⚠️⚠️WARNING⚠️⚠️
This post contains graphic descriptions of violence and gore. If it isn't your thing, or if it's triggering, please mute the tag "apocalyptic comic idea" all of these posts tagged with this will contain violence and gore.
This post will also contain child death, graphic descriptions of injury, social isolation, minor body horror, and burning people. Everything will be surrounded by danger triangles if you wish to still read this post.
I swear in everything, and this post is no exception. I do not and will not say slurs.
You have been warned
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Meet the twins Magnus and Ember! They are highschool freshmen and are ready to kick ass!
They live in an okay neighborhood. It's near a hospital since their mom is always sick. The smog of the city isn't good for a woman with shitty lungs, now is it? Their dad is absent, sending money to help pay for their mom's medical bills, but he isn't in the teens' lives at all.
Speaking of medical bills, because this is a dystopia and I've mentioned the questionable doctors on Dim's posts, their little family is barely scraping by. The twins have a long commute to their school since it's closer to the center of the city. It's cheaper after all and they barely have enough to keep their apparetment as it is.
So every day, the twins walk a mile to the bus stop, ride it for 29 miles (the fare jumps in price once you hit 30 miles. Thanks, Dystopia City) before walking the last 30 minutes to their school. I mentioned that it is in the middle of the city right? It's gonna be so freaky having all of the students wearing gas masks while attending class. (I'm gonna render the shit out of it once I get to it. It's gonna be awesome)
Anyway, today's journey was different than usual. As Ember was playing with the lighter she stole borrowed from the creep of a gym teacher a tall woman shot past them freaking out about something.
Oh! Lore time!
So I've been thinking it over, you know how height is kinda a big thing right now? Like people hating or short dudes and tall women? What if I just multiplied that by 20?
What I mean, is that this is a futuristic world and I think it would be cool worldbuilding if people got surgery to change their height and fit the "ideal" body type. Like women cutting of inches or even feet of their height via science that works like magic and dudes added inches and feet to their height on the otherside of this freaky little coin.
Dim is roughly 6ft (because I love me a tall woman.) This is not a commonly seen height anymore since only those who can't afford it are ever their natural height. So she is crazy tall to the teens (a bit of a role model in the eye of Ember who's been told she's ugly because she's taller than the dudes their age at school.) The only other tall woman they've ever seen is their neighbor [REDACTED] who is part of the military and can get court marshaled if she ever got the shortening surgery because it makes the patient extremely disoriented because they suddenly shrunk.
So the twins are obviously gobsmacked to see this giant lady with white hair rush past them.
"The fuck was that?"
"A distraction. C'mon we're gonna miss our bus."
"Oh shit!"
They make it to school and get some classes done before everything goes to shit. It starts with their teacher pausing in her lesson while looking at her book. Then something fast flies out at attaches itself to her face. It breaks her mask and ⚠️⚠️ (gore warning skip to next danger triangles to avoid) forces itself through the broken glass and into her eye.
She screams and goes down. The kids start scream because of course they do. Suddenly the class is filled with tiny little creatures flying out of the books at attacking people. (I'm tired so this isn't gonna be super descriptive.)
Everyone is panicking a few of their friends go down and stop moving. The twins are fighting for their lives but everytime they squash one of the creatures it just pops back up like a tiny deranged zombie pixie.
The class begins to fill with red, there is broken glass everywhere from the monster breaking the students' masks. Ember steps on a few shards, the glass cutting through her old shoes like butter. She swears clutching her wounded foot. ⚠️⚠️She looks up in time to see another batch of creatures pop out of a book laying open on a desk.
She got a very good idea.
Ember grabs the closest book, and pulls out a lighter from her pocket. A few of the pixies stop staring at her.
She smiles, and lights the book on fire.
With that the pixies scream and turn into ash.
The room goes quiet for a second. The two. Then the pixies rush to Ember. She runs around the room lighting as many of the books on fire, her classmates are running from the room into the hall, a place empty of monsters (at the moment) Magnus waits at the door for his sister.
⚠️⚠️(gore warning number 2 electric boogaloo. This one has body horror focused on the eyes. Skip to the next danger triangles) The pixies have broken through her mask at this point. There is glass in her eyes and it's starting to get hard to breathe. She can feel the mask dying as the room fills with smoke. The pixies are dying too. She grabs the last book setting it aflame, but just as she does pixies charge her eyes.
Their tiny hands scratch and claw. Digging deep into her sclera. An arm reaches into her pupil destroying the delicate nerves, sending waves of pain down her face. Her tears are turning red. The world has gone dark.⚠️⚠️
She stumbles forward into her brother's arms. Everything hurts and she can't see a thing. She's pretty sure he crying; pretty sure she's crying too.
Their classmates rush as a group to the next room down, ducking in when they hear shouts from the stairs.
The room is deathly quiet. Before small groups split off and talk in quiet tones.
Soon the quiet tones turned to silence filled with only quiet groans of pain and the sound of the door clicking closed. Everyone able left. Only the twins and the wounded remained.
"Hey Em. There's a screen in front of you." Magnus holds his sister tightly, there is so much blood running down her face.
"Yeah? What does it say?" She pulls them both to the ground, her head is starting to feel light.
"Uh. 'Congratulations, player! You have completed the tutorial!' What? 'Please wait while we develop your character based on your actions' it has a smiley face after actions. What the fuck is this?"
"You sure you're not hallucinating Mag? Pretty sure that should be me, with the blood loss and all." Fuck she feels really faint now. What the hell.
"I don't know. There was more to it but it just vanished before I could read it."
"Em?"
"What?"
"Holy fuck I thought you were dead."
"Too bad, you're not getting rid of me that easy."
"Hilarious. You still got that lighter on you?"
"Yeah." She held up her hand, arm shaking as if she was holding up the sky and not just a tiny lighter.
"I'm gonna see if I can cauerize some of the wounds here. Then we can head out after the rest of the class maybe."
"Dude what?"
"There isn't any sort of first aid kit in here Em. I need to do something, they're dying. You're dying."
"I'm not dying."
"And neither are they if I can help it. It would be better if we had some silver nitrate, but Im gonna have to do something. The weird fairy things were small, and so are the wounds. There's just a lot of them."
"I ain't stopping you, just don't be upset of the fire makes it worse."
So Magnus went around the room trying to cauterize wounds if he could, bandage the ones he couldn't with whatever he could. It would all have to be checked over by a professional eventually, but at least it kept the blood in?
[Congratulations, player! You have completed the tutorial! Please wait while we develop your character based on your actions :) NOTE: YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO ATTACKS WHILE YOU WAIT. ANY ACTIONS AFTER THIS MESSAGE WILL NOT COUNT TOWARDS YOUR CHARACTER. ]
"Huh."
"What?"
"I just got the blue screen."
"Weir-" before she could finish the word, she started screaming. It raked at Magnus's ears, clawing at his heart.
"Em! Em please!"
⚠️⚠️(body horror time! Skip to the next danger triangles.)He could only watch in horror as his sister writhed in pain. Chunks of metal forcing their way through her skin coated in red droplets that fell from the surface like water sliding off of oil. She screamed as it pushed against her clothes, crying as two new eyes formed in her sockets. Attaching wires to nerves forcing the last of her original eyes out of the sockets. ⚠️⚠️
Magnus threw up.
(For those that want to know Ember is a cyborg mage.)
"Mag?"
"Maggie?"
Magnus looked up from his spot on the floor to see her. Her uniform was replaced by a set of robes falling of her shoulders. (I'll draw it eventually.)
"Em?"
"Yeah."
"Holy fuck. You okay?"
"I... it doesn't hurt anymore. You got a screen too right?"
"Yeah."
"Do you want my hand when it does... this to you?"
"Please."
[Congratulations on surviving after the tutorial! All creatures you have destroyed will now be turned into skill points! NOTE: SKILL POINTS WILL ONLY BE ACCESSIBLE IN SHELTERS AND NEUTRAL ZONES. Your character has been decided! Welcome to the game, Cyborg Cleric, Magnus!]
Okay I ain't describing that again. Kinda the same thing except where the metal on the face is placed.
Time to talk about some fun stuff!
Why cyborg? Well, everytime someone uses some sort of technology to take down monsters it makes the game consider them a cyborg. It will also make their robo parts more based on what they used. In the pic it shows that Ember's fire magic is more controlled than normal fire magic because she used a lighter.
Now. Clerics. So you know by now that you can either, kill a monster, or kill a person to become a player. But you can also help people! It's a very rare class, because let's be honest people are probably more worried about killing the thing that's hurting their friends before helping them.
The twins are some of my favorites in this comic. I love them so much.
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Okay, how did I just now realize that I never posted this amazing commission from @quicksillver?
I asked for a scene from Freedom's Reach, not realizing in my non-artist head that the scene I chose would be a technical *nightmare* what with mirrors being little bastards and all, but Misha came through like an absolute CHAMP. Definitely stop by their blog and give them all the love!
“Penny for your thoughts?” Bucky says. Clint looks up, startled, to find Bucky standing in front of him, collar up and a tie looped around his neck.
Clint clears his throat a little, sure that he must be blushing. There’s a standing mirror in the corner and Clint guides Bucky over to it, crowding in behind him to knot the tie. “I’ll tell you about them later,” he growls, deep and low into Bucky’s ear, just to make him shiver. “Or else we’ll never get there in time.”
Clint takes note of how Bucky’s eyes in the mirror go dark and hot, and he presses a little closer than necessary, letting Bucky feel every inch of him along his back. He reaches out a hand and snags Bucky’s jacket where it’s waiting on the back of a chair, watching in the mirror as he helps Bucky into it and smooths his palms down the front, the gold ring on his left hand gleaming in the lamplight. The left arm of Bucky’s jacket is pinned up neatly, the dark blue wool skimming Bucky’s lean frame and making his eyes glow an icy blue.
“You look beautiful,” Clint can’t help but murmur.
Bucky turns, hand sliding inside Clint’s jacket to cradle his ribs through the thin linen of his shirt, his own ring cool and hard in contrast to the warm press of his fingers. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” he says, cutting off Clint’s retort with a hungry kiss.
By the time they tear themselves apart they are running a bit late, and have to take a few more moments to straighten up their clothes anew. Clint’s skin is still buzzing as he and Bucky descend the grand staircase to the main lobby, hand-in-hand. Bucky gives Clint’s fingers a squeeze and Clint squeezes back, their rings clinking together as they head toward the dining room.
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