Rules: Write the latest line from your wip and tag as many people as there are words in the line. Make a new post, don’t reblog.
I was tagged by the lovely and talented @ruffboijuliaburnsides
Since I'm working on several Kaleidoscope WIPs (plus my Hermbimas gift fic but that's a secret) simultaneously atm, y'all get four for the price of one:
From Rise Up to Meet It:
"Are there no survivors?" Scar asks, frowning.
False glances back out over the wreckage, an odd bitter fire sparking behind her eyes that Scar doesn't think he's ever seen before. "So far as we've found," she replies, "none."
From Separation Anxiety:
"That's for them to find out for themselves," Ren says gently. "You've loved them well and taught them well. Let them fly."
From You Know You're One of Us (There's No Escaping Us):
The librarian shrugs. “I told you. This is my place. Someone’s got to keep the books, make sure the roof doesn’t fall in under all that snow. Besides, you’re not the first to come here seeking him out, nor will you be the last. They drift in by ones and twos every few years, looking for a deal with destiny. Some even find it.”
A queer chill runs through her that has nothing at all to do with the frigid arctic air. A deal with destiny? she thinks. Or a deal with the Devil?
From Color Wheel ch. 18: Now I'm Trapped Within Your Walls (And All I Want is to Be Free)
"February," Wilbur answers, but the second the word leaves his mouth he knows it's wrong."
Tagging @bananasofthorns, @oh-snapperss, @oceans-swim, and @ofthedragon YOUR MOVE <3
the rules: list the titles of your WIPs, whatever they look like. please make a new post instead of adding on to this one.
the game: your followers (or whomever!) may ask for snippets from any WIP and/or they can ask a question about any of them - without knowing anything more than the titles!
My Titles:
as days go by (the night’s on fire)
- 01: Separation Anxiety
- 02: Wildflowers
- 03: Cease Fire
- 04: Dionaea
Voices
- 01: you know you’re one of us (there’s no escaping us)
- 05: know thyself (know thy enemy)
Heterotroph (oneshot)
Color Wheel ch. 18: now I’m trapped inside your walls (and all I want is to be free)
There is no gravestone for the Mechasms. This may be because it was not in their nature to build graves, only to build new members of society. This may be, though, because they died alone - only remembered by a civilization that, too, met its inevitable end. Regardless, the rock they once called home still spins around its sun, undeterred by the lack of life upon it. There is a city at its equator, all broken mirrors and crumbling I-beams and metal shells; twenty miles out, there is a figure resting in the greyish-brown ground.
Once, this was a Mechasm. Perhaps it was one of the grandest, the most noble, at one time. Now, it lies half-covered in rocky soil, a mottled patina of green covering the few areas that haven't rusted over. There is a hole wasting in its chest, around the waist-joint, large enough to reach into and grab a handful of earth from inside - large enough to rip out its heart, if it were to have one. The tubes and wires are snapped, eroded, otherwise terminated. Remnants of gears and springs poke like sprouts from the ground, but not a hint of blood.
Within this cavity, someone has placed a cube - some transient visitor, leaving a gift to this civilization that will never be able to accept it. Anyone familiar with the glyphs inside Mount Zinit would recognize this cube, although those familiar with the glyphs inside Mount Zinit are a dying breed themselves. (An unremarkable feature on a planet that has since laid down to rest - just like this, just like this landscape here.) It is dimmer than it once was - you cannot take from which there is nothing to take. Perhaps it is fitting for an artifact forged by a traitor, an artifact which sucked wakfu endlessly under the pretense of ambition, that it rests where it can sap no more. Sand has battered its surface, wearing its spirals smooth; water from the recent rain beads atop the metal, orange with rust, blue with a wakfu fingerprint like a distant memory.
The soil, though, is richer under this Mechasm's shell. From the holes in its skull, aperture-like eyes that will never see again, a vine has begun to wind out - an orbit around the nose-bridge, one under its chin, as though urging this dead soul don't look so down. There's hope.
Whenever someone accuses me of woobifying some character whom I've written in a SPECIFICALLY CHILL SETTING AND MOOD, I want to laugh and also throw an eraser.
"THAT'S A VILLAIN; THEY AREN'T NICE"
Yeah, no shit? That's why I wanted to explore what they'd be like when they're relaxing/content/not trying to slap the crap out of the heroes.
AND THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THOSE MOMENTS AND THE STABBY ONES ARE FUCKIN' DELICIOUS. Those brief glimpses behind the usual self, revealing hidden facets that the antag's trying to deny, or that they forgot about, or something.
And it's heartbreaking when they hurl themselves back into old habits because "SHIT, I SHOWED MY SOFT UNDERBELLY" and whatnot.
The times Emet-Selch drops his mask/role around Eiri up until Vauthry gets his ass kicked make his reverting to DOUCHE MODE that much more painful. Not only that, but it really fucks with Eiri and appeals to her mean-student-of-Diabolos side.
She's basically going: "OHOHOHO, SO YOU'RE PLAYING THIS GAME? COOL BEANS. YOU SHOWED ME A WEAKNESS AND THEN DECIDED I'M YOUR ENEMY? COOL BEANS. ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR. IF I SUFFER DECEPTION FIRST, MY HANDS ATEN'T TIED ANYMORE. You're full of tasty nightmares, lovey. If you've decided to see me as food, I'll decide to see you the same"
It turns out all right after they beat the shit out of each other and then talk things out, but for a while it gets so much worse because Emet-Selch let down his guard and then felt stupid for having had hope.
A thing that happens a lot in my fanfic: the original characters help make the trip a bit smoother, even if the overarching conflict is still there...and certain things get even fuckier than they originally were.
There's things in-game that don't happen in my FFXIV work because there's WEIRDOES AROUND - like, Foulques doesn't die because Yshandre would rather talk shit out, Haurche and Ysayle both survive because of Dell and Phina respectively, and so on.
Varis lives, but he's got to deal with the absolute horror that is "oh, hey, my terrifying son and his weird murder-twink friend took a CLONE OF ME THAT I DIDN'T KNOW EXISTED and they dismembered it and also made an eikon with it ahahahahahaha fuck"
Sure, it's fix-it fic, but sometimes fixing something means dismantling parts of it to see if some genius-lord compromised a retaining wall...
It's the same with the Deltarune AU. Campanella and Matterly make some things easier to deal with, but the overall situation is still fraught with WTF.
There's things Kris can't or won't talk about with Camm, even with the SOUL unable to eavesdrop. Camm's presence is unnerving sometimes, and Kris feels a certain amount of guilt over wishing that Camm had the SOUL instead. Camm doesn't mind or judge, which can make Kris feel WORSE. The circumstances they're dealing with are still present, and in some ways Camm being involved makes things get MORE funky. They're made of the same string that's woven into the Shadow Mantle, and that does strange things to certain aspects of Dark Worlds. Sometimes, Camm's presence weirds the situation HARDER.
Matterly's presence is like that in the Cyber World. She and Spamton have known one another for years, but there's emotional baggage from the time he got BIG and started acting fucking weird (some of which wasn't totally by choice), and then there was that period where he FELL OFF THE FACE OF THE WORLD WIDE INTERPIPES and came back Different. They're both really stubborn personalities, they were both self-medicating in the face of stress and change and work exploding and updates BREAKING CHUNKS OF THE CITY WOOOOO YEAHHHH, and so they have a lot of regrets about how they acted. There's shit he can't/won't talk about, because it's embarrassing/screwed-up/eldritch/VERBOTEN - and also, if he starts beaking off, his, uh "benefactor" might Play A Funny Joke involving dismemberment. It's happened before! MORE THAN ONCE! He saw Matterly get her shit wrecked by the Cheshire Freakshow not even an hour after he barely alluded to phone calls! If reaching out to your friends will make your friends super-dead, YOU DO NOT REACH. (Matterly's be-wreckening was only tangentially related - she's bullheaded as fuck and will admit she went looking for trouble to suss out the nature of it - but BOY HOWDY did it do a good job of driving Spamton back into hermitsville.)
SO YEAH LMAO. Haurchefant survives, and he has a long convalescence sprinkled with the standard shitty setbacks. Varis lives, and he's beaten around the head and shoulders with the Irony Bat and faced with the full horror of what he's done.
Kris has someone more to talk to, and that someone understands the metaphysics in the same way as Kris does...but sometimes THEY JUST CAN'T TALK ABOUT THIS SHIT. Spamton's reaching over to high-five Kris because SAME LOL HOLY SHIT KID WHAT ARE OUR LIVES. If I see that fucking cat one more time...
The past doesn't go away, in either case. The worlds still need to be changed from the inside, and the heroes are still the ones stuck doing the heavy lifting. The scars people got from past battles are still around.
Basically - recovery's HARD, but it's worth it to try. That's at the core of a lot of what I do. Shit can get better. It often does so slowly, and progress isn't linear, but IT CAN GET BETTER. In the worlds I write, no one's beyond hope if they're willing to try.
