. . . and here is where I post my LaDS brainrot (affectionate) 🌟 26 🐠 Rafayel & Xavier Main 🍐 thoughts and art 🍷 Fandom 🍎 18+ MDNI text banners - @cafekitsune and @cursed-carmine
After playing Love and Deep Space, the brianrot has reached a critical point and I needed to make a Fandom blog about it before it ate my other accounts lmao. As stated in my description, minors aren't welcome here, 18+ posts will be reblogged. If I see under 18s or no age on your blog, you're getting blocked
🐡 I'm a Rafayel main, Xavier is my second, but I love all guys. I've been playing since February. I'm an otome veteran, and LaDS is the first game to live in my head rent free in a long time.
🐡 I'll be using this blog to post Fandom related content - art, writings, shower thoughts, musings, conspiracy theories, screams, etc. Screenshots and Reblogs too. Name is subject to change lol
🐡 side note: I named my MC 'Nox' in the game, so if I refer to Nox I'm referring to my MC specifically or posting abt my times in the game
🐡 Dividers are from @cafekitsune and @cursed-carmine and @pixopix their works are great 💕
_____________ *TAGS* _____________
#ladshead for headcannons
#flamuladraws for my art
#flamulawrites for general writings
#glubglubglub for random rambles and thoughts
#800years for memes
#the valko situation for updates on the valko situation
#Nox - my own LaDS game experiences, photo booth pics, my MC, etc
#flamulaspeaks - answering asks, LaDS posts not related to headcannons, writings, rambles, etc.
#boingfishlibrary - fics recs and reblog tag for works written by other authors
#MoGallery - reblog tag for art
Fic Masterlist
For LI specific aesthetic things, I have #xavier coded, #zayne coded, #rafayel coded, #sylus coded, #caleb coded, #valko coded
Me before June 30, 2026: me and all my homies hate Astra, Ever, and whoever stands in the way of the way of my mc being with any of the lads
Me onward from July 1st : looking directly at infold and papergames ceo for all the extra stress they've thrown into my life after fucking up my stress relief game:
I know today feels like a gut punch. I saw Caleb's new card and I laughed bc i did not believe Infold & Papergames could be this stupid, but I have been wrong before.
I know we're tired. I know we're angry. I know a lot of us are running out of patience.
This boycott is a marathon, not a sprint, regardless of how much we want infold and papergames to lock the fuck in and get their heads out of their asses.
Here's the thing. Valko's stuff is still privated, not deleted. Raf's myth is still delayed. They haven't even officially said anything about his myth yet sooooooooo that's another piece to the puzzle. Infold is currently perusing legal action and word on the street is that infold HQ is moving to a different location, likely bc of either the threats and safety concerns for employees from the cdgs.
today was a checkpoint, not a deadline.
Infold and Papergames still haven't made any official statements. Not about Rafayel's myth getting delayed again. Not about their schedule changing again. Not a corpo speak 'we hear you, we understand there are issues with the game, we will make an official statement on the state of the game at a later date, please be patient with us, here are some dias'.
But most importantly they haven't made another statement regarding valko. Not a return statement nor a statement doubling down on his cancellation.
We need to keep up the pressure.
Don't stop talking about Valko
Keep boycotting
If you still want to log in or you're still logging in, its imperative you don't spend money.
We need to hit them where it hurts. They can ignore our surveys, they can ignore our posts. They can ignore our emails and our letters and our customer service support messages.
They can't ignore this drop in revenue. For anyone unaware, please see this post from @cairoblair and look at that drop. Their revenue is down by 70%. That is not an insignificant drop.
Another thing to keep in mind is to ramp up the pressure on Papergames as well. Papergames is the party responsible for the development and management of LaDS. This is the party that's been making the executive decisions on the direction LaDS is going in and the party that made the choice to cancel Valko. I'll admit, I thought that LaDS was under Infold with papergames as the parent company (like sony owning several game dev studios) but I've been recently corrected. Infold works more as the distributors and marketers. This doesn't absolve any of these idiots. Infold is still 100% at fault for poor communication and basically ignoring all of us and mishandling all of Valko's marketing and release. We've done well at pressuring Infold and we need to do the same to Papergames.
We can still do this. Posting Caleb's card without addressing anything was about one of the worst things Infold and Papergames could have done which could mean a few things that others have said. Either they're
1) testing the waters to see how angry we all still are and if its potentially safe to release Raf's (expectedly lucrative)
2) trying to push through this rough patch business as usual and hoping we'll get bored and distracted by the new shiny,
3) gathering evidence to prove the rumors and defamatory articles fucked their revenue for lawsuits
4) trying to hobble along with the remaining non-boycotting playerbase until they get to either September (anti-cyber bullying law effective) or until 7.0.
if its 1, 3, or 4 we need to continue withholding, emailing, and make our dissatisfaction known. if its 2, we keep it up regardless.
At this point, this isn't just about Valko's cancellation, but the mishandling of LaDS and the complete disregard for the game's entire playerbase, Global and CN alike, and catering mainly towards the cn toxic minority that has a penchant for parasocialism and cow shit. Our CN girlies are fighting hard on their end, and we can't give up on our end.
august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good august will be good
Lowkey annoyed and tired bc I miss my fishie and I need to email papergames and infold again about how they have the business sense of a rabid squirrel for pulling this shit after work instead of working on the fun rafayel projects i started before this mess.
at this point, I think the worst case scenario might be like we all know: infold doubles down on their cancellation, and will go back to business as usual.
however, the consequences of this will be:
not only will this result in a way quicker eos of the game, but it's basically company suicide. not only globally I fear (though that's the main loss, the global expansion infold was working towards) but also domestically. aside from the antis who will be happy with the decision as well as whoever else was behind the smear campaign, nobody will ever touch another game of theirs again
cdgs will feel powerful if they win. they already feel "powerful" since they could cancel a character just like that, so I doubt they will stop. this will be they way they will state their displeasure from now on, everywhere they can. by making it a public outrage, potentially alerting the ccp just to get what they want. this is what doubling down will cultivate, a culture of where hate and fabricated outrage will get you what you want.
this will also likely have an outcome of how other games will operate in the future. it's likely that people will look at this situation and come to the conclusion that it's better not to take risks anymore. this will not just affect future implementation of love interests, it might go beyond that (read: I'm just thinking of the worst case scenario here). it might affect: general censorship of darker themes just in case it might cause public backlash, meaning we might not get darker storytelling as often anymore (or at the very least it'll be cleaner. we might still get villains, but they're either a shell of what their villany might've looked like, or just not allowed to be redeemable at all?), numbers might get scrapped entirely from games since they might get twisted and painted in the worst possible light, and probably more things I can't think of right now.
cultural export loss for china. as others have pointed out, china's soft power lies in their gacha games. genshin, hsr, wuwa, and ofc lads. it's not an unpopular opinion among the global side that if infold chooses to double down, most people's impression on chinese live service games will be soured and will take a big hit. lads was also a HUGE money maker, able to compete and even outrank genshin, hsr and wuwa. while I don't particularly think that the number of genshin and hsr players will go down by a lot, since these games also target the male audience while lads doesn't, atp valko's cancellation is well known, and I'm assuming that IF they double down, it will definitely create an even bigger wave of outrage. it will be in the back of everyone's minds.
the latter might also be something important to keep in mind and why it is important to me that official cn media is not focusing on valko being a threat to women and never issuing a complete erasure of his character. if I am aware of this being a potential risk, I doubt that cn isn't aware of the risk. this is why I don't think infold will double down. valko's cancellation goes far beyond just "a little fuckup they can recover from", this will have an impact on china's soft power and their perception globally.
to look at the bright side, the best case scenario we are currently fighting for that is also very much a possibility still will look as follows:
valko and his main story will be in the game just as intended from the start. this will mean that the dev team can continue with their original vision of lads and their creative vision remains preserved.
this will finally break the cycle of hate and cdgs dictating fandom spaces in china and will lessen the divide between global and cn. we have already seen this starting to happen, with both cn girlies and us working together. we have already uncovered that some of the etiquettes we thought were just cultural differences (like blurring your mc's face when posting a picture of her and an li together) are actually just put in place by those cdgs. we have ALREADY seen the impact we had by giving cn girlies the courage to speak out and let their voices be heard, despite the hate and threats they must receive from those vile people.
to add to this, I think this will (or it even has already) broken the cycle of the rehashed "global voices don't matter" argument and I think the global side will be treated better from now on, because WE do make an impact.
this will also likely have an impact on the company's relation to their playerbase. maybe not fully in tune, but I can imagine that infold might change for the better, communicate more transparently after this and take player's feedback into consideration more openly.
THIS is what we are fighting for. and this is why I don't understand how there are still people against our boycott (probably something to do with not wanting to admit that you were wrong or just reducing this whole boycott to "people are making such a big deal about a fictional werewolf man they've met for 8 minutes").
we are not just fighting for valko to be brought back, we are fighting AGAINST what his cancellation will cause. we are fighting FOR the betterment of fandom spaces, that hate should never be the way to get your way. we are fighting for the creative vision behind love and deepspace and preserving the freedom to express that creativity. we're fighting for better treatment as players, that our voices should matter and should be heard and taken into consideration.
The scent of the apartment hit him before he even reached the door.
That was always how it worked. Valko would clear the front door, shift his bag on his shoulder, and without thinking—without even meaning to—his chest would expand, pulling in everything. The sharp bite of the laundry detergent you both used, the faint trace of the citrus dish soap from the morning’s coffee mugs. The ghost of whatever you'd cooked that morning. And underneath all of it, quiet and constant and unbearably familiar, the warm specific sweetness of you.
Two years of this. Two years and it still stopped him on his tracks every single time.
To anyone who shared a class with him, Valko was the guy with half rimmed glasses, soft sweaters, neckband headphones around his collar like he'd forgotten they were there, a battered copy of whatever textbook he was working through dog eared on his desk. He took meticulous notes in handwriting that was almost too neat.
He called his mother every Sunday without fail, usually from the kitchen while something was already on the stove. He brought back containers of homemade food after weekend visits home and left them in the fridge with little labeled lids because he knew you'd forget to eat otherwise.
He was, by every reasonable measure, a gentle giant with a soft spot for his family and an embarrassing weakness for old equipment manuals.
The wolf underneath all of that was another matter entirely.
He'd stopped trying to logic his way out of it somewhere around month six of your lease. The obsession had settled into him quietly, the way water finds the shape of whatever holds it—gradual, total, and by the time he noticed, already everywhere. He loved the way you laughed when he miscalculated a doorframe carrying furniture. He loved that you used his arm like a headrest when you were tired without seeming to notice you were doing it. He loved that you trusted him with the small, unglamorous parts of your life—the bad days, the grocery runs at midnight, the moments when you needed someone solid nearby without having to explain why.
He told himself it was just closeness. That it was natural, living with someone this long. That plenty of people felt this way about their roommates.
He was lying to himself and he knew it.
You never noticed the small things. That was the part that made it simultaneously easier and worse.
You didn't notice the way his jaw tightened every time you mentioned Caleb's name in passing. You didn't notice that when he draped his coat over your shoulders on cold nights, he always took a moment longer than necessary to settle it there, his hands resting briefly on your shoulders, his nose dipping almost imperceptibly toward your hair. You didn't notice the way his whole body oriented toward you when you moved through a room, like a plant turns toward a window without deciding to.
Two years of this and you'd noticed none of it.
Caleb, though. Caleb was a different kind of problem.
The name sat wrong in Valko's mouth every time he heard it. Your boyfriend. The pilot stationed out in Skyhaven, the one who'd existed in Valko's life as nothing more than a name and a reason you packed a bag every other weekend. You always went to him. A wave from the doorway, a small oveñnight bag, the shuttle to Skyhaven. Back by Sunday night, sometimes Monday morning if the transit ran slow.
Two years, and Valko had never once seen him. Fine. He could work with that.
What he couldn't work with was the scent. Or rather, the complete absence of it.
It defied every instinct he had. A man who kept a woman—who spent weekends with her, who held her hand and her body—should leave something behind. It was a biological fact, not a sentiment. Every time you came home from Skyhaven, Valko would brace for it. Would stand in the hallway with his teeth ground together preparing to smell another man all over you.
Every single time, there was nothing.
Just you. Clean and warm, like you'd spent the weekend alone in a hotel and not with someone who was supposed to love you. No territorial overlap. No claim. Nothing.
It didn't reassure him. It made him furious. A man who loved you would mark you without even trying—it would just happen, the natural consequence of closeness and time. The fact that it hadn't happened said something.
He doesn't know what he has.
Since Caleb clearly wasn't going to handle it, Valko had decided— without discussing it with anyone, including himself—to handle it instead.
It had started small. Sitting on your side of the couch when you were out because "the lamp was better over there". Leaning in your doorframe a beat longer than necessary. Gradually, the apartment had become his in ways that only his own nose could confirm. Your throw blanket carried him now. The pillow on the left side of your bed—your side—carried him. He'd lie across your mattress on the afternoons you were in seminar, shoulders rolling slow against the sheets, transferring the scent from the back of his neck and the inside of his wrists onto everything you'd touch when you slept.
He wanted to be the reason the room felt safe to you, even if you'd never know why.
The laundry had come later. He'd started folding yours without being asked because it was a practical thing to do, a completely normal roommate thing—and if his hands slowed over certain items, if he stood in the laundry room for longer than strictly necessary with warm shirts pressed to his face, that was between him and the four walls.
He wasn't proud of the drawer.
Your scent there was undiluted, something the rest of the apartment couldn't match—private, concentrated, intimate. The first time he'd opened it he'd been looking for your spare key. He'd stood there for a long time, glasses pushed up into his hair, one hand braced on your dresser, taking slow careful breaths and trying to remember what reasonable behavior felt like.
He'd gone back to his room. He'd thought about you.
He'd told himself it would clear his head.
It had not cleared his head.
Two days ago he stood in front of your closet with his heart going faster than he wanted to admit.
You'd been out getting groceries. His hand moved through your dirty clothes on autopilot, past the jeans, past the sweaters, until his fingers closed around silk.
Soft. Warm from being buried against other fabric. Almost nothing against the width of his palm.
He lifted them to his face before he'd fully decided to.
There was your scent, the core of it. He stood there breathing it in with his eyes closed and his chest heaving, and then, he searched. Every thread. Looking for any trace of another man underneath yours.
Nothing. Just you. Entirely unmarked you.
The growl that came out of him was low enough that only he could hear it.
Something about that absence sent a rush of heat down his spine that he wasn't prepared for. His back had found the closet wall.
He couldn't stop himself.
One hand kept the silk pressed to his face. The other worked fast around his cock, his jaw tight, breathing controlled through sheer habit. He'd imagined you beneath him, his weight pinning you into the mattress, his teeth finding the curve of your shoulder, his scent finally, permanently replacing the nothing that Caleb had left behind. When he came it was blinding and quiet, his head dropping back, his whole body shaking with the force of it.
He'd cleaned up carefully. Returned everything. Walked to the kitchen and put the kettle on like a normal person.
He was a patient man. He was methodical. He had excellent grades and he called his mother on Sundays and he was going to wait for the right moment. But the conclusion had already been reached, somewhere in the back of his skull where logic and instinct lived side by side.
He was going to take you. It was a matter of time. He was just waiting for the right moment to show you that a real man didn't leave his woman smelling like an empty room.
--------------------------
The July heat was suffocating. Valko had been inside an exam room for two hours and his brain felt wrung out like a dish cloth. His glasses had fogged twice on the walk from campus, he was looking forward to the AC. He was looking forward to you.
It was a Friday so he'd stopped at the bakery on the corner. Two cinnamon rolls, extra cream cheese frosting. He had them in a plastic bag hooked over two fingers.
He reached the door and stopped. His nose twitched.
The scent of the hallway was wrong. Not dangerous, just wrong.
Valko's brow creased. He put his glasses back on.
He unlocked the door slowly, the click of the mechanism very loud in the quiet hallway, and pushed it open.
The air inside hit him all at once.
He stopped moving. His hand stayed on the doorknob, grip tightening by degrees until the metal pressed hard into his palm, and he stood in the entryway and looked at his living room like a man trying to solve a problem he hadn't been told existed.
There was someone on the couch.
Long legs stretched toward the coffee table. Dark tactical jacket, sleeves pushed up, the kind of build that came from actual use rather than a gym.
And tucked against his side, head on his chest, hand flat against his collarbone—
You. Laughing at something he'd just said.
Caleb.
Valko's mind was still trying to catch up. His instincts weren't waiting.
The heat that moved through him was immediate, flooding from his chest out, his vision sharpening at the edges the way it did when something in him decided a situation required full attention. His breathing stayed controlled—barely, through discipline and nothing else—while every animal thing in him was screaming to move forward. To put himself between you and the man currently comfortable in a space he had no right to be comfortable in.
My couch. The thought was irrational and he knew it and it didn't help. My apartment. My—
As if feeling the shift in the room, Caleb's head turned.
His eyes found Valko's across the space with a directness that said he'd known someone was there before the door finished opening. Dark eyes, calm, taking in Valko's full height and the white knuckled grip on the doorframe.
He didn't look away.
Neither did Valko.
You sat up, something lighting in your face when you saw him. "You're home early." You smiled, easy and warm, completely unaware of the temperature of the room. "Valko, this is my boyfriend Caleb. Caleb, this is my roommate, Valko."
Caleb stood up and extended his hand. He was tall—nearly matching Valko’s height—but where Valko was built like an immovable wall of muscle, Caleb possessed the lethal, agile grace of a feline.
Valko crossed the room and took it.
"Good to meet you," Caleb said. Flat. Even.
And the bottom dropped out of everything he thought he understood.
The scent hit him the second their palms connected, not foreign, not the aggressive territorial brand of another man he'd been grinding his teeth against for two years. It was you—your exact scent, the one Valko had spent two years cataloguing down to its smallest note—but run through something else entirely. Deeper. Heavier. Amplified through the biology of a dominant male until it had become its own thing, something that pressed into Valko's lungs like a hand against his sternum and didn't let up.
Caleb smelled like you the way a home smelled like the people who lived in it.
Two people did not share the same biological signature. That was not how any of this worked. Unless—
His brain didn't finish the thought. His body had already moved on without him.
The heat he felt all over his body was not aggression. That was the part that made no sense, the part that his wolf had no framework for because this wasn't a territorial response. This wasn't the hot, focused anger he'd been bracing for every time he imagined finally meeting the man who had you. This was something strange and considerably more humiliating, a frequency he hadn't known he could receive, vibrating straight through the bones of his hand where Caleb's grip still held.
His cock hardened so fast his vision went momentarily white at the edges.
He couldn't stop it. Couldn't reason with it. Two years of wanting you, of your scent living in the back of his throat like something he'd swallowed and never fully digested—and now here was this man, wearing you like a second skin, your sweetness wound so completely through his scent that Valko couldn't separate the two. Couldn't find where you ended and Caleb began.
It was the most overwhelming thing he had ever experienced. His knees felt weak.
Caleb's grip tightened.
His eyes hadn't moved from Valko's face. Valko watched the shift happen—the smile staying but changing underneath, becoming something quieter and darker. He'd clocked the pupil dilation. He'd clocked all of it.
"Something wrong?" Caleb asked
Valko could not breathe. The apartment was saturated with your/his scent and his body was making decisions he hadn't authorized, and he was going to do something catastrophic if he stayed in this room for another ten seconds. He didn't know what but he didn't want to find out.
He pulled his hand back.
"I forgot—" His voice came out completely unrecognizable. He didn't look at you. Couldn't. "The lab. I left something. I have to—"
He was already at the door. He had no memory of crossing the room.
The hallway air hit him cold and he kept walking, down the stairs, out into the July heat that suddenly felt like nothing compared to what he'd just left behind.
This is my precious baby, treat it well cause I don't want to drop it. 💜💜
🔞MDNI🔞
CW: Jealous Caleb. Mentions of piss 🫣what did you expect? they are dogs 🫣
Part 1 here (Valko's POV)
The day you moved in, Caleb had no more than twenty minutes.
Valko wasn't part of the day at all. He'd told you, the week prior, that he thought it'd be easier on you if he stayed out of the way —no awkward energy while you figured out where your pots and pans went, no stranger on your first night in a new apartment with your boyfriend present. He'd gone home to his parents for the whole weekend, giving you a few days to make the place feel like it was yours too. Considerate, you'd called it and Caleb had thought so too, at the time.
Which meant, practically speaking, that Caleb had never laid eyes on the man whose apartment he was about to wire for sound and picture. He'd done the responsible version of due diligence weeks earlier, before he'd ever agreed to any of this, he pulled together what he could on the guy, the boring paperwork version of a person. Clean record. Solid grades that came from actually doing the reading rather than skating by. No red flags, no history that raised anything, nothing that looked like a reason to say no when you'd asked if he was okay with you signing a lease with someone he'd never met. By every measure that mattered on paper, Valko had checked out fine. Better than fine. Caleb remembers being almost reassured by how unremarkable the guy seemed. A soft looking student with tidy grades and a clean background was about as low risk as roommates came.
It hadn't occurred to him that the things worth worrying about were never the ones that showed up on paper.
He'd priced out the hardware weeks earlier, because reassured wasn't the same as unconcerned, and unconcerned had never once been a setting he came installed with. Units the size of a shirt button, nothing that would catch a casual glance unless you already knew exactly where to look and what you were looking for.
You and your friends had done the actual moving that afternoon — furniture, boxes, all the unglamorous parts — and by the time Caleb showed up it was mostly done, and you'd kissed him hello smelling like cardboard dust and the particular sweat of hauling too many boxes up three flights of stairs. After everyone was gone you told him to give you twenty minutes to shower and change before dinner. Twenty minutes.
The second the bathroom door shut and the water started running, he got to work.
He was fast, not rushed but no wasted motion. The hallway smoke detector took under two minutes, the housing popped and reseated so cleanly you'd never notice it had been touched. The bookshelf in the living room got the smallest unit he had, tucked into the seam of a decorative box you'd already unpacked without knowing it would ever hold anything but its lid. Your bedroom took the longest because he stood in the doorway for a minute first, boxes still stacked waist high, your bed frame leaning in pieces against the wall, and he felt something he didn't have a tidy name for yet.
He told himself it was diligence. A man in his position —deployed on short notice, gone for weeks at a stretch, leaving you alone in a new place with a stranger he'd approved on nothing but a clean background check and a gut feeling— was entitled to a baseline of security. He wasn't watching you. He was watching the apartment. There was, he told himself, a meaningful difference between the two, and he fully intended to respect it.
He mounted the last unit above the window frame, angled down across the bed and the door both, hands perfectly steady, and if some quiet part of him already understood that watching the apartment and watching you were never going to stay as separate as he wanted them to, he didn't let the thought get any further than the doorway.
He checked each feed once on his phone, everything exactly where it should be, and had just enough time left to sit down on the arm of the couch and look unbothered before the bathroom door opened and you came out toweling your hair, already asking if he was hungry.
He said he was starving. He wasn't lying, exactly. He just wasn't hungry for what you thought.
-------------------------
For the first few weeks, Caleb barely thought about the feeds at all.
That had surprised him a little. He'd expected to check them constantly, some low hum of vigilance running in the back of his skull every time he was away, but the footage that came back was really boring. Valko unpacking boxes, arranging books by subject. Valko in the kitchen at eleven at night making tea and reading something on his phone with his glasses pushed up into his hair. Valko on the phone with what turned out to be his mother, every single Sunday, always from the kitchen, always with something already going on the stove. It was almost soothing to watch.
The things about you took longer to notice, because it never happened all at once. They happened in small behaviors stacking one on top of the next until the pile stopped looking like coincidence and started looking like a pattern with a shape.
He noticed the way Valko's head would turn before you'd finished speaking, like he was tracking something about you a second ahead of your voice. He noticed that Valko always knew when you'd walked into a room, even from the kitchen, even with his back turned or before the door had fully opened. Small things. Explainable things, on their own. Roommates picked up on each other's footsteps eventually, right? Caleb told himself that, more than once, in the early weeks, and mostly believed it.
Then there was the smelling.
It started as something he found funny. You'd come home from the gym, sweaty, half collapsed on the couch complaining about your knees, and Valko would drift past on his way to the kitchen and just pause. Head tipping, nose working like he was standing in front of an open oven and enjoying the warmth of it. He did it with your coffee mugs too, picking them up off the counter to rinse, holding them up a beat too long first, eyes half closed.
Caleb had laughed, the first handful of times. Actually laughed, alone in his room at Skyhaven with his boots up on the desk and the feed running small in the corner of his screen, because his first read on it — his honest, uncomplicated first read — was that the guy had a small crush on you and your scent. Some private, harmless thing Valko indulged when he thought no one was watching, like the equivalent of a man who liked a particular perfume on a woman's neck. Caleb had known guys like that. He was like that. It wasn't the strangest thing a person could be into, and it certainly wasn't his business what some guy did with his own nose in the privacy of his apartment. As long as he didn't touch you.
What made him stop finding it funny was the accuracy of it.
Because it wasn't just that Valko smelled things. Lots of people smelled things — coffee, rain,food, the inside of a bakery. It was that Valko was able to smell things nobody should reasonably be able to smell. He'd know if you were coming down with something a full day before you noticed it yourself, showing up with soup and the specific cold medicine you liked, no explanation offered, none asked for. Once —and this was the one that had actually made Caleb sit forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, replaying the clip twice— Valko had stopped dead in the hallway outside your door, utterly still for almost ten full seconds, and then knocked and asked if you'd used a new shampoo. You had. That morning. A sample bottle a friend had given you, something you hadn't mentioned to anyone.
Caleb turned it over for a long time, alone with the feed and his own unhelpful thoughts, and came up with nothing that satisfied him. Good sense of smell didn't cover it. Attentive roommate didn't cover it either. There was a word for what it looked like, and the word was obsessive, he knew obsessive, and once that word showed up in his head it didn't leave again.
He watched Valko lean in doorframes a beat too long after you'd passed through them, chest expanding slow, like he was trying to hold something in his lungs for as long as physically possible. He watched him sit on your side of the couch when you weren't home. He watched, once, an evening when you were out with friends, as Valko stood in the middle of the empty living room for almost ten minutes, eyes shut, breathing slowly through his nose like a man meditating, and Caleb had felt something cold and unfamiliar move through his chest.
Some part of him had started needing to know exactly how far this went before he decided what to do about it. Not for your safety. Not yet, not only that. For the shape of the thing itself — because a man who paid this much attention to a woman he lived with, who catalogued her this precisely, who treated the ordinary residue of her daily life like something worth memorizing, was either about to become a serious problem or already was one, and Caleb preferred not knowing which.
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Whenever you went out to Skyhaven, Caleb asked about Valko the way you'd ask about the weather. Casual. Woven so naturally into the rest of the conversation that you never once thought to notice the frequency of it.
How's your roommate? Is he still cooking those mystery soups you keep sending me pictures of? Small questions, easy ones. You always answered them the same way, warm and a little exasperated. He's good. The other day he left a whole container of dumplings in the fridge with my name on it like I'm going to forget I live there. He tried to fix the shower instead of calling a plumber and now the water pressure's worse than before. Caleb listened to every word of it and heard nothing in your voice that shouldn't have been there. That was worse. It meant whatever was happening on the other end of this was happening in a direction that only ever pointed one way.
Because you never crossed boundaries. You didn't flirt with Valko, didn't linger, didn't so much as change the register of your voice when his name came up. You borrowed his phone charger and let him borrow your blender and that was the whole of it, as far as you were concerned, a friendship built on shared space and nothing else. When you were with Caleb, you were entirely with Caleb. You curled into his side on the couch without thinking about it, threaded your fingers through his under restaurant tables, said his name first thing when you called. There wasn't a single thread of you that had gone anywhere near Valko, not once, not even by accident.
Caleb knew that. Knew it with total certainty, watched it confirmed on a screen more nights than he wanted to count. And it didn't help even a little.
It was never about whether you'd stray, because you wouldn't and you hadn't. It was about a man miles closer to you than Caleb ever got to be, learning the exact temperature of your laugh, memorizing what shampoo you used before you'd finished the bottle, existing in the same rooms as you for more consecutive hours in a week than Caleb sometimes got in a month. Devotion didn't need reciprocation to be a threat. It just needed proximity and time, and Valko had both in a supply Caleb couldn't compete with.
He didn't talk about any of that. Wouldn't have known how to, and wasn't sure it would sound like anything but paranoia out loud. What he did instead —the only outlet that ever actually took the edge off— was let it out somewhere else entirely.
You'd noticed it, the last handful of visits. A new weight to him. He'd pull you against him the second the door shut behind you, like he'd been rationing himself all week and finally didn't have to anymore, his hand holding your ass tightly, keeping you exactly where he wanted you. "Say it" he'd murmur against your throat, teeth grazing skin, deciding whether or not to leave visual proof. "Who do you belong to?" You always answered him easily, breathless, meaning it completely, never once understanding what you were actually settling in him when you did, some ugly certainty that needed re confirming more often than it should have. He held eye contact longer than he used to during the quiet after, checking your face for a softness only he was supposed to put there. He'd trace his fingers along his marks on your body and think about a man miles away who didn't get to see this. Who only ever got the version of you that came home clean.
It never lasted long enough, the satisfaction. He'd lie awake after, you asleep and warm against his chest, and some part of him would already be reaching for his phone. He hated that he did it but he did it every time anyway.
The night everything changed you'd been out shopping and Caleb had pulled up the feed out of nothing but habit, expecting the usual, nothing worth the guilt of looking.
What he found instead was Valko standing in front of your open closet and it took Caleb a few seconds to understand what he was looking at, because his brain simply refused the information the first two times.
He watched Valko lift your panties —Caleb's favorite pair— to his face like he was breathing through it. Watched his eyes close, his shoulders drop, something helpless move through his whole body. Watched him search, actually search, even in the middle of what was clearly costing him every ounce of self control he had, like he was checking for something and Caleb couldn't yet guess what. And then he watched the rest of it happen, when Valko's back hit the wall, watched his hand move, heard a sound come out of him that even through a speaker made the hair go up on the back of his neck.
Caleb didn't move, he couldn't breathe for a while. He sat there in the dark of his own room with the computer screen throwing pale light across his knuckles, and watched the entire thing to its end with a stillness that had nothing to do with calm.
Two days later, he was on his way to you.
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He didn't sleep on the transit out.
That wasn't unusual for him, he'd trained himself out of needing to sleep on schedule years ago. He sat with his bag between his boots, his phone dark in his lap and ran the footage back in his head anyway, even though he didn't need to, even though he'd already watched it enough times that the memory of it was carved into him.
Caleb understood obsession. He'd have been lying to say otherwise, sitting there, thinking about a stranger's face pressed into fabric that belonged to a woman who wasn't his. He recognized the shape of it because he was looking at a version of it every time he looked in a mirror. The difference, the only difference that mattered to him, was that he had a claim. He had two years of your voice choosing his name first. He had every right the other man didn't, and he intended to make that distinction impossible to miss.
He didn't tell you he was coming. That had been a conscious choice, made somewhere over the first hour of travel and never once reconsidered. If he called ahead, you'd ask why. You'd want to know what had prompted an unscheduled weekend, and he didn't have an answer he was willing to give you yet —not I've been watching your roommate lose his fucking mind sniffing your panties on hidden cameras I never told you about.
That conversation existed somewhere down the line, distant and unavoidable, but it wasn't a conversation for a phone call from a transit seat. It was a conversation for later, once he understood the actual size of the problem.
He used the key you gave him the first day you moved in.
He let himself into the apartment a little after one in the afternoon and stood in the entryway for a moment just breathing the place in, coffee snd the warmth of a lived in apartment in summer.
He didn't unpack. He sat down on the couch with his boots still laced, jacket still on, and waited.
You came home first, a little after three, keys jangling, humming something under your breath before you'd even gotten the door fully open and then you saw him and the sound cut off into something bright and delighted, and for a moment none of the rest mattered at all. You crossed the room fast, half a laugh already escaping you, and folded into him with your whole body the way you always did. He wrapped an arm around you and breathed you in properly for the first time in a month, and something in his chest that had been wound tight since the transit finally loosened, just slightly but it was enough.
"You didn't say you were coming," you said into his shoulder, half accusation, entirely pleased.
"I wanted to surprise you." That part, at least, was true.
You settled into his side on the couch, legs tucked up, head finding his chest like it had a reservation there, and told him about your week. He listened to all of it with one hand moving slow through your hair and the other resting loose against your hip, and underneath the listening, underneath the genuine warmth of having you back in his arms, some older and more watchful part of him stayed fixed on the door.
He heard the key before you did. A second of hesitation on the other side of it, a small pause of someone checking a doorknob, unremarkable to anyone who hadn't spent the last several weeks learning this particular man's habits off a camera feed, then the lock turned, and the door opened. Caleb got his first look, in person, at the man that had been living rent free in the back of his head since the closet.
He was bigger than the footage had suggested. That was Caleb's first thought, purely tactical, the assessment running before anything else had a chance to. Broad through the shoulders, glasses fogged from the heat outside, a bakery bag hooked over two fingers like he'd planned a small kindness for the afternoon he had no idea was about to be interrupted. He looked, Caleb thought, exactly like what you'd described. Soft and harmless.
Caleb had spent two days watching him come apart with your underwear pressed to his face. He was not interested in the soft version.
He watched Valko's whole body go still in the doorway, watched the moment recognition landed and something flicker fast and unguarded across his face before it slammed back down into something more careful. His grip on the doorknob went white at the knuckle. His chest rose once, sharp, trying to solve the room through his lungs before his eyes had finished the job.
Caleb didn't move. He let the silence stretch and watched Valko's eyes cut once toward the couch —toward you, tucked against his side, laughing at something he'd said before Valko walked in— and then back to Caleb, dark and assessing, doing a poor job of hiding either.
Good, Caleb thought. Let him look.
You were the one who broke the tension. You sat up, delighted, already making introductions.
"Good to meet you," Caleb said. He'd practiced the tone in his head the whole way over, and it came out exactly as unbothered as he'd wanted it to.
Valko's hand closed around his and it wasn't what he'd braced for. He'd expected tension, maybe something petty and territorial passed hand to hand like men sometimes did it, a grip held a second too long, knuckles pressed a little too hard. What he got instead was entirely outside of anything he had a category for, a kind of current running up through his palm.
He watched Valko's pupils blow wide. Watched his knees go soft, just barely, enough to notice the shift in his weight before Valko managed to correct it. Watched two years of careful, controlled devotion crack visibly down the middle in the space of about four seconds, right there in front of him, right there in front of you, and you hadn't noticed a single second of it. Not even the bulge forming in Valko's pants.
"Something wrong?" Caleb asked. Almost bored. He wanted Valko to hear exactly how little this was costing him, even though it wasn't remotely true.
Valko didn't answer. He pulled his hand back too fast, said something about a lab, something he'd forgotten, already retreating toward the door before the sentence finished coming out of him, and then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him.
Caleb sat back down on the couch beside you, pulled you back into the space against his side like nothing at all had happened, and kept his voice easy while you laughed and wondered aloud what had gotten into him.
He was still smiling by the time you settled back against his chest. It didn't reach anywhere past his mouth. Somewhere underneath the calm he'd built for your benefit, he was turning that handshake over and over, trying and failing to make it mean anything less than what it had felt like — and understanding, with clarity, that whatever this was, it had just stopped being only about you.
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Valko didn't come back that night, or the next. He called you Saturday morning, and Caleb was close enough on the couch to catch your unbothered "oh, no worries, family stuff happens" and gathered from the rest of the conversation that Valko had suddenly needed to go home for the weekend. Something about his mother needing help with some family stuff. You'd relayed it to Caleb after, propped against the kitchen counter with your coffee, not thinking twice about it. "He's probably just giving us space," you said, half smiling, already moving on to what you wanted him to cook for dinner.
Caleb made a low agreeable sound into your hair and thought that "giving space" was an interesting way to describe a man circling the block.
Because he'd seen him from the window. That morning, unmistakable, even from half a block off, standing on the opposite corner with his phone out and not actually looking at it. Not going in. Not going anywhere. Whatever internal negotiation was keeping Valko rooted to that corner instead of walking the last fifty feet home, Caleb wasn't in any hurry to interrupt it. It told him plenty on its own.
He used the rest of the weekend well.
He started in the kitchen, because it was the room that most obviously belonged to someone else. Caleb cooked for you Saturday and Sunday with his sleeves shoved up, moving through the space like he had every right to it, and when he was done he didn't wipe the counter down the way he usually would. He let his palms rest flat against the surface a bit longer than necessary. Nothing you'd notice. Everything a nose that had spent two years cataloguing this apartment down to its smallest note would.
He hung his jacket over the back of the chair Valko used the most. He left the jacket there for two days and didn't move it.
The bathroom he didn't think twice about using. What he did on Sunday sfternoon, though, midway through a shower with the water running loud enough to cover the sound, was something closer to instinct than plan. He stood there with the water running down his back and thought about everything he'd watched over the last two years. A man who could smell what others couldn't, Caleb reasoned, half serious and half not, might be able to smell this too. So he did it, he took a piss right there, telling himself the whole time it was an experiment and nothing more, then stepped back into the spray, rinsing the tile down like nothing at all had happened, filing the thought away with something that wasn't quite a smile.
Valko came back Sunday night. Caleb heard the key turn from the couch and he didn't get up. He sat with one arm along the back of the couch, ankle crossed over his knee, and let the silence stretch as long as it needed to before Valko finally pushed the door open.
Valko's shoulders were doing something different this time. Something tighter, a man arriving already braced for whatever he was about to walk into.
"Evening"
Valko didn't answer right away. His eyes moved once around the room —Caleb's jacket still slung over his chair, a mug left unwashed on the counter— and something crossed his face. Recognition, maybe. The kind that arrives when a man realizes the target he'd assumed was passive has started, without any warning at all, to fight back.
"You're still here," Valko said. Careful.
"Weekend leave, figured I'd make the most of it."
He watched Valko's jaw work, watched him fight against whatever had risen up first. Valko set his bag down slow and made no move to come any further into the room.
"She's asleep," Caleb added, tipping his head just slightly toward your closed door. Valko's throat moved once, like he was swallowing something that refused to go down easy.
"Right," Valko said. "Good."
He didn't sound like he meant it. Caleb hadn't expected him to.
Neither of them said anything else. Valko crossed the room eventually, avoiding the couch like it was something that might bite him if he got too close. He disappeared down the hall, and his bedroom door clicked shut a moment later.
Caleb sat alone for a long while after that. Two years the other man had spent building something out of proximity and starved patience and Caleb had walked in and rearranged the entire foundation of it in less than seventy two hours.
It should have felt like enough. It didn't,not all the way. Some part of him, the part that had felt his own pulse jump under a stranger's grip in the middle of the living room, understood that this wasn't finished.
He got up. Turned off the lights. Went to bed in your room, in your sheets, in the space that —for tonight, at least— was unmistakably his.
He lay there for a while, listening to the apartment settle. You stirred beside him at some point, half asleep, murmuring something into the pillow, and he found himself watching you in the dim light coming through the blinds, patience finally running out of road.
He woke you up slowly, his mouth at your shoulder and your name low in his throat, and you came up out of sleep soft and pliant and already reaching for him, no hesitation in it at all, as if some part of you had been waiting even asleep. He didn't ask you to be quiet. That was the point. He kept his hands on your hips the entire time, murmured mine against your skin over and over again, except tonight he let the headboard knock against the wall it shared with the hallway, and let your voice carry further than it usually did, and didn't do a single thing to soften either.
Down the hall, Valko lay flat on his back with both hands pressed over his own face, listening to every second of it, breathing in a room that no longer smelled like only you, and understood that he had just lost the first real skirmish of a war he hadn't known he'd already started.
I know today feels like a gut punch. I saw Caleb's new card and I laughed bc i did not believe Infold & Papergames could be this stupid, but I have been wrong before.
I know we're tired. I know we're angry. I know a lot of us are running out of patience.
This boycott is a marathon, not a sprint, regardless of how much we want infold and papergames to lock the fuck in and get their heads out of their asses.
Here's the thing. Valko's stuff is still privated, not deleted. Raf's myth is still delayed. They haven't even officially said anything about his myth yet sooooooooo that's another piece to the puzzle. Infold is currently perusing legal action and word on the street is that infold HQ is moving to a different location, likely bc of either the threats and safety concerns for employees from the cdgs.
today was a checkpoint, not a deadline.
Infold and Papergames still haven't made any official statements. Not about Rafayel's myth getting delayed again. Not about their schedule changing again. Not a corpo speak 'we hear you, we understand there are issues with the game, we will make an official statement on the state of the game at a later date, please be patient with us, here are some dias'.
But most importantly they haven't made another statement regarding valko. Not a return statement nor a statement doubling down on his cancellation.
We need to keep up the pressure.
Don't stop talking about Valko
Keep boycotting
If you still want to log in or you're still logging in, its imperative you don't spend money.
We need to hit them where it hurts. They can ignore our surveys, they can ignore our posts. They can ignore our emails and our letters and our customer service support messages.
They can't ignore this drop in revenue. For anyone unaware, please see this post from @cairoblair and look at that drop. Their revenue is down by 70%. That is not an insignificant drop.
Another thing to keep in mind is to ramp up the pressure on Papergames as well. Papergames is the party responsible for the development and management of LaDS. This is the party that's been making the executive decisions on the direction LaDS is going in and the party that made the choice to cancel Valko. I'll admit, I thought that LaDS was under Infold with papergames as the parent company (like sony owning several game dev studios) but I've been recently corrected. Infold works more as the distributors and marketers. This doesn't absolve any of these idiots. Infold is still 100% at fault for poor communication and basically ignoring all of us and mishandling all of Valko's marketing and release. We've done well at pressuring Infold and we need to do the same to Papergames.
We can still do this. Posting Caleb's card without addressing anything was about one of the worst things Infold and Papergames could have done which could mean a few things that others have said. Either they're
1) testing the waters to see how angry we all still are and if its potentially safe to release Raf's (expectedly lucrative)
2) trying to push through this rough patch business as usual and hoping we'll get bored and distracted by the new shiny,
3) gathering evidence to prove the rumors and defamatory articles fucked their revenue for lawsuits
4) trying to hobble along with the remaining non-boycotting playerbase until they get to either September (anti-cyber bullying law effective) or until 7.0.
if its 1, 3, or 4 we need to continue withholding, emailing, and make our dissatisfaction known. if its 2, we keep it up regardless.
At this point, this isn't just about Valko's cancellation, but the mishandling of LaDS and the complete disregard for the game's entire playerbase, Global and CN alike, and catering mainly towards the cn toxic minority that has a penchant for parasocialism and cow shit. Our CN girlies are fighting hard on their end, and we can't give up on our end.
I know we’re all angry and rightly so. I absolutely cannot fathom how a company can say nothing at all, not even acknowledge the month of silence itself.
But that changes nothing; we keep boycotting, and we keep flooding every post Infold makes with Valko. If they think they’ll get some peace and quiet, they’re mistaken.
Even though,understandably, more and more players are walking away from the game for good (something I’ll eventually do too), I’ll still take the five minutes to spread the word about Valko under every post.
Setting aside hope, anger, or despair: this remains the biggest and most effective protest we’ve had so far. Let’s keep using it!
Ignore the antis; we don’t have the energy or time for their perspectives or petty grievances.
We are not responsible for the company, the management, the government or anything else beyond our control.
All we can really do is cut off money, raise awareness among more and more people and spread the word about the actual situation and the problems with Infold.
If we work together, this becomes our greatest weapon.
I want Valko back, but I refuse to give a company that much power over me.
I'm gonna keep fighting for Valko, I see no reason not to! I'm not gonna let Infold, antis or anyone else control how I feel about something.
We can't control what will happen, we can and should do our best, but nobody knows how this will end. What we can control how we embrace things.
For me this means:
If Infold isn't speaking up? Great! I will just keep going and annoy all the antis with good deeds and pictures of Valko!
If Infold insists on not giving Valko back? Well, fine! Let's turn Valko into a global charity organization then. Make this thing even bigger Why should we stop when we can simply establish him as a symbol of unity and doing good?
We’ve built something huge in just three weeks, just imagine what we could achieve in a year!
We shouldn't let them play with our emotions for that long, but continue doing good together? Never letting Infold or antis forget the face of Valko? Reaching even more people because we keep expanding? For me, that sounds fantastic 💛
