Hardest part of my ghost au is actually properly coming up with the unfinished business.
As neither of them died in a way you can really deny, quick sure but knowing. So it’s not that angle, maybe the un-fairness of it all but that’s not the whole truth either.
Part of it I think is that they’re teenagers. They’re never not going to be. It’s a hard state to grow in within itself especially when you’re denied that growth, physical and some mental. So they know their deaths but they can’t really get past them or their lives. Clinging to that could/should have in this world. Trying to insure something of themselves is still here even if all their goals while alive are gone. But it’s hard to recognize impact as a ghost because of that cycling and wallowing that they just stay.
I think… now stay with me as this has all been very rambly and philosophical.
Dally-> determined to make name/reputation for himself again. This time as an urban legend. Ok not a record with police but now with local teens (Something something dad never paid attention to him, so he made the police - now he makes everyone. Very poltergeist, won’t be forgotten.) Needs to learn the fight is over. He doesn’t have to anymore.
Johnny -> he’s a bit of a harder case, he’s also involved and interactive he listens and whispers to folks but his business? I’m not too sure, but then again Johnny talked about dying or even leaving all the time but he always stayed despite himself. He accepted it but … needs to understand his significance/say goodbyes/ his attachment to the gang. He stays, he won’t change that now. He stays. Dally follows.
They both want to know they made the right choices too, still working out what I mean by that.
New goals/distractions/cope lost focus until pony comes around - this was a note to myself I’m keeping it
mystery inc. but it’s morally grey, emotionally repressed, and a little bit unhinged
okay so i fell down a rabbit hole and now i’m mapping regulus and his lot onto the scooby doo universe and unfortunately it makes too much sense.
like this started as a joke — “haha evan is fred” — and then it spiralled into full character analysis, relationship dynamics, and me realising this group functions exactly like mystery inc. if you took away the bright colours and replaced them with tension, bad coping mechanisms, and the occasional questionable decision.
so here’s the breakdown — who’s who, why it works, and how the dynamics somehow got worse.
-
evan rosier as fred jones is the kind of casting choice that makes everything else immediately fall into place.
because on the surface, fred is the “leader.” he’s the one with the plans, the structure, the “gang, split up and look for clues” energy. and evan fits that in the most deceptive way possible — not because he’s the most stable, but because he’s the one most willing to take control of chaos and shape it into something that looks like order.
evan isn’t leading because he’s sensible. he’s leading because he’s fearless in a way that borders on reckless.
fred builds traps. evan would build traps that are slightly too elaborate, slightly too dangerous, and definitely more personal than they need to be. like fred sets up a net and a pulley system; evan rigs something that requires precision timing, a bit of luck, and the implicit understanding that if it goes wrong, oh well.
and the thing is — it usually doesn’t go wrong. which only makes him worse.
he’s got that same hyper-focus too. when fred locks onto a plan, nothing distracts him. when evan locks onto something, it’s game over. he’s not letting it go. he’s not letting you go. he’ll grin through it, joke through it, but there’s something sharp underneath — something that says this was never a game for him in the first place.
also: the aesthetic. fred is clean-cut, all-american golden boy. evan is that same silhouette dragged through something darker — still striking, still magnetic, but with an edge that makes people hesitate for half a second too long. he looks like he knows exactly how things are going to end and is enjoying the process anyway.
and the most important part — the dynamic.
fred is the one who keeps the group moving forward. not because he understands everyone the best, but because he refuses to let them fall apart.
evan does the same thing, just… meaner about it.
he’ll tease, provoke, push — but it’s all in service of keeping everyone engaged, keeping them sharp, keeping them from drifting. he doesn’t do soft encouragement. he does tension. he does challenge. he does that thing where you want to prove him wrong just to shut him up — and somehow, that keeps you going.
he’s the centre of motion, not because he’s safe, but because he’s impossible to ignore.
fred jones, if fred jones had teeth.
-
regulus black as daphne blake is the kind of casting that starts as a joke and ends up being painfully accurate.
because everyone thinks they understand daphne.
she’s the pretty one. the composed one. the one who looks like she belongs somewhere softer, safer, more put-together than the chaos she’s constantly standing in.
and that’s exactly what people do with regulus.
they see the poise. the control. the way he holds himself like something carved and careful and intentional. they see the beauty of it — the symmetry, the stillness — and assume that’s all there is.
but daphne isn’t just “the pretty one.”
she’s the one who keeps ending up in the centre of things.
kidnapped, targeted, singled out — not because she’s weak, but because she’s visible. because she draws attention. because she looks like the easiest point of fracture in the group.
and regulus exists like that too.
he’s the one people choose. the one people reach for, test, push, try to break open. not because he’s fragile, but because there’s something about him that feels like if you could just get past the surface, you’d find something important.
and they’re not wrong.
what people forget about daphne — what they always forget — is that she survives everything.
she gets out. she fights back. she adapts.
and sometimes she does it quietly.
sometimes she does it by playing the part they expect long enough to turn it on its head.
that’s regulus.
he understands the role he’s been placed in. he understands exactly how he’s being perceived — delicate, ornamental, controlled — and he uses that. he lets people underestimate him just enough to get close, just enough to miscalculate.
and then he changes the outcome.
also — and this matters — daphne is the emotional hinge of the group in a way people don’t talk about enough.
she notices things. she feels shifts. she picks up on tension before it breaks.
regulus does that too, but where daphne smooths things over, regulus holds it. carries it. lets it sit in his chest until it turns into something heavier, sharper, more decisive.
he’s not the heart in the soft way.
he’s the heart in the way that hurts.
and visually? yeah. obviously.
put him in daphne’s silhouette — the clean lines, the deliberate presentation, the almost too-perfect exterior — and it works immediately.
but it’s the subversion that makes it stick.
because underneath all of that, both of them are far more capable, far more dangerous, and far more aware than anyone ever gives them credit for.
daphne blake, if you stopped mistaking softness for weakness.
-
dorcas meadowes as velma dinkley is the kind of casting that feels obvious until you actually look at it properly — and then it becomes perfect.
because velma isn’t just “the smart one.”
she’s the one who sees everything.
patterns, inconsistencies, the tiny details everyone else misses because they’re too busy running, arguing, or pretending they’re not scared. velma is always a step ahead — not louder about it, not showy — just right.
and dorcas has that exact energy.
she’s observant in a way that borders on surgical. she doesn’t just look at a situation, she dissects it. pulls it apart, lays it out, understands how it works and where it’s going to break.
and the thing about velma — the thing people forget — is that she’s not passive intelligence.
she’s sharp. she’s blunt. she will absolutely tell you when you’re being stupid, and she won’t soften it to make you feel better.
that’s dorcas all over.
she’s the one calling things out. the one grounding the group when they start spiralling off into nonsense, dragging them back to what actually matters. not gently — never gently — but effectively.
and she’s always doing more than she lets on.
velma is constantly carrying the investigation. connecting threads, building the bigger picture, holding all the information in her head so the rest of them can keep moving.
dorcas does the same thing, just quieter about it.
she’ll let people think they’ve come to conclusions themselves. she’ll let evan take the lead, let regulus sit in the centre of it, let everything unfold — but behind the scenes, she’s already mapped it out. she already knows where this is going.
she just doesn’t need the credit.
also — the dynamic.
velma and daphne are a pair. not in a loud, obvious way, but in that constant, underlying alignment. they understand each other without needing to explain. velma notices when daphne’s off; daphne trusts velma’s judgment without question.
dorcas and regulus fit into that perfectly.
she’s one of the few people who actually reads him correctly. not the version he presents, not the version everyone else reacts to — him. she sees the strain, the calculation, the way he holds everything in too tightly.
and she adjusts around it.
not to fix him. just… to account for it.
and aesthetically? velma’s whole thing — practical, grounded, slightly understated but unmistakably intentional — translates so well to dorcas. there’s nothing accidental about how she exists in a space. everything is chosen, everything has purpose.
no wasted movement. no wasted thought.
velma dinkley, if you sharpened her edges and let her keep them.
-
barty crouch jr as shaggy rogers is the kind of casting that looks like a joke until you realise it’s actually the most unhinged, accurate thing in the entire lineup.
because shaggy isn’t just comic relief.
he’s avoidance.
he’s nerves and deflection and running — not because he’s incapable, but because he feels everything too loudly and too fast and doesn’t have any interest in standing still long enough for it to catch him.
and barty?
barty lives there.
he’s jittery in a different way — not soft anxiety, but something sharper, more volatile. his energy spikes instead of dips. where shaggy goes “nope” and bolts, barty goes “this is a terrible idea” and then does it anyway, laughing like it’s funny when it’s really just too much.
but the core is the same:
he doesn’t sit still with things.
he fills the space. talks, jokes, provokes, does something — anything — to keep from being alone with his own head.
and just like shaggy, people underestimate him because of it.
they see the chaos, the mess, the erratic energy and think that’s all he is. comic relief. background noise. the one who panics.
but shaggy survives everything.
he gets dragged into every nightmare scenario and still makes it out the other side. he adapts. he improvises. he thinks on his feet in a way that looks accidental but isn’t.
barty does that too — just meaner, faster, and with way less concern for whether it’s a good idea.
also, the loyalty.
this is the part that actually hurts.
shaggy is ride-or-die. not in a loud, noble way — in a messy, terrified, i’m still here anyway kind of way. he’ll complain, he’ll panic, he’ll say this is the worst idea ever, and then he’ll follow you into it regardless.
barty’s the same.
he’ll mock you while doing it. he’ll make it sound like a joke. but he doesn’t leave.
and then there’s the dynamic with fred.
shaggy and fred don’t make sense on paper — one’s chaos, one’s structure — but they work because fred keeps things moving and shaggy keeps things from becoming too rigid.
evan and barty slot into that perfectly.
evan builds the plan. barty pokes holes in it, laughs at it, stress-tests it just by existing. and somehow, between them, it becomes something that actually functions.
also — let’s be real — shaggy has that slightly dishevelled, offbeat, “is he okay?” energy that barty wears like a second skin. there’s always something a little off, a little too much, and you can’t quite tell if it’s intentional.
it usually is.
shaggy rogers, if the nervous energy bit back.
-
pandora rosier as scooby doo — but specifically if scooby were human — is the kind of casting choice that makes the entire group suddenly make sense.
because scooby isn’t just “the dog.”
he’s the emotional gravity of the group.
he’s instinct, chaos, loyalty, and that weird, almost supernatural intuition that always ends up being right, even when it makes no sense at the time.
and pandora fits that in the most unnerving way.
she doesn’t think like the others.
where dorcas analyses and evan plans and regulus calculates, pandora just… knows. she’ll say something completely offhand, something that sounds like nonsense or a joke or a tangent, and then three scenes later it’s the key to everything.
not because she worked it out step by step.
but because her brain moves sideways instead of forward.
and scooby does that too.
he stumbles into clues. he reacts to things no one else notices. he’s driven by instinct — food, fear, affection — but underneath that is this constant, quiet awareness of what’s wrong in a situation.
pandora has that same awareness, just dressed up in curiosity and chaos instead of nerves.
also — the loyalty.
scooby stays.
even when he’s scared, even when he doesn’t understand what’s happening, even when everything in him is saying run — he stays because his people are there.
pandora’s like that, but softer about it. less obvious. she doesn’t cling, doesn’t make a show of it — she just… is there. always somewhere nearby, always orbiting, always returning.
and if something threatens the group?
that’s when it gets interesting.
because scooby can be brave when it counts.
pandora can be dangerous when it counts.
and then there’s the dynamic with shaggy.
scooby and shaggy are inseparable. they feed off each other — fear, humour, comfort, chaos — constantly in sync, constantly pulling each other along.
pandora and barty slot into that perfectly.
they’re on the same wavelength in a way that makes everyone else a little uneasy. the jokes that go too far, the ideas that spiral, the shared look before they do something that’s either going to be brilliant or a complete disaster.
probably both.
and aesthetically? making scooby human doesn’t take away the essence — it just translates it.
the big, expressive reactions. the physicality. the way emotion moves through them so visibly, so immediately. pandora has that same openness, that same lack of restraint in how she exists.
nothing is half-felt. nothing is muted.
everything is alive.
scooby doo, if you gave the instinct a human mind and let it wander wherever it wanted.
-
mystery inc. (but it’s them) — dynamic breakdown
—
shaggy & daphne (barty & regulus)
this is teeth and tension and something unsaid sitting between them at all times.
because barty pokes. constantly. he circles regulus like he’s trying to get a reaction out of something carved from marble. jokes that go a little too far, comments that land a little too sharp — always testing, always prodding.
and regulus?
regulus doesn’t rise to it.
which only makes barty worse.
there’s something about the way regulus refuses to give him what he wants that hooks him in deeper. like he’s trying to crack something open just to prove he can.
but here’s the thing — regulus sees him.
not the noise, not the performance — him.
and sometimes, very rarely, he’ll respond. dry, cutting, precise enough to stop barty mid-sentence.
and those are the moments barty lives for.
because underneath all of it, there’s a weird, fragile understanding there. not soft, never soft — but real.
—
fred & daphne (evan & regulus)
this is control meeting control and pretending it’s not a power struggle.
evan moves the group forward. regulus decides whether that movement holds.
they don’t clash loudly — they align, and that’s worse.
because when they agree, everything snaps into place. plans sharpen, decisions stick, the whole group falls into orbit around them without even realising it.
but when they don’t?
it’s quiet. tense. deliberate.
a look across the room. a pause before action. the smallest shift in tone that tells everyone something is off.
evan builds the plan.
regulus decides if it’s worth following.
and evan cares about that judgment more than he’ll ever admit.
—
velma & daphne (dorcas & regulus)
this is the most stable relationship in the entire group and somehow also the most dangerous.
because dorcas understands regulus completely.
no guesswork. no misreads. she sees the strain, the calculation, the way he holds everything too tightly — and she adjusts without making a thing of it.
she doesn’t push him.
she doesn’t try to fix him.
she just… accounts for him.
and regulus trusts her in a way he doesn’t trust anyone else.
not loudly. not openly. but it’s there — in the way he listens when she speaks, in the way he doesn’t argue certain points, in the way he lets her stand just slightly closer than anyone else.
they don’t need to say it.
that’s what makes it unshakeable.
—
scooby & daphne (pandora & regulus)
this is instinct meeting restraint.
pandora drifts — curious, chaotic, following whatever thread catches her attention — and somehow she always ends up back at regulus.
like orbit. like gravity.
and regulus lets her.
which is saying something.
he doesn’t try to contain her, doesn’t try to direct her — he just watches, adjusts, allows. because he knows she sees things the rest of them don’t.
and pandora, in turn, treats him like something precious.
not fragile — never that — but important.
she’ll say strange, sideways things that land a little too close to the truth, and regulus will go still for half a second before moving on like it didn’t hit.
they understand each other in a way that doesn’t translate to anyone else.
—
fred & velma (evan & dorcas)
this is structure and precision.
evan drives. dorcas refines.
he throws out ideas, plans, directions — and she cuts them down to what actually works. removes the excess, sharpens the edges, makes it real.
they don’t argue much.
not because they always agree, but because they don’t need to.
dorcas will let him run with something if it’s functional. evan will adjust the second she points out a flaw.
it’s efficient. almost seamless.
and slightly terrifying because of it.
—
fred & shaggy (evan & barty)
this is chaos being weaponised.
evan builds the plan.
barty stress-tests it just by existing.
he’ll poke holes, derail things, laugh at the structure of it — but in doing that, he forces evan to make it better.
stronger. tighter. harder to break.
and evan lets him.
complains about it, sure. snaps back, pushes, matches the energy — but he never shuts it down completely.
because he knows barty’s chaos is useful.
and barty knows exactly how far he can push before it stops being a game.
—
fred & scooby (evan & pandora)
this is control meeting unpredictability and deciding to trust it anyway.
pandora doesn’t follow plans.
she follows threads.
things that feel right, look interesting, call to her — and half the time, it leads somewhere evan didn’t account for.
and instead of shutting it down?
he adapts.
he watches where she goes and builds around it, folding her instincts into the structure of the plan like it was always meant to be there.
it shouldn’t work.
it does.
—
shaggy & velma (barty & dorcas)
this is irritation layered over something that looks a lot like care.
dorcas finds barty exhausting.
barty finds that hilarious.
he’ll talk just to fill the silence she prefers. she’ll cut him off the second he crosses into nonsense. it’s a constant back-and-forth of push and shut-down, noise and precision.
but.
she pays attention to him.
not indulgently, not gently — but she notices when something’s off, when the chaos tips into something less controlled.
and he notices that she notices.
neither of them says anything about it.
—
shaggy & scooby (barty & pandora)
this is synced chaos.
shared looks. half-finished thoughts. ideas that spiral into something unhinged and somehow work.
they feed off each other — energy, humour, curiosity — constantly pulling each other further than either of them would go alone.
it’s unpredictable. volatile. occasionally a complete disaster.
and absolutely essential to the group.
—
velma & scooby (dorcas & pandora)
this is logic trying to map instinct.
dorcas doesn’t always understand how pandora gets to her conclusions.
pandora doesn’t always understand how to explain them.
but they meet in the middle.
dorcas translates the instinct into something usable. pandora pulls dorcas out of rigid thinking just enough to see other possibilities.
it’s not neat.
it’s not clean.
but it works in a way nothing else does.
—
and that’s the thing about this version of mystery inc.:
they don’t balance each other by being opposites.
they balance each other by sharpening each other.
every edge is made sharper by the person standing next to it.
-
oh this? this is where it gets mean. because the canon scooby dynamics are already messy, and now you’ve mapped them onto people who are worse about it.
i’m gonna keep it tight to those canon vibes — especially mystery incorporated (because that’s where everything is most dysfunctional) and the films where the relationships actually get explored — and then translate it cleanly onto them.
romance in mystery inc. (but it’s them, and it’s worse)
—
fred & daphne (evan & regulus)
this is obsession disguised as structure colliding with devotion disguised as distance.
because in canon?
fred and daphne are terrible at being in a relationship.
fred is so locked into his thing — traps, plans, the mission — that he doesn’t know how to prioritise daphne in a way that actually feels like love. and daphne, who feels everything loudly and fully, keeps trying to pull more out of him than he knows how to give.
it’s misalignment.
it’s wanting in different languages.
and that maps onto evan and regulus perfectly, just sharpened.
evan doesn’t neglect regulus.
he just… focuses elsewhere.
on the plan, the movement, the next step — always forward, always building something. and he assumes regulus will follow, will understand, will be there without needing to be asked.
and regulus?
regulus does follow.
but not blindly.
he watches. measures. waits.
because he needs something evan doesn’t naturally give — acknowledgment, attention that isn’t incidental, something that says you matter outside of the function you serve.
and evan thinks he’s already showing that.
that’s the problem.
so you get that same push-pull as canon — daphne wanting to be chosen, fred not realising he’s failing to choose her properly — except here it’s quieter, more controlled, more dangerous.
regulus won’t beg for it.
he’ll just… withdraw.
slightly. subtly. enough that evan feels it without being able to name it.
and that’s when it flips.
because once evan notices, it becomes a fixation.
suddenly the attention is there — sharp, intense, almost overwhelming — like he’s correcting an error in real time.
like he’s making up for something he didn’t realise he’d done wrong.
and regulus?
regulus lets him.
but he never forgets that it had to be noticed first.
it’s not soft.
it’s not easy.
it’s that same canon dynamic — just stripped of its innocence and left with all the edges exposed.
—
velma & shaggy (dorcas & barty)
and this is where you take canon and let it break.
because velma and shaggy in mystery incorporated?
they don’t work.
not because they don’t care about each other — but because they want different things from the relationship.
he deflects, jokes, prioritises comfort (and scooby) over confrontation, and ends up hurting her by never fully choosing the relationship in the way she needs.
it’s miscommunication. it’s incompatibility.
and dorcas and barty would be that dynamic turned up to eleven.
because dorcas doesn’t do ambiguity.
she wants things to make sense. to be named. to be understood.
and barty?
barty lives in refusal.
refusal to sit still, to define things, to let anything pin him down long enough to be examined.
so if they ever tried?
it would go exactly like canon — just faster, sharper, and with less room for pretending it might work.
dorcas would push for clarity.
barty would dodge, joke, twist it into something unserious.
she’d get frustrated — not loudly, but coldly, precisely — because to her, this is a problem to solve, and he’s refusing to engage with it properly.
and he’d feel that shift.
and instead of meeting her there?
he’d push back harder.
make it more chaotic, more unserious, more impossible to pin down.
until eventually, it snaps.
not dramatically.
just… cleanly.
because dorcas knows when something isn’t functional.
and barty was never going to let it be.
so they don’t date.
not really.
they orbit. they clash. they almost.
and that’s worse.
—
and the thing about both of these relationships?
is that they fail or falter for the same core reason:
misalignment in how they give and receive attention.
fred/evan loves through action, through movement, through building something around the person.
daphne/regulus loves through awareness, through being seen, through deliberate attention.
velma/dorcas loves through understanding, through clarity, through naming things as they are.
shaggy/barty loves through presence, through staying, through being there even when everything else is a mess.
none of those are inherently wrong.
they just don’t line up cleanly.
and when they don’t?
that’s where things start to crack.
-
also just to be very clear before anyone starts getting ideas — dorcas and barty are not, have never been, and will never be a thing romantically.
like yes, that whole velma/shaggy comparison works on a structural level, but that’s just me mapping canon dynamics for the sake of analysis, not actual relationship endgame.
because dorcas is a lesbian.
full stop.
and barty is… barty.
which already cancels out anything remotely romantic before it even gets off the ground.
so what they actually are is friends — in that specific, slightly combative way where they spend half their time bickering and the other half existing in a weird, unspoken understanding.
she finds him irritating.
he finds that entertaining.
she keeps him grounded (whether he admits it or not).
he keeps her from becoming too rigid.
there’s no tension there in a romantic sense — no almost, no what-if — just a very functional, very sharp friendship that works because it doesn’t try to be anything else.
the velma/shaggy thing is just for the parallel, not the outcome.
Modern AU's are kind of missing out on white collar crime when assigning Ed and Izzy a dark past. Why not have them be evil stock traders? Or hackers or things like that? The first one gives a good excuse for suit porn type of things at the very least.
Bikers and mobsters are grand but...expand horizons?
The Apparat is the head of a church whose principal object of veneration or hero is Bel, the counterpart to Czern, a pair of Grisha twins. It would be incorrect to call either of them deities, though they do form the organizing motive for the church. Allegedly, Bel, a summoner of light, and Czern, a summoner of shadow, grew as partners in opposition and power. Czern attempted to coerce Bel into greater extremity and antinomianism, eventually becoming 'Diabol' and urging Bel to cast off all restrictions upon himself and violate every norm in search of unlimited power. Instead, Bel realizes how disastrous it would be to remove every division, from gender and class roles to even the division between light and shadow, life and death; it would be a formless unity without identity or distinction. Instead, he sacrifices himself and his brother by leaping into the heavens, where modest Bel became the sun and greedy Czern became the consuming night sky, though the earth is divided daily between them in recognition of their bond. (No doubt the actual story is less dramatic, or perhaps Bel and Czern never existed, but certainly it has been effective in maintaining the power of the church.)
With most veneration distributed among the sankt’ya and their localities, the church is a highly-distributed organization, with a small ruling council and a great number of pilgrimage sites, hermitages, monasteries, and small chapels. Icons and amulets (as often against witchcraft as other evils) are common tokens of faith and souvenirs from pilgrimages. Monasteries engage in bellringing (to drown out evil incantations) and continuous prayer, and operate orphanages and schools (often teaching in a formal register of Ravkan whose lexicon and grammar makes it difficult to discuss Grisha neutrally or positively). Nunneries are much rarer and are almost always cloistered. The religious community observes strict rules of chastity, gender segregation, modesty, poverty, and hard work, with praise for those who show particularly high levels of self-abnegation or long hours at work and prayer. Solar (and to a lesser extent, lunar) eclipses are times of great danger, and monks and priests engage in extreme acts of asceticism, including fasting and staying awake, while bells ring continuously. Common people often light candles, set off fireworks or start bonfires.
More important to the church are the panoply of Saints, those little lights that pierce the dark sky: all of them Grisha, and the majority of them used up to serve otkazat’sya and then killed for it (most of the rest are likely local folk-heroes absorbed into the newer paradigm). The service, suffering and martyrdom is a critical way to balance the evil of the witchcraft embodied in them. The church would no doubt prefer to eliminate Grisha altogether, though time has surely indicated that this is functionally impossible: attempting to push the witchcraft out of a child through asceticism and punishment almost always has had the unintended effect of unleashing their magic, and cosseting them in the hopes of avoiding this usually leads again to low inhibition and antisocial behavior. Thus the church will (barely) tolerate the existence of those Grisha who serve the otkazat’sya powers (so long as they are thoroughly controlled, segregated and clearly identified), though they are eager to crush anyone who seems to be interested in acquiring too much power or who inadequately publicly observe social norms.
Reposted as "Get Right Church: The Apparat" at AO3.
Jaskier takes you out of the front gates and you descend through the towering conifers. The path seems to dip, rise and wind eternally, until suddenly the trees thin and you’re staring out across a meadow. In the distance, there are some very large... fuck, are those Chorts?
“Hey, don’t look so worried. They’re pretty mellow, really. Well, unless they’re in a rut, and then Lambert comes back looking like he’s been trampled. But anyway, where is he? Ah, yes,” Jaskier points towards the treeline. If you squint, you can make out the vague outline of a... Fiend. It’s... Lambert’s sitting on a Fiend’s shoulder, petting its mane. “Awesome, right? That’s Baby. Lambert raised her from a foal. She can get a bit jealous, so watch that third eye. Lambert always knocks back some Cat just in case she gets a bit frisky. Umm, anyway, I digress. Lambert looks after most things with paws and claws that live in forested areas. So, uh, fiends, chort, manticore, and some others; he’s also very good with insectoids, but he complains about them every time. Says they give him the creeps. I’m just amazed he’s not dead, to be honest. He comes up with these crazy schemes. I guess Aiden’s partly to thank for that. Oh, yeah, there’s Aiden...”
There’s a man sitting in a larger tree on the opposite end of the field. His arms are folded loosely over his chest, with a feathered fox sprawled on the branch before him. “How amazing is that enfield, right? Aiden thinks he’s probably the last one left. We call him Elki. Not really sure where that came from. Anyway, so, Aiden... he’s our scout. He roams, looking for injured beasties, cleaning up after them. He moves quickly, extremely agile. Yen always sends him out first with Elki if she’s thinking of launching a rescue team, or needs a wraith sighting investigated. Aiden’s laidback, smooth talking, can worm his way in anywhere with a smile and an eye flutter. He also likes sneaking up on people as a joke... oh, and never play cards with him. He cheats. I’m not sure how, but he does, and his forefeits are life altering.”
* Enfield is from William O’Connor’s “Dracopedia” (2013).
Do you have any AUs centered around the First Arc era / the Blue/Tall/Crooked Super Edition era? If so I would be really interested in hearing about them!
uhh yeah kind of?
i don't have very many unpublished/unannouced aus, other than something with snowfur!
i don't have enough of the details formed to even really title it but that's why i've been thinking abt her so much...i think it's gonna b a bit of a role swap au? like there aren't going to be a ton of canon differences just snowfur's pov during bsp and maybe! maybe she lives? not sure. maybe bluefur runs instead of snowfur, and then snowfur realizes her mate is going to destroy the forest and now she has to be ambitious,
like her sister was right and her sister died for her, for her kit, how could snowfur let thistleclaw destroy the clan? she's seen him with their son but.
but. she loves him, doesn't she? and he's not that bad, he doesn't hurt whitekit: if anything, he's encouraging! he just wants him to be a good warrior.
but. bluefur died for her, and goosefeather is chasing her and didn't bluefur say something about being special?
snowfur said that was stupid but.
but. maybe it wasn't. maybe bluefur was special. maybe snowfur has to do anything.
whelp okay nvm i do have an entire au planned out thanks anon! sdfjkldfs it's kind of just been sitting in the back of my brain for a while oof.
i also want to do something that covers the spottedleaf's heart/redtail's debt timeline, and it will be an au bc i have problems! so we're not retelling spottedleaf's heart.
this isn't an au! but i'm working on a long one-shot called "when the low tide spits us out again" about crookedjaw and willowbreeze.
finally! i do have quite a bit of published content in this time frame.
"here is the deepest secret nobody knows" covers (or will cover) about the end half of bluestar's prophecy. it's an au where thrushpelt goes after bluefur and the kits and. well. it's a lot of fluff and best dad thrushpelt.
there's a lot of stuff on the back burner for this! i want to explore a number of things, including: snowfur, bluefur falling for oakheart, the kits growing up in thunderclan
"it's mere assignment" is canon compliant, but it covers deadfoot's early life and i'm generally quite proud of it. i love him.
and finally, the first two works of "saccharine tithes of love and glory" cover roughly this time period, with grieving for the living being about yellowstorm (yellowfang), who becomes a thunderclan medicine cat for au reasons.
she gets to give the fire alone will save our clan prophecy! fun fact.
and where the spirit meets the bones is about spottedleaf and i don't want to overhype it but it did make me cry when i was writing it. can't promise it'll do the same to you, but.
it's about spottedleaf in riverclan and while it ends up focusing on tigerstar's reign, it does start before that.
Hello! I've been following your story on AO3 and adoring every minute. I think you'll be addressing this soon but when you mentioned how understanding the Force makes it easier to deceive it, is that how Palpatine is hiding in plain site as the chancellor? Because he is hiding from the Force?
It’s connected and I do plan to address that soon but I can give a little bit of an explanation here as well!
Essentially yes, because Palpatine is a Force user he has an understanding of the force that they wouldn’t expect of a random senator. The Force can’t technically lie, but you can use ti to omit or hide things if you know what your doing. When I described it in the last chapter with Cody it was a nebula, almost like a web every one and everything is visible to it and they all have their own layers and depths.
I’m going to do a cut here in case you don’t want to see the more in depth explanation as it’s kind of spoilers :)
For those who don’t understand the Force their lies will be obvious to most force users as they’ll just be on the surface. For Force users who know what they’re doing there are different ways to hide what may give away their lies and also ways to support them if they know what to do. Mostly, Palpatine works through a level of misdirection more than outright lying. On Coruscant it’s easier than it would be in other places because there are simply so many people to hide both your own presence and the things you want to obscure. The senate especially makes it more difficult as there are many people there who are already unpleasant to Jedi senses which helps Palps blend his own presence in when he hides it.
Palpatine is using those around him, especially the Senators that are already dark in the force to hide himself so that the Jedi only see the presence he presents for them. They don’t notice it because they’re used to the darkness of the Senate and expect it of them by now. And they don’t catch the lies because they aren’t expecting a random Senator, the Chancellor even, to know how to hide the same way they do.
Vigilante Aizawa got me quaking! I love it sm, my question is would he and Mic be friends if they were villains/vigilantes?
Ooh, so Hizashi definitely considers Shouta his friend. And Shouta has a very endearing not-hatred towards him.
Hizashi’s not “the worst” of villains. He’s not a good guy, but it’s not like he’s trying to kill hundreds of people or destroy civilization as we know it. He’s just, a bad guy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But he absolutely loves Shouta, like this guy who’s technically a villain because he’s on the wrong side of the law but he’s just a heroic guy who doesn’t want praise or fame he just wants there to be more peace and safety in the world. He loves that.
They don’t interact too often, their lives are pretty separate from each other’s reach, but when they do it’s a little… soft? a little tender? very “men construct intricate rituals which allow them to touch the skin of other men”, if that makes sense? Like maybe not the touching, that’s probably a little too close for the both of them considering how they’re kind of “enemies”. There’s just an understanding, something that they can recognize and appreciate in the other.
