#last post glitched for whatever reason so another post i guess
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#ghost#last post glitched for whatever reason so another post i guess#i didnt realize how big my backlog was
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journal time, i guess. woke up from a nap that i didn't remember taking. checked notifications and found that apparently i had a lot to say to some friends before that. it looks familiar and i was awake for that, but it's also sort of like looking back with a hangover. like being vaguely aware of words and actions when drinking but the impact of it on other people doesn't really register until later when you sober up and realize oh that happened.
also if the reblogs here and another blog are anything to go by, last night/this morning was at least one small kiddo and possibly an older one as well. which sucks for a lot of reasons:
i'm still not convinced i'm actually a system; i'm definitely dissociative and have the diagnoses and decades of therapy and hospitals to back that up, but chalk a lot up to me and not-me and leave it at that
i have a lot of not-me moments and a lot of smaller ones, like weird memory-reality glitches of like, i'm seven i'm immortal i'm twenty-five i'm ageless i'm sitting on my bed but it's not my bed where am i when am i
building off ^ , the posts of school supplies and sippy cups, playgrounds and those rooms - i'm not sure what the significance of those things are but my gut does not have a good feeling about it
the residual feelings from being small are unpleasant, and i'm left with a sense of embarrassment while at the same time having no sense of the concept
the reblogs are from niche interests or system blogs which i don't follow or actively seek. which is fine, i tend to reblog more based on tags than users anyway, but sometimes i filter and/or preemptively block certain types of blogs to avoid content and it seems like those filters were bypassed
usually reblogs are based on drafts, and based on the sources i'm pretty sure most of the things from earlier weren't drafts
🦄 is small and the idea of them pushing the show content button from filtered posts isn't great. i know a lot of the filters are useless anyway and depend on how other users tag, but with the specific kiddo interests and blogs centered around things like nostalgia, the hidden content can be almost anything, and almost anything can be a trigger
sometimes feels like me or 🛡️are 'in the car' with the smalls when they're driving or in the passenger seat, but i don't think/have a feeling that happened earlier (and i know earlier i was doubtful of being a system, but the car analogy has been in play for nearly a decade at this point to describe the me not-me situations)
some of the posts and drafts tagged with 🦄 don't fit with my view/understanding of them, which is fine, they're meant to be their own anyway, but some seem... not wrong, but wrong for them? like maybe it was just copy/paste and/or me not knowing the overlaps with them but gut feeling says there's something else going on
additional notes/stuff about what the tags here mean/how they're meant to work:
tags are more like emotions/feelings/memories/actions/things than names; there's overlap with some of the parts and i don't want to (over)think the distinctions when i can just point out a general association to them. (🦄 has they/them pronouns in a collective/plural sense; different personal pronouns)
also applies to myself/how i view myself. me, not-me, singular, system, whatever (they/them pronouns for me in a nonbinary/agender sense). with the fandom stuff and the more informative/reminder type of posts, tags are mainly for organization and archival clarity, so the 'name tag' doesn't really matter
there's notes in different notebooks and journals and discord and other shit with names, a sort-of sketch page of them that i gave to therapist and we reference sometimes, and moments of 'after' where i can name a not-me. but for the semblance of privacy and the 'but am i even a system' thing, we got emoji tags and maybe initials
the tags are for things that remind me of them or for when there's like influence/feelings between us and it's like, sign off with this to keep track of whose thoughts/ideas/feelings are associated with something. tags are usually put on drafts, and then whoever scrolls through it like it's the dashboard and pushes the post button whenever
on that note, signing off as 👤 for now because this took way too long to write up and i can't look at this stuff any more
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The Dork Legacy 3.5 part 5
Roman: Right?
HEIR!!
Ithoria: As you can see, ladies and gentlemen of the board, I am double-jointed in this hand.
Ithoria: This is one of many reasons why I should be heir of the Dork legacy. :<
Roman: Dude, in college, I'm gonna kiss so many chicks!
Verdana: Oh, I know! I'm gonna make all the boys crazy for me!
Verdana: I'm gonna walk in in my sexy dress and be like... BAM!
Verdana: Like this!
Roman: Yes! Yes! That's the ticket!
HK-47: *hovers*
What the...? That was the most USELESS chance card ever!
And this, folks, is where all the trouble began. I wanted another Servo around the house, so I had Willoughby start making one.
About five minutes later, the game crashed.
And every time I tried to load the lot after that, I'd get this.
So I underwent a huge process of following instructions, starting with taking out my downloads, going through all the system files to see if something was corrupted, and ending with having to move the Dorks out of their house completely. ;-;
Then, I moved them back into their home lot, to save time. And guess what!
Tara's grave was still there!
And so were these two! And also Adrian Rusewicz's, who was the last victim of the cowplant. Everything else, of course, was gone. Including Caedmon's grave, for whatever reason.
I still had this glitch, of course. -.-
And then I noticed this rather interesting want...
And then she tried to autonomously Tune Up HK-47. Who happily rejected her!
HK-47: Pleased Statement: Do not touch me, meatbag! What would your husband, who is standing just behind me, think of our indiscretions.
Bao-Dur: *seethe*
Bao-Dur: I don't hit ladies, but I got nothing against slappin' hoes! >(
Originally posted at katu_sims.
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S5 Ep 14: So If You Put a Fraction Into a Duel Disk, the Card Explodes
We left on quite the cliffhanger last episode, so I’ll fill you in:
I did not get the haircut.
Like I seriously considered getting a Zigfried for a cool 3 or 4 minutes there, but then I decided to wait a couple of days and I basically forgot.
But, back to the arc finale, Seto has decided to walk, not run, to the Kaiba lab in order to fix the virus rapidly eating his entire company.
I just want to point out that Zigfried went through a LOT of work to get Seto Kiaba to go “uggggh” turn around, and pretend to calmly walk away. I’m used to Seto losing his nut kind of a lot and blowing things up but this season he’s like “be chill be chill be chill” so that the entire world doesn’t think he’s a spaz on TV.
And little aside about Seto’s design choices here, I fell down a hole of interior design videos, and can I just say: apparently these wood frame things on the wall are back in style? Good on you, 2002(3?) Seto Kaiba. Don’t think that current designers are painting them purple but...we’re halfway there to Yugioh fashion.
Meanwhile, Pharaoh decides to remind everyone that these stakes are hella low. The worst that happens is that Zigfried deletes the plane that Yugi needs to fly home...which would be an impressive virus.
Like it’s hard to tell if Yami even has a solid concept of “capitalism” and whether or not he cares about or understands the makeup of Seto’s company (which up till now has operated like a small country and not a business...which is a little more Pharaoh’s understanding. Either way...hard to tell if Yami would shed two tears for the loss of Kaiba corp.)
And, despite what I say in the caps, I feel like Leon and Zigfried are the first villains we’ve ever had that Yugi and Pharaoh didn’t unintentionally disclose that they are 2 people to. Zigfried and Leon are just...completely oblivious to how effed up Yugi’s bean is. They think that’s just a normal kid and lol no dudes...y’all got distracted by Seto Kabia but you have a literal Egyptian God just hovering around in the background and dating 3 people by accident.
Like when the show shelves the main storyline, it is very funny how it’s all “And we’re gonna put the Pharaoh crisis on hold--just put a pin in it. No one will notice this child is two nervous wrecks stitched together” and then Yugi and Yami just kinda hold it in and watch all patiently until it’s their turn to get off the bench.
(read more under the cut)
In the giant computer tower, Seto Kaiba shouts out a string of orders and numbers, admired the many sonar detector looking windows open on every monitor, and then sat down at his desk to like...check the firewall, I guess?
The virus is past the firewall. It’s um...it’s inside the firewall, pretty sure that was the point, but youknow, it’s a kid’s show so they’re just throwing out computer stuff that has no meaning to the writers of this show.
Mokuba thinks fondly of how Seto Kaiba has never screwed him over (which I mean...maybe not on purpose, ((except for that one time he did screw him over on purpose to get Gozaburo Kaiba to accidentally give Seto Kaiba the company, but you could say that was a grander scheme that he knew Mokuba would see through, which...)) but Seto certainly has screwed Mokuba over accidentally. At least once.)
And meanwhile, Yami fixes everything through card shenanigans.
So here’s the shenanigan this episode: I don’t go over cards here but this one requires a limited amount of explanation.
So every round the golden castle deletes half of Yugi’s cards. So he was like...I’ll just draw down to one card. They can’t delete half a card...so that means the card must delete one of the two cards on the field which means it must delete itself.
...which is like the closest Yugioh will probably ever get to abusing a glitch to do a speedrunning tactic like GDQ.
Anyway, like I stated in the title: there are no fractions allowed in Yugioh. If you do that to your priceless one-of-a-kind card you got from winning one of Pegasus’ murder tournies, it will irreparably bust the card.
I’m sure at least one of you will correct me with the proper way to insert a fraction into your duel disk. Cuz like...as I say multiple times so we never forget, I barely pay attention to this card game and I’m just flying by the seat of my pants.
I want to say Seto and Mokuba were in the hacker chairs for like...3 minutes maybe before they realized “oh...Yugi fixed it...” and walked the half a mile back to the duel arena.
and also, as I’m looking at Seto’s glasses here, I just realized...all of Kaiba’s team wears sunglasses all the time. Inside, outside, night, or day...
They haven’t outright said this...but what if those aren’t sunglasses?
Is Roland and that other Roland wearing fancy cyber glasses? They are, right? Because they wear them indoors?
Damn, they can’t take a piss without being on call with Kaiba Corp, can they?
Now the problem is...Yugi played all of his cards (he has two in front of him face down, but none in his deck) and after milling himself, this means he’s now basically a sitting duck for Leon to take the title of “King of Games.”
Leon insists that he defend whatever scraps are left of his card honor and not duel a person who is carrying no cards and Yugi was like “COME AT ME BRO THIS IS THE ONLY WAY I KNOW I’M ALIVE.”
He didn’t even have to do a horror on Leon, he just...played cards good? I skipped it, I’ll be honest, but overall Leon’s card honor was...saved? Maybe?
I mean he also go destroyed when his competitor had not a single card in his duel disk so...
...Leon will have to work on his card honor off screen because he’s pretty well humiliated at this point.
But stumbling onto the playing field like he’s half dazed/daydrunk, Zigfried is like “You forgot I already won, bastards!”
Which is when we find out that Zigfried’s “delete all” virus failed to press “enter” and deleted basically nothing. Just like when my Mom attempts to send something in Gmail but doesn’t press “Send” and tells me that Google is down and broken.
Sorry my bro has informed me that he ALSO has had to help my Mother locate the “Send” button and I just...I know she absolutely did that but I’m in denial that this Riddle of the Sphinx has happened to her multiple times.
Honestly, the pep talk we get from Leon at the end to cheer up his bro was a whole lot of “we will pick ourselves up and we’ll do better next time. Together.” and sure you can translate that as “we’ll be honest next time” or you can translate that as “next time we will be not nearly as obvious about inserting a virus into their computer until it is done doing the job, bro.”
Just like Dartz, we didn’t really get a whole lot of retribution or closure when it comes to Zigfried. But, unlike Dartz, Zigfried didn’t do too much murder, so I guess this is fine. He tried to cheat in a card game...
...and I guess tried to delete Kaiba Corp but youknow...
...people let him have that. The police saw the ticket of “this man tried to delete Kaiba Corp” and they just...didn’t arrest him. The judge saw that ticket and didn’t put out a warrant. They just let Zigfried have this, almost like “better luck next time, ya?”
And then Roland clocked out for the day and went home, thus ending this arc.
Look at all these characters, most of which we never saw duel even one card.
We also got one shot of Mai for some reason although she was not in this arc.
AAAHHHH. Every time I’m like “the show is done screwing geography” we get another freakin geography spook!
But we went back to California in order to get a scene of these guys in an airport to get a flight to Japan...
which means Rex and Weevil just...were they shipped home by the Kaibas? Because way to ditch getting arrested by the American Government, hot damn. They are...literally terrorists who destroyed a Caltrain in a plot to kill everyone in the world so like...really surprised Rex and Weevil are in public...but maybe all the FBI were dead at the time so they just didn’t know?
Meanwhile, Duke has to go back to Death Valley and call a tow truck for his car, RIP.
I sure hope he got PTO during this stunt and isn’t going home to a pink slip.
I’m not sure of Dukes life or anything going on with Duke. I’m sure the thing about Serenity is him joking because we have all forgotten about that girl by this point...but also...is Duke...still living in the Tenderloin? The crime rate is very, very high and the ground isn’t solid, so it will liquefy if there’s an Earthquake, but it is one of the few places in the Bay Area that doesn’t light on fire every year. He has that going for him.
I just really hope Duke moves out of the Tenderloin one of these days, he needs a better life.
Meanwhile, Rebecca does one last crime.
This is like a post-epidemic reaction to a hug, but in 2002(3?).
I don’t think I’ll miss Rebecca too much. Wanted to like her more, but she was under-utilized, like most of the characters on Yugioh. Not even just talking girl characters here--most characters on Yugioh are super under-utilized, just Tristan Wallflowers doing nothing, but also being selectively OP as hell about very specific things they never, ever need to do.
Speaking of the devil:
Yugi...just saved his entire company...
But Mokuba is just has to make sure to make it seem like they owed Mokuba and not the other way around. Just in case.
So off they go on this massive plane. It’s probably more to do with the length of the trip as to why the plane is so big but also...
This plane is overcompensating.
But before we analyze that, lets close the book on Seto Kaiba’s very short therapy arc. Overall, it was a nice distraction, but I can see why people call it a filler arc, as it really doesn’t affect...anything going on in the major plotlines, which makes me think it could have been a movie or a game or something. But overall, it’s not bad, it’s just not what you’d expect if you were a Western audience.
Like I’m preaching to the choir, but typically, Western stories are entirely plot focused, and so our arcs always give or take away from that plot. But in a Eastern story arc, it may instead be character focused, where the climax is a character evolving or coming to some sort of cathartic realization, which this arc was, in a big way. We still had some plot, because this is a Shonen, but overall it was about characters, and specifically whether or not Leon and his bro would reconcile or change--which they did.
We did get to see a little more growth on Seto in that he...didn’t go bonkers and hallucinate during a card game. It’s been a while since we’ve had him not do that. Seto was very chill this arc, which makes sense, it was a very chill slice of life arc for everyone involved.
So, next we move on to the next one, which bro has informed me...is
still not Bakura.
According to Bro, the next arc didn’t even air in the Japanese version of the show? Like he’s got a lot of spicy Yugioh headcanons so he could be wrong (He did tell me that he thought that Zigfried was Seto Kaiba’s ex boyfriend when he saw this as a kid which...that sure is a way to interpret this arc, and it probably wasn’t just my little brother who went down that thought tube there...)
(Bro Note: To be fair, I didn’t watch much of this arc as a kid.)
But he says the next arc was originally a movie. But they released it in the States as episodes to be part of S5, just to put more episodes in there. Which, if he’s correct, makes it seem like we’re getting like the Mulan 2 experience kind of shoved in between this arc and the next
But um..
according to bro it has virtually no card games.
.......
I’m so used to only capping 10 minutes an episode, what?
Anyway, until then, here’s the link to read the rest of these from the start in chrono order:
https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono
I’m kinda itching to do a Season Zero, it’s been a hot minute--so those take a little longer to do, especially since I need to go to a different site I haven’t...checked out yet...I’ll be back...eventually? I just know that at some point in Season Zero they fight it out with yo-yo’s and I want to see it.
#yugioh#yu gi oh#ygo#S5#Ep14#Seto Kaiba#zigfried von schroeder#leon von schroeder#Yugi Muto#Joey Wheeler#Tristan Taylor#Mokuba#Tea Gardner#Duke Devlin#Rebecca Hawkins#recap#photo recap#episode recap
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5 Companies That Have Too Much Hype Around Them
Look, we all love our favorite games with a passion, and to an extent that’s fine, but when that passion becomes obsession and that obsession becomes forgetting our own moral compass for the sake of entertainment, it does feel like it’s gone too far. It’s one thing to love what a company releases, it’s completely another to ignore every problem they’ve ever had. Not all of the companies on this list have done horribly un-ethical things, but they’ve at least been anti-consumer, and the fact that people don’t question that enough has led to them sometimes, making horrible mistakes. I am RepentantSky, I love making lists that trash on things that are popular, and these are 5 companies, that have too much hype around them.
5. Nintendo
Already I can hear people getting angry, and in a way I get it. Nintendo is for many people the place where they either begin to play games, or the place they go to keep on playing them when everything else let’s them down, and of course, they put an end to the flipping video game crash of 1983, and no one else will ever be able to claim that from them. That’s all wonderful, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be critical of them. I’ve talked about a number of things they’ve done wrong before, so let me quickly run down the list of some of their anti-consumer practices. They, charge too much for remasters and ports, they don’t drop prices in games, they used to charge for fixing Joy-Cons and now completely deny it’s a problem for legal reasons, despite everyone pretty much having experienced drift, they haven’t been good at getting stock for their items in at least 20 years, and oh yeah, they sell all the content for a remake for $115 on the 3DS, the system and the fans that helped them get by while the Wii U was massively underperforming, all while handing owners of the, at the time, unproven Switch, free content. Nintendo has a tendency to still think like a toy company, and they even used that idea to present the Nintendo Entertainment System as a toy instead of a console when they first game to the West with it, but they aren’t a toy company, their a gaming company that also sells toys, just like everyone else. I get they’ve done amazing things, I own over 150 physical handheld games from them, and a ton of digital games besides, but when they start charging twice what they are worth for SD cards, while releasing games that absolutely won’t fit on the limited space of the Switch, and they simply don’t care when costumers complain, it’s time to at least question their motives.
4. Bethesda
Boy I used to really rip on this company back when I posted lists on Facebook, but I haven’t done it in a while, so let’s do it again. Bethesda has absolutely spent at least the last 10 years lying to people, Todd Howard, has become famous for it, but I think I might have been the only person who wasn’t shocked when Fallout 76 was the disaster that it was. There were so many things wrong with that game, that I don’t even have time to go over every little thing, but lying, you know the thing that will get another company on this list very soon, was a big thing they did with the game. They promised at one point that they weren’t ever going to charge for items in the game that gave in-game benefits, and they did, allowing ammo and other items to be bought with real money for a time, they promised new, specialized servers if you paid for a yearly service that was way too expensive, and that wasn’t true because people found proof of things missing from what would have been a freshly made, private server, and there’s no excuse for that, games in early access do that correctly, and they aren’t, at least supposedly, even finished yet. I wish I could say that’s all they’ve done, but they also bullied an indie developer over their game Prey, a game they may have bullied the original developer for so they could get cheaper, but we’ll never know because they refused to comment on that when asked, they also refused to update their outdated game engine for years, which caused something they spent over a decade fixing, games releasing with glitches, some of them game breaking. Yet somehow, they have such a fan base that those who love their games will claim the glitches are just part of the charm. That kind of fierce loyalty led to Fallout 76, and even though we make jokes about it even now, the horse DLC from way back in the day, was an indication of everything they’ve done, including trying to charge for mods made for free, meant to be consumed for free, twice. Bethesda is a bad company and they do not care.
3. Activision/Blizzard
You know one of the worst things Nintendo does that I didn’t really mention directly in the first entry, is limit the amount of time a product is available, instead of just letting it be there for consumption as long as it’s selling (that was what the toy company reference was about if it wasn’t clear). However, Activision/Blizzard are the Kings of doing this, as they not only limited things while they were in control of Destiny 2 to the point where you pretty much had to use real money to get everything, and never mind everything else they did to it, because we’d be here all day going through it all, but they also don’t support games as a service titles long enough for dedicated fans. Crash Team Racing Nitro fueled, is a prime example of this. People weren’t done with that game, and when fans thought for even a split second that an update was going to come to fix an issue, their hype (mine to) was so explosive, it was almost like we were getting a new game, but then nothing happened, because they didn’t care. A lot of companies that do yearly release titles as a service have this problem and nothing exemplified that more for Activision, than Skylanders, a series originally made off the back of Spyro, who didn’t even wait for a year to release new games, as technically between October 21st and November 20th of the year the first game came out, they released three of them, and I’m not even kidding. Two of them, were mobile games! You might have thought I was going to go after Call of Duty, for this, but that horse has been beaten to ground, somehow, more than Skylanders was. They also, for whatever reason, released each expansion on different generations console generations, at different months throughout Fall, like somehow the season of Fall, they needed a release every month, if not two, and so off they went. I didn’t even get into Blizzard, but all I need to say is “Blitzchung” and all the memories will likely come flooding back. There’s also the fact that in two separate years, after gaining massive profits, they dropped hundreds of employees, and hired more than they’d let go, but I guess that doesn’t really matter to some of you, because when they did it this year, with so little warning, most employees found out via the news articles about it, but we all made such a little stink this time around, it didn’t create any media buzz, so I guess that doesn’t matter, you’d all rather play flipping World of Warcraft, like better MMO’s don’t exist.
2. CD Projekt Red
I know this one comes off a little more fresh in the mind, and they technically only lied about one game, but man, what a series of lies it was. Also, let’s be honest, one major game, does not a great developer always make. CDPR’s previous two Witcher games did exactly what the author of the books thought they would, and that was almost nothing in terms of making a serious impact, and the reason is, they are kind of bad. They aren’t the worst games out there, but there is a good reason why The Witcher 1 and 2 haven’t been ported and/or remastered, despite how important they are to the story of Witcher 3, and that’s because they both suck. Cyperpunk 2077, was in a lot of ways, them just going back to being the developer they were before, the BIG ONE happened. They lied about nearly everything in regards to the game, including how the main platforms where consumers were going to buy it, were actually running well. I made those references to Witcher 1 and 2 for a reason, although if I’m being honest, they actually look better than Cyberpunk did on day 0, and that’s completely unacceptable. The budget for CDPR was basically nothing for Witcher 1 and 2 combined to what Cyberpunk got, but they were so focused on the PC versions because PC ran the game better, somehow (like maybe because they didn’t try with consoles) and they missed glitches that were so bad, the game felt like it was still in beta, if not alpha upon release. The fact that they’ve only released eleven games in twenty-three years, and only two of them didn’t have The Witcher on them, should have told us all we need to know, and yet the game, even after returns, which was another massive screw-job that led to Cyberpunk being removed from the PlayStation store, still sold Sixteen million units, all because of hype, and because apparently, some people don’t care if they’re lied to. Do you want to know what the other game they released is besides a Witcher title? It was flipping Saints Row 2, a fun game, but also one that’s too goofy for it’s own good, and yet suddenly makes Cyberpunk’s release, make sense, because it was all a massive joke, and a parody of good, well running, open world games. CDPR needs to seriously do something, anything different, and never release a game in this poor of a state ever again.
1. Ubisoft
I put Ubisoft at number one for a damn good reason, and that reason is, that everyone seems to hate the company, but loves their games, and I don’t know why. They haven’t been the overall worst company on this list, although they are pretty bad, but the major problem they have, and have had for at least a decade is that none of their games have any identity, they are literally all the same game, with different coats of paint. Sure, an occasional gem sneaks through like Assassin’s Creed IV, but all of the rest of their games have the same visual style (although ACII does seem to be the base for which they create their art let’s be honest), the shooting mechanics they have in all the games that have guns, all feel exactly the same, which is something even Call of Duty manages to avoid most years (guess I took a shot at them anyways) and yet somehow, someway, I keep seeing people getting excited for their releases, and it doesn’t make any sense. Sure, they throw a celebrity actor in from time to time, and the artistic style they use does look pretty cool, but everything is always the same with them, every single time, no matter what it is, and they still keep making money. It doesn’t really make sense either, because a lot of developers do make games that are very similar feeling, see the Life is Strange team or much as well all loved them, Telltale Games, but at least those titles told extremely interesting stories, and developed their mechanics at least a little, which is something most companies do just on principal, but not Ubisoft. They throw out a few Tom Clancy games every time they talk about what their releasing, the Trials and AC games are still mostly a yearly experience, and I’ll say it again, their entire list of releases since at least 2013, the year the previous generation kicked off, have pretty much all been the same. It would be nice if they made more games like Child of Light, but despite the fact that their games will likely never be as popular as Call of Duty, they keep churning out same-y shooters hoping that one day, maybe just one day, they’ll create their own CoD, and it’s just not gonna happen. The saddest part of all is that when they announce something different, something fans have wanted for years, we get The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake, which was literally delayed because fans said they wouldn’t buy it unless some actual effort was put into making it, why is this company so popular that it can keep doing this, someone please explain it to me.
And that’s my list, can you think of any other companies that are too hyped? Let me know in the notes below, hit me up with a follow if you like my content, and give me a reblog, I’d really appreciate it. Have a wonderful life!
#ubisoft#activision#blizzard#cdpr#CD Projekt RED#bethesda#nintendo#nintendo 3ds#3DS#nintendo switch#witcher 3#witcher#prince of persia#skylanders spyro#spyro the dragon#spyro reignited trilogy#crash team racing#nitro fueled#destiny#destiny 2#cyberpunk 2077#saints row#toys#Joycon#child of light#Entertainment#top 5#lists#hype
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Glitched [Change Your Passwords]
Hacker AU
TW: Implied Stalking, Language
Pairing: (NCT) Unknown x Reader
Genre: Choose Your Story, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery
(3/?) [Previous] | [Next]
[Main Masterlist] | [Glitched Masterlist]
Word Count: 3.9K
Notes: Sorry for the wait on this one! I’ve been studying for my classes, but don’t worry I won’t leave you all hanging haha. Also I’ve updated the video links to go to a video archive blog of mine because the private posts were just not working out for me so I hope this will be easier! I ask that you don’t follow that blog only for spoilers as I’ll upload videos/other medias there first prior to posting the actual fics so you might either get spoiled or just really confused lol. But yeah, I hope you enjoy!!
Disclaimer: Please remember that this is an AU and a work of fiction, obviously the idol(s) mentioned/written/implied would never partake in or condone these actions. I would never wish any of these actions to occur to anyone mentioned in the writings of this story, nor do I wish any harm on them. The idols mentions in this work are meant to be acknowledged as no more than face claims and are not meant to represent the idols in any way.
You sat down first with Jaemin and Yangyang still in line for whatever it was they had decided to eat for lunch, you, meanwhile, decided on changing your passwords. Figure, you have since decided on calling him that since that’s what he told you to tell Instagram, seemed very adamant on it, and thus here you were, changing literally all of your passcodes and writing them down on the side of the paper bag you requested.
But as you did this the creeping feeling of being watched never left you. The security cameras were pointed the other way and no one, to your knowledge, was making an active effort to stare at you. It had to be related to that scare from earlier, you had nearly forgotten about it while in your lab. You finished changing the last passcode and looked down at your phone, the last passcode being the one to your Tumblr account, and you opened your messages, secretly hoping that maybe you’d receive another message from Figure, but none were presented to you. No doubt changing your passcodes might have disconnected you from the person as a whole. But, of course, right when you least expect it, things always turn around. Then in came a message from user011719.
https://videoarchivesatzml.tumblr.com/post/644877251145515008/glitched-change-your-passwords-video
You played the video again. Why did it just stop mid-sentence? You tried to play it again but the message, much like the one you received earlier, disappeared. Like it was never there in the first place. You wondered what could have happened, if you didn’t know what you did already you would’ve assumed that he cut the recording too soon or that he ran out of WiFi, but this couldn’t have been the case, it was too easy, too simple.
But you were more concerned about another thing Figure had mentioned. To your knowledge, no one had used your phone. The only person that it could’ve been was… Jaehyun. But why would he have done that? There was no purpose as to why he would do that.
“(Y/N)!” Seonghwa called out to you and you waved.
“Oh, hello!”
“Oh, thank god, you have your phone,” he sighs. “Did Jaehyun give it to you?”
“Yeah, he did,” you were surprised by how convenient Seonghwa’s timing was, but you had to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Why?”
“Bambam was looking through it.”
“He was what?!”
“Yeah, that’s why Somi isn’t around right now, she’s probably beating his ass. He’s been here the longest but Somi doesn’t really give a fuck,” Seonghwa shakes his head. “Don’t worry, he didn’t open anything, he was just being a bitch.”
“How did he know my password?”
“You really should change your password from 0000, (Y/N), it’s too simple,” Seonghwa laughs.
“Oh god, don’t worry I already changed it. What did he want anyway?”
“I’m pretty sure he was just being stupid, Bambam acts like that but he’s not a dick, he looked surprised himself when he got your password, I figured I’d tell you because that was just out of line.”
“It was, yeah, thanks for telling me,” you nodded your head.
“It was the right thing to do, I’m gonna go head out now, I have to make sure Somi didn’t go too far, I’ll see you back in lab.”
“See you,” he waved at you again and walked out of the food court. You pulled out your phone and stared at it, people seriously have no boundaries. Bambam had already rubbed you the wrong way but this was honestly such a dick move, you shook your head.
You hoped that he didn’t see your Instagram, Seonghwa said that he didn’t see or open anything but still. You’d have to thank Somi later, but you still couldn’t believe that he was so shameless with it. The nerve of some people, if this were a cartoon you’d be certain that steam would be blowing out of your ears, you would definitely give him a piece of your mind back in lab later. You looked at the DMs, if anyone else saw this they would be more than just suspicious, no doubt, or they would think that you were crazy and laugh at you.
But looking at these DMs, you thought back to the video. Figure mentioned that there was someone keeping him captive, and with this knowledge, you felt your heart rate rise slightly, and you could only think of the worse. But, despite this, you were at least able to screenshot that one part that he asked you to send to not.here127, something that you were glad that you did because you hardly remembered what else he sent.
You left the app and opened your notes app, then you tried to type out the screenshot. You got pretty far until about the second sentence, at that point the keyboard started lagging until it stopped working altogether.
“What the fuck?” You whispered to yourself and restarted the app, trying to type out the message again, but still came the same result. You even tried restarting your phone altogether, but still, the same result. Until your keypad started moving itself, and you gasped loudly enough for some people to turn their heads. You dropped your phone on the table. “Uh, sorry, just family news,” you said aloud. Many of the people seemingly understood this and turned back around. But when you looked down at your phone, the lone sentence on your notes app read:
“Don’t. - Figure”
It was like you could feel your blood circulating through you. You had no idea how to feel right now, nor did you want to take the time to figure it out. Then it started typing again.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have hacked into your phone but… something came up, and it would just be safer for you if I did this. I’d tell you what it was but it would be better if I didn’t. Just… tell him in person, okay?”
You nodded your head slowly and picked your phone back up, reopening Instagram. Part of you felt more awkward now knowing that this Figure was in your phone, probably watching you as you typed, but you wanted to give what limited trust you could. Then another foreign feeling came over you, one you’ve felt since entering this facility, actually, and when you looked to the corner of the room, you saw the camera focused right on you, then you continued the conversation.
You stared at the camera that was still trained on you, then at your phone’s camera. You wanted to cover the camera, to be honest, but two things stopped you. One being how you would make fun of your friends when they did so, and two being how Figure had mentioned that the whole reason why he hacked into your phone was because “something came up.” Now, you aren't stupid. You could put two and two together and no doubt this “something” was related to this new person that not.here127 mentioned, Connect.
“So how’s your first day so far?” Jaemin asks once he sits down. You locked your phone and placed it back into your pocket.
“It’s great, it’s everything I could’ve hoped for, I just can’t believe that I’m finally here, you know?” You answered. Jaemin had his usual lopsided smile on while Yangyang sat down, he looked between both of you and a sly smirk crawled on his face. You knew that look, you knew what he was planning and you stomped on his foot before he could think about it.
“You okay, Yangyang?” Jaemin asks.
“Just fine,” he winces. “But how’s the hell lab, (Y/N)?”
“Actually not that bad… so far. But I shouldn’t jinx it,” you shook your head. “How about you, Lab V, right?”
“I think my mentor has it out for me. He’s always pointing out the little mistakes I make, it’s so nerve-racking…”
“Who’s your mentor?” Jaemin asks.
“Sicheng…” Yangyang frowns.
“Oh, you’re fine. He’s like that with everyone.”
“What does your lab work on?”
“Uh, it’s kind of weird,” Yangyang hums. “Some biomatter stuff.”
“You don’t know what you’re studying?!”
“I mean I do! But like, it’s weird,” Yangyang shook his head. “Technically, it’s called Biomatter Space Compression. But like, it’s weird because like… I think there’s more to it,” Yangyang frowns.
“So like what space does to the body?”
“Yeah, but like… you know what, forget it, I have no idea how to explain it,” Yangyang shakes his head. “Give me like a week to make sense of it,” he laughs.
“I used to be in that lab, and that’s probably the best way to explain it,” Jaemin sighs. A loud beeping noise goes off and Yangyang groans.
“Shut up,” your jaw drops while you fought back a smile. Yangyang reluctantly pulls out a device probably twice his age. “Is that a pager?!” You started to laugh.
“Yeah,” he holds it in his hand and shows you. “As soon as my supervisor busted this out I almost laughed out loud,” Yangyang chuckles.
“Oh god, that’s old…”
“I know, looks like he’s calling us all back in early, so I’ll see you after then,” Yangyang waves goodbye and leaves the cafeteria, leaving you and Jaemin behind.
“Ah, I guess lunch is almost over,” Jaemin stretches his arms back and yawns. “I’ll walk you back to the labs,” Jaemin tosses the paper bag into the trash bin and stands up, waiting for you to catch up to him. You quickly followed suit and walked next to him. You both exited the bustling lunch hall and walked back into the outdoor walkway, the grand structure never failing to amaze you but to be fair it is still your first day. You were both making a beeline for the labs, and you, of course, noticed the cameras discreetly following you the entire time. You soon approached your lab building and you both stopped in front of it.
“Thanks…” you didn’t really have much to say, what do you say in this situation? You both had only known each other briefly and never on the level to easily make small talk. You were about to go back inside when he said something rather peculiar.
“No problem… You must be pretty smart if you got this internship, you know. If you feel like something’s off, then it probably is,” he says. Then he walks off without giving you a chance to answer. You walked into the locker room with a heavy mind, putting your equipment back on and begrudgingly placing your phone back into the UV chamber, feeling at least a little more secure with your now changed passwords, then you walked back into the lab.
“(Y/N)!”
“Bambam,” the name came out harshly from your mouth and he shoots an awkward smile.
“You guys told (Y/N)?”
“Of course we did!” Seonghwa glares at him.
“I’m so sorry, (Y/N), he grabbed it because it’s the same model as his phone and he ended up opening it since you both coincidentally had the same password,” Somi sighs. “0000, really?! You have important lab information on your phone and your password is 0000?!”
“I know okay? I changed it,” Bambam rolls his eyes.
“To what? 1234?” Jaehyun laughs.
“Well, when we’re done here, I’m gonna change it again,” Bambam crosses his arms. “Sorry about that, (Y/N), it was a genuine mistake, I didn’t open anything, promise,” he says. Your shoulders relaxed, you couldn’t help mistakes, and though this was an eerie coincidence there wasn’t much you could say anyway.
“It’s fine,” you shook your head. Somi’s explanation made enough sense, you think. “Just be more careful next time, I’d rather not have a complete stranger going through my phone, mistakenly or not,” you said sternly. The other members of the lab group looked at you with a strange expression, maybe you said it a bit too harshly, and truthfully normally you’d shrug it off but with the whole thing going on with Figure, or Connect, or whoever the hell you were DMing on Instagram is just getting to you. Then there were those damn cameras, both around the facility and on your own phone.
“Sorry about that, I’m just a little stressed,” you shook your head and tried to play it off. Bambam starts laughing out loud and you flinched at the sudden outburst.
“Oh, don’t worry, we get it! Seonghwa was worse when he first started,” Bambam’s worried look is immediately replaced with a happier one while he clapped the other one’s shoulder. “You should’ve seen him, he snapped at all of us.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh, you did,” Jaehyun chuckles and moves to the lab table. “But now, with all of that out of the way, we have to work,” Jaehyun says. Everyone moved to their stations quickly, picking up where you each left off prior to lunch. You were put on data recording, something not precisely fun but also the only thing you could currently be trusted with. You were amazed by how easily they all worked together, you couldn’t help but feel like you were just stepping on their toes really, but every time they’d call you over they’d be nice about it at the very least. You each moved around the clock nonstop, you walking around the rather large lab table with the rather large laptop to each station as the main researchers called you over to record something, and them occasionally overlapping in their stations as each of the trials were carried out and analyzed.
“Alright then,” Bambam stands up and stretches his back. “I’m going home.”
“Already?” You asked while you looked at the wall clock, it read 7:48 pm, about an hour away from clock out time. You then looked at the laptop in your hands and saw about 3/4s of the spreadsheet filled. “Don’t we need to finish the rest of this today?”
“Nah, the rest of the trials take about a day to develop, so we’re good on waiting, or at least I am,” Bambam says. “You did good, rookie, don’t worry about it,” he says.
“Oh, thanks,” you cleared your throat.
“Be safe on your way home then, Bambam,” Jaehyun says without looking up from his microscope. “Don’t worry, (Y/N), we don’t have strict clock-out times,” he says while turning the bulb off on the microscope.
“Heading out too?” Somi asks.
“Yup, you all stay safe,” Jaehyun waves at them and walks out of the lab, following close behind Bambam.
“I’m almost done here,” Somi twists open the pipette drip and watches the chemical drop into the solution. “Just have to finish developing these samples and recording color changes, if you want I can take it from here, (Y/N),” she offers.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, (Y/N), you’ve been walking around all day, I’m surprised you’re not lightheaded from all the times you walked around here,” she says. “I’m serious! Jaehyun left so he won’t know,” she says.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Seonghwa shrugs while he closes the mice cage.
“You’re cleared!” Somi smiles.
“Thanks, Somi,” you had on a tired smile, it was true, your feet were killing you with all the walking you’ve been doing and you haven’t had a chance to sit down.
“Get home safe,” she says.
“Do you need a ride home?” Seonghwa asks.
“No thank you, I’ll just take the bus,” you said, hoping that Yangyang was still here.
“Okay, see you tomorrow then,” Somi waved at you while you left. You entered the empty locker room and shrugged your lab coat off and hung it in your locker, placing your goggles on the top shelf and grabbing your bag. Then you turned around and, with your breath held, opened the UV chest. You saw your phone resting undisturbed in the same spot you left it and you felt a wave of relief while you picked it up. Everything was still in order and you spotted the text from Yangyang simply stating that his team messed up an experiment and they had to redo the whole thing and told you to just head home without him.
“Well, great,” you shook your head and walked out into the darkened facility. “West wing…” you mumbled to yourself, following the signs quickly. You pushed open the double doors and walked out into the nighttime, the moon already in the sky. You opened Instagram and quickly read through the conversation again while you descended the steps, and you soon noticed the car parked in front of you, and as you walked over to it, someone stopped you.
“Oh, (Y/N)!” Jaehyun called out to you, he looked like he was just about to re-enter the building. “Perfect timing,” he says while holding up his phone.
“Oh, hello,” you said. He was the first person who came up to you out here.
“I forgot that you weren’t in our work group chat, we were planning on getting dinner together,” he shows you the conversation. You spotted Somi’s text saying that she forgot to tell you about it and asked if anyone had your number. “Want to come?” He asks. You quickly glanced at the car behind him, it hadn’t moved since you walked out and the windows were tinted.
[[Follow Jaehyun or Go to the Car]]
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Digit-Glitched (3/3)
Synopsis: While Dr. Marbles is away, Digit starts to glitch. When things get more serious, the cybersquad is called on to help. Unfortunately, the only one who can perform repairs is... Hacker.
A/n: This is a story that’s already on FF. net but I thought I’d post it here too because I have a tendency to spontaneously delete the stories on that account. the ending to this one is a little anti climatic, but I hope you like it anyways.
IX.
"Ah! That's much better." Hacker came out of the storage room dressed in a dark sweater and purple lab coat. He had found the outfit while digging around and had made the kids wait outside for him to change. "I feel like a new borg."
With the change of clothes, he seemed to carry himself with more confidence as well as condescension, despite his unremitting status as their prisoner. Jackie was already started to regret not making him return to the garden right away. Any desire to view Hacker in a new light had since vanished, along with her patience.
"How much time do you have until you'll need a recharge?" she prodded, half as a threat, and half actually curious to know. Hacker didn't reply, though he seemed to take her point.
"Bring the cyberturkey here," he said. "There's a computer I can dust off. In the meantime, I'll look this over."
"Guys?" Jackie looked at her teammates, exhausted and not sure how much more she could handle. They still had no idea whether Hacker would actually be able to fix Digit and time was starting to run thin.
"I'll get Digit," Matt sighed. "You guys stay here." Jackie gave him a nod, relieved he'd stepped up. She and Inez went back inside and watched over Hacker like a pair of hawks. The cyborg was studying what appeared to be design notes done on a yellowing piece of paper. He seemed completely immersed, as if reading some kind of philosophical genius for the first time.
"Haha! Even when I was one of Motherboard's little groupies, I was brilliant. Just goes to show genius can't be tethered."
"Oh, give me a break." His excitement made Jackie more than a little uneasy. She glanced around the room, wondering if there might be some things Dr. Marbles wouldn't want getting into Hacker's hands. There was that possibility. But this was Hacker's room, wasn't it? Or at least it had been. There weren't likely to be any secrets he didn't already know about. Then again, he'd apparently forgotten a lot of what he'd once written. There was probably a lot it would have been best for him not to relearn.
Her outbreak caused him to pause and glance back at her with a raised eyebrow. She had been hovering over his shoulder and he now put his arm over the book to make it harder for her to see what was written. Not that she could have understood most of it anyways, as much as she'd tried. Coop wasn't kidding when he'd said Hacker liked to overcomplicate things. She watched him grab a pencil and start making marks over the pages, crossing out sections and making little notes for himself over others.
"Much too inefficient," he mumbled to himself as he worked. "I can do this much better."
Was he actually trying to make improvements? The idea stupefied her and it took her a moment to come to her senses. Whatever he was doing, it wasn't to make their lives any better. And it certainly wouldn't be for Digit's benefit. She slammed her hand down in front of him, cutting him off from his jotting while she spoke her piece.
"Digit doesn't belong to you anymore. You don't have the right to change things," she murmured. "He's perfect the way he is and he's going to stay that way."
"Are you mad!?" Hacker retorted, getting out of his seat and using his height to intimidate her. "That tin-turkey is barely functional compared to what he could be."
"Too. Bad." Jackie put her arms on her hips, not even budging an inch as Hacker glowered down at her. Eventually, whether it was because he didn't care enough to argue the point or became increasingly aware of his draining charge, he sat back down.
"Fine. If you earth brats want your bubble brained bird so much, you can have him."
X.
As soon as the ginger brat returned with Digit, Hacker snatched the cyboid out of his hands and got to work. He couldn't rationalized what had gotten him so agitated all of a sudden. If Digit functioned poorly, it would only play to his benefit. The tin turkey wasn't his problem anymore. Yet there was a nagging feeling. Something he hated, but that being back at Control Central seemed to provoke. Was it his programming reeling in its nasty head, or some misplaced feeling that the tin turkey's incompetence would reflect badly on him?
Whatever the reason for these pesky thoughts, he had no time for them now. He had been up for hours and could feel his faculties start to lag. The last thing he needed was to run out of power away from the Grim Wrecker.
He hooked Digit up to the computer and started to program a new CPU. The one he had currently had seen some damage which was likely the source of the data leakage. Hardly surprising seeing how many times the boid had crash landed in turbulent weather. When he'd first created Digit, he'd never intended for him to navigate windy mountains, snowstorms and high altitudes, otherwise he would have built his wings with more durability.
Even now, if Digit wasn't currently an agent of his greatest foe, he would have opted for a full propeller replacement, otherwise it would only be a matter of time before another leak occurred. As it was, he'd probably just slip in an extra layer of metal to afford the CPU a bit of extra cushioning. Or maybe some kind of gelatinous liquid?
Hacker stopped himself mid-thought. There it was again. His programing, or his misplaced pride, or whatever it was. He didn't have to do anything but the bare minimum to get the heap of metal running again. Yet he itched to. His wicked mind was abuzz with ideas for upgrades and alternations. It had been years since he'd built a bot from scratch. Even Buzz and Delete he had just slapped together with a 'Build-A-Henchmen' manual.
A examination of what was left on the old CPU told Hacker that Marbles and attempted to make changes to the base code. Successfully too, although he would never admit it aloud. The only thing that granted him some satisfaction was that it clashed with a later part of the script he assumed Marbles had never gotten around to deciphering. Despite what he'd told himself, correcting Marbles's mistakes had always brought him inordinate amounts of joy and he couldn't resist it now.
"My magnificent mind has once again done it. And in record time." He said as he held up the finished CPU. He rewarded himself with a slathering of wig gel through his over-styled locks.
"Did you carry that with you to sleep?"
"Yes. Now, zip it."
He turned away from the dark haired brat and set his hands back on the keyboard. Manipulating the code, he was able to disengage the cyboid's system, enabling him to take complete control of his functions. This done, he unlocked the cover shielding Digit's face and limbs. With access restored, he took off the boid's hat and used a screwdriver to remove the lid over the back of his head.
"All those with weak stomachs should look away," he said, remembering something they'd used to say in university during robotics demonstrations.
Hacker pulled away the lid, exposing two little chips connected by a thick mass of wires. He picked up a pair of probes and gently peeled open the mass of wires, looking for the specific one he was meant to cut. As he picked up the scissors, a pair designed especially for operating systems of Digit's size, whose blades were about half the length of his little finger, his hand started shaking. He brushed off the minor jitter, but the closer he brought his hand to Digit's wires, the more the quivers started to look like tremors.
He drew his hand away before it could accidentally snip the wrong cord. It was the confounded lag delaying precision mechanics! In his current state, he probably couldn't scratch his head without poking out an eye. He turned towards the earth brats still peering over his shoulder. Just thinking about uttering the words he was about to say caused him physical pain, but it seemed like there was no other opinion. He summon all the will he could muster as well as an accusatory tone which served to shift the blame.
"You want to help your feathery friend?" he grimaced, shoving the scissors into the bespectacled one's hands. "Now's your chance."
"T-to do what?"
Hacker held up one of his trembling hands. He had to grab it by the wrist to keep it relatively still. "Unless I get very long recharge, I'm going to turn your tin turkey into minced turkey." He gestured matter-a-factly at Digit and got up, inviting one of them to take his seat. The kids looked among each other, trading silent arguments until one spoke up.
"Who has the steadiest hands?"
"Jackie," the other two said in unison.
"Me?"
"You play the piano."
"Piano isn't brain surgery!" She eyed the scissors and kneeled her balled fists into her forehead, screaming in panic on the inside.
"I guess I could do it. I have the smallest hands. That counts for something right?"
"Are you sure, Inez?"
"It's okay I'll be careful. You're talking to the Queen of Operation from her preschool class," she chuckled, not sounding too self-assured of that particular credential. She slipped her fingers into the scissor's holes and practiced aiming and snipping them. Putting her free hand under her wrist to keep it completely steady.
"You don't even have to understand what you're doing," Hacker scoffed, more to mock than to reassure. He hadn't gone to school for over a decade just for his job to be forcible outsourced to a little girl. "Just do exactly what I tell you. Child's play. Wait, how old are you again?"
"Nine."
"Hmm. The tin turkey's toast."
XI.
Inez held the scissors up to the mass of wires over Digit's head. She exhaled a deep breath trying to relax herself before she started on the most stressful task she'd ever been given in her life. And worse still, the person she was relying on to guide her through was none other than Hacker! It was the worse possible situation they could have been stuck in, and worse, she couldn't think of any way it could have been adverted.
"Okay. What first?" she said, tentatively.
"You're cutting five of the wires that link the the CPU and personality chip," the cyborg lectured, quite smug about being the one in charge. "If you so much as SNAG any of the wires around it, they'll snap and your bird brain will be bird food. If that happens, I claim no culpability," he added, sounding a bit too pleased by the scenario. "You have to replace the wires as you're cutting. Never have more than one wire disconnected at a ti-"
Inez leapt out of her seat as Hacker collapsed like dead weight beside her. "Guys, I think he ran out of power."
"I'm FINE!" Hacker wheezed dragging himself back onto the table, his voice a venomous whisper. He grabbed a pen and drew a map of the wiring, marking out the ones that needed to be cut in order. "There. I spelled it out for you. Now get to work," he groaned, collapsing again.
"GUYS!?" Inez cried, shooting panicked glance at her friends.
"We can do it together," Jackie reassured her, placing a supportive hand over her shoulder. "I'll help you find the wires."
"I'll start looking for screws," Matt said, getting up to look around the room. "I'll need them when you're replacing the wires."
"Just take your time," Jackie said. "If you need me to switch with you, I will." Inez nodded. It was always a relief to have her friends with her. They had done big things together. Incredible things. Winning a skating contest by the narrowest possible margin, taking out a giant frog, escaping a gang of Hackerized gorillas. Their adventures together would take all day to list. With their support, there wasn't anything she was afraid of. Even performing causal neurosurgery on one of her best friends.
"Okay. I got this."
She pried the mass of wires open with the prongs and Jackie helped her search and marked out the ones she needed. She slowly brought the scissors up to the first one, trying not to touch any of the cords around it which all looked thin enough that they might rip with a only a slight provocation. The tangle made it difficult to identify the two ends of the wire and which ones actually matched up. She was just thankful a few of them were different colors.
"They kind of look like neurons in a brain," she murmured, hesitating as her blades hovered over the one she was meant to cut. "At least what neurons look like in drawings." She tilter the scissor's curved blade down at an angle and aimed it with a level of precision that could only have been possessed by an Operation master. "I got the first one." Matt was right by her with the replacement wire and screw.
"Let me do this part," he offered. "My dad taught me a little when he was fixing the lights in the barn." Inez handed the tools to Matt, relieved to have someone else with more expertise help out.
With Inez cutting, Matt rewiring and Jackie keeping the whole team organized, they made incredibly efficient progress. In a little over an hour and a half they had gotten through all five wires. The old CPU was still in Digit's head though. They would need to remove it and replace it with the new one. She was just about to examine the chip closer when a hand pushed her out of the way. Hacker had dragged himself up again, but didn't look like he'd last more than a couple of minutes.
"What are you doing?" he snapped, seemingly having forgetting the instructions he'd given them before.
"We're done replacing the wires," she announced.
"You what!?" He looked over their work and let out a series of unintelligible grumbles. He seemed to be trying to find something to complain about, but was coming up empty. Using a pair of foreceps, he lifted the CPU off its knobs, fitting the new one over and gently pushing it into place. "Now close him up and GET ME OUTTA HERE!"
"Not so fast." Jackie held her hand in front of his face, then seemed to realize how close she was to touching him and drew it away. "We're going to make sure you didn't try and pull anything first. Boot him back up."
Hacker growled and started jamming his thumb on Digit's power button. "Wake up you bothersome bird."
Jackie quickly rescued her friend from the bad guy's clutches. She placed Digit's box on her lap and slid a finger gently over his power button. After a few seconds there was a soft chime and what sounded like a pre-recorded message. "The Digi will be right with cha!"
"It worked!" she cried, eye glowing with excitement at hearing the boid's voice.
"Of course it worked, you infantile ingrate," Hacker sneered before being elbowed in the face by Matt. The villain faceplanted on the ground with a loud thonk and laid still.
"Matt!"
"What?" the boy shrugged. "Admit it, you wanted to do it too."
"Yeah, I did," Jackie muttered reluctantly.
Inez reached over at patted Digit on the back. There was a soft humming coming from his operating system, but still no movement from the boid. "Are you alright, Digi?
At her touch, Digit's head and limbs popped out of his body like a jack in the box. He looked around wildly, his eyes big and panicked. "Where am I? What happened?"
"Do you remember us, Digit?" Jackie asked.
"Course I do, Jackster, but what is the Hacker doing here?"
"It's a long story," Inez giggled. "But we better get a portal from him back to the Wrecker before he wakes up again."
"We missed ya, Digit," Matt said, giving the cyboid a playful punch on the shoulder.
"Don't worry," the boid cried, hopping over to the desk to flash superhero poses. "The Digi is back! He's better! And he's here to stay!"
XII.
"Boss! Rise and shine. I've got your breakfast right here. Eggs with You-shaped pancakes," Buzz said, waiting outside Hacker's room for permission to enter. "I think Delete might have gotten a bit of shell in by mistake. Boss?" He waited another minute before pushing aside the trolley and knocking on the door.
"Something wrong Buzzy?" Delete said, coming by with a warm towel laid smartly over one arm. It was part of the Hacker's daily routine to have a towel over his face every morning to warm up the circuits and aid in general wellness, at least according to the cyber-health magazines he was always reading.
"The boss isn't waking up. Wicked's gonna be here any minute."
"Maybe something terrible happened to him! We should check," the lanky bot cried, pushing open the door.
"Deedee, wait!" Buzz moved over the stop him, knowing the Hacker hated being barged in on while he was enjoying beauty sleep. The two tumbled through the door, knocking over a drawer of photos and sending shards of glass scattering across the spotless floor. "The Hacker isn't going to like this."
"Boss!" Delete pulled himself off his colleague, seeming not to notice the mess they'd made, and ran over to Hacker's bedside where the villain lay, face flat on the floor. "Boss?" He gave the cyborg's head a little poke, but got no response.
"I think the boss needs a recharge," Buzz suggested, shoving the glass shards under the carpet. "That's funny, I don't think he's ever run out of juice in the middle of the night."
"Maybe someone came in, in the middle of the night and took him somewhere," Delete said, letting out a little frightened gasp. "What if they're still HERE?!"
"That's ridiculous. Who'd come all the way out here? And how would they have gotten past the security?"
"We have security?"
"Of- er... now that you mention it," the round bot gave his chin a scratch. "Check the room, and then we've got to get the boss to his recharging chair." Delete nodded, opening the closet and yanking out Hacker's capes in order to make sure no one was hiding inside or behind any of them. Meanwhile Buzz was pulled off the sheets of the bed to make sure no one was hiding inside of it.
"I can't believe we have to drag him half way across the Wrecker," he muttered.
A spark of electricity buzzed between Delete's antennae. "We could bring the chair here," he suggested. "That'll be easier. We could take it apart and put it back together right next to the bed."
"Good thinking, Deedee! How hard could it be to put together a chair?" The two duncebuckets gave each other the high five before walking out, leaving their boss lying on the floor beside his disheveled bed.
THE END.
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Yet Another Hollow Theory
Hi, yes, hello. I’m back on my dumbness today folks. ANOTHER HOLLOW THEORY BECAUSE SEASON 2 IS RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER AND I’M LOSING MY MARBLES!
SO, this is a theory I DID NOT come up with on my own, I had the help of the lovely @lunaria-gryfe to assist me with this. This theory is based on how they got back into the game this season.
Originally, we’d been thinking tournament style or it’s the “next level”, however, it’s referenced a few times in the trailer than something wasn’t right and that they felt they were supposed to be there. So, this lead to a 6 hour long discussion (with some unplanned intermissions and tangents) about different theories. I started off with the idea that the code got to them and that they never actually woke up, that the ending was just the corrupted code messing with them. This was a maybe, so we explored how this was possible and discussed the way of how they entered the game.
They entered the game through those chairs or machines or whatever and it was making sense until Luna reminded me that Weirdy, whom we now call Chad because someone on Tumblr named him that and we loved it, didn’t use the chair thing. Which means, if he was getting in one way, they had to be getting in the same or a similar way. Which made my brain connect two things, the blue glowing screens that the kids look at, the ones they used to choose powers, and Chad’s (Weirdy’s) glasses. He never takes them off, which would make it easy for him to pop in and out of the game at his convenience. However, we didn’t think it was just the screens that was allowing them in, Luna and I thought, “Well, what about their memories and projecting their consciousness,” and some other things I can’t quite remember.
This lead to the theory of brain implants. Yes, I know I sound deranged and it makes no sense, but like, stick with me on this. If they’d gotten implants, it would make sense how the program was able to erase their memories and other things. Not to mention, that these implants most likely had some sort of access to their their nervous system, which would explain how they felt pain, heat, cold, and other sensations while being in a digital world, though these feelings were very much dulled down. Not to mention, the glitch in Vanessa’s eye could have been her implant. I guess you may be wondering, why’d it glitch? We’ll get to that in a moment.
The question is, how this comes into play with season two? A faulty implant. A broken one. Luna and I believe that something went wrong with one of the players implants and it affected everyone else while they were in the game. Which would be why Vanessa’s eye glitched. It was her implant becoming or being corrupted by the faulty one.
Whose implant, you may ask? Easy, it was Adams’. The reason I say this is Adam has definitely been a little more tired and unsteady than the other two. When he woke up, there was a high pitched sound and he seemed to have a headache. Nothing serious, right? Maybe, but the fact that the other two didn’t react the same way, just might say something about that. Luna then informed me of something I’d forgotten. During the Minotaur's labyrinth, Adam crashes into Mira and then struggles to get back up, dizzy and disoriented, but Mira’s just fine. Granted, this might be nothing, but it’s still something to consider.
Now, a big thing that’s been going around the fandom for a while now, a big question that’s been unanswered. Why was Dave so scared of Adam? His implant. Adam’s corrupted implant. Dave might have been able to sense it when he touched Adam or at least sense something was dreadfully wrong. Now, not to mention it was after that, that things started glitching out, after Dave touched Adam. Possibly that corrupted implant is was caused the code to go wacky and eat itself, because part of the game allowed the implant contact. Also, if it IS Adam’s implant that’s corrupted, that could possibly be another reason his reflection was reversed. Also, if his implant was corrupted, that might mean it wasn’t working correctly and which is why Adam put everything together so easily after seeing Dave glitch, because it was in the very back of his mind.That or he’s as smart as we think is, maybe both. This might also explain why Chad (Weirdy), was kicked out of the game and not the kids. Since he’s not always in the game or there as long as they were, the his implant might not have been affected, which is why he was forced out.
Back to how this connects to season two. The kids are very confused and believe this isn’t supposed to be happening. They’re right, it isn’t. Adam’s implant most likely affected everyone else, causing them to become corrupted as well. Throughout the first season we see that the game has a pretty impressive AI, allowing the characters that were created have their own personalities and respond with ease, unlike an NPC. This means the game can almost run itself, meaning it could easily take over the implants in the players brains, causing them to go right back to The Hollow. This also explains the new worlds, the way Luna phrased is was, “Yeah and I think things keep breaking because of the implant. If it's only purpose is to react with The Hollow, then it would explain why things are happening. But it seems The Hollow has taken preventive measures in order to keep the game from crumbling. Instead it looks as if the game is creating more so it can't be destroyed” Now, my first thought was that was why the game chose to send them “home”, so they’d be comfortable and safe, however Luna made yet another wonderful point. “That's giving the game a lot of credit. If anything the programmers & artists make the settings and the game randomizes it.” This means that the game is just rolling along a course it’s planned, but now it’s trying to save itself at the same time. Also, if these kids did have implants, that would make the adults, especially their parents, not knowing about the Hollow even weirder. First off, the game took 5 hours, meaning the parents would have had to known where their children were for that whole time. However, we know that they’re all under the age of 18, meaning they’re all minors, which means that if they were to do this game and get these implants, they most likely needed parent permission. Which means, these parents had to have signed these forms for the kids to have participated, meaning they had to know about this.
Since this post is getting pretty long, I’ll try to make this last bit short and sweet. The last few things we need to tie up here and for this theory to possibly make sense. What about the two other teams? How come Chad (Weirdy) is in the game? What about the fears? Are you off your ROCKER, Space? The answers to these questions are ones Luna and I think make sense, but one we’re not so sure about.
The two other teams. My theory was that these kids either were playing a different game at the same time and somehow got corrupted too or played after the others and THEN got corrupted, Luna’s theory, which probably is better, is that these two new teams were about to play new game and our Season 1 buddies just got thrown in because of their implants. How is Weirdy in the game? Well, seeing as he most likely has an implant as well, that allows him to pop in and out of the game at will, he probably had it altered or hacked so not only could he get in, but use his powers to help the kids as much as he could. This would also explain his line at the end of the trailer. The fears also have two theories, but I’ll only use one because the others a stretch and this post is long enough. The main one we have is that the kids took a “survey” allowing the producers to know certain things so they could create task and challenges. The computer decided to use this in the game as a challenge or task. As for that last bit about me being crazy? Yes. I am and honestly, this post killed my last two braincells.
So, I’ll leave this post at that and I think I got all of our thoughts down. Feel free to leave your thoughts and criticisms for Luna and I! We’d love to see it, but try to keep it constructive, thanks!
#the hollow netflix#the hollow season 2#the hollow#shitpost#The hollow adam#the hollow kai#the hollow mira#the hollow theories#i'm sorry this is so long#i just wrote an essay I'm am so sorry y'all#netflix
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You guys know that I’m back to working on Transposition. But it is, frankly, a challenge, and I feel a lot of pressure to put something out there and prove that the story will be finished. So I’m posting what is essentially some AU tidbits, because it’s a draft of part of Chapter 52 that I threw out and totally reconceptualized. It is not particularly good, but here it is!
Telford trades the tel’tak to a junk dealer in the P3S-805 system and ends up in a ratty little cobbled-together half-Kerobottri exoship that shakes when you try to engage its makeshift FTL drive, but, hey, it comes with no questions asked. And it’s not like he has any reason to be picky; he’s just trying to get a couple of gate-trips ahead of Kiva’s people before he finds a spaceport and settles down to get drunk.
The place he ends up in is a shithole clustered around the North Pole of a medium-sized planet in the Formalhaut Debris Ring, about twenty-two light years from Earth. It’s a frozen, sandy desert with a dozen tiny speckling moons above it, and not a single building more than three stories tall. It caters to frack miners running hot crews through the debris ring, which the LA’s First and Second House periodically squabble over, and the occasional Goa’uld war criminal hoping to lay low. That makes it a good place for Telford, even if the liquor is shitty. So he hauls out some of the raw data crystals that he stripped off the Sixth House tel’tak and pays enough to dock his ship, then keeps paying until the barkeeper at the watering hole hands over the bottle.
It’s whatever the latest thing is that the Lucian kids are cooking up out of kassa. It doesn’t really taste like anything; just like ethanol and antiseptic. He hunkers down in his ship and knocks the stuff back without a chaser. And again. And then again. For a while, grimly determined, that’s all he does: limiting his world to the fumes that he breathes out, and the back of his throat, where the mucous membrane is burning.
He doesn’t have a jacket anymore, but he’s got what the bounty hunter threw in with the exoship: a couple of Himalayan-looking blankets made out of knotted-up fibers, and a hooded coat lined with some kind of animal fur. So he puts the coat on, and, after a while, the hood too, then drags one of the blankets over his shoulders and breathes into his cupped hands. He can smell the coat’s earthy leather, and whatever it is that fur smells like. The air smells like naquadah and ozone. He looks out over the bulks of the ships, great beasts sleeping in the desert on every side of the outpost-city, some as tall as the buildings and twice as big. The dim light of the sun, filtered through dust clouds, glints off the shinier of their surfaces, along with the occasional scattered fleck of a moon. They’re like shrapnel wounds, that spray of moons— not quite regular enough to be strafe-marks, but deep enough that you can see the inside of whatever it is that was punctured.
He takes another abrupt swig of the liquor.
He thinks his first step should be to take stock of what he has left. The Hemingway is gone now, and the Dostoevsky. The— assorted personal knickknacks that he hadn’t needed anyway. He took enough shit off the tel’tak to last him a little while if he barters, but when he’d made his elaborate back-up plans, he always assumed he’d be leaving from Earth. So he hasn’t got a whole hell of a lot of assets out here in deep space. He can always sell intel, but that comes with the risk of someone back-tracing the information. Or he can take the sensible option and just turn mere. It’s what a lot of guys did on Earth, anyway, after they’d left the service, if they’d gotten deep in debt or just couldn’t fit in.
He’d tried to imagine it himself, when he was younger: leaving the service. Retiring. Consulting. Security. A house, a car, a wife, a couple of kids. On some level that language didn’t reach down to, the thought had always repelled him. He’d thought that if he tried it, he would end up like one of those guys you heard about who just went missing, just up and walked away from their lives one day. They turned up twenty years later running a tackle shop off the coast of Alaska, or flying prop planes in the South Pacific, or else they didn’t turned up, and stayed question marks forever, strangers who had sealed whatever secret they carried so well inside them that they had taken it, totally unknown, to their graves.
It was possible to do that. It wasn’t a failure. Maybe it even meant that you’d won. Whatever was inside you, you’d kept it: pure and unsullied, a hard bright crystal, a fuel you could burn. It was uncontaminated and yours forever.
He can feel it inside him now: a pain in the region of his chest, close to but not exactly contiguous with the heart.
He drinks and watches cosmic dust catch the amber glow of the distant sunlight.
A cold wind shifts and rattles the sand.
***
An ice storm in the morning, with no rain: only hailstones rattling like pebbles against the walls of the exoship. He wakes from a restless sleep still wrapped in fur and heavy blankets. He feels like God has picked up the box he’s hiding in and shaken it right next to His ear to hear if anything left inside still scuttles. He thinks about Rush explaining Wittgenstein’s beetle. There is something alive in us, though it may be a very singular creature. It may not be what other people thought— hoped— it was.
Still. Something scuttles. Insect legs against the siding.
He erases his travel history in the ship’s computer and swallows down another couple fingers of kassa liquor for breakfast, tunelessly humming Mahler under his breath, then throws it up an hour later courtesy of his hangover.
When he stands, he sees starbursts against the array of evening. It’s not really evening, of course; there’s not really night or day, this close to the magnetic pole of a planet, unless you count the constant half-dim polar twilight. One long night lasting half a year, deranging the little rock’s temporalities like every other kind of measurement was deranged by the location. Get too close to the axis of something, and you lose all sense of how to chart it.
He’s familiar with the problem.
***
Ships come and go like fireflies in a summer time-lapse, their engines burning off into the dusk.
It’s fall on Earth, he guesses. So: no more fireflies, which: fuck ‘em, anyway. They only last a few months before they’re done. Like humans, when seen from an Ascended perspective. Little chips of mica; little specks of dust. You could lose a fistful and not notice, so why should they matter?
He thinks of Rush sinking his hands in the floor up to the wrists, as though he could reach down and reclaim the mineral flecks trapped there for eons. As though the whole universe were just water, none of it yet set in stone around him.
It should’ve been me, Telford thinks. It should’ve been me who—
But he hadn’t had the genes.
Always something missing.
***
He doesn’t speak English out here. He speaks the degraded Babylonian of Sixth House. Or at least that’s what Jackson had always said it was— the bastard child of Akkadian and Aramaic, mixed with the Hebrew dialects of the Asar planets, sort of like what might have happened if the Babylonian Empire still existed. He’d had to learn it from scratch when he went undercover the first time, in case the translation matrix ever encountered a glitch. It was hard work, but he was good at it, at least according to Jackson. Jackson had seemed faintly surprised; Telford had said, “You thought I’d be as dumb as a brick.” “No,” Jackson had said, but his eyes had slid guiltily away. Telford had smirked, grimly pleased by the implied admission. Jackson had said, too hurriedly, “I didn’t. II wasn’t surprised because— I mean, I wasn’t alluding to— obviously that’s not what I meant.”
What he’d meant didn’t interest Telford. At forty-two years old, he’d had every version of that conversation, the one that was all ellipses. The last thing he wanted was to rehash them again with fucking Jackson. So, instead, he’d said, “Aramaic in space. Doesn’t it ever make you wonder?”
Jackson had looked uncomfortable. He’d adjusted his glasses with both hands. “Wonder what?”
“Oh, don’t play coy with me. If Jesus was— you know.”
“Extraterrestrial, you mean? A Goa’uld? The idea’s been floated.”
“And?”
They’d been sitting in an empty conference room, waiting for some meeting to start; it had been late, Telford thinks now, or very early; there had been this hush, like sound was suppressed. Sometimes late at night there, he’d feel like he was under the ocean: the pressure deforming his eardrums, till all he could hear was the rush of his own blood. Jackson had toyed with a pencil, balancing it on the side of one finger. Unbidden, Telford had been reminded of the Egyptian scale of justice, where your heart was weighed against a feather after you were dead. The image had seemed apt; Daniel, he’d thought, what a fan-fucking-tastic Eternal Judge you’d make, sitting there with your schoolboy pout and your moralizing.
Without looking up, Jackson had said, “Oh, I don’t know. Not really the Goa’uld modus operandi, is it?”
“No? Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s; forget about getting what you deserve, and God’s going to magically provide you with loaves and fishes?”
“That seems like a very thin interpretation of the Gospels.”
Telford had half-laughed incredulously. “You’re going to come over all Christian on me, Jackson?”
Jackson flattened his pout out into a thin line. “I hardly think it has to be Christian to suggest that the impulse behind one of Earth’s major religions, and a full interpretation of its sacred texts, is about more than just the redistribution of resources.”
“So— what, then?” Telford moved restlessly in his chair.
“Divine justice,” Jackson said. He had the air of someone offering a challenge. “The idea that there’s something beyond us, some truth, some ultimate harmony or knowledge. Something that we’re a part of, if we want to be— if we want to be good.”
Telford had felt incredulous. “Knowledge,” he’d repeated. “Ultimate knowledge.”
“You don’t think that’s what God is? Knowledge?” Jackson seemed genuinely curious. His forehead was furrowed.
“Well,” Telford said, “for starters, I don’t think God is good.”
“I can’t tell you how amazed I am to hear it.” Jackson’s mouth gained a sad quirk. He looked down, at where the pencil was perfectly balanced on his finger. “So: not harmonious, but maybe— maybe still knowledge.”
Telford had shaken his head— slowly at first, and then faster, like a round of sardonic applause building. “Don’t get me wrong, Jackson— I know you’ve been a floating space octopus of pure light and shit, and gotten the sublime wisdom of the Ancients, but to paraphrase a much wiser man than myself: kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe that all I need is more information, like a giant celestial textbook is going to make it all make sense.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Jackson said.
But he looked hurt; stung, somehow. His face had closed off. He curled his fist around the pencil. Telford had felt a brief surge of triumph; he liked defeating Jackson. At the same time, he had recognized Jackson’s expression. Back then, he hadn’t known why or what it meant. Now, he remembers it and senses some vague association with the dreams in which he tries to find the Chinese room. He wants to trust that there’s a place in which the answers will all be provided. He wants a dictionary that will teach him how to be a man. Unlike Jackson, though, he doesn’t think that one exists. There are no universals. There is no truth that we are trying to uncover in the only way that Jackson would’ve understood— the way an archeologist sifts through layers of dirt, patiently looking for the pieces that were once part of a coin, a corpse, a kettle, before the annihilating storm of history blew through. There’s a churning mass that has never had a meaning. It isn’t moving towards or away from something. It just is what it is.
When he was undercover, speaking Babylonian had helped; he’d felt like a different person. He’d felt like he was moving through a different world, one that wasn’t organized according to the same kind of principles he’d grown up with. There was no right or wrong to it; just a different set of facts. He took to it like a fish to water, once he’d mastered the language. The sense of alienation was familiar to him. When he went back to Earth between assignments, that was the strange part— standing in his own house, his own kitchen.
And now he never has to go back there. Never has to speak English again, if he doesn’t want to. He can move through different languages, different truths, like putting uniforms on and taking them off when you’re finished.
“Shkarum,” he says to the bartender, tapping the bar with two emphatic fingers. “Ak shkarum yahab, vakash.”
His accent is very good.
***
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wandavision theories for ep 8 | contains spoilers
Obligatory disclaimer, these are my opinion + thoughts, and ideas, take all u see here with a grain of salt as of course, these are just theories. Now, shall we?
I’m writing this at 7:30am on Friday 26th, it’s taking all my self control to actually write this down before I go watch the episode.
Let me start this by saying that ever since this show started I’ve looked like this every single week, until the next episode, and then the cycle just starts over. I’ve seen the promos and the trailers in like 0.25x so many times.
Agatha/Agnes
I called it from before the show’s start and the fact that it was so obvious makes me think she’s not really the main but more like a pawn that’s serving a supervillain if that makes sense.
On episode 1, there was the June 2nd line and then the “Charmed” thing that confirmed it for me.
I think that she’s either
possessed
just crazy
I’m leaning a bit more towards the crazy part, she’s been an instigator throughout the whole show and seems to be doing it and enjoying it (ie agatha all along)
basically put the idea of having kids in Wanda’s head
instigated Vision’s doubts which then ultimately made him realize something was wrong
she literally gave him the last push for him to try to go outside the hec which might have killed him
she killed Sparky
brought Peter from (according to me) Fox’s universe as a stand in for Pietro bc he’s dead…
From the couple of promos and leaked images for ep 8, I think she’s gonna show Wanda her past which I think is tied to Mephisto because let’s be honest, how does a witch have powers comparable to those of someone who basically was exposed to an infinity stone. The amount of demonic symbolism in her secret lair was a lot, the cicadas, señor scratchy, what looks to be the darkhold.
I also think she’s the one that manipulated Wanda into creating the hex, seeing as her creepy basement is apparently outside of it. She manipulated her into having kids, we’ve seen that every time the twins are about to age up, she’s there. She didn’t even blink to Wanda having powers. That’s why I think she killed Sparky, because for some reason she wants to age the twins into teenagers to serve her purpose.
But why?
Does she want to bring someone back from the dead? Or does she want to manipulate Wanda into opening the multiverse because she knows she’s a Nexus being? Is she using her to bring Mephisto into the MCU world in a physical form?
Peter
I’m sure he’s just Peter from X-Men who Agatha pulled into the MCU as a stand-in for Pietro.
I think when Wanda yeeted him in the halloween episode, he got snapped out of Agatha’s control and we might see him team up with Monica to help Wanda and the residents of Westview.
I think he might stay in the MCU and be in Dr. Strange the multiverse of madness, and then we’d see him return to Fox
Monica
Not sure what name she’ll go with, Photon, Spectrum or even Captain Marvel 🤷🏼♀️
I do think she’ll take over as Director of S.WORD since I’m 99.9% sure Hayward broke the Sokovia Accords (and Vision’s will)
Hopefully we see more of her and why she’s so mad at Carol
Dottie
I have the feeling that there’s a lot more to her, but I’m on a time crunch and really want to go watch ep 8 so I'll just say that she’s either Arcanna Jones or Clea and I’ll be disappointed if she turns out to just be Dottie.
Also, she’s not on the board so I have my doubts about her.
Hayward
I’ve hated since I first saw him
I’m 99.9% sure he was experimenting on Vision trying to bring him back online which is a breach of the Accords, but he couldn’t and then saw that Wanda had breathing, living version of Vision and became hellbent on getting him, that’s why he’s vilifying Wanda so he can put the blame on her.
Vision
This one’s a bit tricky, because I have my doubts about him being Old Vision, but I really liked him throughout the show and it sucks that he’ll probably die at the end.
Theory 1:
He can’t leave the Hex, which makes me think he was created by Wanda, I mean after all she can manipulate things to a molecular level and could’ve given him the same traits as Old Vision, that’s why he has the stone and can’t really remember anything from before Westview, because he didn’t exist but still exhibits his selfless behavior (i.e doesn’t even remember being an avenger yet he wanted to help and then when he was dying outside the hex, he asked for help for the people and not for himself even though he was disintegrating)
This scene from one of the promos where Wanda’s still wearing modern day clothes and then she’s wearing the outfit from the first episode, and Vision’s like “Wanda?”. I think that’s where she created him, and gave him some basic memories to start from.
Here, where she’s looking at the stone, in another promo I believe, I think it’s that she’s “destroying” the stone which will inevitably kill vision.
Or when she has to inevitably bring down the Hex, he’s gonna die, again. The only plot hole to this theory would be, how is Hayward able to track him? Is he tracking the Vibranium signature only?
That scene where Wanda’s at S.W.O.R.D and she’s recovering his body, makes sense that maybe she made Westview Vision from Old Vision’s scraps, but he was completely disarmed and taken apart, how could she have done that? She would have had to completely put him together (which shouldn’t be hard considering her powers) but I’m guessing he wasn’t Vision anymore, they were turning him into something else.
Theory 2:
I remember reading in October, that White Vision could make an appearance which kinda makes sense? After all, he was killed and taken apart by a spy agency which could be S.W.O.R.D as it is now a “Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division” that is very specifically focusing on robotics and A.I. This could be what Hayward mentioned that he intends on launching on episode 7. Considering there’s only 2 episodes left, this seems like a lot to include with so little time left. But the possibilities are endless, it is Marvel we’re talking about.
Either way I think he’s gonna die and we’re all gonna cry. His death might be what pushes Wanda over the edge and into insanity, if even when she was living a normal, happy life she was pushing her grief onto those she was controlling, what would it be like when she has to let go of this? Heartbreaking, that’s for sure.
Billy & Tommy
I think they’re somehow fully real, made from who knows what but real
I don’t think Agatha killed him, but she might have aged them as that seems to have been her goal (it also makes them the right age for the young avengers set up they seem to be going for)
Perhaps, instead of living with Wanda, once the Hex goes down they’re forgotten? Like when, in the comics, Agatha wiped them from Wanda's mind.
I read a theory that the missing person Jimmy was looking for at the beginning was Teddy Altman who ends up being Billy’s husband in the comics, so that’d be cool.
Wanda
Poor Wanda has been manipulated this whole time.
Going with my theory that Vision’s body was completely torn apart when she got to S.W.O.R.D, I don’t think she could take it with her like that, that’s why I think Hayward is so obsessed with finding the Vision that she has alive inside the Hex.
I feel she was manipulated by Agatha all along, Westview might’ve just been the first town she found as soon as she left S.W.O.R.D where Agatha manipulated her into creating the Hex. This whole time she thought she was in control, it was Agatha behind the scenes controlling everything. Jimmy mentioned that she was displaying an amount of powers that far exceeded anything she’d displayed before and I think her crumbling mental stability, along with the fact that Vision almost died at the end of episode 6 (or he did actually die idk) could be what’s causing the Hex to start glitching and failing.
There’s a scene from one of the promos, and honestly it was hard to find, but we can see her in the town surrounded by all of Westview’s residents who look like they’re begging her for something (Phil). Maybe she couldn’t keep her control over them or once Agatha showed her the truth, she decided to free their minds.
and this scene where she holds hands with Vision while wearing modern clothes, I think it might be one of their last scenes together.
My working theory for Wanda is:
She realizes she’s been manipulated and how wrong it all is
Frees everyone
Tries to take down the Hex but has to fight Agatha and Hayward(and whatever he launched) in order to do so but she has the help of Vision, Monica and Peter
Inevitably kills Westview Vision when she takes down the hex, says goodbye and we’ll cry
Grabs her children and we go into dr. strange 2 where she’ll try to fix what she fucked up
or
She forgets her children, probably Agatha’s doing and goes crazy with the grief of losing everything at once hence setting her up as one of the main characters (villain?) of Dr strange 2
I’ve had the feeling that phase 4 is going to revolve around her and her powers, spiderman 3: no way home and dr. strange the multiverse of madness, even loki and antman: quantumania. They all give multiverse, ripples in the fabric of reality kinda vibes.
So far all I’ve got are more questions for episode 8
Why did Agatha do this? What’s the purpose of it?
Is Vision gonna die? Is he alive? Are my theories right?
Are the kids alive or aged up? Trapped in the creepy ass basement?
Is Peter under Agatha's mind control or will he team up with Monica?
Will the town people die in Haywards attack?
Will we get to see the big bad in the show?
Who is the aerospace engineeeeer?
Hope you’ve enjoyed reading my delusions, expect a theory for the final episode after I watch ep 8. Leave me a like or reblog if you’ve found this interesting. You can also follow me on Twitter where I usually post my dumbassery first!
#blog post#wandavision#wandavision theory#wandavision theories#wanda maximoff#vision#agatha harkness#spoilers#wandavision spoilers#episode 8 theory#episode 8
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TFW when you try to do Anastasia but you also suck at your job: A Master Class by The Rise of Skywalker
Okay. So, I promised you guys a TROS review, and it’s coming, I promise… except I’ll be making two “spin-off posts” about specific issues just in order to clear up some stuff, mainly because in my mind, those issues are important.
First post is going to be, of course, about Rey’s parentage.
So. After TFA, it would have been possible for Rey to have been the kid of “someone”. However, TLJ made it impossible to do so, unless you’d have some serious, bullshit retconning going on – which is exactly what happened.
I know this is a VERY controversial thing to say at this point, but post-TFA, Rey Palpatine “could” have been possible. Okay, maybe not have her be Palpatine’s granddaughter, but more of a descendant of his.
This said, I “tried” making an origin story for Rey Palpatine that “works” for the purposes of this meta, on a hypothetical basis, while making it consistent with canon (something JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio clearly couldn’t be bothered to do, LMAO). I had plotholes no matter what. I do think I could have eventually found something with a little bit of brainstorming, but truth is, IT’S HARD, and a lot of exposition would have been for novels/comics only.
From a thematic perspective, though? It wouldn’t have been a bad idea. For this to work, though, you would have needed to go on full-blown Romeo and Juliet mode with sprinkles of Anastasia, though. I mean, The Lion King 2 did something similar, so why the fuck not. Because, yeah, Ben Solo, the grandson of Darth Vader, son of Han Solo and Leia Organa, the last prince of Alderaan, who falls in love with the last Imperial princess Rey Palpatine while they’re on opposite sides of the war but not the ones you’d think of is the stuff of fairy tales and star-crossed romances, except this one would have a happy ending and brought peace to the galaxy.
Truth be told, I still really enjoy fanfics who go for that story and find a way to make it work in canonverse or in AUs – because it’s genuinely fun. But in canon itself, as I point out earlier… it’s not easy.
So, we have Rian Johnson who said he made a list of potential origins for Rey while he was working on TLJ’s script. You bet Rey Palpatine was on that list. However, he came to the conclusion that Rey Nobody was the best way to go, and whatdyaknow, he made the right call.
Why? Rey Nobody requires minimal exposition. Storytelling-wise, you don’t have a lot of brainstorming to do, and it’s easy to have Ben revealing it, and easy to present it as a repressed memory of Rey’s. On a thematic level, that puts Rey on the same level as Jane Eyre or the main character from Rebecca: she’s a nobody from nowhere who is thrown into a family drama, and since she’s the glitch in the matrix, she must stop the story from becoming a tragedy.
See? Simple. You got your easy exposition, you got your thematic coherence, and you got the literary call-backs.
So, JJ and Terrio decided to retcon this shit because, as they said, they thought it was boring. I think Colin Trevorrow probably thought it was boring too, because I have my reasons to think a lot of TROS is from him (but more on that in my main review). But thing is, it’s not it’s “boring”, it’s literally that they didn’t know what the fuck to do with Rey. No, more than that, they don’t understand her, and frankly, they can’t be bothered to do so. She’s an empty vessel they can toy with at their ease, and in the process, turn her in a Mary-Sue. Because yes, TROS!Rey was a Mary-Sue, whereas TFA/TLJ!Rey was not. So, what I say above regarding Rey might be a bomb for some, considering how people are (understandably) defensive when it comes to that statement. I promise I will elaborate more about it in the main review, once again.
So, with the lineage aspect addressed, it’s time to talk about Rey’s parents themselves.
It’s hilarious how HARD JJ and Terrio tried to make Kylo’s explanation work – because as much as they butchered the shit out of him, they said: “Well he’s a bad liar, right? Gotta keep that in mind.”
Although, I don’t think it was a case of them being concerned with Kylo’s characterization – they’re not that graceful. They had to figure out QUICK why the hell Kylo wouldn’t have known Rey was a Palpatine from the get-go, because the Force is a great DNA test and shit, and I guess that’s how Palps located Ben’s Mighty Skywalker Blood™. Except that still doesn’t work because Palps couldn’t even locate his own goddamn granddaughter, but I digress.
Seriously, why would Kylo lie to Rey about her being a nobody instead of her being a Palpatine? It makes no sense, because if you’re going to roll with the theory Kylo just wants UNLIMITED POWAH, the Palpatine princess is not only a great asset (since marrying her legitimizes your claim to the throne in the eyes of the Imperial Remnants, I mean, that’s literally why Henry VII married Elizabeth of York), it’s also the one argument she needs to hear in order to sway her to your side. So I guess JJ and Terrio’s one shared brain cell kinda flicked a bit at that moment.
This said, getting the Palpatine princess on his side is clearly Kylo’s intention in TROS (which, again, makes no sense with what was set up in TLJ but that’s something I’m keeping for another post), except they trip all over themselves by having Kylo say he didn’t lie to Rey in TLJ. Except…
So, what Ben said in TLJ was the following:
Her parents sold her for drinking money.
They’re dead and buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere on Jakku.
Rey is related to no one.
Here’s what Ben reveals to Rey in TROS:
Her parents sold her for her protection.
They died on another planet, while being hunted down by a guy working for Palpatine and instructed to bring Rey back to them.
Rey’s dad is a Palpatine and Rey’s mom is Villanelle (nah, for real: the actress who plays Rey’s mom is Jodie Comer).
So, um, yeah, it’s the EXACT opposite of what Ben said in TLJ. Just say Palps was fucking with Ben’s mind-reading or Rey’s memories instead, JJ. Not that “Oh Ben was telling the truth, but he didn’t have the whole story”, because that’s not it.
For the latter, once again, it would have been feasible: the one thing, for me, that was possible to be added was that Rey had killed her parents accidentally, by having their ship to leave Jakku crash down with the Force: that’s what made her Force powers go dormant for all those years and provoked her trauma. It would also make sense that Ben would willfully not bring that back to her memories, because she’d understandably not be able to cope with the truth, which is often what happens to a lot of trauma victims. THAT was the theory I had pre-TROS, because that’s the only answer I could come up with when it came to JJ saying that there was more to Rey’s past. I guess I expected JJ to be, like, actually able to write, lmao.
I even wonder if that was actually in the cards, considering we see Rey in TROS bringing down a transport that supposedly has Chewie in it… but I guess they deemed that to be “too dark” for their heroine. Except the bullshit that comes instead is actually… much worse.
To make things simple, I’ll just take the above points and develop them.
Rey’s parents sold her for her protection.
Okay, so, Rey’s parents need to hide her to make sure Palps doesn’t get his hands on her. Fair enough. This said, why did it have to be Jakku and not, like, ANYWHERE ELSE? Especially that Palpatine had interest in Jakku at some point and that maybe having Rey anywhere close to that place would not be a good idea?
But let’s play the game and say that Jakku is the only place they can hide her because… I don’t know, it’s hard to find someone there with the Force. Whatever. Even then, why the fuck would they think Unkar Plutt is a proper guardian for a tiny little girl? You know they could have walked a few miles more and found a nice old man who likes the Light Side of the Force and the Jedi and all that shit called Lor San Tekka? Hey, why not even try to find a guy like Luke Skywalker who’s like, a Jedi and shit, and have him take care of their little girl and protect her?
Even then, why the hell doesn’t Rey’s mom stay with her daughter? Her husband is the Palpatine, not her. All Rey’s mom has to do is find a nicer hiding place for her and Rey somewhere on Jakku, like, not Niima Outpost (again, Tuanul is just a few miles away), and just let Dad hide somewhere else. He’s a grownass man, he can take care of himself and he just has to hide on Nar Shaadaa or some shit. Fuck, why don’t all three of them hide on Nar Shaadaa? Or in the Coruscant undercity? ANYWHERE ELSE?
Also, wouldn’t Plutt clearly see two desperate parents as a business opportunity? Like, if you want to do a Les Misérables comparison here, he wouldn’t “buy” Rey from them, he’d try to get money for them à la Thénardier with Fantine. Except Rey’s parents make Fantine look like frigging Einstein because at least she had the excuse of thinking Madame Thénardier would take good care of Cosette since Éponine and Azelma seemed well-cared for.
Again, a creepy-looking alien who exploits the outpost’s inhabitants for portions in exchange for junk, who asks you to pay him to take care of your kid should be a big fucking red flag – unless you want to involve blackmail, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
Seriously, why the hell would Rey’s parents even ACCEPT money that comes from selling their own child? Were they really that desperate? Fuck, even if I had no other way of getting off Jakku, I wouldn’t even THINK of using money that comes from selling my own child. Any parent who’d even CONSIDER doing that is automatically a godawful parent in my book. Shame on you. And shame on JJ for trying to make me buy them as saints, because THEY’RE NOT, JUST BY THAT SINGLE ACTION.
They died on another planet, while being hunted down by a guy working for Palpatine and instructed to bring Rey back to them.
I didn’t notice it until Jenny Nicholson pointed it out in her TROS review, because it SOMEHOW completely escaped my notice, but… Rey’s mom saying Rey is DEFINITELY NOT on Jakku is like the worst fucking lie I’ve ever seen in a film because it’s so hilariously bad. Congratulations, Space Villanelle, may you be forever remembered for this line.
Also, it’s stupid af that Oshi (that’s his name, right? Can’t be bothered to Google it, might just call him Barney the Bounty Hunter from now on) just kills Rey’s parents, because HE’S EVUL MUAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA, because he literally creates a dead end for himself. He still has no fucking clue where Rey is, and he just killed off his only leads. CONGRATULATIONS BARNEY THE BOUNTY HUNTER, YOU SUCK AT YOUR JOB.
Rey’s dad is a Palpatine and Rey’s mom is Villanelle.
So, Rey’s dad looks like he’s in his early thirties at most, right? Maybe a little younger than Luke and Leia, then. So, unless he got frozen in carbonite at some point, that means Palpatine fucked at some point while looking like this:
Anyway, I sure hope Sly Moore was Grandma Palpatine because she’s pretty much the only person who’d be game to smash raisin ass. Which leaves me with extremely disturbing pictures of Palps and Sly having sex, so I’ll spare you the more graphic details of my twisted mind that’s screaming for an end to this misery.
I sure hope having Rey’s mom as Jodie Comer isn’t a clue that we’ll get spin-offs with those two (GOD PLEASE NO), but while I crack jokes about how Rey’s mom is Villanelle and Palpadad kinda looks like Ramsay Bolton… I find it fucking hilarious they dressed Rey’s mom in BLUE. LIKE, SEE? SEE? SHE’S IN BLUE, LIKE THE VIRGIN MARY, BECAUSE REY IS SPACE JESUS!!!! GET IT??? GETIT???? PLEASE TELL ME YA GET IT, OKAY???? *gross sobbing* I knew we should have had Rey born in a manger, that would have made the artistic intentions clear *wipes tear*
All right. There’s a lot more that could be said about Rey’s lineage, but I’m keeping that for my main review because what’s left to say ties up to the bigger picture. What I tried to point out with this preliminary post is that while Rey Palpatine *could* have worked, in different circumstances, it couldn’t have had post-TLJ… and we’re left to see a mutilated horse who was dead on arrival. And that’s tragic.
#star wars#tros spoilers#the rise of skywalker spoilers#rants and reviews#anti tros#rey#reylo#my meta#reylo meta#rey meta
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The Cold Sun and The Dark Moon- Chapter One
A guard, a fae warrior, and a prince walk into a meeting...
Sixty years after the war, Fenrys moonbeam still traveled the world as Terrasen’s ambassador, working through his demons as he works to keep the world together.
Sixty years since things changed for the better, and worse for some. Enedina Kane has always thought her only choice was to run, but suddenly she realizes she can’t run forever.
quick note: I typed this whole story and then the app glitched and I lost all of my work :( but I loved this idea so I rewrote it all over again, hope you enjoy. Part two will be posted tomorrow! If you would like to be apart of a tag list so that you can be reminded every time I post a new part to this story let me know. Please enjoy! :)
Warnings: some light swearing (twice I believe)
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Another meeting, another alliance opportunity, another day in his new life. Fenrys Moonbeam accepted the role as the Queen of Terrasen’s ambassador about fifty years ago, ten years after the war had passed and he had come, somewhat, to peace with his past horrors. He loves his job. He got to travel the world, meet new people, and still got to go home and be at peace. He knew if he ever needed a break Aelin would gladly give it to him. But once he started the job, he didn’t think he would ever want to stop.
Today he found himself in Melisande, a kingdom that had kept to itself during the war, if you could even call it that. The kingdom kept quiet through the years and no one seemed to know much about it, though Yerne and Aelin both had been there before, neither truly knew much about it.
That’s why he was here, to make connections with a forgotten kingdom. To make new ties with Terrasen.
He had traveled many days to reach the kingdom, on the way visiting some old friends including Dorian, Choal, and Yerne, who were all growing old. The Westfall’s children had greeted him at the gate, smiling and talking his ear off, filling him in on what had happened since his last visit. He talked with the King and his wife Mannon, both still looked the same. Whatever bit of fae blood Dorian had kept him young, and by some miracle, Choal and Yerne had not aged a day. He guessed it had something to do with the healers powers, or maybe the long gone Gods had smiled down upon the couple when Yerne had defected Erawan.
He knew Aelin was more than thrilled to hear about her friends slow to no aging, he still remembers the tears that welled up in her eyes when he told her twenty or so years ago.
After the war everything went into high speed yet seemed to go ever so slowly at the same time. There was no impending doom, just rebuilding, crowning, and weddings. So. Many. Weddings.
First Rowan and Aelin has an official ceremony, then Elide and Lorcan, then Lysandra and Aedion. Then ten years ago Mannon and Dorian finally tied the knot.
He was happy for his friends, they often asked him if he felt lonely not having a significant other, but then he always joked that Vaughn was still single too.
Vaughn has turned up at the palace one winter day. He waltzed right in and claimed he was done freezing his ass off and asked for a room.
Of course everyone was in the middle of dinner and was wondering how in the hell he had gotten in, but it wouldn’t be Vaughn’s return if it wasn’t dramatic.
That had been six years after the war.
It still felt like it was yesterday the war ended.
He sighed and looked at the clock on the wall of his chambers. He had been given quite a nice room the moment he got here and hadn’t spoken to anyone except a few servants in two days. He arrived early in hopes of learning more about the mysterious country but had not seen anything but the stone chamber that had been decorated quite loveily he must say.
A knock sounded at the door before it swung open to reveal three guards all dressed in light blue and navy with yellow accents, the colors of their kingdom. Two males with masks that covered all but their eyes flanked a tall woman who’s light colored hair was braided over her shoulder, and a wore no mask. She had kind eyes and a small smile, red tinted her pale face, and freckles adorned her nose.
“Fenrys Moonbeam?” His name rolled off of her tongue, a slight accent making it come off even smoother.
He nodded his head, standing from the chair by the window which he found himself at most hours of the days he had been here. “Yes, that’s me.”
She turned towards the door and nodded her head, “Come with me then.” And began walking before Fenrys could ask any questions. He followed her, eventually keeping pace next to her while the two guards followed behind. He couldn’t help but catch a whiff of her scent, and he wish he hadn’t. Not that she smelt bad...it was that she smelt so good. Her scent was intoxicating.
“Are we going to the meeting?” He only received a nod as she continued walking. “Is there a reason I’ve been confined to my rooms?” Annoyance flooded his tone without him meaning too. Her scent still invading his nostrils, making it hard to think straight.
She cut him a glance, “You were told you could venture throughout the city, no?” He shook his head in response. Her eyebrows furrowed and she stopped walking for a moment and turned to the guards behind her and said something, in what he guessed was the native tongue of the area, quickly and curtly, before continuing walking.
“May I inquire what you said?”
She smirked at him a bit before smoothening her features back into a face of calm and discipline. “That they have disappointed me in being rude to our first guest from Terrasen.”
He wanted to ask about the language but something she said caught his ear. “First of Terrasen? Have other counties been here since the war?”
“You may discuss that with the King.” She moves a bit closer to him before quietly adding, “Fenharrow, Red Dessert, and the Southern Continent.”
He nodded gratefully at the information, glad to know something of the strange kingdom before going into the meeting.
She leads him to the end of a hallway made up of windows, overlooking the Oakwald forest and a river rolling through the heart of the city, that he still had no name for.
“Isn’t it beautiful.” He was shaken from his gaze at the lands to see the woman standing next to him looking too, adoration swimming in her bright blue eyes. Her scent becoming stronger at the close proximity.
“It is... is this your homeland?” His gaze still resting upon her.
Something in her eyes turned hard as she frowned and she looked away from the view and became very interested in the doors, “No.” Before he could inquire any further, she walked to the doors and opened them, revealing a long table with many seats, a few had already been claimed. Empty plates sat in front of each seat along with silverware and a tall glass.
The woman held the door open for the two guards and himself, and as he passed he looked at her again to be met with the face he saw when she entered his room. Calm, disciplined, a small smile and calm eyes. It should have been comforting, but something about the gaze made him feel more uneasy about the strange kingdom.
“What is your name?” Slipped through his lips before he could even process the thought.
She blinked and the mask dropped for a moment revealing a look he could not tell what it meant, before the composed look was back and she answered, “Enedina” before walking into the room, not seeming to care if the door smacked him.
She walked beside a young man who looked to be young, but his slightly pointed ears gave Fenrys the feeling he was at least a hundred years old. A Demi fae prince? How had this kingdom survived the wrath of Adarlan’s old king?
The male looked away from another demi fae, who looked older and was wearing a crown upon his head, the king then, to turn his attention to Enedina. He smiled and pulled her in for a hug, she laughed at something whispered in her ear and he laughed when she returned the favor. When they pulled apart, the man he guessed to be the king pulled her in for a quick hug before nodding and walking over to a group of human men standing on the other side of the room.
Fenrys couldn’t help but stare at Enedina and the male as she suddenly came alive, seeming to tell him a story, her face alive and joyous, hands moving tell the story with her, the male laughing and mock frowning at various parts.
He sat down at the table in a random seat, tearing his gaze away. He didn’t understand why he felt a twinge of jealousy, he barely knew her...and yet he could still smell her intoxicating sent from all the way across the room.
~
She couldn’t help the wide smile that spread across her face as she told Ellery of her adventure to the Red Dessert, she has been sent there for a mission and it had gone amazing, as usual.
She had missed her friend very very much and had been worried sick about him while she was gone.
When she finished with her story, Ellery glanced somewhere behind her before signing to her, “What a pretty male.”
She rolled her eyes before saying, “He doesn’t know our ‘language’” she air quoted language, “you can speak, no need for silent conversation.”
Ellery rolled his eyes before signing back, “He may not know it but others in this room do, no one but you and I know our broken made up sign language.”
She huffed out a laugh before looking at the male, sitting by himself at the table, glancing around the room, and turned her gaze back to her friend and signing, “He’s nervous you know. He probably thinks we will kill him.”
“I’ve heard his form is a wolf” She quirked up an eyebrow. “I’ve heard roasted potatoes and wolf are quite delicious.”
A laugh tumbled out of her as she smacked his hand, his laugh following. She was aware of the looks she received, knowing only one would be confused.
“I think he fancies you” Ellery signed, smirking that Gods awful smirk of his. She knew he was up to no good.
“You’re an idiot, go find your seat, the meeting starts soon” She said aloud in common tongue. Ellery boomed out another laugh before going and sitting beside the head of the table.
She took her position by the door and was well aware of the fae male’s gaze upon her, but she chose to ignore it and opted to watch the guests filter in, saying hello and hugging a few. Once all the seats were filled the king nodded to her and she ushered the other guards and servants out before closing the door and going to stand in the corner of the room.
“Let the meeting begin.” The King announced, voice easily filling the large room, in the countries fabricated ‘language’.
She cleared her throat, bringing the King’s attention to her, “Yes Enedina?”
“Our guest does not speak our tongue sir.” She reminded him politely.
“Ah yes, our guest.” The King nodded and turned his attention to the warrior ambassador of Terrasen. “Let’s begin.”
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Hope you enjoyed chapter one, let me know what you think! Part two will be up tomorrow!!
#throne of glass#fenrys moonbeam#fenrys imagine#fenrys moonbeam imagine#fenrys throne of glass#throne of glass imagines#throne of glass incorrect quotes#sarah j. maas#sjmaas#sjm#sjm fandom#sjm spoilers#sjm fanfic#throne of glass fanfic#sjm books#book imagines#bookworm#imagine#story#my writing#original character#my oc character#tower of dawn#nestaq#fenrys x reader#fenrys x original character#throne of glads oc
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aight... here’s a pretty long yet tip-of-the-iceberg collection on my overall thoughts on bl3 now that i’ve finished the damn thing, every main mission & every sidequest (dynasty dash don’t interact).
obviously mega spoilers
the good
aside from that one infuriating difficulty spike when i arrived on promethea, i had a lot of fun playing. i found the gameplay a lot smoother than the others in the series (as it should be), i liked being able to climb stuff, i liked having an easy mode tbh!!
i really liked playing amara and i like the flexibility of action skills and being able to swap on the go without having to respec. the brawl tree ended up being very well suited to my type of play, it hindered me only during boss fights and even then at least i could switch to phasecast y’know
i had a lot of big fears about what this game would do and it managed to not do anything that makes me want to, like, burn and salt the earth, so that’s a win
i thought it was pretty funny! or at least on par with the other main games, which always kind of ride the line between funny and obnoxious and sometimes misstep
i enjoyed a lot of the cast, both new characters and characters who were returning but who i had no particular feelings about before, hammerlock, zer0 and ellie as particular examples
hammerlock and wainwright were cute af and it’s nice to see a gay couple in a triple-a game
thought the twins were fun and funny af i liked them. because fandom is Like That i was a little exhausted by troy before he even showed up but even then, like, idk i liked them as a duo and i liked the break from jack honestly
a lot of the new gun quirks were fun. i’m not like a big... gun person... but i found some cool ones i enjoyed playing with.
loved getting to see different planets, it was a nice break from pandora all the time. and skywell was super fun! love the low-grav playfulness from TPS without the infuriating oz kit nonsense
the little quality of life improvements from previous games were great, like fast travel from anywhere, auto-refilling ammo, etc
some of the side quests were really fun. i liked the ratch quest for rhys, the birthday party quest for mordecai, the claptrap dancing quest was sweet, the buff movie buff quest was fun, the quest where i killed grandpappy 2 seconds in and got a reward was funny as hell esp because i drove off a cliff by accident, etc
lots of people had really bad glitches and stuff but... honestly can’t relate the game ran very well for me. advantages to not marathoning it before they’ve released their first couple patches, i guess, lol
the less good
i played a solo amara and there are some bosses that seem like they would’ve been pure hell to do alone... i was lucky and able to phone a friend for a lifeline in those scenarios (shoutout to @heavybreathingcatt and @valoscope) but if i couldn’t do that idk i would’ve just broken my controller in rage i guess lmao
why is resurrecting each other so hard? i don’t think i’ve ever done it successfully, because it takes too long and more importantly bc while i’m doing it some enemy will just toss a grenade or punch me and i get knocked away from the ally, rendering it useless
rest in peace maya, the best res AI in the whole damn game, got me through the rampager fight her damn self
there were a lot of characters and themes and ideas that i liked in theory more than in practice... because in practice they felt like a first draft. very often i felt like i liked a thing, and then on reflection thought about nine hundred ways it could’ve been better, deeper, more emotionally resonant, more developed, whatever.
the angel stuff was kinda nice but... also... my longest deepest sigh ever @ Poor Sad Jack Some People Terrorize Entire Planets And Abuse Their Daughters To Cope With Their Fridged Wife
like the siren lore... wish i coulda heard it without having to backtrack across every map post-game
while i found the game generally pretty funny, almost all the emotional scenes fell completely flat for me and there were a number of scenes that SHOULD have been emotional that just were not
for eg i am actually not upset about maya or lilith dying (or turning into the moon as it were) -- i am ok with those beats for those characters, especially lilith getting a heroic sendoff. however... both of those scenes could’ve been more impactful than they were. maya’s i think was better than lilith’s, but both of them felt flatter, either in the moment or in the aftermath, than those characters deserved.
related: NPCs reacting to major events is fun. i liked to do the tour and check in with all my buds to get their couple custom lines after a big plot thing happened. HOWEVER... those lines are obviously timed which is *mostly* fine but in some cases really, really weird? the lines about maya should stay in rotation for a lot longer. ava shouldn’t go back to LOL LET’S STEAL two seconds after maya’s gone. i missed zer0′s maya lines entirely bc i didn’t track down zer0 on time lol. stuff like that
the bad
i miss my girls :( we really did keep only the white men huh
the last act felt severely underbaked. i have to wonder how many rewrites this game went through, and how much the back end was slapped together last minute, or cobbled together from various drafts. a lot of this felt very first or second draft, where the characters and themes are *there* but not refined at all, or they contradict each other. the family theme that goes basically nowhere and says nothing. the way the story handles atlas vs the way the story handles jakobs vs the way the story handles corporations writ large.
for the twins -- lack of proper emotional resonance or development for them is one of the biggest failures imo, because i think they WERE very enjoyable villains and the core concept of like... evil video game streamers is honestly on-brand and funny af for the franchise... but as soon as troy died everything went downhill? tyreen’s non-reaction to her brother dying isn’t even a reaction, it’s not even “tyreen doesn’t care she’s evil lol” which would’ve been a boring direction to take anyway) it’s just.... “we barely wrote a response don’t worry about it”. her endgame is to be a big monster because... she’s ... fame hungry? huh? her motivation fell apart.w whether they went with “troy and tyreen are shitty people who get caught up in a power struggle but ultimately love each other” OR “troy and tyreen are shitty people who turn against each other in individual bids for power” could both have been interesting stories but they did neither.
i’m def missing some echos on the twins which brings me to another thing i hate although it’s endemic to the series and not to bl3 specifically -- hiding important lore and characterization in random echos in random places on the map without even an indication of how many there are total, how many you’ve collected, where to find them... frustrating as hell. a lot of those echos are some of my favourite material in the game! at LEAST tell me “1 of 5 echos on this map” if you don’t wanna tell me where they are! why is major lore like the twins’ backstories hidden??????
and bc i haven’t heard them i don’t know if it’s fandom doing what fandom always does, or if it really is the game implying tyreen is The Evil Mastermind and troy is poor manipulated brother, but either way fuck that entire noise lmao of course the women of colour in the series are just Born Evil but jack and troy and whoever else are just Sad :( fuck off actually
typhon... sucks... what an irritating character. irritating to retcon him in as The First Vault Hunter, irritating to have him talk about shit and sex all the time, irritating to have every established NPC be like oh wow my HERO typhon deleon what a HERO i LOVE him, irritating that we skate over his parenting failures, irritating that he has a fridged beloved wife, ESPECIALLY irritating he gets a memorial sidequest and maya didn’t . just. bad.
aurelia is evil now cause reasons... bad...
vaughn also bad lmao i can’t believe they made amara yell “blood feud”... disgusting...
the playable had no role in the story. they’re just a fly on the wall in every cut scene. this is whack in general, and a crit i can apply to all of the main borderlands games, however it is extremely jarring to play amara in a siren-heavy game and have no one acknowledge it.
OVERALL... I guess like a B-? Maybe a B. I had fun playing it and I’m still having fun running around in Mayhem Mode and I am def looking forward to the DLCs. Gameplay is great. But while I had hoped this installment would take the storytelling of the main games a step further, it actually felt like a step back in virtually every respect.
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Day 3: Rebirth, New Beginnings
Compendium Game Route 2019 for @vrainsrarepairweeks
Ship: Aoi/Blue Angel
Rating: T
Word Count: 1,736
Tags: Post Canon, Canon Compliant, Selfcest, Out of Character, Fluff Tinged With Angst
Aoi wrestled with her sheets as she came to in the morning. As she awoke, she got the feeling that she had woken up slightly earlier than usual on a Sunday morning, the one morning she could guarantee a sleep in, however, little as her brother liked to have her up well before her internal clock would have her up. But something else was off, aside from her circadian rhythms.
The morning was warm but unusually so. It was still early spring, barely bordering on the middle of it ergo edging towards summer. Just two nights ago, it had been freezing, even in the morning and now, it was absurdly warm. Aoi rolled over and that little niggling feeling inside of her became a full-on sensation of something being certainly wrong. She tried to move but something go caught on the light pyjamas that she wore.
It wasn’t her sheets. It wasn’t any of her pillows. It wasn’t the Evilswarm Mandragora that she still cuddled with all these years later, either. It was something else entirely. It was an arm.
Aoi’s blood ran cold and colder still when the arm phased through her.
She scrambled out of her bed, taking her comfy blanket and Mandragora doll with her. She held onto them, frantic, as she looked over her bed. She had company. Impossible company because not only did Aoi go to sleep last night alone, the person who had wound up in her bed was not someone who existed. Not like this anyway. All blue, wavy hair and wings on her back.
“What... is going on?” Aoi asked, voice hoarse. “Who are you?”
Cutely, the not quite stranger in Aoi’s bed roused herself from sleep. She yawned kittenishly and pawed at her face before looking up at Aoi with adorably offended, ultramarine eyes. They watered and her lower lip quivered; even her detached, white wings which slowly unfurled and fluttered. As meticulous as her movements were, in creating the image of someone bubble-gum pop perfect, there was a veneer to her. Creases in her night gown which glitched in and out of existence, the way her hair cut through what should have been the flesh of her body.
With a snap of her fingers, this person, this figment, this whatever she was, she prettied herself up as though through some technological magic. Her hair was split apart and yanked back and looped until it was in perfect heart shaped buns and then pulled into twin pigtails. She traded her satiny nightgown like look for something more preppy and suitable for the daytime; a sleeveless white blouse, blue tie, and a hoop skirt which shimmered at the fluffy hems as she moved over the bed. She knelt there, looking up at Aoi, slightly rejected but rather pleadingly.
As much as Aoi wanted to deny what she was seeing before her eyes, it was undeniable. Blue Angel, her Blue Angel, had somehow come to life.
“I’m you, silly.” She giggled and then put a perfectly manicured finger on her chin. “Hm, I guess not. After all, you’re you and I’m... not you? But I am you. I was you.” She hiccupped and her eyes watered.
She looked pathetic but not in the way that Aoi remembered being pathetic when she was Blue Angel. Pathetic in a way which was real. All torn feathers and broken hearts, beaten into the dirt, screaming and ugly crying, put to sleep, and so on and so forth. This was something far more manufactured, but this Blue Angel lacked the mark of the manufactured. She lacked a cyan notch on her neck; not that Aoi, or her brother, for that matter, trusted SOLtiS bots enough after the debacle with Ai, to have one around which might somehow, miraculously, absorb the likeness and personality of her original Link VRAINS avatar.
Aoi hesitantly returned to her bed. She placed her hand close to the one which was keeping Blue Angel propped up as she was. With a trembling heart, Aoi wiped tears from Blue Angel’s eyes. Her skin felt like cheap polyester from the sewing shops that Aoi had wandered in and out of a few times whilst at the mall. It wasn’t bad but it was a little disconcerting, but Blue Angel was comforted by the act, even if it was ultimately in vain as Aoi blankly poked at the edge of her eyes.
“How are you real?”
“Angel dust and other magic.”
Aoi snickered. “That’s a drug.”
“You know what I mean!” Blue Angel defended herself, her shoulders perking up as her cheeks turned red.
“Magic, basically.”
“Yeah...”
An awkward pause lingered between them and Aoi’s lips felt dry. Blue Angel prettily, daintily, waited for something to be said; she didn’t seem to want to take the iniative, being girlishly evasive. Aoi swallowed a lump in her throat.
“Can I ask you a question, Blue Angel?”
“Of course.” Then, with a wink, Blue Angel added: “So long as it’s in reason, you know me. I like to keep things a secret. Identities, motivation, all my different tricks.”
“Why are you here?” Aoi asked.
Having met Aqua, having fought Ai, having participated in the Ignis Warfare, Aoi knew that there was a world of things so scientific that they became magic that she didn’t understand. She was modestly certain that the Blue Angel before her was some manifestation of that. Having lost to Bohman, having lost to Ai, Aoi was terrified that things would come in threes and the Blue Angel that she saw before her was an ill omen in white winged disguise.
“Because I love you.” Blue Angel replied with a beam. “So where else would I be, of course, silly?”
Aoi’s heart fluttered. Her ears pricked up. “You do?”
“I do.”
Blue Angel leaned in and their foreheads bumped together. Their noses brushed up against one another. Whatever it was which allowed Blue Angel to be in this world was soft. She placed a hand on the left side of Aoi’s face.
“I truly, truly do. True as blue.”
“I’m glad.” Aoi smiled a watery smile in reply.
Blue Angel frowned. Pouted, really. “But you abandoned me.” Her voice became a high strung, high pitched whine. She flung her arms back and bear hugged Aoi, sobbing. “You abandoned me.”
“I... did?” Aoi murmured.
Clutching onto her, Blue Angel looked up from Aoi’s breast. “You did.”
“I’m sorry.” Aoi murmured as she tentatively rubbed Blue Angel’s back, navigating her floating wings and emotions in general. “I didn’t mean to abandon you.”
“I know.” Blue Angel’s fingers dug in, clutching onto fabric, pinching Aoi’s skin beneath. “I know. All girls grow up. You got what you wanted by taking new chances, getting involved with all sorts of horrid affairs, was it worth it?”
“I think so.” Aoi mumbled.
She wasn’t sure. She could look at parts of her life with conviction; her becoming Blue Angel, her becoming Blue Girl, her becoming Blue Maiden. But there were other parts of her life which made her feel helpless, hopeless. Not realising Playmaker and Soulburner had been sitting in the back row of her own classroom all this time; not winning when it truly counted. It was enfeebling. She couldn’t do anything when her brother had sunken into that comatose state; nothing except watch.
Blue Angel snuggled against her. “I’m glad.” Aoi flinched. “No matter where you go or how you grow, I’ll always love you, Aoi. I have loved you most since you were a child and I will love you forevermore, my angelic promise to you.”
Aoi blushed. Blue Angel’s words were dulcet and like much of her persona, theatrical but not insincere. Aoi’s heart pounded in her chest. Feeling emboldened by such soft touches and sweet words, she angled her head down towards Blue Angel and she understood; perhaps intuitively, perhaps because she was some entity so intimately intertwined unto Aoi as she was, but she knew. She took the silent permission and kissed Aoi’s lips.
Blue Angel’s lips were such sweet serenity to kiss. Aoi felt all her doubts and helplessness which stirred in her chest quell as Blue Angel sighed into the kiss. It was slow and tender, making a melting moment out of the succulent fabric which Blue Angel existed beneath the veneer of; neither flesh nor silicon, like the faces of uncanny androids.
And it was such bitterness to end that kiss. Blue Angel didn’t need to breathe but Aoi did. She had to break off such a lovely kiss after what had felt like an eternity. She reared back and there was a delightful blush in Blue Angel’s cheeks.
“How was it?”
“Amazing.” Aoi replied, breathless but evening out. “Its not conceited to say that, is it? You’re, like, a really good kisser.”
Blue Angel giggled impishly and Aoi was hit from every angle regarding just what bliss that she had woken up this morning into. The sunlight from the early morning outside was gently warm. Somewhere, birds chirped to a more chipper tune than the general hustle and bustle of city life. It was nice. Contenting.
Aoi took a small breath and continued to look over Blue Angel. She couldn’t help but drink in the sight of seeing her childish style brought to genuine life like this. It was both embarrassing and heart-warming. Though, it raised a few questions which made her stomach turn.
Was this how she saw herself? Or was this how Blue Angel saw herself? Or, more concerningly, was this how her fans saw Blue Angel? The very one which was retired. Aoi shuddered as she overcomplicated this weirdly simple situation.
Blue Angel was real. Real enough to be interacted with. And that seemed to be all there was too it. Well, maybe she wanted somewhere to stay. Aoi’s brow furrowed. Well, maybe she needed somewhere to stay. After all, it wouldn’t be good for someone like Blue Angel, whatever she was, to be walking around. No matter, Aoi was quite certain that she wanted Blue Angel all to herself. She was still a selfish child like that, no matter how grown up she had become since her creation.
For now, she would merely incite a few more kisses, a few more exchanges of sweet words. Anything else, anything practical-minded could come later. All Aoi wanted was to indulge herself and, well, herself.
#writing tag#bluestshipping#vrainsrarepairweeks#vrainsrarepairweeks2019#yugioh vrains#vrains#yugioh#aoi zaizen#zaizen aoi#blue angel (vrains)#selfcest#femslash
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Truth Pt. 7
Master List: @afewmarvelousthoughtsadmin
Request:
What’s up sug! sorry you’re struggling right now but I’ve come to help you If you could bring this to light for me I’d absolutely love for YOU TO DO JT So basically Bucky X Enhanced reader who are fuckin enemies. Hate each other to every last fiber of their beings bc Bucky is rude and she calls him out on it. AnywHs, they get drunk, truth or dare (go crZy baby) and LOTS LF dirty talk if u wanna do smut but if u don’t then buck taking care of her while she’s drunk cause she admitted her feelings
Pairing: Bucky X Reader (Enhanced)
Summary: Since The Avengers gave you a home the only blight has been Bucky Barnes, a ghost from your past that you can’t seem to shake. It makes you hate him. The feeling, it seems, is mutual. But… a simple game reveals that maybe things aren’t quite so simple. (Post Winter Soldier AU)
Warnings: Honestly, this is, and I’m not lying, kind of FLUFFY WHAT?!
A/N: These two. I just... wow. I really like them ok? Also, I like thinking about fun quirks or hobbies Bucky may find himself being drawn to after everything. Little frivolous things that bring some happiness into his life and space.
I just hope y’all enjoy these tender moments. ♥️
(Sorry for the long post with no “Read More” it’s glitching and some folks can’t see the whole thing for some reason.)
Tags are open!
@midnightdream83 @mywinterwolf @disagreetoagree @breezy1415 @peachthatdrinkslemonade @wonderlandmind4 @piensa-bonito @handplucked @buckysstar @sam-jae @marauder--harder @for-the-love-of-the-fandom @meg-asaur @jewelofwinter
Even though the elevator ride to his apartment is short you’re already dozing a bit in his arms. Your face half buried in his chest, softly breathing, though your expression is far from relaxed.
Once inside he gently sets you on the couch, laying your head on a throw pillow and tucking the thick blanket around you. In just a week you’d lost mass, he could feel bones where he had been unable to feel or see them when you’d last been here.
Your power, he knew, meant you needed to stay well fed because it could drain your body, pulling from your own metabolism to keep running. From what he could tell it had been running for the past week.
You groan a little and reach for him. A sad smile rises on his lips, “I’m not going anywhere, doll,” he strokes your forehead pressing a kiss to the crease there, “just rest a second. Nothing is gonna get through me, you’re safe.” This seems to work as your forehead smooths a bit and your hand relaxes.
“Sargent Barnes,” Jarvis pipes up quietly once Bucky is in the kitchen. “I do not want to impose but I have noticed Ms. Y/L/N’s distress for days. She has not granted me permission to request any additional aid on her behalf.”
“Not shocking,” Bucky says looking over at you.
“I will continue to heed her wishes as long as her life is not in immediate risk. However, she is massively undernourished, if she goes another day without eating in her condition I will be forced to notify medical per my programming.”
“I understand, Jarvis. Thanks.”
“May I suggest a light soup and an electrolyte fortified beverage? I worry her system cannot handle much else.”
“Good call.” He opens the pantry to find a can of chicken noodle.
“That would be most excellent I believe. I will have one of the bots bring the beverage for her.”
“Thanks, Jarvis.”
“Of course, sir.”
Bucky isn’t much of a cook but thankfully he can manage a can of soup. Just before it’s done Dum-E slips in quietly with a basket from the main kitchen with bottles of Pedialyte. He pats the weird bot on the head, always viewing it like a friendly dog more than a machine, and it lets itself out.
He brings the soup to the coffee table and gently tries to wake you.
“Y/N,” he shakes your shoulder gently, “I know you’re tired but I need you to wake up for just a few minutes.” Nothing. “Doll? Come on, wake up for me.” Another shake.
With a gasp, you shoot up, frantically looking around the room, tendrils of light snaking every which way under your skin. Bucky grabs your shoulders.
“Hey, hey, look at me,” his voice is kind but stern, he needs you to hear him. “Look at me, Y/N.” You do finally and the light comes on, he can feel you relax in his grip.
Moving a strand of hair from your face he says, “Sorry, I know you need sleep, but you’ve got to try and eat something.” Your head sort of falls to the side rather than turn to see the soup on the table behind Bucky, brows knit.
“You don’t have to eat much, just something. Ok?” You nod, eyes fluttering a bit. For a second he’s worried he’s going to have to feed you, worried you’re that far gone, but you pull your self together and reach for the bowl. He hands it to you and surprisingly you make it through half.
“I can’t,” you say handing it back.
“That's ok,” he takes it. “Here,” he hands you the Pedialyte standing to take your bowl to the kitchen. “Sip this.”
You smile a bit, “So bossy,” you say looking up at him. A genuine smile fills his face, you had said that the night you were together. He strokes the side of your face and heads into the kitchen.
Back in the living room, he sits at the end of the couch as you drink what you can. You set it down, shaking your head.
“Ok, let’s get you to bed.” You look up at him, terror on your face. “I’ll be with you. If you want me to be.”
“Please,” you say, your voice less hoarse than before. He nods and holds out a hand. You stand a little more steadily and make your way to his room.
He gives you a shirt and a pair of boxers to change into assuming you don’t want to sleep in your gym clothes. While you’re in the bathroom he changes too, into pajama bottoms and turns the bed down. When you come out he has to force himself to not gawk. For some reason, you look incredible in his shirt and boxers. He swallows hard.
“I guess this will make three pieces of clothing I need to get back to you,” you say, voice sounding steady. Good.
“I’ll send you an invoice,” he says taking a few steps toward you. Tenderly he caresses your arm, “Come on.”
In the bed, you immediately curl against him and he holds your right hand in his left pressing it to his chest.
He thinks you’re just about asleep when you say, “Bucky?”
“Yes, doll?”
“You meant it earlier right?” He doesn’t respond, “Your promise…”
His heart aches, “I did.”
“You’ll kill me, then.”
He won’t lie, “No.” You shoot up and stare at him, betrayal on your face. He’s unfazed and just cups your face in his right hand. “I’ll kill you if you’re about to lose control, I told you that the other night. But Hydra… anyone else… they won’t ever get close enough to you for it to matter.” His tone shifts cold and certain, “Ever.”
You stare at him for a minute before that sinks in, just how much he means it, what exactly it means. That he would take on anything to protect you from becoming someone else weapon again, anything.
You nod and in a flash your lips are on his. His hand is still hovering in the air where your face had been before it slowly rests on the back of your head. He lets this go on longer than he should he knows, you need rest, but he can’t help how good it feels to feel your lips on his, to have you in his arms.
Eventually, you sit up, leaning against his chest, looking down into his face, “Thank you.”
[Reader]
Your head is throbbing and your mouth feels like a damn desert. Logically you knew you weren’t fully out of the woods. This bout of trauma wrecked you, body and soul. Even so, you feel more human than you had for days. It was a start.
Bucky’s warm presence behind you feels something like comfort. You can’t tell if he’s awake but you press even closer to him, the weight of his right arm across your torso grounding. Reacting to your movement his hand flexes, laying flat on your stomach, holding you tight against him.
“Hey there,” the warmth of his breath on the back of your ear sends tingles all over your body. He begins to lift his arm and move but you grab it, holding him in place, not ready for him to let go. Immediately he settles back down and presses a kiss to the back of your head. Ugh, your hair was filthy, not that he seems to mind.
“Hey,” you rasp, voice almost as cracked as your lips.
“Excuse me,” Jarvis intones. “I’m very sorry to intrude but I have an urgent message from Mr. Stark informing you both that you need to be in the conference room in two hours. I didn’t want to wake you.” Bless Jarvis.
“You can tell Mr. Stark to go fuck himself,” Bucky snaps, his body tensing.
“Don’t tell him that Jarvis,” you sounded like a pack a day smoker.
“I had no intention to.”
You turn in Bucky’s arms to face him, “What the hell?”
His face is a mask of concern, “Whatever they need can wait. You’re not in any condition-“
“I can handle a conversation Bucky,” probably… “I mean… they gave us almost a week. That’s more than fair…”
“No.” His tone says there’s no argument here and your brows raise, “You need rest.”
Gently you move a few stray strands of hair from his face, “So do you,” the circles under his eyes were still dark.
He takes your hand in his and kisses your palm, “I’m ok, doll.”
“Please,” you roll your eyes, “we’re both far from ok. They deserve to know why.” He knows you’re right and sighs heavily before kissing your forehead.
“Ok.” He squeezes you tight before sitting up cross-legged on the bed.
As he leans forward you can’t help but ogle the way the muscles in his back move. If you weren’t so cotton-mouthed right now you’re not certain you wouldn’t be drooling. Sex drive had to be a good thing right?
Slowly, you sit up, not wanting to set the room spinning and kiss his back before laying your cheek on the warm flesh there. He hums a little, contented sound, reaching back to grab your hand.
“What if we have them come here?” His low voice vibrates through his torso.
“Here?”
“Yeah. Or your place. I just… if they wanna talk we can talk but they’re gonna come to you where you can be comfortable and…”
“I’m not in danger from them, Bucky.” The look on his face tells you he doesn’t trust that. It’s understandable, his concern.
Before, in Hydra, your display with him would have been grounds to be wiped and iced. You sigh heavily, “My place is… not currently fit for other people…” That was putting it lightly. Five days of depression, no sleep, and fighting the storm in your head meant it was just as wrecked as you were.
“They can come here, it’s fine,” he gives your hand a reassuring squeeze.
“Ok,” you pull away from him and run your fingers through your greasy hair. “I’ll head up and shower then-”
“No,” he says shaking his head, “you’re going to have some breakfast before you do anything.” You glance at the clock, it’s 12:30pm. “Brunch, whatever,” he says with a smile.
The thought of food makes your stomach growl, “Actually not going to fight you there.”
Bucky makes you simple eggs, dry toast, and water per Jarvis’ suggestion before getting in the shower himself. Surprising yourself, you manage to eat it all and don’t want to throw up. Progress. When he comes out, you’re loading the dishes into the washer.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he says, drying his hair, looking better than he had any right in his navy henley and grey sweats.
“Wanted to feel useful,” you say with a shrug. He comes into the kitchen and pulls you to him, smelling like that tea tree shampoo and toothpaste. This whole thing is so weird. Maybe weird is ok though…
“Just shower here, I’m sure I’ve got something you can wear,” his lips press against the crown of your head. You nod against his chest, “You not fighting me is a strange change of pace,” his voice is tinged with humor.
You shrug, the side of your face still pressed to him. “Don’t want to face my apartment yet is all...”
His left-hand takes your chin and tilts your face up, “That’s ok.” The corners of his eyes crinkle a bit when he smiles, “You’re welcome here as long as you like. When you’re ready I can help you get your place up to code… if you want.”
A laugh bursts from you and his brows knit in concern. “A little over a week ago I was thinking of ways to kill you. Now…” Your laugh swallows the rest of that statement.
“Now maybe you’re glad you didn’t?” He asks with a smirk. You cup his face and rise up a bit on your toes to press a quick kiss on his lips.
“Maybe. Don’t push your luck though,” you say with a wink.
He shakes his head, smiling, “Go shower.”
Stepping back from him your hand rises to your chest, “Are you saying I’m dirty?!”
He laughs, “No. I’m saying, you’re greasy. But we could work on dirty later if you want.” A devious smile lights his face and his tongue flits across his bottom lip.
You can’t help the huge smile that stretches it’s way across your own face and you playfully smack his chest as you walk past him, “Dick.”
Another laugh tumbles from him. You’re a few steps away when you feel his arms wrap around you and pull your back tight against his torso. His face is pressed against yours, his short beard tickling the skin on your cheek. You hold on to his forearms and lean into the embrace, letting the comforting feeling of him wash over you.
“I’ll put some clothes on the bed,” he says next to your ear, “and deal with Stark. Take your time.” With that, he kisses your cheek and releases you.
You sit on the bench in the shower and let the steam engulf you. The heat may relax some but for you it’s a boost, sending a low hum of energy thrumming through you, clearing your head. It’s a good thing too. There’s a feeling in your gut that this is going to be a fairly unpleasant conversation.
Sighing you stand, you’ve been in here long enough to be a touch pruney. Your muscles still ache from being tense with constant adrenaline for days and your legs shake just a bit but you’re miles ahead of where you were last night. It sinks in a bit just how close to the edge you were. If Bucky hadn’t come in… would you have lost it? And if you had…
Pushing the thought from your mind you shut the water off and reach for the plush towel. Your reflection in the mirror is, disheartening, to say the least. Hopefully, the hollowness in your cheeks and the purple under your eyes would tell enough of the story for you when everyone came in with their questions. You roughly dry your hair and find a hair tie in a drawer to toss it into a messy bun.
On the bed, Bucky has left you a pair of drawstring sweats and a hoodie, both in his favorite midnight blue color. They’re just big enough to be oversized but it’s so comfortable to be surrounded by warmth and his smell. Your eyes ache to close.
Bucky’s in the kitchen, setting out mugs and the smell of coffee fills the air. You were certain coffee wouldn’t be on Jarvis’ recommended list of nutrients for you at the moment but you’re feeling sleepier by the minute. If they want you to make it through this you’re going to need that boost.
“That smells like everything I need right now,” you hop onto one of the metal barstools by his island. He doesn’t question you and pours a large cup.
“How do you take it?”
“Black.” Your fingers curl around the mug he hands you, it has the Brooklyn bridge on the side, one of those things you find at gift shops all over the city. It’s now that you realize all the mugs are different.
Some like this one are souvenirs, a Broadway mug with comedy and tragedy masks, one from the Met with a Monet on the side. There are a few that look vintage, from the 70’s maybe. Others are novelty mugs. There’s one that looks like a camera lens, one says “Get Shit Done” on the side, another is shaped like a donut. You can’t help but smile.
He notices you looking, “I… uh, like mugs I guess.” Awkwardly he runs a hand through his hair. “Figured coffee would be good. My… my ma always made coffee when people came over…”
Your heart may actually burst. “You’re cute,” you say sipping what is actually an exceptional cup of coffee. He snorts and pours his own cup, this one with “Rocket Fuel” on the side and the NASA logo.
“Come on,” he heads into the living room. You hadn’t noticed he’d pulled his dining room chairs in here to accommodate the others. “There’s still a bit before they get here.”
Plopping onto the couch he hits play on the remote sitting on the side table, old jazz fills the space. Unsure where to sit you stand awkwardly between the kitchen and living room weighing your options.
“Psst,” he quips from the couch, you meet his gaze. A smile fills his face and beckons with his left hand. You take a tentative step in his direction, “The big chairs are comfortable too if-”
“No,” you say as you set your mug on the coffee table and sit next to him. His left arm wraps around your shoulders and pulls you close. You lay your head against his chest and immediately feel your body relax. “This is perfect.”
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black-eyedbitch
Hi! Sorry, struggling with basic math over here....
I have problems with the fact that the flashbacks in After School Special allegedly took place in 1997 simply because...
I have problems with the fact that the flashbacks in After School Special allegedly took place in 1997 simply because there is a banner in the high school that says “class of 1997” which, if this is supposed to be occurring in the fall, would make it 1996.
(hi hi, I went and copied the rest of your comment here since it’s only tangentially related to the other long post, and merits its own post...)
I’ve written about this so many, and some of it was back before the era where I tried to tag stuff, or ended up in posts with too many episodes to tag them all...
https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/159198977940/re-the-post-about-dean-and-sam-not-seeing-much
this one is long, but it mentions one theory I’ve had about why Dean might still be at school despite being almost 19:
https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/116419056090/if-dean-is-so-intelligent-why-did-he-ever-get
Which is... Dean HAD graduated/gotten his GED/lied about his age being a year younger because John ordered him to keep an eye on Sam... We know canonically that Dean and John have left Sam alone for longer periods of time even before this incident in 4.13 (thanks 11.08!) But it also seemed to be at a time of the year when Sam wasn’t enrolled in school, merely locked up in that motel room by himself.
Heck it could be that Sam finally argued John into LETTING him enroll in high school, and for the first few months one of his conditions was that Dean had to go with him to make sure he was safe. It would also explain Dean’s flippant attitude toward class (been there, done that, got a GED), AND the gross-for-an-adult but possibly what 18-year-old Dean would’ve been concerned about at the school: the guess which cheerleaders are legal comment.
But... I’m completely willing to handwave dates like this where it’s convenient. We’ve got all sorts of timeline glitches all over the place that if you think too hard about them, stuff starts to fall apart...
The writers seem to be particularly confused about High School in general, too... Starting with your suggestion to handwave it as October 1996 instead of October 1997 could work, and it would reduce the Oopsie Factor down to a singular point of error: the title banner informing us it’s November 1997. As you said, everything else in the episode is either unstated, or seems to imply it’s actually November 1996 (the banner).
But if that was the case, that would mean that Sam was... actually the age to be in 8th grade. So how how how would he have been in 9th grade, in high school, at that time? But... that might actually fit the timeline better. He did seem... young for high school, which fits because Colin Ford was TWELVE when he filmed that episode.
So what’s a 12-year-old with an arguably spotty educational record (moving around every few weeks doesn’t help one get a consistent education) doing enrolled in 9th grade? (when the vast majority of students begin 9th grade as 14-year-olds in the US?) (with the caveat he was portraying Sam Winchester, who would’ve canonically been 13 at the time if it was November 1996). That theory honestly lends a LOT of credit to both Sam’s intellect (he’s able to keep up with course work designed for students a year older who’ve had a consistent education to that point, and even excel at it), and his dedication to his education. Because hooboy, for him to have been pushing himself like that meant he was maintaining a grade-appropriate curriculum for himself despite all the moving around they did.
AT AGE 13.
Without either of his “parental figures” encouraging and guiding him through that.
Which, if that’s actually the case, goes a long way toward proving just how dedicated Sam was to getting out of the life. He wasn’t just “running away from something,” but actively engaged in pursuing something else without John or Dean’s knowledge, you know? Reframing his running away from Flagstaff as something more than just holing up in that trailer with a strange dog and living off funyuns and mr. pibb... and that was framed as just one incident of Sam’s “escaping his life” with the implication that he’s actually had this plan to eventually get out for a really long time...
Because of 11.08, when he abandoned his imaginary friend and was THRILLED to be called into a hunt with John and Dean, that conviction that he would be a hunter lasted less than a year or two before he was actively pushing himself to find another way for himself, and it’s possible he decided that getting an education was the most direct way out of the hunting life.
I always like to imagine that Bobby had a hand in this pursuit for him, since we know he had spent time alone at Bobby’s in 1995 while Dean was at Sonny’s (thanks, 9.07!), which would’ve been within the year or so prior to the events of 4.13. It could be Bobby that guided him to that course of action, since we know Bobby himself was highly intelligent, multilingual, and clearly at least very well self-educated, even if not traditionally educated... that would’ve made him the perfect person to have encouraged Sam to pursue a similar path for himself...
Or it could’ve been as simple as John demanding that if Sam wanted to enroll in school, he had to enroll in the same school Dean was attending, for whatever reason... convenience, so they could keep an eye on each other (or Dean could keep an eye on Sam...), or whatever.
But again, in the end, aside from these assumptions based on the handwaviness of any of these potential scenarios, and what they might suggest about the characters, the actual dates of these events doesn’t really affect canon. Some are just more ;_; than others, you know?
#black-eyedbitch#spn timeline#spn 4.13#spn 9.07#spn 11.08#sam fucking winchester#i really hope it was bobby who helped him behind john's back all those years#like helped him maintain his gpa despite switching schools all the time#helped him assemble his school transcript despite having been at so many schools possibly with different aliases or fudged birthdates#and gave him a stable home address when he started applying to colleges#we saw bobby flashback to playing catch with 10-year-old dean that time in 7.11 so maybe he did something similar for sam#but with his education... and we know bobby and john had a falling out when sam and dean were teenagers...#kinda makes me wonder if THIS might have been the reason why...
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