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#espionage au
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♥️ ♣️ ♦️ ♠️ THE LOVE GAMES AFFAIR ♠️ ♦️ ♣️ ♥️
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my multi-chaptered modern espionage au ofmd fic, featuring a slow burn, fake relationships, secrets, lies, game tournaments, going undercover, and so much more!
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♥️ ♣️ CHAPTER 1: START OF SOMETHING NEW ♠️ ♦️
the first chapter in THE LOVE GAMES AFFAIR is here!! from stede's pov, witness the start of the mission, learn a bit about the team, and buckle up for the #ofmd espionage au ride of your LIVES!
read chapter one now on ao3!!
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elvenpixiex · 9 months
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“Meeting you with a view to a kill. Face to face in secret places, feel the chill”
A View to a Kill by Duran Duran
Nico and Hayden, LabiRYNTH x Espionage AU
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laiqualaurelote · 2 years
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This is an excerpt from a fic I started writing after reading Silverview by John le Carré and then realised I’d never finish, because it was too unwieldy to plot, but since it’s @ted-lasso-au-gust and Day 10′s prompt is Espionage, I thought I might as well leave it on here. It’s a spy AU in a Notting Hill AU. How the hell is that supposed to work? you ask. Me too, friend. Me too.
Cover Story
“You wouldn’t happen to have the latest John le Carré, would you?”
Trent has to climb a little ways down the ladder to see the man speaking to him. It’s one of the American tourists who wandered in after lunch. There are always Americans underfoot these days, trawling the aisles of the bookshop as if in hope of a meet-cute out of Notting Hill. Trent, as a rule, finds Americans tedious and does his level best to avoid them in all his lines of work; he achieves this in the bookshop by hiding in the stacks and leaving them to the tender mercies of his assistant. Unfortunately, this appears to be a particularly persistent specimen. Trent descends a few more rungs and braces himself.
“Is that the one with Brexit?”
“The one with the bookshop.” The American has a very distracting moustache. He looks almost exactly like a slide Trent once saw in Disguises 101: How Not To Overdo It. He is also wearing multiple layers beneath his puffer jacket, like some sort of Midwestern matryoshka, even though the shop’s heating is working perfectly well. Trent is automatically suspicious of customers with many layers, lest they are shoplifters. But a shoplifter would not go to such lengths to gain his attention.
“If you mean the posthumously published one, it’s not yet in stock. Shipping delays, I’m afraid.”
“Ain’t that a pity,” says the American. “I was sold on the premise. A bookshop that’s secretly a base for spy shenanigans? Tell me you don’t want to see how that turns out.”
Trent removes his glasses, keeping his expression bland. “You could put in an order, but if you’re not in town for long then I daresay there isn’t much point.”
“Oh, we’ll be here for a while. Long vacation. Thought we’d take it easy, like the Eagles would say. Though this ain’t Winslow, Arizona.”
“You can place an order with Miss Bowen at the counter,” says Trent, after he has cast about for a response to that string of gibberish and come up empty.
“You bet I will. If I could just - ” The American reaches out, and Trent almost breaks his wrist on instinct, but he simply brushes past Trent’s sleeve and pulls a secondhand copy of Call For The Dead off the shelf. “Maybe we ain’t see the last of le Carré, but at least it’s a first.”
“Ah, ha,” says Trent, to mask his surprise that they even have a copy of Call For The Dead in stock. It’s probably languished in here for years, unsold. “Good eye.”
“Well, I thank you for the consultation, Mr…”
“Crimm. Trent Crimm, The Independent.”
“Well, Trent, I appreciate you. Keep fighting the good fight.”
Trent blinks. “Against…?”
“Amazon,” says the American brightly. “Which, as an American, I apologise for.”
“Er, quite,” says Trent. “Sorry about Brexit, and all that.”
The American’s name on the order form is Ted Lasso, which makes him sound like a fictional character. He collects his bearded friend from the philosophy section and they depart, engaged in a discussion so animated that Lasso walks into the shop door, rebounds with no perceptible damage and continues his argument without missing a beat. Trent and Miss Bowen watch them go, mildly perplexed.
“Is he a subscriber? I don’t recognise either of them.”
“Just an ordinary customer, from the looks of it. He wanted to talk about books.”
“I suppose it must happen from time to time, in a bookshop,” says Miss Bowen dryly.
Trent crosses to her side of the counter, which is built in such a way that a customer, standing in line, would not be able to see what her hands might be doing. He leans down casually to check the automatic shotgun mounted under the countertop.
“He was talking about the new le Carré. It’s about spies in a bookshop, apparently.”
“Oh,” says Miss Bowen, eyebrow raised. “Is it now?”
“Yes,” says Trent. “We ought to get hold of it quite quickly, I think. In case there’s been a breach.”
“Come now.” She turns to him sharply. “Le Carré couldn’t have written a novel about us. I mean, he’d never been in the shop. We’d know, wouldn’t we?”
“I daresay we would, Miss Bowen. But put in the order anyway.”
“Certainly, Mr Crimm. And did you want new grenades on top of that?”
“I did, yes, thank you for reminding me.”
“Of course.” A pause. “We are quite sure that man wasn’t a subscriber, are we?”
Trent scoffs. “What, that guy? Come on.”
~
Trent’s childhood dream was to own a bookshop. He thought of bookshops as places where you could read all day and avoid people, which seemed like paradise. However, his family being who they were, his skills being what they were, the job market for English degree-holders being what it was – he spent a year at odd ends, haphazardly weighing the pursuit of postgraduate studies against attempting to break into the publishing industry, until finally he gave up and took the path he knew had always been there, lying in wait for him. He became a spy.
It was another fifteen years before he revisited the idea of the bookshop, in the wake of his abrupt and unceremonious retirement from the Circus. Cleis was one and a half years old by then, and he knew he must find something, for her sake – he had promised, he had promised –  even though he could not stomach the thought of going out in the cold again. He was mulling over his various options – heaven forbid he wind up in something horrible, like insurance – when his mother dropped by for tea and said peremptorily: “Mae is retiring, don’t you know?”
Mae – the only name anyone ever knew her by – was a veritable battleaxe who ran the Crown and Anchor, a pub that doubled up as the London station for agents of every stripe working in or passing through the city. The stations, by the unspoken rules that governed their universe, were neutral ground; they served every agency and freelancer without question and in turn brooked no conflict within their confines. To move against a station was to move against the combined powers of the rest of the agencies. Nobody had tried it in Trent’s lifetime.
“Oh?” said Trent. He was only partially listening to his mother; most of his attention was focused on trying to get Cleis to keep her yoghurt in her mouth. “Who’s taking over, then?”
His mother fixed him with the glare she had honed on some of the finest intelligencers this side of the Atlantic, as well as his teenage self. “I rather thought you might throw your hat in the ring, dear.”
Cleis mawed at her in surprise and dribbled watery yoghurt down her bib. Trent sighed. “I’ll talk to Mae.”
Mae thought it was a ridiculous notion to run a station as a bookshop. “You wouldn’t catch half that lot dead in a bookshop,” was her take on it. “Who has time for reading these days? And you’ll have to get in books! Actual books!”
“That’s rather the idea, yes,” said Trent. “It can’t be harder than maintaining a liquor licence.”
“Well, it’s not like I was going to hand the tender over to anyone else,” admits Mae. “What will you call it, love?”
Trent considered. “The Independent. Because that’s what it is.”
Even Mae had to admit, a few years in, that it was working out quite well. He’d even managed to sell some books.
~
“How’s the le Carré?” Miss Bowen asks, amid her reshelving. “Are we in trouble?”
“I don’t think so.” Trent is perusing Silverview at the counter, book in one hand, the other on the rifle. “The bookshop’s in East Anglia, and the protagonist hasn’t the first idea how to run it.”
“Oh, well then,” says Miss Bowen. “It will put nobody in mind of us at all. Is it any good? I’m always wary of these late discovery manuscripts. I don’t think I ever got over the disappointment of Go Set A Watchman.”
“It’s unevenly weighted. Makes you miss him at his best.” Trent turns a page. “Still, I’m glad he didn’t go gentle into that good night.”
He tenses as the shop bell rings, then sees that it is Keeley Jones, resplendent in a fluffy yellow coat. “What can we do for you, Miss Jones?”
“Trading in,” sings Keeley. “On Jamie’s behalf.”
Trent takes off his glasses and gives her a forbidding look. “What, has he gone and lost the lot again?”
Keeley winces. “Only some of it.”
Trent sighs. “Let’s get it processed in the back.”
Jamie Tartt is one of the stars of the agency known as the Dogtrack. He’s also aggravatingly cocky and spectacularly laissez-faire with his equipment; Keeley’s always in here, making apologies for him having thrown his Glock into a volcano, or something. Trent has no patience for the likes of Jamie Tartt. One already has so many people trying to kill one in this line of work, but there he is, giving even more people reasons to want him dead.
The back room is behind a reinforced steel door that can only be opened using either Trent’s or Miss Bowen’s fingerprints and a passcode that changes every day. The passcode is in fact a rolling alphanumerical series that progresses through the entirety of Hamlet, and if anyone ever cracks it, Trent will be very impressed by their grasp of Shakespeare. In the back room, Trent lays out the remnants of Jamie Tartt’s mission kit and purses his lips.
“To lose one dart gun, Miss Jones, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.”
“Oh, you needn’t have a go at me, I’m proper mad at him myself. You know what he did last week? Tried to murder Roy Kent. Roy Kent!”
“What, for work?”
“Not even that! Some kind of fucking…pissing contest.” Keeley makes a noise of exasperation. “Some days it’s like we gave a bunch of five-year-olds guns and let them loose on a jungle gym. You know what I mean?”
“I’ll just put it on his tab,” says Trent. “Which is astronomical, by the way.”
“I’ll chivvy the folks at the Dogtrack to send you a cover. Only they’re rushed off their feet this week – you must have heard.”
Trent has heard, but it always serves one in intelligence gathering to pretend to know less than one really does. “What’s happening over there?”
“The Mannions are going to war,” says Keeley, her voice lush with the juice of gossip - another reason why Trent likes having her in the shop. “The whole Dogtrack’s splitting up. Christ, but it’s a mess down there.”
“Who’s Jamie backing?”
“Hasn’t decided. Rupert’s putting it about that the whole agency’s going with him, but word on the street is that Rebecca Welton’s brought in someone from abroad to take him out. They’re saying it’s an American.” She sucks in an excited breath.
“Why would you bring in an American for that?” demands Trent.
“Beats me. It’s going to keep us all on our toes for a bit, to be sure. I reckon it’s some Tom Cruise type, all Mission Impossible Jack Reacher like. But nobody knows for certain.”
“Surely not,” says Trent. “You at least must have some idea, Miss Jones.”
Keeley flutters her eyelashes at him. “Who, me? I’m just a humble secretary.”
“Of course you are,” says Trent. “And I’m just a poor bookseller.”
Keeley slants a sly look at him. “You haven’t seen any Americans around, have you?”
“We get Americans in the store all the time. Just this morning we had a Mrs Glenda Johnson from South Carolina complaining that we don’t have a café in the store.”
“Yeah,” says Keeley, “fairly sure it’s not Mrs Glenda Johnson. Isn’t there a Costa two doors down?”
“Precisely,” says Trent. “Americans.”
They return to the front of the store, the afternoon light streaming across the polished wood floors and touching the book covers. “It really is awful pretty, when the light’s good,” says Keeley, running a hand across a row of Sally Rooneys. “You know what you ought to do? You should do #BookTok.”
“That,” says Trent, “is the single worst suggestion I’ve ever heard.”
Keeley laughs. “Give me a pot of money and some Madeline Miller and I’ll do it for you. I’ll make you so famous, you’ll be beating influencers off with a stick.”
“Just tell the Dogtrack to pay for your boyfriend’s damage.”
Keeley sticks her tongue out as she swings out of the shop. “If you see the American, you’ll tell me first. Won’t you?”
~
“Tell me a story,” says Cleis. They’re curled up in her bed, her tiny frame pillowed against his side.
“You’ve had two already.”
“But I want another.” Cleis looks up at him, her eyes clear and green as the sea. “Tell me about Maman.”
Trent stares up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that speckle her bedroom ceiling. Tell me about a complicated woman, he hears Coralie say in his head. She sounds slightly amused. This is an anachronism, of course. Coralie never lived to see the Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey. She would have loved it.
“Where do I start with your mother?”
“Was she very beautiful?”
“Yes. She knew exactly how beautiful she was and what to do with it.”
“Do I look like her?”
“The spitting image.” Even at four, Cleis looks so much like her mother that Trent will sometimes look over at her, in the middle of something mundane like making dinner or brushing her hair, and the resemblance will strike him like a punch to the gut.
Cleis is pleased by this. “What else?”
“Well. She loved old poems, and she was a lot stronger than she looked, and she wasn’t scared of a thing. Never listened to anyone either.”
“Not even you?”
“I like to think she listened to me a bit more than most other people,” allows Trent, “but even that wasn’t very much.”
Cleis kneads her quilt between her small hands. “Why didn’t she come back?”
Trent swallows. “She couldn’t. She had to save everyone.” Including me, he doesn’t add. Instead he says: “She loved you more than anything in the world.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me so. It was the last thing she said, before – ” Trent stops. Cleis is silent.
“Go to sleep now, chouette.”
It’s another hour before she drifts off to sleep proper. He sits in the dark, her hand tucked in his, until she does.
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auideas · 2 years
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The SleepAw.ai AU
As human beings, we all share a few common grounds: eating, drinking, and sleeping -- in fact, sleep is one of the few things in life that you can’t live without. This simple fact makes it one of the best targets for curious minds in design (only so many people find repeated use for a can opener, but a bed is universal, and therefore lucrative). 
Character A sets their mind on integrating the most important invention of the century into one of the oldest inventions time had to offer: an artificially driven mattress that changes according to the needs of the user in a split second. The invention was lovingly called "SleepAw.ai" and was a massive success, being purchased by the thousands, installed in hospitals, hotels, etc., all for a relatively reasonable price. They’d done it: they’d given the world a truly good night’s rest.
As with any invention, though, it soon got away from them. Stockholders became disinterested after purchases began to flatline (after all, where would the profit come from after everyone already had the mattress other than routine maintenance?). Marketing and business analysts came to the conclusion that if BMW could get away with it, so could they. The revolutionary SleepAw.ai became rife with microtransactions that locked away beloved features (heating, tweaks, lumbar support, etc.) behind a paywall. As it turns out, you can put a price on a good night’s rest.
Months after the update is rolled out, customers begin reporting worsened sleep, including not being able to fall asleep quickly and waking up too early. This pattern and reports continued, almost in a rhythm, across the board. In a fit of rage, Character A infiltrates their own labs, performing digital espionage to figure out exactly what was happening to their pride and joy. 
TL;DR - Character A discovers that the restless nights of their customers is due to a new type of ad software, meant to target the first and last REM cycles that could have been achieved in a normal night’s rest. As it turns out, the company had made a deal with caffeine-based and sleeping pill companies to share the resulting profits of customers buying pills to sleep, needing caffeine to stay awake, and purchasing new SleepAw.ai’s after thinking theirs must be defective. The unfortunate reality of capitalism and greed may have never been so clear.
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quillerqueen · 2 years
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Not a Universe Goes By (10/31)
(a series of fic(let)s for The Ted Lasso AU-gust challenge) #10: Espionage
 “You’re running late,” Rebecca teases, kissing him goodbye in their kitchen. “Have a good day at work, love.”
 “You too, darlin’.”
 Ted barges into the Welton Agency gripping the straps of his backpack, takes the stairs by two, and bounds into the office with an apologetic knock-a-doodle-doo. Beard and Roy are already parked on the couch, Keeley’s hand hovering over the speaker as Ted plonks himself down in the middle. The crackle of static clears up, and Ted’s favourite voice in the whole wide world greets them with the customary phrase and oh-so-familiar lilt.
 “Good morning, Angels.”
 “Good morning, Rebecca.”
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lenny-link · 26 days
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TF2 x Steven Universe ⭐️
guess who’s bacc with another crossover au that nobody asked for 😎
pls dont ask me about lore/story/drawing fusions i have no idea i just wanted to draw the mercs as gems lol
but id love to hear ur ideas!
edit: if you ever wanna draw about this go ahead! just tag me :)
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ew-selfish-art · 10 months
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Dp x Dc AU: Tucker gets hired by the JL to work on the Watchtower’s cybersecurity... He might have a few friends visit. 
Batman looked over the application for visitors presented to him by Dr. Foley, who was nervously wringing his hands but seemed excited to talk about his two close associates, and it appeared that everything was in order for the pair to be allotted a short visitation time slot. 
The paperwork was established by Batman himself after all, needing a way to permit non-members (His Children) to visit him at his office in the watchtower. Looking over Dr. Foley’s application, the invites to Dr. D. Fenton and Dr. S. Manson seemed to be somewhat warranted.
Dr. Fenton is a well known astrophysicist and Dr. Foley had been upping the security to reflect more complex physics models as the ‘lock’ mechanism for access to Watchtower servers. Dr. Manson was a more controversial figure in social justice but a biochemist to rival Dr. Pamela Isley, not to mention she was someone Bruce Wayne had met a number of times and not completely hated (though he was sure she hated him and everyone else in the gala). She was a fan favorite guest by his children and a great advocate for animal and human rights. 
Batman approves the application, allowing their visitation for a few hours at a time once a week until the completion of Dr. Foley’s project. 
He doesn’t hear much from it, nor from Dr. Foley, but things start to come down the rumor grapevine that the two guests were more than they seemed. Red Robin was the first to comment on it to him, and as practical and efficient Tim could be, there was a look of chaos in his smile as he discussed the two additional PhDs. He was stingy on details and that always meant something bad for Bruce’s mental health. A few others asked a few questions as to who exactly the pair were visiting, and Cyborg commented that they weren’t really doing too much to assist Dr. Foley. 
Batman decides to intervene and meet these two for himself when he hears Constantine complain (not that the man wasn’t always complaining about something) about the two new magic users being way too OP for normal humans. 
This is how the JL gets to become allied with Ghost King Phantom and Thorn (not Poison Ivy pt.2 as Robin insisted). Turns out they weren’t sure if the JL could be trusted with interdimensional politics, so Tucker spent the last two years gaining their trust to let Danny and Sam up here to ‘check the place out’ before they committed to becoming members. 
Batman doesn’t even get to raise alarms at the espionage of it all because Red Robin has already programed their new badges and welcomed them on with open arms and a project to take down the LOA’s Lazarus Pits “safely”.
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cariocay · 9 days
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I needed to draw this, engiespy fusion from @lenny-link 's tf2 x su crossover au, Turquoise
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Fist post of them:
And inspired by this art piece:
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gearbroth · 1 year
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DNAD Valentine’s Week: Monday 13th - DEFEND, Tuesday 14th - VALENTINE’S DAY, Wednesday 15th - CREATE
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paranoidginger · 29 days
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The Support team won in the last poll, meaning that you will be getting information on Medic, Sniper, and Spy next! Unfortunately, that post will have to wait for tomorrow.
As an apology, you get to have some doodles I made with some of the cast!
From now on, you can find my Blu Team work under the tag #CloneBlu
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xshrimpcake · 1 month
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tension
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jellazticious · 1 year
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Ive done nothing but draw Engineer and Spy as fugly dogs
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elvenpixiex · 9 months
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💥🌸 Hayden undertaking an intense mission 🌸💥
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doodlebugpyro · 2 months
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Saw your engiespy posts and was like
... Y E S
God, I love that dynamic. I been imagining Scout was, like, seeing Spy and Engineer kissing and like "hey! don't you dare to touch my dad!" and standing up between them, actually defending Engineer while Spy could actually believe that Scout was talking about him
Just skabaksnsksboslanaoalqnoqelidhdnqk I just love seeing how Scout reacts to that, idk why
Scout is the anti-Cupid 💔😭
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jojococomo · 1 year
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[Before Law can get a word in edgewise explaining how he would rather not. Luffy's gone in a whirlwind. Or a typhoon. Any natural disaster that left the land devastated in its wake. Law is left standing in the middle of the cafe, clutching his phone as the door slams shut behind Luffy, the bell ringing his exit. 
Law slumps into his stool, suddenly exhausted. 
“Sorry about him.” Nami says sliding into the seat that Luffy just vacated, “He’s like that. Once he takes a shine to you, that’s it. He’s all in. He has no care about whether you want to be his friend or not.”
“We’re not friends.” Law mutters. Nojiko snorts into the mug she’s drying, “I barely know him.”
“I’ve been friends with him for years and I barely know him.” Nami responds with a shrug, “That’s just Luffy. Count your blessings that he likes you. People he doesn’t like usually get punched in the face.”]
---
I should be working, but today brain bad. Here's a peek into my LawLu hospital AU that is never going to see the light of day because i'm a BAD person who can't finish things.
#LawLu#One Piece#jojomakesart#jojowritesfic#monkey d. luffy#trafalgar d. water law#Law is a ER surgeon who specializes in cardiothoracic trauma#Luffy is a firefighter who is surprisingly good at their job#the first drawing has some of my favorite little detail work#also Cora is ALIVE in this AU because I want him to be an embarrassing dad#Ace is NOT alive because I need that good good angst#Sabo is and he's feral#Zoro owns a dojo called Santoryuu that Luffy trains at#Nami is a weather girl for the local news station#Robin is a archeology professor who also has a shady past in espionage#Franky is a engineer that specializes in ship building (and also likes to make wild and outlandish treehouses in his spare time)#Usopp is a biochem major who also spray paints murals into parking garages at night#Brook is an 80 year old musician that is surprising spry but cannot help making the 'when I die...' jokes at every opportunity he can#Sanji obviously is at the Baratie but he also does DRAG because he likes to wear dresses DAMMIT#A list of fun easter eggs because tumblr does not want people to see my genius#1. Law's Coffee Cup is from Camie's the local coffee shop and art house that services the greater area of the Grand Line.#It has Hachi on the logo a la starbucks#2. Nurses station- Kaya as a oncology doctor and Conis as a triage nurse. They gossip a lot and Law does not GOSSIP#but he does#3. CP9- Going to visit Rob Lucci#4. Room sign- 2Y3D#I imagine the hospital is set up not unlike the mangroves in Sabody#5. Reallllly tiny can't see it but the exit sign has Bon Clay on it#6. Patient File- Whitebeard's Law's patient
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lucydoodlessometimes · 2 months
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Down the rabbit hole we go!
I know what I said about the rest of the Lunar chronicles art, but have you considered: I wanted to rewrite Miraculous Ladybug to my tastes instead?? so here. have bunny miraculous felix, or better known as Lapin Blanc.
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