them. Dipper throws an arm up, instinctively, to protect his head, as one lump hisses past inches from the Shacktron’s main window, momentarily blotting out the sun. It’s hard to make out more than a hazy red glow through the clouds of drifting, slightly sparking smoke. And that glow could be the sun, the rift, or whatever power Ford’s summoned up.

“Well, guess we didn’t need to do all that planning after all,” Mabel says brightly, from somewhere to Dipper’s left. “Go, Grunkle Ford!”

To Dipper’s right, Stan crosses his arms over his chest. “See, kid? Told you my nerd brother didn’t need me to rescue him.”

“Um,” Dipper says. He’s pretty sure he’s not just imagining that that hazy red glow is getting brighter. And bigger.

And closer.

...

Cipher falls in pieces.

It's harder to think when you're dead.

No. Not think. Focus.

Focus.

Focus on what?

Clouds of smoke too thick. Impossible to see if Cipher is re-forming. Too easy. This can't be it. After all this time? Can't be this simple.

Movement. On the left. Cipher's Henchmaniacs? Cipher himself? Immolated with a thought. So easy. Too easy.

Lup said something about this. About the power. About something else too. A warning. Not that he needs to be warned about anything anymore. Movement to the right this time becomes a pillar of flame. It’s so easy.

He should have died years ago. If he’d known it would be like this, he would have. All that time wasted on quantum destabilizers when this power was waiting just under his skin? Foolishness. Selfish foolishness.

So easy. After all this time. So easy to make Cipher burn.

So easy to make everything burn.

...

“Um, guys?” Dipper quavers, pointing towards the window where the red lightning skeleton guy is hovering. Sure, he’s wearing Grunkle Ford’s trenchcoat, and sure, he just blew up Bill Cipher, so it’s definitely Grunkle Ford, but it’s very important to take a moment and just appreciate this new look he’s rockin’. It’s a big change! He’s probably a little self-conscious about it. He’s gonna need lots of compliments.

Good thing nobody gives compliments like Mabel!

“Grunkle Ford!” she cheers, running for the window. She ignores Dipper’s yell of “Mabel, wait!”. He can go be a big worrywart somewhere else. Mabel knows her great-uncles when she sees them. “That was so cool!”

Mabel slaps both hands against the glass, leans her forehead against the window. On the other side of the glass, Grunkle Ford’s head tilts slightly to the left, lightning arcing from his shoulder down to his wrist in a wild, agitated wiggle. He raises his hand, palm towards the glass, and Mabel smacks her own hand against the glass between them in the best high-five she can give a skeleton guy made of lightning. Or should that be a high-six? Or - wait, now there’s another lightning bolt coming from Grunkle Ford’s hand, does that make it a high-seven -

Stan tackles her around the waist and knocks her away from the window a second before it explodes.

...

Tiny figures scatter.

Mechanical monster lurches, roars. Another blast into its eye. Stumbles. Slow, certain, driving it back.

Screaming. High and small and distant.

Monsters. All of Cipher’s monsters. All his waking nightmares. All his followers and friends.

Burn them all.

“Mabel, give it up! That’s not Grunkle Ford anymore!”

“For once I agree with your brother. My idiot twin’s lost whatever was left of his mind, we gotta get outta here before he explodes us too!”

“No!” A note to shatter glass. “Grunkle Ford, please! We’re your family! You have to remember!”

“Mabel!”

“Sweetie, no!”

Tiny figure charges forwards. Arms raised. Skids to a stop at the burst of flame.

“Please! It’s me, it’s Mabel! And Dipper, and Stan - you have to remember your own twin brother -”

Twin...?

some brother you turned out to

“No!”

Tiny figure, darting forward. Two of them, now. Mirrored. Why? What new trick of Cipher’s -

“Great-Uncle Ford, I know you don’t want to do this! You’re a hero, remember? Not the bad guy!”

because that’s what heroes

“Kids!”

That voice. Scared raw, tiny under metal shrieks and crackling flames, but -

That voice -

you stay away from those kids I don’t want

some brother

accident

poindexter

high six?

Ford gives himself a shake, all over. Like he’s waking from a long, long nightmare.

Stanley, crouched in front of the kids, glowers up from the wreckage of the Shack’s main window. Wait. The Shack isn’t - Legs. It has legs?

“You wanna hurt these kids,” Stan growls. Threatening a force of nature with his bare fis- oh. No. With Pa’s old knuckledusters. Well, that makes this so much less idiotic. “You gotta go through me first.”

“I’d...prefer not to,” Ford manages. Has that hiss in his voice always - No. That way madness lies. “I - is anyone hurt?”

“Hurt, no. Traumatized for life, probably,” Dipper says. “Great-Uncle Ford, what the fuck.”

“Dipper!” Mabel gasps.

“Mabel, we’re almost thirteen, you can stop pretending like we don’t know what swear words are! I know you only do it because you think Stan’s swear-substitutes are funny!”

“Wait, what? Have you kids been fucking with me all summer just to hear me say ‘hot Belgian waffles’ every time something went wrong?”

“No, just Mabel,” Dipper says. “For the record, none of this was my idea.”

“We’re gonna talk about this when we’re not standing in a giant robot that’s on fire,” Stan says. Glances up at Ford as he says it. “No thanks to you, Sixer.”

“I can’t actually,” Ford starts. “Um. Put it out.”

“Why am I not surprised,” Stan huffs. But he’s smiling. Kids clinging to him are smiling too. He doesn’t have a face, exactly, anymore, but - Ford knows he himself must be smiling as well. “Can you at least get us down from here?”

“Sorry, he’s not gonna be able to help you with that,” a voice - familiar? - says, just behind him, and then -

a swish -

a bright, blooming pain -

and darkness.

...

“What did you do?!” the besweatered kid yowls, shaking tiny fists in the air. She’s like four feet nothing of pure childish adorableness wrapped in a pink confetti sweater, but Barry catches himself taking an involuntary step backwards anyway.

“Yeah, I kinda had to send your uncle -”

“Great-uncle,” the kid who looks like a fifty-year-old university professor in a twelve-year-old’s tiny, sweaty body says. He sounds as unimpressed as he looks. Same with the girl. It’s not the usual reaction to a literal grim reaper. Barry would be lying if he said he wasn’t thrown a little bit off his game.

“Grunkle!” the girl protests. “He’s our Grunkle Ford and you shouldn’t have done...whatever you did!”

“Sent him to the Eternal Stockade,” Barry says, annoyed. “You don’t just get a free pass for being a lich because your great-niblings are cute - wait, did you say Ford?”

Both the girl and the boy nod.

“Oh,” Barry says.

“Oh,” he says, again, looking around at the yellow sky and the big (but shrinking) glowing oil-slick X slashed across it and the menagerie of nightmares and monsters prowling the pines and the smoking chunks of yellow brick dotting the ground at the feet of the flaming robot.

“Uh oh,” he says, with feeling, looking down at the scythe in his hands. His currently very skeletal hands.

“Yeah, uh, Death, or whatever your name is? Can we take this conversation somewhere where we’re not about to burn alive?” the old guy with the kids asks, looking around him at the burning robot house. “Sure, I wanna be with my brother again, but I’d rather not get it by also dying.”

“Oh yeah. Uh, hang on a second,” Barry says.

“Running out of seconds here,” the old guy points out. “Real fast.”

“Okay, just -” Barry sighs. “Look. You want your great-uncle -”

“Grunkle!”

“Your grunkle back, okay, kid. Look, there are rules, and even if it was for a good cause, he broke them. The Raven Queen’s not gonna be too happy about that.”

“The who what with the what now,” the old guy says, deadpan, crossing his arms over his chest. Barry’s realising he kind of likes him.

“The goddess of Death, can you try to keep up?”

“Wait, wait, so you’re not Death? There’s a hierarchy of Deaths? How does that work? If she’s a Raven Queen, is Death a monarchy? Is it constitutional, or does she rule by divine right? What -”

“Whoa, kid, slow down!” Barry says, partly because he’s a little scared the kid’s going to pass out if he doesn’t take a breath, partly because he doesn’t actually know the answers to at least half of those questions and he’s got a sinking suspicion they only get harder to answer from here. “Like I said. Raven Queen. Real pissed about liches. But -” he says, as they all start grumbling again, “and this is an important but, turns out she’s got a soft spot for heroes.”

“That’s Great-Uncle Ford!” the boy says, excited, sounding like a kid and not a fortysomething pencil-pusher for the first time. “He beat Bill Cipher and saved our dimension, he’s totally a hero -”

“Yeah. Only problem is, I already dropped him off in the Stockade. And, uh, they call it the Eternal Stockade for a reason.”

There’s a moment of silence, during which Barry notices a handful of people wearing colourful parachutes drifting towards the ground from the lower levels of the robot house. Are those...sweaters?

“Well, then, we’ll just have to go and get him!” the girl says, planting her hands on her hips and her feet shoulder-width apart like a tiny, determined Lynda Carter. Barry’s pretty sure the old man grumbles something like ‘oh, not again,’ but he chooses to ignore it.

“That’s the spirit! Now, since I’m kind of the grim reaper, I’m not...technically allowed to help you.” He holds up a hand when the grumbling starts again, gives his scythe a one-handed twirl before cutting a portal through into the Astral Plane. The waters lap quietly against the shore, a beautiful, soothing contrast to the sharp snap and hiss of the flames starting to devour the walls. “I can get you started, but you’re gonna have to get in there and get out with him in tow without me.”

The girl’s already charging through the portal. Barry watches her feet disappear into the Astral Plane, then turns to the other two.

For the first time, the boy looks uncertain. “I...I don’t know about this. Will we be able to get back? How will we know where to find him?”

“Hey, kid,” Barry says, in what he hopes is a comforting voice. Skin. It would probably be more comforting with skin. He tries it again, with a human face this time. “Look, I knew your great-uncle, so I know what kind of guy he is. I don’t wanna see him stuck in ghost jail for the rest of eternity any more than you do.”

“Really?” the boy asks, looking up at Barry with wide eyes, even as the old man’s eyes narrow.

“You knew Ford.”

“Well, I wasn’t the grim reaper at the time, but yeah. We ran into each other a couple times,” Barry says. He leaves out the part where he is probably personally responsible for Stanford Pines, Lich. That’s a need-to-know. As in, nobody, ever, needs to know. “Your great-uncle’s a big nerd, and that’s coming from me, but he’s got a good heart. He really doesn’t deserve to be treated like a death criminal forever.”

The old man sighs, glaring into the portal. “You’re gonna make me do this stupid thing, too, aren’t you.”

“Grunkle Stan, don’t be such a meanie-pants!” the girl pipes up, sticking her head back out of the portal. “Come on!”

She vanishes again before anyone can say a word.

“I have so many questions,” the boy says, looking up at Barry with an expression that Barry can only describe as ‘hungry’.

“Ask your great-uncle, kid,” Barry says. “When you rescue him.”

The boy bites down on his lower lip, and then looks up with a determined nod. Readjusting the cap on his head, he stalks forward, and into the portal.

The old man gives Barry a sidelong look. “This isn’t some kind of literal death trap, is it?”

Barry shrugs one shoulder. “You’re just gonna have to trust me. Or not.”

The old man - Stan - stares distrustfully at the portal for a long moment, and then sighs, uncrossing his arms and slouching forward in a clear expression of defeat.

“Somebody’s gotta look out for those kids,” he sighs. “And my idiot brother, I guess.” He takes a deep breath, throwing his shoulders back and his chest out. “And it beats burning alive.”

He stomps forward, through the portal, and Barry can hear a distant, gravelly yell of, “Kids!”

He chuckles, to himself, before digging in the pockets of his flowing black robe for his Stone of Farspeech.

“Hey, babe? Remember that Ford guy we kept running into? ...Yeah, that’s the one. Listen. I need a favour...”

...

Mabel makes it halfway down the beach before a figure entirely draped in ominous black robes rises up before her, blocking her path. The figure hovers in place, its arms outstretched to its sides, skeletal hands peeking from under the edges of its robes. One of them holds an ornate scythe with a pattern of flames along the edge.

“Whoa!” Mabel shouts, skidding to a stop in the pebbly sand. Dipper pours on what little speed he has, running to catch up with her. He’s not sure what he’ll do against the death police, but he’s not letting them take his sister without a fight.

The figure slowly, slowly raises its hands, slowly, slowly peels back its hood to reveal a bare and glinting skull. As Dipper watches, a crimson flame erupts from the dome of the skull, forming a sweeping mane of hair. Red glints in the depths of the empty sockets as the skeletal figure slowly, slowly raises its head, fixing Dipper in place with a hollow, dreadful stare. He can’t move. His legs have frozen under him. His heart rabbits in his chest.

The skull’s lower jaw drops open, and from the depths of its dark robe, a hissing, sinister voice echoes:

“Hey there! Heard you nerds were going on an Orphean underworld quest!”

Dipper and Mabel exchange a startled look. Stan, puffing to a halt behind them, groans. “Oh, what now?”

The skeleton in front of them grins...more somehow. “Name’s Lup, and if I’m gonna be your guide, I literally cannot stress enough how important it is that you not look back.”

#gravity falls #the adventure zone #balance arc #this is mary's fic tag #this got WILDLY out of hand #and I had way too much fun with narrators

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lucarioisinthevoid · 5 years

Note

*cracks neck* OKAY JERRY we're gonna perform a ritual to summon a portal to the void so i can ask henry what the FUCK the question mark tag bullshit is about. take this saltshaker and pour its on me while i balance this spoon on my nose. make sure to do it directly in the center of the pizzeria.

Henrywas standing up a bit straighter, confused. “What- what is happening? What arethey trying to do there?!” “They are trying to open a portal to the void to ask you what the FUCK thequestionmark tag means!” “I got that far, thank you VERY much. I meant, WHY are they opening a portalfrom the restaurant, instead of coming here? They are ruining my plans! Aninterference like that, this amount of distortion near my machine will-““Maybe that is why they do it?” “No- NO, NO- I will NOT allow that-“ Angrily he moved forwards. “I have TAKENthe boy. I PUT him where the others were-“ Something seemed to snap in him. “The machine may not be stable, but I assureyou, I refuse to play along in this disgusting charade any longer. I am sick ofthis, I am sick of ALL of this! Of these nonsensical Anons! Of these emptyconversations! Of the fact that you are BREATHING! No more. I will break thisreality once and for all.” “U-Uh, Henry you-“ Ignoring the kid, he walked towards the machine, booting it up. “I havegathered so many soul fragments. Do you even UNDERSTAND how hard it is toextract souls out of things that shatter? Out of all those little passions- itwas work, too much work to have it all go to waste because of one foolish anon.What is there so hard to grasp? Jeremy. Jeremy ? Is it truly Jeremy? NO IT ISNOT. THAT WAS OBVIOUS! To be fair- it was probably… hm… 13%. Which is a goodbit, compared to the… others. But it took quite a toll on him, did it not? Itchanged him up a lot. He did a few favors for me… the Puppet is out, the PhoneGuy is out- I have PLANNED, I have CREATED and now it is supposed to be alldestroyed? No. I will take all of it with me.” “… I´m mildly concerned.” “Rightfully so.” The machine began blinking and beeping. “I have planned awhole finale. I have planned out a showdown. I have planned so many things andnow THIS anon…” He sighed. “Does not matter. Time to see what my work can do.” Reality tore.-

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!”

“BOYS AND GIRLS!”

“GATHER ‘ROUD, GATHER ‘ROUND!”

“SIT BACK, RELAX AND PLEASE STAY AT YOUR SEATS!”

The spotlights lit up and wandered around, searching for the people screamingtheir lungs out, which was rather unnecessary, seeing as they were alreadyenhanced by the speakers at the sides. What came out was a rather unpleasantstatic mess.

“FOR TODAY YOU’RE AT THE ONE AND ONLY!”

“THE LEGENDARY!”

“THE MYTHICAL!”

“THE INCOMPREHENDABLE!”

“WORLD OF OLD SPORT!”

“Wait, that’s not what we agreed to say-“ The spotlight found the two, Old Sport, who was wearing something close to asuit and Dave, in Springbonnie. Actually, that Springbonnie looked… patched up.They proceed to argue. “But Sportsy! You’re the main attraction!” “No, Dave, not everybody is-“Another Old Sport proceeded to walk on stage. “Excuse me, but what in the actual fuck-“A painful smashing sound was audible in the background, together withtrademarked swearing. “WHO IN THE ACTUAL FUCK DID PUT THE FUCKING LIGHTS OUT, ISWEAR TO GOD THIS PLACE IS A FUCKING SHITHOLE, THIS IS HELL-“ “Uh. Mike. I think we have a bigger problem then the, uh… lights.” A pause ensued after Phone Guy said that, followed by Mike’s reaction to the happenings on the stage.“OH FUCK NO.” “W-wait, was that another Phone Guy?” Phone Guy asked.“IF YOU’RE FUCKING WITH ME I WILL LITERALLY KILL YOU-“ Jeremy joined. “F-found the light switch! Everybody calm down!”All the lights turned back on and everyone was stunned. There were three clonesit seemed- a Phone Guy, an Orange Guy and a Purple Guy, all standing around, inblank terror.Lies, actually the Zombie-bunny was screaming. “TWO OLD SPORTS?! HOLY FUCKIN’SHIT! THIS IS INSANE! I AM IN HEAVEN!” This triggered the other Dave to protectively hold his Old Sport. “Back off, yafilthy copy! This one’s mine!” For a moment things calmed down, as nobody knew how to react. Until a new voice joined, voice only- Well, actually most of them knew, even if they haven’t heard it in decades. “Well, well, well. A universe rift thatapparently entailed multiple dimensions to be sucked in. How utterly predictable and boring.” Henry looked around, displeased beyond words. “No wonder it iswhat the kid went with.”To my defense, what else was I supposed to do?“Anything! Everything! Something!” With these words he managed to exclaim allhis distaste for this. Both Dave were just falling over, seemingly dead and while the Old Sport in suittried to help his partner, his counterpart froze up completely. The Phone Guys both let out some distressed beeping. This situation was toomuch. Mike scoffed. “Oh luck, it’s the pink-peach-mc-fuck-me-sideways.” At that Henry snapped up. “What did you just say?” “I said you’re a fucking piece of shit.” “Oh, I simply misunderstood.” Relaxing again, he inspected the corridors going off the mainarea closer. Endless, gaping hallways, so long you could only see blackness instead of anyend to it. “… at least it appears we will not have to walk into each other thatmuch. Apparently the places combined in regards to space too. What a relief.” “Oh, Mr. Miller!” Jeremy sounded glad, as he ran up to him. “You are alright!You made it! I knew you would, but- what… what happened w-while… n-not gonna lie, I was… it was scary…” How does this kid even still exist afterhaving his soul literally fractioned and partially banned into the void-But this wasn’t really worth thinking about. Not now, maybe later when he had settled in.Turning away, Henry proceeded to walk down the corridors, met with ever similarrooms, but not minding it. At least he had plenty of access to parts and robotsnow. It felt as if the rooms grew colder the further away he would go. “So. How do you think you can handle this? Did you even think for five minutesabout this event?” Softly he scoffed at nothing in particular. A bit, I guess?It’s… basically just that for a certain amount of time, people can ask for allsort of whacky AU shit and meetings! And if they don’t ask for anyone in particular, like they usually do, I just…send the anon to the normal crew. “This is unimaginable pointless and nonsensical.” Finally picking a room, some sort of office, hesat down in the comfortable chair and booted up the camera system. While theold computer was booting up, he went through the papers at the side. Hm. Complaints, bills, people begging to be let in again they swear they won’tyiff the fox after the first time it was a one time thing, and……… a list.

HenryWilliam/DavePhone GuysThe PuppetAnimatronicsDoggosFredbearEveryone who ever set foot into thisplace

… Henry turned, looking almost baffled. “You are completely and utterly serious?” Bold of you to assume you were the worst the multiverse had to offer. “You are implying I am even attempting in any way to be evil. Which isnonsense. It just happens to be perceived like that by clueless onlookers. So,indeed you are correct, if there is somewhat out there in the universe deliberately WANTING to be as evil as humanly possible…” Trailing off, he putthe paper away. “Thankfully, this will be fruitless. This isn’t a place to tella story. You know that perfectly well.”Maybe I want to have a bit dramatic potential for once. “Your askers are far more interested in sending copy pastas.”Well, if that makes them happy! But I still wanna play around with the idea. Atleast for a short bit. “Great. Another set of pointless events, right after the first one. How utterlyentertaining.” Oh, shut it, your existence is pointless. “Only because you are a bad creator.”I will call a magic anon to seal your lips for the next hundred asks. “I am thoroughly intimidated by that threat and plead with all my being. Imaginehow utterly horrifying it would be to have a valid excuse NOT to interact withanons. Please spare me.” Well, at least Jerry is back. Now somebody gotta reactivate the Marionette.

#henry miller #old sport #Dave Miller #phone guy #Jeremy Fitzgerald #mike schmidt #kiddo #event time #Shit I hope this isn't too cheesy

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daizyredz · 5 years

Text

I want to talk about Tammy, from I Am Frankie. Spoilers below.

You know, I feel really bad for Tammy. She’s the resident mean girl but I don’t think she’s really a terrible person. I think it comes from a place of insecurity and arrogance (some of which I think is her version of feigned confidence), none of which is surprising given her age and usual status within the school. While some of this does seem to predate Frankie’s arrival at the school, her arrival seems to have seriously upped it several notches because for the first time in her life she feels like she’s being usurped, and the things that make her special no longer make her special. She’s never had to deal with this before, and that can be difficult for a kid who has their identity wrapped up in being perfect, which usually comes so easily for them, only to suddenly have some new person come along and bump her into second place.

She definitely needs to work on that, and I hope that she does as the show progresses. I don’t need her to be Frankie’s new bestie, or even to like Frankie at all but I would like for her to have Frankie’s back once in awhile when it really counts (like in matters of actual importance and real-world consequence bigger than just herself and her reputation within the school).

I will say that the only time I truly disliked Tammy was when she came up with the idea to dump water on Frankie. She’s already gotten it into her head that Frankie’s a robot, so if that’s true it would fry Frankie’s circuits and that could be catastrophic for her. I can see how she may not think this is a horrible thing, considering that she may be viewing Frankie as just a machine that isn’t really alive and doesn’t have actual feelings and probably can’t even feel pain (at least as far as she knows, none of that is far-fetched). When people dump water on a laptop, for example, nobody expects them to feel bad *for the laptop*. They expect the person to feel bad for upsetting the person that owned the laptop. And it’s possible that’s kind of have she views that situation, not so much the same as putting a human being in the hospital or killing a person, or sending a cat the vet, but as destroying somebody’s property that can’t feel anyway.

BUT...the reason I disliked Tammy in that instance is because her reasons for thinking Frankie is a robot, while the conclusion was right, were ridiculous and she was jumping to conclusions based on her own distress at her concern for her waning status as the smartest, most perfect person in the school. And on top of that there was an alternate reasons given for why Frankie was not allowed to get wet; an allergy to water that could be very, very dangerous to her. Even her friends tried to tell her that this was a really bad idea and an awful thing to do, because if Frankie isn’t a robot, which they were sure was extremely unlikely and certainly untrue, then Tammy would be triggering a dangerous allergy from a human being. And you could tell that for a moment, it did give Tammy some pause, because she doesn’t want to actually physically harm actual people. She hates Frankie but that doesn’t mean she wants to kill her or send her to the hospital with a life-threatening allergic reaction or disfigure a real person.

And while she is right that Frankie’s a robot, her friends were right to try to talk sense into her. It was infinitely MORE likely that Frankie was just a human girl with an unusual but potentially dangerous allergy. That should have been enough to have her abandon that particular plan in favor of something else. But, she went ahead with it anyway and almost did dump water on Frankie. She would have done it, if someone else hadn’t pushed Frankie out of the way in the last second so the water fell on empty floor where Frankie had been standing a moment ago instead.

(also, don’t think I didn’t notice that that was absolutely a Carrie inspired moment, even if it was water instead of pig’s blood in that bucket and even if it ended quite differently)

That was just beyond the pale, and I wish there had been more consequences for her on that front and that she had truly been made to feel bad for what she’d almost done. There’s still time for that to happen, and I hope that it does, but I also won’t be shocked if they just forget all about it in the show or gloss over it. I mean, it is a Nick show and they don’t seem to try very hard with shows that are deemed for kids these days. Although, I will say that this one definitely s good enough to capture my interest and get me engaged and thinking about the characters, so it’s definitely a good show and I’m not trying to say it’s not. I just don’t trust easily, ya know? :p

But, I would like to see Tammy have some sort of redemption arc, and I do see a lot of potential for that within her.

I haven’t really explained the current reason I feel so bad for her, though. I’m on season 2 right now, and WARPA tricked her into going with them and I’m...not entirely sure what’s going on with her right now. I’m kind of waffling between whether I think they’ve got some kind of mind control device on her (they’ve branded the back of her neck with their name in a kind of...weird tag or tiny plaque, like you see on toys sometimes), or if they’ve replaced her with an android that doesn’t know it’s an android. I’m leaning toward the former for now, but it’s just...awful what they’re doing to her.

She doesn’t know she’s been brainwashed, because they take her over and literally make her say their own words and do their bidding whenever they feel like it in order to try to spy on Frankie and her friends to see if they’re up to something. She walks where they want her to walk and she talks how and when they want her to talk. They literally speak into a microphone and she says their words to whoever is in front of her at the time. When they’re finished, she has no memory of having done any of this and is often left confused about what people around her are talking about, why she’s standing here with people she doesn’t like, or why her friends are acting so weird around her and insisting she’s been acting weird and saying weird things she’d *never* say.

And I’m sure there are plenty of other connotations that are pretty awful, considering that one of the people monitoring her, seeing through her eyes or through some camera they have on her I don’t know, taking over her body and manipulating where she goes and who she talks to and what she says, is a white man while Tammy is a person of color.

I can’t really begin to explain why this entire situation is so horrible. I mean, where in the heck do you start wading through that slime? This poor kid. :(

Also, as a quick side note. I realize I’ve spent all this time talking about Tammy and the horrible decisions I think she’s made, and I don’t want to leave out the fact that she’s in this situation right now is at least somewhat due to Dayton lying to her and tricking her into hacking WARPA’s servers, that specific lie is even the reason that Tammy went so willingly and quietly with them when the WARPA agents came looking for her. I don’t think Dayton ever thought something like *this* was going to happen, and would probably have tried to come up with an alternate plan had she known that she was truly putting Tammy in danger. She had Tammy help her because Tammy would know how and Dayton didn’t know how. Not because she was afraid that WARPA would come after her, I don’t think the consequences of what she was doing had truly set into Dayton’s mind. But, she also didn’t try to warn Tammy when she realized WARPA agents had come to the school looking for whoever had hacked in, and she didn’t even attempt to stop Tammy from leaving a calling card when she hacked in so they’d know it was her even though Tammy told her she was going to.

Now, why do I say Dayton’s only somewhat responsible here? Because, Tammy and Dayton are both children. The real villains in this scenario are WARPA and their goons who are coming after kids to do horrible things to them FOR ANY REASON. There’s no excuse for that, there’s no way anything could make that okay, no matter what.

Anyway, this post is already way too long so I’m gonna stop now. :p

#I Am Frankie #Tammy #WARPA #I Am Frankie spoilers

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codylabs · 6 years

Text

Chapter 5

Mabel shone the beam from the laser pointer all around the floor. Juan chased it to and fro joyously, his saws scuffing up the floorboards whenever he thought he’d caught it. Always it eluded him, always it escaped him, always he gave chase. He was just like a cat. A heavy metal cat, but nonetheless just as smart, playful, energetic and eager. Mabel laughed at his antics.

When he finally got tired, Mabel turned the laser off, and sat down next to a wall outlet. Juan crawled up on her chest, and stuck his hooks into the socket beside her. A few sparks fizzled, and the robot relaxed.

Mabel petted him. He wasn’t quite as fun to pet as normal animals, since he wasn’t soft or furry in the least. But he was warm, and he was active and squirmy, and if she closed her eyes she could aaaaalmost imagine he was something nice to cuddle.

He finished recharging, and curled up in her lap. She petted his antennae, and they extended and retracted at her touch. His red eyes looked up and met hers, and for a moment, she felt they shared a deep, spiritual bond.

His claws plucked at her sweater as he stretched, and aperture-like eyelids twisted shut over his cameras. He wiggled around one more time to get comfortable, and then he was asleep.

Such a sweet thing.

Too bad she couldn’t talk to him. He spoke and heard in radio signals, and since she hadn’t figured out how to do that with her own body, she had to speak with the walkie talkie. She would listen in on his ‘distress signal’, and add words of her own onto the same frequency. She hoped he could hear her, and she hoped he understood that she was just trying to be friendly.

She pulled out her walkie talkie again now, and turned it over to his usual frequency.

But for some reason, the line was quiet. She cycled through all the other channels, but those were all quiet too. Mable frowned at the robot, and the realization slowly dawned on her.

Sometime in the last hour, Juan had stopped sending out his S.O.S.

He thinks I’m his mommy.

He’s happy here.

He loves me.

But it broke her heart. And she put her hands to her head, and her heart began to race, because another realization was close behind the first.

He doesn’t want his real mom anymore.

His real mom is looking for him, but now she’ll never find him.

I’m his mom now.

“Oh no…” She told the creature. “No… I can’t do that… I can’t keep you… This isn’t right for you… I’m not right for you… This…” She shook her head, and brushed aside a tear. “This was never what I wanted…”

Meanwhile, ten miles away, Dipper and Wendy ventured deeper into a hidden valley. And as they did so, they realized they’d stepped into a different world entirely.

“Okaaaay.” Wendy nodded. “We can tell them apart, at least. The trunks here aren’t bark-colored brown. They’re more like rust-colored brown. And the newer, smaller branches are totally grey.”

“Probably is rust. The newer shoots just haven’t had time to rust.”

“And, of course.” She added. “If we’re ever unsure, we can always just touch the leaves. If they feel like leaves, you’re good. But if they lay you open, chances are they belong to the robot trees.”

“Ha ha. Yeah.” Dipper laughed nervously. “Robot trees.” He echoed. He looked around him again, just to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. But he wasn’t. Before today, he never would have imagined using the words ‘robot’ and ‘tree’ in the same sentence, but there you have it. Those words had passed his lips. And as ridiculous at it sounded, it was nonetheless true. “Robot trees.” He repeated, and liked the sound of it. “I guess this is a thing now.”

“Man, you can smell it!” Wendy commented on the air. “Like oil, or the school’s metal shop after somebody’s been grinding… It’s not normal.”

“Yeah… Wow.”

“So how do we do this whole ‘science’ thing?” She asked, dragging them back to the mission. “I mean, we could just walk around, but shouldn’t we be doing… ‘Experiments’ or some junk?”

“Uh… I dunno…” Dipper bent over to examine a smallish sort of weed. “I guess we take pictures and stuff… And cram as many samples as we can into our backpacks.”

“Sounds good…” Wendy slipped on some gloves, grasped a tuft of grass, and pulled. And then she pulled some more. And then pulled some more. “Oh, okay, want to play it like that, do ya?” She grumbled at the plant. She pulled out an axe, and chopped it into the roots beneath her hand. The tuft finally came out with a snap. She shoved the plant into her backpack.

Dipper peered down at the hole where the grass had been. He poked his finger inside.

A tiny spark of electricity arced between his roots, directly through his finger. He yelped with pain, and brought back his hand.

“You okay? What got ya?”

“Oh, these… The roots zapped me. It must have its power cells down below ground. The panels charge up sun during the day, the batteries power it at night…”

“Wear gloves mate.”

“Yeah.”

This time he wasn’t zapped, and he brought out a handful of soil.

“Dirt?” Wendy frowned curiously.

“Soil.” He clarified, and he dumped the sample into a plastic bag. “Metal plants are growing out of this soil. That… Doesn’t happen. Ever. And that means this soil must be special.”

“Fair enough.”

He pulled out a disposable camera. Ford had suggested no electronics, but this model was so simple that it wouldn’t count. Nothing could detect this bad boy. Dipper took pictures of Wendy’s sample, his sample, and the hole they’d removed it from. Then they moved on.

Careful to dodge the leaves, they made their way up to the trunk of one of the larger trees. Wendy began tapping lightly on the surface with the back of her axe, looking for irregularities or hollow spots. The metallic clanking echoed through the silent forest.

Dipper was hit by a sudden sense of deja-vu, as he remembered his very first adventure in Gravity Falls. He’d found Ford’s hollow, fake metal tree, and a mechanism inside had opened the way to the journal. It was the thing that started it all. The one event that made the way for his entire life since. He took a minute to reflect. He… Or rather they… Had come so far since then. So very far. They knew so much, had done so much, conquered so much, become so much… It was amazing.

“Hey, this part sounds hollow.” Wendy remarked, and tapped again.

“Cool…” Dipper nodded. “Wonder what’s in there… Do we have a way to cut through?”

“Well… The trunk looks like it has a sort of grain to it, like regular wood. Maybe an axe will work?”

She took a swing at it, and made an impressively loud sound.

The axe didn’t work.

There was a dent in the tree, but there was also a dent in the axe.

“Awe…” She ran her finger along the defaced blade. Suddenly she laughed. “Look at me! I’m a scientist! Whacking a metal thing!”

Dipper laughed too. “Who’s the greater scientist? The scientist who whacks, or the scientist who watches whack?”

She groaned in mock-misery. “Waaaah… Why does science feel so much like the chain gang?” She struck the tree once more.

Then they heard movement inside the hollow spot, and took a step back. Something was alive in there. They could hear it scuttling around, clacking against the inside of the tree. Then the sound moved upwards through the trunk. Their eyes followed it up, and landed on a small hole, about 10 feet up. A tiny robot peeked its head out of this hole, and looked down at them with red eyes. It had a vaguely similar design to Juan, but with several different specializations. It was thinner than Juan, and longer, as if for fitting through tight spaces. And instead of buzzsaws, it had a system of small drill bits, which it spun at them in an angry, threatening sort of way.

“Guess we know what the hollow spot was.” Wendy observed.

“Robot squirrel.” Dipper smiled. He held up his camera and took another shot. “Cool.”

Irritated by the flash, the robot climbed out of its hole and up the tree away from them. It had long hooks on the ends of its legs, and a small sort of hollow cone where a tail would be.

As they watched, this cone began to emit a loud wining sound. Dust began to spray and billow around the animal. Then it let go of the tree, and hovered through the air off toward another tree. It grabbed onto a branch of the new tree, pulled itself up into a better position, and looked back at them.

“Robot rocket squirrel.” Wendy noted as Dipper snapped another picture.

“Just too cool.” He nodded.

They continued on.

“Hey, have you seen any other tracks recently? Any sign of the lion?”

“Naw, man. I can’t track anything here. Can’t make heads or tails of this grass, and all the tree roots just cover the mud and dirt.”

“All right.”

“Are you picking up any radio signals? Like Juan makes? Or from the decoy we put on her yesterday?”

“No, nothing from the decoy.” He said. “The tracker we put on her stopped transmitting sometime last night. I guess she found a way to get it off.”

“Dang it… Well, any signals at all?”

“Uh…” He turned on his walkie talkie briefly. It became to click and whistle with noise. There were hundreds of signals around here. All of them weak, quiet and brief. Like the chirping of crickets, or the singing of birds. Dipper realized this forest wasn’t silent. It was filled with life, but all of it was silent to human ears. He turned the device back off, and returned it to his vest. “Yeah. None as loud as Juan, but… Yeah. They’re there. And they’re everywhere. But they’re all so quiet that they’re undetectable from far away. Probably why we never detected this place before.”

“Huh. Say!” Wendy pointed ahead. “What’s that up there?”

She gestured toward a nearby stream. Bright, bulbous white flowers were growing all along its banks, some of them the height of trees.

“Woah. Giant flowers.”

“That’s science, right?”

“Yeah…” He approached the nearest one, and circled it slowly. Nothing much to see… But this plant didn’t have any leaves; no solar panels. All the other trees had solar panels. How was this one getting its energy?

He looked inside the bulb of the flower, and slowly put it together. Although they wide pedals were white on the outside, they were extremely shiny on the inside, like so many separate sections of a bowl-shaped mirror. And each one shared the exact same shape: that of a geometrically perfect paraboloid. And in the exact center of each ‘dish’, there was a tiny metal bud, attached to the wider stalk by what looked like tubes.

“Solar thermoelectric power.” Dipper nodded.

“A what now?” Wendy frowned.

“Instead of using plain old solar panels, like the trees do, these plants use the flowers.” Dipper explained. “The flowers are giant mirror dishes, and concentrate sunlight into those little buds. Those buds must have steam turbines or something inside them. The sunlight is all focused into the bud, that boils the steam, the steam spins the turbines, the turbines generate power, and that’s what powers the plant.”

“Woooooah…” Wendy scratched her head. “So ‘flower power’ is a real thing… I always thought those stupid hippies were insane…”

“Solar collection is actually much more efficient that normal photovoltaic systems.” Dipper continued. “It’s not used much in the human world because it’s so expensive to build, but these things just grow that way, so I guess expense isn’t an issue… And that’s probably why they only grow so near the creek. They pump up the water to refuel their turbines and dispose of waste heat.”

Wendy considered this.

“Is that why you were so tired this morning?”

“What?”

“You stayed up super late studying weird science.”

“Uh… Yeah. Why?”

“Okay… Hey wait a minute, why the heck were you studying thermoelectric solar power anyway? That’s such a randomly specific thing…”

“Well… I figured that these things would have to live without fuel, so I just started researching self-sustaining power, and clean energy… Parabolic solar collectors came up at some point so I read about them… And anyway, it came in handy, didn’t it?”

Wendy scratched her head. “Of all the millions of people in history who’ve ever gone out looking for trouble, only two of them have ever happened upon a thermoelectric solar flower. And one of those people just HAPPENED to thoroughly research that same thing the night before.”

“It… Seemed prudent.”

“Why are you wearing long pants instead of shorts today? As if you knew we would be walking through razor grass.”

“Well… You mentioned my… Habits… Yesterday… And it seemed… It seemed like a good idea?”

Wendy seemed suddenly suspicious for some reason.

“Dipper.” She asked. “Are you psychic?”

Why was she so suspicious? He went on the defensive. “No…”

“Do you have any psychic friends?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Is being psychic a thing?”

“Not that I know of…”

“Have you always been this randomly lucky?”

“Definitely not.”

“Do you consult oracles?”

“No.”

“Do you own a crystal ball?”

“No.”

“Does a future-Dipper travel back in time to give you advice?”

“What?? No…”

She gave him a hard stare. He frowned back at her, in a confused way. What was she thinking? What did it matter? What was going on? Did she seriously believe whatever that was? Why? Huh?

Then Wendy just smiled and shrugged. “Ah, never mind.” She turned back to the flowers. “Flower power. The hippies were right. Whatever we do, we can’t tell my dad about this. Got it?”

“Umm… Yeeeeeah… Got it.” Dipper yanked one of the smaller stems out of the streambed. It weighted about 3 pounds. Wow. He never thought he’d ever hold a 3-pound flower, but hey, there’s a first time for everything. He put it in his backpack. “This sample is Ford’s eyes only.”

Seeing as how there was less razor-grass in the water, they followed the creek up deeper into the woods. They kept a look out for lion-bot tracks, but nothing was visible.

Before long, a loud roar echoed through the trees. It was like the sound of a massive motor, grinding, tearing, ripping.

“Woah.” Wendy said. “Cliché giant monster sound. That might be our girl, huh?”

“She never made noise before… What was that?”

Now there was a new sound, the whizzing of small motors, and the scraping of metal-on-metal. The teens looked up to see several monkey-octopus-robots swing through the treetops above them, moving away from the cliché monster sound. Each one had a spherical torso about the size of a basketball. The torso had an eye on the top, another eye on bottom, and 5 long tentacles around the rim. They were using these tentacles in much the same way that normal monkeys use their arms. (Except, judging by the way they were swinging and flipping, they had very little concept of right-side-up and upside-down.) Dipper thought they looked strikingly like the evil robot from the movie ‘The Incredibles’ but he kept this to himself, as it would make him seem like a total dork.

One of the monkey-bots stopped to look down at them, and spun one of its claws in their direction. Dipper noticed it had smaller monkey-bots latched onto some recharge sockets between its arms. Nursing babies; Mabel would think that was adorable. The mother seemed to decide they weren’t a threat, and followed its companions off into the distance. Dipper took several pictures as they went.

“Good grief, they look just like the robot from ‘The Incredibles’.” Wendy frowned.

“You’re such a dork.” He replied.

“And among present company.” She retorted. “I need not feel ashamed.”

The monster noise sounded again, and they continued to follow it up the creek. They were moving even more carefully now, silent and alert. Eventually the noise was very near, just on the other side of the next thicket. They stopped and hid themselves to prepare. Dipper got his camera ready, Wendy took her axe out, and they both tightened the logging chaps on their arms.

“This could be it.” Dipper whispered.

“Don’t engage.” She reminded him. “Just take pictures. Be ready to run.”

“Yeah.”

They stepped quickly from behind the thicket. She leveled her weapon, he leveled his camera, and they both came into view of the sound’s source. And then they both frowned, disappointed.

An adorable little round robot had been cutting down a small tree. Now it paused in its work, and looked up at them. It had a flat paddle tail, little chubby legs, and a gigantic cutting blade built into the front of its head. The blade slowed down, and the noise died off. It tilted its head at them curiously.

“Aw man…” Wendy groaned. “All that noise! All that noise, and it turned out to just be a chainsaw beaver.”

“Come on!” Dipper sighed, taking a picture anyway. “Man, who knew?”

The chainsaw beaver cavorted back toward the creek, and disappeared beneath the water.

“Well.” Dipper shrugged, and noticed the tree the beaver had been chewing on. “Hey! At least we can get a picture of the inside of these trees. For science!”

“Yeh science!”

As it turned out, there wasn’t much for science to see. The trees had bark on the outside and growth rings in the middle, just like normal trees. The only really different part was all the pipes and wires, but even those weren’t all that surprising.

“This is boring.” Wendy decided, after Dipper took his 4th picture of the tree’s innards. “Let’s keep going. Gotta be more to see!”

They left the creek now, and steered into the trees. Toward what seemed like the center of the robot forest.

The trees were getting closer together now, and the grass was getting thicker. All the leaves were still razor sharp, so they proceeded ever more slowly and carefully. Dipper had taken the precaution of wearing long pants today, so his legs were mostly shielded. And the chainsaw chaps kept the worst of it off his arms. But he was still getting pricked and sliced, just a little bit, here and there. On his exposed hands, or through his socks, and even a couple times on his face. It was always just light brushes or pricks, but even that was enough to sting. Sometimes he would stumble or let his arms get clumsy, and a branch would contact his pants or chaps hard enough to pierce through. He would make a face, pull himself free, and soldier on.

Good grief, this was miserable! Dipper felt he was made of paper, walking through a world made of scissors and knives. Dying slowly and surely, just by walking. Once he wiped the sweat off his face, and there was traces of red among the moisture. He looked at Wendy. Her face had some slight damage as well, though he couldn’t tell about the rest of her body. Their eyes met, and they silently shared their misery.

This place wasn’t a good place.

This place wasn’t okay for people to live.

This place wasn’t suited for flesh.

Well, it explained one mystery at least: why they hadn’t seen any ordinary animals or birds around here. Everything soft that ventured in here carelessly (or without clothes) probably just DIED.

“When we come back tomorrow.” Dipper said. “We need football pads and helmets. And bigger boots.”

“We need something more like knight armor.” She agreed.

“And a diamond-tipped weed-eater.”

“Or a tank.”

“Or one of McGucket’s robots.”

Wendy thought about this. “Say.” She said. “Are we seriously coming back tomorrow?”

“Uh…”

“You have a hot date tomorrow, and I just need a day to rest and… You know, take a bath! Don’t want to go through this two days in a row…” She rolled back the chaps to show him the scratches and cuts on her arms. “Plus, dad wants me looking for a job and stuff…”

“Oh yeah… Yeah…” Dipper remembered his date. “I guess I probably shouldn’t show up to some fancy dinner looking like I got ambushed by a pencil sharpener…”

“Pacifica would NOT appreciate that.” Agreed Wendy.

“No, she would NOT.” Dipper glanced around. “Say, speaking of eating, you want to take a break somewhere?” Dipper asked. “Have some lunch?”

“Ugh.” Wendy nodded, and stopped walking. “Yeah actaully. I just need to sit down.”

They found a hollow trunk from some massive fallen tree, and Dipper ducked inside. Apparently, small animals or micro-organisms in this ecosystem found the inside easier to eat than the outside. Although the outer crust and bark was mostly intact, the inside had been cut completely away. A few small robot bugs scampered away as he crawled deeper.

The metal wasn’t particularly smooth, but it was sure better than the grass outside, so he got himself comfortable in the narrow space. Wendy ducked in after him, and took off her backpack. Dipper took off his hat and chainsaw chaps, and wiped his face with his shirt. All his tiny cuts stung as he did so, and he remembered not to wipe again. Now he removed a map and a sandwich from his pack, and leaned back against the metal to chew thoughtfully and inspect the map.

Wendy peaked over his shoulder at the map.

“We’re somewhere around here, right?” She pointed to some contours in the southeast.

“Yeah.” He made a small black mark at his best guess. “And the robot forest is… Well, we crossed in somewhere about here: the northwest border…” He drew a short line.

“Oh wow. We haven’t come very far have we? Maybe a half mile. How big is this forest anyway?”

“I’m not sure how far it extends south and east, but it can’t be much more than about 20 miles wide and 50 miles long, since there’s a highway over here, and the cliffs over here, and there’s hiking trails all along the cliffs…”

“Yeah…” Wendy nodded. “I’m thinking this place has to be pretty small, y’know, since nobody’s ever noticed it before. A couple miles at most.”

“Yeah, or very new…” Dipper began to chew his pencil. “Say, what if something we did caused the creation of this place? What if we… Released it from somewhere, somehow? What if it came in through Bill’s rift, or…”

“I doubt it. It doesn’t look new.” Wendy shrugged. “Some of these trees are dead, some of them have all fallen over, like this one, and… And most of these trees are gigantic! Just like the normal forest. How many growth rings did we see in that tree the beaver was sawing on?”

“Uh… 16, I think…”

“Yeah.” She said. “And that was a really small tree. So, assuming growth rings here mean the same thing they do in the normal forest, that means this place has to be a couple hundred years old at least… Right? Before the white man settled here, for sure…”

Dipper nodded, slowly, and chewed his pencil even harder.

“What if they’re not robot trees?” He asked. “What if they’re just normal trees… And normal mountain lions, squirrels, monkeys, and beavers, for that matter? What if there’s some virus that turns things into robots?!?”

Wendy’s eyes got wide. “Dude… We’d be infected then!”

“Oh dang!” Dipper looked at his hands, rolled up his sleeves, and blinked his eyes. Everything seemed normal… He stuck out his tongue. “Weny! Iz ma tug a saw yeh?”

She looked. “No. Not a saw yet. Show me your feet.” He took off his right shoe. “No.” She reassured him. “Not a tank track yet… Maybe it takes a while… Or starts on the inside and works its way out… Maybe you have a robot liver by now? How would we check?”

Dipper put his shoe back on. And then he put some serious thought into the virus theory. “No.” He finally answered, after a minute or two. “That can’t be it… A conversion virus doesn’t make sense…”

“Why not? There’s been weirder things.”

“Because… Because the creatures here are all made of straight-up metal.” He tapped the tree trunk next to his head, and the resounding clang proved his point. “But normal living bodies don’t have any metal in them, not more than a few grams at least… So we’d have to start eating metal, gorging on it, if we wanted to transform our bodies into that. And then, the only way we could actually chew or digest that metal is if we already had a body like that… So… So the conversion process can’t happen. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of thing.”

Wendy thought about this. “So… I guess that begs another question: where’d all THIS metal come from anyway?” She asked. “This forest is made of metal, but where did it come from originally? There’s not that much metal in the ground, there’s just rock…”

“A lot of rock is actually aluminum by weight…”

“Really?”

“Yeah…”

“Well… You’ve held Juan, and those plants. They’re heavier than aluminum. Gotta be partially steel, at least.”

“Yeah…” Dipper scratched his head, and turned back to the map.

“Hey, what’s that big circle?” Wendy leaned over and pointed to a mile-wide disk he’d drawn on the map, centered around the hill above the town. “That’s the Weirdmageddon radius, isn’t it?”

“The Weirdmageddon radius was a little bigger. That’s actually…” He suddenly hesitated. That circle was the giant, buried alien spaceship. But should he tell her about that? Ford had definitely told him to keep it a close and guarded secret from anyone outside the inner circle… But then again, who would he ever trust more than Wendy? She would probably run across it on her own eventually… Right? It would be safest and best to tell her all about it up front…

That was when Dipper got a new idea: he wouldn’t tell Wendy about the UFO. He would show her. One of these days, he would show it.

But for now, he still had to tell her what the circle was. “That’s uh…” He decided on a half-truth. “That’s the epicenter.” He said. “The focal point of weirdness in Gravity Falls. Ford’s been studying the ‘weirdness magnetism effect’ of this place, and as it turns out, this place exerts a pull on anything unusual. Sometimes it manifests as a psychological pull, which is how six-fingered Ford and I guess Trembley found it. Sometimes it manifests as a literal magnetic force, as it was for ethereal beings like Bill and his goonies. And sometimes it’s just quantum probability. For instance, gnomes could theoretically live anywhere. But they’re very improbable, which makes them very probable to be here. And brain-switching carpets? Or eye bats? Those things probably don’t exist. So when they do exist, they probably exist here.”

“That probably makes sense.” Wendy joked. “And that circle is where it’s strongest?”

“Yeah.”

“Man. The town’s right on the edge of it.”

“Hence why we get mermaids, living video games, and ghosts popping up underfoot all the time.”

“Makes sense… Makes sense…” She turned back to her backpack, and began removing her lunch.

Dipper looked back at the map, and his eyes caught on the ship

Could the crashed UFO have anything to do with this robot forest?

It didn’t seem like it could. The forest didn’t start until about 12 miles south of the crash site’s furthest radius… If this was aliens, it would have to be a separate crash entirely…

Worth an investigation, anyway.

Wendy extended her hand with some food in it.

“Bacon?” She offered.

“Oh yeah! I could go for some bacon right now…” Dipper took a piece from her.

“Smoked sausage?”

“Oh… Sure.”

“How about some jerky?”

“Um… Did your dad pack you this lunch, by any chance?”

“What makes you say that?” She asked.

“Oh you know… It’s just your dad’s sort of… Style. I mean, meaty, high-protein everything… And this.” Dipper held up the package of jerky, with its ultra-manly mascot, and its ‘YOU’RE INADEQUATE’ slogan. “I haven’t seen anything less than a manotaur try to chew this brand.”

“It sure takes a mighty resolve, doesn’t it? Well, surprise! I packed this lunch! That’s just the Corduroy style, mate! Gotta keep your energy up, and keep your jaws strong.” She ripped open the bag of jerky, removed a stick, and tore off of a piece with her teeth. “And hey.” She continued with her mouth full. “Don’t be intimidated by a little bag of jerky, dude. I bet you can chew it. Take some.”

Her encouragement suddenly made Dipper feel very motivated to chew it. He took some from Wendy, bit off a huge piece, and he chewed it.

And he kept chewing it.

A minute later, he paused briefly, frowned, and kept chewing it.

And he kept chewing it.

About 5 minutes later, it was finally chewed, and he swallowed.

He rubbed his jaw, and stared down at the rest of the jerky. “I don’t… I don’t really want to do that again.” He decided out loud.

“Hmm.” She snickered. “5 minutes. Not bad.”

“’Not bad’…? What’s ‘good’, then?”

“I can chew it in 2 minutes. My brothers are between 3 and 6. My dad can do 45 seconds. I saw a manotaur do it in 5 seconds once, but I think he mostly swallowed it whole, and that’s totally cheating.”

“Oh totally. Those guys are bogus.” Dipper rubbed his jaw again. “So… I ate the jerky. Does that… Prove I’m manly, then?”

“Eh.” She shrugged. “There’s better ways to measure manliness. Mayor Tyler, for instance, can giiiit, giiiit that jerky in about 4 minutes, and he ain’t no man. So…”

“What’s a better metric?” Dipper perked up. “Wrestling bears…? Jumping over cliffs…? Plunging your fist into holes filled with pain…?” (He had done all these things at some point, and thought he’d done all right.)

“Uh…” She frowned, and scratched her head. “That third one is super random, but yeah… That’s kind of the stuff my dad uses… But I’ve got another little method. A little more… Personal. You wanna try?”

“Okay!”

“Awesome. Do you have a spider phobia or anything?”

“Uh… Well, no not really… I mean kinda. Not as bad as some people, but I’m not a huge fan of spiders anyway…”

“Awesome!” She smiled. “Well then, if you wanna prove your manliness, would you go ahead and describe what you see?”

She turned around. When he saw what was on her back, Dipper gave a scream nothing short of girly. “AHH! UH. Yeah! Spiders!”

“Describe them.”

“Uh… There’s about, like, 7 maybe. They’re all about 4 inches across. They… Ooooh… Wow. They’re pretty spiky and… Wow. They’ve got drills and everything. You know what, until today, I wouldn’t have honestly believed that robots could look quite that scary.”

“Good to know.” She nodded, and began to hold perfectly still. “Now would you do me a solid and pick them off for me?”

“UHH?”

“Come on, I can’t see back there.” She hissed. “Grab them and pull them off. Be a man, man.”

“I’m not sure…”

“And they’re sharp little legs are starting to get on my nerves.”

“Uhh…”

“Literally on my nerves. As in past my skin, and down to my nerves. Come on man, you got this.”

Dipper summoned up every ounce of manly courage he had in his reserves, reached forward, and gripped one of the spiders by the thorax. It panicked, waved its drill around threateningly, and began to grip into Wendy’s skin with its legs.

“OW.” Wendy grimaced.

“Sorry!” Dipper stuttered. “Uh… I don’t want to hurt you…”

Wendy’s cool demeanor broke, just for a second. “Just yank it, wimp!”

He yanked it, hard.

It didn’t yank.

Instead, it dug in further. The skin on Wendy’s back stretched up in eight points as Dipper pulled, and each point began to bleed badly.

“OW!” She screeched, and doubled over in pain. Tears came to her eyes.

“UH!” As his heart thundered out of control, Dipper let go of the spider, and turned to his backpack. “SCREW MANLINESS! THIS IS GETTING DUMB!” He said, and pulled out the magnet gun. He flipped it to pulse. “Hold still!”

The gun hummed, and the spiders all convulsed violently. Their red eyes stopped glowing, their legs went limp, and then they were dead. Dipper picked them off one by one, and tossed them outside the log. The last one he removed was the one that had dug in. He had to manually unhook each of its legs, leaving a circle of 8 wounds on Wendy’s back. This one he didn’t toss. This one he smashed with the butt of the magnet gun, leaving its wreckage sparking on the bottom of the log.

They breathed a sigh of relief. Wendy’s breath sounded forced. Dipper had never seen her like this, in so much pain.

“Are you okay?” Dipper asked.

She turned back to him, and she had tears in her eyes. She stretched her back experimentally. “Uh…” Her voice was small and shaky. “I didn’t stay chill…” She muttered, ashamed.

“Oh man, oh man, I’m… I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have tried to yank it.”

She stretched some more, and grimaced. “Uh… No. You didn’t do ANYTHING wrong. I was the one who told you too… I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay… I…”

“Dipper, no, I’m SORRY. I did WRONG. I made a fool of you, and made you hurt me on accident. And dude, that wasn’t a manliness test. Heck, far as I know, manliness CAN’T be measured! You know what that was?? That was me being dumb! I just wanted to tease you a little, and… And honestly, I kind of have a thing with spiders. So when you described them… I started to panic. Just wanted them gone. I did the worst possible thing I could have done, and I yelled at you, and made you panic… But you didn’t panic for long. You did all right. So here it is, honestly: I’m sorry.”

Dipper nodded, and held her eye. “I forgive you.”

“And finally: you’re not a wimp. You know that. I know that. We both know that. Don’t let anyone tell you different. But I forgot it for a second, and I made it sound like I meant it. I made it sound like I don’t respect you, even though I do. I’M SORRY.”

“And I said I forgive you.” He repeated plainly.

She held his eye for a minute, took a deep breath, and then smiled shyly. She picked up her backpack. “Let’s get back in the open.” She mumbled, and led the way out of the log.

Dipper cast another glance around the inside of the tree, looking for more sharp metal creepy-crawlies. Now that his eyes were adjusted for the darkness, he noticed a mean-looking centipede thing and a colony of shredder beetles (which he named himself based on what their mouths looked like.) Metal bugs seemed to be much larger than their normal counterparts.

He wasted very little time following Wendy out into the light. He picked up one of the dead spiders, and put it in his pack with the other samples. Then he shouldered the pack, tightened his chaps, and seated the hat more firmly on his head.

Wendy grimaced as she put her pack on over the spider cuts.

“Want me to carry your stuff…?” Dipper offered.

“Uh… I’ll be fine…”

They stood there for a moment, and Dipper began to have second thoughts about this mission. He looked left, toward the iron thicket ahead of them. He looked right, back the way they’d come. He looked at his camera, already full of amazing pictures. He looked at the cuts on his hands, still painful. And then he looked Wendy in the eye, and he could tell she was thinking all these same things.

“We need to go back.” She stated, matter-of-factly. “We’re getting cut, drilled, sliced, and stabbed. It ain’t getting easier to take, and it sure as heck ain’t stopping. We can’t survive here. We’re only human, and there’s only two of us. If we stay here any longer… If something bigger or sharper comes around… Something that’s actually trying to kill us… Nobody will know anything’s wrong until 6, when Thompson shows to pick us up and we’re not there… We’re not in a good spot. This wasn’t a good plan.”

It was then that Dipper understood: Wendy was afraid. He’d seen it before only rarely, but he recognized it now: she feared for their safety. She feared for their lives. And that made him afraid too.

“Yeah…” He agreed. “But we need to come back. Like we said earlier: armed to the teeth, and armored from head to toe. We’ll bring the equipment, and a plan, but we need to come back here.”

“Oh, of course! We will!” She promised. “Heck yes we will. But not now. Not until we have a plan. For now we need to get OUT.”

He nodded. “Let’s go.”

#The Forest Of Daggers #Gravity Falls #Wendy Corduroy #Dipper Pines #Shapeshifter #see you next summer #wendip #wendipweek #wendy x dipper #fanfiction #fanart #scifi #alien #robot #ghost

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milothebastardman · 7 years

Text

Roses

(Yes it's Radmond fanfiction featuring two OOC boys probably)

KO had been the one to find the first rose. He'd been cleaning up after the first official Plaza Prom, and had found the somewhat wilted flower laying on the punch table. He hadn't thought much of it, really he only mentioned it to Rad and Enid because he felt sad that somebody had forgotten their flower. "I know if I'd gotten Mommy a fancy rose and she'd lost it, she'd be super upset about it!", he explained, giving his two best friends the KO Puppy Eyes.

That's how Mr. Gar’s shop ended up having a vase (KO had made it himself out of macaroni, somehow...) with a much happier looking rose resting in a couple inches of water. Nobody questioned it, probably because nobody really cared, but the little addition seemed to brighten the shop a bit. KO was convinced someone would come in and recognize the flower, even though Rad insisted that nobody would remember "Some dumb flower" well enough to actually miss it to begin with.

KO, with his ever present optimism and selective hearing, decided that someone would definitely come in just to get their lost rose back. Enid just shrugged and hid her smile behind some trashy gossip magazine. She was the one who found the second rose, along with a rather short poem.

"Jeez, listen to this guys!", she called, giving the rose a precise, gentle kick so that it landed safely into the vase. Rad and KO crowded around the counter, eager to hear what the note said. Enid cleared her throat and began reading in the cheesiest romantic voice she could muster. "This rose is red, quite a beautiful hue, but I prefer instead, flush of the color blue.", she started, striking a couple of dramatic poses for good measure. Rad snickered at her antics while KO looked positively awed by the poetry.

"Enid, that was so beautiful! Who do you think could write something so amazing?!?", he asked, hopping in place excitedly. Enid rolled her eyes and slipped the note under the counter, the gears in her head turning. "I dunno, KO. Whoever it is clearly has it bad for someone.", she replied, giving Rad a sly grin. It went unnoticed, as Rad picked KO up and let the little hero rest on his shoulder.

"Man, who writes poetry anymore? Why not just ask someone out?", he asked, giving KO a little head pat. He smirked and flexed before he bragged, "I guess some guys just have it hard. Not everyone can be as cool as me!" KO agreed happily, and the store employees soon got back to their work. And by that I mean KO did whatever menial tasks Enid and Rad didn't feel like doing.

A few days later, after a particularly difficult fight with Raymond that involved bad sports puns, a chicken, and a possessed television set, the trio tramped back to the store. They were exhausted, even hyper little KO was quiet for once, and he probably wouldn't have noticed the rose if it weren't for the fact that one of the thorns pricked his foot.

After a little sniffling and first aid care from Enid, the trio managed to find yet another poem to go with the rose. A slightly trampled rose was levitated into the vase, and KO was given the honors of reading this poem since he'd found the rose.

"The ocean reminds me of you, not only for the color, but of the way I drown in its depths, like I do with your eyes.", he recited, blinking a couple times in confusion. "Is this guy super tiny or something? How could you drown in someone's eyes if you weren't super small?", he asked, looking up at Enid from the spot he'd taken on her lap. "Well, it isn't-", she began, not at all surprised when Rad cut her off.

"It's not like, something literal. This person means they get caught in someone's eyes really badly, and can't like, look away from them because they're mesmerized by their beauty.", he replied, not noticing the weird look he got from Enid for a second. However, he quickly added, "I mean, I guess they could be super tiny? I don't know dude, poetry's too lame and nerdy for me to get."

KO bought it entirely, but Enid didn't. She didn't call Rad out though, and simply tucked the note away with the other one. "Well, either way... Someone in the bodega clearly has an admirer.", she stated, moving KO from her lap to the counter. He got all starry eyed at the prospect, momentarily forgetting he was supposed to be hurt as he jumped to his feet.

"Then we gotta find this secret admirer, and help them confess!", he exclaimed, realizing a second too late that he'd just put weight on his injured foot. Enid and Rad spent the next half hour soothing a crying KO as they treated his boo-boo. His little mission was pushed to the side for a couple days, until they found the fourth rose.

Or, more accurately, Mr. Gar found the fourth rose. After a long, awkward minute of stuttering and avoiding eye contact with the employees, he handed over the rose and the attached note before he hurried off to his office. Before Enid or KO could get a chance to even see the note, Rad used his cool powers to levitate over to himself.

Unlike the other two, his eyes scanned the words a few times before he read it. "I was never programmed to pine, yet I find myself doing so for you, my mechanical heart is no longer mine, it belongs to the alien of blue.", he mumbled, eyebrows knitting together in confusion. KO and Enid went really quiet for a second, then Enid burst into hysterical laughter while KO got the hugest grin on his face.

"Rad, do you know what this means?!?", he shouted, running up to his best friend with that starry look in his eyes again. "It means you're the one with the secret admirer! Oh man, I wonder who it is? It could be anybody, you're so cool and strong and who wouldn't like you?", he rambled, pacing around the floor quickly. Rad only scoffed, his cheeks darkening slightly.

The note was crammed into his pocket, though, even as he insisted nobody with good enough taste to like him would confess through a cheesy poem. Still, for the rest of his shift he went about with a little, content grin on his face. Anytime his eyes would wander over to the growing collection of roses, that familiar flush would creep up the back of his neck and spread to his cheeks.

KO began analyzing the notes from before, using his half hour break to call Dendy in for her genius. She brought some weird little machine along, and fed the two scraps of paper to it despite Rad's little cry of protest. "This is a highly developed machine I've constructed myself, Radicles. There is merely a 0.001% chance that the chemical processes the papers are going through could cause any sort of physical damage to their structure. Besides, you'll find that even if the papers are damaged, the results will more than make up for that.", she explained, looking up briefly to make sure he was following before looking back to the machine.

Eventually, the screen went blank before it was filled with page after page of text. Dendy looked it over closely, KO grinning from ear to ear as he waited for the results. Enid seemed disinterested, as always, and seemed to be enamored by the bright screen of her phone as her fingers flew across the keyboard.

"Judging by the prose your admirer uses, and the chemical traces my machine has detected on the paper... I would say your admirer is not only quite smitten with you, but he is also that of a mechanical nature.", she finally said, nodding slightly to herself. At Rad's blank look, Dendy sighed and reiterated, "Your secret admirer really likes you, and he's a robot." KO let out a huge gasp of surprise, while Rad seemed stunned into silence. "We don't even know that many robots! What if it's Darrel?!? Or... Or Mr. Boxman?!?", he cried, looking distressed at the thought of their arch nemesis having a crush on Rad.

"Oh please, Mr. Boxman isn't even fully mechanical, he just makes robots. Besides, he's too busy fawning over his client to think of Rad like that.", Enid commented. She smirked as she sent off another text, then finally put her phone down. "It's clearly Raymond. Darrel doesn't have any other interests besides making his dad proud, and Raymond is the only robot we know that's cheesy enough to write poetry. And honestly, who else would use the word pine besides him?", she added, quirking an eyebrow at them all.

Dendy seemed pleased enough with the results of her machine, and bid KO and his friends goodbye before she left. Rad was still in a state of shock, his brain still processing everything. Even when Mr. Gar came by and yelled at him for not working, he was slow to start stocking the shelves. KO was mildly worried for his best friend, and didn't understand how Enid seemed so calm and matter of fact about the whole situation.

"Isn't... Isn't this bad, Enid?", he asked quietly, head tilted to the side in confusion. She tensed slightly at the question, and put her phone down once more so she could bring KO to eye level with her. "Why exactly would it be bad, KO?", she asked, keeping her voice low. A little worry crept into her chest when she could see KO struggling to put his thoughts into words.

"Well... Rad's a good guy! And... And Raymond is a bad guy! I thought bad guys only liked bad guys and good guys only liked good guys!", he finally blurted out, immediately looking embarrassed. Enid let out a huge sigh of relief, glad that she wouldn't have to have /that/ conversation with KO.

"Well... People don't decide who they like, KO. Neither do robots, I suppose. You just like who you like.", she explained, giving him a soft smile. KO nodded slowly, then brightened up almost immediately. "You mean like how you like Red Action-", he began, the rest of the sentence muffled when Enid clapped a hand over his mouth. "KO, you need to help Rad with the bottom shelves!", she demanded hurriedly, tossing him over to the super soft pillows on aisle seven. The little hero let out a happy cheer as he flew through the air, and landed with a nice bounce on the pillows.

For nearly a whole month after that, the roses and poems weren't mentioned. KO tried to bring them up at one point, but a silent stare from Rad had him quickly changing the subject to a video Enid had shared. KO and Enid scoured the little store for another rose and poem, but always came up empty handed. That is, until KO went out back to take the trash out during Rad's break.

He barely managed to withhold a gasp of surprise when he saw Raymond there, a smug look on his face as he presented Rad with a bouquet of roses. "Dude, I swear if you wrote more than one cheesy poem...", Rad threatened, the dark flush on his face instantly negating any intimidation he had going for him. "Why, Radicles my darling, you know the rules! One rose, one poem! And since I got you 12 roses...", Raymond trailed off, giving Rad a rather wicked grin.

Rad let out a very flustered sound and snatched the roses away from Raymond, grumbling under his breath about annoying boyfriends. "I'll read them later, you giant nerd.", he said, the grin tugging at his lips causing KO to scream internally. His idol was an even bigger softie than he'd thought! "Well, I'm afraid I must deprive you of my presence, my darling! Might I steal one last kiss to remember you by?", Raymond asked, batting his eyelashes innocently.

Rad rolled his eyes and pulled his boyfriend in for a quick kiss, pulling away a few seconds later with a flushed face. "You're literally going to see me at the diner in three hours, dude. I guess I can't blame you though. Three hours without me must seem like three days to you, Mr. 'Oh how I pine for thee'.", he teased. KO was then left to question how a robot could be capable of blushing as much as Raymond was able to blush. The robot in question left quickly after that, and Rad let out the most un-rad giggle before he turned around to head back inside. He froze when he saw KO standing there, a nervous sound passing his lips.

"Rad...", KO began, shaking his finger at his idol in a scolding manner. "I can't believe you didn't tell me you guys were dating! How would I have known to start planning the wedding, huh?", he asked, giving Rad an upset look. Rad only sputtered in response, the thought of a wedding between him and Raymond too much for his poor brain to handle. Enid poked her head out the back door, looking mildly annoyed with both of them. "Dude, your break is over. Sneak kisses with your dorky boyfriend on your own time, not on store time.", she griped, pulling them both back inside after she kicked the trash into the garbage bin.

As embarrassed as Rad was that KO had found out, and Enid had apparently known the whole time, he was mostly relieved that neither of them seemed upset by the fact that he and Raymond were together. In hindsight, he thought, he should've known from the beginning that they wouldn't care. When it came to their blue friend, all they ever wanted was for him to be happy. And if he was happy with a dorky, pun spouting robot, then who were they to judge?

He couldn't help but smile as he clocked back in and went to work, a new spring to his step as he stocked the shelves. Enid and KO stopped looking for roses, and Rad stopped hiding them from everyone. The vase was once more full of beautiful roses, and the tension that had lingered in the shop had dissipated.

Mr. Gar didn't really know what was going on, but he didn't question it because Rad was actually doing his work and getting it done on time. As long as his employees weren't doing drugs or slacking off, who was he to judge?

#fanfiction #radmond #radicles #Raymond #ok ko let's be heroes #Mr. Gar #k.o.#enid #here you go #didn't know how to end this so #mlep

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