#figment tag

[gooseintime]

chill ox who low key doesn’t give a peck

[alternis]

The earthquake kid (he probably had a codename but it was, also, probably terrible. The good names were taken years ago and left everybody else trawling through thesaurus dot com with severely lowered standards) gives him a Look.

"No," Figment says, still fiddling with the lock because honestly how is the guy who can walk through walls the only one on this assignment who knows how to disable this style of security system? He's still mad at the Titans, for everything, but at least they were more competent than this group of wannabe-villains.

"But how can you know that it's you having that opinion, and not the thing in your hand?"

"Because Aestel has purple thoughts." The colour coding had been a great idea, once he'd decided to play along with the Aestel's 'just trying to help' act. Communicating with words was still too much for it (when it wasn't directly hijacking his brain to wear him like a suit) but even animals had instinctive, subconscious reactions to colour. So when he suddenly found himself thinking of purple, or noticing purple objects, he knew it was time to start noticing whatever else he suddenly found himself thinking about.

Also it made him sound like he was going crazy when he tried to explain it to people. Which in ordinary circumstances would be a bad thing, because heroes needed to seem reliable and trustworthy, but in these specific circumstances 'Figment is a little bit crazy' was a great cover for all the other things he was trying to do. Like run interference on their plans, sow dissent in their ranks, and sabotage their grand evil scheme without getting caught. It was important that whenever he did something strange or self-contradictory he had people questioning his sanity—and asking if maybe he'd be better working with some other team member—rather than looking to see if his actions had a pattern.

And now they were significantly less likely to notice other things, like the fact he was purposefully delaying opening the door so that the agent on the other side, who'd locked it less than five minutes ago, had time to get rid of whatever it was that they'd risked their life to destroy—before it got into the hands of teenage supervillains.

How terribly inconvenient, for his teammates, that none of them trusted Figment to blink through the door and handle it on his own. And that he was the only one here who knew how to disable this style of security system.

[gooseintime]

making a queue..

In February the chief executive of time was turned into a whimsical hag. she dresses like Ms Frizzle in a blazer

[gooseintime]

does anybody know this girls name. I’ve just been calling her WithRoyalty.png this whole time

[alternis]

i said "im gonna make an au where tim has a cursed amulet" and then i blinked and tim had befriended the cursed amulet. they had a whole enemies-to-friendship arc. the amulet is his superboy. where am i

[alternis]

i really went from "this is the spooky plot device amulet that gives tim his powers in this au" to "the plot device amulet has developed a personality and Opinions. it's sad now" much faster than anybody could have anticipated

[alternis]

wow it'll be so fun when eventually figment!tim gets trapped in some kind of psychic dream realm that separates him and aestel into two separate 'bodies' that are finally able to communicate, and both of them can get into a giant screaming fight about how the other one 'never listens to me!'

tim gets to run down his list of grievances including the repeated violations of his bodily autonomy, the mental intrusions making him doubt his own sanity to the extent it left him vulnerable to outside manipulations, the horror of waking up to discover something else has been interacting with people using his face and he has no idea what they did or said. and aestel gets to tell tim things like "no i don't understand why it's so terrible when i use your body because you use my body all the time! my powers are me, my being, you don't think twice about using me" and "meeting you was the first good thing that ever happened to me. you saved me. and you hate me".

and then finally tim gets to admit that he already figured out from all the evidence that aestel probably was telling the truth about being non-malevolent but he couldn't admit to himself he was wrong. whilst aestel can admit that they know that tim gets uncomfortable about the body sharing situation and that their actions have been hurting him, but they decided tim's safety was more important than his comfort.

wait i have image editing abilities i can illustrate this. behold:

it really is just the most fucked up roommate situation imaginable for both of them tbh.

[alternis]

you know considering Aestel's backstory is "a magical(?) artifact that gained sentience whilst trapped in an ancient tomb, was discovered by an evil organisation who kept it in a box and only took it out to force it to kill people, that had no way to communicate with the test subjects other than 'try to make them think that using it was a bad idea', and couldn't escape the organisation bc it had no control over their physical form or how their powers were used until it finally found the Compatible Organic that could take it and escape"

it does kind of make sense that it's dismissive of tim's whole "you're violating my boundaries by communicating with me using thought-language (which i didn't even recognise as a foreign intrusion until it was pointed out to me) and taking over my body (to save my life and also protect me from the negative consequences of overusing the Aestel's power)" thing

yes, from tim's perspective he is living in a psychological horror! but also: Aestel would absolutely, 100%, never take the option of "permanently erase Tim's personhood to take over his body", whilst if Tim had the option to erase Aestel's sentience to keep using the artifact without any risk of mind-manipulation or body hijack... he'd consider it.

like neither of them is In The Wrong here, neither of them is an objectively evil entity. they just have completely incompatible value-systems and no way to properly communicate with each other or find compromises.