#unethicallypleistocene

[practically-an-x-man]

ooh I’d love to see 💤 for Merit and 🗯️ for Eris! (really interested to see what Eris would never admit to doing…)

Oooooh, good picks!! Thank you!

Make my get caught red-handed doing something

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💤 : get caught asleep in a weird place/position/moment for Merit!

A hand on his shoulder woke him, and Merit lifted his head from the table. The movement sparked stiffness and aches throughout his body - his neck, his shoulders, his lower back - and he hissed at the sudden pain. Sheets of paper shifted under his arms as he sat up. "Mm. Sorry." he mumbled largely out of habit, and rubbed at his eyes, "...time is it?" "Almost four." Rex answered, "Surprised the baby didn't wake you up." Merit tilted his head, but the apartment was quiet around him. "I don't hear him." "I got him calmed down," he said, and Merit's eyes finally adjusted to the darkness enough to see Joey tucked into the crook of Rex's arm. Rex rocked on his feet a little as he spoke, drawing a sleepy burbling from his son. "Was coming to warm up a bottle to try and get him back to sleep." "Mm." he agreed, only half awake. Merit rubbed at his eyes, staring down at the blurred mess of character sheets and half-drawn maps strewn across the table. "Still stuck on the campaign?" Merit nodded, pushing the papers around in the hopes that it might spark some new idea. "They're newbies. Getting swamped by what I've written up for 'em." he said, "It's not even a level issue, they're just not... reacting to things the way they should be. Making silly mistakes. So I've got until five-thirty this afternoon to figure out how to rewrite this." "Why don't you just give them a guide character?" Rex said, and nudged at a few of the pages with his free hand, "Y'know... write Superman into it, or something." "Huh." he replied, "Not bad, T-Rex." "You gotta fix those maps, though," he added. Joey fussed in his arms, and Rex bobbed him gently as he turned towards the kitchen, "There's not enough agriculture to support a city of that size. Especially if you're that close to- Mount Canticle, is it? You'll have rocky soil and the mountain's rain shadow to deal with." "Nerd." Merit huffed. He flicked a pencil at Rex's back and watched it ping off a chunk of quartz. "I felt that." "Maybe I should write you into my campaign," he continued, "And give 'em a history bonus for every time you nerd out about the mountain's soil quality." "You're probably better off sticking with Superman," Rex said, "And definitely better off going to bed." "Yeah, alright, I'm moving."

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💬 : get caught chatting with their s/o or crush very late at night for Eris!

"Flag." He startled awake at the sound of his name, and Eris winced as the creak of his bedsprings echoed through the barracks. Others in their cots shifted in the darkness, though none seemed to fully awaken. "Wh-" Rick huffed, looking at Eris blearily as they perched on the edge of his cot, "Why aren't you in the infirmary?" Eris just tilted his head towards the door. She stood up and walked - limped - her way out, expecting Flag to follow. And follow he did. His intrigue was predictable, and perhaps the slightest bit endearing. "The hell are you doing?" he hissed as he met them outside the outer corner of the barracks. There was anger in his voice, though it seemed only skin-deep. "You're not supposed to be up- and you know you could get me into a hell of a lot of trouble." "I meant to thank you," Eris said, "Anyone else would have left me. You... have a good deal more humanity than the others on that field." "Can we talk about this in the morning?" Eris shook his head. This was not an admission meant for many ears. He could hardly manage it to be brought to Rick's ears. His chest still smarted with the sting of half-healed bullet wounds. The others, Flag's squadron, had begun to look at her with distrust and suspicion after the events of the day. Flag himself seemed the only one exempt - the only thing new they'd seen on his face was a good deal of concern. "You are..." Eris started, but struggled to place words to their thoughts. They ducked their head in a sort of mock bow, the closest thing they could think to express their gratitude. "You are a warrior with honor like I haven't seen in centuries." Rick hummed and shifted on his feet, clearly unsure of how to accept the words. His eyes still darted back and forth, from Eris to the door of the barracks, as if he couldn't tell which to be more nervous of. With a sudden burst of inspiration, or a strange sort of courage, Eris stepped forward and wrapped him in an embrace. Aside from a dead man's still-clutching fingers, or Rick himself carrying them bleeding from the field only hours earlier, it was the first personal touch she'd had in years. Floodlights snapped on all around them, and Rick went tense. Eris darted away from the light and ran, hobbling as quickly as their still-healing body could manage. His heart was racing.

[posallys]

As both a newfound posally shipper and black sails prisoner enjoyer I wanted to say I appreciate your blacksailsposting 🫡

It seems to me there is a direct correlation between shipping posally and being consumed by black sails

[practically-an-x-man]

For the ask game- 3 silly/angsty (dealer's choice) headcanons for Vivienne and Wojchek?

AND 12, 14 and 16 for Madison and Alex?

Oooooh thank you!! These will be fun!

Ship Development Ask Game

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3 headcanons for Vivienne and Wojchek: (let's do... one fluffy, one angsty, and one silly one)

Wojchek isn't known to sing much at all, even when the rest of the crew join in shanties or sailing songs. However, Vivienne swears it can hear him hum along under his breath when it sings something familiar

There was a part of Vivienne that knew from the beginning that the voyage from Romania would be the Demeter's last, and her husband's along with it. Even before Dracula's presence was revealed, the waters felt particularly cold and malicious towards her, in a way that it hadn't felt since the day it drowned. No amount of prayer or pleading to Poseidon could shake away that feeling.

As you know, Vivienne enjoys telling a lot of stories - and as you know, Vivienne has a bit of a cheeky streak. I could see her completely fabricating a few sea monsters, just to see how far her influence can spread when those tall tales spread from crew to port to mainland.

For Madison and Alex:

12. What interests/hobbies would they have in common?

Madison's gotten Alex into a fair amount of outdoorsy things, like hiking and kayaking, because it taps into both her need to be out in the wilderness and his enjoyment of exercise. They also both do a lot of sparring and training for missions, and while the schedule for X-Men training can be a little strict, I think they both really enjoy the sparring elements of it!

14. What are their core values?

Madison's core value comes down to protectiveness, both for herself and for the people she cares about. She tends to be protective like a wild animal most of the time, tending to snap at whatever appears to be threatening her or her family even when the intention might really be to help, but it also makes her incredibly driven to keep her loved ones safe.

It's hard to say what Alex's core values are, at least at the time of their main story together, because I think at that point he's still trying to sort out his life after being in prison for most of his late teen/early adult years -- it's hard to assess what your core values are when you're barely allowed to have them in the first place. But that being said, I think he has a similar protective streak to Madison, though he's not as obvious in how he shows it.

16. What would they do to surprise one another?

I'm not sure either of them are the most fond of surprises, with the histories they're each coming from I think it's more comfortable to have things out in the open and with a clear element of choice to them, so I think the extent of their surprises would be "our hike today ends with a picnic", or "stumble upon this little wooden trinket I carved for you and set on your nightstand so you'd see it as you went to bed", or "hey look, I stopped at the grocery store so you didn't have to, now you have time for a nap", and not much bigger than that.

[practically-an-x-man]

Could I humbly request a Talk Shop Tuesday for how you developed Madison's mutation, if you haven't done one already?

Yes you may!! Thank you so much!!

The biggest thing that led to Madison's mutation was just that I wanted to write about an aquatic-based character, since I was intrigued about how to play with that dimension! I had the image of Alex being out on a mission to somewhere with a body of water, and seeing Madison's face just barely visible under the water. That then evolved into him being thrown into the lake and brushing past her in the chapter, and her bursting out of the water later in the same scene, because I felt like that was a more dynamic and energetic introduction to her character; initially it was more like calm intrigue, with Madison more like this mysterious water spirit, and I ended up recycling part of that entrance in my Celtic myth AU!

And a bonus piece of insider trivia for you: when I first was developing Madison, I toyed with the idea of making her entirely aquatic, and needing to always be in water to breathe -- similar to Nina in Creature Commandos (though I created Madison before the show came out), where she'd need a specialized suit and would sleep in a tank of water. In the end I decided against that, not for any particular reason except that her character took me in a different direction than that.

When it comes to Madison's physical mutation, and it being enhanced later in the fic, I had that planned from the beginning. There's a scene earlier in the fic where she's choosing her codename, and decides on Lionfish because of the coral-colored markings on her arms, legs, and back - despite the fact that lionfish don't camouflage, and that she didn't have any spines or venom. I wanted that scene to be a bit of foreshadowing: the name seeming like it was picked largely on a whim, but her later developing venomous fins and other more lionfish-like traits once her mutation is enhanced. And as a bonus, the initial areas of those coral-colored markings are her down her spine and on the outsides of her legs and arms- the same areas that her spines develop later.

I really enjoy giving physical mutations to my X-Men characters, whether that's dramatic traits like Mira's or Madison's, or subtler details like the reflective silver veins Rae has. I feel like it makes the characters more striking, for one, but it also opens up a lot more opportunity for mutation as a symbol for being a minority and the bigotry that comes from that. There's plenty of thematic value to the characters with invisible mutations and those invisible struggles, but as a person who's very visibly queer and will likely end up visibly disabled in the future (thanks, progressive connective tissue problems), I tend to connect a lot more with the visible mutations, and especially with the visible mutations that develop later and the character needing to adjust to how society views them differently.

Finally, Madison as a character is one who's prone to hyperindependence, and I feel like her mutation reflects that. I'm not sure when this came into play, if the character trait influenced the design of her mutation or if I saw an opportunity with her mutation and went from there, but the two are connected. She runs away from other people because she feels like she has to, so I gave her a way to run where people can't follow: the bottom of a lake. I'm a big fan of characters whose fantastical abilities and base character traits work in tandem with each other (I could get into a WHOLE essay on this, believe me, it's something I incorporate a LOT), so Madison has both unintentional physical isolation in the form of being a visible mutant and in the form of developing venomous spines, and intentional physical isolation in the way that she can breathe underwater and use that to escape where others can't follow.

(also bonus points: Madison develops those venomous spines after she learns to start letting people in again and being vulnerable, which only adds to that angst and emotional punch)

I am... massively rambling, but man I love Madison as a character so much. The short answer is that I wanted an aquatic hero, I wanted a physical mutation in play, and I wanted her powers to play in tandem with her hyperindependence and habit of running away from emotional vulnerability.

Thank you so much for the ask!!

[practically-an-x-man]

gardener, songbird and aesthetics for the ask game?

Thank you so much!!

"What type of writer are you?" Ask Game

Gardener : Quick, on the top of your head, give me a first sentence for a (genre,) novel.

You didn't give me a genre for this one, but my go-to is probably horror, so...

Ohio, 1963 The television shuts off after midnight. The final program of the evening ends, and the screen falls into static as if to finally usher its insomnia viewers to bed. The sound was atrocious - the horrible screech of a poorly-tuned radio - and yet I would find myself staring at the screen for minutes longer, willing another picture to appear though I knew the late-night operators had surely punched out for the night themselves. Tonight, though. Tonight the static begins to bend.

I know it says the first sentence, but I feel like horror really lends itself to just a bit more setup in order to really be effective. This idea plays with the historical context of WTVN in Columbus, the first station to broadcast 24-hour television, while also adding a sort of I Saw The TV Glow-style horror to it.

Song bird : If you could pick three songs to capture the feel of your WIP, what would they be and why?

Hm... I've got a lot of WIPs, but I'm going to go with the new Vivienne/Wojchek piece I've been tinkering with!

Empire Now - Hozier: I feel like this song just captures the vibe of a 19th-century schooner crossing the ocean, the hardships of being at sea, but in the end seeing the sun rise over the ocean after the pain of the night has passed. I view this more in line with the main plot of LVOTD, since the sun rising has some deeper meaning in that case, but it definitely works with this piece (sailing through a nest of sirens, barely holding onto your wits enough to steer the ship) as well.

Soulless Creatures - AURORA: This song to me represents the sirens themselves. On one level, the overall sound of the song really aligns with how I hear the siren-song in my head, with this sort of ethereal, echoic quality, so listening to this song captures the feeling of the Demeter sailing through the nest of sirens. The lyrics, on the other hand, more reflect Vivienne's overall charact - love and loss both intertwined, and still with that ethereal, supernatural quality to it.

That Unwanted Animal - The Amazing Devil: This song tells of a monstrous creature attempting to creep its way into the sanctity of the lead characters' home, which... yeah, that's pretty much this whole fic. Not to mention, I love the line "and you rip my ribcage open and devour what's truly yours" for Vivienne, since I've mentioned the concept of it claiming Wojchek's heart and eating it after he dies as a final act of love.

Aesthetics : Look for three images which best showcase the overall aesthetic for your WIP

Still sticking with this same WIP for Vivienne, so:

(I'm not great at finding cool pics like these, I'm forever impressed by people who can make cool moodboards)

[practically-an-x-man]

OOH perhaps a snippet for the Gia/Kate fairytale AU? (I’m working on a fairytale AU fic currently, by coincidence! Would love to see your approach 👀)

Oooooh sure thing!! I think I'll go with that first idea with the whole multiple-colliding-tales thing, mainly since I feel like the Twelve Dancing Princesses idea would take longer to set up. Kate takes the role of Sleeping Beauty, Gia is Rapunzel.

And I can't wait to read your fairy tale AU too!! It already sounds incredibly intriguing to me!

Here's the link to the AU summary, and here's the original ask game

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She'd walked these woods a hundred times, but she'd never seen that tower.

It was impossible to believe it had sprung up overnight, but equally impossible to think she'd somehow never noticed it in all her prior journeys. She'd walked this same path day and day again, hunting rabbits and plucking fruits from trees for her supper, and she'd never caught a glimpse.

The shape rose high above the surrounding trees, a cylinder of weathered gray stone that looked decades if not centuries old. The blank gray ceased about two-thirds up the tower's shaft, replaced with a shock of vivid green that almost looked like foliage of its own.

Kate almost thought she might have lost it amid the rest of the trees - if the tower weren't at least twice their height, and the gray bricks strikingly dead-looking against the surrounding brown.

Drawn in by curiosity, or perhaps something even stronger than that simple emotion, she found herself wandering towards the tower.

As she grew closer, Kate saw that the splash of green atop the tower was in fact not leaves but in fact a thicket of some smaller plant. The base of the tower appeared blanketed in the same, as if the tower was stuffed to the brim and beginning to leak out the ends.

A few more steps, and she determined the plant was common garden clover. A few steps past that, and she found something much less common.

There wasn't a single clover with three leaves. A quick scrub found hundreds upon hundreds of four-leaved clovers, and a closer look found some with five or more. It was impossibly lucky, something that told her this was either some newly-cultivated strain or...

Or magic.

A voice from the tower shocked Kate so hard she leapt a foot in the air. Her head snapped up, and from the top of the tower she found a sight that shocked her far more than the lucky clover ever could.

A young woman leaned out from the upper window of the tower, her head and torso dangling above sixty feet of empty space. There wasn't much Kate could see by way of details from so high up, but the woman wore a loose-fitting white dress, and there was a mess of blonde-brown hair partially obscuring her face.

"A person!" she shouted, "A real, genuine person! What's your name?"

Kate offered her name before she could stop herself, and listened to it echo up to the woman above. She found herself craning her neck to see the other woman, and realized a moment later that she'd somehow come to press her hand against the weather stones of the tower.

Climb it, a voice whispered from the back of her mind.

Her feet had left the ground before she knew it.

The first ten feet passed in a daze. She was dimly aware of shouting up to the girl, and the girl shouting back, but the conversation became a haze against the sharp grittiness of the stones beneath her hands.

Kate glanced down once and found the ground some thirty feet below here. Aside from a mild burn in her shoulders and forearms, she hardly felt tired from the climb. There was no more point in climbing down than reaching the top, at this stage.

After another ten feet, she found spongy clover beginning to dampen the roughness of the stones. Kate worried the plant would tear under her fingers, but it held strong - far stronger than ordinary garden clover should be, she thought, and remembered again the sea of four-leaved plants below her. Good luck. Luck and magic.

She had nearly reached the top, now almost losing the stones beneath handfuls of clover, when the woman from the tower suddenly began to shriek.

"My mother!" she yelped, a sudden fear flooding into her voice, "Climb faster! Quick- before she sees you!"

From just the fear in her voice, Kate knew not to protest. She doubled her pace, not even daring to glance down, focused only on reaching the lip of the tower.

A gruesome face flashed through her mind, a gray-haired crone whose skin seemed gnarled and craggy as the bark of the trees all around her. Something about her seemed familiar, but Kate could not place a name to the sight.

The crone lifted a finger, and her lips moved to form only a single word.

Sleep.

Kate's mind fogged against her will, and her fingers fell slack in their grip against the clover. She felt the fall only vaguely, and it seemed like no more than the fall from waking to sleep.

The last thing she saw before the world went black was a flood of endless green, clover surging towards her like grasping hands.

[practically-an-x-man]

Random ask (because I feel like we haven’t talked in a while!)

Pick an OC (or multiple) and describe how they would feel getting pushed into a mentor role- how would they adapt/fail to adapt? What would they be best at?

Oooooh thank you!! For the sake of an intriguing answer, I'm going to go with the best and worst responses out of my OCs!

Best Mentor: Kestrel

Kestrel already acts as a bit of a mentor even in their main story! Kendra and Seth (the main characters of the Fablehaven series) are young adventurers who are new to the magical world, and in Taking Flight, Kestrel adds to the cast of adult adventurers who collectively train and guide the kids.

Kestrel's view, by and large, is somewhat casual, and perhaps more hands-on than the other adults will usually permit. They would never let the kids be placed in serious danger, but they're much more willing to answer any questions, test out theories, or actively engage with the magical creatures rather than keeping a strict distance. They understand that youthful desire to explore, and they feel like it's better to encourage that curiosity, albeit to temper it from recklessness into a respectful, academic interest. The magical world is dangerous, yes, but understanding the danger and being prepared for it is infinitely more valuable than avoiding it entirely.

All in all, the mentor role is very well-suited for Kestrel, because they have a good amount of knowledge and want to share that knowledge as much as they can. And especially when it comes to magical creatures, being a magical creature themself allows them to give a lot of deeper knowledge and insight that others might miss.

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Worst Mentor: Quinn

Quinn just... doesn't do teaching. She doesn't have the patience for it, she's got too much of a mouth on her and struggles to turn that off, and she just doesn't enjoy the feeling of dragging a newbie around and jeopardizing a mission by their lack of expertise.

Now, that's not to say Quinn hasn't helped train up a few newbies to the Wolf Pack, back before her fall - parkour, pickpocketing, things like that. The difference there, though, is that the people she was training were adults, and often just as sharp and intense as Quinn themself. Traditional mentorship would not be Quinn's thing.

Final answer, then... if she had to, and if her mentee were a very specific type of person with a very specific in skills, Quinn could mentor someone. But she wouldn't enjoy it, and most likely her mentee wouldn't either.

(Oh, and if you're wondering why I went with Quinn and not Eris for this - Eris is just as intense or more, but they're also a warrior who was classically trained and holds a strict code of honor, so passing that on actually wouldn't be as bad as you'd think. It would be intense as hell, a sort of "only the strong survive" attitude towards it, but they'd be an overall better teacher than Quinn)

[practically-an-x-man]

For the whump prompts- 21 for Madison?

Ooooh thank you!! I have a feeling this is going to end up more hurt/comfort than whump, but it should still be a good one! (And of course, given the prompt, this takes place a while in the future)

21. Chronic Pain from a Lifetime of Hero Work

50 Superhero-Inspired Whump Prompts

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"Y'know, I'm-" Madison huffed, grimacing as she crested the last few steps, "I'm beginning to recognize why most people don't go live in the woods for half a decade."

She reached the top of the stairs and paused, shuffling over to lean against the wall for a moment. Her pride took a hit - the joint pain wasn't new by any means, but rarely was it ever this severe - but Madison tried to shake it off.

"That bad?"

Madison just shot her husband a withering look.

"Bad enough that I'm hobbling up the stairs like an old woman," she replied, "Malnutrition's catching up to me."

The thought of that scared her, somewhere deep inside. She'd thought that her time in the woods was long behind her. It was a formative part of her life, yes, but now decades in the past. It was far enough behind her that it almost seemed to belong to someone else entirely: that Madison Douglas, the stormy young girl running from her own life, was worlds away from the woman she'd become. And she was content to leave that in the past.

But here it came back again. Years later, in its own little echoes. Even decades of healthy living couldn't erase the damage she'd done to herself back then. Hiking on sprained ankles because she didn't have a choice, surviving on birch tea and scraps of jerky when she didn't have any other food, spending years with little protection from the elements... and all during those delicate teenage years, all during a time when she needed her health more than ever.

She'd known for years that there would be some sort of consequence for that way of living.

Knowing that, however, didn't make experiencing it any better.

It made her wonder how many hikes she had left in her, before she had to hang up her pack for good. All those calluses and rigid edges she'd carved for herself had now gone soft - or maybe not soft but brittle, worn thin and finally beginning to crack from the strain.

"Want me to carry you?" Alex offered, already hovering close as Madison picked herself back up off the wall. Fresh aches erupted at the motion, and she was reminded of how many nights she'd spent holed up in her old canvas hammock those years ago. She could hardly imagine it now. If she tried spending a night anywhere other than her own bed, she thought, she might not be able to walk the next day.

"Oh, sure, show off how you're still just as strong and perfect as you were twenty years ago," Madison scoffed, though there was no venom behind it. She shoved at her husband's shoulder, a faint but playful smile twisting at her lips. "Bastard."

"Hey, it could be worse."

"Oh yeah?" Madison fired back, taking a few more hobbling steps down the hall. She imagined she could place every ache in her body, every old wound and where they'd all come from. Her left ankle acting up, stiff and half-refusing to bear weight: a bad sprain from falling out of a tree, worsened when she'd had to outrun a storm before it blew in. The sharp pain when she turned her head: the lingering crick in her neck, not one injury but the culmination of nights upon nights spent curled up awkwardly amid the branches of a tree. Even the strange, shooting pains down her spine and forearms: points of strain where her fins met her body, weakened by how many times they'd been wrenched back in battle.

"Yeah," Alex replied, "You could still be out there."

Madison froze at that, the words striking her harder than she'd expected. If it hadn't been for that one little skirmish, if the Brotherhood had picked any other campsite than hers... she probably would still be stuck out there in the woods like some kind of wild hermit. If she hadn't died by now.

He was right. That would be worse.

Madison turned to look at him and was greeted with a chorus of impressive snaps and pops from her spine and hips. She rolled her shoulders, and they spoke their protests as well.

"Oh, listen to that," she said, "My body agrees with you."