The Fox Den

my brain dump

[galahadwilder]

The Joker’s violent attention-comedy bullshit would 100% just not work if his main opponent was John Constantine. Both because John is funnier than he is and just does NOT care. Joker would be bouncing around like “look at me, I’m so EEEEVILLLL” and John’s just bored because this isn’t even in the top ten evil things he’s seen this morning

[galahadwilder]

Joker: hahaha, I’ve POISONED THE RESERVOIR

John, casually purifying it by dropping a charm no bigger than his pinkie into the water and then walking away: call me again when you’ve turned an orphanage into inside-out land sharks or something

Joker: *splutters*

[galahadwilder]

Joker: you’re TOO LATE, Hellblazer! Now you have to choose between rescuing this civilian… or your PARTNER! Hahahahaha!

John, who specifically chose this partner because he was a serial killer and therefore expendable, and was also planning to feed him to Dagon tomorrow anyway: aw thanks mate, you’ve saved me an arseload of trouble

Joker: …

Joker: what the fuck is wrong with you

[galahadwilder]

Joker: I am going to murder your ONE TRUE LOVE! AHAHAHAHA

John: haha I’m dating King Shark so good bloody luck

Joker: WHAT THE FUCK AAAAUGH NEW PLAN NEW PLAN

[concrastinator]

local british man banishes fraudulent clown

[galahadwilder]

Joker tries to take the Tate Club hostage to get Constantine’s attention and gets his ass kicked by a 200-year-old woman who is more bones than skin at this point

[youkorayah]

WTF yahoo?

so at the start of October yahoo mail decided all messages from AO3 were spam. i now have fic reading to catch up on.

[fortunate-cookie]

Constantine’s apprentice

“Whose sidekick is this?” Barry asks.

Everyone in the watchtower turns to look at the skinny, black-haired teenager sitting patiently in the corner. He’s got big round blue eyes, and smiles and waves at the heroes when they look at him. He would be perfect bat-bait if he weren’t also the picture of innocence.

(Every Robin in existence has had an unmistakable aura of menace around them.)

That wide-eyed innocence is precisely why it’s such a surprise when the kid answers “I’m here with John Constantine”

“John Constantine?” Zattana asks, bewildered and worried all at once. She knows better than most how it feels to be burned by Constantine, and is instantly angry on the kid’s behalf.

“Someone call?” The man himself asks, as he steps into the room, bag of chips in hand.

“Why do you have an apprentice?” Zattana demands, accusatory.

John tsks and frowns, directing his next words towards the teen in question, “I told you no, kid.” Then he turns back to Zattana and the room at large, and says, “I’m dropping this kid off here. He’s being hunted by the US feds. Hole in the meta human rights bill. He is not,” John’s eyes slide back over to the kid, “my apprentice.”

The kid (and someone should really ask his name, sooner or later) frowns and crosses his arms. Now he looks more like a Robin.

“And why not?” He whines. “You’ve been teaching me just fine so far. I haven’t even been that annoying!”

“Son, no,” Hal Jordan speaks up from the back. “You’re lucky to have made it this far, you don’t want to spend any more time in Constantine’s company than necessary.”

Zattana nods and says, “he’s got a habit of sacrificing others. It’s usually for the greater good, but still… you don’t want to be the nearest convenient sacrifice.”

“Really feeling the love in here.” John mutters.

“Well… it’s true, isn’t it?” Dick shrugs apologetically.

“Not to mention you’re just a bad role model in general.” Hal tacks on with a shit-eating grin.

“Is that all?” The kid asks.

“Do you… need more?” Dick asks. “Betrayal in a life-or-death situation isn’t a small thing, kiddo.”

The kid (and really, someone needs to ask his name. And also get the report on that hole in the meta rights) just looks at John with a supremely unimpressed expression. “Y’know I haven’t been relying on you for my safety this whole time, right? We were always safe, I just stuck with you to learn magic.”

“Danny, what the hell,” John says.

Ah, so the increasingly-more-Robin-like kid’s name was Danny. Good to know.

Danny shrugs, and says with a smug smile, “the night before we left Amity Park, I contacted an omniscient time-god from another dimension and blackmailed them into giving me forewarning for any dangerous situations I might get into. I think the specific wording was ‘enough forewarning to be able to escape any situation resulting in my death, capture, torture, loss of powers, or sanity.’”

The watchtower is completely silent for a count of three.

Then Dick snorts.

“Did… did John Constantine get conned?” Barry asks with glee.

“God I hope so…” Zattana breathes.

“I really appreciate you taking me this whole way, though.” Danny says to John. “I definitely want to get a few autographs.” He says with an innocent smile.

It’s at this moment that it sinks in for the whole room that a kid tricked John Constantine into traipsing across some portion of America with him for no reason.

Hal doubles over laughing.

“You’ve been blackmailing a god this whole time?” John checks, face blank.

“Uh huh,”

“You were able to trick an omniscient being, and now have struck a deal for divine intervention any time you’re in danger?”

“Yup,” Danny pops the ‘p’

“You’ve been wheedling magic lessons out of me for weeks with the full knowledge that my only reason for sticking around — to safely get you to the watchtower — was a complete waste of my time because you are effectively safe for the rest of your life in every situation forever?”

“Uh, yes? To be clear, Clockwork won’t intervene in situations where I can handle it myself. But if I’m ever in over my head, then they’ll show me a solution.”

The room is filled with poorly concealed grins, and not-at-all concealed appraising looks. After a long moment, John finally throws his hands up in the air.

“Fine!” He says, exasperated. “I guess you’re my apprentice!”

[shamebats]

[youkorayah]

this is important year round

[writing-prompt-s]

You always wanted to be a Healer. Unfortunately, your dad was an Necromancer and your mother a Demon Summoner. So your healing was a bit… unconventional to say the least.

[timeclonemike]

“WHO SUMMONS ATRANOR, DEVOURER OF- OH IT’S YOU AGAIN.”

“Yeah. I have a patient with an inoperable tumor in her brain. I need you to drag it, and only it, to hell.”

“YES YES I AM FAMILIAR WITH YOUR BIZARRE STIPULATIONS BY NOW. AS YOU SHOULD BE FAMILIAR WITH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID.”

“Right, here’s your goat.”

“OOH, IS THAT CHIPOTLE RANCH?”

“Yup.”

“THE CONTRACT IS SEALED.”

[youkorayah]

GNU Terry Pratchett

[youkorayah]

May the Force

Be with you

Always

[papayafromtv]

Jason is in civilian clothing absolutely plastered at a Crime Alley bar when Joker breaks out of Arkham, and while still drunk he abruptly decides he’s sick of all this dramatic bullshit and just. kills the Joker. tracks him down, kills him without any fanfare, and ditches. it was executed flawlessly, incredible really considering his intoxication levels at the time. he only slipped up a teeny-tiny amount.

because he got seen leaving the murder scene. in civilian clothing. and then got caught once more via a security camera as he was disappearing back into Crime Alley. and the bats fucking saw that footage.

Bruce Wayne, an emotional wreck, just found out that Jason is alive, apparently just murdered the Joker, and is now living alone in Crime Alley (and who knows in what conditions?! he’s legally dead, there’s no legal way for him to make money, his poor son might be homeless.) and for some reason he isn’t coming home. Bruce is in despair, getting worse the longer they can’t track Jason down. finally, at his wits end, he decides to ask the help of the one other vigilante figure that seems to know Crime Alley better than the bats, and that might have some less-savoury contacts that could be of better help tracking down a legally dead boy.

the Red Hood, struggling not to laugh hysterically in Batman’s face, has never been more excited to accept a job in his LIFE. he has no plans on how he’s going to fuck with Bruce just yet, but by god is he going to do something.

[youkorayah]

i need 100k words of this, just saying

[grrlscientist]

in recognition that TODAY is ECONOMIC BLACKOUT DAY, i ask us all: "When did firing park rangers, scientists and air traffic controllers become a better idea than simply TAXING BILLIONAIRES?

[youkorayah]

when you cannot find a fic

ugh. ok the memory of this fic popped up in my head and WILL NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.

And now i can't find it. :(

set post the first Transformers live action movie (Bay?)

Jazz/Prowl

Prowl had sent word to have Jazz's frame repaired in prep for his arrival

Prowl and Jazz are (spark?) mates

Prowl has Jazz's Spark (soul) with him and restores Jazz to life.

help?

[youkorayah]

ok sadly it is Not the fic Cantus by mmouse15.

in the fic i'm looking for, i think it was part of a series, and when Prowl did the spark revival thing jazz didn't get up so prowl did the mech equivalent of digging his figures into the ticklish spot on Jazz's ribs

also i think them becoming spark bonded was from a mission where they got caught and for the longest time they weren't in a relationship.

[youkorayah]

when you cannot find a fic

ugh. ok the memory of this fic popped up in my head and WILL NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.

And now i can't find it. :(

set post the first Transformers live action movie (Bay?)

Jazz/Prowl

Prowl had sent word to have Jazz's frame repaired in prep for his arrival

Prowl and Jazz are (spark?) mates

Prowl has Jazz's Spark (soul) with him and restores Jazz to life.

help?

[youkorayah]

ok sadly it is Not the fic Cantus by mmouse15.

in the fic i'm looking for, i think it was part of a series, and when Prowl did the spark revival thing jazz didn't get up so prowl did the mech equivalent of digging his figures into the ticklish spot on Jazz's ribs

also i think them becoming spark bonded was from a mission where they got caught and for the longest time they weren't in a relationship.

[youkorayah]

when you cannot find a fic

ugh. ok the memory of this fic popped up in my head and WILL NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.

And now i can't find it. :(

set post the first Transformers live action movie (Bay?)

Jazz/Prowl

Prowl had sent word to have Jazz's frame repaired in prep for his arrival

Prowl and Jazz are (spark?) mates

Prowl has Jazz's Spark (soul) with him and restores Jazz to life.

help?

[the-future-now-deactivated20170]

this is a massive step forward for renewable energy (x) | follow @the-future-now

[saysomethinghuman-deactivated20]

[ethonydawn]

Yup

[viralthings]

Picking and choosing.

[youkorayah]

yes!

[youkorayah]

reblog because this is ALWAYS relevant.

[whitepeopletwitter]

Wise words.

[youkorayah]

this

[madddscience]

An interesting sci-fi short story from 4chan.

[Imgur]

[the-real-seebs]

That is some fine writing.

[space-australians]

The Imgur link is broken so:

[Series of posts on 09/16/11]

About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.

His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.

One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.

People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.

Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)

It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.

The galaxy moved on.

Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.

Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.

Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.

Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.

“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”

After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.

“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”

The Admiral said “Who?”

What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.

Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.

We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.

That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts - acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets - was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.

Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.

[fattyatomicmutant-deactivated20]

This makes me cry

[stephendann]

It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.

Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five, 

A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field. 

Waiting.

When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”.  The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace. 

Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.

We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice.  In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off.  It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.

Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.  

Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.

We find it terrifying.

[youkorayah]

this is Still one of my favorite posts, these 2 stories still make me smile.

[youkorayah]

May the Fourth

be with you