GUESS WHO UPDATED!!!!

My dear Zelinkers, chapter 29 of Dear Hero is finally up and I love it so much. I had so much fun writing it, and it was such a struggle to block out character motions through the scene, but I'm sooooo happy with it.

If you're one of my new followers, this is my tp zelink fic, post-canon, where Zelda and Link write letters to each other as they adjust to life beyond twilight and rebuild. They're silly and in love, though it takes so long for them to get there because of the silly part, and all the other traditional obstacles of cross class marriages (not that those politics have a hope of defeating TP Zelda, tbh).

so I’m back?? (for the time being) to my 3+ drabbles a day. I got a lot of writing done last night and it allows me time to work on my longer fics.

almost done with skypiea.... then i can go back to 1 million years of water 7... again....

The knowledge that his hands are a little heavier, his fingers are a little more elongated, and his nails are a little sharper doesn’t strike Hobie necessarily, but more sinks in softly, like blunt canine teeth in flayed flesh. He shuts his eyes; opens them again. Still the same room. Same light. Same hands. Must be a dream. That’s how dreams work, right? Peter’s still breathing beside him. His nose crinkles in his sleep and he shifts, rolling over so he faces the wall with his back exposed to the room. A little hand wraps itself around Hobie’s heart and squeezes. “He loves us,” a voice whispers. It’s the scratching of nails over mouldering wood and the whisper of rats’ tails through layers of dust and the sweet decay of flesh in a hot summer field. If Hobie shuts his eyes and concentrates, he can feel the sharp prickles from the beheaded wheat stems. “I know,” he says. “If anything were to come through that door right now, we’d kill it for him,” the voice continues, as though Hobie hasn’t spoken. Peter’s leg twitches in his sleep. “I know,” Hobie repeats.

sneak preview for the third chapter of my latest fic, crying wolf!

Edit: third chapter has been posted!

Y'ALL I FINALLY GOT A FUCKING DIAGNOSIS FOR THE SHIT I'VE BEEN GOING THROUGH SINCE I WAS 18 LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOO 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Aughhhhhhh, ergh, ouch, and other such exclamations of mild frustration.

Part 3 recreating Radars Bear Tiger

So the apoxie sculpt and safety eyes arrived and unfortunately the eyes are too small and rounded for my purposes so I have different ones on the way

Now I stuffed tin foil in the back of the nose, and that did not work. I tested the apoxie sculpt with a thin layer and it both stuck like I wanted and solidified the front (not pictured)

Did a first pass on the nose

Second pass I did some more detailing on the mouth, nose, and separated the muzzle a bit

I pinned some scrap fabric around the fur to protect it while I sprayed a sealant (Mr Super Clear) to prep for painting

After this will likely be the last and final pictures, I'll paint the muzzle, eyes, stuff and sew the bear closed :)

Officially up to December 24th on the incorrect quotes I've written out to be posted. Progress! Only about 3 more months worth left to write out to post! I got past the hard part for my brain to write out (which was apparently August through November) I guess.

I applied for a new job today 😩

if it has "orders" that vague, would showing obvious enough dismay that Jean doesn't accept his agreement to them be "refusing"? In a situation where he is aware that having those tells caused him to get out of the order

I envision that as part of the ramping-up: the magic, as it grows out of control, starts actively reacting to anything Kaeya does to evade Jean's orders. Enforcing less and less explicit orders over time comes hand-in-hand with shutting down each new way Kaeya finds to work around them.

In fact, the cause-and-effect might even be the other way around! I'm tempted towards the notion that aside from the issue of a Vision's power being way more than the spell needs (and the Pyro-on-Cryo complications), the fact that a Vision responds to the intentions of their bearer is also playing into this. At the time Diluc does this magic he is still reeling from the revelation that Kaeya was deceiving him for all those years, and afraid on some level that he's going to somehow be able to wriggle out of this safeguard by fooling Jean as well. He does not want Kaeya to find any loopholes! And if I go with that, then the spell, turned by the Vision into an active rather than passive restraint, closes said loopholes as soon as Kaeya finds them--each strategy, including that one, has only a limited window before the magic starts triggering on it. And if that's what's happening, then forcing indirect or non-orders is just part of that overgrowth, because 'she didn't make it a direct order' is just another loophole, as far as that nasty mess of Abyssal magic and Vision power and Diluc's mistrust is concerned.

Even if that's not the specific mechanism I go with for why, I do know the magic is shutting down even that kind of passive resistance. The incident that makes Kaeya decide he has to tamper with it involves him being completely unable to give Jean mission-relevant information because it would have changed her strategy and the magic takes that as 'arguing' even though she would want to know. People get hurt because of it (including him)! No one gets killed this time, but... it's worth the risk to him not to put Jean in the position of being unwittingly responsible for someone's death. Because Diluc's coming home someday, and there's "so uh we might have anchored this on you without your knowledge or consent," and then there's "so uh someone died because we anchored this on you without your knowledge or consent," and there's both a moral event horizon here and, on the personal level, only so much forgiveness they can beg.

Hello!! I adore your writing, by the way, both fics from you I've read!! I had a hard time deciding between asking about New Growth and Cryptobotany, but!! In New Growth, what does Wolfwood think of what's going on between Knives and Vash? Like he was technically a part of the Eye and has got to have some complicated feelings on Knives himself, but he's still trying to play mediator himself. He seems pretty chill with Knives, all things considered, but he also yelled at him pretty quick when he set off a panic attack in Vash on accident. So I'm really curious on what Wolfwood is thinking through all of it!

First off:

Thank you SO much! Both Cryptobotany and New Growth have been so much fun to write and I had no idea that they'd get as much traction as they have.

Secondly! Answer under a cut here! I got a little (very) long winded.

OKAY SO!

There are a few reasons that he's so relaxed about Knives hanging around and it really boils down to three things.

First: Knives isn't the only one here that's chilled out since the end of trimax. This version of Wolfwood has had the time he needed to do some inward thinking and more or less come to terms with at least some of the suffering that he'd been subjected to and the actions that he was forced to take to keep himself alive and the orphanage safe. Less of the kind of healing that actual therapy sort of help would do for him and more the result of there no longer being a constant threat and end goal to keep his mind too busy to stop and go 'Man. Was that fucked or what?' But the peace made him have to address it on his own. (Mostly on his own. Ofc he had support from Vash, it would've been impossible for him to miss.) He was able to accept what had happened and that very little of it, if any, had been his own fault. None of that is to say that he no longer feels any guilt over what had happened or that it doesn't still keep him up at night from time to time, but he has healed from it enough that he no longer has nightmares about leaving bloody hand prints on anyone and anything he touches.

All of that is to say that he recognizes Knives and his influence and responsibility for the things that the Eye did, either directly or in a more roundabout way, but at the same time the Eye is gone, LivRaz is free from their influence, the kids in the orphanage are safe from the possibility of having to go through the same things that he did, and Chapel is dead. All that's left of it is Knives and, well... The first thing he saw when he tracked Knives down was this man that was so clearly exhausted and beaten down. There was no fight left in him at all, and it almost reminded him of when he'd finally found Vash hiding out in a little town and calling himself Eriks. Except Knives didn't even have that little town or a Sheryl or a Lina to lean on or give himself some semblance of purpose.

So he went looking for Knives he'd only seen a few times before. The Knives he'd once pointed a gun at and feared too much to pull the trigger. He knew that this Knives was de-powered and defeated, but he still wasn't prepared for the sad wet beast born in a cardboard box all alone version that he found. He didn't even know that was possible… and kicking that when he was already down would have felt shitty to say the least. It was a version that was a lot harder to dredge up any fear for.

Second: This one is simpler. He knows that despite everything that has been done to him that Vash still has some deep rooted desire to have his entire family back, even if that isn't possible for one reason (dead) or another (tree-d and disappeared). He understands Vash's complicated feelings on it to some degree from his own experiences with the orphanage after he left and for the extended period of time where he thought he would never be able to go home. Their situations weren't the same, but they were just close enough for him to empathize with Vash. But then there Knives is all of a sudden, and even if it isn't going to fit in with or match up to the sort of impossible, idealized, shameful daydreams that Vash has to have from time to time, it's suddenly possible for there to be some kind of reconcilliation and even if they try and fail then there's more closure there than there would be if Knives was chased off and Vash was left to wonder what-if for the rest of his life. So even if he still does rightfully hate Knives... He hates the idea of Vash suffering another regret and having to cope with another source of misplaced guilt more.

And he wasn't lying when he told Knives that he wanted the twins to have more family and more support in their lives. Yeah, they've got him and Vash, and they've got Meryl and Milly and LivRaz. They've got the help of Melanie and they've visited the kids in the orphanage before, and they even have a few of the townsfolk, but Knives would be an important addition for the fact that he is a plant, and the twins are going to need some sort of guidance and Vash can only offer so much of that himself. Especially as he is now without powers and after a lifetime of trying to distance himself from what he was and after receiving no guidance of his own. They each had to figure out everything as they grew and between the both of them then the girls might not have to struggle as much as they did.

Third: this is the most important point. In New Growth Wolfwood knows about Tesla. I'll actually be getting more into this and why Vash chose to actually share something THAT personal later on because the idea of a short Wolfwood focused prequel planted itself into my head recently and I'm going to be doing something about that as soon as New Growth is finished. But anyway! Wolfwood knows about Tesla, and he knows about how both Knives and Vash reacted to their discovery of her. He knows why Knives made the choices he did, and he understands why he made them. Knowing that all of his actions came from fear and exactly what caused it gave him everything he needed to know to feel safe in believing it when Knives says that he's done.

So he is more comfortable with Knives around than he would have been without that knowledge, without needing him around for the girls' sake, and if Vash didn't want anything to do with him, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't still hold any uncertainty about having him in their home. He's still worried about the very real possibility of the whole thing falling apart and going wrong. Accidents still happen, and the panic attack that Knives triggered is a perfect example of that.

Even if the mistake that triggered that whole thing was pretty much harmless, the picture it made was still startling enough that it set off some of those fears. His reaction wasn't warranted but it wasn't exactly unwarranted at the same time. Does he really think that Knives is a danger/is going to do something to hurt anyone there? No. But the anxiety is there and he's spent the whole time feeling like he's juggling the temperaments and the potential for violence of two pretty much wild animals, even if those wild animals are busy playing house.

So in short... outwardly he's pretty calm, and he's having a good time pretending that he's all chilled out and in total control of the situation (and he kind of is, Vash and Knives are struggling but he's really doing the best he can for them and it's working) but internally he's shaking like a nervous chihuahua.

whoever decided that a mental illness should have negative effects needs to DIE.

:-)

Hi! Just wanted to say that I absolutely love your Ebb and Flow cover

first of all, thank you!

second of all, i just finished fully buttoning the rough mix and:

very funny how desperate i am for art theory & art history in our course like I don't have a history of not being able to a) read assigned reading and b) unable to write an essay without feeling like im dying.

Davey: I don’t have any friends :(

Davey: wait… Jack has friends…

Davey: if I get close with Jack I can just steal his friends

Davey: be gay do crime 🏳️‍🌈