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intheticklecloset · 4 months

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These Distracted Days (Dr. Stone)

Summary: When Senku accidentally hurts Gen while trying to escape being tickled, he takes an extra minute to make sure he's all right and gets...well, a tad distracted.

A/N: I wrote this one almost a year ago and have had it waiting in the wings for just the right moment. I've been in a Sengen mood lately, so here you go! Enjoy!

Word Count: 1436

Warning: Some suggestive content, but still SFW

~~~

Senku was seriously beginning to wonder if he’d ever be safe again.

“Gah! Mentalist, wait – cuhuhuhut it out! Gen!” the scientist found himself giggling for the millionth time, trying to curl up protectively even as Gen knelt over him, fingers in his belly. He left his work for one second…!

Gen beamed at him with that devil-may-care smile that always made Senku’s heart do weird flips in his chest. “Time for your tickle time out, Senku~”

“Thahahat’s not even a thihihing! Seheheriously, mentalist, stohohop – I hahahave to gohoho!”

“Go where?”

Senku’s face flushed at how silly he knew he was about to sound, but well…desperate times.

“I hahahahave to peehehehehehee! Let me uhuhuhup!”

Instead of being released like he’d hoped – and honestly, rather expected – Gen’s eyes lit up instead.

Oh, no.

“Aww~ I’ve never made you laugh that hard before! I wonder if all it takes is a little tickle riiiight here…”

Gen pinched that spot at the base of Senku’s sides right above his hips that he’d recently discovered, giggling along with the scientist as he arched his back and squirmed in the grass, lips pulled into a helpless smile despite himself. The mentalist was so busy trying to get the younger man to snort that he didn’t realize the imminent danger he was in until it was too late.

“Mehehehehentalist!” Senku cackled as Gen pinched a particularly sensitive bundle of nerves. He tossed his head back and brought his knee up, catching the mentalist in…well…a rather unfortunate place.

Gen groaned, clutched his stomach, and rolled off of Senku in one fluid motion, all playful tickling coming to an abrupt halt. Despite his mildly hazy state, the scientist was fully aware of what he’d done, and he sat upright quickly, grasping Gen’s shoulder.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean…I just reacted, and…” He cursed under his breath when shifting his weight reminded him of his original problem. He had to go. Like, now. He’d waited until the last minute as it was. “I’ll be right back, I swear – don’t you dare move, mentalist!”

A minute later Senku rushed back, business done and mind refocused on the next problem to solve.

Gen was sitting up now, taking deep breaths, shooting a smirk at the scientist when he knelt down beside him, hand on his shoulder. “I guess you did try to warn me, huh?”

“The last thing I meant to do was…that.” Senku coughed. “Can you stand? Let’s get you back home.”

“I’m fine, Senku, really,” Gen replied, though he accepted the offer of help and got to his feet, allowing his friend to steer him toward the tent they shared with Chrome and now Ryusui.

Senku tsked. “Just let me make sure, okay? I don’t want to lose our prized mentalist; we need you now more than ever.”

Gen hid his face behind his longer strand of hair before he gave his blush away. “Aww, I’m touched by your concern~”

Ten minutes later, Gen was sitting cross-legged on his bedroll, empty bowl of water nearby, and Senku still fussing like a mother hen. It was hilarious, really, but the mentalist knew better than to say anything.

“I am sorry, Gen,” the scientist said again. “At the risk of putting myself back into your warpath, is there anything else I can do to help?”

The mentalist smirked, and for a moment Senku regretted asking when the older man uncrossed his legs and leaned back on his bedroll with a suggestive glint in his eye, propped up on his elbows. “I can think of a couple of things you can do if you really want to pay me back, dear Senku.”

There was a brief silence. Gen hid his racing heart with excellence, not daring to even hint at the hope he felt right now, miniscule as it was. Senku’s mouth pulled down in a slight frown, but then his features smoothed out and his trademark chuckle escaped his lips as he got to his knees and crawled forward.

“Well, if you insist…” Senku murmured, grasping Gen’s knees and pushing them aside so he could slot in between them, “…I’d be happy to show you how to tickle someone properly.”

Gen didn’t even have time to process the words before fingers were drilling into his ribs and belly, making him squeal and fall back with peals of laughter, legs flailing but catching nothing but air.

“You’ll notice I’ve positioned myself so that I’m unable to be kicked ‘where the sun don’t shine,’ as they say. Rookie mistake on your part, really. I expected better from you.”

“Sehehehehehenku!”

“Are you taking notes, mentalist?”

This wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind, but Gen couldn’t complain. He nodded through his frantic giggles, trying to shimmy away. “Yehehehehes, teheheheheacher!”

“Being smart with me, eh? All right, how about we move on to the next section?” Senku grinned, his playfulness seeping through every word as he snatched up Gen’s arms and pinned his wrists above his head, still scribbling at his ribs.

“Ah! S-Sehehehehenku!”

“The next obvious thing you missed is to get their arms out of the way so they can’t defend themselves. You usually do that. It must be first on your list of things you do when you tickle me.” Senku quirked a brow, mock disappointed. “I wonder why you skipped it today?”

Gen tried to stick his tongue out defiantly, but it was hard when he was smiling so big. “The dahahahahay is yohohohoung!”

The scientist grinned, and a wicked gleam came over his eyes that both excited Gen and made him nervous at the same time, his giggling turning more panicky without his realizing it.

“Finally,” Senku said, his voice lower now, fingers walking up his ribs one by one in a slow, torturous crawl, “go for the kill. Completely immobilize them by going for their weakest spot. You were just shy of doing this one.”

“S-Sehehehenku,” Gen whined, trying to squirm away and then – failing that – wrapping his legs around Senku’s waist from behind and pulling him closer so that their foreheads were pressed together. Again, not what he’d had in mind, but…

Senku’s fingers had stopped tickling now, his entire body going rigid in surprise. “What…?”

“You talk too much,” Gen whispered, shivering at Senku’s breath on his lips.

“I talk too much? Have you looked in a mirror lately? Then again, Ryusui could give you a run for your money now that he’s joined up—”

“You’re driving me insane, Senku.” Gen bit his lip, shifted his hips, eyes flicking down and then up to meet the scientist’s crimson irises.

Senku swallowed, but he didn’t move, didn’t release Gen’s wrists. “Oh.”

“Oh?”

“I didn’t…I didn’t know I could do that to you.” Senku’s voice was a murmur now, his own gaze flitting down just slightly. “You’ve been making me crazy forever, mentalist.”

Gen’s heart sank a little. “I don’t mean in the annoying way—”

“I know what you mean.” Senku closed the distance between them, pressing their lips together in a gentle, searching caress that made Gen’s breath catch.

Only then did Senku release his hands, propping himself up above the older man with his arms, shaking from the effort even as the mentalist wove his fingers through his hair and pulled him the rest of the way down so their bodies could fit together like they were always meant to do so.

Senku had to pull back first, gasping a little, eyes clouded over with something Gen had never seen in them before. Something he liked to see very much. He giggled.

“Never thought you’d be the one to top, Senku-chan~”

“Thought about this, have you?”

“Only since forever.”

Senku groaned low in his throat and kissed him again.

Later, after they were both spent and had entirely forgotten what they’d planned to do with their days, the mentalist snuggled into his scientist’s chest and murmured, “I’m so sleepy now.”

“Then go to bed,” Senku answered, his usual dry, logical side back in place after being thoroughly scrambled and rearranged to adjust to this new turn his relationship with Gen had taken.

“Noooo.” Gen snuggled even closer, arms and legs wrapped around him like a koala. “You’re so warm. I want to stay like this forever.”

Senku took a shuddering breath, heart skipping a beat at the openly affectionate tone. He brought one hand up to pat the back of Gen’s head, saying nothing more, basking in the moment while it lasted.

The mentalist hummed contentedly, also unwilling to break the silence any further for once.

He’d never been happier in his life.

#fanfiction #tickle fic #dr stone #dcst #asagiri gen #ishigami senku #sengen #playful #fluff #cute #boyfriends #lovers #tickling #ticklish #tickle

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tutyayilmazz · 8 months

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The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.

The American visitor to Rome arrives with certain preconceptions that feel like stereotypes but turn out to be basically accurate. There really are mopeds flying around everywhere, and traffic seems governed by the principle that anyone can be replaced. Breakfast is coffee and cigarettes. Despite these orthopedic and nutritional hazards, everyone is better looking — not literally everyone, of course, but statistically, as if whatever selective forces that emerge from urban density have had an extra hundred generations or so to work. And they really do talk like that, an emphatic mix of vowels, gestures and car horns known as “Italian.” To be scolded in this language by a driver who wants to park in the crosswalk is to realize that some popular ideas are actually true. Also, it is hot.

The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On that Tuesday in July the temperature hit 107 degrees. The Tiber looked thick, rippled in places and still in others, as if it were reducing. By Thursday morning the band’s vast management team was officially concerned that the night’s sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.

There was no opening act, possibly because no rock band operating at this level is within 10 years of Måneskin’s age. The guitarist Thomas Raggi played the riff to “Don’t Wanna Sleep,” the lights came up and 60,000 Italians screamed. Damiano David — the band’s singer and, at age 24, its oldest member — charged out in black flared trousers and a mesh top that bisected his torso diagonally, his heavy brow and hypersymmetrical features making him look like some futuristic nomad who hunted the fishnet mammoth. Victoria De Angelis, the bassist, wore a minidress made from strips of leather or possibly bungee cords. Raggi wore nonporous pants and a black button-down he quickly discarded, while Ethan Torchio drummed in a vest with no shirt underneath, his hair flying. For the next several minutes of alternately disciplined and frenzied noise, they sounded as if Motley Crüe had been cryogenically frozen, then revived in 2010 with Rob Thomas on vocals.

That hypothetical will appeal to some while repelling others, and which category you fall into is, with all due respect, not my business here. Rolling Stone, for its part, said that Måneskin “only manage to confirm how hard rock & roll has to work these days to be noticed,” and a viral Pitchfork review called their most recent album “absolutely terrible at every conceivable level.” But this kind of thumbs up/thumbs down criticism is pretty much vestigial now that music is free. If you want to know whether you like Måneskin — the name is Danish and pronounced MOAN-eh-skin — you can fire up the internet and add to the more than nine billion streams Sony Music claims the band has accumulated across Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. As for whether Måneskin is good, de gustibus non est disputandum, as previous Italians once said: In matters of taste, there can be no arguments.

You should know, though, that even though their music has been heard most often through phone and laptop speakers, Måneskin sounds better on a soccer field. That is what tens of thousands of fans came to the Stadio Olimpico on an eyelid-scorching Thursday to experience: the culturally-if-not-personally-familiar commodity of a stadium rock show, delivered by the unprecedented phenomenon of a stadium-level Italian rock band. The pyro — 20-foot jets of swivel-articulated flame that you could feel all the way up in the mezzanine — kicked in on “Gasoline,” a song Måneskin wrote to protest Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. From a thrust platform in the center of the field, David poured his full emotive powers into the pre-chorus: “Standing alone on that hill/using your fuel to kill/we won’t take it standing still/watch us dance.”

The effect these words will have on President Putin is unknown. They capture something, though, about rock ’n’ roll, which has established certain conventions over the last seven decades. One of those conventions is an atmosphere of rebellion. It doesn’t have to be real — you probably don’t even want it to be — but neither can it seem too contrived, because the defining constraint of rock as a genre is that you have to feel it. The successful rock song creates in listeners the sensation of defying consensus, even if they are right in step with it.

The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans’ taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way my generation (I’m 46) experienced jazz. The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting this month, Måneskin will take this business on a multivenue tour of the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — whose first stop is Madison Square Garden.

“I think the genre thing is like ... ” Torchio said to me backstage in Rome, making a gesture that conveyed translingual complexity. “We can do a metaphor: If you eat fish, meat and peanuts every day, like for years, and then you discover potatoes one day, you’ll be like: ‘Wow, potatoes! I like potatoes; potatoes are great.’ But potatoes have been there the whole time.” Rock was the potato in this metaphor, and he seemed to be saying that even though many people were just now discovering that they liked it, it had actually been around for a long time. It was a revealing analogy: The implication was that rock, like the potato, is here to stay; but what if rock is, like the potato in our age of abundance, comparatively bland and no longer anyone’s favorite?

Which rock song came first is a topic of disagreement, but one strong candidate is “Rocket 88,” recorded by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythym band in 1951. It’s about a car and, in its final verse, about drinking in the car. These themes capture the context in which rock ’n’ roll emerged: a period when household incomes, availability of consumer goods and the share of Americans experiencing adolescence all increased simultaneously.

Although and possibly because rock started as Black music, it found a gigantic audience of white teenagers during the so-called British Invasion of the mid-1960s (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who), which made it the dominant form of pop music for the next two decades. The stadium/progressive era (Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner) that now constitutes the bulk of classic-rock radio gave way, eventually, to punk (the Ramones, Patti Smith, Minor Threat) and then glam metal: Twisted Sister, Guns N’ Roses and various other hair-intensive bands that were obliterated by the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in 1991. This shift can be understood as the ultimate triumph of punk, both in its return to emotive content expressed through simpler arrangements and in its professed hostility toward the music industry itself. After 1991, suspicion of anything resembling pop became a mark of seriousness among both rock critics and fans.

It is probably not a coincidence that this period is also when rock’s cultural hegemony began to wane. As the ’90s progressed, larger and again whiter audiences embraced hip-hop, and the last song classified as “rock” to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 was Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” in 2001. The run of bands that became popular during the ’00s — the Strokes, the Killers, Kings of Leon — constituted rock’s last great commercial gasp, but none of their singles charted higher than No. 4. Let us say, then, that the era of rock as pop music lasted from 1951 to 2011. That’s a three-generation run, if you take seriously rock’s advice to get drunk and have sex in the car and therefore produce children at around age 20. Baby boomers were the generation that made rock a zillion-dollar industry; Gen X saved it from that industry with punk and indie, and millennials closed it all out playing Guitar Hero.

The members of Måneskin are between the ages of 22 and 24, situating them firmly within the cadre of people who understand rock in the past tense. De Angelis, the bassist, and Raggi, the guitarist, formed the band when they were both attending a music-oriented middle school; David was a friend of friends, while Torchio was the only person who responded to their Facebook ad seeking a drummer. There are few entry-level rock venues in Rome, so they started by busking on the streets. In 2017, they entered the cattle-call audition for the Italian version of “The X Factor.” They eventually finished as runners-up to the balladeer Lorenzo Licitra, and an EP of songs they performed on the show was released by Sony Music and went triple platinum.

In 2021, Måneskin won the Sanremo Music Festival, earning the right to represent Italy with their song “Zitti e Buoni” (whose title roughly translates to “shut up and behave”) in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. This program is not widely viewed in the United States, but it is a gigantic deal in Europe, and Måneskin won. Not long after, they began to appear on international singles charts, and “I Wanna Be Your Slave” broke the British Top 10. A European tour followed, as well as U.S. appearances at festivals and historic venues.

This ascent to stardom was not unmarred by controversy. The Eurovison live broadcast caught David bending over a table offstage, and members of the media accused him of snorting cocaine. David insisted he was innocent and took a drug test, which he passed, but Måneskin and their management still seem indignant about the whole affair. It’s exactly this kind of incongruous detail — this damaging rumor that a rock star did cocaine — that highlights how the Italian music-consuming public differs from the American one. Many elements of Måneskin’s presentation, like the cross-dressing and the occasional male-on-male kiss, are genuinely upsetting to older Italians, even as they seem familiar or even hackneyed to audiences in the United States.

“They see a band of young, good-looking guys that are dressing up too much, and then it’s not pure rock ’n’ roll, because you’re not in a garage, looking ugly,” De Angelis says. “The more conservative side, they’re shocked because of how we dress or move onstage, or the boys wear makeup.”

She and her bandmates are caught between two demographics: the relatively conservative European audience that made them famous and the more tolerant if not downright desensitized American audience that they must impress to keep the ride moving. And they do have to keep it moving, because — like many rock stars before them — most of the band dropped out of high school to do this. At one point, Raggi told me that he had sat in on some classes at a university, “Just to try to understand, ‘What is that?’”

One question that emerged early in my discussions with Måneskin’s friendly and professional management team was whether I was going to say that their music was bad. This concern seemed related to the aforementioned viral Pitchfork review, in which the editor Jeremy Larson wrote that their new album, “RUSH!” sounds “like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150” and “seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom” en route to a score of 2.0 (out of 10). While the members of Måneskin seemed to take this review philosophically, their press liaisons were concerned that I was coming to Italy to have a similar type of fun.

Here I should disclose that Larson edited an essay I wrote for Pitchfork about the Talking Heads album “Remain in Light” (score: 10.0) and that I think of myself as his friend. Possibly because of these biases, I read his review as reflecting his deeply held and, among rock fans, widely shared need to feel the music, something that the many pop/commercial elements of “RUSH!” (e.g. familiar song structures, lyrics that seem to have emerged from a collaboration between Google Translate and Nikki Sixx, compulsive use of multiband compression) left him unable to do.

This perspective reflects the post-’90s rock consensus (PNRC) that anything that sounds too much like a mass-market product is no good. The PNRC is premised on the idea that rock is not just a structure of song but also a structure of relationship between the band and society. From rock’s earliest days as Black music, the real or perceived opposition between rocker and society has been central to its appeal; this adversarial relationship animated the youth and counterculture eras of the ’60s and then, when the economic dominance of mass-market rock made it impossible to believe in, provoked the revitalizing backlash of punk. Even major labels felt obliged to play into this paradoxical worldview, e.g. that period after Nirvana when the most popular genre of music was called “alternative.” Måneskin, however, are defined by their isolation from the PNRC. They play rock music, but operate according to the logic of pop.

In Milan, where Måneskin would finish their Italian minitour, I had lunch with the band, as well as two of their managers, Marica Casalinuovo and Fabrizio Ferraguzzo. Casalinuovo had been an executive producer working on “The X Factor,” and Ferraguzzo was its musical director; around the time that Måneskin broke through, Casalinuovo and Ferraguzzo left the show and began working with the stars it had made. We were at the in-house restaurant of Moysa, the combination recording studio, soundstage, rehearsal space, offices, party venue and “creative playground” that Ferraguzzo opened two months earlier. After clarifying that he was in no way criticizing major record labels and the many vendors they engaged to record, promote and distribute albums, he laid out his vision for Moysa, a place where all those functions were performed by a single corporate entity — basically describing the concept of vertical integration.

Ferraguzzo oversaw the recording of “RUSH!” along with a group of producers that included Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker best known for his work with Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. At Moysa, Ferraguzzo played for me Måneskin’s then-unreleased new single, “Honey (Are U Coming?)” which features many of the band’s signature moves — guitar and bass playing the same melodic phrases at the same time, unswung boogie-type rhythm of the post-Strokes style — but also has David singing in a higher register than usual. I listened to it first on studio monitors and then through the speaker of Ferraguzzo’s phone, and it sounded clean and well produced both times, as if a team of industry veterans with unlimited access to espresso had come together to perfect it.

“There’s hundreds of people working and talking about you and giving opinions,” De Angelis said at lunch. “So if you start to get in this loop of wanting to know and control and being anxious about it, it really ruins everything.” Here lies the conflict between what the PNRC wants from a band — resistance to outside influences, contempt for commerce, authenticity as measured in doing everything themselves — and what any sane 23-year-old would want, which is to have someone with an M.B.A. make all the decisions so she can concentrate on playing bass.

The other way Måneskin is isolated from the PNRC is geographic. Over the course of lunch, it became clear that they had encyclopedic knowledge of certain eras in American rock history but were only dimly aware of others. Raggi, for instance, loves Motley Crüe and has an album-by-album command of the Los Angeles hair-metal band Skid Row, which he and his bandmates seemed to understand were supposed to be guilty pleasures. But none of them had ever heard of Fugazi, the post-hardcore band whose hatred of major labels, refusal to sell merchandise and commitment to keeping ticket prices as low as possible set the standard for a generation of American rock snobs. In general, Måneskin’s timeline of influences seems to break off around 1990, when the rock most respected by Anglophone critics was produced by independent labels that did not have strong overseas distribution. It picks up again with Franz Ferdinand and the “emo” era of mainstream pop rock. This retrospect leaves them unaware of the indie/punk/D.I.Y. period that was probably most important in forming the PNRC.

The question is whether that consensus still matters. While snobs like Larson and me are overrepresented in journalism, we never constituted a majority of rock fans. That’s the whole point of being a snob. And snobbery is obsolete anyway; digital distribution ended the correlation between how obscure your favorite band was and how much effort you put into listening to them. The longevity of rock ’n’ roll as a genre, meanwhile, has solidified a core audience that is now between the ages of 40 and 80, rendering the fan-versus-society dimension of the PNRC impossible to believe. And the economics of the industry — in which streaming has reduced the profit margin on recorded music, and the closure of small venues has made stadiums and big auditoriums the only reliable way to make money on tour — have decimated the indie model. All these forces have converged to make rock, for the first time in its history, merely a way of writing songs instead of a way of life.

Yet rock as a cluster of signifiers retains its power around the world. In the same way everyone knows what a castle is and what it signifies, even though actual castles are no longer a meaningful force in our lives, rock remains a shared language of cultural expression even though it is no longer determining our friendships, turning children against their parents, yelling truth at power, et cetera. Also like a castle, a lot of people will pay good money to see a preserved historical example of rock or even a convincing replica of it, especially in Europe.

In Milan, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees, and Måneskin’s show at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza — commonly known as San Siro, the largest stadium in Italy, sold out that night at 60,000 — was threatened by thunderstorms instead of record-breaking heat. Fans remained undaunted: Many camped in the parking lot the night before in order to be among the first to enter the stadium. One of them was Tamara, an American who reported her age as 60½ and said she had skipped a reservation to see da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in order to stay in line. “When you get to knocking on the door, you kind of want to do what you want,” she said.

The threat of rain was made good at pretty much the exact moment the show began. The sea of black T-shirts on the pitch became a field of multicolored ponchos, and raindrops were bouncing visibly off the surface of the stage. David lost his footing near the end of “I Wanna Be Your Slave,” briefly rolling to his back, while De Angelis — who is very good at making lips-parted-in-ecstasy-type rock faces — played with her eyes turned upward to the flashing sky, like a martyr.

The rain stopped in time for “Kool Kids,” a punk-inspired song in which David affects a Cockney accent to sing about the vexed cultural position of rock ’n’ roll: “Cool kids, they do not like rock/they only listen to trap and pop.” These are probably the Måneskin lyrics most quoted by music journalists, although they should probably be taken with a grain of salt, considering that the song also contains lyrics like “I like doin’ things I love, yeah” and “Cool kids, they do not vomit.”

“Kool Kids” was the last song before the encore, and each night a few dozen good-looking 20-somethings were released onto the stage to dance and then, as the band walked off, to make we’re-not-worthy bows around Raggi’s abandoned guitar. The whole thing looked at least semichoreographed, but management assured me that the Kool Kids were not professional dancers — just enthusiastic fans who had been asked if they wanted to be part of the show. I kept trying to meet the person in charge of wrangling these Kool Kids, and there kept being new reasons that was not possible.

The regular kids, on the other hand, were available and friendly throughout. In Rome, Dorca and Sara, two young members of a Måneskin fan club, saw my notebook and shot right over to tell me they loved the band because, as Sara put it, “they allow you to be yourself.” When asked whether they felt their culture was conservative in ways that prevented them from being themselves, Dorca — who was 21 and wearing eyeglasses that looked like part of her daily wardrobe and a mesh top that didn’t — said: “Maybe it turns out that you can be yourself. But you don’t know that at first. You feel like you can’t.”

Here lies the element of rock that functions independently from the economics of the industry or the shifting preferences of critics, the part that is maybe independent from time itself: the continually renewed experience of adolescence, of hearing and therefore feeling it all for the first time. But how disorienting must those feelings be when they have been fully monetized, fully sanctioned — when the response to your demand to rock ’n’ roll all night and party every day is, “Great, exactly, thank you.” In a culture where defying consensus is the dominant value, anything is possible except rebellion. It must be strange, in this post-everything century, to finally become yourself and discover that no one has any problem with that.

#måneskin #maneskin #i had a free nyt article so here you go #the article is so painfully a middle aged american perspective #which the author admits #and like thinking the fans on stage is staged?!??#or like how there can be no more authentic rebellion - maybe that's what it's like from your cushy position #but doesn't go into tdi at all #the stuff about the industry surrounding them i agree and its worth the read though

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bluebellofbakerstreet · 15 days

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A-Z Sherlock Fan Fiction Tropes Bingo

Many thanks to @swissmissing for creating this bingo card! Because I'm like that, I decided to go for a blackout bingo! And because, even as I was typing these, I kept thinking of more wonderful fics that would fit the brief, I hope to fill in my bingo card again. Writers are amazing and deserve to be lauded, and I have left off so many amazing fics and authors. Besides, we all need fic recs. 💙

AU/Amnesia The Murder of Emory J Amat by chriscalledmesweetie. Sherlock and John in 1920's AgathaChristieLand. It's a WIP but is currently updating weekly. (52k, T)

BDSM/Bodyswap - Certain Skills by NoStraightLine. John expressly told Sherlock that if he stole his gun again he’d get the fucking he was asking for. Sherlock “Boundaries Are Boring” Holmes stole John’s gun. (3k, E)

Crossover/Crack - Repo Men by Anyawen. In which Mrs Turner's married ones are James Bond and Q. Q is kidnapped; everybody is a BAMF. (7k, G)

Domestic/Disability A Building of Bridges by pengke. Alternate first meeting. No one would ever send Sherlock in to defuse a stand-off; but on one unlikely day, that’s exactly what happened. “Congratulations, Lestrade,” he called out sarcastically. “You’re traumatizing a war veteran.” (11k, G)

Established Relationship/Enemies to Lovers - Interview by bluebellofbakerstreet. In which the boys are in an 80's punk band, and are being interviewed by Rolling Stone. (2k, G)

Future/Fluff 50. Be You - No one Else Can by KittenKin. John's had a bad day and Sherlock doesn't know how to help. They both feel better at the end, and you will, too. (1k, G)

Gen/Genderswap - The Art of Communication by stillwaters01. Lestrade is receiving odd texts from Sherlock; he reads between the lines and brings help. (2k, T)

Historical/Humor - Acceptable Behavior by bbcatemysoul. Sherlock isn't really sure why John wants to shag him, but he's certain that if he's careful to behave properly about it, John can be persuaded to keep doing it. (3k, M)

Illness/imprisonment - Radioactive Trees in a Red Forest by Maribor_Petrichor. Harrowing account of John's battle with mental health issues and addiction after - you know - everything. (280k, E)

Jealousy/Jilted - Hungry by LipstickDaddy. John can't figure out why Sherlock is being so nice to that new guy working with the yard. (7k, G)

Kids/Kink - The Alchemy of Sea Glass by reveling_in_mayhem. Salt and air and sand surrounded their little party of three. Crashing waves, gull cries, and the exhilarated exclamations of an excited three-year-old served as the soundtrack to a day filled with blue skies and bright sunshine. (22k, E)

Long/Love Triangle The Edinburgh Problem by snorklepie. “A nice holiday, just a bit more...murdery. ” John said drily. “Yes! The best kind of holiday!” Sherlock beamed. “So we won’t get bored!” (152k, E)

Magical Realism/Major Character Death Left by LifeonMars. John Watson is left-handed. He’s tried not to let it affect his life, but as any Lefty knows, that’s almost impossible. (45k, M)

NSFW/Next Gen. Warzone by abundantlyqueer. Three smutty stories that pick up where the first two episodes left off. (13k, E)

Omegaverse/Only One Bed - Scars Don't Lie by CumberCurlyGirl. The prospect of going undercover as husbands to a couples retreat is just too enticing to refuse. (33k, M)

Parenthood/Platonic The Man With the Cartier Frames by JRow. Sherlock's top priority is The Work, just as it's always been ... in between trips to Putney to help with Rosie, collecting Rosie from school, and preparing for Rosie's sleepover at Baker Street. (32k, T)

Queer/Quest Dance With Me by TotallySilverGirl. Sherlock's queer quest for johnlock requires dancing, and some help from Sally Donovan. (28k, E)

Retirement/Road Trip - The Winter Garden by Callie4180. As Sherlock nears the end of his career, he's given the gift of a cottage in Sussex. The honey from the beehives out back is amazing. Almost...magical. (31k, T)

Soulmates/Slow Burn Soul Mate by Mottlemoth. Mystrade. The words appeared on Mycroft's arm aged fourteen. He's now lived with the unfortunate words all his life, not certain that he even wishes to meet his soul mate if that's how the man talks. (4k, T)

Teen AU/Time Travel - The Curious Adventure of the Drs Watson by ShinySherlock. What if ACD Watson and BBC Watson switched places? (40k, M)

Undercover/Unrequited - Last Call at the Homesick Pub by Chryse. During the hiatus, Sherlock is both undercover and suffering from unrequited love. (3k, T)

Vampires/Villain POV - Nine Tenths of the Law by bendingsignpost. John knows what's his - of course he'll kill for it. (Modern vampire AU) (18k, M)

Whump/Werewolves When Your Belly’s in the Trench by Morgan_Stuart. The next time that door opens, John Watson will kill the person on the other side. (4k, T)

Xenomorphism/Xmas - Ghost Stories by SwissMiss. Sherlock's parents think he and John are a couple. They might be onto something. (22k, M)

Zombies/Zoomorphism - Aim for the Head by Breath4Soul. Sometimes you don't really find yourself until everything has ended.A fic about finding love, healing, and purpose after everything has gone to hell. Still a WIP, but worth it. (44k, M)

#fic recs #I reserve the right to interpret categories as I see fit #writers are amazing

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qpr-competition · 1 year

Text

alright, so i dont have the energy to make Information Posts for every contestant right now (i will try to draft several but its gonna take a while), but i do want to give you the list

in alphabetical order (including the "the"s) of the media theyre from:

Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey

Hideki Hinata and Yui from Angel Beats

Achilles and Patroclus from Aristos the Musical (i have been asked to emphasize that this is specifically the musical portrayal)

Chalco Yong and Ikora Rey from Destiny 2

Senku Ishigami and Gen Asagiri from Dr Stone

Hawke and Varric from Dragon Age

Edgin Darvis and Holga Kilgore from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Joan Watson and Sherlock Holmes from Elementary

Peri Dubois and Abel Moreau from Entropic Float

Zagreus and Dusa from Hades

Polly and Yaretzi from Hello From The Hallowoods

Nepeta Leijon and Equius Zahhak from Homestuck

Serene-Heart-In-The-Chaos-Of-Battle and Luke Sunborn from In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

Jay Ferin, Gillion Tidestrider, and Chip from Just Roll With It

Sakuko Kodama and Satoru Takahashi from Koisenu Futari

John Doe and Arthur Lester from Malevolent

Venus McFlytrap, Rochelle Goyle, and Robecca Steam from Monster High (the ghoulfriends book series)

Criss and Cross from Roleslaying With Roman

Anzu, Kazuki, and Junta from Romantic Killer

Zolf Smith and Oscar Wilde from Rusty Quill Gaming

Jas Emari and Sinjir Rath Velus from Star Wars Aftermath Trilogy

Blind and Sphynx from The Gray House

Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus from The Locked Tomb

Tim Stoker and Sasha James from The Magnus Archives

Jet Siquiliak and Buddy Aurinko from The Penumbra Podcast - Juno Steel

Moraine Damordred and Lan Mandragoran from The Wheel Of Time

Chongi-Re, Numeri, and Butler from Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure

Chance and Shadow from Woe.begone

Alana Maxwell and Daniel Jacobi from Wolf 359

Joe and Sasha from Wonderlab

Dairine Callahan and Roshaun ke Nelaied from Young Wizards book series

Joe Tazuna and Sara Chidouin from Your Turn To Die

i dont have any dates for you regarding either the introduction posts or the polling starts; i hope to be able to do the latter within the next week, but unfortunately for all of us i have adhd

#qpr competition

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toasecretsanta · 1 year

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Family Time

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Family Characters: Apollo, Nico, Will, Austin, Kayla, Jerry, Yan

After a stressful day of family arguments disguised as a council, Apollo really wanted some less stressful family time. A gift for @crystalcatgamer from @tsarinatorment using the prompts “Apollo visiting his kids” and “Apollo and Nico bonding”. Couldn’t fit the third prompt in, unfortunately! This is set in winter so it’s year-rounder campers only, and I headcanon Gracie as a summer-only, which is why she’s missing.

Campers were just beginning to peel away from their breakfast tables when Apollo strolled into camp. The winter solstice the previous day had been full of its usual family tensions and thinly veiled posturings – things Apollo only really enjoyed when he wasn’t directly involved, and in the darkest depths of the year, when he was cold and tired and maybe Artemis wasn’t completely wrong when she said he got lazy in the winter, it lost most of its entertainment factor even then. No wonder, then, that he wanted to spend the next day with his children, away from the tense politicking of Olympus.

His intention had been to spend it relaxing, but immediately he noticed something a little odd at his table.

Nico was there (not odd at all, the son of Hades frequently joined his children and was incredibly welcome to do so), but Will was not.

When Apollo thought about it, Will’s absence wasn’t completely surprising – even whilst dealing with the biannual family argument disguised as a council, Apollo had felt and responded to his son’s healing prayers as they reached him, so he was well aware that something had happened late into the previous night, although the lack of unease throughout the camp implied that nothing was concerning the demigods now.

The only question was whether Will was doing the sensible thing, or the worried healer thing, but even that was quickly deduced by Nico’s unhurried presence at his table. If Nico thought Will was doing anything remotely daft, he would be telling him so at the very least, and almost certainly attempting to stop him, so Apollo approached his table with the reassurance that Will was fine.

“Good morning,” he trilled, sliding onto the stone bench between Austin and Yan and putting an arm around each of their shoulders, reaching out to grip Kayla and Jerry’s shoulders in greeting and sending Nico an enthusiastic grin which had his future son-in-law rolling his eyes – but also the hint of a returning smile playing at the corner of his mouth, which Apollo’s keen eyes definitely spotted.

“Hi, Dad,” his kids chorused. Yan leant against his side subtly and he gave their shoulder a brief squeeze as he began with the usual questions – what had they been up to since he last saw them, anything fun or exciting? He’d been keeping as much of an eye on them as he could get away with, of course, but it was always so much better hearing about Austin’s latest youtube fame straight from his son’s mouth, or the fact that Kayla’s experimenting with bow styles outside of her mastery in recurve had her currently focusing on a specific type of horse bow (Apollo had wondered if she would ever pick one of those up, and if she did, if it would be because or in spite of the memory of a certain older brother). Jerry’s continued determination but tragic failure to convert the primarily American born-and-raised kids to the wonders of cricket always made for a riveting story, and Yan’s own strides in increasing their distance at the archery range filled Apollo with pride.

Nico, Apollo noticed as he listened to his kids’ stories, was quietly piling a plate full of food which looked suspiciously geared towards Will’s preferences. The fact that he wasn’t running off with it as soon as he was done, but rather set it to one side with a glare towards table eleven that just dared someone to try and touch it (not even Hermes’ children were that foolish), added weight to the likelihood that Will was still asleep.

Eventually, after their tales were fully regaled, his kids helpfully confirmed it for him.

“There was a new arrival late last night,” Austin told him. “Will didn’t get back to the cabin until…” he trailed off, clearly trying to remember although Apollo was pretty certain none of his children had any real sense of time when the sun was down, if they’d even stirred when Will had no doubt stumbled back into the cabin, exhausted and bleary-eyed.

“Three in the morning,” Nico finished for him. “I was the one that dragged him out once he was done,” he informed Apollo, who gave him an approving look.

“You’re good for him,” he said, not for the first time and certainly not the last, either. The Italian boy’s pale cheeks flushed slightly pink, although Nico didn’t look away or otherwise acknowledge his words.

“He’ll probably wake up soon,” his son’s boyfriend continued instead. “Seeing as for some reason he always seems to wake up at dawn, or near after it.” The accusation was pointed.

Apollo shrugged. “What can I say, it’s the best time of the day,” he said, fully supported by his four awake children who were, of course, all natural morning people.

Nico scoffed. “Just keep telling yourself that,” he retorted, and Apollo pressed a hand to his chest, swooning back in dramatic offence.

“The betrayal,” he whined, to the beautiful sound of four children laughing and a fifth snorting almost imperceptibly. “Nico di Angelo, I thought we were friends!”

“Am I supposed to be friends with my boyfriend’s dad?” Nico asked, eyebrow raised, and Apollo spluttered, remembering at the last moment that Nico might not like the reminder that he was also Apollo’s cousin in the context of the current conversation and redirecting his response into safer waters.

“Are you telling me we weren’t friends before you met my son?” he demanded instead, hand still splayed across his heart. “I don’t give just anyone a ride in my chariot, you know!”

“You would if you could.” Nico’s call-out wasn’t wrong but he didn’t need to say it. Apollo chose not to respond to the accusation, partially because that was the sort of thing he didn’t really need as more than a passing remark where certain gods might be listening.

“So, what are you all planning to do without Will to keep an eye on you?” he instead asked his children.

“Yan promised to help me get enough people for a game of cricket,” Jerry said instantly, and Apollo glanced down at the child in question, who scoffed.

“Are there enough people in camp to make a full game?” they asked, not disputing their British brother’s claim but ruthless with their logic regardless.

Jerry was undeterred. “We can adapt it,” he insisted. ��“Smaller teams, with less wickets…” He continued along the vein for several minutes, having clearly thought about the topic in great depth, while his siblings rolled their eyes good-naturedly. “…and Harley already agreed to make us bats, wickets, and balls!”

That got the alarmed attention of Austin, who had at some point during his youngest brother’s impassioned speech withdrawn an oboe reed (Apollo suspected it was one of Alice’s spares, left behind when she’d gone back to her mother for the school term) from one of his pockets and started absent-mindedly blowing into it. The loud squawk that erupted from it at Jerry’s proclamation earned him a punch from Kayla, who had the misfortune of having her ear a little too close.

“No,” Austin declared immediately. “Will would kill you.”

“Will’s asleep,” Jerry pointed out, with all the flawless logic of a preteen.

“And staying that way,” Nico interjected, a little forcefully. “Not being dragged out of bed to patch up everyone who gets in the vicinity of Harley’s latest death traps.”

“Cricket is a safe sport!” Jerry argued back, and Apollo sensed the potential for some injured pride and genuine sibling arguments – things he had left Olympus to escape.

“It is,” he agreed, reaching for Jerry’s shoulder once more and giving it a soft squeeze. “What your siblings and Nico are trying to say is that Harley, while a very impressive young man and inventor, has a tendency to make things that are supposed to be safe… not so safe.” He remembered the three-legged death race all too clearly.

“But camp doesn’t have all the gear,” Jerry whined, shoulders slumping dejectedly. “I’ve got Mum’s ball, but…” There was the hint of a quiver to his lower lip and Apollo was not letting that happen.

A snap of his fingers and one flash of bright light later had a pile of cricket equipment on the ground next to table seven, complete with all the safety gear Jerry had forgotten to mention. Instantly, bright brown eyes lit up in delight, and the threat of tears disappeared. “You’re the best, Dad!”

He all but launched himself from the table, rummaging through the gear until he found the brand-new ball nestled inside one of the wicket keeper’s gloves and held it aloft proudly.

“Dad,” Kayla complained, just as Jerry excitedly insisted that Yan join him and the other demigod slipped off of the bench with far less enthusiasm to get drawn into a game of catch. Jerry jammed a helmet on their head, and Apollo had to fight not to laugh at the unimpressed look on their face.

But Yan and Jerry had managed to develop a strong bond at some point while Apollo had been mortal and forcibly unaware of his children’s lives – he had later heard that the two of them had met on the way to camp, escorted by satyr guides who didn’t all make it, and that sort of shared experience usually prompted a powerful connection – so they didn’t take it off despite clearly disapproving of their younger brother’s antics.

They did, however, throw the ball a little hard and high, and smirked when Jerry let out a wail and tore down the pavilion after it. “Yaaaaaaaaan!”

Yan chuckled and reclaimed their seat next to Apollo, tugging the helmet off but keeping it in their lap.

“Cricket’s not so bad,” they shrugged at the disbelieving noise Kayla made. “Just a lot of throwing, catching, and running.”

“Archery’s better,” she grumbled, and Yan – also a fantastic archer and general marksperson – shrugged in agreement.

“It keeps him happy,” they said, which was a point she had to concede on, if rather ungracefully.

Nico muttered something under his breath which wasn’t as grumpy as the son of Hades tried to make it sound, and stood up. “I’ll go leave this where Will can grab it when he wakes up,” he said, picking up the heavily laden plate.

“I’ll come with you,” Apollo said instantly, giving the still-sitting kids another shoulder squeeze and making his own way to his feet.

It was somewhat of a surprise that Nico not only acquiesced, but also waited for him rather than walking to cabin seven by himself, and Apollo certainly didn’t waste time scrambling to join him, throwing a “be good!” over his shoulder at his awake children – Jerry had finally caught up with the ball and was hurtling back to them with it held triumphantly above his head, and Kayla’s bright hair splayed across the stone table as her forehead connected with it – despite being well aware that four demigods between the ages of twelve and fourteen left unsupervised was a recipe for chaos.

The thick curtains of cabin seven were all drawn tightly shut, a sure sign that there was an occupant either sleeping or recording a video inside. Given that the only one of his children currently in camp that wasn’t outside and causing a ruckus was not one with particularly musical proclivities, it was a clear indicator of the former – or at least, that Will was supposed to be asleep.

Neither Apollo nor Nico made a sound as they edged the door open and slipped through, but something had apparently alerted Will’s trouble’s brewing big brother senses regardless, because Apollo’s eldest in-camp child was blinking blearily as he pushed himself into a sitting position.

The blankets pooled around his waist as Will yawned, running a hand through an impressive bed-head of tangled waves. He still looked exhausted, skin a little too pale and an indication of bags threatening to form beneath his eyes, and in a wordless agreement Apollo and Nico were immediately at his bedside, the plate of food set on top of his semi-cluttered dresser and promptly ignored.

“Go back to sleep,” Nico said bluntly, gripping his boyfriend’s shoulder and pushing him back down with arms that were far stronger than their thin appearance implied.

“What time is it?” Will asked, his voice thick, as though Nico hadn’t spoken, and Apollo added his own hand to the fray as, between them, he and Nico got Will once again laying back down.

“For you, it’s sleep time,” he informed his son, and got wide blue eyes as Will registered his presence.

“Dad?”

Apollo smiled at him, pulling the covers up and tucking them under his chin as Nico hovered, ready to stop any attempts to sit up again.

“You did well last night,” he promised, fussing with the edge of the blanket until it sat just right. “But that’s no excuse to go without sleep. Camp is fine, your siblings are fine” – it was a testament to how much Nico wanted Will to continue resting that the son of Hades didn’t have any quips to make on the subject – “you are tired, and need some sleep.”

“But-” Will protested, and Apollo shushed him.

“But nothing,” he said, brushing a light hand over his son’s forehead. Messy stands of hair tried to cling to him as he did so. “Everything will be fine; I want you to stay in here for a few more hours.”

“’m not tired,” his son tried, but the fact that he hadn’t even managed to vocalise I’m at the start of the protest defeated his argument before it even started.

“You’re being an idiot,” Nico grumbled at him. The son of Hades had perched himself on Will’s bed, near his legs, and was regarding his boyfriend with dark, slightly worried, eyes. “You need some more sleep.”

“So do you,” Will pointed out, which was clearly true on a technicality because Nico, too, had been awake at three in the morning, but also the son of Hades’ sleep schedule appeared to have finally settled into something that was far more akin to frequent naps rather than a single long sleep.

As adorable as their bantering could be, right then it was starting too feel too much like the bickering that Apollo had had more than enough of at the solstice yesterday, so he cleared his throat and drew both of their attention back to him.

“A few more hours, Will,” he said gently, adding a slight pleading tone beneath the words to make it clear that, at the end of the day, it was his son’s decision – although Apollo had strong opinions on the decision he should be making.

“I’m already awake,” his son pointed out, still not sounding like the most awake demigod the world had ever seen, but with a clear point regardless – Will, like the majority of Apollo’s children and unlike his boyfriend, was not one for naps. Having woken up already, getting back to sleep would be a greater challenge than before.

“I can help with that,” Apollo offered. Will looked torn, and Nico stepped in.

“If you sleep now, you avoid the insanity of Jerry dragging the rest of the camp into his stupid game,” he said. “Apollo gave him what he needs to torment the rest of us with it.” There was a dark look sent his way, but Apollo just shrugged it off.

“They’re bickering,” he said instead of responding to the accusation. Instantly, a look of tired resignation crossed Will’s face; head counsellors did not enjoy separating bickering younger campers, especially when said campers were also their siblings. “Escape while you can.”

Responsibility and tiredness waged war across the battleground of Will’s eyes, a battle Apollo could well appreciate.

“I won’t let it escalate,” he promised, and those words seemed to be enough to have the tension draining from Will’s muscles.

“Just a couple of hours,” his son demanded. Apollo was relieved to get any agreement at all – Will had a deep well of stubbornness which he frequently drew upon, which was probably not entirely from Naomi’s side, but apparently the idea of facing his younger siblings bickering over cricket was enough to make him want to roll over and go back to sleep for a few more hours.

Apollo could certainly relate to that.

“Just a couple of hours,” he confirmed, brushing his son’s forehead one more time and this time humming the beginning chords of a lullaby. Nothing too loud or powerful – Will would benefit best from a natural sleep, which meant being simply coaxed back down rather than being forced under – but just right for a couple more hours of truly restful sleep.

“You’d better still be here,” Will mumbled suddenly as his eyes began to droop, and something in Apollo’s chest did a happy little twist.

“I plan on being here all day,” he assured him – it wasn’t a promise, he couldn’t promise something like that when Zeus might start making ominous gestures and insist he depart, but it was the closest he could truthfully get.

It was enough to bring a small smile to Will’s lips as he slipped back under again, and Apollo pressed his lips lightly to his forehead, unable to resist.

“Sleep well,” he murmured. “You deserve it.”

Part of him wanted to sit in the peace and quiet of the cabin, rather than face whatever mischief his other progeny had managed to whip up in the handful of minutes they had been left unsupervised, but not even the constant bickering of siblings was enough to put Apollo off the idea of spending as much of the day as possible with happy demigods whose biggest issue was whether or not they wanted to play a ball game.

In the shadows of the bunk, Nico’s pale face stood out starkly as he surveyed Will’s sleeping form for several long moments.

“He’s just sleeping?” he asked after a moment, voice barely above a whisper. Apollo lowered his voice to match.

“Just sleeping,” he promised – that was an easy promise to make. “He’ll wake up again in a few hours, as agreed.” He half expected Nico to make himself comfortable and settle down for the hours’-long wait, but once again the son of Hades surprised him as he slid off of the end of Will’s bed, leaving barely a wrinkle in his wake.

“He’ll get mad at me for ‘wasting’ the day looking over him,” Nico explained, apparently sensing Apollo’s faint confusion. “And I want to see how long it takes Kayla to turn that cricket ball into a pincushion.”

It was certainly a possible scenario, although Apollo hoped she wouldn’t show off her prowess quite like that – Jerry would not react well and then he would have actual fighting children on his hands. Parenting One-oh-One books tended to advise not to let that happen, especially the godly ones which were fully aware that the children involved could be rather… powerful. And destructive.

Definitely destructive.

“Please do not give her that idea,” he replied as they cautiously slipped back out of the cabin, Nico squinting at the sudden change in light levels. “She has plenty of feasible targets to try and hit in the archery range.”

“She’ll call that ball feasible,” Nico deadpanned. “You know she will.”

Nico wasn’t exactly wrong, but Apollo made a mental note to get Kayla her own supply of balls fit to be converted into pincushions so she had no excuse except pettiness to target Jerry’s new collection.

“Even more reason not to give her the idea,” he said lightly.

In the time he and Nico had been in the cabin, it appeared that the rest of his children had devolved even further into bickering – although Apollo was hopeful it remained playful bickering rather than a serious argument – over whether or not Jerry should try and get the entire camp into a game of cricket.

Kayla and Austin were firmly refusing to participate, while Yan stood steadfastly at their younger brother’s side and plucked at the grill of one of the helmets’ mouth guards. Apollo was fairly certain they didn’t actually mind the idea of playing, even though it was clearly more Jerry’s interest than their own.

Then again, Yan had already proven that their aim was as sharp with a ball as it was various other projectiles and knew they’d be a force to be reckoned with as a bowler or a batsperson.

“Is he still asleep?” Austin asked Apollo as he and Nico approached. The oboe reed had disappeared from his mouth at some point, and Apollo got the feeling that Austin was subconsciously slipping into Will’s role of eldest sibling while his own big sibling wasn’t around.

“He’s asleep,” Nico confirmed before Apollo could compose an answer. That didn’t, however, stop his mouth from running with other ideas.

“Will’s worked very hard recently,” he said, not sure if he meant just the past couple of weeks, where winter and ice provoked falls from even the most graceful demigods, or recently in the terms of a god’s reckoning, which encompassed Will’s entire life, near enough.

Not that it really mattered, though. Will deserved a break regardless, and Apollo was determined that, at least for this one morning, he would get one.

The murmur of agreeing noises was the first time since his arrival that all four awake children had been in harmony with each other. It was far more soothing than the various small bickers and snipes he’d been hearing since.

“Should we do something for him?” Austin wondered, fingers fiddling with one of the buttons on his long, soft jacket.

“He got breakfast in bed,” Kayla pointed out, although Apollo didn’t think she was actually disagreeing. “When’s the last time we got breakfast in bed?”

“But that was Nico and Dad,” Yan said. “Not us.”

“He hasn’t actually eaten it yet,” Nico muttered, but if there was one person (besides himself) that Apollo was certain was fully on board with Austin’s suggestion, it was the son of Hades. Apollo regarded the demigod in question out of the corner of his eye as his children started debating what they could do for their brother – “no, Jerry, we’re not making Will play cricket!” – and was relieved at what he saw.

Nico had been through a lot in his life. Far too much even for a grown adult nearing the end of a long and fulfilled life, and both physically and mentally he wasn’t even sixteen yet, despite what mortal records might suggest. Apollo remembered the young, sullen and betrayed child he had seen in the snow, just over four years earlier, remembered doing what he could do distract him at least for a short while from the abandonment of his sister whilst fully aware that the camp he was taking him to would not, at the time, be Nico’s salvation despite his wishes.

Not for a son of Hades, not against the stigma that had been in place for millennium. In all four thousand or so years of the camp’s existence, it had never been a safe place for children of Hades, although Apollo had tried.

To see him here, now, still standing with a group of demigods despite his main link to them being absent, interjecting in their debate and being listened to – respected, as much as a group of twelve to fourteen year olds knew how to respect someone – and all parties completely comfortable with his presence.

If Apollo was still mortal, he would have burst into tears then and there.

It was still a close-run thing, even with a sliver of godly self-control to hold them back, as he reached out for the son of Hades and gave him a brief, tight, squeeze.

Nico jumped, and fixed him with a confused glare.

“What was that for?” he demanded, interrupting Kayla’s suggestion of archery lessons.

Apollo couldn’t say what he was thinking, not without several suddenly self-conscious demigods in his midst, so he just gave Nico the biggest, brightest smile he could manage without blinding him. “I’m so happy for you,” he said, which did absolutely nothing to clear up the confusion on the Italian boy’s face.

Nico blinked at him once, twice, then shrugged and turned away. “Whatever. Kayla, are you trying to stress him out more? You know he doesn’t think he’s any good at archery.”

“A concert?” Austin suggested as his sister pouted. “I could whip up a few things for us to play… Nico, I can’t believe I’ve never asked this before, but can you play anything or would you rather sing?”

The look of stunned outrage on Nico’s face had Austin’s siblings all laughing, and even Apollo couldn’t help but smile, amused.

“Neither,” the son of Hades said firmly, and Austin’s face fell.

“Not even for Will?” he wheedled, and got a glare in return.

“Not in front of you,” Nico countered, and all of Apollo’s children pouted. There was a gleam in Austin’s eyes, however, that had Apollo wondering what idea his son had suddenly got into his head and if he should be worried about it.

Whatever it was, however, it went unspoken as Yan spoke. “We could make him something,” they suggested.

“Like what?” Kayla asked. “Best Bro Mug? He’s not Nico’s brother, though.”

“A cake!” Jerry piped up, and all of the demigods looked at each other, and then, to Apollo’s mild concern, him.

“We’re not allowed in the kitchen without supervision,” Austin said slowly.

Oh. Apollo could take a hint.

“I think a cake sounds wonderful,” he agreed, before gesturing in the direction of the Big House. “Shall we?”

The thinly-veiled concern on Chiron’s face as Apollo shepherded five demigods into the kitchen was entirely uncalled for. Dionysus simply scoffed as they passed and informed Apollo that any disasters were on his head, and Apollo beamed back at his brother, reminding him which god it was that tended to leave culinary disasters in his wake.

(So maybe Apollo had left a few. But Dionysus’ parties were legendary for a reason.)

It was only once he’d nudged all five children into washing their hands – none of them had hair long enough to need tying back, although he snapped his own from its half-up half-down manbun into a low ponytail – that he realised there was an important question that needed asking.

“Who knows how to bake a cake?”

Immediately, they all looked at each other, eyes widening a little as none of them put their hands up and said I do!

“Mum makes them all the time,” Jerry said after a moment. “It can’t be that hard.”

Genevieve Allen might have baked a lot (and Apollo remembered how delicious the outcomes had always been), but it took less than a minute into the start of the process for Apollo to realise she had never imparted any lessons on her son – or that Jerry had never paid any attention if she had.

Flour was spilt – not that anyone believed for a moment that was accidental when the victim was Nico, whose all-black aesthetic was suddenly inverted in a single incident – eggs were smashed, and Kayla seemed more interested in eating the chocolate than melting it.

Still, Apollo let the chaos continue, plucking out shards of eggshell before they could join the mixture and subtly replenishing the flour and chocolate supplies, because while it was readily apparent that none of them really knew anything about baking, they were having fun with it – despite his makeover, Nico still had a small grin on his face as he attacked the mixture with a spoon – and Apollo knew that that would be far more important to Will than the cake itself being a culinary masterpiece.

It definitely took some godly intervention (mostly in the form of Apollo prodding the five of them into doing things in approximately the correct order, rescuing more shards of eggshell, and in one particularly close call, catching the bowl when Jerry got too enthusiastic in his stirring and it almost fell to the floor), but the thing that went into the oven to make at the end of it all would at least not poison their poor brother.

Actually, Apollo had full faith that it would still be delicious. What was the use of being the god of knowledge if he didn’t know things, and he definitely knew how to bake a cake, even if for some reason no-one believed him? The steps might have been rather haphazard and chaotic, but they were still the right steps, overall in the right order.

Then he remembered that he was supposed to be supervising more than just the cake-making process, and that the kitchen looked like a warzone.

His suggestion that the children clean it while they waited for the cake to bake was met with a glorious chorus of whining, and Yan’s suggestion that Apollo do it for them – which was then met with a chorus of agreement.

Apollo shouldn’t. He knew he should make them do it themselves, but really, who was he to deny five pleading faces (even Nico’s was expectant enough that Apollo mentally grouped him with the other four).

With a sigh, he snapped his fingers and the kitchen was once again sparkling clean.

“Now what?” Kayla asked, leaning against a cupboard with a slightly-open door. Apollo could see her fingers sneaking inside to grab some more chocolate but decided to turn a blind eye. If his daughter wanted chocolate, she could have chocolate – at least until it reached the point of making her sick, but he was confident he would notice before it got to that point and stop her.

“Icing!” Jerry chirped. “Mum always makes icing!”

“Cakes need icing,” Apollo agreed.

“How do we make that?” Austin wondered, as Kayla gave up on the pretence that she wasn’t raiding a cupboard and threw it open.

“There’s sugar in here,” she proclaimed, “hey-!”

Nico had swooped in next to her and swiped the half-eaten bar of chocolate, taking a bite with a satisfying crack.

“That was my chocolate!” Kayla protested. Nico shrugged.

“Mine now.”

“I’ll shoot you,” she threatened, but Nico just smirked at her.

“Try it,” he dared.

Apollo decided to intervene before it got out of hand.

“For starters,” he answered Austin, “we need this.” A snap of his fingers had the chocolate bar disappearing from Nico’s grip and materialising on the counter.

It was Nico’s turn to exclaim “hey!” in protest. Kayla laughed at him.

“Dad, do you know how to do this?” Jerry finally asked, and five pairs of eyes settled on him. He smiled back at them.

“Of course I do!” he insisted.

“And you let us guess our way through making the cake?” Nico demanded. Apollo shrugged.

“You were having fun,” he defended himself. “It’ll be a fantastic cake. Now, as for the icing…”

With the five children now looking to him for direction, he split up the tasks between them and with far more concentration and less chaos, by the time the cake was out and cooled, they had more icing than they really needed, in a variety of colours, and Jerry had demanded Apollo produce a pen and paper so he could design how they were going to decorate the cake.

Mess returned with the application of the icing, and more of it ended up consumed than used, but that was why Apollo had arranged for so much to be made – even by the time they were done, there was plenty left over, which he reminded them was Will’s share when Kayla’s sticky fingers made fresh advances.

His daughter surrendered, and this time Apollo persuaded them to clean up the kitchen themselves – although he did at least snap them all clean so they didn’t all need urgent appointments with a shower – rather than doing it for them, which neatly ran them up to ‘a couple of hours’ since he’d helped Will roll over and go back to sleep for a bit.

No-one needed any encouragement to scramble back to the cabin, although Nico threatened all of them with shadowy horrors if their chaos woke Will if he wasn’t already awake. Apollo took care of transporting the cake, well aware that a quintet of hyped-up-on-sugar demigods was a recipe for disaster (maybe Will wouldn’t thank him for that, although there was more than enough icing left over for him to join their number very quickly), and before long they were all impatiently tapping their feet on the cabin floor.

Will, it transpired, must have already woken up because his bed was empty – although not yet made – and the plate of food Nico had left had been partially eaten. The sound of running water from the bathroom left no doubts at all as to his location, leaving the six of them with nothing to do but wait.

Nico commandeered Will’s bed, even going as far as to roughly pull the covers up before sitting on it. The other five scattered to their own bunks, while Apollo snapped a low table with plates into existence to place the cake on before perching on Will’s bed, next to Nico.

With enough noise to wake the dead, there was no way Will didn’t know they were all in there, so when the bathroom door edged open to reveal a fresh, healthy looking demigod with still-dripping hair, all they got was a fond eyeroll.

“What are you all doing in here?” he asked, apparently not noticing the new table. He was eying the clear hyperactivity with an air of I don’t want to know, and Apollo found himself the target of an exasperated look that clearly said I thought you were going to keep an eye on them.

“Waiting for you!” Kayla exclaimed, jumping down from her bunk and landing nimbly on all fours, rather like a cat.

From the look on Will’s face, that didn’t reassure him at all – or maybe he just didn’t like Kayla jumping down from her bunk rather than using the ladder.

“You can’t tell me you’ve had nothing better to do than wait for me to wake up,” he said, putting his hands on his hips – every inch the big brother he was.

Apollo decided to put him out of his misery.

“They made something for you,” he prompted as Austin joined Kayla on the floor with far more suave and much less chaos in his approach. Yan and Jerry scrambled to join them, and Apollo watched Will’s eyes widen in a surprise that quickly shifted to delight as Nico slunk to the back of the pack but unmistakably part of it.

“You helped, Dad,” Austin told him.

“I just supervised,” Apollo deflected. “You all did the work.”

That was the moment Will finally spotted the table. His siblings and boyfriend crowded him as he approached it, while Apollo settled himself by it and waited.

It would not be winning any fancy cake-decorating tournaments, but in his humble and not at all biased opinion, it was one of the best cakes he had ever seen.

THANK YOU was picked out in golden calligraphic icing – Jerry had a much steadier hand than most people equated with twelve year old children, although there were still some wobbles where he’d lost control of the piping. Around the words, each of the five had drawn something with various levels of skill.

Austin’s musical notes notated the opening bars of his latest composition in a perfect copy, while the saxophone he’d attempted to draw looked more like a smudged banana, especially when he’d started trying to scrape it off before Yan told him not to. Yan themselves had drawn the rising sun, with its rays just starting to poke over the horizon, while Jerry’s artistic talent had been used up on the calligraphy and he’d opted for a simple red cross, and a dark red blob that everyone knew was supposed to be a cricket ball, even if it rather resembled a splotch of blood.

Kayla, predictably, had attempted a bow at full draw. Bows weren’t difficult to draw, if kept simple, but she’d tried to add on all the accessories on her recurve so it had ended up a rather indistinct mass of various shades of greens and greys. Nico appeared determined to pretend he didn’t have any artistic talent at all, and had simply drawn a bright ring of gold around a black circle – Apollo was pretty certain it was supposed to represent Will’s ability to glow, although it also looked rather like a simplistic solar eclipse.

“I-” Will started. “Wha- Guys, what is this for?”

“It says right there!” Jerry protested, pointing at his calligraphy. Will put a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“I can read it,” he assured him, “but… what for?” His confusion rang through the cabin clearly. The six of them looked at each other; Apollo wondering how to say everything in a colloquial way that would get through to his son as the demigods seemingly faced the same dilemma.

It was Nico who answered him, in the end, summing it up with a blunt succinctness.

“For being you.”

Will blinked, but then Kayla grabbed him in a hug, and that was the cue for the rest of them to dog-pile their big brother. The blond boy went down in a flail of too many limbs, and Nico and Apollo both laughed at the sight before catching each other’s eyes.

It was only a split second, but they came to an instant, silent, decision.

Will shrieked in protest as two more bodies joined the pile on top of him, but then there was laughter, and maybe a few tears, and far too many demigods hyped up on sugar and emotions – and maybe a god, too.

It was a long time before they got around to eating the cake – which was absolutely delicious in the way all things made with love were – and catching Will up to the rest of them in terms of consumed sugar and subsequent hyperactivity that Apollo could already sense Chiron’s despairing disapproval for, but he loved every moment of it.

This was how family gatherings were supposed to be. Olympus: take note.

#toasecretsanta #tsarinatorment #crystalcatgamer #pjo apollo #nico di angelo #will solace #austin lake #kayla knowles #toa jerry #toa yan #trials of apollo #toa #riordanverse #trials of apollo fanfic #toa fanfic #riordanverse fanfic

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unfortunate-arrow · 2 months

Text

𝐎𝐂 𝐱 𝐎𝐂 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬: A Masterlist — 1960s-2010s

An open offer for oc x oc interactions for all of my HP OCs and the types of relationships that they’re open for! This also functions as a masterlist for my Hogwarts dorms. In addition, everyone featured will only get one tag to avoid breaking the post.

Interactions for ocs born between the 1870s & 1950s can be found here.

The preference is for mutuals and the ability to slip it the (few) storylines. If any of them strike your interest, please comment, reblog, send an ask, or DM and specify with the OCs’ names.

Extra Info:

Total Number of OCs: 18

Number of OCs Open for Dormmates: 12

Number or OCs Open for Friendships: 16

Number of OCs Open for Love Interests: 1

Eras: HPHM, Golden, HPMA, Next Gen

𝙷𝙾𝙶𝚆𝙰𝚁𝚃𝚂 𝙼𝚈𝚂𝚃𝙴𝚁𝚈

Huck Fitzgerald

b. november 28, 1972 | saggitarius

hufflepuff | muggleborn | irish | entp | enneagram type 6w7

in a different universe than the ruth & the o’donnells

a little more removed from the drama of ‘R’ and the cursed vaults

an orphan and raised by his aunt and uncle from the age of 5

traveled quite extensively with his aunt and uncle who are both in fields related to archeology and therefore knows how to hold a very basic conversation in a few different languages

more of a cat person than a dog person

makes friends easily, although most aren’t close friends

healer to stay-at-home dad to ancient studies professor at hogwarts

Love Interest:

Dorm: Huck | Rohan Khanna | Diego Caplan | Reid Van de Lune (kc-and-co) | Marty Raymond (@hogwartsmysteryho)

Open for: Friendships

Ruth Lyman

b. july 17, 1973 | cancer

not involved very much in the cursed vaults, she works more as a background character like levi kidd

raised by her father and her grandmother in a bakery in dublin, ireland

a quieter soul who spends time alone but enjoys being with other people

a literature nerd

works as a tutor for the younger students while at hogwarts and for a few years between the end of hogwarts and the start of the wizarding world

a children’s book author and later, the charms professor at hogwarts

Love Interest: Conor O’Donnell

Dorm: Ruth | Badeea Ali | Tulip Karasu | Isabelle Dubois (@endlessly-cursed) | Lyse Spindle (@magicallymalted)

Open for: Friendships

Ryan O’Donnell

b. august 18, 1973 | leo

gryffindor | half-blood | irish | esfp | enneagram type 8w7

the firstborn quadruplet, although the second born child

chaotic disaster quad

most involved in the cursed vaults mystery

“i hate mysteries, they need to be solved” vibes

the rolling stones over the beatles any day

impulsive and kind and someone that you can count on

puts on a front that he’s always brave and has everything together

has a bit of a reputation for causing trouble

plays chaser on the gryffindor team and has a friendly rivalry with his sister, cara

cursebreaker

Love Interest: Penny Haywood

Dorm: Ryan | Ash Khanna | Ben Copper | Jae Kim | Charlie Weasley

Open for: Friendships

Cara O’Donnell

b. august 18, 1973 | leo

slytherin | half-blood | irish | enfp | enneagram type 8

the second born quadruplet and the third of five siblings

disaster bi quad

chaotic and messy, but she’s still put together

enjoys quidditch and skateboarding, but no other sports

plays chaser on the slytherin quidditch team and has a friendly rivalry with her brother, ryan

artist who eventually becomes an illustrator

Love Interest: Rowan Khanna

Dorm: Cara | Ismelda Murk | Merula Synde | Liz Tuttle | Semele Thorne (endlessly-cursed)

Open for: Friendships

Sara O’Donnell

b. august 18, 1973 | leo

hufflepuff | half-blood | irish | esfj | enneagram type 2

third born quadruplet and the fourth of five siblings

soft sweetheart quad

has a tendency to put others’ problems and needs ahead of her own

always willing to lend a hand, especially to her friends

would say that tonks is her best friend

worked in the hospital wing in her sixth and seventh years

was named prefect in her fifth year

not the most invested in the vaults, but she’s going to help out her siblings

healer

Love Interest: Barnaby Lee

Dorm: Sara | Nymphadora Tonks | Penny Haywood | Rowan Khanna | Chiara Lobosca

Open for: Friendships

Conor O’Donnell

b. august 18, 1973 | leo

ravenclaw | half-blood | irish | istp | enneagram type 5

youngest quadruplet and child

least involved in the cursed vaults mystery and is fully done by his sixth year

honestly, he’s usually just here because of his siblings

keeps to himself and hard to get to know

stutters and because of this, he doesn’t speak much and deals with feelings of fear, shame, and aniexty

also swears like a sailor and has no shame about it

plays seeker for the ravenclaw quidditch team

really good at nonverbal magic

architect

Love Interest: Ruth Lyman

Dorm: Conor | Talbott Winger | Andre Egwu | Victor Ketsueki | OPEN

Open for: 1 dormmate

𝙰𝙲𝚁𝙾𝚂𝚂 𝙴𝚁𝙰𝚂

Camila Valdez

b. september 19, 1979 | virgo

second of five children

attended hogwarts in the same years as harry & co.

silently beefs with draco malfoy because she thinks he’s an insufferable jerk

named prefect in her fifth year and headgirl in her seventh (much to her immense surprise)

becomes the astronomy professor in 2004, at the age of 24

is helping to raise her two youngest siblings, amada and joaquin who were both born in 2000

she’s a fair professor, willing to give out second chances to those who earn it

Love Interest:

Dorm: Camila | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN

Open for: Friendships, colleagues, 4 dormmates

Nicholas Wraxall

b. february 2, 1989 | aquarius

hogwarts professor (still not sure what exactly he teaches, what subjects don’t have ocs?) and head of hufflepuff

orphaned at the age of 12 and then adopted by an eccentric and wealthy pureblood wizard

gained a reputation for being the weird american kid during his time at hogwarts

played seeker while at hogwarts

worked as an auror for a few years before becoming a professor

became a professor by accident

his reputation as a professor is the hot professor that half the hogwarts student body has a crush on

totally oblivious to student crushes

either teaches muggle studies or flying

Love Interest: Frances Fersen (@endlessly-cursed)

Dorm: Nicholas | Harker Hartford (potionboy3) | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN

Open for: 3 dormmates, friendships

𝙼𝙰𝙶𝙸𝙲 𝙰𝚆𝙰𝙺𝙴𝙽𝙴𝙳

Finn MacKade

b. december 30, 1996 | capricorn

eldest of four boys with an identical twin brother

an avid photographer who is rarely seen without his camera

plays chaser while at hogwarts

someone who is good during a crisis, but terrible at handling the aftermath

kind and trustworthy but private and introverted

takes the big brother role pretty seriously, but not always the strongest with it

becomes a professional photographer and works for the daily prophet for about a decade before moving to free lance work

Love Interest: Scotty Rosier (@drinkyoursoupbitch)

Dorm: Finn | Efesto Vecellio (@nicos-oc-hell) | Duncan Ludwig (@usernoneexistent) | Jimmy Crouch (@potionboy3) | OPEN

Open for: Friendships

Nate MacKade

b. december 30, 1996 | capricorn

second of four children with an identical twin brother

soft, sweet, kind, sunshiny, big heart

massive history nerd and one of the few students who have never fallen asleep while binns is teaching

nate’s a great friend, but he doesn’t open up very much

usually wears his heart on his sleeve

often puts others ahead of himself

a bit of a people pleaser

archivist then historian and finally, history of magic professor at hogwarts

Love Interest: Nova Hartley (@gaygryffindorgal)

Dorm: Nate | Quincey Alderly (gaygryffindorgal) | Conner Everett (@amerrymystery) | Zephyr Mercury (@slytherindisaster)

Open for: Friendships

Jack Whitten

b. february 28, 1997 | pisces

reckless af and a bit of a trouble magnet

dyslexic

not a fan of quidditch, much to everyone’s surprise

he likes fishing, soccer/football, and hurling… and broom racing

has an identical twin brother

his recklessness is a result of abandonment issues as his parents disappeared when he was a baby and no one knew anything about it until about twenty years later

magiopalentologist

Love Interest: Sage Carridan (@kc-and-co)

Dorm: Jack | Maxim Raeburn (potionboy3) | Levi Vecellio (nicos-oc-hell) | Isander Yaxley (gaygryffindorgal) | OPEN

Open for: Friendships, 2 dormmates

Benedict Whitten

b. february 28, 1997 | pisces

prefers to spend his free time in the outdoors

he has abandonment issues and thus, doesn’t let himself have too many close relationships

very hard to get know

goes by “ben” sometimes, but absolutely hates being called “benny”

tends to bottle up his emotions

he ends up joining the frog choir by accident

plays seeker on the ravenclaw quidditch team

he starts his working life as an archivist before being hired as the curator to the scamamder wizarding natural history museum in london

Love Interest: Lottie Turner

Dorm: Benedict | Marco Han (magicallymalted) | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN

Thea Whitten

b. may 29, 1997 | gemini

the middle of three sisters, both of whom are muggles

thea’s an avid baker

she’s the cousin of jack and benedict, whom her parents are raising

her mother passed away when she was thirteen

shows her love via flowers

she has a big heart and is soft but chaotic

she plays beater on the gryffindor quidditch team

herbologist who later owns her own florist shop

Love Interest: Noa March (@thatravenpuffwitch)

Dorm: Thea | Mary Ann Von Dynne (endlessly-cursed) | OPEN | OPEN

Open for: Friendships, 2 dormmates

𝙽𝙴𝚇𝚃 𝙶𝙴𝙽𝙴𝚁𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽

Sophie Pembroke

b. january 7, 2000 | capricorn

eldest of three with a younger brother, rhys, in hufflepuff and a younger sister, emmy, in gryffindor

her mother died when she was nine and then her father had a stroke when she was sixteen

tends to keep to herself, although she doesn’t mind other people’s company

tea lover

plays keeper on the ravenclaw quidditch team

stubborn, sarcastic, and doing her best but feeling like she’s failing herself and everyone else

descendant of max pembroke through his son, harry, and william devlin through his daughter, lucy

inherited max’s cat allergy

wandmaker

Love Interest: Luke Battersea

Dorm: Sophie | Victoire Weasley | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN

Open for: Friendships, 3 dormmates

Luke Battersea

b. july 21, 2000 | cancer

youngest of five by quite a bit

sole survivor of the attack that killed his parents and older siblings when he was six

grief-ridden and generally kinda of angry

acts like everything is no big deal and that he’s cool with it, but really, he’s got a lot going on

grumpy old man energy

dog lover and a star wars nerd

plays seeker on the gryffindor quidditch team

obsessed with finding the truth about why his parents were murdered

great-grandson of simon battersea, through his son, oliver, and edmund kennedy, through his daughter, cecilia

Love Interest: Sophie Pembroke

Dorm: Luke | Joaquin Valdez | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN

Open for: Friendships, 3 dormmates

Declan O’Donnell-Lee

b. september 1, 2001 | virgo

eldest son and second of four children born to sara o’donnell and barnaby lee which also makes him the second oldest of the ten o’donnell cousins

dyslexic

the odd one out amongst his family

sports boy through and through

plays seeker for the slytherin quidditch team and is eventually named captain of the team

dog lover

plays quidditch professionally as a seeker for the ballycastle bats

Love Interest: Callie Black (@mjs-oc-corner)

Dorm: Declan | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN

Open for: Friendships, 4 dormmates

Quinn Power

b. december 1, 2004/5 | sagittarius

middle of five children with two older brothers, kevin and jason, a younger brother named orion, and a younger sister named cassidy

a werewolf who was bitten at the age of five after his parents accidentally angered a werewolf

plays beater for the slytherin quidditch team

demisexual and biromantic

angry in general, mostly at himself

grumpy loner

descendant of minerva kennedy

career is tbd

Love Interest: Open

Dorm: Quinn | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN

Open for: A love interest of any gender, friendships, and 4 dormmates

Jude Cozens

b. june 13, 2002-2005 | gemini

gryffindor | muggleborn | american or canadian | ixxx

hockey obsessed

doesn’t know who his father is

moves to the uk because his mother got married

angry about the move to the uk and very disappointed by the lack of hockey

has played ice hockey since he was little, he plays center

highly allergic to bees, so he carries an epi-pen

heterosexual

very new and undeveloped, plus his name might end up changing (previously nico, now jude)

Love Interest: Noor Verna-Dhendron (@legilimenace)

Dorm: Jude | Scott Morris (potionboy3) | OPEN | OPEN | OPEN

Open for: 3 dormmates, friendships

#oc x oc connections #hphm #hogwarts mystery #hp professor oc #hp golden era oc #hpma #magic awakened #hp next gen #hp next gen oc #my aesthetic

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giggly-squiggily · 11 months

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*GASP* HEADCANON DRABBLES

I would love to contribute for le Dr. Stone pls uwu

My hc involves sengen actually! Gen uses some sort of freestyle-ballet when he wants to clear his mind, since being a mentalist is sometimes as demanding as being a scientist, and he actually knows when to step away from it and calm himself, unlike our resident workaholic scientist XD

Senkuu himself is always captivated by Gen's dancing, and sometimes (very rarely) would go out of his way to ask Gen to dance for him.

Now here's the thing~

Gen sometimes DRAMATICALLY refuses Senkuu because he 'can't see the appeal of it' which, he can't, but also!

This prompts Senkuu into 'making him dance' by just tickling the shit out of him and following him about the place like, " I think I like this dance just as much!" Or some hilarity.

Do with this Hc what you will then uwu

karkakejrkjlaekjrakej this is grand!!! I love Sengen so much! Since I've been fiddling around with dancing fics a lot lately, I've decided to be a bit experimental with this dabble! I hope you like it :D

Gen was full of surprises. He said the most unexpected things to Senku just to see him blush. He sang little songs whenever he worked, and he was always pulling out little things from his sleeves to present to the various people of Ishigami village.

His dancing was another one of these surprises- uncoordinated ballet moves he did in an open space whenever his mind was racing and he couldn’t focus. They weren’t anything outrageous- simple flutters and twirls with the occasional leg raise- but each one was so graceful and lovely Senku found himself leaning into his hands, work forgotten as he watched the mentalist float.

One day, his curiosity won over, and he found himself walking up to Gen while he was in one of those dancing states. Without a word, he offered his hand.

And Gen rejected him.

A hand across his brow while the other held a “Stop” gesture to Senku, his tiptoed away from him quickly, distancing them. Senku blinked, shocked and perhaps a tad hurt.

Then Gen was smiling and Senku realized: Oh. So that’s how it is.

Accepting he was about to make a full of himself, he tried mimicking Gen’s earlier moves, spinning after him as Gen fluttered. He felt like one of those silly top toys, but it worked. Before long he was next to Gen.

Gen did a little twirl, getting ready to leap away when Senku suddenly grabbed him around the waist, pulling him into his chest. Within seconds, Gen was a squealing pile of limbs, feet kicking and hands clutching at Senku’s wrists as he danced his fingers along his stomach and sides. Senku was smiling- he had won.

Still tickling, Senku picked up where they left off, spinning them around the space as he tickled and prodded his torso. Gen could barely stand it, sinking against Senku’s chest as he cackled and wheezed. It was like their own personal music box- the sounds of mirth giving them a sense of rhythm.

Finally, it all came to an end when Gen’s foot caught Senku’s. Body’s tumbled and rolled, and before long Gen was on top of Senku, eyes dancing and cheeks flushed. The scientist smiled sheepishly, shrugging some at being caught. He waited for retaliation.

Instead, Gen’s lips pressed into his, feather soft and sweet.

Which- followed by his ribs getting drilled into, but it was all worth it.

He should ask Gen to dance more often.

Send me a headcanon and I'll write a dabble for it!

#headcanons to dabbles #tickle #tickle dabble #sengen #dr stone #gen asagiri #senku ishigami #fluff #dancing #experimental dabble

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quietwings-fics · 7 months

Text

tight-knit boys (brothers in more than name)

Rating: General Audiences Archive Warning: N/A Fandom: Supernatural Ship: Gen (Gabriel & Lucifer & Michael & Raphael) Additional Tags: Alternate Season/Series 01, Alternate Universe - Human, Human Michael (Supernatural), Human Gabriel (Supernatural), Human Raphael (Supernatural), Human Lucifer (Supernatural), Role Reversal, Siblings, Road Trips, Good Older Sibling Michael (Supernatural), Angst and Humor, Mild Hurt/Comfort Summary:

Finding their Dad is going to involve a lot of driving, and Michael does almost all of it. A snapshot of reverseverse archangels in the car.

“I spy with my li-”

“It’s corn,” Raphael interrupts, “like the last time and the time before that and the-

“Time before that!” Gabriel finishes for him. “Because there’s been nothing for the past three states except for corn!” He flops against the car door on his side. Michael absently makes sure the doors are all locked, even though he never starts driving without checking at least three times, the same way he looks over all of his siblings to see that they’ve put their seatbelts on.

“It hasn’t been states,” Michael tells his little brother. “We’re haven’t left Iowa yet.”

“It’s been hours!”

“Two hours.”

“Can’t you go faster?” Michael rolls his eyes, but he’s used to this. Gabriel might have been able to keep his mouth shut when Dad was driving them across the country, but he’d always gotten squirmy by the time he’d been locked in for an hour. Michael doesn’t mind hearing him complain. If nothing else, it passes the time.

“I’m going 70,” he says. He’d been going slower until thirty minutes ago when the car he’d been matching had pulled off onto an exit and left them alone on the open road. The road is smooth enough under his tires that Raphael can work in the backseat without any trouble. Michael peeks at him in the rearview mirror. His head is bent over one of the newspapers he picked up before they left the last motel. Michael can catch glimpses of his red marker running through different sections.

His hair is getting longer.

Maybe, more accurately, Michael has allowed it to get longer. He hasn’t offered to cut it because he knows Raphael would say yes and refuse to meet his eyes for the next hour when he was done.

He was happier with it growing out, and if their father would have thoughts about that, well… They’d have to find him first to know.

And they were no closer to that then when they started. Michael will admit that to himself, even if he’ll never tell his siblings about it.

“I spy-“ Raphael starts, the first time Michael’s heard him initiate the game this trip.

“Corn,” Gabriel grumbles.

“No,” Raphael says, and if Michael chances another look back, he can confirm that the note he can hear in his voice is a smirk. Gabriel sits up straighter and peers out the window.

“The road?” Raphael shakes his head, letting a sheet of newspaper slide down into the footwell when he’s done with it. “A bird? The sky? …A billboard?”

Lucifer takes that moment to snore, loudly. Michael resists the urge to poke him in the side and startle him awake. As funny as it might be to watch his brother flail and snort as he drags himself up to consciousness, Lucifer needs the rest. He barely sleeps when Michael isn’t driving, but deep down, he’s still the little kid who conked out at the first notes of a Rolling Stones album. Michael knows how to take care of him, even with their years apart existing as a wound they still haven’t completely stitched up.

He reaches across the bench to adjust the blanket he’d draped over Lucifer at the last rest stop. He draws it up to Lucifer’s collar. Sunlight dusts across his whole body, but the tint of the window will keep him from getting burnt if they drive for longer. One of his legs is scrunched up against the seat while the other sprawls onto the floor among half-empty water bottles. He’s got his arms and face smushed up between the door and the glass of the window in a way that’s going to leave him sore when he wakes up, but there aren’t any comfortable ways to sleep in the truck. At least, not with Raphael right behind him blocking his seat from tilting back too far.

Gabriel groans. “You can’t pick him!”

“I can see him,” Raphael argues. Lucifer snores again, unbothered by the bickering he’s the cause of. Michael adjusts his grip on the wheel and smacks his own cheek a few times to wake his brain back up. He should have drunk more coffee that morning. Raphael got to it first. He tries his best to keep his eyes on the road, but between the wavering illusions of false water scattered across the asphalt and the sound of his siblings sniping at each other in his ear, its difficult to keep himself on track. He has no idea how he used to manage this years back when he didn’t have the experience he does now. Dad didn’t let him take the cross-country hauls until he was eighteen.

Eighteen. Michael remembers being eighteen. He had his whole life ahead of him.

He’s twenty-six now. Raphael and Gabriel make him feel old.

He told Lucifer that once, and Lucifer looked at him like he was crazy. He’ll understand in four years. He’ll regret his wasted youth. Or not. Michael’s scattered thoughts briefly coalesce into something more bitter. Lucifer didn’t seem to regret anything he ever did, no matter how much the rest of them got hurt.

“Anything, or anyone, in the car is off-limits. That’s the whole point.” Michael shakes his head and focuses back in on the argument between his youngest brothers. I Spy is the most common game that’s been played in this truck, followed closely by 21 questions (Lucifer is reigning champion of that one) and everyone’s favorite, I Just Saw A Cow.“Pick something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know! Not Lucifer and not the corn.” Raphael glances out the window just in time to see what Michael swerves in the lane to avoid.

“There’s some roadkill.”

“Your face looks like roadkill,” Gabriel mutters. Raphael glares at him.

“I don’t have to play with you.” All of a sudden, Michael is sixteen again, and holding back a very irate Gabriel from trying to grab Raphael while Lucifer watched with amusement from the passenger seat and their father very pointedly didn’t interfere. Luckily, feuding ten year olds hadn’t been much of a problem to handle for a boy who’d been going on hunts for the past seven years. They might be older, but they still fight the same.

“Calm down, you two,” Michael says in the sternest voice he can manage. He likes to think he sounds like their father. It never seems to have the same effect, though.

“Or what, you’ll turn this car around?” Raphael huffs a tiny laugh at his brother’s words. Michael taps the steering wheel.

“I have plenty of gas, Gabriel. I can survive driving back through farmland for a few hours. Can you?”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Raphael, have you found any hunts yet?” Michael asks. Raphael kicks another sheet into the footwell.

“Nothing substantial.” With that, Michael smiles at Gabriel in the rearview mirror. His little brother scowls at him, but he settles back down against the car door.

Finally, peace and the thrum of a familiar tape. Michael breathes easy.

At least until Lucifer starts whimpering in his sleep.

Michael nearly swerves into the next lane. That sound is like a gunshot, pure pain and fear strangled out of his brother’s throat. Michael’s been tuned into it since Lucifer was a baby in his arms, and it makes his whole body go cold before he can pull the car back into the right lane and steady his driving out. A quick look in the backseat lets him know that Gabriel — who is not wearing his seatbelt like he should be — took that as an excuse to fall all the way across the seat until his head was in Raphael’s lap, cushioned by newspaper. Raphael doesn’t seem like he’s going to push him away.

Lucifer whimpers again. Michael’s hand shoots out across the bench to shake him awake.

“Lucifer,” he says gently. “Lucifer, shh. You’re alright, brother.”

“Maybe it’s just a wet dream,” Gabriel tries to joke, but his voice is small. He knows what this is. They all do. Michael is dreading what will happen when Lucifer’s eyes open, but he can’t leave his brother trapped in his own dreams. He shakes Lucifer again as the car wobbles to the right of the lane, enough for the wheels to bump along the side loudly and push Michael to fix it.

“Or a nightmare,” Raphael says, as quiet as his brother. He knows that Lucifer has always had his nightmares in dead silence, that fact alone betraying what was happening to him. Lucifer would toss and sniff and grunt in his sleep all unless he was having a bad dream, and then he was like a corpse, cold and still.

Michael shakes him again, and this time, Lucifer jolts and flinches away from Michael’s touch, his hands raising to protect himself from a blow that doesn’t come.

(Michael lifts his hand away, and Lucifer isn’t in the passenger seat but on the ground, eye already bruising and hands up to hide behind, Michael’s knuckles aching from the punch that he already regrets and won’t get a chance to apologize for before Lucifer tears himself out of their lives for years.

All Michael ever asked was for him to stay. Why did he have to fight so hard?

Why did Michael have to fight back?)

“It’s alright,” Michael soothes as the sound of Lucifer’s rapid breathing fills the car. Lucifer squeezes his eyes shut and curls in on himself. He’s trembling, and he would hate that Michael notices that. Once upon a time, it was him being a stubborn kid who wanted to stay up watching horror movies without his older brother bothering him. Then, him in the backseat, furiously scrubbing away tears because he thought that this time, Michael and Dad wouldn’t be coming back. Now, he doesn’t even want to tell Michael when he’s hurt, only take care of all his wounds himself. “What did you see?” Nothing makes Michael’s stomach twist the way that Lucifer’s visions do. They’re wrong in every way that Michael understands. Hunters aren’t supposed to be able to see the future or move things around with their mind when they’re scared or angry enough. If someone else ever found out…

Michael’s known how to hold a gun right since he was nine. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do to keep Lucifer safe, even if his brother doesn’t believe that.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He’s sure Lucifer is aiming for standoffish and short, but he just sounds shaken. If Michael wasn’t driving, if Lucifer was someone who could still let him do it, he’d wrap his brother up in a hug and hold on tight until he wasn’t scared anymore.

“You didn’t see someone die again, did-“ Gabriel starts.

“I said, I don’t want to talk about it!” Lucifer snaps, managing to reach something like anger this time but just barely. Gabriel can’t tell the difference like Michael can. He winces and shuts up, turning his head to press his face against Raphael’s stomach. Raphael pats his head automatically. They fit together so well, no one would ever guess they were only half-siblings by blood. Then again, they’ve never really known a world where they weren’t together, not that Michael knows of. They were so little when Dad picked them up. Michael remembers them barely being at his knees.

Lucifer scrubs at his face. He looks up out the window.

“How long was I out?” he asks, taming the tremor in his voice until it’s almost non-existent. “Why is there still corn?”

“You were only asleep for ten minutes,” Raphael lies, the reason why evident in the muffled sound of Gabriel giggling. Apart, they’re fantastic liars. Together, one of them always gives the game away. Lucifer swings his head around to narrow his eyes at them before checking the truck’s internal clock. It’s only fast by about seven minutes. Lucifer huffs and stretches. Michael sees him wince when he pulls his arm the wrong way too quickly, probably yanking on that scar he got during his first hunt. It’s never stopped hurting him.

Lucifer kicks the volume of the cassette deck up a bit. He lets his eyes slide shut as he leans back in his seat, breathing in deeply. He’d almost look like he’s over whatever he saw, but his hand is wrapped so tightly around his own wrist that his knuckles have gone white. His nails dig into his skin, leaving little pink crescents whenever he relaxes them. Michael frowns, but he can’t say anything.

It isn’t until hours later, with the sun a bleeding scratch across the horizon and darkness falling over their sleeping siblings in the backseat, that Lucifer speaks up about it at all. Michael’s feet are almost numb, and his eyes and neck ache. They only stopped for lunch, dinner, and a bathroom break in the woods (that, as usual, devolved into snickering and claims of ‘bet I can shoot farther than you.’ His little brothers were gross. Besides, they could never beat his record.) Michael could have handed the wheel over to Lucifer at any time. He probably should have. He grips the wheel tighter and keeps them on the right road forward.

“You think we’re going to find him?” Lucifer asks. He’s leaning forward against the dashboard, at the edge of his seat with his belt dangling off unused to the side. Michael feels the urge to push him back and buckle him in. The dying sunlight barely lights his face, leaving deep shadows around his eyes that make Michael uncomfortable. He flicks on his headlights. That brightens Lucifer up and scares away the dark red pallor across his features.

“We will,” Michael says, with utmost certainty. “Dad’s out there.”

Lucifer shifts awkwardly. “Right,” he says. He pauses. “I meant the demon.” Michael turns his face to hide the way his mouth twists and only looks back when he’s got his expression back under control.

“We’ll find it, too,” Michael says, “and kill it.” Lucifer digs his nails in against his elbow. “Why?”

“Nothing,” Lucifer says, in a voice that has always meant the exact opposite.

“Lu,” Michael warns. Lucifer curls in on himself more.

“The other… people like me. They get visits from him- from it in their dreams.” Michael’s heart stops. He forces himself to breathe. “It just talks. I know not to listen to what it’s saying, Michael. I’m not stupid.” That last bit comes out sharp, too defensive, like he really thinks Michael would believe he would trust a demon.

“…What does it say?” Lucifer hides his face in his arms and doesn’t respond. Michael swallows.

“You’re going to kill it, right?” Lucifer says.

He sounds small and scared, and Michael can’t do anything else but promise him, “Yes. I’ll give you its head on a platter if you want.” Lucifer breathes out a shaky laugh. When he raises his head again, he keeps it turned away like Michael won’t recognize him wiping his eyes.

There’s a horrible part of him that thinks of Dad’s theories about Lucifer, the ones all scribbled down into his journal that Michael told the rest of them he’d lost. The entries where special turned to cursed, where disobedience and teenage snark became signs of something terrible growing inside his son, where Michael’s actions were dissected down to bone every time he sided with Lucifer. Michael trusts every other scrap of knowledge in that journal. He puts his life, the life of his little siblings, in the hands of the information their Dad gathered over the years.

But he can’t be right about Lucifer. He just can’t be.

Michael tentatively reaches over and touches Lucifer’s shoulder. Lucifer jumps a little in surprise, but when Michael doesn’t pull back, he relaxes again. Accepts it. Michael presses his thumb into his brother’s shoulder, rubbing up to the corner of it that once used to be small and bony and is now layered well under muscle, and then he lets go again. It’s not much, but the way Lucifer stares at him, wide-eyed, confused, like he would beg for more if his pride would let him, before he swallows all of that down and faces forward again, makes Michael’s chest ache.

“Do you want to drive?” Michael asks.

(Enjoyed it? Any interaction is welcomed. You can even support me on Ko-Fi <3)

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losthavenart · 6 months

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Game Development

So I'm coming off developing one game (Abbadon) which I'll be sending to the manufacturer to get printed either over the weekend or early next week. I've dived right into dabbling a bit with another idea and jumping full on into a solo journaling idea. Stone Saga is a game where you play as a dwarf taking a Sacred Flame to a reclaimed dwarf holding to light their furnace and bless them with the ancestors.

I've done some drawings, got character gen figured out as well as how you generate your prompts and roll to resolve hazards. I've even played around with the book cover.

#ttrpg #ttrpgs #indie ttrpg #ttrpg design #ttrpg stuff #ttrpg community #ttrpg art #dwarves

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drawnaghht · 11 months

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Neo Edo, Ki-Stone and Kaikishi connections

another little wayward thought i've kept pushing back in my head to post about it another time: the way the connection between both our younger Usagi and the Ki-stone is pictured and then the original, older Usagi, how these things connect in the story and wordl. (Fanramble)

when Usagi first touches the Ki-Stone, he describes it as "like if you had a friend, who was lighting " and seems to be visibly fine after the Ki-stone pushes him away from the connection (or it seems more like; he's so taken aback to see Miyamoto Usagi in the same space as him, he just "wakes himself up from it" but doesn't look worser than usual).

But you'll notice that 1) his pursuers (newfound friends) + Spot are all ALSO lying on the ground, smoking from being zapped by the Ki-stone, and 2) Tetsujin who was touching Usagi on his shoulder to stop him is "not a ghost" - "transmuted into another plane of existence" - so basically we can say that as a kindness, the Ki-stone "transmuted" him instead of just killing him. So we can assume that usually touching the Ki-stone either kills or zaps the person.

But Usagi is basically fine, save for maybe feeling a bit hurt by the push-back onto the temple floor. Most of the next times he connects to the Ki-Stone again, it's by his yo-yo. Did the Ki-Stone, recognizing Usagi as a familiar rabbit, or even recognizing him as Miyamoto Usagi's descendany, know he would need this yoyo? Did she know Usagi could solve the 1000-year old problem delayed by Usagi's ancestor by killing the shogun and trapping all spirit-farers?

We also see in ep 6 "Nobody likes A Ninja", the ninja trying to list the Ki-Stone get zapped back as well. Side-note: we don't know if they just get a bit "burnt" like the main cast in ep 1, or if they're actually dead here after.

Whatever the case, the Ki-stone can't be touched directly without harm to the physical person. The way the fake scroll bait is used by the Neko Ninja also makes me think that Tetsujin, knowing that Fuwa would want to steal it, also made the scroll in a way he could punish the Neko Ninja a little, but without killing them (i know it's maybe not that important since they're technically enemies, but Tetsujin's whole outfit makes me thing that he'd approach it peacefull, or more with mischief that lethal harm in mind.)

In the same ep, Tetsujin also repeats the "Do not Touch the Ki-Stone" rule, also explaining why (magnetic pull of the earth - sidenote: that's why u can also see this magnets idea in how people in Neo Edo carry their weapons - magnets are everywhere in Neo Edo and that's how the cars and some of the appliances work for example)

As the series goes on, we see Usagi get gradually worser reactions after each time he has touched the Ki-stone. In ep 5, trapping Hakai, we see him step back and yell in pain, holding his eyes closed and covering them, staged in a way that makes it seem both the info and physical experience were tougher to experience. Trapping Sakuran in ep 6, he stands in shock and simply rolls down from not being able to stand on his own anymiore, lying down for a while when Tetsujin and Spot approach him. He says "That hurts a little more every time." At the end of the season, once he's seen the final scene with his ancestor, he holds his head again, but in slightly less pain. This could be explained how the whole city saw the scene and is "sharing the brainload", as we see everyone from Gen to the city police rubbing their heads in shock. Ironically, the only person to recover quickly from this is Lord Kogane (for humor, but this scene was genuinely funny with how it's a comment about history changing in a 1000 years)..

Anyway, this all to say that it's an interesting internal consistency within the show world x3 Usagi is the only one who survives touching the Ki-Stone, presumably bc of his connection to Miyamoto Usagi, who was able to also survive connecting to the stone and even cut it thanks to Willow Branch, his own personal weapon. I had a theory going in my head a while back that perhaps, despite him not having a legacy left after the murder of the fake shogun, what if the Ki-Stone decided to "save" Miyamoto Usagi somewhere? I probably forgot to post on it, but that first scene with Usagi and Usagi together in the white space of the Ki-Stone made me think. the older Usagi "wakes up" in a similar way, as if his spirit has been asleep for a 1000 years. We know he wasn't in the Ki-Stone like the Yokai, bc we see at the end of s1 that he survived that interaction + in s2 that he sent his sword away,.. but what if he had to send it for safe-keeping with his family not just because he was sure he would die and be captured, because he knew the sword would be needed later? "Willow Branch is a special sword" as he puts it in the ep 10 flashback. (and more abt this theory another time then)

At the end of the episode, we see that Yuichi connects to the Ki-Stone again, but this time, not to remember and not with his yoyo but to return Omurasaki to the Ki-Stone as it was the piece that his ancestor cut, was passed down instead of a sword, and now sit's on his auntie's Edgewing, at the pommel.

Maybe it was this connection to the Ki-Stone that also saved Usagi the first time? Whether it was the connection itself (having the sword with him, with the stone still spiritual/magical) or the Ki-Stone knowing that the piece was back in the city, and thus choosing Usagi based on it in the first ep. But the stone saw that he needed his own spirit weapong, and so it opened up the vault for Usagi to pick the most suited weapon for him. Again, I wonder how much the Ki-Stone in it's magic/spirit sentience actually foresaw or predicted some of this?

(I also find it interesting that the piece of Ki-Stone attached to Edgewing is named after the national butterfly of Japan, the Sasakia Charonda, or, ō-murasaki " (オオムラサキ - "great purple") - but all that for another time)

Giving the piece back the Ki-Stone throws Usagi back so far that he's actually left unconscious for a longer time, enough for the Ki-Stone to pulse with some sort of energy to close the big energy portal in the sky, go wireless and for his friends to basically finish fighting the rest of the warbotto.

Side-note: Like. he actually looked kinda dead in this scene and while being a longtime cartoon fan I knew it probably wouldn't last long, I was kinda convinced enough just to be like "no way. they're not gonna kill off a main character!" at it haha x3

Now, for the other times that Usagi touches it, he uses the yoyo, which basically seems to act as a conduit between his spirit and the Ki-Stone (which is basically a spirit-energy stone, going by the name), even tho he feels worse each time, he can still endure the memories and connection without bigger harm. Does this mean the other's in his orphan crew also get this ability with their Kaikishi weapons in s2? or is it special to just Usagi's yo-yo? It's also intersting that while both the Ki-Stone and the entire city feature magnet-related features as does the yo-yo (being able to connect to metal, but also spirits), it seems the other weapons do not have this ability. Except maybe Chizu's arrows, which she can change at will. Kitsune's new batlle fans can also disappear at will, matching her personality and skills, but the disappearing "woosh" energy also resembles the Ki-Stone itself, being purple. Gen's new war clubs can change size, but also connect into one big version which he is able to lift with ease, so that could also be a connection to the magnetic theme related to the Ki-Stone. Kinda wish we'd gotten more of the others or to see more of these weapons secondary skills, but alas, 10 eps is what we got.

But would this ability to connect to the Ki-Stone via weapons, mean that the others would also have more backstory and lore to explore if the show went on longer or even just for another season? More of those 2D cutscenes where characters remember or imagine something? What kind of story ideas did the writers and crew have simmering underneath all the stories they had to cut for time?

Also of note: While the rest seem to have standard features + super-natural ones which reflect their users + some hidden ability we don't know about, it might be that the yoyo also has one more secret ability?

Usagi's yoyo can act as a normal yoyo. When lit/glowing, it acts as a magnet and Yuichi can use it creatively in a lot of ways. It's nigh-indestructible, which seems like a feature that would be common to all Kaikishi weapons. It can capture anything magnetic and in episode 3, Possessions, we see it can also capture a yokai in place. Dare Mo, the yokai who takes auntie's appearance to fight Usagi, is surprised to see him sporting a Kaikishi weapon and begs him not to "use [his] weapon's power!"

So that has always made me wonder if there's more to it than what we see later? Because we see with ep 5, capturing Hakai, that if Usagi asks respectfully, the yoyo will "calm" the yokai into not struggling or resisting. It's about Usagi learning to respect and trust his weapon and learn to not jump into a fight all sword-crazy. But also, if it's part of it's spirit we could poetically state that it's about Usagi learning to trust and listen to his own soul as well.

In any case, this "calming" effect of the yoyo seems the most obvious third extra power, but I get the feel like there might more. (again, sorta wish we'd gotten to see more of the rest of the Kaikishi weapon's special powers x3) And then, if the other spirit weapons are not there for capturing yokai + we've already seen their secondary powers, what else could be there?

What's subtly interesting about Usagi's choice in the yo-yo, is that the Ki-Stone seems to have wanted to pick Chizu at first (she's the temple student and in reality an experienced fighter, but also, not being picked is a visual gag here), but then comically turns to Usagi, giving him the spotlight... but also making him react in a way that to me at least speaks that "that stone took his spirit-orb and sent it to the weapon door". We see him pick the yo-yo impulsively, but we also see. So it makes it feel like the Ki-Stone picked him deliberately, as if knowing he'd pick the yo-yo, instead of something sharp that could cut her, since we know that a sword is usually a samurai's spirit (and probably why in this show, Willow Branch was able to cut it at all).

In s2, after saving the city from the Makkine attack with his spirit-samurai form, granted to him by meditating while connected to the Ki-Stone by his yo-yo again, Usagi says that it's probably something he won't be doing again. It almost seems as if this drained all of Usagi's own spirit energy, and then some. The Ki-Stone gave him a boost upwards and he got some heavenly spirit-power to transform into a spirit-suit basically - with Usagi himself in the "heart" of the mech.

Interesting design. (I've made notes about this before). It's really cool! Also cool that it mirrors the end of UY: Senso in this way too. The show's showrunners and other creative staff were such big fans, they put something like this into the story, but it still makes sense internally.

also just because: of COURSE it ends with a bit mech vs kaiju fight!!!