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#data structures for assholes

a-risk-to-take · 1 year

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Andrew Hussie is often criticized for the “hostility of the narrative” in Homestuck, but there were warnings early in the work that this would be the case

#homestuck #data structures for assholes #narrative

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bd-charlie · 6 months

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Hi, I just popped into your ask box to tell you that you seem like a cool person.

Yeah.

That's it.

Also, I don't think your art is badly drawn. It's actually pretty good. :)

- ScOOC (@concernedcrimson mod)

aaskdkfk thank you so much!! im honored ^u^

and likewise- i think you're super cool yourself!!! i always love answering scanon asks and reading through the conversations they have with dsprite. ALSO UR ARTSTYLE IS SUPER RAD i love it sm.

#bdhs #charlietalks #scanon #i also love that you pick up on a lot of the silly references i stick in johns work #like i didn't think anyone would get the “data structure for assholes” parallel i was making with johns communication book heheh #but you got it pretty much right away

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cellarspider · 2 months

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14/?? Gnosis, and lack thereof

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

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We return to the movie that could’ve been a contender, Prometheus. In this episode, a two-year-old poisons a man.

I’m not alone in thinking David is the most well-realized character in this movie. Michael Fassbender was given the most space to act through expression and reaction to others and his environment, which helps create an android character that has much more inner life than his human castmates. He also gets what I’d call the Data bonus: android characters can more easily get away with screamingly clunky exposition or explicitly stating the meaning of a scene. You can give them absolute gibberish if you want to, and it sounds perfectly logical when they say it.

youtube

[Video description: A small selection of technobabble from Star Trek: The Next Generation, mostly featuring Data.]

David is also the easiest to be sympathetic to, because people keep being assholes to him.

Yes, David has received mysterious orders from a mysterious man who’s still in stasis. It’s Peter Weyland. It’s obviously Peter Weyland, this is why David has the dream-reading helmet thing that felt so out of place at the start of the movie. This is also why Guy Pierce, a 45-year-old, was hired to play an infinity-year-old man. Weyland was going to appear as his ideal self in one of these dream sequences, but it was cut from the movie. So instead, we just have Vickers demanding to know what “he” wants, and the answer is “Try harder”.

Peter Weyland, beginning a trend for the company bearing his name, has an obsession with this alien stuff. …This trend was actually begun by Charles Bishop Weyland in a completely different continuity that also featured ancient alien contact with Earth, but hey, details. This Weyland wants results, damn it, and David gets an excuse to kill one of the crew.

Although it’s not quite that simple. The movie indicates that David can’t go against orders from the company, especially from Weyland. He has to “try harder”, and he’s brought back one of those alien urns that apparently nobody cares to examine but him.

It’s got a goth lava lamp in it.

While we don’t get much indication David knows why this stuff is dangerous to organic life, I’ll give the movie a very tiny pass: it’s implied that David has figured out how to read the Engineer’s cuneiform script. He decants a droplet of Menacing Black Goo onto his (Weyland-branded) fingertip, and sets off to find a test subject.

Thank god, he chooses Holloway.

I don’t like not liking characters. I don’t generally anticipate seeing someone’s comeuppance, but this movie gets me damn close to that feeling. In the movie’s partial defense, some of this was probably intended. Mainstream American fiction sets a high bar for what a bigot looks like, and Holloway’s been clearing that. I’m less certain the movie knows everyone’s behaving like a bigot, but we’ll get to that eventually. But Holloway? Definitely.

This creates a fairly interesting scene. One that even reaches towards good. David has the means to kill Holloway. The audience knows this. And we get to watch when he makes the decision to commit to it, and why. And, blessedly, it actually ties into an intentional theme of this movie.

Holloway’s still drunk and miserable–he’d previously muttered that the alien structure on the planet was “just another tomb.”

I, speaking hyperbolically, would consider that grounds enough to off him. He’s an archaeologist who can be sent into a drinking binge by finding a thing made by dead people. An archaeologist. That in itself is such a ridiculous indicator of how unfit this character is for his role.

But no, he wanted to meet his maker, “To get answers.” Sure, lots of people have existential questions they feel are important to them. That is understandable. Even clueless assholes can wonder about that. But it takes an especially hubristic asshole to decide they’re the one worthy of asking someone who might have the answer.

Did anybody notice they didn’t bring any diplomats or orators on this trip? They didn’t bring any cultural exchange gifts with them when they approached the alien structure? They weren’t treating the Engineers as people, just something to discover.

David, someone else they’re not treating like people, asks Holloway “Why do you think your people made me?”, and the answer he gets is “Because we could.” David is quietly but openly disappointed in that.

This is the whiplash of this movie. We have the biggest bunch of shambolic assholes klutzing around, waiting to get killed off by the plot, and then we have David expressing the horror of Valentinian gnosticism.

In brief, because even the wikipedia page says “The theology [...] is extremely complicated and difficult to follow”, the strain of Christian gnosticism expressed by the 2nd century theologian Valentinus believes that the world was created by an ignorant being. They believed there was a benevolent god out there which was/produced Jesus, but the “demiurge” (lit. “craftsman”) who created the world was not this deity. The demiurge was an imperfect, lesser being, that believed itself to be the supreme god of the universe. In Valentinianism, as with other gnostic schools, to be born into the world was to be trapped within a creation of a creature that was prone to fits of abusive behavior.

Gnostic christianity was, at the time, an attempt to square a number of contradictory ideas: the incredibly influential ideas of Plato on the formation of the universe, the growing theology of the new Christian movement, and the examples of divine wrath and jealousy in Jewish scripture, that were hard to square with what early Christians saw as a less violent deity they wanted to worship. There were probably also some anti-Jewish Egyptian myths thrown in as well, depicting their god as a donkey-headed incarnation of the malevolent deity Set. Some may recognize that particular slander from its deployment against early Christians, including our first-ever depiction of Jesus’ crucifixion: a rude bit of graffiti.

In our time, there’s only one remaining gnostic (non-christian) religion with direct continuity to the period, the Mandaeans. Christian gnosticism was deemed heretical, when one of the many different gospels circulating at the time was selected as orthodox in the 4th century, along with an attendant theology. But it remains a fertile ground for philosophers, fiction-writers, and every once in a while someone reinvents bits of it when they hit upon contradictions in christian thought.

The latter seems to be the case with Ridley Scott. He’s sometimes described as an atheist, but his actual statements on the matter show he’s either casually gnostic or a deist, very much influenced by christian doctrine:

“If we looked at the whole thing practically speaking, the Big Bang occurred and then we go through this evolution of millions, billions of years where, by coincidence, all the right biological accidents came out the right way. To an extent, that doesn't make sense unless there was a controlling decider or mediator in all of that. So who was that? Or what was that? Are we one big grand experiment in the basic overall blink of the universe, or the galaxy? In which case, who is behind it?”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/films/callingtheshots/ridley_scott.shtml

Tangent: that question came right after he’s quoted as saying “I think there's no originality [in modern films]. I think everyone is stealing from everyone else and going back to the originals. I usually go in for 20 minutes and then get up and leave.” This interview was back in 2006. The next year he’d direct American Gangster (loosely based on a biography), then Body of Lies (Roger Ebert called it "a James Bond plot"), then Robin Hood (it’s Robin Hood), then Prometheus, the movie I only watched because it seemed to be in dialog with a film he directed in 1979. Buddy, if that was your problem, you were part of the problem.

But anyway. We have a director who had stated interest in a christian-influenced cosmogony: he seems to state a belief that we exist because we are supposed to exist, rather than being a random event. This is a movie where he does seem to be trying to do something with that. He is beginning with that premise, and using Alien as the shared language to express it. He doesn’t know why we exist, but he can imagine why we would make someone exist.

Placing that in amongst these characters is bleak to the point of puerility, frankly. Why would we create a being like us? Well, this one asshole doesn’t know.

David, at this point in Prometheus, has already determined that humans are fallible creators. Hell, he’s decided the Engineers were also failable. He, y’know, witnessed how gooey one of their corpses was. But he’s yet to decide on whether humans are just ignorant, trying and failing to be good–as per Valentinus–or if they’re actively malevolent.

The fact that David doesn’t poison Holloway’s drink until just before handing it over does neatly show that he was quietly given a chance to answer that question. Holloway continues to be a jackass and, when asked what he’d do to answer the existential question he wanted to pose to the Engineers, he says he’d do “anything and everything”.

The movie eventually treats Peter Weyland as especially deluded in his self-serving quest to get the Engineers to answer his more selfish questions, but I don’t think his ego was unique in this movie.

On our journey into the movie this time, Prometheus has attempted to grapple with subjects its script hasn’t earned. Next time, it incorporates imagery it hasn’t earned. It’s worse than this scene, but in a far more subtle way.

If you want a neat look on european and middle eastern mysticism from an academic standpoint, Esoterica is a pretty damn good channel, put together by a self-described “dialectical materialist in the tradition of Structural Marxism”. I’ll happily take recommendations on other academic sources aimed at the general audience.

https://youtu.be/7EwRD6SzXws

https://st-takla.org/Feastes-&-Special-Events/Coptic-Nativity-of-Jesus-Christ-Milad-El-Masih/Coptic-Jesus-Incarnation-Christmas-03-Incarnation-of-the-Word-Book.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masbuta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drabsha

https://www.deviantart.com/pretty--kittie/art/Prometheus-Engineer-407322241

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon_(Gnosticism)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sethianism

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(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

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#Prometheus 2012 #Prometheus (2012)#I've been threatening to go on a ramble about gnostic philosophy since the start of this movie #it's finally happened #I'm not a scholar of this stuff #but neither is Ridley Scott

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cadmusfly · 3 months

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Analysing the Quality of Napoleon's Marshals With Silly Data Science

Let's talk numbers and laugh at funny graphs with missing data!

Other people in this fandom do really lovely detailed information posts, I do weird fanfic, dragon shitposting, body pillow design shitposting and run a stupid Lannes ask rp blog. But! I'm also a programmer with an interest in Numbers, and today we're going to Analyse These Dead Frenchmen with a bunch of screenshots of graphs.

Ethan Arsht published a really interesting article called Napoleon was the Best General Ever, and the Math Proves it., where using data scraped off Wikipedia articles, he creates a statistical model drawing from multiple variables per battle to calculate How Good A General Is At Winning.

Give the article a read, it's great stuff, but if you don't feel like it, he basically applies WAR - "Wins Above Replacement" - which is a value from baseball that measures how many wins a player is worth when compared to a replacement.

So the general's WAR would be how well they compare to a completely average general who replaced them. Yes, as Arsht says, "in other words, I would find the generals’ WAR, in war."

But as he says, this is not a stringent historical analysis and is more of a fun thought experiment. Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive dataset on this topic that he had access to, but it is Wikipedia the crowdsourced online encyclopedia, so it is going to have holes and inaccuracies. And this was written seven years ago, and the data was collected then, so any updates to these articles since then wouldn't be reflected.

And it's not a perfect model that takes into account everything - it's an approximation, a whole bunch of number crunching. I haven't looked too deeply into how the numbers work exactly, even though I could.

I think that 0 would be "completely and utterly average"? A positive WAR is good, a negative WAR is not. Napoleon is the best general ever at 16.679 WAR, the next highest is Caesar at 7.445 WAR.

(Link, you can hover over each battle and look at each datapoint!)

But I'm interested in Napoleon's marshals. The 26 men he raised up to military nobility! The dramatic assholes who kept arguing with each other. I'll post links for all of them at the end of this, but I won't be screenshotting each of their WAR graphs, just a few.

I'm not entirely sure how the scraper collected the information about what battles a commander is considered in "charge" of - I tried looking at the provided code repository but I am reminded that data science people bless them are not really good at structuring or publishing code and why are all the html pages just straight up saved in the root folder why are the jupyter notebook outputs just uncleared aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Oh yeah this was scraped from seven years ago so current wikipedia pages won't be reflective of what's on the graphs - so we can assume that this is just grabbing stuff from the "Commanders and leaders" part from each individual battle page and collating them into numbers

Anyway let's look at the iron man himself, Davout, considered to be the best of Napoleon's marshals.

(Link)

Heh, here we see the first hole in the dataset - Jena-Auerstedt is considered to be one battle, and Napoleon would like you to think that's the case.

Anyway, pretty good! Let's look at Jean Lannes, the lively Gascon

(Link)

Oooooh, even better than Davout! Helps he didn't go to Russia. Wait, why is Aspern-Essling dated to before Ratisbon, especially when Lannes died in the former?

Let's look at André Masséna, also known as being pretty cool:

(Link)

Damn, neat, though I think there's a lot of omissions here.

Here's Murat:

(Link)

Lol Tolentino, I do like how Murat Peaked there a little bit

But we're forgetting a certain redhead, aren't we?

(Link)

Ouch. But also Waterloo not appearing there, hmmm.

Anyway let's finish off the screenshots with Napoleon's greatest strategist, Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the man that Wellington called a master of the defensive!

(Link)

honestly this is the entire reason why i wanted to write this post

in soult's defense - as a soult defender - he had a pretty shitty army full of conscripts, was isolated, was occasionally pretty bad at adapting tactically to new surprises and had to deal with the english being stubborn fuckers, but he was brilliant in setting things up strategically and forcing the english to catch up through a fighting retreat with a demoralised army, stopping them from closing in on france too

but also the way this graph bullies soult so hard makes me laugh a lot

Anyway, yeah, these graphs are definitely inaccurate and I'm also posting these to see the Napoleonic community on tumblr's reaction to them, but they are a fun way to engage with history!

Just don't take them seriously, and feel free to argue in the tags/comments/reblogs

I could theoretically use this guy's code to rerun this just for the Marshals now - I know my way around some data science code - but I do have a lot on my plate, but it would be a fun experiment!

Marshal WAR Graph Links

Note: So these are under the Wikipedia article names at the time that the web scraper was run seven years ago so some of these names turned out to be different from what they are now and I had to do a bit of digging to fix some

you can definitely tell that the information is incomplete on a lot of these, again i repeat the information was scraped off wikipedia seven years ago

Louis-Nicolas Davout

Jean Lannes

Joachim Murat

Michel Ney

André Masséna

Jean-de-Dieu Soult

Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey (one battle lol)

Jean-Baptiste Jourdan

Charles-Pierre Augereau

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte aka Charles XIV John of Sweden (Two battles and only Swedish ones I think)

Guillaume Brune

Édouard Mortier (two battles)

Jean-Baptiste Bessières (two battles)

François Christophe de Kellermann (one battle, Valmy)

François Joseph Lefebvre (two battles)

Charles-Victor Perrin (ouch)

Étienne Macdonald

Nicolas Oudinot (lol)

Auguste de Marmont (loll)

Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr

Józef Poniatowski (three battles but hmm. pretty bad but feel like there's too much missing info here)

Emmanuel de Grouchy (two battles, can't make a Where's Grouchy joke)

Marshals Without Graphs Not because they didn't command anything but I couldn't find their graphs on the website or in the code repo

Catherine-Dominique de Pérignon

Jean-Mathieu-Philibert Sérurier

Louis-Gabriel Suchet (wtf? maybe seven years ago the documentation on him was sad)

EDIT: wait i was looking at the notebook (the uh place where the code was being run, to see if i could run the code myself)

soult is one of the lowest ranked generals overall on this initial list pfftHAHAHhahahahahahahaha

#napoleon's marshals #napoleonic era #napoleonic wars #napoleonic shitpost #cadmus rambles #cad rambles about dead frenchmen on main #jean lannes #louis-nicolas davout #joachim murat #michel ney #andre massena #im not tagging all of them #jean-de-dieu soult

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lackablazeical · 5 months

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💚🐉Ishida Miyamoto🐉💚

Specific trigger warnings -

Masochistic behavior, self hate, body hate, chronic/degenerative illness, medical malpractice, medical tools (i.e syringes, blades, etc), experimentation, objectification, anger issues, emotional dependence

Specific boundaries w/ this character -

Ishida is a disabled character. Please treat him thus. Do not say he does not 'look disabled', etc etc.

General info -

Ishida's birthday is April 18th. He is an Aries ♈️

Receives love through Words of Affirmation, gives love through Acts of Service and Quality time.

Ishida is bisexual with a preference towards women.

Ishida has BPD (Bipolar Disorder).

Ishida has ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder).

Ishida has MD (Muscle Dysmorphia).

Personality traits -

Ishida is impulsive, determined, friendly, adventurous, clingy, trusting, gullible, and open-hearted.

Ishida tends to do things on a whim, for the excitement or rush of it all. He then has to deal with the consequences of it, which he greatly dislikes.

Ishida never gives up once he sets his mind to something, no matter if he hates it or not.

Ishida loves meeting new people and making friends, and can talk to anyone, anywhere.

Ishida is clingy, especially to Donnie. He loves having the attention, and often feels extremely down when Donnie ignores him or doesn't want him around. Same with Usagi, as well.

Ishida is a bit too trusting, and will often believe things Donnie tells him immediately. He also trusts the people around him not to lie, and takes what they say at face value.

Ishida is very open with his love and affection, and voices his care and support of his loved ones often.

Important details -

His Health -

Ishida has conditions including hemophilia, asthma, POTS, low blood sugar, chronic fatigue syndrome, anemia, and poor circulation.

Ishida has a detached 'Ki', or soul. His soul is not bound to his body properly. This makes it so he is mostly unaffected by mystic spells, but is also connected to why he is so ill and disconnected from his body. Mystic magic does not work to improve his health because it tries to heal him through his Ki, which doesn't work. Donnie's medical practices only focus on his body, which make them more effective.

Donnie uses extreme medical practice to help Ishida, making Ishida much more energetic, strong, confident, and healthy. If Ishida didn't have his meds, he'd have about a month before he'd be right back where he started.

His beliefs -

Ishida's element is fire.

Ishida feels a strong connection to fire, ash, marble, and dragons.

Ishida will burn things like paper, old clothes, or bites of his food and pray over the ash. He doesn't burn meat or pictures with peoples faces, as he finds it disrespectful.

Ishida will pray/pay respects to buildings or structures made of marble, he will do the same if he's eating/drinking from a marble bowl.

Ishida will doodle dragons often, and finds great value in art of them. He gets very starstruck around yokai that look like dragons too.

His beliefs about Usagi's death -

He believed Usagi was dead, and felt heavy guilt over it. He wished he had been healthier/stronger, to be able to protect his brothers.

Ishida was often helping comfort Kenichi, and he tended to 'feed into' Kenichi's idea that Usagi was still alive.

His dynamic with Donnie -

Ishida considers Donnie his best (non-blood related) friend.

He trusts Donnie with his life, and listens to whatever Donnie says. Donnie has a say in everything Ishida does, including what he eats and how he spends his time.

Ishida may occasionally call Donnie out for his bad behavior though, telling him if he's being an asshole or going too far. Donnie doesn't really care what Ishida has to say.

Ishida allows Donnie to run experiments on him, to test his pain tolerance and allow Donnie to gather data.

Ishida enjoys snuggling with Donnie, because of the vibrations from when Donnie churrs.

Ishida loves to spend time in Donnie's lab, and often goes in there to draw, work out, or just generally hang.

Ishida holds Donnie to a very high pedestal because of how Donnie had helped him, so may also brush off Donnie's outbursts/general rudeness because of this.

Ishida learned some sign language to be able to communicate with Donnie when he is overstimulated.

Fun facts -

Ishida's favorite food is bananas, and his favorite drink is coke.

Ishida's favorite animal is a dragon. He likes to doodle them occasionally.

Ishida heavily dislikes plans changing.

Ishida has very few sensory issues, but notably he hates 'light' sensations (elbows brushing, gentle breezes, etc.)

Ishida has a talent for pickpocketing/ sleight of hand. He is also good at magic, like card tricks.

Ishida isn't a morning person, but still always wakes up early.

Voice claim [Ross Lynch] -

Tags that include Ishida -

#addams! Ishida, #addams! Donnida, #addams! Miyamotos

#addams! tmnt au #addams! ishida #addams! donnida #addams! miyamotos

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deep-spaghetti · 4 months

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my undertale act structure analysis post is getting traction all of a sudden and ppl in the tags have all sorts of ideas about what Specific Gamer Behavior undertale’s narrative is condemning and like that is the most lame way to interpret that narrative. if the emotional and thematic core of undertale revolved specifically around some gamer bros who really ground toby fox’s gears it would be a shitty story. if i were to pick A Condemnation or at least a concern undertale expresses it would be entitlement surrounding art and rapid consumption of it. it offers you its story, its compelling world and characters, its happy ending and then it’s done. at least internally, it doesn’t really guide you to anything but true pacifist. a no mercy run is not something flowey eggs you on to do at the end of neutral runs, it’s not an encouraged mode of play in “The RPG where no one has to die!” the entire no mercy run is about how it is your active, conscious decision to have gone out of your way to do harm, even when it is actively more tedious and difficult than any other option. if you engage with its narrative exclusivey through the lens of it being a meta spin video game tropes and mechanics and nothing more, then yeah, it does look like the thesis statement is “completionism is immoral” but i think an extremely critical thing that people miss is that no mercy is not an encouraged mode of play. there is an entire discussion around how implementation functionally is encouragement, “if it’s in the game on purpose, the developer didn’t put it there to keep it out of players’ hands.” but again observing through the lens of narrative and not activity (or activity as a means to communicate narrative) the implication is that feverish unconditional consumption of media is destructive. the player is literally given the agency to suck the life and joy out of a game about quirky characters and big cheesy emotions because that’s what happens when you are dead set on seeing as much as possible instead of appreciating what’s there. althought undertales [FIGHT] and [MERCY] buttons are functionally similar to a dialogue option to be nice or an asshole, undertale’s no mercy differentiates itself from other games’ “evil” routes because it actively discourages engaging with the evil option on a mechanical level. you have to tediously grind away literally every enemy through a small habdful of encounter configurations in every area and the game denies you as much of itself as it can at every turn, long stretches of tedious grinding interrupted by deliberately ludicrous difficulty spikes, trying to act as roadblocks so utterly insurmountable that you just quit. if you do succeed, your reward is a copy-tainting flag that makes a point of ruining your good endings if you every try for them again. it is an actively discouraged mode of play on every level above implementation. you are not supposed to play this way, and the only reason you would (and again this is from like the gameworld’s internal moral perspective, enjoying a challenge or wanting to experience an aspect of the narrative yourself is a perfectly valid reason to want to do it) is if you wanted to exhaust something you enjoyed of every last drop of stimulation it could offer. undertale is a game packed with secrets and even with direct messages to data miners. it was aware from minute one that it was going to be gutted and picked apart and given a million cover to cover skimmings across the world because that’s just what happens to art in the information age. i think it definitely does actively encourage paratextual engagement, everything to do with FUN values and gaster are absurdly rare random chance events that try to foster discussions about mysteries only witnessed by a precious few players, but i think it does resent that to some extent it cant truly have any real mysteries. so quickly was every code cracked and every secret shared to millions, because that’s just what people do to things they love, they shatter them into pieces so they can put them back together a thousand times.

#interesting i didn’t know there was a character limit on tumblr posts #this post came 10 characters short lol

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qdbs-writes · 1 year

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May I please request headcanons for Cassie, Jacqui, Sonya, and Johnny reacting to their female military S/O being arrested and jailed for a crime she didn't commit because she stood up against sexual harassment and corruption?

MK Peeps x Falsely-Imprisoned!Reader

Cassie Cage

When she first hears that you're in jail, she assumes you were put in the drunk tank or something, but when Security Forces refuse to let her see you or release you she realises that something is wrong.

So Cassie breaks in to see you, and she finds that you're under file for "violating the safety and integrity of Security Forces data" which she knows is complete bullshit.

She visits you in your cell and you explain that you tried to expose some higher-ups for their sexual harassment and then they had you locked up. Cassie is pissed, and she vows to destroy the assholes who've falsely arrested you.

Jacqui Briggs

When Jacqui learns that you're in custody, she knows something has gone wrong because you were a key witness to a string of SA trials.

Jacqui knows about corrupt and sexist power structures: she's an African American woman, but she never expected it to extend to the Security Forces or to impact you.

Knowing she can't trust the Security Forces, she pulls every news outlet she can find into investigating your arrest and the miscarriage of justice that's occurred, hoping media attention would be enough to force your release.

Sonya Blade

Sonya had her concerns about you managing the Security Forces SA claims internally, and all of those suspicions are confirmed when you're held in custody for a crime you would never commit.

When Sonya realises how far the corruption has spread, she gathers all members who are loyal to her and tears the Security Forces apart, stripping those who arrested you of all authority in the organisation.

When she's regained control, she has you released in exchange for the rapey assholes who tried to stop their abuse from getting out, and Sonya will use the fullest extent of the law to punish them.

Johnny Cage

When Johnny learns that you've been imprisoned after trying to expose SA from high-ranking Security Force officers, he leaves and exposes the officers' crimes and your unlawful arrest on his social media, where he has millions of followers.

Soon military police and news helicopters surround the Security Forces base and it's not long before a UN court is held to break down the accusations of SA and corruption that has festered within the Security Forces ranks.

By the time you're released, news cameras and reporters surround you trying to get your opinion, but Johnny comes and guides you away, eager to protect you from any more exploitation.

#mortal kombat #mortal kombat x reader #cassie cage #cassie cage x reader #jacqui briggs #jacqui briggs x reader #sonya blade #sonya blade x reader #johnny cage #johnny cage x reader #qdbs writing #queuedbs

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lockboxbooks · 7 months

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Overwhelmed 1C: Penny (RWBY) is ambushed by two rouge robots that fuck and infect her with a lust based virus.

Penny had been given a directive to explore a sealed section of an older wing of the Atlas RND division. The sole directive she was given was to collect data and blueprint material from sealed weapon files and to return to Central Command of the Atlesian Military Offices to present to Commanding Officer Ciel Soliel and Specialist Winter Schnee all the material she was able to de-scramble. She wanted to happily prove herself as a strong, driven, and utterly capable Android for her fellow soldiers and the commander in chief of Atlas' entire Military complex and centralized government.

Penny had few supplies as she made her way deep into the sealed RND division; including her weapon Floating Array, a collection of data storage devices, and a map of the sealed division with ear-marked locations of interest. Penny watched as both Ciel and Winter stood at the entrance of the RND division and waited until she had passed through to reactivate the doors; enclosing the redheaded android in a dark silence.

Penny had been able to scan through the documents related to the first RND division and why it had been sealed; most had been redacted with only those with Specialist Schnee's or General Ironwood's security clearance. But what she had been able to scrub from the redacted files was that she wasn't the first artificial lifeform that Atlas had created, but she was the first not to fail. Other attempts were plagued with infected code and it had been decided that they couldn't be allowed beyond the RND division lest they destroy Atlas' Information Technology platforms and super-structures.

Penny had been careful, shifting through the dark halls and large libraries of the RND division as she gathered the data Specialist Schnee and General Ironwood demanded she retrieve. Now it was time to return to the origin point and hand the data to her superiors. It was as she passed through what she believed was a shortcut, that Penny knocked over a chair with her curvy ass; causing a booming noise to fill the cavernous chamber. Penny started to run, knowing her position had been given away; stealth was no longer a viable option for her. If only she'd been built to be faster; just as she saw the hallway to the origin point she was tackled by two of the defective automatons.

The backpack containing Floating Array and the data was torn from her and thrown away into the darkness. The soft fabrics she was dressed in was ripped into tatters as the mad machines slapped their massive, throbbing cocks against her pale skin.

"P-please I-I can get you help." Penny pleaded with them but only saw hungry, vacant looks in their eyes. Whoever they had been before their code got corrupted were long gone. Now, they were just savage virus factories.

Penny tried to leave but the Android behind her gripped her arms tightly, he had to have been built to exert more force than she was; she couldn't even budge an inch. "... Pussy... f-fuck pussy.. breed ... pussy... fuck pussy stupid..." The Android droned out as they forced Penny to her knees and slammed into her. Each thrust came with immense power and blinding speeds, Penny felt her body and her software be stretched to their limits as they pounded her senseless. Her asshole and pussy were being gaped as the servos in her face started to fail, leaving her with a slutty ahegao-look as the infected code was being forcefully downloaded into her started to corrupt her central matrix.

"Cock! S-so much cock!" Penny found herself screaming as she let the doomed Androids use her like an onahole. "DRAIN EVERYTHING INTO ME, I AM SENSATIONAL!" Penny screamed as she used her multi-point muscle systems to massage and milk her lover's into cumming hard and deep into her body. Penny came over and over as her body overheated in an attempt to try to protect her from the viral malware; but all her systems were being overwhelmed and overrun by everything she was experiencing.

By the end of it all, Penny had a vacant expression and had no idea how long she'd been between the two infected machines; but she watched as they both slowed to a stop. She barely remembered her mission and lunged, expertly striking their shutdown points and finally freed herself. She tried to ignore the sensations within her as she gathered her things and returned to the origin point. Definite signs that she was now no different than the other machines sealed within this section of Atlas Central Command.

Penny felt her holes all trembling with desire as she hoped to meet with General Ironwood, Specialist Schnee, and Officer Soliel. So she could show all the things she downloaded during her time in the sealed RND division. "S-so many... u-unfucked cocks... so much cum to drink..." Penny moaned as the infected code took more and more of her mind. Floating Array and her case of Data drives long forgotten as the image of her superiors using her like a sex toy filled her mind.

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autumnbrambleagain · 5 months

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sure and here's one for sv so i can keep these assholes all consistent

including a few alternate semiotic structures for fun, including divine symbolic black-hole trinary solar system

i forgot to do these ref sheets proper with like DATA and FACTS tho because we have the joke line we've wanted to use for a while now under like

a section for sexuality like

bi, chimmering preference

the idea of making the sexuality "chimmering preference" is really funny to us ok

#autumn draws things #character tag sv

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pigcatapult · 2 years

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“Victim Group A is bigger than Victim Group B, so even bringing up that Victim Group B exists is discrimination against Victim Group A and proof you hate Victim Group A!”

This is a ridiculous bad argument. Even if there was only one (1) person in Victim Group B, they deserve the same accommodations and considerations as someone from Victim Group A. Saying they shouldn’t be is ridiculous because everyone is a person of equal worth. Saying they shouldn’t be is ridiculous because abuse is always wrong no matter who is doing it. Saying they shouldn’t be is ridiculous because abuse is always wrong no matter whom it’s being done to.

This ridiculous bad argument also seems to be the only argument the radfems one of my mutuals is arguing with have for why rape and abuse laws should not be gender neutral and resources for abused men should not exist. Well, that and using the very data skewed by those same gendered laws and the incentive structures that naturally follow those laws to argue against changing them.

Based on the behaviour and rhetoric I’ve seen on this very hellsite, I believe that radfems don’t just not give a shit about gender equality, but are explicitly and demonstrably hostile to it. They act like bigoted assholes jockeying to be the ones on top facing no repercussions for hitting the ones below them with sticks. They act afraid to be treated equally under the law.

We stan universal rights on this blog. Laws should apply to everyone or no-one. The law should be a shield that protects everyone equally, not a weapon to be wielded against only people you don’t like. Justice should be blind.

My blog, my rules. By interacting with this post, you are agreeing to either:

Not clutter my notes with misdirection, bad faith, or sweeping generalizations about ~50% of the population

Volunteer for the exclusive club that is my block list

#radfem bullshit #Piffy rants #rape tw #abuse tw

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gaykarstaagforever · 4 months

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I missed the fine details of the Linus Tech Tips implosion back when it happened, because I was starting a new job and dealing with workplace bullshit of my own (fortunately nothing quite so serious as what happened here).

But I'm nothing if not a little slut for other people's drama, so I watched Austin Green's 2 hour discussion of the LTT car going off a cliff.

youtube

Being 40 and not interested in Call of Duty, I am no longer always shopping for new overpriced hardware and so was never a huge Linus fan. Some of the little side channels were interesting enough background noise. Filled with bad data and lazy tests, apparently.

Like, you had one job, dude. And it wasn't to turn into a daily content farm with an accuracy rate rivaling what you would have gotten if you'd just had AI do it. You chucklehead.

I don't mean to be trite. This guy is a man-baby piece-of-shit, and ruined how many people's lives and livelihoods because he thought he was Steve Jobs or something? And Steve Jobs was also a huge asshole with emotional problems who treated people like necessary evils. But at least the company he worked for had a barebones functional corporate structure to smooth over all the internal fallout from his shenanigans.

It isn't like Linus didn't have the money to pay qualified people to handle his chaos. If he wanted to personally step back and do his dumb podcast - which he obviously did, or he wouldn't have hired 120 people to churn out bad videos in the first place - why didn't he turn management over to people who could just quietly run things for him? Instead he let whatever managers he had seemingly hired from the darkest recesses of Twitter yell at and grope whomever they wanted, so then he had to personally whine and threaten people to deal with the consequences.

Like...that's MORE work, not less, you weiner. And it immediately puts all your brand deals and corporate relationships in trouble, because real companies run by grown-ups aren't going to want to be associated with you and your egg carton of incel turds. I don't understand the math. Except that he just didn't give a single fuck so long as someone was handing him money, and he never figured it out beyond that.

Which is believable. I mean, who is he? Just some YouTuber who got big. That doesn't immediately qualify you to be good at anything besides whatever batch of skills that is. But that's why so many people in his position hire qualified corporate people to run their businesses, or at least agents and PR people and lawyers to deal with the boring day-to-day slog of contracts and paying bills and making sure people show up to work and stuff.

He didn't do that. He never learned that? He's out of Vancouver, and he didn't know he could do this any better?

Or is he just so greedy that any dollar spent on something not immediately generating 2 dollars wasn't appealing to him? That's such bad business. Like, his entire brand and career was always doomed the moment all the behind-the-scenes shit he refused to be a man about inevitably went public. And that is exactly what happened.

Businesses are inherently evil and exploitative. Sure. But they also pay all those people and have all those rules because they NEED TO. To follow the law, to not get sued, to stay solvent. How did a 35+ year old man, presumably with a mortgage and family, not ever learn this? I'm not much older than him, I don't even have a YouTube channel, and I knew this. Come on, dude.

...Also, LTT OnlyFans? Where you allegedly made at least one female employee flirt with guys sending her cock pics?? What kind of exploding clown car shit is that?? Where in Steve Jobs's biography did he sell iPhones by making his PA do topless conference calls? That sounds like something I would sarcastically suggest a failing company try. And I'm an idiot who has to remind myself that wrestling isn't real at least 4 times a week.

I hope Linus and the other Reddit trolls he hired go to jail or at least get fined for all the obviously illegal things they did. And Lord give the rest of us the strength to cancel them for all the other nonsense they pulled that didn't actually break Canadian law.

And if you still need product reviews to help you shop for graphics cards, watch Gamers Nexus, the guys who stood up to call LTT out in an unimpeachable way, back when they got nothing but flack for it. I can't vouch for their accuracy, but they at least seem to care about more than just pimping the Algorithm for money they can then ill-advisedly invest in doomed little tech startups no one cares about. Another thing Linus does.

Say what you will about Jimmy Donaldson, but at least he just rebranded crappy chocolate bars. Which was also a confusing and stupid thing to do, but at least no one got groped. Allegedly. That we know of. Yet.

...People may have gotten injured during his Squid Game thing. I can't remember the details. And I can't google MrBeast facts without YouTube peeing the very worst content all over my recommendations for the next month.

I think we can all just agree that Google deciding to do revenue sharing with content creators was probably one of the worst decisions they ever made; that we, as a global society, have ever made. These are the people who after 20+ years still haven't come up with a user-friendly interface for Gmail, and we put them in charge of Earth's television?

Linus is terrible, and we made him into what he is today. It would be great if we could all learn from this sort of thing.

We won't, but wouldn't it be great?

#Youtube #linus tech tips #ltt #austin green #youtube drama #rant

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sirowsky · 2 years

Text

The Lost Island

Chapter 17 - An Ending

Summary: Everything that's happened to you and Marcus since the plane-crash finally comes to a head, all the pieces put together across both space and time falling into place, and suddenly you're out of time.

Author’s Note: Okay, my loves. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, I'm not going to write out the full warnings on this chapter, but if you're hesitant to read without more details, just message me and I'll be happy to tell you. I do recommend reading this with a large quantity of Oreos handy, or whatever your favorite cookies might be. It'll help against the angst. Also: This is not the final chapter!

Rating: Mature 18+ONLY Warnings: Cursing, angst, end of the world-themes, mentions of strained family relationships. Word Count: 7034 Masterlist (this story) Author’s Masterlist

If the portal/gateway/hellhole/asshole ever reappeared, you were gonna fucking kill it.

That was the prevailing thought on your mind as you made your way through the hallways at HQ, back in your time, where your Marcus had clearly not been returned. The thing had plopped you out inside your own office, suddenly holding the sapling in your hands again, and a quick glance at your screens had informed you of the date and time. You’d then wasted half a day looking for your Heroic, before finally accepting that the goo was no longer an ally and absolutely couldn’t be trusted.

You walked into the Science Department, storming through the work area fuming like a thunderous cloud about to release millions of volts of electricity, passing the desks and various machines without a glance at anyone. There were seven people in there, all of whom fell silent as you made your way through the room, continuing into an adjoined lab where you placed the sapling inside one of the bio-scanners and then returned to the control desk back in the work area.

“Run it.”

The poor biologist at the desk didn’t even glance at his Department Head, Jennifer, before starting the scan, making you wonder just how angry you looked right now. You didn’t care enough to find out. The machine ran its cycle, the pressing silence of the room becoming more and more suffocating as the seconds ticked by. And then the computer beeped and all the data it had managed to collect about the plant was displayed on the huge observation window.

“What am I looking at?”

Jennifer, being the only one in the room familiar enough with you to dare speak, came to your side and studied the screen thoroughly.

“From what I can tell, this plant is not terrestrial.”

“Damn it, Jen, I know that already, I need to know what’s significant about it.”

“Nothing. As far as the machine can tell.”

“Nothing?”

“It’s a plant. Normal structure and growth parameters, no obvious mutations or variations in the DNA, nothing molecularly deviant from what appears to be its natural state. If I knew more about the origin-world and had access to more data, I’d be able to give a more comprehensive analysis.”

“If I told you that I was given this sapling by a matriarch tree the size of a small moon, in order to help me stop a deadly outbreak of mutated spores, would that help your analysis at all?”

“Are you serious?”

You merely glared at her, and she took the hint, immediately shifting from casually answering questions, to actively assessing the situation.

“What kind of spores? What’s the threat level?”

“Alien, originally from an unexplored territory. The spores are a mutated form of either pretty much ordinary pollen, or bacterial spores, used as a source of nutrients for the indigenous lifeforms.”

“Do you have any idea how they were mutated?”

“Yeah. Human blood.”

“Shit… that’s not good. That might make them much quicker to adapt to our environment, we might be looking at a global spread within the space of just a few years.”

Oh, how you wished that that had been the case.

“Jen… The mutation started here, within our environment. They’ve already adapted. The information I have suggests that these things could wipe out all biological life on this planet, within months. If that, even.”

She was struggling to believe you, which was understandable, but unhelpful.

“Listen, that tiny little tree over there is somehow connected to how we stop this, and I need you to help me figure out how.”

“Right, okay… Well, if we’re talking defences, I know that some trees can release spores of their own, to protect against other species trying to land on them and take root in their trunks. But that wouldn’t protect us, only other plants, and probably only for a brief time.”

“What about… I don’t know, like an antidote? Something that could neutralize the harmful aspect of the mutated spores?”

“In theory that should be possible, but not in this short of a timeframe. Something like that would take months of cultivations and careful testing. It would be like trying to create a vaccine for a new pathogen, only in a fraction of the time and with no chance of testing it before distribution. It’s just not a workable solution.”

You both stood there, staring at the digital information still being displayed in front of you, each trying to work the problem, and each coming up empty. You tried to backtrack, returning to the basics of what you knew and how you’d thus far approached a solution (clearly not successfully), tried to think in odd angles and look with a wider lens. And soon enough, something occurred to you.

“Maybe microbiology isn’t the solution, here.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I need to see a botanist. I’ll be back, but call me if you figure anything else out, and DO NOT let anyone touch that sapling until I get back. Only you, got it?”

She nodded while you made your way to the door and left the lab, heading for the Heroics HQ Gardens, and the colourful Mrs. Bates. The gardener was a super, but not only that, she was one of the first known generations, one of the first ever to allow herself to be studied by scientists for a chance to better understand the super-gene. She was almost a hundred years old now but looked no more than sixty and had the energy and strength of someone even younger, still just as passionate about her craft and always happy to lend a helping hand to anyone that might need it. Later generations seemed to have lost this longevity, aging largely like ordinary people, but those first few were different. In more ways than one.

“I do believe I hear the footsteps of a troubled soul.”

“What gave it away?”

“You mean aside from the thunder that’s rumbling over your head?”

You sighed and lowered your head, trying not to let your mind veer off towards Marcus, but failing spectacularly.

“That’s not what I’m here about.”

“No? I struggle to fathom how you could possibly focus on anything else.”

“You and me both. But, desperate times… and all that.”

“What can I do for you, my dear?”

“I have a plant-based problem and I’d like your input.”

“Ah, my speciality. Let’s hear it.”

“Do you know of a way that plants can somehow neutralize threats from other plants?”

“Oh, nature is full of clever solutions. All plants have means of protecting themselves from all manner of problems.”

“What about aggressive spores? How would a tree protect itself from something like that?”

“Hmm. You’re talking about parasitic bacterial spores. That’s a tough nut to crack. They’re designed to be hardy, to survive under unfavourable conditions in order to allow a lifeform to spawn, once it encounters more favourable circumstances. They’re aggressive and generally very adaptive little things, which is why most biological lifeforms won’t have a natural defence against them.”

Your heart sank, hearing that.

“So, if spores that had been severely mutated and become extremely aggressive were to attack our flora, there wouldn’t be anything in nature that could survive them?”

“Not likely. Why? Are we facing such a threat?”

“Yes.”

She’d been calmly tending to a bush of some sort while she spoke to you, but now she put her hands down and turned to face you fully, looking genuinely worried. You took a step closer to her, feeling an urgency come over you, a need to move or act, probably just because you were truly starting to fear that you wouldn’t be able to solve this.

“I was brought to the world where these spores were naturally developed, over eons, and while I was there, a matriarch tree gave me a sapling from its own roots, and I just know that it somehow connects to how I’m supposed to stop what’s about to happen here, but I don’t know how.”

She instantly perked up, hearing that.

“What kind of tree was it?”

“I don’t know, it was alien.”

“That’s not what I mean. Was it coniferous or deciduous?”

“It was a leaf tree, millions of years old.”

“How fascinating. Did you speak to this tree?”

“Um… yeah. I mean, as well as I could, I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

“That’s of no concern. If a lifeform that old and that strong allowed you to connect to it, then you already know everything you need to.”

“What? How? I’m not following?”

“Bring the sapling, go where it told you to go, and you’ll find the answers you seek.”

“No, wait, it didn’t tell me to go anywhere, I don’t know what you’re ta-argh…”

Your words faded away into a frustrated growl, as Mrs. Bates herself faded away. Her powers had always been a bit of a mystery, however turning herself into dust and disappearing into the air was a well-used party-trick of hers. As far as anyone knew, the botany was only a hobby, but you wouldn’t put it past the old girl to have some influence over the growth or resilience of her plants. She was certainly mischievous enough to simply not tell anyone if that was the case, even though she’d volunteered to be a guinea pig. Perhaps as a challenge to see how long it would take science to advance enough to figure it out anyway, which you could respect. Still, you were abruptly annoyed again, because apparently you were gonna have to figure this crap out on your own, anyway. A quiet buzz in your pocket alerted you to your phone ringing, and since you didn’t have a plan on how to relocate the damn gardener yet, you picked it up.

“What?”

“Hey, it’s Jen.”

“I know that; what do you want?”

“Wow, you’re really in a mood today.”

“I’m losing my fucking mind, actually, so get to the point!”

“Alright, alright… After you left I put the house to work, sending alerts to all medical facilities to look out for any unusual cases, and we just learned that some folks have come into a hospital in southern California today, with symptoms that seem to be some sort of reaction to an unidentified substance. No one knows exactly what kind yet, they’re working on getting samples to us, thus far it’s just scans that have confirmed the presence of foreign parti-…”

“How many?”

“Uh… thus far… ten.”

“Shit. What kind of symptoms?”

“Difficulty breathing, vomiting, liver and kidney disfunctions, and apparently some of them are exhibiting some aggressive behaviour.”

Ice flooded your blood where you stood, surrounded by lush green plants and their flowers, sporting every colour of the rainbow and so many more. How long would it take before it was all gone?

“It’s already happening.”

You’d known, just from the fact that the portal had been so adamant about making you and Marcus understand all this, that it had to happen soon, but you’d still hoped to have a few days to figure out exactly what you were meant to do to stop it.

“What do we do, Sec?”

What could you do? All you had was a fucking plant and a presumed hint from a barely sentient being, that this could be halted. But the portal had never claimed as much. It had only showed you what had happened, not what would, everything else was your own assumption. Yours. Not Marcus’. Not anyone else’s, because you were the one that somehow just knew things. Right now, though, you felt like you didn’t know anything at all. What did your soul have to do with this? What had Bates meant about going somewhere?

Why had the portal separated you from Marcus?

Was that the answer… rather than a question? Had it moved him to a safe place, because the truth was that this wasn’t survivable, and he was more important to protect? More important for the future. You could believe that. Perhaps your part in all this had never been to stop the destruction, but instead… to simply plant a tree. Maybe that little stalk would survive, carrying the legacy of something so old and wise that it now knew how to shield itself, and would still be here when the dust settled, ready to bring life back to the Earth anew. All your life you’d been out of sync with the world, scrambling to understand even the basics of how to just live. Only to now, when you’d finally begun to figure it out, have to try and understand how to die. How to be alright with that, even though it seemed so unfair and cruel. Not so much that it had to be you that knew about the end of the world, someone apparently had to, but that you couldn’t have gotten to be with Marcus for your final time. You’d never feared laying down your life for others, but this was different. Because this wasn’t taking a bullet for a colleague or friend, this was accepting that everything that had ever lived, would be destroyed. There’d be no one left to protect any records. None to safeguard history. It would all be turned to dust in the thousands or even millions of years that you imagined it would take for the planet to recover, if it even could.

So… what could you do?

“Sec?”

“I need to see my brother.”

<><><><><>

Marcus knew that something was wrong. He could feel a kind of charge around himself that had nothing to do with his powers, and it was growing with each passing day. It might just be that he was in the wrong place, that the universe was being stretched the wrong way because of his misplacement, but if it was, what would happen the day that the cosmos decided to push back? And if it wasn’t that at all… then what? He’d easily fallen back into the routines of life, having already been stranded in this time for two weeks, the only drag being that he already knew everything that was going to happen. The Belgian worm that ate cars, Tech-No breaking his knee (it healed within five days), Guppy and Wild Card getting in trouble in school because of a particularly clever, albeit ultimately disastrous, prank that saw the entire basement of HQ completely flooded. He could’ve prevented those things, but since they weren’t life-threatening, he chose not to, for fear that intervening could somehow tamper with his chances of getting back to you. Missy didn’t seem at all bothered by knowing that he wasn’t technically the same dad she’d grown up with. He acted, spoke, moved and treated her exactly the same, and that was enough for her to accept that they were the same person after all. The only problem was that Marcus didn’t feel like he was. He felt out of place, literally. It was there in every movement, every ray of sunshine that hit his skin, every bite of food and sip of drink… like it didn’t actually happen to his body.

When three weeks had passed, he was getting desperate. He’d seen no hint of the portal anywhere, gotten no information at all about what was happening on your end, and he was beginning to fall apart. That evening at dinner, Missy could tell that something had changed, that he’d begun to break, and it didn’t matter that he could see how much it scared her, he just couldn’t conceal it anymore.

“Dad… is there anything I can do?”

He hated that she even asked. That she felt that same desperation. No kid should know what that felt like.

“No, sweetie. You get going on your homework, okay. I’ll clear the table.”

“But, dad-…”

“Missy, I can’t-…!”

He stopped himself before he could finish that sentence. Firstly, because he’d raised his voice at her, which he never ever did, and secondly, because he’d been about to say that he couldn’t take her kindness right now, which would be a terrible thing to say to a ten-year-old. Especially when she was looking for comfort.

“I’m sorry. …I’m sorry, honey.”

She was on the verge of tears, watching him sit there, shaking with a feeling he couldn’t name but which haunted and tortured him, right before her eyes. She stood up slowly, and came to wrap her arms around him, offering him the comfort that he’d been unable to give to her, and his heart shattered. His arms wrapped around her almost without his knowledge, squeezing her too tight, but she let him. In her endless kindness, she let him, and he didn’t deserve that, but he took it anyway, because he was drowning.

“I don’t know what to do… I’m so scared for her.”

“Don’t be. You know as well as I do, Ace is the toughest Hero there is, powers or no powers. And if she loves you, she’ll find you. I know it.”

Her confidence eased the worst of his fears, although not his guilt. But when they’d said goodnight and she’d disappeared into her room, he found himself outside in the backyard, quietly whispering to the stars just like he had every night since he got there. It was pointless, he knew that. To hope that the words would matter somehow, that they’d carry over between the impossibly large bridge that he hoped still connected the two of you. But standing there among the trees, amidst the mumbled wishes of ‘please, keep her safe’, spoken to figments of his imagination, a very real memory snuck into the forefront of his thoughts. And as his focus shifted, it was followed by a whole string of adjoining ones, all on the same subject: Chief Akela, talking about you.

--We might be able to help her. If you will let us.

--She has a strong spirit, that’s what truly saved her.

--Yes. Love can be a weakness. But it’s also the greatest source of power known, when you dare to wield it.

--We’re not meant to fight these heaviest of battles on our own, none of us would survive that.

Flashes, moments in time, all so significant as he’d lived them, but all equally significant now, for entirely different reasons. Akela had named you Mana, one of their very strongest words, but he’d never disclosed what Kahele meant. Now, standing out there under the stars, Marcus could almost feel the meaning of his name through the energy that the Chief had imbued it with. He heard the man’s voice as if a record was skipping inside his head. And with each repetition, the meanings seemed to deepen, burrowing further down into the depths of his soul. Hearing these phrases back-to-back, knowing the same man had spoken them, a man that saw things other people couldn’t, put them under a whole other light. Suddenly, Marcus knew that he had to get to you. Right now! All these phrases had been warnings, cemented into his brain long before they would become truly relevant, because Akela had somehow known that you would end up the sacrificial lamb on the altar of time. The portal had showed Marcus… it had fucking showed him what would happen, and still he hadn’t understood it. His dreams had been filled with your eyes, staring back at him as you took that final step into the unknown, but he’d seen only peace within you, and assumed that it meant victory. He had to get to you! But how!?

“Akela… help me! Please!”

He screamed at the treetops, ready to believe that the magical old man was still alive in some form, reaching out to him from some other world, or time. But the answer didn’t come to him from up there. It came from within himself. This time, the memories that berated his senses were all of you, as you’d unknowingly prepared him for this very moment.

--There’s not a single shred of all this that’s easy, but the fact is: we’re alive. And as long as we are, there’s hope.

--Are you seriously telling me that you’re prepared to just roll over and die, just because someone might try and stop you from going home?

--You’re a leader and a fighter and a hero. When did you become a quitter?

--You’re stronger than this.

His lungs emptied in a kind of subdued shock. And when the air flooded back in, the sky turned black, lightning flared high into the atmosphere and struck the ground all around him, not just the house, the trees, the pool, but the entire neighbourhood. Dark purple threads spread out around him by the thousands, searching and waiting. The lightning intensified, but became more and more focused, eventually drawn to the same spot, just fifteen feet to his left, where something was taking form. He let the threads join the lightning, one by one attaching them to the thing, pulling it closer and closer until it was forced into his timeline. The portal. Trapped by his power, the real power of his being, awoken by you, by his immeasurable love for you, it had no means of evading him as he approached it, noting that the surface of it, which was usually in constant turmoil, was now smooth. Like a doorway of silk, gently billowing against the simultaneously both light and dark forces that locked it in place through Marcus’ true strength. He knew that it would take him where he wished, it had no other option, so he didn’t hesitate to step towards it.

“Dad…”

Her voice, small and absolutely terrified, reached him like glass cracking under his feet. He’d never be able to ignore that voice.

“Sweetheart, it’s okay.”

Holding his powers in place, he closed the distance between them as he spoke, pulling her into a hug. Her voice was even smaller when she whispered in his ear.

“How are you doing that?”

He pulled back to look at her, putting his face in front of her eyes to force her focus away from the frightening spectacle.

“Because I have to.”

His own voice crackled, precariously close to dying out on his tongue as the tears filled his eyes with the knowledge that he had to walk away from her. Again. All he had to lean on was the blind faith that the timeline would somehow reset, and all of this would never have happened for her. But he’d always remember.

“You were right about what you said after dinner, except it’s the other way around. I’m the one that has to find her. I have to go, baby, but everything will be okay, I promise.”

“I’m scared…”

Her tears nearly broke his resolve.

“I am too. More than I ever have been before. But listen to me, Missy, because I need you to remember this, no matter what: You are stronger than your fears.”

Something sturdy seemed to brace her shoulders as she absorbed those words, and he backed away from her with a small hope kindled in the depths of his heart. That perhaps those words, once given to him on the ocean wind, existed outside of time, and that she’d remember them always, in all versions of the cosmos. He turned away from her, and without pause, stepped into the portal.

<><><><><>

You found him only hours after you’d hung up on Jen, even though he was several states away, by commandeering one of the Heroics helicopters and flying out there yourself. It had been years since you’d last flown anything at all, but you were a certified helicopter pilot and the training came back to you quickly once you were in front of the controls, the familiar abbreviations and dials somehow feeling like old friends from a past life. These machines were bigger and heavier, operated by more advanced engines than the one’s you’d flown back then, but you adjusted easily, using your fingers and feet to feel how the bird moved and responded. Ms. Granada had called you about half an hour after you left, not to yell at you, but to let you know that an additional eighteen hospitals along the coast had now called in suspected cases of spore-infections. That changed the projected timeline for how long it would take before this went global, into a mere fraction of the time you’d originally thought. Not that it made that much difference, in the end.

The base where Chris was stationed right now was inland and had rarely seen a visit from a Heroic helicopter, so when you approached the marked out landing pad, just a stones-throw from the training grounds, everyone stopped what they were doing and just stared. You came in fast, having alerted the base’s flight operator and tower that you were inbound, and for the first time since becoming Heroics Chief of Security, throwing your weight around in ordering them to clear the air for you. It was a bigger position than many would think, your job. For the sake of protecting the people that protected the world, you had the authority to assume command over any agency or company, civilian, military or other, as well as any location anywhere in the country. An authority you would ordinarily never have used for a personal matter, but the fucking world was ending. You landed smoothly, leaving the engine running idle while you climbed out and identified yourself to the armed guards around the helipad, who promptly stepped aside, saluting you as they recognized you as a superior officer. You asked one of them to direct you to Chris Hadley, having to scream over the sounds of the engines, and the guard pointed you towards the mess hall. Both of you had changed surnames after learning about your parents, but while he had stuck with a family name, after your maternal grandparents, you’d chosen something completely unrelated.

There was a loud buzz of voices in the large room as you stepped inside and stopped to look around, but it died out quickly when the people closest to you recognized you, and started spreading the word, until every eye in the room was on you. They weren’t required to stand in attention unless you ordered them to, or if you appeared in official attire, so you simply studied them, looking for a familiar face. You were just about to call out his name when a tall frame rose above the seated diners. You had the same eyes and chin, the same hair, albeit his cropped short along the sides, and only slightly longer over the crown of his head. It had been at least five years since you’d last seen him, and even though there had never been any animosity between you, he felt somewhat estranged, given that you hadn’t been close for a lot longer than that. You’d kept tabs on him, but only ever contacted him for birthdays and thanksgivings. Still, you’d grown up together, and knew each other accordingly well, so when he took in what had to be a strained or possibly even desperate expression on your face, he immediately made his way over to you and pulled you into a bearhug. He was a full head taller than you, broad-shouldered and muscular, so you all but disappeared into his embrace.

“What’s the matter, Sunshine?”

The whisper of his voice in your ear, the nickname he’d given you the first time he saw you and never stopped calling you since then, the love he still offered you so freely, even though you were the one that had pulled away from him, all threatened to break you. But you didn’t get to do that. You’d have to be strong now.

“I need to talk to you.”

He let go of you but kept his arm over your shoulders as he moved back to the door, holding it open for you and following you through. He brought you to an empty area outside, that you recognized as a practise ground for driving military vehicles, but which was currently unused. There were no obstacles or buildings anywhere nearby, so no one could get close enough to eavesdrop without being noticed.

“Tell me.”

Ever the military man. Straight and to the point. But how did you tell someone that the world was ending? How did you tell a beloved family member that you were there to say goodbye?

“Chris… I’m sorry. I know I’ve said it before, and I know that you would’ve forgiven me even if I hadn’t, but I need to say it. I need you to know that it’s not just about what happened back then, but all the years since, that I’ve avoided you. You didn’t deserve that.”

His stance softened, his hands coming to hold your shoulders, as he realized that this wasn’t an official visit, despite the Heroics helicopter.

“Hey, I know that, of course I do. What is this? Are you in trouble?”

“No, not trouble, just…”

…My last chance to tell you… Oh, to hell with spores and fuck time-travel for making you do this!

“Something’s gonna happen soon. Something really bad, and we can’t stop it.”

“The Heroics can’t?”

“…No one can.”

He stared at you for a minute, taking his hands off your shoulders and bringing them to his own hips instead. He was reading you, gaging the severity of your tone and everything else about this strange situation, and then he dipped his head and swallowed hard, having apparently landed on a conclusion.

“You’re talking end of the world-level bad… aren’t you?”

You only just managed to nod once in confirmation, and saw his eyes close, trying to avoid having to absorb that. But he did. No matter what, Chris had always believed you, always known when you were joking and when you weren’t. Your being there, coming to him like this, in the end it was probably all the proof he’d ever need that this was real.

“How long?”

“Days… at best. It’s gonna get bad. People going mad and then dying like flies. We know what’s causing it, but we just don’t have enough time to stop it.”

“But you’re gonna try something anyway.”

Your chest pinched at his words, just because of how sure (and correct) he was, your eyebrows knitting together with equal parts grief and solace. Because he knew you, down to the smallest damn detail that not even Marcus had managed to figure out yet.

“What gave it away?”

“You left the engine running.”

You couldn’t help but chuckle at how matter of fact he made it sound.

“Don’t I always?”

He knew what you were really saying, you could see it in his eyes. That you were always ready to run. Always kept an escape route open, because the world had taught you that even the parts of life that you’d thought were safe, sometimes weren’t. He pulled you into another hug, and this time you felt sorrow in the uneven breaths that tugged at his chest.

“Whatever’s coming… whatever happens… I love you.”

You gave yourself permission to break, just for this one little moment in time, standing in his embrace, holding him as tightly as your arms could, wishing that the world would just stop being so cruel.

“Love you, too.”

The actual word goodbye was too hard, though, so you merely pulled out of his frame, and walked away, back to the chopper and into the pilot’s seat, grateful that he didn’t follow you to stand there and watch you leave. Like you had so many times before. Once airborne, you pointed the nose of the bird towards the Pacific Ocean and gunned it. It didn’t really matter where on the coast you ended up, you just figured that planting the tree where the infection was spreading the fastest, was a logical conclusion. Whatever Mrs. Bates had meant about the matriarch telling you to go somewhere, was completely lost on you, so you chose to work on the basis of Occam’s Razor instead. Don’t make assumptions or attempt to draw conclusions without facts to support them. Stick to what you know. Easier said than done when something had been putting presumed facts in your head for… however fucking long you’d been in this time-travel rollercoaster. The dampened humming of the rotor, through the protective earpieces in your helmet, was the only sound you heard for the two-hour flight, but the rhythm had a calming effect on you. With each quiet whoof-whoof-whoof above you, it was like your brain was sorting itself out, and by the time you were closing in on your undefined destination, you’d both cried and laughed at old and new memories, fears and hopes, but ultimately reached acceptance. Whether it was fate, or just circumstance, the simple fact was that you had been chosen for this. No one else knew the things that you did. And even though you didn’t know exactly why the sapling had been given to you, you did know that you had to plant it. That it served a purpose. Made all the clearer now when you reached the coast, and flew into a literal red cloud.

The body of the chopper was sealed, the spores had no way of reaching you as long as you stayed inside it, but you’d have to step outside to plant the tree. It was less than five hours since you’d left Los Angeles, and in that time, the coast had been completely overrun by the deadly infection. You flew lower, identifying the city you’d reached as San Diego, and finding the streets littered with bodies that had already decayed enough to release freshly born spores in incalculable numbers. A fresh volley of pain coursed through you at the thought that this cloud would’ve already reached LA too, and that the reason you hadn’t heard anything more from HQ was likely because it was already devoid of anything living. Your mind violently revolted against the image of Missy and Anita having been reduced to these petri dishes of biological matter, shocking you back into focusing on your task. Landing anywhere in the city was out of the question, because any people that were still alive would be out of their minds and extremely violent, which presented too much of a risk against your success. So, you aimed for South Coronado Island instead, the closer of the two islands that sat just eight miles off the coast. It was more of a cliff than an island, sitting in the bay like a knife laying on its back. But on the southern half of it, around what looked like the tallest section, there was a more flattened out area where the chopper should fit.

You landed a little less smoothly this time, because the winds out here were stronger, and coming at the craft from a downward angle as they were pushed up along the steep side of the island. Once you were safely down, you cut the engines and pulled the brakes on the rotor to help slow it down quicker. The cloud was less dense out here, being pushed inland by the winds, but the moment you opened the door, you’d get infected. There was no avoiding that. The frail-looking little plant sat on the second pilot’s seat next to you, making you wonder how the hell this little thing was meant to survive against all this… And then you remembered that that was still only what you’d been made to believe would happen, based on the magical insights that came from inside your own head. In reality, no more reliable than a wish upon a star. And yet, you trusted it. Was that what Bates had meant?

Go where it told you to go, and you’ll find the answers you seek.

Perhaps it wasn’t about going to a physical place, but to a place where you believed that this would succeed. Perhaps it was all a leap of faith. You took off your headgear, picked up the baby tree, tucking it safely against your chest, and opened the door. The spores actually stung your skin, they were so potent, and the burn in your lungs was instantly unbearable, making you cough and struggle for air after just one small inhalation. You dropped to your knees right outside the chopper, quickly digging a little hole in the tough, rocky soil, before putting the sapling down in it and covering the base. It couldn’t have taken you more than a minute in total, but as you finished, you could already feel your mind being invaded by the infection, stripping you of thoughts, wishes and memories. Instincts took over, trying to protect you, but there was nothing that could be done. With each passing second, a little more of you was burned away, aggression becoming more and more prevalent to your being.

And then it suddenly stopped. Something moved over your skin, soothing the burn from your toes to your scalp, even under your clothes, and then a movement to your left caught your eye. A man had appeared there, out of seemingly nowhere, and for some reason, your body was reacting to him. Wanting him closer. You were scared and angry, but you didn’t know why. All you knew was that this man looked safe and protective, so you allowed him to put his arms around you. And when he did, something seemed to wake up inside of you. Something so powerful that it felt like you might burst with the force of it suddenly churning through you, making you tremble and spasm in his grip. He took your hand and brought it to the ground right in front of a little plant that had somehow grown all alone up here on the cliff.

“That power you feel, I need you to give it to that little plant. As much as you can spare, can you do that?”

His voice made your body still, calming the whipping waves under your skin, even though you had no idea how you were meant to do what he was asking.

“Look at it. Helpless and all alone out here. Let’s help it grow.”

Something seemed to fall into place inside you as you heard that. You liked to help. To be of use. You didn’t know how you could possibly aid this frail little thing, but he seemed so sure. A thin and shiny thread flowed from his index finger to the sapling, and when it landed, through him, you could feel the thing. Its tiny roots looking for nutrients, and all at once, you knew exactly how to help it. The power inside you flowed through that one little thread, guided by whatever power he had, to be able to do that, straight into the lifeblood of the young tree that eagerly sucked it all in, quickly draining you of strength.

<><><><><>

You didn’t know him. That was the first thing he realized as he stepped through the portal and found you right there, right in the same spot he’d seen in his dreams. His shield could protect you from absorbing any more spores, but it couldn’t undo what damage had already been done. Why hadn’t the portal brought him there a minute earlier? Two minutes… however long you’d been exposed. He could’ve made sure that you’d never needed to inhale a single particle. But you were still alive and letting him touch you, and you seemed calmed by his presence, so perhaps something inside you did still remember. He only knew about the tree because of what the portal had showed him, since he hadn’t been there when you’d received it, or met you at all since then, but he knew that it was the key to everything. When he felt it take the power from your soul, he was terrified at how quickly and effectively it drained you, and he tried to break the connection, to pull his thread back before it killed you. But he couldn’t. The tree grew before his eyes, one foot, then two… five… ten… twenty… fifty, its roots breaking the ground it stood on, turning the south side of the island into rubble under its increasing size and weight, but without letting the two of you get jostled. A thick root settled underneath you, keeping the ground steady so you wouldn’t fall or get buried under the rolling masses of dirt and rock that sent the chopper crashing down into the ocean. But Marcus stopped caring what happened around him when he felt your body go limp in his arms.

“No, no, no… hey, Pita! Look at me, come on.”

He turned you so that your upper body was resting in his lap, gently tapping your cheek to get you to open your eyes. But when you did, ice filled his heart. Because this was the moment. The one he’d seen, over and over, thinking that it was the moment you won. The one he’d clung to in his exile, needing to believe that he had to be absent for, so that you could succeed, but which he now knew was the moment of your sacrifice. You didn’t look scared or confused, angry or sad. Only accepting. His lips, hands and arms started trembling, his stomach clenching in a tight knot, as the tears burned his eyes and a choking pressure clamped down on his throat. In his mind he was begging.

Don’t go. Don’t leave me. I can’t do this again. I need you. Please…

But not a word managed to claw out of his tortured body. And then his thread suddenly snapped, as your soul left you. A single, agonized breath was all he got, and then the roots shifted, something snared you, and you were torn from his grasp, pulled into the ground and buried, without pomp or circumstance. Without choirs or hymns. The roots settled themselves over the spot where you’d disappeared, and the tree and the ground finally stilled.

—————

Link to Chapter 18

Yeah, um..... My apologies, I was cleaning my tearducts and this fell out. Thank you for reading, and I’d love to know what you thought :) Have a wonderful day/night!

Give me a shout if you wish to be tagged on updates, and same goes for being removed from the taglist.

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#the lost island fic #marcus moreno fanfiction #marcus moreno x reader #marcus moreno x female reader #marcus moreno x you #we can be heroes fanficiton #we can be heroes #pedro pascal fanfiction #pedro pascal characters #oreos against angst

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incarnateirony · 1 year

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Regarding: fandom and projection and assumptions, and you people hearing what you want to hear, because people aren't speaking the exact way you want them to, to fit your comfort or bias and/or the lack of interest in them as an individual and what they're communicating.

Remember the fuss about the pilot script? lying hableries like 2po, wiki, big boasters that don't get it yelled fake. Then Jensen said "A script was leaked, but it's different." Fandom thus took their poor viewpoint data from people with bad perspective like 2po and rubber stamp coffee runners at low grades, then projected that at what Jensen said, "JENSEN SAID THE SCRIPT IS FAKE!"

But he never said that. What he said was true. By then, Robbie had a chart, for reasons, that was drawn, with Better Call Saul references manifested out of the aether (Bobo, it was Bobo, if you listen), and the formula and structure of presentation changed.

That doesn't mean the original script was fake. It means your lenses and biases were flawed, and you read what you wanted to. The script was real, and even realer and newer than their own coffee runners' that they were relying on, but yes. It was different from the final product.

Everything else the fandom noisemakers attached--and DOUBLED DOWN ON INSISTING even LONG after it was proven, they had Committed to their bad take about A Fake Script so goddamnit they were gonna double down into it past the point of blazing gaping asshole stupidity until they shoot themselves in the foot for their own attention for their own script that showed, SHOCK, IT WAS REAL, AND NEWER THAN YOURS.

This is about projection. This is about people who assign bad biases and readings, project their nonsense, their bad faith, and have zero intention of listening to what's actually being said. People see and hear what they want to see and hear without asking themselves if that's what the target individual is actually communicating, rather than what you want to hear.

Then, those who had doubled down into their own misreading turned around screeching "JENSEN LIED!!!!!" no, motherfuckers, you just don't listen. You're too busy inside your own narcissistic heads trying to make the world comply to your headcanons about real people and what they're saying.

Another example: Jensen's two different takes between the two shots, segregating In That Moment vs New/After/Next. Nobody wants to listen to him. He's speaking just as clear and true about his separate before and after--the In That Moment Brohug notsexual vs In The Next Shot I. The had a take vs have a take. Listen to what he's saying. Stop trying to find ways to warp it, like you guys did with the script.

Because this is, I say for the 101th time: THE FUCKING PLOT. The plot is all interpretations are NOT equal, they are NOT all true, yours sucks ASS, and there's an actual meaning and truth to things whether you stomach it or not.

Context, assholes. Learn it, live it, love it, because it's about to spank the everloving shit out of you.

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scythelucifer02 · 1 year

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Hussie should make a real version of the DATA STRUCTURES FOR ASSHOLES book in homestuck

#homestuck

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