#oh you can write some forced shit with 10-16 yr olds where girl and boy cant be friends so they gotta fall in love for ur entire run | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

apprenticenerd · 3 years

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"Anyone can send me an ask with one of the titles and I’ll post a snippet or talk about that WIP!" The Acropolis, Tacet, Checklist, A Tiny Galaxy, Hearsay, Going Back, Ella Disenchanted, Making Peace, The Slashed Circle, Wake Up, Tenno, Midnight, Heliotropism, Arrhythmia, the one about Among Us, the one about Library of Ruina, the one that’s a D&D world concept. Yes, all of them. I know you wanna talk about all of them. So go, go forth and do it!

Hoooo boy, this is gonna be a long post. Lots and lots of writing snippets under the cut to avoid dash stretch!

The Acropolis - original - length uncertain - 1.4k and counting

im not ready for this im not i thought it would be yrs i thought id at least get an english degree first

omg sal whats goin on

fuckin hell whyd it have to be now i have a chem lab tomorrow

sally-tate macpherson. u never swear. ever. wtf is goin on.

ok. jess. i need u to listen really really carefully. understand?

answer the goddamn question ur scarin me

shut up and listen and this will go a lot better

fine but u need to tell me wtf is happnenig

ok. im going to tell you a bunch of stuff. not giving u advice, thats not allowed, but im gonna tell u stuff it seems like itd be impossible for me to know.

?????????????

i said shut up this is really important dont question how i know it. just go with it and figure out what to do. and dont die. bc no matter how crazy stuff seems, if u die, ur dead. here and everywhere. ok?

This is an original story coming straight from a @/writing-prompt-s prompt about a crack in a kid’s hardwood floor that they fantasized was a portal actually being one. I originally intended to write the entire thing like this, as a conversation over text, but that may not be feasible given a certain world-building detail at the other end of the portal (and the limits of my creativity lmao).

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Tacet - The Blackout Club - one-shot - 3.2k and counting

She closed her eyes again, and there it was. Hallucination? Some new science trick with electromagnetic radiation off the visible spectrum? Evidence that she was actually going insane? Whatever it was, it burned behind her eyelids in bright, incontrovertible red - and was completely invisible when she opened her eyes again. There was just the usual mess of club posters and one big one about someone’s exceedingly dumb-looking lost cat.

Eyes open, there was only Sargent Snuggles. Eyes closed, there was the normal darkness and then three lines of text where the poster had been, wavering like scarlet fire:

JOIN TBC JOIN TBC JOIN TBC

TBC? What the fuck was that? She’d never heard of any group with that acronym before. Hardly aware of the flurry of weird looks from half the other people in the hallway, she crossed the hall to examine the lost cat poster more closely. It felt like perfectly normal paper when she touched it, and there wasn’t even a hint of red with her eyes open, unless you counted the cat’s tacky pink sweater. How the hell was this even possible?

“You’re finally cracking, Bri,” she groaned under her breath, then headed for her locker. She did have to get home. Add another big fat entry to the weird shit list.

A backstory one-shot for my Blackout Club OC Briar, telling the story of how she got into the club in the first place. I’ve been stuck in the same spot for a while now, after Briar’s friend Dani explains the club to her, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the scene’s over as is. Of course, writing the next one is the tough part.

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Checklist - The Blackout Club - one-shot - 1.7k and counting

8. You still have a headache. Shouldn’t you go back to sleep and try to do this in the morning?

9. (wake up)

10. Nah, you’ve always been a night owl, and school starts criminally early, too early to get much done beforehand. It’s quiet, except for Dad snoring. Your parents are asleep already. You can stay up until this is done, and they’ll be none the wiser.

11. Your head hurts worse. It’s getting harder to think. At only 9 pm? 9:30? Whatever. You should sleep.

12. (wake UP)

13. What are you thinking? You have to read at least a little of this chapter, or there’s no way you’ll be able to bullshit your way through class tomorrow. Besides, all of a sudden, the silence feels...strange. Heavier? You can’t describe it.

14. You need to sleep. You need a drink of water or something. You need to finish this damn homework. You need to sleep. You need to sleep.

15. Stare at The Great Gatsby. It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense.

16. Realize what’s up with the silence. Dad’s not snoring anymore. You aren’t feeling like yourself. You need to sleep.

17. Something’s weird.

18. (WAKE UP)

19. ...No. Something’s wrong.

Another Blackout Club story and another Interface Screw, as it were, this time in the form of a (very long) checklist. None of the characters have names (yet). It describes another way a kid could find themself running around at night with the Blackout Club, this time by fighting off the Song just enough to run into a club member who could wake them up the rest of the way. As with Tacet, I still need to write the suspenseful part.

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A Tiny Galaxy - Warframe - 4 chapters planned, 1 complete, 1 in progress - 7.8k and counting

Try it if you don’t believe me, the kid in the vent had said.

It was impossible. It was physically impossible. All of this was impossible. Had the Void...? Could the Void...?

The ship was at a standstill. Her mother had tried to kill her, and something had happened. She’d made something happen. There had been no holoprojector in that kid’s hand. Nothing was impossible anymore.

Jhia took a deep breath. How the heck was she supposed to do this? Was she supposed to feel something, some internal guide? Blue Hair hadn’t said. Feeling incredibly stupid, she did a quick mental checkup on herself. Nothing felt wrong, or different - but now that she thought about it…

Afterward, she would try many times to explain it, and fail every time. The best she could come up with was that once she found the Void, calling on it was as easy and as natural as breathing. She opened her hands in front of her, concentrated on that force like an extension of herself, reopened her eyes, and there it was: a riotous little ball of energy, wisps and motes of light and not-quite-light like a tiny galaxy, the Tau system in the palm of her hand, raging.

More OC backstory time! This one’s for my Tenno, a nerdy fourteen-year-old (at the time of this story, anyway) by the name of Jhia, going through the hell that is the Zariman Ten-Zero and what happened on it. This is possibly the first part of the story I actually wrote: the roll-credits moment when Jhia realizes the Void’s changed her more already than she thought.

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Hearsay - Lobotomy Corporation/Library of Ruina - one-shot - 1k and counting

"Oh? Did they investigate further?"

"They tried. Found a few fingerprints, but they didn't match anyone in the database."

"What's the update, then?"

"Reports from elsewhere in the district of someone not in uniform carrying a Zwei sword. They're slippery, good at avoiding us, which would suggest Syndicate operative to me and HQ. Except that in every one of the descriptions we managed to get, our sword thief is a child."

"What? How?!"

"You tell me, Iona. You're the one who went to the crime scene."

"Right... Jeez, if it's a kid, I guess that'd explain why Petrov thought they weren't a threat..."

"My thoughts exactly. HQ has a fair amount of hearsay to go on, but nobody can quite agree on how old the child is, or whether or not she's with a Syndicate. Most agree that she appears to be a girl, tall for a child, auburn hair, clothes and demeanor typical of a Backstreets native."

"We got a name?"

"They've heard Yeri, Kali, Redbird, Suma, Aelfin... No one knows which is her real one, or if it's even any of them at all."

"Damn. ...Say, are you going to drink that entire pot of coffee?"

"Help yourself."

This is one of those stories that turned into an accidental AU when more of canon came out. The idea behind it is that it’s Kali’s backstory told entirely in conversations in which she did not participate, showcasing the fact that a Fixer’s fame is their livelihood and Kali was about as famous as they come, before the whole L Corp thing happened. Of course, the vast majority of the headcanons here got invalidated with a certain Ruina update, so my motivation’s kinda down on this one.

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Going Back has already been talked about here!

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Ella Disenchanted - The Blackout Club - one-shot (maybe two-shot??) - 1.4k and counting

She woke. Her stomach went through a series of panicked flip-flops as she thought something strange had done it, Dad or a little-kid-nightmares shadow beast had made noise, but no - why had she fallen asleep in the first place? Her butt and shoulder were sore where they’d been leaning on the bottom and side of the windowsill, presumably all night, since the sun was full up over the trees on Old Growth Hill.

All night. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t fall asleep, but she did anyway. God dammit.

As she unfolded herself from her cramped ball, though, she froze. Under the comforter she’d pulled around her shoulders for warmth, she was wearing her gray jacket, a T-shirt, jeans, sneakers getting dried mud all over the carpet.

Last she remembered, she’d been in her pajamas.

In which a Blackout Club kid’s little sister wonders where he’s gone when he runs away to the boxcar, and tries to get to the bottom of the mystery herself. Usually she’d be too young for the club to recruit, but her investigations and an incident involving SAO are more than enough extenuating circumstance. Unlike most of my other WIPs, there’s a whole outline at the end of my doc for this one.

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Making Peace - Warframe - multi-chapter - 1.5k and counting

“I…” Iksoh finally said. “Sorna, I hope you realize. I’m not into this. I never - I’m not doing this. Whatever you’re doing, I can’t.”

“I know,” Sorna said softly. The decision tore at her heart again and she almost backed out of the vent, but no. She had to go. She wouldn’t see another innocent crumple in her rifle sights. “I hope you realize. I’m not coming back.”

Behind her, Iksoh let out a long, shaky breath. “It’s taking all I’ve got not to report you right now. Sorna… the Queens’ll have my head for this. Please, please, let it be worth it. Go. Don’t let them take yours.”

“I won’t,” Sorna promised, and meant it.

Later, after her last fight for her freedom was done, on the Steel Meridian ship headed for Kronia Relay, Sorna looked out at the planet retreating behind her and thought of Iksoh. She’d just learned a new word from a Meridian soldier: vaykor tal, the defector’s spirit. Iksoh had let her go, at risk of their own life. They’d had a bit of the vaykor tal themself, even if they hadn’t known it, even if they’d thought it was just some weakness that was bound to get them killed.

“Ranre treri, duf krun,” she whispered into space, a Grineer well-wishing passed down from sergeant to tube-fresh lancer since time immemorial. May your hands be steady, and may life be kind.

This is an AU born of me and some friends wondering why in the heck Perrin and the Meridian hate each other so much in game. It’s about a group of Kavor - Grineer defectors distinguished from other Meridian members by their pacifism - who get to a Relay and start wondering the same thing. Besides Sorna (and, later in the story, Iksoh as well), there would have been Chakh, Beket, and Sydon, plus at least four of the syndicate leaders and a bunch of side-character OCs, all caught up somehow in what turns out to be a surprisingly far-reaching web of intrigue.

The Slashed Circle - Warframe - one-shot, probably - 429 and counting

In addition to their written and spoken language, the Grineer have a full language of hand signs. It has its quirks, as all languages do - be careful of confusing it with the Corpus sign language, in which the sign for “to pay” roughly approximates the Grineer sign for...a certain portion of the male anatomy. Among these is the common Grineer sentiment against those who defect from their ranks, baked into the sign just as much as their spoken words.

The sign of the slashed circle, the sedashkur - a finger drawn in a circle on the chest, followed by a diagonal line - is the highest of taboos to any loyal Grineer. It shows support for such scum as the Kavor and Steel Meridian, enough so that it forms the basis for the Meridian’s battle standard. To sign the sedashkur is to betray your siblings, commit a grave insult to your superiors, paint a near-indelible target on your back. It is an object of hatred and fear throughout the ranks.

She fears it, yes, but she does not hate it, for all her life and into her death as well. It shouldn’t trouble her now, though. It is easy to hide a language, and she burned her journals before she was called to the fortress.

This is a fic about Jhia and her one (1) converted Kuva Lich, namely about the process of said Lich’s defeat and defection, that kinda never got off the ground. Contrary to this snippet, I think most of it would have been written in what are essentially space emails back and forth between Lich and Tenno? I definitely got as far as Jhia sending an audio recording of a bass-boosted dog fart, anyhow.

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Wake Up, Tenno - Warframe - one-shot - 950 and counting

“Wake up, Tenno.”

She wakes. She is - she is Tenno, right? She is a Tenno? Her mind is confused, so full of fog and dead ends - how long was she asleep?

The voice that woke her seems familiar. She might have loved the speaker, in her scrambled past life, the woman in the purple helmet, the one called Lotus in her HUD vision. Her surroundings are a ruin of some sort. Her body is—

...what?

She can move just fine. Her fingers and arms and legs respond with suspicious ease, given how long she must have slept to be this scattered upon waking up, and yet there’s some fundamental disconnect. This is her Warframe, her body, but it’s not her body somehow.

...wait, where did the term “Warframe” come from?

A Tenno, unnamed but intended to be Jhia on my end, wakes up on Earth at the very beginning of the in-game storyline. Since the tutorial has gotten an overhaul in recent months, I may have to modify even what little I have on this a lot.

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Midnight - Iconoclasts - poem - 280 and counting

been anything smaller than been anything

never been anything smaller than

“good morning, how’s miss grump doing today? i heard about that last mission...if you didn’t sleep well i can call you in sick, it’s alright-” “oh, shut up, grey”

there has never been anything

“oh, shut up, grey” “love you too”

smaller

“love you too”

than

A very fragmented, stream-of-consciousness-y poem meant to represent Agent Black’s failing sanity near the end of the game. The words of her famous one-liner (“there has never been anything smaller than me”) are interspersed, out of order until the end, with poetic descriptions of other characters and bits and pieces of a flashback involving Agent Grey.

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Heliotropism - Iconoclasts - one-shot - 1.1k and counting

Lily, though she’s superstitious, will have none of these self-important truths, none of these semblances of certainty when really all it is is wishing on Ivory and hoping for the best. She calls for Miss Andress instead.

A stout but severe woman with ten grandchildren and a great-grandchild on the way, Miss Andress is perhaps the quintessential matriarch: nurturing, selfless, brutally honest. She is the one the people of 17 trust when they feel they can trust no one else. Lily needs the kind of reassurance only she can give, with the authority of ninety-one years and the wisdom of two sons, one daughter, and some five dogs raised under her care.

When Miss Andress visits House 4, she asks Polro and Lily to each bring an object they cherish the most. For Polro it’s his largest wrench, pitted with use but still polished to a brassy shine; Lily surprises everyone by pulling out a tiny, unloaded stun-gun, and surprises them more by not explaining it at all. Miss Andress doesn’t question it. She just turns the two tools over and over in her hands, head bowed, squinting at them as if trying to read the secrets of the universe in the scratches carved into them by time.

Finally she straightens up and sighs, pushing a strand of silver hair behind her ear. Her forehead is slick with sweat, though the night is cool outside. “I don’t know what she’ll do,” the wise woman says, heavily, as if delivering bad news. “I just know she’ll change the world.”

Can you tell I like backstory fic? This one is for Robin, with one short anecdote for each year of her life, up to age 17 and the events of the game. It’s also an excuse to world-build a bunch, lol.

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Arrhythmia - Crypt of the NecroDancer - one-shot(?) - 4k and counting

The creature didn’t say anything, just beckoned to the shadows. Before I could move, two other creatures came for me, sending the other humans - former humans? - scrambling away in panic. One landed a hard blow on the back of my head that sent me to my hands and knees, seeing sparks; the other said “Freeze!” and I could only watch as ice sprouted from the leaf litter, cementing me to the ground.

The one who’d hit me produced a dagger from the inside of its cloak. I tried to pull myself up, to do anything at all to keep myself from getting shanked, but it was no good. There must have been a secondary effect on that spell; my limbs wouldn’t respond. I felt the dagger tear cloth in the region of my back, and prepared for the pain.

It didn’t come. The creature cut a slit in the back of my tunic, then another. Neither one touched the skin at all. I can’t really describe what happened next - my brain was having trouble computing how my arms were in front of me, visible, unable to move, but it felt like the creature was pulling them through the gashes in my tunic, but that was wrong, they didn’t feel like arms at all.

“Holy fuck,” I heard someone say.

The ice holding me down melted into nothing as the spell wore off. I jumped back up, head spinning a little, ready for another fight, only to spot two flicks of scarlet in my peripheral vision. I spun around, but they moved with me.

I think I already knew what they were. I just couldn’t admit it to myself.

You’ve already seen this one, Nick, though I’m pretty sure it was well over two years ago. It’s a pile of old headcanons, some of them now outdated I’m pretty sure, about how Nocturna ended up a vampire in the first place and a little bit about how vampire society works. According to Google Docs, I’ve been stuck on this one since March 2018. Whoops.

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untitled (working title “adult citra meets an impostor bc what is self-control”) - Among Us - one-shot - 572 and counting

“I know. You’re stuck, aren’t you?” Having well and truly gotten their full attention, Citra continues, “God, I can barely imagine. Having to take a weird-ass host whose biology might even be toxic to you, I don’t know. Needing to get to a whole other galaxy, feeling like the only way to do that is by deception and death.” “How…?”

She sighs. “I told you, this isn’t my first rodeo. One of your kind saved my life when I was a kid. Since he’d killed Mom and Dad had been out of the picture long before, he stayed here and helped raise me afterward. It’s how I learned to pronounce...a few of your words, at least.”

“You missed the ‘H’ sound.”

“Isn’t that the one that’s literally impossible to do right with Terran anatomy?”

“Maybe. You think I know Terran anatomy all that well?”

Citra chuckles. “Fair point. You let us find your buddy and fix the ship, I’ll raise Xai when we get comms back and he can try and help you get home. Deal?”

I found an Among Us comic on Tumblr, absolutely ran into left field with it to make a couple of OCs, and then made AUs of those OCs because of course I did. This one is from a future scenario in which Citra (typically orange) meets someone rather familiar on a mission with the crew of the Skeld.

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untitled (working title “library of ruina but they adopt half the guests”) - Library of Ruina - length uncertain - 1k and counting

“And what happened to not caring about others because it’s a waste of time and heartache?”

Now it’s Roland’s turn to sigh. “I don’t care about him. I just don’t want the guilt of killing - look at him, he can’t be older than eighteen or nineteen!”

Raised eyebrow. “Finn will be twenty years old in fifteen days’ time. He is a legal adult. I fail to see why this should matter to either of us.”

“He’s fresh off his first Fixer license! I have years of experience! He had no idea what he was getting into when he signed that invitation and you know it!”

Angela fixes him with a glare that turns his stomach, his freshly remade body reacting to the memory of its sudden, and extremely painful, dismemberment. “I could quite literally hold your soul in my hands if I wanted,” she reminds him in an undertone of steel. “I must do the same for him, following the invitation’s guidance, or my entire plan will be lost, my coworkers’ sacrifices all for naught. Do not disappoint me or ask any more impertinent questions. You know what to do, and what will happen if you do not.”

Look, some of the people you fight in this game deserved so much better, okay? I came up with an AU concept where if a guest willingly concedes the fight and agrees to stick around, you can get their book without killing them. Finn doesn’t die; neither do Tomerry or Shi Association; all the former employees realize exactly what’s going on with Philip after the Wedge Office fight and manage to calm him down, avoiding the whole Crying Children situation. (And then Gebura makes him collect his jaw off the floor by revealing herself as the Red Mist.)

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The one that’s a D&D world concept doesn’t have anything concrete written for it yet. (Don’t read this bit if you might want to play in my campaign at some point!) Instead of your typical Forgotten Realms planar setup, the world at large would be called the Seven Spheres, each of them different in terms of climate, geography, native species and magic, etc. The First Sphere would be the most “generic” one (to our way of thinking) and the main setting of the campaign; it would also be the smallest of the Seven, its primary continent home to a former empire of dragons that spanned most of the Sphere until its mysterious fall a thousand years ago.

Now, since the empire fell, the dragons and their children have slowly been dying out. Best estimates are that there’s only a thousand or two left in the entire First Sphere, with fewer eggs hatched every decade. The player characters enter a world with pretty typical low-level quests to start with, but every so often, especially if they engage with optional story stuff (this would be a more roleplay-focused than combat-focused campaign), they get wind of changes in the air - a failed harvest here, an unusually hot and stormy summer there, a trade war once they start hitting mid-levels.

It mimics real-world climate change in all but cause. As coastal cities struggle to contend with rising seas and, more alarmingly, wizards all over the Sphere start to notice their magic falter and wane, the PCs’ goal becomes getting to the bottom of this. And what’s at the bottom is...your typical Nerd fusion of science with fantasy settings.

The Seven Spheres are not planes of existence in the normal D&D sense, but seven planets in the same solar system, each with its own ancient god far more powerful than any god in any mortal pantheon; the First Sphere is so named because it’s closest to the sun. These planetary gods are incredibly large and incredibly alien, thinking in geologic time and concepts far too broad and slow for most sapient beings to comprehend. A thousand years ago, the fall of the dragon empire was caused by an ill-advised ritual meddling with the god of the First Sphere’s natural process of rebirth, causing said god to die without a replacement.

It’s taken this long for the First Sphere to feel the effects because, again, geologic time - a thousand years is a blink of an eye in this kind of time scale. But now the ancient earth-magic that had kept the Sphere’s climate temperate and its magicians in business is failing. The dragons, as beings of magic intrinsically, have been failing all along. And now it’s up to the PCs, up at level 17-20 if not higher by that point, to figure out how to fix the situation and find a new planetary god for the First Sphere before the whole Sphere burns to death.

#bulletnick #wow this got long #you're right i did want to talk about all of them though

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