hey so if you go on Bart’s tag im LITERALLY the only person who has posted shit abt him in like an unreasonably long time. you too but you’re answering my asks.
im in a prison of everyone liking my blorbo but being the only one insane enough to ramble.
plz ramble about him (and ryley) to me. plzzzzzzzz
I KNOWWW I WAS JUST IN THERE,,, it's like an echo chamber 😭 just two nerds rambling about the ocean men
This one ended up being long. I'm not sorry.
Okayokayokay. So I've been too busy to write or draw much of anything, seriously I've been stuck on a ref for Petra and fic for a mini bang for like two months, but I really need to draw them, and I've been rotating an idea for several fics for a while now. I already have a post-canon au I'm very attached to, where Ryley runs from Alterra, becomes a wanted man because they don't like that, and ends up working as a smuggler for a while, this whole time he's living in denial of his feeling of regret over leaving 4546b, then he gets double crossed and crashes there again and gets a little brother (it's a whole thing), but I've been wanting to do a prequel (novelization of the game) for a while now, since I started my au, but I also want to do a Bart lives au but I don't want to write the same first few chapters over and over again, so I have decided I'll have the first fic be the start of two series (I think you can do that on ao3) and at a certain point the timeline will diverge into two, maybe three separate series (a canon telling, followed by my au, a Bart lives and they never leave the planet au, and maybe a Avery lives au)
Anyways all that to say I don't have the time to write it rn but I have ambitious plans for the blorbos :)
I don't want to spoil too much of it, and I don't have much more than half formed ideas anyway, but I plan for Bart to still be well enough to travel around, and he's seen the Aurora so he knows there's been another crash, but he and Ryley are just in the wrong places at the wrong time and don't run into eachother until complete accident several weeks later.
A lot of the fics I've read there's some dramatic event and one saves the other but I want it to be pure chance. It's been several weeks and Bart hasn't seen any signals or groups of people, he finds Ryley's lifepod, but only after it's been abandoned and Ryley's built a base elsewhere, ans he hasn't seen anyone in 10 years so he doesn't really get his hopes up in the first place, and just assumes no one made it. Ryley, is still new to isolation and is just starting to accept that it's just him, no one else made it, and he has been listening to every voice recording he can get his hands on to keep on feeling like a sane person. (Failing)
They're both getting resources, one of them is out of their seamoth swimming around and picking stuff up, and the other just drives overhead and they see eachother and both freeze in place and just stare, open mouthed and unmoving, until the one that's outside gets low on oxygen and has to scramble back into his seamoth. Spurred on, they both unfreeze but can't talk separated by two windscreens and several meters of water, and they end up have an awkward excange through the glass that goes like
"👍?" (You okay?)
"👍" (yup)
"👍👍" (cool)
Then they ascend to talk at the surface. Bart is going "holy shit holy shit holy shit one of the new ones made it. I don't know how to be around people anymore." and Ryley is thrilled because he thinks Bart is someone from the Aurora, of course until he opens his mouth and Ryley immediately recognizes his voice from the pda recordings and just goes "BART TORGAL??!?"
And then they're ocean roommates that are horribly horribly sick and plagued by visions and so on.
I think that they should be allowed to be ocean roommates with 20 pets and multiple sprawling gardens, and a scrap pile out back where Ryley Makes Stuff.
Ryley got attached to the first hoverfish he caught and named it Pancake, he has one cuddlefish named Squiggle and his favorite creatures are the stalkers, he's raised and released several. Bart has a Peeper Tank, and a separate larger containment with every small fish he could get his hands on, as well as the cuddlefish from the mushroom tree that I haven't chosen a name for, and a herd of jellyrays.
Also, you know what I went and made this, here's a low effort doodle, as a treat :].
Close ups/individual sections + ramblings below cut
This bitch is a monster of a file and crashed when I got to around 32 hours, luckily I was able to restore it with ibis paint's playback feature, but during the restoration Mason's (orange) lineart bugged and was duplicated and shifted upwards, all on ONE LAYER, so I had to redraw parts of it. All said and done, I spent 38 hours on this piece when my usual is between 5-15, and after merging down all the layers that I could bare to, it has 151 layers. :')
