#tweoad

[deadly-dapperling]

I told myself I was just gonna do some simple doodles, and TECHNICALLY, I did do that! I just also did a few more complex ones with references and cleaned up lines and shading... so there!

Anyways, never let anyone tell you you're too old to play with dolls!

And go read The Welcome End of a Dream by @adjacentperception

[adjacentperception]

Thank you for writing The Welcome End of a Dream, it scratches an itch of heartache that’s been in my mind for a long time. I like to read about that kind of unfamiliar body horror and being in a body that’s similar to your own but not quite, it’s special, it’s a kind of escapism. I have imagined a concept like this in my mind for years and years but have never written it out of fear of people thinking it’s too weird or something, but you did it exactly.

It’s perfect thank you thank you thank you for giving me something else to day dream about

Oh my goodness! Thank you so much for such a lovely message to wake up to ;-;!!!

I absolutely understand, it is such a very specific vibe and mood and it's something that I also have been turning around over and over in my brain in a million different ways for years now. I cannot tell you how many stories and characters I've got kicking around that all lead back to 'this is me but it also isn't me and now i have to figure out how to navigate this'. I'm sure a therapist would have a field day psychoanalyzing this phenomenon but damn if it's not just such a fun narrative pool to splash around in.

I gotta get back to writing that one. I gotta get back to writing anything. I promise the premise hasn't been abandoned and I fully intend to continue and complete it. It's just been a bazonkers year for mental health and personal life events and so everything has taken more of a back seat than I would have otherwise intended <<;

Still. Messages like this are worth all the gold in the world to me. Thank you again. I am always so unbelievably happy to know that something I've written has resonated in a brain outside of my own <3333333

[adjacentperception]

The Welcome End of a Dream - Chapter 4 is now available!

Hello good afternoon and welcome to Stella and Archer's wonderful world of Investigation and Remembering.

Thank you all so very much, not only for your interest in this silly little story but also your patience as I pried the next chapter out of myself. Sometimes the words just don't wanna come easily, despite knowing what I want them to ultimately do.

As always, feedback, questions, etc are always very appreciated <3 I hope you enjoy!

edit: the usual link insert isn't working for me atm so just click the title.

[adjacentperception]

The Welcome End Of A Dream - Chapter 3 is now available!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Happy New Year, everyone!

Figured it might be a good fit for a year in which I hope to write more, to post an update on the first day of it.

So here we are. Archer and Stella both taking some time away from each other to sort out their feelings on this Very Strange Situation so that they might start off on a better foot with one another.

Archer comes to terms with his current doll body, more or less, and Stella comes to terms with the idea that Being Confused is a better answer than Absence.

Hope you all enjoy and would love to know your thoughts :)

[adjacentperception]

there are certain things that you learn about your ocs as you travel along the narrative with them that you're not sure are ever going to make it into the actual story itself

and i mean that's great! i love knowing these things because these little details still color them as a person even if I'm the only one that knows them.

but i also have a blog, so i don't have to be

so this is how I'm telling you that Raymond would be/will be absolutely devastated to know that he completely missed Woodstock even though there's a Higher Than Likely chance that his square ass wouldn't have gone anyway but that's really not the point.

what i want y'all to know that under this fuckin desperate 2 b respected academic candy coating is a man who was into some really crunchy music of the day complete with a hidden record collection and enjoyed the poetry of allen ginsberg and shit like i know this and i want everyone to know this and i don't care

[adjacentperception]

lord lord LORD i need to finish up chapter four of TWEOAD but I've left myself at the edge of a moment and while that usually makes it easy to come back to i'm caught like a deer in headlights on this one

me and archer both.

[adjacentperception]

Hey Zip, if you're cool with questions, I'd like to know more about Raymond as a professor. Not sure if you plan on touching on it in the story but what were his classes like? Is he actually any good at teaching? Did he like doing it? (...are any of his old students still around?)

Feel free to answer as much or as little as you like. Thanks!

Hey there! I am always totally cool with questions. I got a dome full of background information and only a narrative to try and spill it into otherwise😅

I do apologize in advance though, as I cannot summarize for the life of me.

So! When Raymond was teaching back in the 60's, the magical community was still very secluded. It wasn't a secret, but access to that information was incredibly hard to come by without already being within it. (For comparison, this is technically the same universe as my Rose & Laporte stories, and the magical community is much more open and lax in that universe when it comes to 'mundane' folks.) So, what Raymond was studying and teaching in those days were mostly magical fundamentals and how it works. In this universe, magic is a fact of existence/force of nature in the same way that gravity and magnets and time and space are. It's like an energy that permeates existence itself, and magic users are just those that can latch onto that energy manipulate it for their own use, sometimes intentional, sometimes not. Raymond's classes were about understanding what that energy is, how it can be harnessed, and what forms that takes.

Which then leads into discussing magical mediums (i.e. potion making, gemstone magic, sigil/symbol/rune work, enchanting, charms, etc, etc, etc) and I could really just go into a long babble about what that actually entails bc I've been hammering out the details of this sort of Mental Expanded Fantasy Universe in my head since... =checks notes= 2005, but i'll stop myself there to save everyone some scrolling, but that's the nature of what he studied and what he taught.

He will tell people his interest is purely academic, for the sake of record and interest, but deep down he just wants to figure out for himself. Thinks that if he breaks down the whole of magic down to its core components and understands every facet, he'll eventually be able to use it himself. Nothing else has certainly ever worked for him.

All that being said, I do think he was a very good teacher. You need someone who is passionate about a topic, and there are practically no other Non Magic Folk with a passion for the study like Raymond Archer. He's deeply fascinated with it all, and he wants to share that with as many people as he can. He sees a lot of value in the information, and thinks it can ultimately do a lot of good in a lot of ways (for instance, in making it easier for the magical community to integrate more seamlessly into modern mundane society. Understanding leads to Acceptance, and I don't think it would be a stretch to say that his papers and books on the subject were incredibly helpful on a wider scale than he realizes.)

So... yes. He was a good teacher, and I think he truly loved the job. It wasn't a class a lot of people were looking to take, as it wasn't taken very seriously still, but those who were there cared about the subject matter and that made it much more fulfilling for him.

Whether any of those students are still alive today though... I mean I'm sure there are some. They would have been twentysomethings in 1969, so you're looking at people in their late seventies and early eighties at this point. To be entirely truthful, I haven't at this time given his former students a great amount of thought. I've focused much more on someone else from his past that's still kicking ;D (Stella was going to bring it up with the other stuff, but uh... after going to sleep mode she elected to hold back on follow up questions for now. they'll get there though~) Thank you so much for the questions, mock! sorry it turned into a small lecture, but as stated, I cannot summarize for anything x_x

[adjacentperception]

What if I sent you prompts for that oc ask game five days after you rbed it? What then?

🎮 🎻 for Raymond and 🎶 🌴 for Stella

And an extra 💯 for either/both if you want to ramble :3c

What if, in return, i accidentally responded to this three days late? That seems fair? (i am so sorry, I have not been checking over here much this week and that is my absolute B ;-; you are so sweet) Raymond: 🎮 VIDEO GAME CONTROLLER — what are three of your oc's favorite hobbies? Oh dear. As someone who was singularly focused on his study this could be a difficult one for him. The thing with Raymond is that he spent so long hyperfocused on his one special interest that when he's forced to come up for air, he's lost as to who he is as a person and what he even likes doing.

So. Studying Magic, if that counts as one.

He was always an avid reader, even outside of his general subject matter. which could count as a second but there's some severe overlap with the first.

(this boy wanted to do magic so badly it made him look stupid ok like why do you think he works so hard for the respect lmao)

the third, which vaguely ties in with below, is that he really does love listening to music, and was a bit of an audiophile in that had to have the best speakers he could afford to do so.

Tragically, he was also simultaneously incredibly embarrassed by his own musical tastes, thinking that as an ~academic~ he should only listen to Classy Tunes when really, deep down, the man was a sucker for the pop music of his day and listened to it in secret as much as possible.

that being said... 🎻 VIOLIN — does your oc play any instruments?

Absolutely not. In my pantheon of OCs most of them have some sort of musical talent (if for no other reason than I am a music obsessed creature) but Raymond Archer could not carry a tune if the damned thing had handles. Occasionally he'll try to hum along with a song he likes but he generally stops himself after a few seconds anyway. (raymond is truly the latest in a long line of heavily neurodivergent characters lbr)

Stella:

🎶 MUSICAL NOTES — what type of music does your oc like?

So! Stella, like myself, is very much a 'can enjoy just about any genre' type listener, however, she does have an incredible love and affinity for the grungy sounds of the 90s. Whenever she's gotta get Kitchen Hype she usually throws on some Alice in Chains or something to that effect, but even as I type this I have to wonder if this is part of her 'Gotta be One Of The Boys' hangup she's developed while working in the restaurant industry <<; I'm willing to bet if she unshackled herself in some ways we'd learn that she's actually a huge sucker for The Carpenters.

(oops, canon now I guess.)

🌴 PALM TREE — does your oc have a green thumb? do they enjoy gardening?

Truth be told, I don't think that she's ever taken an honest stab at it outside of trying to grow some fresh herbs in the window of her apartment. She always has pie in the sky dreams for those, but ultimately she'll forget to water them or water them too much because she's forgotten if she's been watering them at all and it just becomes a whole mess. If she had someone to help her keep track of these things (*ahem cough cough*) it would likely work out more in her favor.

---

I may have to come back and reblob with the extra prompt there, if only for the fact that I'm a bit fuzzy in the brain this morning and I feel like I'm forgetting some incredibly basic stuff, but I hope this has otherwise been a satisfactory set of answers ;o; <3

thank you as always for your interest mock <3333 it means so so much