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the-evil-authoress · 4 years

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GX Month Day 5: “Pass The Salt”

No story is perfect. So what is something you wish you could have seen in the story of GX?

Season 4. Season 4 and I have issues. So here is a condensed version of the things that should have happened between the trauma of Dark World and the bullshit of the Darkness plot.

I have a vast headcanon for this series and these prompts are only the tip of the iceberg.

Jaden avoids them after he finally returns from the shitshow of Dark World. They try to reach out, but he straight up disappears to parts unknown. Somehow, Jesse can always find him but even he stops looking after a while. It’s not that they aren’t worried, they are, but they have school and their own trauma to deal with and it’s hard to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.

Jaden falls through the cracks.

Jesse definitely tells North Academy to ‘faen ta deg’ - whatever that means - when the other schools start a ruckus and demand the exchange students be returned to their own campuses. Axel and Jim follow suit and eventually the other schools back off.

Of course Chancellor Shepard tries to put them all in therapy, but how are any of them supposed to even begin explaining what they went through? And who would actually believe them?

It’s Jim’s idea to start the group talks, to give themselves a safe space to just talk about shit and deal with the fallout. They only have one rule: everyone has to share something. It can be big or small, or completely unrelated to Dark World, but they all have to share one thing that’s been bothering them. Even if they end up screaming at each other or crying, that’s okay because the whole point is to express themselves. Even on days where bottled emotions explode, they still come away feeling better or just relieved by the release of a burden.

Jaden continues to avoid them. When the tension between him and Christina finally snaps, Jesse intervenes and Jaden starts crashing in his room. Which is fine, despite ill concealed jealousy; with his newfound ability, Jesse’s gained an appreciation for the absurdly large room - Amber Mammoth can fit comfortably.

Jaden still refuses to talk about Yubel, but it’s not like Jesse can fault the guy when he still hasn’t said anything about the scars on his back.

Slowly, Jaden starts to open up again.

It’s a surprise when Jim shows up to the group talk with Jaden in tow. Honestly, it was bound to happen eventually; Christina just figured it would have been her or Jesse or maybe Syrus doing the dragging. Jaden, for his part, sits with his knees folded against his chest, looking very much like he just wants to leave, but he’s sandwiched between Jim and Axel who aren’t letting him go anywhere.

Good, Christina thinks, trying to curb the lingering bitterness from when Jaden tried to ditch the Academy a couple weeks ago.

Today’s pretty low key, mostly grievances about classwork and graduation. Most of them have aired their dirty laundry from Dark World by now. So when silence falls around the group, more than one pair of eyes linger on Jaden, still hugging his knees, and hasn’t said a word yet.

“I’ve been meaning to apologize.” Alexis breaks the silence, staring somberly at the floor. “Back in that other dimension, I said some horrible things.”

Jaden jerks but no one else is actually looking at him now, too distracted by their confusion. Christina almost missed it, but years of hanging out with the same single person can attune you to even the smallest shift in their demeanor.

“At the time, I was so hurt and confused, but that’s not how I always feel. That resentment was only fleeting.” Alexis looks up, and Jaden stiffens under her gaze. Wait just a damn second- “I’m sorry, Jaden. I didn’t mean any of it.”

“You still believed it...” Christina murmurs in the blissful few seconds of silence before half their circle erupts at what should have been the most obvious epiphany of all time.

“Sarge!” Hassleberry's hands hit the floor with enough force to shake it as he rocks forward in a frantic fervor. “I didn’t mean it either! I don’t hate you! I swear!”

“Yeah, no! It’s like Lexi said, our emotions were all jumbled!” Atticus jumps in, probably half a step away from trying to hug all the bad feelings out of Jaden. “That’s not how we really feel! Come, Chazz, tell him.”

“What? Why do I have to--”

“CHAZZ.”

Chazz flinches under the ire of the other guilty four, curling in on himself with a scowl, and mutters, “Yeah, okay, I’m sorry too. Wasn’t your fault.”

Jaden’s shoulders shake, his face in his knees. Gently, Jim places a hand against his back.

“Jaden...?”

He slowly peeks up from his knee at the soft call of his name, and just that action alone must have been one hell of a feat for him. Prior to recent events, Christina hasn’t seen Jaden cry in years. Now, his tears are on display for everyone.

“Oh, Jaden.” Alexis is the first to bridge the gap while the others reel over the revelation. “I’m so sorry.”

He shudders with a quiet sob but doesn’t resist as she gently wraps him in her arms. Syrus and Hassleberry immediately scramble to latch onto either side of their ‘big bro’, and Atticus drags a reluctant Chazz into the group hug.

“There, there, slacker, let it out.” Chazz winces and awkwardly pats when Jaden finally lets out a particularly loud wail.

“We all love you, Sarge. Ya gotta remember that.”

“You don’t have to be our leader, or smile all the time. Just be you.”

It’s heartbreaking, watching as all of Jaden’s walls crumble and the fragile boy beneath shatter; but all of them are here to help him pick up the pieces.

“So what happened?” Jesse whispers, eyes shining with confusion even as they move forward to join their friends.

“I’m an idiot.” Christina swipes the tears out of her own eyes, mad at herself for not realizing sooner. Jesse even said Jaden seemed like he was afraid of something. All the times he demanded to know what happened after his disappearance and Christina still managed to gloss over a crucial detail that kickstarted this spiral.

“Well, it all worked out in the end,” Jesse murmurs.

“Thanks to you.”

“H-hold on. I’m the reason this mess started in the first place.”

Shaking her head, Christina leans into him as much as her other friends. She’s had enough of the blame game. She knows without a doubt that Jesse played a pivotal role in all of this and will continue to do so for better or worse.

The connections between them are tangled as fuck after all.

"Faen ta deg" - literally "devil take you", basically the same as "go to hell" with the vulgarity of a "fuck you". Day 4 of little to no sleep, Jaden was still missing, and Jesse was straight up DONE with the bullshit. Foster/Ichinose laughed his ass off.

#gxmonth2020 #gx season 4 #gx headcanons #jaden yuki #judai yuki #jesse anderson #johan andersen #alexis rhodes #asuka tenjoin #tyranno hassleberry #tyranno kenzan #atticus rhodes #fubuki tenjoin #chazz princeton #jun manjoume #gx #ygo gx #yugioh gx

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zechleton · 4 years

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The Outer Worlds: Fascinating but Flawed

I don’t play a ton of games. I spend a lot of time playing games, and probably even more time watching professionals play them, but I play a lot of different games. That also means I’ve never really written a ton about single player gaming, least of all reviews.

But when I saw The Outer Worlds on Jim Sterling’s Youtube channel, and then found out it was included in Microsofts’ PC Game Pass… and then found out that that was having a £1 for the first month trial, I had to give it a go.

And then, when I completed it (even rarer still), I had to write about it.

Here, it seemed was a smart, spiritual successor to the (in my eyes overrated, but I get why) legendary Fallout: New Vegas. I loved Fallout 4, but could never really get into the less action-packed, hideously ugly older games, but I digress.

Better yet, TOW looked like a satirical takedown of late capitalism, which is even more up my alley. TOW delivered on this front, to an extent. The critique is very frontloaded into the now infamous early quest, and it is a little on-the-nose, but this kind of political discussion is something I’d love to see more of in games. Sadly, this aspect of the game somehow manages to be both heavy-handed and easily-ignored after that. It’s there, pretty much constantly, reminding you how shitty capitalism is, but it never really adds much to the game after the first hour or so. Apart from a few notable moments, such as a town being billed for damage to company property in the wake of a worker’s suicide, the social commentary is mostly set dressing.

The game itself is fine. The story was good, the setting is interesting and relatively well fleshed-out, and I enjoyed most of what the main quest had to offer. There are issues, though. The combat, while relatively smooth and satisfying in terms of gunplay, is ruined by the game’s insistence on forcing you into playing as if it’s a sort of single player squad based shooter. So much of the actual game play is designed around having companions fight with you, but doing so felt very unsatisfying and un-interactive. You can use their special abilities once or twice a fight, but that’s it. I found that mine usually “fainted” very quickly, leaving me to clean up a bunch of lightly damaged enemies by myself.

Maybe I was supposed to invest more in upgrading my buddies, but that’s not how I want to play game like this, and I felt punished for it. Worse, so many of the perk points push you in this direction, despite the fact that companions already have their own perk trees. Worse still, almost all of the perks, both yours and your companions’ are extremely uninteresting, and many of them are just straight up bad. I’m a fan of perks and talents in games when done right. They make each level-up feel important and exciting, much more than simply adding another point in stealth or ranged weapons does. But when they’re as dull as the ones in TOW, it makes the whole system feel like it was just put there because games like this always have them. The fact that this is all happening in a game with such a great history of delivering on this front makes it all the more disappointing.

Speaking of Obsidian’s lineage, the lack of weapon diversity was a huge problem for me. I liked the tinkering system, but it meant I basically stuck with the same four guns for most of the game’s relatively short duration. The fact that none of the science weapons (TOW’s version of legendary weapons) fit the way I wanted to play was particularly frustrating, given how Bethesda did this with Fallout 4. I ended up not using a single one of the science weapons in my first playthrough, and I have no urge to play again.

That last point is perhaps the most damning thing I can say about TOW. With Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, I’m always excited to try out new play styles, even if they don’t end up finishing the story with them. With TOW, all the decisions that make repeated play interesting in other games are stripped away. The perks are so generic, and you are pushed so hard into playing with companions, that I have zero interest in replaying the game, except maybe to try out a melee build.

One thing I haven’t even mentioned yet is the fact that the companions you are essentially forced to play with are not particularly interesting. Parvati, the first one you come across, is probably the strongest of the bunch, as she plays a big part in your first and biggest moral decision. The rest of them are pretty forgettable: there’s the drunk one, the angry one and the amoral mercenary one. I never unlocked the religious one, so hopefully he has a little more going on, but I doubt it.

In the end, I’m left with the feeling that The Outer Worlds is really more like a TellTale game with minimal shooter elements attached than it is a Fallout clone. There is an interesting, fun story here, but the actual game play is functional at best and tedious at worst. It’s a shame, because I love losing myself in this kind of game, and the Space Capitalism is Bad aspects of the game were promising, but they weren’t enough to outshine the mediocre gameplay.

I still enjoyed the game overall, despite how this might seem, but it peaked early. Really early.

#games #gaming #the outer worlds #review #fallout #elder scrolls #roleplaying #roleplay #scifi

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whitewolfbumble · 6 years

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The Fallout - Part Seven (Bucky x Reader)

Summary: You had been a ghost for years, taking down the bad guys from the shadows that had once enslaved you. That is until the Avengers finally caught up with you and yet again your life changed. But your past won’t stay dead and everything starts to shift when a familiar face joins the ranks: Bucky Barnes. He may not remember you, but you certainly remember him.

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Warnings: Slow burn, language, claustrophobic-ness,

Word Count: About 5k

A/N: And down we go! Some more bits of You/Bucky origin info here. Please let me know what you think lovelies!!

MY MASTERLIST // THE FALLOUT MASTERLIST // PART SIX

The tunnel was intensely musty, completely pitch black, and uneven in all respects. And running top speed through it was a fucking challenge here. You might not be as “super” of a super soldier as the two men you were running towards, but after your years with Hydra you doubted you would pass a drug test.

But you still weren’t a bat. And navigating this blind was disorientating. You did have a small disk-shaped light strapped to your shoulder to somewhat guide you, but with your speed and the sweat in your eyes, it was not enough to spare you a lot of cuts and bruises. Coupled with the fact that you were going so fast and jostling so much, you basically saw what was in front of you only as you were running passed it.

Dodging under a low beam, you raced forward, eyes only half on the terrain and mostly on spotting any traps laid out for you. This one went right to the base so it would be stupid not to set something.

Unless they wanted you there.

You grunted, bring your knees up swiftly towards your chest for a moment as you jumped, trying not to fall as the floor suddenly dropped down a couple feet. You landed- not gracefully by any stretch- without breaking anything though, so win.

Suddenly you skidded roughly to a stop, one leg low in front of you and one bent, hands on the ground bracing yourself. Up ahead there was light. You checked your tracker and saw you were almost there, just another small stretch after a sharp turn. That was what you were seeing ahead of you now.

Okay, get your head in the game here.

Far too slowly for your liking, you walked forward, eyes darting over every inch of the murky, dusty space. It gave you time to calm your panting breath down somewhat.

As you reached the sharp turn you crouched low and looked cautiously around the corner, just the slimmest sliver of your profile visible around the corner. If anyone was there, they would be expecting someone to appear at a normal height, not so far down. It would give them pause before shooting.

But the space was empty. Just another dirty, dusty hallway. So you kept walking, small machine gun out and ready to fire.

You walked like this for some time, heading deeper and deeper until you were at the end of the tunnel and at the base proper. Stopping by the large metal door leading to an empty foyer type room, you pulled up the schematics you had of this base before putting a hand up to the door.

Patchy at best, it looked like you were on the top of two levels, the bottom being much larger than the top. You took in a steady breath, gun ready with your finger just a hair above the trigger. You slowly opened the door and began your mission.

Steve and Bucky had probably made quick work of this floor, set up and looking like an abandoned office out of the eighties. Nothing was out of place in the oddly empty space: no bullet holes or shells from Bucky’s gun, no slashes in the wall from Steve’s shield. And no bodies or blood. Just dingy floor tiles, off-white peeling walls, and the distinct smell of stale neglect.

Your search of this floor was thorough and as quick as you could make it. No traps to your knowledge, and if you had to escape the same way you came in, you knew the best route to do it fast.

A grimy stairwell with railing and steps slick with moisture lead you down to the next level. This one was quite different. The upper level would have been just mundane offices at some point, but the level below was where the experiments happened.

This base had been used largely for imprisonment and human experimentation. You had been here before and from what you remembered, it wasn’t pretty. You didn’t dwell on that much. It wouldn’t help here, as you only had one memory of one room.

Barred cells lined some hallways, others were lined with thick metal doors, their white-painted exteriors a wet and dingy grey-brown with rusted reddy-brown walls that matched the dried old blood on the tables and chairs within. Age had rotted this place, long forgotten and out of use.

The more hallways you slunk down silently, peering into cells with a laser focus, the more you felt your anxiety creeping up on you. And for you on a mission? That was not typical.

This isn’t right.

You couldn’t place what was out of place in all of this. So you kept moving, as silent as the still air around you.

Eventually after some minutes moving through this base like a ghost, you got to the last room in the whole base. It was the furnace room, a large and a complicated mess of pipes and big towering tanks. Again, nothing there. Just that terrifying sound that silence had when it closed in on you.

You had stopped in your tracks by the far wall behind one of those metal tanks to try and collect your thoughts.

This isn’t right.

Okay, no signs anywhere that Steve and Bucky had even entered this base. You knew they had though, as they had said as much before the comms went out. Everyone got into their respective base.

So what the hell? Had they left after their comms went out? But that didn’t sit right with you. They would’ve signaled somehow, figuring you would dig your way through to the base in a heartbeat after not hearing from them.

This isn’t right.

You had no facts, no visuals, no way of figuring out what happened. All you had was a feeling.

So since that was all you had, that was what you focused on.

Yes, this was a creeping fucking place and the silence was all but comforting, but you had been through dank dangerous places before. It was second nature to you and you knew that you shouldn’t be feeling this way. You had too much practice in these kinds of places.

THIS ISN’T RIGHT.

So what’s wrong with it? The emptiness? The cells? The tables with dead blood crusted onto the straps that once held those poor souls down?…

“Shit,” your voice echoed suddenly and loudly in the dank, dark room. "Fuck!"

No, no, no, no, no, no!

You ran top speed, not caring to be quiet or careful anymore, traps or lurking enemies be damned. You took off as fast as your legs could take back towards a hallway lined with those big metal doors. The ones where countless people were held and tortured, like you had been at one time.

You looked in the first cell, then the second, then again down the whole hallway. Running through to the next section, you did the same, quickly taking in the haunted rooms.

And every room you looked in confirmed what was wrong.

Every room may have had a different setup, layout, door, or purpose, but every room in the whole complex was painted the same colour. A red rusty brown.

You swallowed hard and worked to pull up that single memory you had of Vier Gliedmaßen. You had actually dreamt of it not that long ago, that nightmare being the worst of them.

It was the one that featured Bucky, standing in front of you in a concrete-lined cell, with a small barred door the only way out. On the other side of that door were eyes watching, notes scribbled on their notepads as you screamed for help. Not for them to help you exactly, but for Bucky too. Though he never did.

He was hurting you, holding you there while you screamed to be let go, to go back home. But you also didn’t want to leave the cell. You didn’t want to face them again. Impossibly they were far worse than Bucky was.

You didn’t know his real name then, just called him Soldier like they did. Calling Bucky the fake name he had given you always made him hurt you more. You figured he probably killed the man whose name he stole.

You eventually made a name for all of them, the soldiers that came to hurt you again and again. But it wasn’t them- the soldiers- that did it; it was Hydra. They were the ones you hated. They were the ones who did this. And you would rather stay in that cell with the soldiers than face the horrors that they did to you in the name of experimentation. Or the horrors that they made you inflict on others.

The cell they held you in was wet, dank, and concrete. It was painted green, making your bruised, bloodied, and beaten skin look sickly, and Bucky look like some monster, with shadows dancing terrifyingly across his face.

But not a rusted red-brown.

Your memories, however compartmentalized to stay sane, were intact.

They rarely wiped your mind, needing your…creativity in the field, along with the ominous threats and repercussions over the years to have the needed weight. They just pumped you full of something to set you loose, or keep you docile, or keep you in agony and begging them for some relief before it started all over again. Day after day. Decade after decade.

You remembered them calling this place “Vier Gliedmaßen”, the name sticking to your mind as you heard it a few times through the years, conjuring up visions of that cell and that terror. You remembered the overwhelming dirt smell. The dank water pooling on the floor under your bare feet. There was no light beyond the artificial light that patchily lit everything.

You knew the base must be underground, so naturally it had to be this one. Right?

You mentally ran through the other bases and their descriptions from the team. The mountainside base was huge and airy, big enough to easily fit the Hulk, with every room broad, no cells at all, just large rooms of weapons and air support vehicles.

The tech base was one floor, no lower level at all, made of glass and steel. It was half underground but half above. The whole base, start to finish had windows on the upper half of the rooms. They could have updated it? But unlikely. Tech development was never held in the same spot as experimentation as they were resolute to keep it under strict lock and key. You had never been in a tech base while under Hydra’s influence. They wouldn’t have had you or anyone like you near a base like that.

The last base was the one you had been to with Steve and Bucky originally, and nothing there rung a bell at all. It was all above ground, besides the power generator in the basement.

Unless that wasn’t the last base.

Again, you took off running.

“To anyone who can hear, there is another undiscovered base," you said, stomach dropping more with every step. "Repeat, there is another base we didn’t know about.”

You took the stairs three at a time, running up to the top floor as soon as possible. You needed to figure this out fast.

Shit, shit, shit, shit!

“Bucky, Steve… I’ll find you," you practically shouted into the comm. "I will fucking find you. And good luck to anyone listening in that gets in my fucking way!”

If Hydra had captured them and were listening in, they would know you were on your way now.

Good.

You wanted them to know you were coming. You would kill the lot of them before they realized, and you wanted them to know it was you that sliced them open. And if they so much as touched Steve or Bucky it would be so much worse.

“F.R.I.D.A.Y., ” you snapped, barely registering the blur of the base as you ran through it. "Tell me you’re still here,

A little light lit up on the wristband. “Here for you, Y/N.”

“Tell me you know where the team is.”

“No, Y/N.”

“Fine,” you breathed heavy, running down to a corridor that held the most exits into the tunnels. “Tell me you at least can still see their vitals."

Your small screen lit up, but the blinking green lights were gone, just grey blinking circles where they had once been. “I can’t seem to find them, Y/N. They’ve vanished.”

“Even Tony?”

“I can’t connect with him.”

“Okay, shit,” you said, boots screeching loudly to a halt as you reached your destination. “The maps of the tunnels, I still have them?”

A map of the tunnels appeared on your wristband. “If there was a base, somewhere in a similar size to the four different Vier Gliedmaßen, where are possibilities within the tunnels?”

“There are four hundred and sixty-four possibilities.”

You took a furious breath in through your nose before strapping your gun back to your thigh holster in favour of unsheathing a knife from the back of your belt. You began turning it and playing with it absently, focusing your frantic energy as best you could.

“Okay, next question, what tunnel leads down the farthest into the ground, that has a dead end?”

“There is one," Finally some decent news. "And an entrance to it is down this hallway, third door to your left, and is the second exit on your left.”

You bolted immediately, kicking in the door, a terribly loud clang echoing everywhere.

“Chances that something base sized could be under it?”

“It’s definitely possible, Y/N.” But not guaranteed.

You reached the door, adrenalin begging you to keep up the pace but you stopped for a moment. Pulling up the map, it did not look like a fun ride. Some sections were almost a straight drop down and incredibly narrow.

“Y/N, I will lose contact with you partially down the tunnel. It’s too deep for me to reach you.”

“Understood,” you said tersely. Fuck Tony and his tech right now. Your heart briefly constricted as you made a promise that you, he, and everyone else on the Team would live for you to tell him that in person.

Then down into the black again you went, praying your hunch was right.

_______

Three kilometres in you hit a first narrow patch. The tunnel had been on a steady decline but it suddenly angled down, the walls getting incredibly close together. It was completely black besides the little shoulder light that bumped and moved with you, causing your focus to be hard to keep. The air itself was dead, stale and it felt like you were breathing in not oxygen but exclusively dust and dirt. Your lungs felt heavy with the weight of it, making this all the more unbearably stifling.

Squeezing through and letting gravity do its part, you let your body fall through, only slight bracing yourself with your hands and feet against the walls. Rock and more dust flew at you, entering your airways and pelleting your face. You wanted speed over safety here though so you kept it up.

Depending on who specifically had taken Steve and Bucky, Hydra could do a lot of damage in the time since you heard from them. The cuts and scraps that riddled you would be nothing compared to that, so you refused to stop.

You hit bottom only making it a few more feet on the rocky ground before you reached another steep decline. This was far more narrow.

“F.R.I.D.A.Y.?”

No response.

You would have to be the sole judge on if you fit through. But honestly, this was the only option. In your mind, despite the incredibly huge possibility this was wrong, to you this was somehow the only way to save them.

Tony had mapped out tunnel after tunnel, but this one wasn’t on the radar. It led nowhere, and they were only looking for exits or tunnels leading to the bases at the time.

In the black, you mentally braced yourself for this.

It would not do much with the tunnel walls so close to your body to get claustrophobic now. You didn’t think of the unknown shrinking space below you or the untold tons of dirt and rock above your head.

Far deeper than six feet under, you thought before shutting that down and focusing.

You got into the best position you could to try and see down through the narrow passageway angling down below you. It looks like it was narrowest at the opening, only a few metres until it opened up, if only slightly.

This better be fucking stable enough.

You shimmied yourself into the opening and began your descent further into the darkness. Struggle was an understatement. You felt the walls pushing your breath back into your mouth, feeling the unrelenting pressure of the dirt covering you on every single inch of skin. You could only move your hands and feet, while your legs and torso were pressed flush against the wall, like toothpaste in the tube.

As your hips hit hard against the narrow passage, you tried to force yourself through with your severely limited movement.

With your fucking weapons strapped to your legs and body, this was not going to work. You contorted yourself to try and get a hand down to your hips. Your fingers fumbled in the darkness for a minute before you heard a small click. Your weapons belt that hung loosely around your hips was free.

But the guns at your thighs were in the way and would have to go too.

I better get these back.

You forced your hand painfully down your body, fingers only barely able to touch the clip of your gun holster. You tried and tried to force it down further but it wouldn’t budge.

This wasn’t going to be the end. You were going to do this, find them, and get out a different way. You only had to get through this tunnel.

After minutes your nail hit the clip in the right spot, loosening the holster immediately. After moving your hand over to the other thigh, you managed to get the other one undone in half the time. It hung in place, but loose. With the guns on your side able to move, you have the space to squirm your hips through. As you shimmied further, rocks and roots cutting into your sides, your now loose weapons and straps moved up as you moved down. They clung around your neck and chest as you moved, unable to get past your shoulders.

Feeling with your feet braced on the wall on the way down, you felt the cavern open up, the walls widening, leaving you dangling above an unknown length of space.

Your breathing was contracted by heat and dirt and effort, and you tried to think it through. If there was a large opening or cavern below you, it wouldn’t be that big. You hadn’t seen anything on the map. So again you continued, jaw set painfully hard in determination.

The sound of crumbling dirt and stone was your first clue that this was going to happen fast.

Suddenly the feeling of being constricted finally ended, and immediately relief turned into overwhelming nausea as your body in a split second was falling fast through a wider tunnel.

Quickly you picked up speed, body slamming and bumping and scraping against the sides like this was one big slip-and-slide tube.

As you slid down feet first, you were tossed and slammed against the sides of this slide. Your light was like a strobe light in the dark, being turned on and off, illuminating the sudden curving jutting walls that you couldn’t avoid. The sudden flashes were disorienting and adding to the chaos until the edge of a rock hit your shoulder, liquid warmth erupting as the light broke against your shoulder and neck. In the darkness you tumbled further, not praying you would survive, but praying that this wasn’t the only way out once you hit bottom.

You held your hands and feet out against the wall, trying to brace yourself, groaning with the effort. You had on your fingerless gloves but that was not enough for the sharp stones to shred your fingers on the way down. At some point, the momentum threw you against a dirt barrier before tumbling further.

What felt like years later you finally hit the bottom, skidding to a stop with a hard, dazing knock to your head against the rough, flat ground.

Blinking silent and slow you looked around, trying to take in your surroundings and instinctively scoping for enemies. You tried to get your breathing under control but from either the effort or pain of almost free-falling, it was hard. You stayed low, breathing hard, hand reaching to the gun at your side that was no longer there with bloodied fingers.

Shit.

You were now in a perpendicular large tunnel declining slightly down towards a dimly glowing light source. This hallway was rounded and completely made of dirt and support beams, with tiny lights periodically placed on the walls. Compared to where you just were, this was deliciously open.

So first things first, that was your way out. Secondly, you had literally no weapons on you anymore. Between unhinging some and fall on the way down, they were gone with no sign of them anywhere.

You had the option to either turn left, up the tunnel to what you figured was an exit out, where you could catch your breath, find your team members, or stock up on weapons. Or you could turn right, down deeper into the supposed base where you had assumed Bucky and Steve were, weaponless and bleeding.

If you left now, you were sure there would be no time. You weren’t sure if it was already too late now. The tunnel could go on for kilometres for all you knew. Nothing about this had any degree of certainty to it at all.

So you chose to save your friends.

Quietly you set off down the side of the tunnel wall, weaponless and alone.

_______

This was it. The smell, the look, the feeling… It hadn’t changed in all these years. Wet, green, and dirty concrete lined everything. Large dark metal doors lead the way to room after room, dingy and empty.

You swallowed down where this mentally took you. The past was coming flooding back in the worst way. You had gone in “mission-mode” after leaving the jet, focusing on your actions and not everything that this was bringing back. You tried to keep that focus.

Until you found it.

Silently you peered out around a corner as you silently exhaled. Six Hydra agents, clad in black, standing still and quiet against the wall in the shadows.

You quelled the flash of panic as you realized what this really was. What this really meant.

You were here, in a Hydra base, who knows how far underground, no backup, no one knowing where you were, and no weapons besides your bloody hands to speak of.

All you knew was that they had designed this plan all for you.

This was all to get you here. They wanted you back, and it was like you were running into their fucking arms.

You could wait alone and tied up for thirteen men to kill you in the comfort of the Tower, sure. But walking back into Hydra’s doors was not what you wanted. You hadn’t fully considered what this meant until now.

If they caught you, they would never let you go.

You would be their plaything for the rest of your unending life: frozen until they needed you, drugged until you complied, tortured until you broke. At the end, you had come up with a way to block them for triggering you, but they could wipe you and start again, couldn’t they? Start all over from scratch?

You would be exactly what you were all over again, what they made you. The Siren. The unhinged torturer for Hydra, insane and unstoppable. You would do again everything you had done- torture, kill, drive people mad, ruin countless innocent lives and whole governments.

I’d be their Siren again, you thought with eyes wide and holding your breath.

And there would be nothing that you could do to stop it if they caught you.

You pressed your back flush against the wall as hard as you could, trying to ground yourself in what this actually was about.

This wasn’t about you.

Because if you didn’t keep going, it wouldn’t be you but Bucky falling back in their hands. It wouldn't be you turning into the Siren but Bucky turning into the Winter Soldier instead.

You would’ve failed him. Like you had all of those years. You remembered the question he kept asking you when you first met and how you had failed him then too.

So the choice was run back to Hydra or sacrifice Bucky to them.

Immediately the hair on the back of your neck rose, a shudder running through you. That would never happen while you still had breath to fight. You would never let them take him back.

On that courage of that thought you stood, silently stepping around the corner towards those men.

________

PART EIGHT

________

If you liked this part please let me know somehow! A like or reblog or recommending it or a message! I’d love to know that you’re out there reading this! Thanks loves!

Tags: @seninjakitey @thetimidsarcasticcat @dontpanc @hawkspriing @kanekibooty @elizabeth-rose771 @methefandompanda @bookluver01

#bucky barnes #bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky fanfic #bucky fanfiction #marvel fanfic #marvel fanficion #avengers #winter soldier #the fallout #the fallout part seven

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acequeenking · 7 years

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Thoughts on the Andromeda Crew

I've done two more missions in ME:A, one on Voeld and one on Havarl. Thoughts on the crew thus far below the cut:

CREW

At this point in the game, it's become clear that your crew (and the Andromeda initiative as a whole) might have had good reasons to flee the Milky Way galaxy. Besides the incoming, machine-orchestrated apocalypse, I mean. None of these guys quite “belong” in their home cultures, and all of them are misfits to some degree or another.I like that, and how, in many ways, these aren't carbon copies of Tali/Garrus/etc. It's a risk, but I think it pays off. Mostly. Liam is super-emotional, and at times this can make him unprofessional. He loves a lot, definitively an extrovert. Liam is basically the “Deanna Troi”, less in terms of psychological well-being, but more in terms of being the peacemaker of the Andromeda crew. Liam is consistently the one who who worries about making sure everyone gets along, who wants to bond not only with the milky way crew but goes out of his way to bring in Jaal as well. Not only does Liam reject our ideal of toxic masculinity, but he actually takes on a very traditionally feminine role in the group. No wonder he didn't exactly fit in in a police force made up of men like Harkin. Disaster response is closer to what his calling is, but I still think it’s wrong. Honestly, I think Liam would make a great teacher or social services provider; he cares, sometimes too much, but he cares. I also like how the game does point out this is both a positive trait and a negative one; his over-kill on the kett at Habitat 7, his arguments with Cora. It adds balance to his character. My one question: Liam, what is up with those media recommendations on your emails? It must take you a while to set those up and with everything going wrong you'd honestly think he'd focus on something greater than titles of books relating to community.

Cora, like Liam, is a rejection of traditional gender roles. She's clinical, precise, but also pig-headed. She has an almost masculine amount of confidence; she calls it how she sees it, and that's...it. Yet at the same time she has a lot of reverence for the female-coded people in her life; the girl who isn’t like the other girl, she isn’t.

This leads to a lot of conflict with...just about everyone, actually. She's savage to Peebee for not caring about what she cares about; she doesn't get Drack, and mistrusts him even when he's pretty harmless. She doesn't get Liam, she doesn't get Jaal, and she doesn't get Vetra. Cora butts heads with literally just about everyone who doesn't believe what she does. This makes her character difficult to like, for me, personally. She's very focused on the asari, to the point of almost being an asari otaku (tm @buhnebeest). It's an ironic twist, a human who you would think, from the name, would be all “human rights forever!!!” to be pretty much in love with the asari. It's clear she believes in asari culture in asari religion, in asari strategies. She doesn't belong with humanity anymore; one gets the sense she would have rather been on the asari arc.

Peebee is an asari with commitment issues a mile long. She's very much the anti-Liara; whereas Liara constantly wanted to get closer to Shepard, Peebee is constantly pushing Ryder away. She doesn't want to commit, tells you up front she's only here to get what she wants and then she's leaving, free-bird style. Peebee would never be so devoted to a friend/lover that she'd go on a one-woman mission to rescue their corpse, I'm saying. Despite that, Peebee is a charming girl; she's clever, smart as a whip, and you can tell she really is passionate about the remnant tech she studies. For Peebee life is all about the new and the now, and you get the feeling that there's no place she'd rather be than the frontier. Of all the people on your team, Peebs best encapsulates the “trail blazer” persona.

Vetra is, like Peebee, very much the Anti-Garrus. Garrus was a Palaven homeboy, from the capital no less. He came from a position of turian privilege, and it's very evident, particularly in Mass Effect, that he doesn't know how to relate to the others. He started off wary of humans, absolutely cruel to Tali. (Thankfully, he got better.) Vetra is also from Palaven, but has pretty much the opposite sort of backstory: her family life was chaotic, her parents basically unsupportive. She was forced to scrap and save for her sister from a young age. Garrus ran from his family, Vetra is absolutely attached to her sister at the hip. Vetra's my favorite cast member, and while I feel like I'm becoming somewhat of a stereotype by tending to focus on turians (TURIANS!), I think she'd be my favorite even if she wasn't a spiky bird. She's kind, adaptable; I adore the way she makes decisions focused on giving people what they want. She's also intense as fuck, which is something I'm generally into in characters (if you uh, haven't noticed, which...you almost certainly have). Also her addition to dextro cereal is absolutely endearing. Vetra is almost certainly the one I'll romance my first go; I've been flirting with everyone, but I like her best, and some of her dialogue in her romance is so good. “I've got a good feeling about you, Ryder,” said in a soft, but affectionate tone; “It's nice to be appreciated”. Oh Vetra. 10/10 will fanfic forever. I can't wait until Scott wakes up and sees his two new, slightly raptor-like sisters. (I honestly couldn't think of a better way for him to wake up than having Sid squealing about him and how she's heard so much about him from Sara, and did he really break his arm climbing a tree and did it grow back or is it a robot arm???)

Jaal, like Liam, and Drack, rejects the idea of toxic masculinity; so much of Jaal's story is about his emotions, how he must express what he feels. Jaal is a soldier, but he is unquestionably a lover of a great many things: not just people, but places. Jaal I think honestly does love Andromeda; he takes great pride in talking to people everywhere and really reminds me of no one quite so much as Piper from Fallout 4 in terms of connection to the game world. Jaal was the biggest turn around in expectations for me. I don't think his look is particularly attractive and nothing about the pre-release info about him excited me. I love him and I will definitively romance him second go. He's so emotionally powerful but also kind-hearted; he is absolutely dedicated to his people and turning things around for them. Also, his voice sounds like Javik's which is A+ for me. I will write several fics where he has eight millionty babies he adopts with Ryder. I want to write a bunch of cross-cultural fic, as the angara are interesting; a culture-heavy race long focused to be at war. Plus the reincarnation thing is just...oomph. Def. Space husband.

Drack is a rebel. He's definitively not your standard Krogan; he likes war, sure, but he's far more into family. No one in the party is as much a care-taker as Drack, expect perhaps Vetra. (Whose relationship, as an aside, I find fascinating because it's not how a turian and krogan relationship should go according to the milky way rules; Drack and Vetra not only get along like a house on fire, but Drack is presented as the expert and Vetra as the lesser-experienced.) Drack is very emotional, and it's obvious he loves his granddaughter Kesh and also that he cares about you. I was shocked – in a good way – when he sent Sara an email commiserating with her about her dad and trying to cheer her up with pictures of guns. He's astonishingly emotional, paternal even. I wish you could romance Drack because I would ride that old man's quad. He's gruff and grumpy but also incredibly caring and like Liam, someone focused on unity. He's lived a lot and seen a lot and he's old and jaded but somehow still hopeful and secretly soft as hell and I love him. It's obvious why Gil didn't really fit in in the milky way; he admits cheerfully that he “lacks purpose” and just kind of drifted from one place to the next. He wants to find this purpose in Andromeda. I have to admit I really do not like Gil at all; I think he's a bit of an asshole. I hate his interactions with Kallo, because Gil just comes off as a jerk who thinks he knows better than the ship's builders. His modifications don't tend to be better than what we already have and as Kallo points out, often cause problems. Worse, he doesn't tell the crew he's going to be doing them, then is offended when they don't work or set off alarms that inconvenience others.

I met him for Poker on the nexus and he seemed more charming from that, as is his poker table book (although it made me wonder why Ryder doesn't get invited to the poker games when Jaal does, and he's only been on the ship for six seconds). His friend Jill sounds hideous and gross and I absolutely hate how any attempt to tell him that her “U GOTTA MAKE A BABY BRO” speech is inappropriate is met with you don't know her, it's how we do. Yeah making someone feel bad for a sexual orientation they can't help is abuse, not friendship.

Suvi. Suvi I love, on a brighter spot; definitively space wife material, and again, a character I will run through to romance at some point. She's so bright and smart, and while I feel like a lot of people won't like her religious viewpoints, I really do. Religious characters are rare, and I glom onto them like hydrogen to oxygen, baby. I think the dichotomy she feels between being forced to choose to marvel at nature or be forced to explain it is interesting; it gives her depth. I wish Ryder had more ways to talk to her other than “I agree” or “You're shit also your religion is shit” but I do enjoy that Suvi is not an atheist. She's a profound believer in something bigger.

I think this is what enables her to go to Andromeda, because that's not welcome in an area so soon after first contact, when so many religions on earth must have been shaken by the knowledge that we weren't alone, that there were more belief structures in the universe than we'd accounted for. She is very much a rejection of the absoluteness of science; interestingly, she somewhat echoes Mordin, who also held some religious viewpoints and took comfort in them in regards to his work on the genophage. Also, she licks rocks, and there's nothing cuter than a girl that licks rocks. Her voice is nice as well, though I'm not sure where the accent is supposed to put her (Irish? Scottish?).

Kallo is probably the closest to fitting in with his species' general stereotype. He's another bright spot for me; Salarians really are bringing it in this game. I like him a lot. He's bright and brave but also a bit of a stick in the mud. It's clear that he expects things to run to spec, and doesn't have a lot of patience for people meddling with his stuff. (I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt in the conversation however, mainly because he isn't furthering the conflict 99% of the time with Gil, and his reasons for...wanting to know what's happening on his ship…are reasonable). Like Joker, he loves the Tempest, but he loves it in a less romantic way. He has more pride in it than emotional love.

Lexi is...there. And I can’t honestly say much more about her? She doesn’t seem to have half the personality that Chakwas did, but hopefully she’ll get a scene to shine soon. Right now she seems like a waste of a rather famous VA.

#Mass Effect #Mass Effect Andromeda #Mass Effect Andromeda Spoilers #MEA Spoilers #These observations are all pre loyalty missions

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willidleaway · 4 years

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Doctor Who, series 12, mid-series thoughts

In short: series 12 right now is looking like a real mess, but I’m honestly not sure if in a good way or a bad way. Chibnall has been bringing back a big chunk of RTD-era elements (and seemingly destroying a few Moffat-era ones), after the decidedly continuity-nod-averse series 11. It was fun at first but is now starting to look like Chibnall could end up amplifying the worst excesses of RTD and Moffat’s tenures.

In the span of a single episode, we have gone from ‘god I hope Chibnall doesn’t mess up the space rhino police’ to ‘god I hope Chibnall doesn’t mess up the entire show forever and ever’, because the arcs that he’s set up ... well ...

Moffat may have implicitly threatened to reveal the name of the Doctor in The Name of the Doctor, but to his credit he knew not to actually show that card. Chibnall, I suspect, feels too clever to show such restraint. What he’s getting up to may well permanently ruin the character of the Doctor for me, and I don’t think I’d be alone.

Spoiler-filled further thoughts behind the Read More break.

Overall thoughts on where series 12 is going: Boy do I not know where it’s going, but I know where it needs to not go.

OK, so thinking about where series 12 is going basically requires thinking about Fugitive of the Judoon. We get two major mystery points set up:

Captain Jack (who I am not entirely sure I’m glad to see back) has this warning about the Lone Cyberman.

Jo Martin plays an incarnation of the Doctor that cannot possibly exist.

I say I’m not entirely sure I’m glad to see Captain Jack back not because I don’t think his character is delightful or because John Barrowman is older, but because of the way he seems to solely exist to pull the companions out of the interesting story and set up this mystery point.

One of my problems with Moffat-era Who was all of the Doctor worship—and perhaps in retrospect it’s really unfair when it was RTD with his series 3 finale (a key example of RTD’s mixed legacy in terms of the direction RTD took new!Who in his later years, and the ways in which I genuinely think it encouraged a lot of trait that Moffat gets so much flack for in the fandom) and all the Oncoming Storm-type stuff that really started the show on that train. But in my defence, Moffat treated Clara as a living MacGuffin for much of her tenure—with a central plot point being innumerable split existences that revolve entirely around the Doctor—in a way that RTD never treated any of his era’s companions.

With Chibnall at the helm, I had hope that perhaps we’d return to compelling, active companions—especially after Moffat gave us series 10 with Bill and Nardole—and the series 11 premiere looked quite promising in this respect. But series 11 ultimately had at best mixed success on this front, partly because Bradley Walsh is in such a different class from the other two that it doesn’t even make sense. And series 12 so far has simply reverted to a group dynamic where the Doctor has all the answers, Graham has all the quips, Ryan has none of the dyspraxia, and Yas (Yaz? never sure about that one) has nothing.

And when it feels like the companions are doing nothing or even getting in the way of the narrative rather than actively driving it—to the point where you have Captain Jack literally scooping them away from the main thrust of the story—then something’s not right with this show. Why even have a companion, then, let alone three?

All that aside, let’s talk about Ruth!Doctor, who I’m going to assume is actually an incarnation of the Doctor, rather than the Master or the Rani or the Meddling Monk or some other Time Lord simply disguised as the Doctor. Having ‘Introducing Jo Martin as the Doctor’ in the closing credits sure seems to dispel that alternate notion—but certain past show runners have definitely taken part in circulating falsities!

First off, no matter what happens: Ruth!Doctor needs her own EU material. Books. Radio plays. Overpriced cheaply-made replica props. Yes. All of it. We’ve only gotten a couple dozen minutes of this Doctor so far and yet I am already utterly convinced.

Second: has post-RTD Who just completely forgotten about parallel universes? I mean, pocket universes, sure—Gallifrey was in one for a good while. But the Turn Left-style parallel worlds? The kind of parallel world seen in Rise of the Cybermen? Sure, the latter ep sets up the fact that the Time War fallout made it impossible to travel freely between parallel worlds, but with Gallifrey returned (well, before Chibnall burned it all down again), you’d think that would have changed. It doesn’t even seem to occur to 13 that Ruth!Doctor might be a parallel existence, which strikes me as astonishingly odd.

Third: if Ruth!Doctor is an actual incarnation of the Doctor in the prime timeline, then where does she fit? Pre-1 is the actual worst idea, because the TARDIS is already shaped like a police box and only like a police box, and Moffat already showed the TARDIS being stolen by 1 in capsule form. Granted, maybe the Doctor was captured by the Time Lords at some point, regenerated into 1, and stole another TARDIS that also had its chameleon circuit fried, but it seems needlessly complex.

I like the Season 6B idea a little better—the 2/3 interregnum—and maybe Ruth!Doctor is an extra regeneration granted by the Time Lords as reward for 2′s services to the CIA or whatever. One other possibility is simply that Ruth!Doctor had her memory altered—but this is possibly the least interesting idea and thus the least likely, because Chibnall clearly wants to provoke rather than catch a breath and be actually thoughtful with all of his twists this series.

Whether Ruth!Doctor fits in before Hartnell or after Troughton, it will represent a major shift in lore. Moffat was competent enough to make 8.5 work, arguably making better use of RTD’s Time War than even RTD ever did. But we are on shakier territory where Chibnall isn’t really building on anything. And if Ruth!Doctor is the Zeroth Doctor, and Chibnall really wants to provoke, well ...

Part of the fun of the Doctor, at least for me, is that at the end of the day, the Doctor really is a mad man in a box, an idiot that wants to be kind and help out along the way. They’re a Time Lord, sure, but amongst Time Lords they don’t have some overriding power that does not arise from their own initiative. For all of Moffat’s faults, I think he knew this to be at the core of the character. If he didn’t always show it, he at least always tried to tell it, even alongside all of the most egregious Doctor-worship.

And the Doctor’s origins are vague, even mysterious, but only because the Time Lords as a whole are rather mysterious. Their social psychology is eccentric, to be sure. Their control of time and space is unparalleled. But we’re not sure whence they arose and that’s fine. It’s not necessary, because the show was never about the Doctor, but about how the Doctor affects those around him. Much of Moffat-era Who had maybe a more Doctor-centric tilt to this, but nonetheless it was never quite all about the Doctor!

Meanwhile, in the Chibnall era, now we’ve got the Master talking about the Timeless Child and lies about the history of the Time Lords, and Captain Jack scooping the companions out of the way so that we can get all this new Doctor lore set up. And, well ... forget RTD’s Oncoming Storm. Forget Moffat’s literal origin of the word ‘doctor’. I think we’re about to see Chibnall elevate the Doctor to being literally the Genesis of the Time Lords, and it makes me very, very uncomfortable.

Hmm, I do wonder if we will get an episode actually titled Genesis of the Time Lords, only I want it to be about Gallifreyan prog pop-rock.

Additional thoughts, episode by episode:

OK, so I already said my bit on Spyfall and the latest ep. So that leaves two.

—Orphan 55: I think everyone’s had their curb-stomp on this one. I’d just like to say that it was particularly disappointing because Ed Hime’s previous contribution to Doctor Who was ‘It Takes You Away’, by far one of the most brilliant episodes of Series 11. It was ambitious and witty, and the characters were interesting and compelling, and basically it succeeded so well at everything that Orphan 55 fails at so badly.

Orphan 55 is like Midnight except the villain all along was man. It just feels like Ed Hime was playing a bunch of Metro games and then Chibnall told him to write a Very Special Episode about climate change, and everything suddenly clicked together. At least someone thought it did.

Was it really that bad? I’d say it was no less messier than Fugitive of the Judoon, honestly. I think with time, people will either look more kindly on it or completely forget about it, because frankly its reputation can’t get worse. The fact that Orphan 55 did not have the blockbuster Who-lore reveals and twists of Fugitive of the Judoon will be either the reason it becomes forgotten or the reason it becomes more favourably looked upon.

—Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror: My main qualm with this story is the over-romanticisation of Tesla. The show acts as if Wardenclyffe was this amazing proto-Wi-Fi apparatus that would have worked if only JP Morgan hadn’t pulled his funding, when in fact it was the epitome of this big wireless tech bubble and a folly in the most literal sense of that word. They mention the Gilded Age right near the start of the episode and somehow view Tesla as this pure-minded inventor and almost a human Doctor for the 20th century, rather than someone who basically lived off of Gilded Age capitalist money, and a shrewd man knew how to game the press and public opinion in his time.

Don’t get me wrong. Tesla was legitimately wronged very badly, both by Edison and by Marconi, and he seems to have had a real intuition for electrical engineering in ways that few in his time did. But intuition is not the same as scientific enquiry, and that seems to me to be no small part of why Tesla after Wardenclyffe never enjoyed the success and admiration that he did before, and why he was rather badly forgotten for so long.

And then Edison seemed a bit too softened??? Caring for his workers at some level, sure, but surely he would absolutely never be the sort of person to offer Tesla a job with him ... ?

That said, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better actor to cast in the role of Tesla, and generally I found the episode pretty good. I believe others have sufficiently pointed out the mild hypocrisy of the Doctor’s criticising the scorpion!Racnoss for stealing technology (still can’t be bothered to remember what they actually were, sorry), but I generally found it more amusing than problematic.

#(Doctor Who series 12 spoilers!)

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