#the only way i manage to draw them is to simplify them to hell and back | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs | Tumgik (2024)

roll with it

the aventurine trailer???? so ill so ill so ill im on my knees he had one hand behind his back the whole time i'm shaking and sobbing and yes i am aware of that one random stroke on the bottom right but i drew this all on three layers so i can't fix it sorry folks

closeups below keep reading

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"Fandom is a community!" is a very common cry in fandom but while that was once true it hasn't been for a while now. Fandom has long since, consciously or unconsciously, decided to become a consumer culture instead. Yet the cry persist because most fans don't want to own up to what they are: consumers, not community members.

I don't know if it's because fandom is mostly made up of white people that but as a whole it doesn't understand, nor does it want to learn, what community is and how it works. A community isn't just a collection of people that's gathered together. A community, whether a fandom or some other form, is based on the Social Contract of Reciprocity.

Now what is that and how does it work, you may ask. Let me explain.

The Contract of Reciprocity means that you don't just take out of a community, you give back too, with your time and energy. What you give depends on what the community is about and in the individual in question. For a fandom community it means that its writers, artists, gif makers and other creative people give their time and energy in the form of their works, it's their fic, art, gifs and so on. The non-creative people give with their enthusiasm and engagement for these works.

This is of course a bit simplified but we're on the introductory level here.

Which is why the arguments of, "write/draw/whatever for yourself!," and, "you're not owed kudos/reblogs/comments," aren't just utterly wrong but very harmful. Because they maliciously encourage non-creative people to break the Social Contract of Reciprocity and tells creative people that we shouldn't not expect that contract to be honoured. We shouldn't expect anything in return for our time and energy.

They are the battle cries of consumerist fans who doesn't want communities because communities mean effort. They want a consumerist Paradise where they get as much content as they can for as low a price as they can manage to pay. And since creative people in fandom can't really demand money, for writers in particular it would put us on shaky legal ground, and we have no way of enforcing the upholding of the Social Contract of Reciprocity, what these fans can get away with is often repaying nothing.

But a consumerist fandom is directly antithetical to having a fandom community.

Alas I must report that the consumerist fans and fandom have, by and large, won. There are holdouts in older fandoms, but even these are being encroached upon and destroyed. A slow process to be sure, but one that is happening faster and faster, and one that is 100% of fandom itself.

Unfortunately this means more and more creators, writers, artists and more, are leaving. And fewer and fewer are arriving to replace them. Because, and pardon my French here, why the hell would they?

Why the hell would anyone put time and effort into making something that they don't get money for and where the people consuming it will just throw it in the trash the moment they're done with it? Where they as people are only seen as a nuisance? Where they will be sucked dry by people who loudly and proudly announces that they don't matter and that the Social Contract of Reciprocity will never be honoured?

You'd have to be a particular kind of masoch*st to subject yourself to that and really most of us aren't.

So fandom really needs to cut it out with the, "fandom is community!". No, we're not, we haven't been for years. It was destroyed by the consumerist "creators aren't owed anything!" brigade and its resulting apathy towards creative fans. Because if you want a fandom community then yes yo do owe your creatives your time and energy. You owe to give back to them and not just take from them as much as you can. Even if all you can give today is a tagless reblog, hitting the kudos button or writing 'second kudos' in the comment section, or whatever small effort it is that you can manage. But yes you do owe it.

Or you can decide that you'd rather have a consumerist fandom that doesn't owe its creators anything and suck them dry. But in that case I hope you enjoy AI generated content because very soon that's all you will have.

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TUNNELS UP THROUGH YOUR FRONT YARD

DAUN YOU BEAUTIFUL BASTARD YOU ARE THE REASON

I HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT

THE LOGISTICS

OF KISSING A SUNFLOWER, DAUN

CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE ALL THE SEEDS POKING YOUR FACE, DAUN? BECAUSE I HAVE. CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW MORTIFIED YOU WOULD FEEL IF YOU WERE MAKING OUT WITH YOUR SUNFLOWER BOYFRIEND AND YOU GOT A SEED STUCK IN YOUR TEETH? I HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THIS EXACT SCENARIO. YOU MANAGED TO MAKE A SUNFLOWER SO ADORABLE I HAVE SPENT A NOT-INSIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF TIME FROM MY ONE AND ONLY LIFE TO IMAGINE HOW THAT EXACT SCENARIO WOULD GO. I'M NOT EVEN GONNA GET INTO THE SEVEN STAGES* OF GRIEF YOU'D GET INTO IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY HORFED UP SOME OF MOON'S SPECIAL STANK

YOU MAKE THE BOYS LOOK SO DAMN APPEALING I WANNA CRY. ANYTHING YOU DRAW WITH THEM USES THESE REALLY GORGEOUS, SIMPLE SHAPES THAT MAKE THEIR DESIGNS EASY TO UNDERSTAND, BUT THE DESIGNS THEMSELVES ARE SO UNIQUE THAT THEY'RE INSTANTLY MEMORABLE. also, this is kind of a weird thing to point out, but I really like the way you draw folds in clothes? it's something I've always struggled with, and you just seem to add a little scribbled loop or two at the armpits and elbows and suddenly that shirt that character's wearing looks hella comfortable. AND THEIR COLOR PALETTES ARE GORGEOUS AND PERFECTLY ACCENTUATE THEIR PERSONALITIES SUN ALL WARM AND GOLDEN AND MOON CHILL AND COOLER THEIR COLORS MAKE THE CHARACTERS FEEL LIKE THEY HAVE A TEMPERATURE

I LOVE YOUR SHORT LIL COMICS WITH THEM AND I WOULD HAPPILY READ A HUNDRED MORE and your short story with the flower boys was cute as hell too I'M A HUGE SUCKER FOR ANY STORY WHERE ONE CHARACTER SEES ANOTHER CHARACTER WHO'S A COMPLETE MESS AND IS LIKE "oh I'm so gonna fix you" IT'S LIKE MY CATNIP AND THE FACT THAT YOU DO THAT WITH REALLY GOOD ART AND CUTE STORIES AND A HINT AT A TRAGIC BACKSTORY? YES YES YES YES YES KISSING YOU STRAIGHT UP FROLICKING I AM THROWING HANDFULS OF THOSE WEIRD MUTANT RED MARIGOLDS THAT STARTED GROWING IN MY PORCH FLOWERPOTS AT YOU

*the extra two stages of grief are "Regret (Bass Boosted)" and "Evil Sleep"

HFSGJGKD I COULDN'T KEEP THIS ASK TO MYSELF ANY LONGER

ORDINARY YOU EXTRAORDINARY BASTARD, THIS IS WHY EVERYBODY IN THIS COMMUNTIY LOVES YOU.

Honestly I don't think kissing Sun would be that weird, since sunflower seeds are a bit dusty feeling, but rather tender and firm otherwise. If it gets in your teeth...

Chew it, spit the casing out into the trash, and swallow it. He'll lose his mind. (Y'know like because??? That's not a normal thing that happens during kissy kissy smooches and somebody not being upset by it would just reassure him that okay they DO like me, even my bad or weird parts, y'know??? It'd send him over the moon)

And I mean... I've discussed this before but you CAN kiss Moon. I made a loophole for the simps.

If he wants to, he can just (mostly) nullify his effects so that those in close proximity can't really feel them like they normally would. He just doesn't most of the time because it's helpful and Sun isn't really affected by it. However, the mostly part is still there, so you're gonna get HELLA good sleep after smooching this dude.

Did I also mention he'd totally hide the two of your faces with his petals whenever you kiss??? Did I did I?? It's just the two of you in those moments, nobody else.

Jsjsjsj thank you for all the praise I'm gonna shed tears

THE BOYS ARE JUST SIMPLE BECAUSE I HATE COMPLEX CHARACTER DESIGNS WITH A PASSION LMAO, IT'S FOR THE REDRAWABILITY and I have no idea how I did those colour palettes but I agree they do look really good (even though sun gets called eclipse sometimes heh)

I draw sleeves the way I do because it's just a simplified version of the way loose sleeves tend to fold (and I draw loose sleeves much more than I should) plus I've just stared at a lot of artists that do that over the years

AND IT WASN'T A SHORT STORY LMAO I'M JUST REALLY BAD AT WRITING CONSISTENTLY

Maybe... they can fix each other?? Teehee

BUT ALSO AGAIN GKJTSKS THANK YOU SO MUCH

Your flowers were spicy but they went down alright (a bit crunchy too, but that could've been the pot)

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how abouuuuuut 2 and 10 for the artist ask meme!

2. Is it easier to draw someone facing left or right (or forward even)

i think right is more natural for me, but over the years i've tried really hard to get better at doing it both ways, so i don't favor it as heavily as i used to. as for forward, i can manage it, but if i try to do it without any use of the symmetry ruler i cry and give up after a few minutes

10. Favorite piece of clothing to draw

for a long time i really did not like having to deal with clothes, but i always did anyway because all my characters wear them AND i've only figured out p*rn in like the past two months lmfao

so like, for a while i think my answer would probably have been scarves or hoods but like, genuinely? somehow, it's shoes now

I DON'T KNOW HOW IT HAPPENED. i've struggled with shoes all my artistic life, so much so that in recent years i simplified the hell out of them or avoided drawing them entirely. then i drew these:

and suddenly, somehow, they made sense. and i've legit only gotten better since.

my running theory is i was so adamant on not pushing myself past my limits that i didn't even remotely realize just how much i had absorbed from art tips and guides and watching other people do it. it just felt natural. the only shoes i referenced at all for those were newt's, because i very specifically wanted him in converse and couldn't draw those from memory.

drawing is weird

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soft haikyuu!! boys with a baddie* s/o 😈

characters: yamaguchi, hinata, suga, akaashi, nishinoya & tendou

tw// swearing

*(a/n): anon requested a kinda sassy, sarcastic reader and verbatim‘she is basically a salt bag, but she also has like some sugar’ so i simplified that down to baddie :) so the reader isn’t really a delinquent but they are a bit rough around the edges uffabvrslbv

Tadashi Yamaguchi

he definitely thinks you’re really cool and he wants to be just like you :O

bc you give off‘bad bitch who doesn’t care about what other ppl think about them’ energy and what he would give tO HAVE THAT!!

so that’s when he knew he needed to be your friend >:)

so he was like‘tsukki, go talk to (y/n) for me >:)’ thinking that was his first step to becoming confident pfft

luckily, god was on his side though bc the teacher rearranged the seats and you and him were sitting next to each other

hence, he got the opportunity to talk to you without it seeming too forced

you both fell for each other so hard

like he would act tough to try impress you but you preferred his natural softness while you tried to act uncharacteristically docile so you wouldn’t scare him off but he liked you for your boldness

it was a match made in heaven 💞

he eventually worked up the courage to ask you out one day and y’all have just been falling more ever since

although, that doesn’t mean yamaguchi’s forgotten one of the main reasons he wanted to be with you in the first place

‘please teach me your ways, (y/n)!’ he pleaded, his head resting on your lap so you had to cover his puppy-eyes with your phone

‘no, tadashi. firstly, you’re sweet and gentle- you’re just built like that. secondly, i don’t have any‘ways’ to teach you!’

yamaguchi continued to pry,‘then how are you just so effortlessly self-assured?’

‘who told you that, tadashi?’

‘no one.’ yamaguchi poked the back of your hand to get you to move it,‘but remember that time one of the guys in our class tried to make fun of the size of your head and you told him to shut up?’

you rolled your eyes, setting your phone aside before placing a brief kiss on yamaguchi’s forehead,‘he said he couldn’t see the board because of my‘big head’, tadashi; that’s hardly an insult. also, what else could i have possibly said other than that?’

but then you remembered this is yamaguchi you’re talking to; if that was him, he’d probably apologise, move his head aside then cry in the bathroom or sumn.

‘i should be the one asking you why you’re so insecure. i mean, i know everyone is a little bit insecure about something but you just take it to a whole other level.’ you mused, absentmindedly massaging his scalp

yamaguchi frowned,‘exactly! teach me how to stop being insecure.’

‘no please, no thank you?’ you inquired with a snicker, realising that your habits might of accidentally rubbed off on him

bc just a few weeks ago, he’d be thanking you for breathing the same air as him but now he didn’t even say‘please’ when asking for a favour

gasp

‘please teach me how to be resilient, (y/n).’

you chuckled, leaning down to whisper in his ear,‘okay, since you’re so polite, i’ll tell you my secret - but promise not to tell anybody else!.’

‘i promise.’ yamaguchi replied without hesitation

‘okay, first thing you need to do is go to the depths of hell and find satan hims--’

yamaguchi let out a sigh as he realised that you weren’t being serious then playfully flicked your forehead away,‘rude.’

you beamed, pressing another kiss upon his forehead,‘i know~’

Shōyō Hinata

let’s not pretend hinata wasn’t sh*tting his pants when he first heard about you from kageyama

‘they called me a sh*tty setter the other day.’

but kageyama failed to mention the part where he cut you in line for lunch 🙄 mans had it coming

like hinata genuinely thought that if he came within a 5 foot radius of you, you’d literally come for volleyball career

plus, hinata knew he had a lot of things to be insults on (mostly, his height) so he decided to keep his distance at first

but when he actually saw you - rather than a vague description that kageyama conjured - he kinda fell head over heels

well, not only bc of your looks - he isn’t that shallow

but the same day, you dropped your purse/wallet on the walk home and ,mhsince hinata was walking behind you, he acted as any good Samaritan would; picked it up then handed it to you

then you said something along the lines of‘thanks, shorty.’

not shawty. lord- shorty as in short with a y at the end

and whether you meant that as a dig or not was beyond him - but either way, he fkn adored it

also it doesn’t matter whether you are taller or shorter than hinata- he is still short-stuff >:)

by some miracle he managed to ask you out successfully and he’s kinda been glued to you ever since

like he wants to spend every second that he’s not at volleyball club/school with you

and if you tell him he’s being clingy, he’s going to cry-

nonono jk jk

he’d probably be a bit offended but then give you your space

also, you noticed how he was really endeared by the tad mean nicknames you gave him like‘shorty’,‘short stuff’ and‘ginger’

the only ones he didn’t like was‘boke’ or‘dumbass’ bc it reminded him too much of kageyama + tsukishima

so you started calling him these things - teasingly - more frequently

and he loves it ngl

as long as you aren’t truly mean to him, he enjoys being called these things by you for some reason

so, his first mistake was assuming that you’d like being called these joking nicknames just as much as he does

you were helping him with english once and it’s definitely not his strong suit

same, hinata

‘look at that! you spelt all your vocabs correctly, for a change.’ you commented, peering over the desk at the paper sitting in front of him

his eyes widened and his lips curled into a hopeful smile, ‘really?!’

‘no.’ you snickered, pointing to the first word on the list.‘your word was taxis - you wrote‘texas’, dumbass.’

hinata let out an exasperated sigh, propping his elbow onto the table to rest his cheek on his palm

then, he had an idea ( •̀ ω •́ )✧

‘alright, stupidface, should i rewrite them?’

you gasped, furrowing your brows at what he just called you

for a moment, you thought you might’ve misheard him but upon observing his smug expression, you realised that he really did just call you a‘stupidface’

so you burst out laughing

obviously, hinata was rather shocked at your reaction

‘hey! what’s so funny?’

‘di- di- did you just call me a‘stupidface’?!’ you panted in-betweencackles, clutching your stomach to soothe the butterflies

hinata jutted out his bottom lip and folding his arms over his chest,‘yeah, what about it?’

‘that is so cute!- do it again!’ you demanded, enthusiastically slamming your fist against the desk

‘IT’S NOT CUTE!’ hinata barked, playfully flicking your forehead

once you caught your breath, you took hinata’s hands and looked him dead in the eyes,‘you’re f*cking adorable, shōyō.’

the hoarsenessof your voice making it sound like somewhat of a threat

‘you’re adorable-er, (y/n).’

‘i know.’

Kōshi Sugawara

he admires how strong and independent you are/seem😍

and the fact you don’t go out of your way to suck-up to ppl

he kinda wants to be like you in that sense but unlike yamaguchi, he accepts that he’s way too much of a people pleaser for that lol

so he sticks to admiring you from afar

then he musters up the courage to ask you out with some chocolate cupcakes; the same kind that you accidentally got on his blazer on the first day of second year :))

and you say yes (╯▽╰ )

also a big part of your relationship is aggressive positivity ✨😡

like if he makes a joke about looking crusty, you’ll promptly respond, ‘shut up, kōshi - you look so hot.’

or if you berate yourself for getting a poor mark on a test, suga will interruptwith no hesitation,‘f*ck off, (y/n), you’re literally so smart and hard working - you’ll probably get 100% on the next test.’

also when he’s around you he switches between canon and fanon suga rapidly

one second he’s like‘aww, are you stressed bc of school? i’ll bake you some cookies, baby--’ then you’ll jokingly make a comment about his post-practise B.O and he’ll literally get so defensive

‘WOW I OFFER YOU SOMETHING NICE AND THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY ME?! STOP BEING SO MEAN TO ME, COMING FOR MY INSECURITES LIKE THAT - I WAS JUST ABOUT TO GO FOR A SHOWER ANYWAY GEEZ’ ┗|｀O′|┛

ISVBFELIAEA plz he is too much ✋

he just prides himself in smelling like ocean breeze 99% of the time so you really didn’t need to hurt his feelings like that when you caught him lackin c’mon LMAO

‘wait so are we making cookies or not?’ you inquired, stifling a snicker at his little diva moment

‘ofc we are🥺’

he’ll probably use red icing on one of the cookies to draw a‘>:(’ face then hand it to you, saying that he drew you

he’ll also break of bits of his own cookie and feed it to you’re doing something that requires both hands like typing, homework, dishes etc

whether you eat it from his hand happily, decline his offer or bite his fingers off is really up to you

and over time, he probably picks up on some of your traits too

especially being more straight-forward

the team will never forget the first time he was chatting about something with the vice principle and‘sorry, but i don’t remember asking’ fell from his lips

everyone was shocked :o

tsukishima, tanaka & noya were so impressed tho

and so were you IVBEAOGVRN

‘wow, suga. you wanna be me so bad.’ you gloated, pressing your hand against your chest

‘GAEIVBSLR leave me alone.’ he growled, toiling over the apology letter he was currently writing to the vice principal

Keiji Akaashi

he wanted you to be the dark academiato his light academia pfft

it was very much love at first sight btw

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ soulmates *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

the embodiment of opposites attract

he’d write you a poem/love letter to ask you out lol

‘you’re so sappy and lame, akaashi’ you scoffed in attempt to hide the smile that was tugging at the corners of your lips as your eyes finally parted from the letter to meet his

he couldn’t help but chuckle,‘so is that a no?’

‘-nonono!’ you shook your head rapidly, hastily correcting him,‘it’s a yes.’

phew

honestly, he acted all nonchalant on the outside, but akaashi would’ve been devastatedif you rejected him

like he constantly tried to remind himself that you would probably say no, i mean he thought you were way out of his league. plus, it didn’t seem as though you were as much of a romantic as him

but fortunately, apart of him stayed hopeful

now he was cuddled up beside you on a cold winters’ evening, casually drinking is hot cocoa as you both watched a disney movie (❤´艸｀❤)

he’s the type to not even care or retort if you call him stupid or whatever

as long as your context makes it clear that you’re joking

he’d never call you those names back though ✋

to him, you’re always gonna be‘love’ or‘sweetheart’

also, he’s probably equally as sarcastic as you so that’s not an issue

ngl he probably gets really insecure when you’re hesitant about PDA tho

like he just wants to hold your hand but he doesn’t want to force it upon you and make you uncomfortable 🥺

but also, perhaps you’re too embarrassed by him to kiss him in public

so please occasionally reassure him that you love him (；′⌒`) that always washes all his worries away

Yū Nishinoya

it’s literally canon that he likes ppl who show 0 interest in him (kiyoko, tsukki etc)

so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s all over you after that one time you called him a midget

to be fair, he had it coming - he stepped on your fkn toe >:((

he does everything in his power to impress you and get you to take back what you said

‘hey, (y/n)!’ he calls out to you in the middle of the bustling lunch hall,‘could a midget do this?!’ *backflips off the table*

or when he demanded that you come to one of his volleyball games so you could see what he’s capable of and whenever he makes a good receive, he turns to look at you in the stands and winks/ points

or when he actually studies for a test just so he can flaunt his slightly above average grade to you

‘look, (y/n), i got a 49%!’ he waves a paper in front of your face, which you stare at before lowering your gaze onto your 95%.

but ngl..he really brings out that lil’ bit of sugar in you

‘well done, noya.’ you choked out feeling your dignity slowly fade in your chest

he’s just so enthusiastic and charming how can you be mean to him 🥺

to his face, at least

as soon as he leaves you beef about him to your friends

‘he is so annoyingly bodacious - audacious! why does he feel the need to show me all of his achievements like i care??? and why does he have to be so cute while doing it???’

‘do you think you maybe have a teeny-tiny crush on him?--’

‘never.’

nishinoya probably asks you out pretty casually like‘lemme take you bowling this saturday and i can show how good i am at that too!’ he offered with a bright, bold smile

‘sure, whatever.’

‘kay! it’s a date!’

‘wut-’ but before you could question him further, he sped off

nishinoya really likes to fluster and tease you

you’ll be sitting waiting for him at the park or whatever and he’ll swagger in and shout something like‘how’s my gorgeous s/o doing today?! i hope you weren’t waiting for me too long!--’

then you’ll have to quickly shush him before everyone with a 7 feet radius is looking at you judgementally

he also likes to call you the most extra nicknames just to see you blush

‘good morning, my beautiful, divine, radiant god(dess) who i worship every morning of my life!~’ he sung as he waltzed into your classroom to spend lunch with you

but he only does that bc you are so dismissiveof his advances lol

like if you openly adored his kisses and nicknames, he’d probably do them sparingly

oh and he calls you‘my hunny bunny’ too - don’t ask why

Satori Tendō

you gave him your number/snap for a project and he’s one of those ppl that just assumes that y’all are friend now lol

but that wasn’t nessicarily a bad thing bc you thought he was really cool and you were happy that you still got to talk to him even after the project was over

not that you’d ever admit it tho (╹ڡ╹ )

he’d send you cursed memes at 3AM and you’d reply like‘mood’ then he’d fall for you

you’d also have random, deep convos in the middle of the night

hence he fell for you even harder

especially bc he basically just shared his whole life story with you

he’d spill out all his insecurities to you then you’d reply like‘ok’ then he knew he had to ask you out bc you’re the first person not to have left him on read

so he asked you to meet him in the park and you’d reply‘no lol 🖕 ‘

then he’d just smile at his phone like‘wow, they’re so in love with me’

he’s just so used to his friends being mean to him jokingly that he can’t even tell if you’re being serious or not

so he goes to the park at the time he put forward, and ofc you’re there even though you said no bc you didn’t want tendō to show up for nothing 🥺

he was ecstatic that you were there and he probably brought you an energy drink or lollipop then asked you out

and ofc you said yes

i mean- you had kinda developed a soft spot for the poor guy

you’d let him get away with certain things that others couldn’t around you

for instance, you’d let him borrow your pencils/pens despite usually not allowing others to get ahold of your stuff

but that was just coz like- he’s your trustworthy bf- not some random classmate who had no reason or motive to be kind enough to return your pencils

also, you’d let him cut in front of you in the lunch line and he did the same for you

oh and please bully anyone who makes fun of him 🙏

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I think what you wrote about is like super important cause like it’s not about “was this the most rational choice?” But “is it valid within the context of the narrative, story, and character choice?” which I think it is.

Like yes it really is the wayland trip 2.0; that’s why I think it will be good for them, cause they had fun during the the road trip and we see from Cordelia POV how good it was for her and she’s been through so much…I want happiness for her

All she feels like she has left is her pride, and like…I wouldn’t be willing to let that go either. Plus I think sometimes people overstate how close the Carstairs siblings are in tlh, only by a little bit because i think they aren’t close enough to know each other’s secrets clearly and there is miscommunication there that is well…they need to talk but like idk her BFF is trying to resurrect her boyfriend and her brother has his hands full with her mom she will NOT be the disappointment, she will NOT! And I feel that so much.

oh anon, I think you hit the nail on the head! I think it'd greatly help this fandom if some discussions shifted their starting point from "Was this good/rational/empathetic enough/etc.?" to "is it valid within the context of the story/narrative/feelings?".

re: Carstairs siblings, i actually agree so much!! See, their relationship is very complex, and, sans the two or three moments in ChoI ( "that was nice" for example ) I think CC actually managed to portray it very well? do they love each other and would go to hell for the other? absolutely. is affection still a little awkward between them at the same time? also yes.

I know I'm simplifying, but my point is: they're surely getting there. They're greatly improving their bond after years of Alastair's emotional unavailability and the secret of Elias's illness standing in their way. But it takes time to change and get used to a new dynamic/thinking patterns/habits, and their relationship is still shaky. I know it might not be obvious, but relationships with siblings can also be awkward and uncertain and stressful - doubts and fears aren't just reserved for friendships or romances; if you care about someone but aren't sure where you stand/your relationship is currently "recovering", so to say, it will still be intimidating to face them in vulnerable moments.

oh I feel that last part too! I believe she really thinks she's doing them a favour by not burdening them with her mistake and taking the danger away from them. after all, if Lilith told her now to draw a blade through Alastair's heart, she'd have the whole journey back to figure out a way to warn him, y'know?

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Respectfully, I would love to hear more about these OCs, or any others that you may have.

okay i am really not used in talking about OC so... :')

first things first. not all are drawn. like some are really just original story oc that i may one day will draw but we will see!

This is rather long so in order to not spam your timelineclick below!

Starting with the one that technically has a face but refuses to have a face.

moth-man & 0-experience:or is it woman? moth-person? morph??? they are the ones that hire the 0-experience person for the job. and what is the job you ask? well technically everything. simplified i like to call their profession "the collector and curator of stories" you have to imaging 0-experience person, enters this really old book shop that is inside way larger than it is outside, and moth-man just hires them. just like that.

and they both go out, listen to people and what they like to tell them about. and then they go back to the bookstore and start working on creating and binding the other person story. i have a hard time sitting down and drawing this because the moth- person really changes shape for every profession and person they interact with. there is not a fix shape. and ahh... ONE DAY I WILL MANAGE!

the hornist ace in existence:well... let’s say you are a creature of the dark. and in the monastery, this new cutie arrives. and all these old rusty dusty nuns and priest bullies her. but this girl is the sweetest creature that ever was abandoned in this place and has a natural curiosity for science and biology, and you just really crush hart for her so like... why not pass the girl an apple again, shall we?(not gonna lie... its Christian lesbian in love, though one is literally a creature form hell. and there is some nsfw in this story but. God no, demon girl has no interest in vile human needs, but she will gladly talk with you about universe and constellations and how birds fly, also ‘yass girl tear the bible into tiny pieces that is so hot!’) (listen... easter time in church is really boring and if god listens, I hope he enjoys the outline of this story in my head.)

Reaching the ones that have a face my bi disaster man is this guy so...

say hallo again to Waylin, who end up meeting Camille here, who is well... look at her she is cute! and then he turns around to Camille in guy version which is her twin brother Burscop. and yeah... he shortcrust. and no being Bi, and a disaster is not his only characteristic. he is quite reliable, skilled with weapon, really gentle with the little kids, a great storyteller, handy with the needle and solution oriented. but yeha, he is crushing hard for the twins. and that’s partly because i can't decide who he should end up with at the end ;;;

Camille finds it cute and funny at the same time and makes Waylin’s live living hell on purpose. Burscop on the other hand... doesn’t really care.

he has his, well he is angry at his dad. but before you come at me with "oh he has an abusive dad!!" no! not the case here. a distant dad, yes. but Burscop over here, doesn’t grow up and decides to be a petty 9 years old for the rest of his life. not that their dad isn't as petty as his son. but for other reason. Camille is just tired, she has to visit her mom soonish to vent.

and the award for best father of the year that cut his daughter fingers off goes to!!!! Cavan over here!

eokay it is not his fault! i just... didn't want to draw all Zorya’s finger one day and was like. "YOU KNOW WHAT?!? fine no fingers" and that’s why she is missing fingers :'D but by now there is actually some kind of story for that. Basically, Cavan was for some time a single dad. and well Zorya is just a wild child. never sitting still and needs to run and jump. complete opposite of her dad that is more of a well... sitting in his laboratory, drawing maps for the queen building, and tinkering on telescope and scientific models etc etc. and well... little children better should not play around with heavy duty tools and so...

hey! Cavan is distraught, he is unable to forgive himself for this okay! he was an overworked single dad, with a whirlwind of a child. Zorya doesn’t even remember the day she lost the finger and fingertips. so now Cavan is the world best and most supportive dad in my world by letting his daughter spend most of the year with her grandfather and uncle in the tundra. and regularly sends er presents and trinkets and yea. winter he is there for her 24/7. and she is a really happy child.

So... this was rather long;;; sorry about that. but hey you asked!!!

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3, 4, 16 (DON'T say cherik), 22, 28

oh my god i absolutely hate you for asking me these aha you’re my favourite person in the entire world

3. What is the best fandom you’ve ever been involved in?

to date, it’s been X-Men (alt timeline movies, ofc) despite the rocky beginning I had. in this fandom I’ve learned so much about my own writing, and my writing style has grown SO greatly since I first joined and has taken shape into... well whatever the hell it is now, which is something I really like (most of the time)!

I fairly quickly created a small, tight circle of people I really enjoy being around in this fandom, and have since cultivated my own little fandom space that I really, really enjoy. it’s filled with people I love chatting with, people as open-minded as accepting as I am, and it’s a place that I strive to make feel welcoming for all who join, as well! I run an 18+ X-Men Alternative Timeline Movies focused discord, so if you’re interested, join us here!

I am trying to branch back out into The Fandom a little more after feeling a type of way for some time, and I’m honestly enjoying that a lot too! it’s been interesting to follow some more folk, and I’m really happy to see my dash start to thicken up after being close to barren for so long.

currently, I have a small group of close friends I care a great deal for (hi, Mid!) that has absolutely made this fandom into one of the best i’ve been involved in.

4. Do you regret getting involved in any fandoms?

very very very simplified and slightly unture answer: no. every single bad experience has taught me something that I’ve carried into my other fandom experiences, just like life lmao, but for more of a meaty answer to this question:yes.

so much yes.

I have SO MUCH regret around teen wolf, actually, for so many different reasons, but I’ve also learned SO much.seeing a server ran in a way I Did Not Like has helped me better mod my own fandom spaces, and I am very anti-totalitarianism and am VERY against showing abject favouritism to specific members, while I also always try incredibly hard to ensure no one feels ignored. I was reminded of how finicky friendships are, and learned not to be the person who puts in the sole work to keep ‘em going (and how to recognize if I am) because... when you stop the friendship might stop, too. I learned NOT to hit on close friends, no matter how much I might want to, and I learned the importance of open, clear and precise communication in romantic endeavours, which was actually a very good life lesson because I’d never been in a situation that could teach me it before. I’ve learned, or, am LEARNING, not to let personal experiences with one-on-one relationships taint my view of a fandom—this one is hard, and is something I am trying very, very hard to work through as I’ve recently been hit with a very strong and very sudden wave of inspiration for teen wolf.

but like, with that all said, I still absolutely LOVE the teen wolf fandom and have had so many amazing amazing amazingexperiences that I wouldn’t change for all the bad, and that the bad experiences are really localized to the ship-focused spaces I was in and the personal relationships that I had, NOT with the fandom as a whole which I am slowly dipping my toes back into! I learned so much about myself and my writing during my time in the fandom, and that is another thing I absolutely wouldn’t change for the world. I am over the moon that I’m writing here again, honestly, and the reception I’ve gotten has been SO insanely amazing.

starker is another one I regret-but-don’t-totally-regret-because-I-learned-sh*t. starker taught me the importance of 18+ fan spaces, and showed me what can happen when people... aren’t careful. when mods are minors themselves. I learned that cross-generational nsfw spaces are a RED flag, and that they mean GET OUT, and that anyonewho would willingly allow minors and adults to mingle over explicit content are people I Do Not Want To Be Around. I learned a lot about myself there on an interpersonal scale, and I found out a lot about my sexuality and kink preferences, too (which was a wild time). while I do very much enjoy the lessons I learned from being in the space I was in, I could do without some of the more negative things I witnessed, even if they taught me a lot.

16. Are their any popular ships in your fandom which you dislike?

SINCE I CAN’T SAY CHERIK I’m going to have to dig a little deeper and talk about Sterek, lmao. I was really, really, reallyinto Sterek starting around... 2014? I read... f*ck tons. absolutely insane amounts of Sterek fic. and I wanna say... around 2015? maybe? there was a really popular trope in Sterek, wherein Derek would push Stiles away (by being mean, by pretending to date one of the Pack (usually Erica), by bullying him, by telling him the pack didn’t want him, etc, etc) so that he could... keep Stiles safe? it almost always went the same way. there is a threat no one told Stiles about, Derek did“what he had to do” to keep Stiles safe (i.e cutting him off from all his friends and massive, obvious crush) and then when Stiles got hurt, the pack would come to his rescue and save him (only after Stiles got a little beat up), and then Derek would care for him, or not leave his side, or check up on him, and Stiles would wonder why he cared after everything that had happened and... bam. Derek would admit his undying love. And Stiles would just like forgive him and they’d get together and be happily ever after as a pack and...

that was so damaging lmao??? I can’t even tell you how many fics fitting into this trope that I read, to the point where I was like... “wow Derek loves Stiles so much he’s such an amazing person for keeping him safe by pushing him away and making him feel isolated and alone and hated” BUT LIKE WHAT. WHAT. that’s horrible??? so so so horrible??? I am so f*cking thankful it isn’t something I really saw too much of when I came back around to the fandom around 2017, but.... oh boy. for a ship that I considered an OTP and read like the entire tag of, I have VERY few sterek fics of substance (when compared to the rest of my teen wolf writing) and this is the reason why.

this trope and it’s absolutely ludicrous popularity a few years ago really, really turned me off the ship.

22. Is there anything you regret writing?

content-wise: no. very, very easy no. I don’t regret any of the pairings or kinks I’ve written & I don’t think I ever will (I’m very anti-shame, lmao. if you like it, flaunt it).

but... I do regret some of the emotional labour I’veput into works? the emotional attachment I have with certain fics, or genres, or pairings, and how I’ve tied them to a specific person or persons. like, I can’t write ageplay anymore, because of how strong the association of ageplay is to someone I cared for deeply and no longer have in my life (and even if I ever manage to write it in general,I’ll never be able to write Steter ageplay). I have 13k of a fic that was supposed to be a surprise gift to a close friend that I hadn’t heard from in... ages, to the point where I gave up on sending the occasional monthly-message. I have one thing I wrote for a dear friend (who never interacted with it) and now I can’t help but feel like the story is awful, despite notdoing horrifically stat-wise.

I write because I love it. I write for people I care about, because writing isa labour of love, and it’s a way I can show them how much I care for them, but... sometimes that bites me in the ass, I guess.

I’m working on it, lol.

28. If someone were to draw a piece of fanart for your story, which story would it be and what would the picture be of?

god okay there is NOTHING better than the idea of this. I’ve had a few mood boards made for me here and there, which are always SO loved and cherished and massively appreciated down to my BONES, but I don’t know if I’ve... ever really gotten fan art? I had someone make some really, really cool like... OG bit-moji type art of a couple of my fics, which is amazing and I have it on my phone still, and @hd-hale once drew me a GORGEOUS sheriff stilinski inspired by Daddies’R’Us,but to get FAN ART i would CRY lmao

right now, I think something from to love and be loved by youwould feel really, really extra special because even at 6/17 chapters posted, it’s my longest work ever. what would it be a picture of?? hell if i f*cking know but probably something that hasn’t happened yet, lmao

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A Quest for Gods

AN: This is an inherited request for a DemiGod!Reader, child of Hades, going about the task of reviving Erwin after the events of season 3. This turned into far more of a behemoth of a part 1 than I’d been expecting, and wow did I love writing this. I’m playing with the idea of a part two, but if I do a part two, then unlike this one, it will be more pairing centered, and yes, I already have a pairing in mind. But that’s entirely up to how this part 1 is received and the feedback I get. Also, yeah, this part is pretty much pairing free because there was already SO MUCH TO DO WITH THIS IDEA without adding a pairing into the mix. Finally, I tinkered with some of the Underworld myths because there’s different variations/conflicting stories, and here and their I wanted to tweak the narrative to fit my needs :)

Characters: Demi-God!Reader, Levi, Hange, Erwin (?), Hades, Charon

Warnings: Language, Death, angst

Word Count: 9930 (Sweet Merciful Glory, this is the size of my longer AO3 fanfic chapters O_o)

Part 2 --->

(I reached a dead end trying to find who made the gif)

“He’s already dead.”

The solemn finality that settled over the group of five--now four--was crushing, the weight of the yawning unknown in front of them causing a suffocating pressure to build in your chest. The grim air cloying around those gathered near Erwin’s body was in stark contrast to the reunion happening several houses over. As glad for Armin and the others as you were, Erwin’s loss hung too heavily over you for you to join those feelings.

You didn’t envy Levi having to choose between Erwin and Armin, something telling you that if you’d only had those two choices, you wouldn’t have been able to choose.

If you’d only had the two choices…

Your gaze slid towards Erwin’s body, the inkling of a dangerous thought starting to tickle the edges of your consciousness. Before the idea could form into a solid thought, Levi’s words about why he’d chosen Armin despite his earlier stubbornness to save Erwin echoed in your mind.

He had no choice but to become a devil. It was us who wished for that. And in the end, when he had finally been set free from hell, we wanted to bring him back once more.

But I think...it’s time to let him rest.

You snapped your gaze away from Erwin with a guilt starting to eat its way through you at feeding the thought that hadn’t even completely formed. How could you even start to consider doing such a thing to Erwin? Floch had said the reason he didn’t kill Erwin upon finding him was because Floch wanted Erwin to suffer more. Part of Floch’s argument had been to make Erwin suffer more.

Surely, whatever it was that awaited them in the abyss of the unknown, was something they could navigate without Erwin having to suffer on this Earth any longer. The few Survey Corps that were still alive would find a way.

Somehow…

And yet...I can’t quite bring myself to believe it.

The basem*nt didn’t bring enlightenment. It brought darkness and fear, a frightening reality that made frightful questions plague your mind. Yes, Armin was a genius in his own right, and he was valuable and still had so much to live for...but with possibly the whole world against your people…

How were any of you going to survive without Commander Erwin’s leadership? You all had thought he could finally rest--whether or not he’d earned it wasn’t in questions--but it seemed now you all needed him more than ever.

But could you justify pulling that man out of what very well could be true rest after the hell of this world?

Your eyes stared unseeing into the darkness of your room as thoughts, ideas, theories, all angles of the moral dilemma in front of you churned in your mind. It was an unseen wrestle of the soul, and when at long last you decided you would not come to a conclusion on your own, you threw the covers aside and felt your feet touch the cold floor. You subconsciously made yourself decent, your still-bare feet carrying you out the door as you strode with a purpose through the halls. You didn’t even fully realize where you were going until you were standing outside the door and were halfway through four quick knocks.

You needed another opinion if you were going to break the pattern of indecision. What better place to go than to someone who said things as he saw them, blunt, and the one who’d already made the impossible choice?

There was a moment of complete silence that made you briefly worry that you had just knocked on Levi’s door one of the few nights he’d managed to fall asleep.

“Who is it?” After giving your name, you heard shuffling inside, and then a follow up, “come in.”

Levi’s office was almost as dark as your own room, except for a single candle on his desk lighting the small area. Levi was still in uniform--minus the cloak and jacket--and leaning against the front of his desk, a faintly steaming cup of tea in hand. Beside him, sitting in the chair normally placed in front of his desk, was Hange, a glass of what was most likely alcohol gripped in her hands. She was leaning forward, tired eyes focused on you as you slipped inside and shut the door behind you.

“What is it?” Levi asked, the hint of a worn note reverberating in his curt question.

f*ck, what were you doing?

You were already here, the door was shut behind you, there was no going back. You might as well--

“Spit it out,” Levi commanded as an awkward silence started to fill the room.

Don’t even think about it, just say it and get it over with--

“If there was another way to bring Commander Erwin back, would you do it?”

Another, this time painful, silence fell over the room. Levi’s eyes widened in surprise, and Hange leaned back in her chair. The urge to squirm under their intense and shocked gazes was hard to resist, but you didn’t want to give them any more reason to keep giving you those looks.

“What the hell kind of a question is that?” Levi eventually snapped.

That piercing gaze was not one you wanted to meet right now, considering Erwin had just died and the pain was still fresh, and here you were asking this. Instead, you looked either at the ground or at Hange, even if her gaze was also quite piercing.

“It’s just something I need to know,” you said softly.

“Tch.” Levi turned aside, placing his cup on the desk with more force than necessary.

“There’s no way to bring the dead back to life, y/n,” Hange said in a serious tone you were still adjusting to hearing from the woman. The new Survey Corps Commander...she had a lot of weight on her shoulders, now--you might be seeing this serious side of her far more often.

“It’d be a pointless conversation,” Levi cut in with a tone that suggested there would be no more discussion of the matter. “If that’s all you wanted to ask, then you should leave.”

You stood your ground, summoning up the courage to meet Levi’s gaze head on, even if you wanted to squirm or dash away. “Just answer the question.”

The faintest smile appeared on Hange’s face, while Levi scowled and turned away, walking around his desk. He paused at the desk’s side, his back still towards you, and started to speak.

“It’s like I said...Erwin’s earned his rest.”

“We might need him more than ever, now that we know what’s out there,” Hange pointed out.

“But would you want to take that rest from him?” Levi asked sharply, head turned to Hange as he addressed her. He turned just enough to face you, part of his face cast in shadow. “Does that answer your question?”

No, it didn’t. It was just the simplified version of what you were struggling with, and didn’t give you the solid answer you needed.

It seemed you were only going to get the sure answer from one person.

Your frustration bubbling, you hoped the dark of the room hid your feelings and the serious contemplation you were still struggling with.

“Thank you, Captain. Commander,” you said suddenly, re-opening the door to make a quick exit before things could get any more awkward.

As the door shut behind you, Levi and Hange shared a look.

It was depressingly easy to sneak out with so few Scouts left.

Upon returning to your room, you had simply stood in the center of its darkness for a few moments before stirring to action. After pulling on your green cloak and some socks and boots, you grabbed a pouch you’d been keeping hidden under a loose floorboard, tied it onto your belt, and hurried back out of your room, drawing your hood to hide your face.

Outside it was a little easier to see with the moonlight filtering down through light canopies of the trees instead of peeking through the occasional window of the Survey Corps headquarters. Your steps were sure and quick, your destination firmly in mind as you moved in the shadows--just in case someone who was still awake like Levi and Hange happened to look outside. This was something you needed--or, at least, wanted--to do alone, and prying eyes was the last thing you wanted on you.

A couple miles away from the Survey Corps headquarters, you finally saw the outcropping of rock you’d been looking for. Walking up to the exposed rock wall, you placed a hand thoughtfully against the cool, smooth surface, your other hand reaching into the pouch you’d brought with you. After a quick inspection of the rock, you pulled out one of the small medallions your father had given you long ago for emergencies only. You hesitated for one brief moment, then carefully pressed the medallion against the surface of the rock. The metal-wrought image of an ancient helm placed in front of a bident suddenly sank into the surface, a dark red glow appearing around its edges. You stepped back as the medallion seemed to melt, the trickles of metal turning to thin lines that shone like obsidian framed by magma in the night, forming the outline of a slim, arched doorway. The rock within the outline started to crack, then suddenly crumbled with a burst of steam to reveal a dark, cavernous passage leading steeply down into the earth.

You hesitated at the entrance for a moment, wondering if you needed to brave the depths alone or if you needed to wait for…

Movement in the darkness caught your eyes, and you stepped back from the entrance at the sight of silver streaked white hair. The figure emerging from the darkness was an elderly man dressed in tattered, simple clothes, a sturdy, long rod in hand that he leaned upon in the doorway of the newly formed entrance.

A gnarled hand reached out towards you, held out as if expecting an offering of some kind. His eyes were dull and haunting, framed by a tangle of long, unkempt hair the same silvery white as his patchy beard--but his eyes also held danger, a threat, even for you if you made a wrong move.

Reaching back into a pouch, this time you pulled out a handful of ancient silvery coins, dropping three into his hand. The man quickly clamped down on the obol coins, tucking them away as you spoke up.

“Does he know I’m coming?”

“You’ve been gone a long time--he would not miss your arrival.” As he spoke, his eyes shifted, looking at something behind you. A shiver went down your spine, hairs standing up on the back of your neck.

“And who exactly is waiting for you?”

The low, dangerous tone had you backstepping before you’d even finished turning around.

Captain Levi, the one who just spoke, and Commander Hange were both standing directly behind you, a look that matched the dangerous tone darkening Levi’s face.

The reality of just how bad this all looked, considering what they had learned today, struck fear in your heart, even if you knew you weren’t doing anything wrong.

All they knew was that you’d snuck out in the middle of the night, opened a hole in the earth by means unknown, and were talking about some mysterious individual you wanted to see. Considering you’d all just learned about a world of unknown capabilities beyond the walls that was out to destroy everyone in the walls...you understood why Levi was pinning you with such an expression.

Lying right now was only going to get you killed. They would know you were lying, and at the very least, the fact you were trying to lie might condemn you if the ‘you wouldn’t lie if you didn’t have anything to hide’ philosophy applied here. The truth was your best option, no matter how outlandish it may seem.

At least after today, after all the information that had been dumped on everyone, they might be more liable to listen to the outlandish and insane.

“My father--I wanted to try asking for his help,” you said quietly in the face of their suspicion, doing your best to stay calm.

Levi’s eyes narrowed. “Your father?”

“I know this looks bad, but I’m trying to get help, not fetching another threat,” you said, glancing between the tense Hange and Levi.

“Your behavior suggests otherwise,” Hange pointed out. “Sneaking around, keeping secrets--it’s in your best interests to start explaining.”

“It’s a lot to explain, and a lot to believe…” you said with a hint of hesitation, conscious of the fact you’d already paid an increasingly impatient Charon.

“I would not keep your father waiting. Not on account of these mortals,” Charon said behind you, his annoyance clear.

Your father’s anger, or Levi’s…

Your father could wait a few moments longer.

“Look, I don’t have the time to explain right now,” you said, drawing Levi’s and Hange’s attention back to you and away from the fact they’d just been called mortals. “But, if you think you can trust me enough to come with me, I’ll try to explain along the way.”

There was understandable hesitation from both of them. Considering the current situation and the recent betrayals even among former Scouts, you weren’t expecting these two to trust you immediately, no matter how many fights and near-death situations the three of you had been through in the past years. Frankly, you’d be disappointed if they hadn’t hesitated, or didn’t even try to question you to some extent, first.

“How do we know you won’t lead us into a trap?” Levi asked.

“I suppose that’s part of the trust. You’ll have to trust that I don’t mean either of you harm, or anyone within these walls, for that matter.” You put your hands up in a proffered silent offer. “You can frisk me for weapons if it will make you feel better. I don’t have any--considering I’m going to meet my father, I didn’t think weapons were needed--but you can still check.”

Not one to disappoint, Levi checked you over anyway, fingers prodding in places you hadn’t even thought of for any kind of hidden weapon. While Levi searched you, Hange asked questions.

“Who’s your father?”

“Hades. Just Hades,” you said simply.

“You say that like it’s supposed to mean something to us.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t--it didn’t mean anything to me the first time I heard it, either,” you admitted, finally putting your arms down as Levi stepped back, finished firsking you for weapons. “If you’re satisfied I’m not going to try stabbing you in the tunnel, I’ll explain who he is on the way there. If I keep him waiting any longer, he’s going to be furious...and that’s not something I want to be on the receiving end of.”

They didn’t say yes, but they didn’t say no, either, so you assumed they were willing to follow you, turning back to Charon and digging back in your purse, pulling out six obols this time. Charon didn’t reach out to take them.

“Your father will not be...pleased that you’ve brought mortals into his realm.”

That earned a bit of a glare from you as you dug back through your bag and pulled out two golden drachmas to add to the obols. Now that you’d tripled the fare, Charon accepted the coins and turned to face the depths below them, already starting the path down. You turned back to Levi and Hange, neither of them looking pleased to be following you down into the unknown.

“Stay close to me,” you told them seriously. This was uncharted territory for them, but somewhere familiar for you, and considering all the dangerous things the three of you could run into on your way through the Underworld...you’d rather keep an eye on them, for their sakes.

With no torch lighting your way, the three of you followed the narrow tunnel, the sound of Charon’s rod tapping against the rocky ground acting as an audible guide through the darkness. You had a hand pressed against the wall on your right as a way to stabilize yourself.

“Where does this even lead?” Levi asked, his voice coming directly behind you. Hange was probably walking behind him.

“The Underworld...not to be confused with the Underground, that’s entirely different.”

A few moments of silence, then, “Start explaining.”

Here we go…

“Before the walls were put up, there used to be this ancient civilization known as the Greeks. They believed in many different gods and goddesses, but the most important were the Big Three: god of the sky, lightning, and thunder, Zeus; god of the sea, earthquakes, storms, and horses, Poseidon; and god of the dead, hidden wealth, the Underworld, and some would also say regret...Hades. My father.”

“You want us to believe you’re the brat of some ancient god? You do know how insane that sounds?”

“Even though we live in a world with Titans, and after everything we’ve learned about what’s outside the walls, is it really that hard to believe?” you asked, noting that the ground beneath you seemed to be leveling out once more. “Besides, you’ll see it for yourself soon, anyway.”

Light started to filter into the tunnel, a faint bluish light that made it possible to see the ground beneath your feet and Charon walking a few steps ahead of you. If you turned your head, you could see Levi indeed walking only half a step behind you, Hange only a step away from Levi. At least they were staying close, like you’d asked, though you had the feeling part of it was in preparation for an ambush or trap of some kind. Especially since you were officially claiming to be the offspring of a god.

“And the Underworld would be what, exactly?” Hange asked.

The light grew brighter, an indication that you had at least made the on foot part of the journey. You were about to come to the part that made Charon invaluable to anyone who wanted to travel through the Underworld. In fact, it was close enough you made Hange wait for an answer until you’d gone down the last few steps and could finally see the beginning of the Underworld, moving aside so that Hange and Levi would be able to see as well.

“The land of the dead.”

They had entered a vast cavern that was bathed in the etheral blue light. The tunnel ended in a small cliff that jutted out into the cavern, the rest of the space made up of vaulted natural ceilings and a bottomless pit instead of a smooth rock floor. As for the light, it came from a flowing silvery blue river that touched the lip of the cliff before disappearing down into the dark depths below.

And it was suspended in nothing; just a stream of ethereal water thick enough for a narrow boat to sail, winding forward and curving out of sight, deeper into the realm.

It was all they could see at the moment, though considering it was a glowing river suspended in the air, you figured it would be enough of a first sight of the Underworld to get them thinking you were telling the truth.

Hange gasped behind you, pushing her way to the front so she could get a closer look at the river, peering over the edge to gaze at the water disappearing below. She got close enough to the edge you saw a slightly wide-eyed Levi shift closer, ready to catch her if she leaned too far over the edge. As you watched, Charon’s boat started to make its way towards you as if it had a mind of its own, Charon’s gaze focused on the boat and ignoring the three of you entirely. Hange was momentarily distracted from the river by the approaching unmanned boat, eyes wide.

“Ooh, you have to tell me how it’s doing that--and this river--”

“Most of what you’re going to see down here I can only explain by calling it magic or divine...or infernal, whichever you prefer. I don’t think you can call some of the things down here divine.” Maybe if you said that now, it would save you from having to explain things you really didn’t know how to explain later.

The boat reached the cliff, causing Hange to step back as Charon reached out a hand and placed it on the boat’s figurehead of a screech owl, bringing it to a stop and steadying the boat in place.

“Come on--we need to keep moving,” you said, already climbing onto the boat, watching the other two as they climbed aboard.

Hange was studying everything, from the figurehead carving as she climbed into the sides of the boat for any kind of visible mode of movement--finding none--and still gazing at the glowing water, an arm resting on the side of the boat as she did so. Levi was far more cautious, approaching the boat like he expected it to tip over and drop all of you into the bottomless chasm below, leering at the glowing water--he probably thought it was poisonous or tainted in some way.

Sadly, he wasn’t wrong.

Charon was the last one to get in, the rod in his hand dipping into the shimmering waters and pushing off the cliff to get the boat started forward. It glided through the waters without any kind of turbulence or resistance, making it deceptively smooth sailing into the land of the dead.

“I don’t see many dead people for a land of the dead,” Levi pointed out, leaning back in his seat at the end of the boat opposite from Charon, his back against the bow and other carved figurehead.

“We haven’t even gone through the entrance yet,” you defended, watching Hange as she leaned over the edge of the boat to get a closer look at the water. “That tunnel only brought us over the boundary river Styx. This river is going to bring us past the actual entrance. Don’t worry, you can’t miss it, there’s a three he--don’t touch the water!”

Your hand shot out before you even finished speaking, lunging forward to stop Hange from plunging her hand into its glowing current. You had her by the wrist, your eyes wide as you pulled her back into the boat. Levi was half out of his seat from your sudden shout and movement, but Hange was looking at you startled and with an expression that clearly asked ‘why not?’

“This is the Lethe, river of forgetfulness. Souls drink from this river to erase the lives they’ve lived from their minds entirely. So unless you want to forget everything you’ve ever known, I’d resist the urge to touch it...or any of the rivers, on that note--none of them are good.” You let go of her wrist. “It’s best to just steer clear of the waters down here.”

Levi pulled Hange down into her seat by the back of her shirt after your explanation. “This place isn’t curiosity friendly, four-eyes, try to keep yourself under control.”

Hange pouted. “But I wanted to get a closer look…”

“Sorry, Hange, but this is as close as you’re going to get in this stage of existence,” you said with a bittersweet smile.

“This is all...interesting...but why did you come down here?” Levi asked. “This isn’t just a family visit.”

You looked away, choosing to look at the glimmering water below rather than at your companions. “No, it isn’t. Ever since we found out what was in that basem*nt, I’ve been thinking, and I want to try…”

You really hoped they weren’t going to take this badly. Especially knowing Levi’s thoughts on the matter.

“I want to try asking my father if he’ll let Erwin come back.”

There were a few beats of silence with you refusing to take a peek at their reactions, just in case their reactions weren’t pretty. Your eyes were fixed on the water until you finally heard Hange speak.

“So you are trying to raise the dead, essentially.”

Your question in Levi’s office had been rather obvious and odd, hadn’t it?

“Sort of. I personally can’t do anything more than get down here. My father’s the one who can do it, if I can convince him. I wouldn’t dare try this without his permission--”

“Were you listening to anything I said?” Levi interrupted, voice low, his body taunt and his eyes stormy. Predictably, he wasn’t happy about your rushed scheme.

“I was. I put this whole notion aside several times listening to you. But knowing our situation, knowing we might need him, and hearing conflicting opinions left and right…”

Turning the bend, the actual entrance to the Underworld loomed overhead. The sight made you trail off as you rose to your feet, exuding calm in the hopes your companions would retain their calm.

Trying to attack the Titan sized three-headed black dog pushing to his feet would not go well.

A snarl reverberated around the cavern, causing Levi and Hange to reach for what you could only assume were concealed weapons. They really had been prepared for the worst, for a possible betrayal, when they’d followed you tonight.

“Steady,” you admonished, trying to carefully step around Hange to get a little closer to the massive dog. “Cerberus might be a big, scary guard dog, but he’s got a soft spot for my father and his children, which includes me.”

As you spoke, you reached out a hand as the boat came close enough for Cerberus to be within arm’s reach. Levi rose partially out of his seat while Hange leaned closer…

The snarls resided when Cerberus got a whiff of your scent, lowering his heads as you came within range. The left and right you gave affectionate rubs along the sides of his faces, while the middle you nuzzled against affectionately. The head on your right nudged your pouch in askance, prompting a small chuckle out of you.

“Sorry, Cerberus, I don’t have any treats for you today. Maybe another time,” you told the giant hound with one last affectionate rub on two of his snouts before pulling away, the boat already drifting past the giant hound.

Turning back to the other two, their expressions were rather priceless. Hange seemed like she was about to burst at the seams with questions--when was she not? This place was like a eutopia of question provoking things for her--and Levi...well, his reaction had been fleeting, and he’d already schooled his expression back to its usual neutral state. He’d definitely been watching you treat the giant hellhound like a fluffy puppy, though. You must have been quite the sight.

After passing Cerberus and continuing past a passage on the opposite bank, a jagged opening in the cavern appeared around one last bend, a cacophony of ethereal lights emanating just beyond the exit. The Lethe grew wider, and as the boat passed under the opening, divided into three separate directions. To the right, the Lethe continued with its glowing blue waters. The left melted into a seething river of fire that winded over the immediate landscape and towards a jagged collection of sharp rocks that reached towards the skies like broken blades, a hellish red glow emanating from something unseen within their center. Down the center, the glowing blue rivers melted into waters blacker than ink and appearing bottomless even though it wound through the air--at least at the beginning. At points, the waters of the different rivers dipped low and ran along the ground before reaching back into the air.

At the moment, the only thing of the land that was visible was a stretch of field that seemed endless in its bleak, grayish appearance, devoid of most color, only a few of the hoards of wandering souls below appearing to retain faded memories of color in them. In the distance to the right, the Lethe melted away into a river dark red and thick as blood, the border to an area of land draped in a heavy fog and darker than the rest, no other definite features visible from such a distance.

As the boat continued forward along the black waters, you shuffled back to your seat, gaze searching the horizon for your destination. Hange and Levi were both looking around, taking in the sight of the actual Underworld as you waited for them to process their surroundings.

“A little grim for an afterlife, especially compared to what you normally hear,” Hange commented, gazing over the edge of the bow into the colorless fields teeming with aimlessly wandering souls.

“Most of it is, yes,” you admitted before launching into an explanation of the Underworld’s regions, Levi and Hange both letting their gazes roam to follow your explanation. “There is a better corner of the Underworld, it’s just on the completely opposite side. What we’re going over now is the Asphodel Meadows, the largest portion of the Underworld, that acts as a sort of in between--no one down there did anything exceptionally bad or extraordinarily heroic or good. They fell into a middle ground. Those jagged rocks at the end of the Phlegathon--the river of fire--cover Tartarus, where the especially nasty beings go. We’re on the Acheron River right now, river of sorrow and pain--it winds through most of the Underworld. That foggy place over there is the start of the Fields of Mourning, a place specifically for those done wrong by love who never recovered, framed by the Cocytus River of lamentation and sorrow...Then somewhere off in the distance, on the other side of the Underworld, is the Elysian Fields and the Isles of the Blessed.”

“That sounds much better than Fields of Morning and River of Fire,” Hange said in a tone so deadpan that for a moment you thought it was Levi who’d spoken. It definitely wasn’t Levi who spoke, though. He was looking up at the rock ceiling high above--almost out of sight--with an expression that disgust and trepidation only began to describe.

“They are. The Elysian Fields are for the truly exceptional--the heroes, the ones who made a difference, the truly good. And the Isles of the Blessed are for...the cream of the crop, I suppose.”

“Then you’re going there. For Erwin,” Levi cut in. You would have assumed it was a question, but it still sounded like a statement, which was a little confusing for you. Thankfully, whether it was a statement or a question didn’t matter, because he was wrong.

“Actually, no. I am not about to presume where the judges decide souls go, that’s not my area--even my father rarely pulls strings for who goes where. And I’m not about to piss off my father by trying to sneak a soul out of here, either--not that it would even be a successful endeavor,” you said with a shake of your head. You weren’t about to be pretentious or foolish enough to think you could do anything successfully down here without the permission of Hades...or Persephone, but it wasn’t winter, so she wasn’t down here and wouldn’t be any help. “Which is why we’re not going to any of these fields--we’re going to my father’s palace. I’m going to talk to him, see if he’ll be willing to make some kind of deal or arrangement. And if he is...I’ll ask Erwin himself if he’d be willing to come back. Since everyone else can’t seem to agree, I figured why not ask the man himself instead of assuming what he’d want.”

After your explanation, you settled down leaning against the side of the boat, eyes cast in the general direction you knew the palace was, letting Hange and Levi gaze at the Underworld around them to their heart’s content. You were simply waiting for your destination to come into view, eyes glazing over as you eventually stared off into nothing, the subconscious squirm in your stomach at the thought of asking such a big thing of your father coming to the forefront of your mind. You could probably count the tales you’d heard of someone successfully bringing a soul back from the Underworld on one or two of your hands. And most of those had been because Persephone gave permission, not your father. Perhaps you should have waited until winter, until Persephone was in the Underworld as well--maybe then she could have been a mediator.

You could feel Hange’s gaze lingering on you after some time traveling down the river, and you looked up a split second before her question burst out of her. “So how long have you known your father was this Hades guy?”

You grimaced at her casual use of his name, a little tingle on the back of your neck as you wondered if he’d sensed it. “Ancient Big Three Greek God of the Dead...best not to speak casually about him, he won’t like it.” You saw Levi roll his eyes behind a once again pouting Hange, but you ignored him and continued. “I was about fifteen when he sent one of the truth Oneiroi--daemons of dreams--to find me and bring me down here so he could explain my heritage to me. It’s not exactly the olden days when everyone knew about the Greek Gods--well, at least everyone in the Greek area--and he could just give some sort of well-known sign to claim me as one of his children. A lot more explanation was needed. I knew nothing about any of this until that explanation, other than the fact I was a little...different.”

As you spoke, you could finally see Hades’ palace appear in the distance, the Elysian Fields visible a little ways to its left, a stark contrast to the rest of the Underworld, with its rich color and brighter atmosphere. You also knew, from the few times you’d been allowed in--no matter how briefly--that there was a sky visible in those fields. You weren’t entirely sure if it was an illusion or some kind of magic or bending of the cosmos, but you knew the sun shone on the fields and the waters, and the stars blazed in a night sky in those fields.

But that wasn’t where you were going. Even though the Acheron River twisted and split in two separate directions low to the ground to form a border between the Elysian Fields and the Asphodel Meadows, Charon was guiding the boat to the right, closer to the palace of ebony, obsidian, and marble intricately carved in an ancient Greek style. Columns lined the front of the first floor of the soaring building, the top and bottom of every pillar containing tales from ancient Greece, tales of heroes dying, of the toppling of the titans, of the legends Hades and Persephone were both well known for such as Hades taking Persephone to the underworld, and Orpheus attempting to lead his wife out of the Underworld (one of the unsuccessful stories).

Charon brought the boat to a stop at a bend in the bank that brought the three of you as close to the palace as you could get by boat, his staff planted firmly against the loamy soil of the bank where the river briefly met with the earth. You climbed out first, taking the lead since this was your mission, your father’s palace, and you knew where you were going and what you were doing. As soon as the three of you had your feet planted in the ground, Charon pushed off of the bank with his staff, already making his way back down the inky river.

“No second thoughts or going back, now,” you murmured to yourself. You took a deep breath, and strode the last few steps to the onyx pathway that led all the way to the marble steps of your father’s palace, steeling your resolve.

(Levi POV)

The increasing tension you were radiating with every step towards and into the looming palace of marble and dark stone did nothing to put Levi’s mind at ease about this entire...bizarre situation. They way you talked about your father--about Hades--you had more fearful respect of the--man?--than anything else. Him being the apparent ruler of such a grim afterlife and the god of the dead made your mannerisms make sense, but even then, if he was your father, Levi might have expected those feelings to be a little less...intense. But they were cloying with how strongly they radiated from you, and did nothing to reassure him this entire idea wasn’t as stupid as it had initially sounded. At first he’d simply thought you were talking nonsense, but now he kept waiting for this rushed, half-baked idea to go south, ready to claw his way out of whatever bad came even if he didn’t understand half of what was happening.

One worldview altering information dump was already a lot to handle, but this was getting ridiculous.

He still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t some crazy drug-induced dream or hallucination caused by Hange slipping something in his tea to try and get him to sleep. Of course, he hadn’t seen Hange put anything in his tea--which he would have if she’d tried--but at least that would give him a more logical explanation for everything going on from the moment you’d opened a hole in the goddamn ground.

They passed the columns and approached the main entrance, Levi taking in the carvings--warriors dying in battle; a woman eating what looked like an apple, tomato, or maybe a pomegranate--some sort of fruit; a man holding some sort of instrument watching a woman disappear in a wisp of smoke--after he’d established there wasn’t anything dangerous lurking in the shadows.

As your hand settled on the ebony double doors, you paused and turned around to fix Levi and Hange with a serious gaze. “Whatever happens in there, just let me do the talking, okay?”

Hange shrugged. “He’s your father.”

Your gaze moved to Levi, who still hadn’t said anything, clearly waiting for him to give verbal confirmation he agreed.

“Are you going to keep us standing out here all night, or are you going to go inside already?” Levi asked eventually.

He wasn’t about to make any promises. If things started to go bad, he was going to do what he had to.

You gave a little huff as you turned back around, prompting the faintest smirk to flash across Levi’s lips. You knew he was dodging making the promise, but you also knew you weren’t going to win if you tried to press the issue.

The ebony doors opened with a groan, and Levi followed close behind as you strode confidently inside despite the slight tremble of your hand he’d caught as you’d passed the doors. They immediately entered the main chamber, a vast room of marble and obsidian and doorways along the walls that signaled different halls leading to different parts of the building. At the far end of the room there was an intricately carved ebony throne, and sitting in it was a man reclined like a cat about to pounce and radiating raw power, a two-pronged bident weapon glinting in his hand with the blunt end resting on the ground, grasped--at the moment--more like a scepter than a weapon.

More came into view the closer they drew--he was wearing a deep, dark red suit jacket that hung open over a dark grey button up shirt and black pants, his long black hair was unruly and falling just past his shoulders, a carefully kept full goatee and mustache of a matching black, and the rest of his jawline cleanly shaven. He had a bolo tie loosely around his neck, the pendant the exact same symbol that had been on the medallion you’d used to create the tunnel. Then there were his eyes--a piercing, all-knowing ice blue, which when matched with his stern and serious expression, gave the impression he was gazing into the very soul of whoever he cast his eyes towards, weighing its very value.

It was unsettling when that gaze was turned on Levi, but he refused to look away.

When you came within a few strides of the throne, you dropped to one knee and gave a respectful bow of your head. Normally, Levi would have stayed standing...but you had said god of the afterlife, and if you, his own kid, was kneeling, then clearly it would be expected for Hange and himself to kneel, too.

That didn’t mean he had to like it.

After all three of you were kneeling, Hades leaned forward in his seat, that sharp gaze watching Hange and Levi while he spoke to you.

“I was under the impression you were coming alone. Why are these mortals with you?”

Again with the mortal thing. And you still weren’t being included in that address. So, since your father was a god, did that mean you weren’t mortal? You were immortal because of your parentage?

No, that wasn’t right. Levi had seen you injured before, even close to death. You weren’t immortal...but clearly you weren’t quite mortal either. Somewhere in between. He’d have to ask after all of this and try to get some clarity on the matter.

You raised your head from its bowed position, meeting your father’s gaze head on once it returned to you. “Unforeseen circ*mstances.” You answered Hades’ question like it was an afterthought, trying to redirect the conversation towards the whole reason you were here. “What’s important is why I came down here to see you.”

Hades leaned back in his seat again, sizing you up where you were still kneeling on the ground. “The last time you were here you were quite adamant that you needed nothing from me. Are you already swallowing your pride?”

Levi saw a muscle in your jaw twitch at the allusion, his curiosity rising once more. There were so many things he wanted to ask once the three of you--maybe four--left this place.

You ignored what Hades had just said, speaking as if the veiled taunt wasn’t there and rising to your feet. You were also tense again, which gave Levi the impression that Hades was not going to like what you said next.

“I came down here to ask if you would make a deal to allow me to return a soul to the living.”

In the next moment, Hades was on his feet, eyes flashing with a fire in stark contrast with his cold tone. “What?”

As if the man--being, god--hadn’t had a presence before, now the power crackled in the air, the smell of ozone accompanying it.

To your credit, you didn’t back down in the face of Hades’ anger--Levi had never known you to back down in the face of anyone’s anger, even his own.

“There’s someone who just died that we’re going to need in the coming war, and I wanted to see if we could come to an arrangem--”

“No soul that comes down here is allowed back. There’s a balance that must be kept, death must be final. I would have thought one of my own would know this.”

“I do know--I know it’s happened in the past, some of the legends are carved right into this palace’s columns outside.”

The light in the room seemed to be dimming as Hades’ anger grew, a black fog rising in the room. Levi’s breath misted in front of him as the temperature in the room dropped, something that, now that he thought back, was similar to the chill in the air the few times he’d seen you angry. At the visible proof of Hades anger, which was directed at you, Levi and Hange both got to their feet.

“If you’re so knowledgeable, you’ll remember those were also instances where the Olympians meddled in the nature of things, or Persephone made the deal without my knowledge,” Hades growled.

“But it has been done, and I’m willing to work out a deal, something that will get us what we need without disrupting the balance of things,” you returned, stepping closer to the angry god of the dead. “Maybe something like the deal with Iolaus--”

“Iolaus,” Hades hissed, turning away. “The Olympians plucked him from the Underworld without any cares for the balance and the chaos their interference caused down here until he was returned.”

He turned back to face you again. “That kind of deal would give me nothing, except the chaos of disorder. If I was to allow a soul out of the Underworld, a price needs to be paid, one that preferably serves my own interests. Besides--you were so intent on doing things on your own the last time we spoke. Even if I was delusional enough to agree, another Iolaus arrangement would be too much of a gift, even by your apparent standards.”

Levi saw your fist clench at your side as you let out a long breath, suddenly falling silent.

Hades turned his back, already making his way towards one of the halls as the fog receded and the chill started to dissipate. “If that’s all--”

“What about more of an...Orpheus, Alcestis kind of deal?”

Hades paused, a tense silence falling over the room. Levi’s gaze was fixed on you, though, not on the god. Instead of trying to figure out what was going on in Hades’ head, he was studying you, a foreboding feeling starting to grow in his gut at the reluctance he could hear in your voice. That wasn’t a good sign, not with all this talk about balance and prices for reviving the dead.

Hades faced you, his composure back to the calm and calculating demeanor he’d had when the three of you had first entered the room. “A little more promising. I’m listening.”

You started to turn towards Levi and Hange, but stopped yourself, squaring up to Hades and centering your gaze on him. “This may take a while. Let’s find somewhere to discuss it,” you said with a detached air.

You didn’t want to get into the details in front of Levi and Hange. Now he really was worried.

Before Levi could do or say anything, Hades was already turning back to continue his way down the hall he’d already been heading towards. “Then let’s talk,” he said, melting into the shadows with you close behind. You only turned back long enough to give Levi and Hange a brief ‘wait here’ gesture before you’d disappeared as well.

“I don’t like this,” Levi said bluntly once you and Hades had disappeared. “Whatever deal they’re making can’t be good.”

“What are you going to do, fight the god of death?” Hange returned, jumping up the steps to take a closer look at the ebony throne, running her hands along the woodwork and intricate carvings.

Maybe.

“Besides, whatever they’re talking about we clearly don’t have a say in--there’s not much else to do but wait,” Hange added.

“You don’t believe that.”

“This time, I do. He’s a god, Levi, one we know nothing about, and we’re in this Underworld--the afterlife. We’re getting a glimpse into the afterlife, Levi!” Hange said, her voice bubbling over with excitement as she continued to examine the throne.

“Some afterlife,” he muttered, finding a spot against a pillar on the opposite side of the room he could lean against while he watched the hallway, waiting for you and Hades to reappear.

After what felt like hours listening to Hange rattle excitedly about everything they’d seen and come up with theory after theory, Levi finally saw you and Hades return to the main room. Thankfully, Hange wasn’t ogling over the throne anymore, so they didn’t have to worry about raising Hades’ ire for playing around with his throne.

Levi studied your face, trying to get an idea of what had happened while you were gone from your expression. You seemed relieved, which was a good sign...but there was also a slight wilt in your movements, a slight dimness in your eyes, and it worried him.

You stopped as Hange and Levi both approached you, Hange clearly anxious to hear the outcome, while Levi kept his thoughts to himself and simply watched you closely.

“Both my father and Erwin agreed.”

Wait, you’d already seen Erwin? Without them? Where was he? Especially if Hades agreed to let him go, why wasn’t he with you?

“The deal involves us leading him out of the Underworld, but the two of you cannot look back until you’ve returned to the surface world and you see the sun clear the horizon.” While you explained, Hades passed the three of you and headed towards a smooth section of the wall on the right side of his throne. “No looking back, even for a glimpse--you’re not allowed to see him until then.”

“What about you?” Levi asked sharply. You didn’t hesitate in your reply, which was, admittedly, a good sign.

“I’m taking up the rear. I’ll be guiding you through the tunnel from the back. Special child of Hades privileges. Plus, I felt it would help put your minds at ease if I could see it was Erwin we were leading to the surface. That way you’re not tempted to look back to make sure it’s him.”

A sudden clang of metal on stone rang through the vast chamber as Hades planted his bident firmly in the ground, drawing everyone’s attention. A beam of silvery light emanated from between the two points of the weapon and cast onto the smooth wall he’d been approaching, a new tunnel appearing within the confines of the light like a billowing curtain being blown back. Once the tunnel appeared, you made your way towards it, gesturing for Levi and Hange to follow.

You shared a glance with your father, stopping just shy of the tunnel and placing a hand briefly on Levi’s shoulder to stop him from starting down the tunnel. You were fiddling with the pouch on your waist that you’d pulled the coins and medallion from, undoing the strings and handing it over to Levi, who clutched the bag tightly in his hand as his sharp gaze tried probing you once more. Why the hell were you giving this to him?

“You guys are in front--I just want you to have it in case you need it on the way up. To open a passage or pay a guarding being or something like that--I don’t know if we’ll run into anything like that, but just in case.”

...something about your voice was off. The timber, maybe, but whatever it was made it hard for Levi to believe that was the real reason.

You waved a hand impatiently.

“Come on, we’re on a time limit here, we have to get going. You two walk side by side up the tunnel, I’ll be right back here.”

Hange shared a worried glance with Levi. So she had her suspicions as well. Surely this wasn’t the whole deal? Did Hades really think it would be a challenge not to look back?

The image from the columns outside of the man looking over his shoulder as a woman faded away entered Levi's mind, and for a moment, he wondered if it was more the fact that Hades knew eventually it would be difficult to not look back.

After that shared glance, they started forward.

The darkness was quick to swallow them up, no light to even guide their footsteps and forcing them to reach out for the walls to steady themselves. From behind, you had already started to speak.

“The tunnel should be on level ground at first, but eventually it’s going to start climbing up, you’ll feel it. Just so you know ahead of time. And stick close, there’s going to be a few forks I’ll have to tell you which turn to take, and we don’t want either of you wandering down the wrong path.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” Hange said rather cheerfully. “Since we have quite the walk, do you think you could answer some questions for me?”

“I’ll try to. I don’t know how well I’ll be able to answer, but I’ll try.”

With that, Hange started pelting you with most of the questions she’d been babbling to Levi about while the two of them were waiting for you and your father. You did your best to answer most of them--there were three demi-gods who judged the souls while your father supervised them, Hades was the god of the dead but not of death, Olympians were twelve gods that got to live on Mount Olympus and were considered the main twelve gods, Hades wasn’t counted as an Olympian despite being the oldest male god because he was never at Mount Olympus since he spent all his time in the Underworld--but other questions you admitted to having given little thought or knowing nothing about. Two or three times you interrupted Hange’s questions to tell them to go right or left, but other than that, most of what you were saying were answers to Hange’s questions instead of directions.

Until…

“Wait, wait, wait, stop...but don’t look back.”

Levi sighed. “We know that part--what is it?”

You didn’t answer. Instead, he could hear you shuffling around in the dark, moving first to Hange, who gasped.

“Hange, don’t look back!”

“Sorry, sorry, I didn’t look, though! Is that--”

As you shuffled towards Levi, he suddenly felt a weight on his shoulder--currently a light weight, but it still felt like a fairly large hand.

“All right, you can start walking again. Just keep those eyes forward, we shouldn’t have much longer, now.”

Levi started forward, a little more hesitant this time, surprised that Hange even seemed to have grown quiet beside him. But the further they went, the heavier the weight on his shoulder seemed to get, like something was solidifying behind him, or gradually leaning more and more weight on him. He felt his heartbeat pick up as he realized it was Erwin behind him, Erwin’s hand he could feel on his shoulder. You would have said something if it wasn’t Erwin.

This was happening. The deal was paying off, whatever its details had been.

Feeling Erwin’s hands on their shoulders seemed to make the situation feel that much more real, enough so that even Hange fell silent and no longer bombarded you with questions about everything they’d learned tonight. The four simply walked in silence up the steepening tunnel, with your voice giving directions every now and then about particularly steep parts that were coming up, or forks in the tunnel.

Then, at long last, light began to filter in--faint at first, but growing in strength as they neared the surface. It seemed the sun had started to rise above ground, which thankfully meant that they wouldn’t have to wait too long to turn around and see the results of their patience.

Of course now Levi also knew that if he looked back, he might be able to see Erwin. He wasn’t going to, he wasn’t about to break the deal--he trusted you, so he knew it was Erwin behind him. It was just that he could feel the impatience to see Erwin starting to settle in, and finally he was starting to understand what was so hard about not being able to look back--especially when the person you were trying to bring out was right behind you.

Levi squinted against a sudden piercing light as they climbed up a particularly steep patch of ground and made a turn around a slight bend, bringing the mouth of the tunnel into view. Outside he could see the sun making its rise above the horizon--not clear of it yet, but getting there. Would they have to keep going once they were out of the tunnel or would they simply stand there right outside of it until the sun had fully risen?

“All right, this part,” you said from your spot at the back of the group. As you spoke, the group came closer and closer to the mouth of the cave. “Once you pass the tunnel’s threshold you’re going to keep walking--doesn’t matter how fast or how slow, as long as you’re still moving--until you can both visibly see the sun clear the horizon. You both might want to check with one another until you do, just to be safe. Once you both can see that, you’ll be able to look back. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” Hange answered.

Levi hummed in response, his feet finally carrying him out of the tunnel and back onto the grassy surface, gaze fixed on the horizon.

“Good. Then just keep going, no matter how tempted you are to look back. Keep going.”

Levi sucked in a breath.

Your voice...was getting farther away.

Levi’s step faltered at the realization, his head starting to turn, to make sure you were still right behind Erwin, that you were still with them, with hi--

“Don’t look back.”

Your sharp words pierced the air in startling clarity, admonishing and firm. Levi grit his teeth, fixing his eyes forward and berating himself for almost losing Erwin for his moment of weakness.

But he hadn’t been wrong. Your voice sounded farther away with every step they took. He needed to look back, to make sure you were there...but he would wait until the sun cleared the horizon, just like the deal required. That way, if his growing worry was unfounded, he wouldn’t screw this up because of a moment of weakness--he was not going to be the reason Erwin died again.

Levi and Hange both shared a look, the two of them both appearing tense and on edge to the other, but neither of them daring to look back as the weight on their shoulders grew more and more real. They couldn’t turn around, as much as they wanted to, even as your calls to ‘keep going, don’t look back’ grew fainter and fainter.

“I see the sun’s cleared the horizon, what about you?” Hange said suddenly, reaching out a hand to place on Levi’s arm. He didn’t answer the first few moments, gaze still on the horizon, waiting, watching…

“Yes,” he said briskly as soon as he saw the sun completely break away from the visible edge of the earth. He’d hardly finished speaking before both of them finally, at long last, looked back.

Levi turned sharply around, hand instinctively reaching out to steady a perfectly healthy and whole Erwin Smith as the man staggered from a disorientation Levi wasn’t even going to try and understand. Erwin was alive, resurrected from the dead, and no longer missing his arm, either--something made obvious by the fact the once-missing hand was the one buried into his blonde hair as the Commander uttered a low groan of discomfort.

Levi wasn’t paying much attention to him beyond that. His wide eyes were instead fixed on the now-distant rock outcropping behind him, no sign that the tunnel had ever existed...and no trace of you ever being there, aside from the small pouch that now hung heavy at his waist.

He finally understood what had made Hades accept the deal, despite the resistance and displeasure at the simple suggestion of letting someone return to the land of the living--or rather, what had made him accept the trade.

Why the f*ck did you do it?

Part 2--->

AN: I was going to write the discussion between Reader and Erwin about whether or not he even wanted to come up to the surface, but this was already sooooo long and I didn’t feel confident enough to do such a discussion justice, so it got chopped. If I do a part two, I might have the deal discussed in hindsight so I can cheat and talk about the spirit of the discussion without struggling for days with writing the discussion itself, heh.

Tags: @mysteriousmagicx @humanityshottestsoldier @final-fantasy-xv-nut

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hi! your art is fantastic! i was wondering - how long does it take for you to finish an art work?

Thank you! ^^

And it varies greatly. Speed is my biggest obstacle when it comes to art. I could lie and say I doodle out stuff in an hour – or I could call half bad drawings I spent hours on, a “doodle”. Sometimes I think I do – but for me, “doodle” is more about how seriously I took the job. If I throw down lines and squiggles and do some line-arting on top without really caring about the details, that’s a doodle to me, even if I then proceed to spend hours on correcting lines, getting the colors right, and trying out different filters for every experimental shadow.

Over all, I spend a lot of time on drawing, and I mean a lot. But I’m getting better! They say you’ve gotta make 50 bad pieces for every good one (simplified, but you get the gist), so you’re best served not spending days on every piece. What I’ve found helps, is to not get overly invested in every piece. It’s a little sad, because you gotta have your heart in the art, right? Yeah. But that heart should be in your love for the craft and your enjoyment in performing it; not in one specific piece and its need to be perfect. Sure, some pieces are special, but if you can’t distinguish between your magnum opus and just your average drawing, every single drawing will feel equally important to you, and that will slow you down from the sheer weight of it.

Pro tip I wish someone would have told me a long time ago: nobody looks as closely at your drawings as you do (talking about the general public; loving friends might).

In other words, painfully slaving over details you find only when you zoom in,… ant nobody gonna tell the difference. Unless you’re insanely good and got 50K on insta, aint nobody gonna zoom in on all your work and look for the easter eggs you put in there (@me, lol). Learn what’s important to spend time on, and what can be left alone. If I had been given back all the time I’ve wasted on details that nobody even sees… I could have made a lot more art lol.

Learn what matters – like general proportions, interesting expression, big things that people could pick out from a distance. And story! Oh boy, don’t get me started on story! Unless you’re really good, people usually won’t be impressed with just a head shot with no story. Armin smiling generically into the void in ¾ view, no background?

“Cool. But I’ve seen a million generic Armins like it. Why should I be invested in this one in particular?”

Say something with your art, make me feel or think something. Because with so many good artists out there, it’s hard to get ahead on just the aesthetics alone. Make a joke. Show something mid-action (like someone slipping on a banana peel; instantly more engaging than a static pose that tells no story).

Why am I being so harsh? It all ties back to speed… Once you realize that your pieces, generally, aren’t that big of a deal, you can hopefully put aside some of that anxiety over it having to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be, and the details you spend an extra two days on will rarely matter to anyone but yourself (which is ok, I just want you to be aware. If you’re very proud of something, maybe point it out to invite people to pay attention to it. But otherwise, they probably won’t look at your drawing for that long before deciding to reblog or move on). If you enjoy making those details, please go ahead! Art should be about what YOU like to do, at the end of the day. But if your speed ties into your perceived self-worth, like it does with me,… well, I got a lot faster once I realized that nobody really cares all that strongly. (Though, I’m in no way discrediting all the support and love I receive, guys, thank you – truly. I’m talking in the grand scheme of things. Art is a lot more personal to the artist, than to the random scroller-by).

How many of you would stop being my friend or suddenly dislike me just because I draw Armin with a wonky nose and disproportionate arms sometimes? Yeah, no, if I put out an unfortunate piece, so what? (Hell, if I can tell a funny joke with it, you might even enjoy it all the same!) Once I learned to understand that every piece is not a blaring spotlight on me where all eyes will be on me and my mistakes, I got faster.

… and with that insanely long prologue, here’s how much time I generally spend:

The first art I started (in 2016), took over a year to finish.

Though, in the meantime, I think I put out a “doodle”. I call it a doodle because I intentionally simplified the anatomy so it would be easier to make – but this one still took me four months to finish!

(The above images took me a year, and 4 months respectively).

In other words, in 2016, my average was MONTHS – on just one drawing! Keep in mind, I quit art for ten years before this, just from how much anxiety is gave me over my self worth (if I made one bad line, it meant I was worthless).

In 2017, I think my average was weeks. I had to take breaks between sessions a lot just to cope with the building anxiety. I look at the finished products now and I think “look how few steps this needed. With how much time I spent, I must have averaged one single brush stroke an hour”. And it’s probably about right. Although, I did manage to finish one drawing in a single day, and I remember being really proud of that!

(Above, the first one is an example of stuff I’d tinker with for weeks, while the second one is the one I completed in a day due to it being his birthday and the pressure was on to get it done)

In 2018, I think my average was 2 or 3 days. I put out more smaller pieces, stuff that doesn’t need to be as elaborate. At my peak, I think I could do two of those meme-things per day. Looking back, though, I can see a clear difference between time spent on “doodles” and time spent on projects I put my heart into. I spent days on the eremin week entries, for example. This was the year I started to learn to tier my projects.

(The above shows an art I admittedly spent over a week on, much thanks to the needless details in the bottles, while the second is one of two pieces I completed during one day)

In 2019, I don’t think I shortened down my average a lot, but looking through my gallery now, I see that I started doing more elaborate pieces. So… if I spend as long as before, but get bigger and better content out of it, that’s improvement too!

(Aboveyou’ll see an art that probably took me a couple of days - 4 or 5 maybe? - and the second once which took me an hour I think? A good example of how much better i’ve gotten at tiering projects and not being afraid of making sloppy art just for the fun of it).

So far in 2020, I’ve only drawn for Armin week, and I spent an evening to a day on each one of them. After finishing one, I’d uploading it to my drafts, then lie in bed and scrutinize it, zooming in, looking and looking. Then the next morning, I’d get up and spend an average of an hour fixing/editing them because I was getting increasingly displeased with them. So I think on average… god honest truth, even if I’m a little self-conscious about it, I think I spend an average of 8 - 18 sitting hours on anything. This includes the revisions.

(Above you’ll see the entry I spent the most time on first - I’m guessing probably 12 sitting hours - and the one I spent the least time on - I’m guessing 5 hours)

I love drawing, but it’s very hard for me. I’ve used drawing as my main source of personal self-improvement for the last couple of years - for many reasons; it has a lot of lessons to teach me. It’s not always fun, and it’s rarely easy. But.. uh. It’a been worth it? I don’t know what your art journey is, but I hope this gave you some help, inspiration or comfort. Good luck and draw with heart, not fear.

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Anon said: Um so hello, I’m just here to say keep up the awesome work, I love your kiribaku art and it’s adorable and I go on binges through your blog (omg I sound so creepy I’m sorry I just love ur art so much) and it makes my day so yeah please keep drawing!

Ahhhhh you don’t sound creepy at all, don’t worry!!!!! Thank you so much for liking my stuff that much!!!!!!! <3<3

Anon said: May ask what kiri///mina would look like in your style? You don't have to draw it if you don't like the ship.

Gosh sorry but I really really don’t ship it!

Anon said: you know how I miss?? your OCs!!! they're the cutest!!

AWE thank you so much!!!!!!! I have a few comics planned for them, hope I’ll manage getting to them soon enough!!! (oT^T)9<3

Anon said: This is so sappy but some of your kiribaku posts really make me really appreciate long relationships! I’ve always found pining and crushes the cutest bc it’s full of intense feelings, but you portray being in love and accepting each other so well!! it’s amazing how you show characters interacting with each other and being so comfortable instead of worrying about hiding part of themselves and long story short I love your art and ideas so much

This ask!!!!!!!!! means the universe!!!!!!!!!! to me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m so glad I can manage portraying love in such a way, I’m so in love with the idea of open, accepting love, andI try seriously hard to make it look healthy in my comics so!!!!!!! thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have no clue how many times I’ve reread this ask I’m not even exaggerating TT^TT <3

Anon said: I just want to start off by saying you’re my favourite blog on tumblr, your art is incredibly adorable and always makes my day!! I was just wondering how you were able to create your own unique art style? It’s something I’ve been struggling with a lot lately with my own art. Any advice is appreciated, thanks for everything you do!!

I think it’s about finding the right spot between what feels comfortable for you and the end you’re using your art for? In my case what’s comfortable is something fun and smooth, and the main end has always been to be able to draw comics - I’ve always liked comics because I like writing and I like drawing, but my attention span was too short to manage finishing them, and the way I had of drawing was too stiff to properly convey emotions the way I wanted to, which made drawing comics sound like an impossible dream haha I fixed it by simplifying my style, by taking away or reducing to the bare minimum everything that took me ages to work out/draw and pushing my expressions and body language to extremes to make up for the lack of details.

That’s just my experience with it, though! The best advice I can give you is to sit back and look at your current way of drawing from an objective perspective - do you enjoy it? Is the process of drawing something you’re comfortable with? What’s uncomfortable in it for you, and in which ways could you change it to make it comfortable and fun? Does your current art style allow you to do what you want to do with your art? If you want to paint, does it allow you to paint in an easy and fun way? If you want to make comics, does it allow you the range to properly portray a character moving and living without making you wish you’d never started drawing halfway through it?

Imho the first step to find a style that’s your own and feels right is to find a style that’s fun to use and doesn’t stress you to hell and back every time you pick up your pencil. This is easier to do the more things you attempt, so for a bit being inconsistent in style is a good and normal thing - try things out! The best one for you will definitely stick in the end. And if you already feel comfortable with the way you have of drawing, then hell! You already have a style that works for you! Just because to youit doesn’t look unique and special it doesn’t mean that it isn’t - if you asked me to point out what makes my style unique I wouldn’t be able to tell you either, the way I see it my style is the most uninteresting and common-looking style out there. To be honest with you that’s probably just how it is for every artist out there hahaha

Anon said: Hi!! I love your art and just want you to know I always get a big, stupid smile on my face whenever I see you cross my feed, whether it’s something new or a reblog of an old post. Everything you do is just amazing and I love it

AHHHHHHH Thank you so so much!!!!!!!!! (TT^TT)<3<3<3

Anon said: Hey Fran! First off, thank you for the Fire Force art. I remembered to actually check it out, after seeing it lol. Second, I still can't find your Fatgum 😭😭 the link didn't give any, and searching on your page didn't help either. I WILL FIND IT ONE DAY

I think it’s a problem of the app orz I can see him just find from desktop but the app can’t find him either T-T stupid app!

Anon said: Do you have a mini Bakugou and Kirishima living in your head? Are they just living their lives up in your brain and that causes your hand to to write and draw the most perfect and accurate things? Of course mini Kaminari, Sero, Mina, Jirou, etc. also come to visit your head hole from time to time and just chill with mini Baku and Kiri. That’s the only logical explanation on how all your Bakushima content is so inconceivably spot on

That’s such a kind thing of you to say, anon!!!!!! I’m glad you find them that IC!!!!!! I try my best, but sometimes I admit I just have them do and say stuff I’ve done and said myself, the only difference is that I word things in a way that feels right for their usual way of talking hahaha

Anon said: I personally would love to read your essay on why bakugo is the best character ever because I really really really want to love him that much but i feel like there's something that I'm just not getting about him- there's something I'm missing about his personality (keeping in mind that i kinda left the manga after the whole mirio/8 precepts arc). I've always found bakugo compelling and would love love love to read your take on him! Hope you have a great day!

Bakugou has had some amazing character development scenes after the overhaul arc!!!!! He’s outright shown he understands where he was lacking and where he was wrong, that he’s perfectly capable of working in a team and letting people help him and helping them in return, that he cares about his class and how the rest of the world sees them! (and that he worries/cares about how the world sees him too, actually, that broke my heart a bit ;; )We haven’t seen him in a hot minute by now, but most of anything before the current arc has had him improve and develop and become even better than he already was - I’ve always thought him a good guy with just a lot of troubles relating to the world around him due the way he has been brought up as special and different (it creates a drift between yourself and the rest of the world when everyone around you keeps treating you as if you were other- when you tell a kid he’s different and better for his whole life he’s bound to grow up believing it, after all), but if the problem you have with him is that he isn’t showing the good in himself plainly and obviously enough, then the arcs after the overhaul one are gonna help you like him better, definitely

Well, the thing about Bakugou is that he’s not a plain/obvious character, so you need to think about his actions and his words a bit more, and can’t just take him at face value - it’s what I like about him, actually! How much you need to think about him to figure him out on a deeper level than just the surface one. Since I dunno why you like him and why you feel something’s missing, I can’t tell you specifically what it is in the way I see him that completes him for me, but as I said I try to keep him as IC as I can so probably reading my comics about him might help you understand the way I see him. To me Bakugou’s honest, and kind, and loving, but he’s also arrogant, and angry, and used to taking some things for granted, and I like how all those things work with and against each other in his character. He’s at the same time incredibly proud and absurdly insecure, and I like that about him too - where each comes from and where and how they clash, I like the complexity it gives him. I like that he’s a people person in the sense that he likes having people around himself, and I like that at the same time UA is the first time he’s had actual, honest to god best friends, and how that means that he’s gonna be awkward when usually he’s so sure and proud simply because he isn’t used to having people he actually specifically cares for, I very much like that about him. I like that he overthinks everything he doesn’t immediately gets, I like that he still acts on instincts more often than not, I like that somehow with him those two aren’t mutually exclusive. I like that he’s smart and still so damn dumb, I like that he’s just as simple-minded as he is an actually labyrinth in thought process, I like how one-track minded he is even on the most silly things - how once he sets his eyes on a goal he goes for it like his life depends on it. I like that he’s barsh and rude and impulsive in what he says and does, but when he f*cks up he knows he f*cked up, and he backstracks, and he does his best to make amends.I like that he sits in stupid ways and has the worst posture in the class and then he wears his hero costume and suddenly he’s a model on the catwalk, that’s so damn endearing to me. I like how ridiculously hyperbolic he is and how he just assumes people will get it, get what he actually means, like there’s a point between his brain and his mouth were things get blown out of proportion and he doesn’t even realize it. There’s just so many things to love about him, for me!!

But most importantly I like that he started as low as he could get and that because of it his plot is a one way towards the summit. I like it. I like watching a character grow and every new chapter become a better version of themselves, I love it. Ultimately that’s probably why he’s my favorite, after all haha

Anon said: Hi, this isn’t a question but I just wanted to say how much I love your art and the way you clearly appreciate Bakugou as a character. So many of my friends hate him, but I think he has a lot of depth and so much potential. Your art always makes me smile! Thanks for doing what you do. :)

THANK YOU and thank you for liking the boy too!!!!!!! He deserves it, he absolutely does deserve it!!!!!!! <3<3<3

Anon said: I just went digging in the archives of my blog (which is.. a mess) and found some old art of yours (like... I'm talking bokuto and kuroo level old) and g o s h. I already loved your art so much then and I still do n hhhhhhhh u go. U great.

Gosh you’ve been around a long time then!!!!! Thank you so much for sticking with me all this time!!!! ✨o(TT0TT)o✨

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228. Sonic the Hedgehog #160

Birthday Bash! (Part One): Giving and Receiving

Writer: Ian FlynnPencils: Tracy Yardley!Colors: Jason Jensen

Welcome to the beginning of Ian Flynn's reign, everyone! As many of you will know, Ian is a fan favorite amongst readers of the comics, and for good reason. Objectively, I'd say he has a much better sense than any previous writer of how to construct dynamic and interesting stories, as well as a great head for writing dialogue. Every character has their own unique voice when speaking, and as someone who takes a particular interest in dialogue in her own writing, it's something I admire a lot, especially given how stilted and unnaturally formal a lot of dialogue by Karl and especially Kenders often sounded, regardless of who was speaking. That said, I think that it took a good year or so for him to fully come into his own as head writer for the series, so some earlier issues are a bit strange and not up to par with a lot of his later work. Some of this, to be fair, is due to him essentially playing clean-up for this first year, untangling a lot of the bizarre leftover plot threads that Karl and Kenders left behind, and generally trying to make the world of the comics conform a little better to that of the games. All that aside, anyone reading the comics will likely notice an immediate and apparent improvement in the overall quality of the work starting with this issue. This is helped along, in addition, by none other than the very talented artist Tracy Yardley! who always (well, almost always) introduces himself in the story credits with an exclamation mark. It's kind of his calling card. Tracy took a while to really improve his art as well, so while his earliest issues sometimes have some strange proportions and poses, later on his style became easily one of the most visually attractive and recognizable ones in the series, simplifying a lot of the inconsistencies that many character designs had as well as doing away with the strange pseudo-human proportions that some artists tended to favor, particularly with the female characters. All this said, I will say that Ian isn't going to be immune to my criticism, as while I do recognize his skill as a writer and the good things he brought to the table, there are definitely some problems I have with the way he handled certain things. We'll cross those bridges when we come to them, however, so for now, let's dive into the new world he's creating and see how he does!

Elias and Sonic are walking on the outskirts of Knothole as Elias explains why his father approved the Metal Sonic troopers from last issue. We don't even really get to hear the explanation, but to be fair, we hardly need one, as the idea was so insane to begin with that the only true explanation is that Kenders needed a plot device. Sonic tries to make Elias promise that "you royals" won't hit him with any more weird surprises, and Elias says they only have one more, leading him to a building next to where the Great Oak Slide into the village ends.

I mean, canonically he's supposed to be turning seventeen here, even though realistically he should be turning eighteen, because remember, for him to have turned sixteen in StH#68, had the Robians be deroboticized in early June in StH#123, and still have managed to spend close to a year in space before turning seventeen, literally everything in between the two aforementioned issues would have had to take place in the span of a few weeks - yes, that's counting the month-and-a-half time span that Sonic was confined to Knothole, as well as major events like Eggman's return and the entire Green Knuckles saga. You can see why this huge discrepancy still bothers me, right? Hmph. Anyway, no sooner has the party begun than an explosion destroys the door, and two new players enter the scene - Bean the Dynamite and Bark the Polar Bear from Sonic the Fighters! Nack's been part of the comic for long enough now, so it's cool to see these two make their first appearance. Bark is totally silent - as far as I remember, he never says a single word during the entirety of the comic - but Bean, in the absence of an obvious personality to draw from in the game, has subsequently been given the personality trait of "criminally insane" in the comics.. He's erratic, he talks to himself, he cracks jokes where jokes really shouldn't be cracked, and most importantly of all, he loves his goddamn bombs. Bean starts chucking said bombs left and right at the various Freedom Fighters in the base, while Sonic tangles with Bark. He seems to think these guys are only after him due to something Evil Sonic did in his place, something which he has by now apparently finally explained to all the women of Knothole, and manages to break away from Bark to stop Bean's bombing spree by pinning him to a wall and asking about Evil Sonic. However, Bean happily insists there's been no mistake and he wasn't even aware of Sonic having an evil twin, nor does he particularly care. Oh, speaking of Evil Sonic…

Huh, it seems that Evil Sonic has actually explained his true identity to Rouge in between their previous failed attempt and now. I'm surprised she hasn't outright abandoned him by now due to Rouge not exactly being evil-aligned to begin with, but I guess the pull of the shiny is just too strong for her to resist. And as it turns out, Bean suffers from a similar insatiable need! Fiona pulls out a ring of keys and shakes them around, completely distracting Bean from his current activity of bashing Sonic's head in, and throws them out the hole he made in the wall, prompting him to immediately abandon everything to chase after them. Fiona then advances on Bark, who by now has gotten himself cornered by every Freedom Fighter in the room, and convinces him to stand down as he's outnumbered. Outside, Bean plays with the keys and talks to them, seemingly convinced that they're a beautiful woman with an "adorable accent" who wants his number, when a suspiciously-Shadow-shaped shadow converges on him, prompting him to try to invite him into smashing Sonic as well. Good luck there, buddy, I don't think Shadow usually runs with crazy…

Geez, Sally, cut Fiona some slack. Not everyone had a squeaky-clean record - hell, just look at Shadow! Back in the Chaos Chamber, Rouge and Evil Sonic begin to battle Locke, who tosses Evil Sonic to the side as he perceives Rouge to be the bigger threat. However, that turns out to be a bit of a bad idea, as with Rouge tied up in the fight, Evil Sonic takes his chance to go after the Master Emerald without her, obviously recognizing it as more than just a shiny trinket.

Back in Knothole, Shadow explains that he's only here to thank Sonic for saving Hope, as he knows he wouldn't have been able to do it on his own, and reminds him that as soon as he leaves this building they're back to being enemies, as Shadow's still aligned with Eggman for now. Sonic, to his credit, seems to recognize that Shadow is only allied with Eggman because he doesn't yet know better, and cheerfully invites him to come back here whenever he cuts out on that deal in the future. It's at this point that everyone realizes Bean has quietly snuck into the brain trust's comms room to casually let Eggman know that he and Bark failed to take Sonic down, and when Fiona ushers him back out of the room, Eggman is only too happy to let Sonic know personally that he wishes him a happy birthday and he's sending him a new, more metallic present. Within seconds a thud outside alerts them to the arrival of this present, and everyone rushes out to see a strange figure emerging from an egg pod - a figure which resolves itself into the combined forms of Crocbot and Octobot, now merged into the singular entity of… Croctobot! (Don't worry, Ian knows just how silly this is and even acknowledges it next issue.) But what of Evil Sonic and Rouge? How is their fight faring against Locke after the former got knocked aside? Well, Evil Sonic takes his chance to dramatically emerge from behind the emerald as the other two get ready to continue their fight…

Plot twist! How many people actually didn't know by now that Evil Sonic and Scourge were the same person? I'm guessing there had to be at least a few of you. You can actually already see Ian's new plans being put into action - it's very telling of his intentions when the very first issue he ever pens immediately makes a point of distinguishing a rather tired and boring character into a new and improved version of himself, with a unique name and new, visually distinct look. Apparently Kenders, who if you recall is the original creator of Evil Sonic, never liked this and continued to insist on referring to him as Evil Sonic, but screw that, Scourge is a much more interesting character and this was a change that sorely needed to be made.

Sonic Rush (Part One of Two)

Writer/Pencils: Tania Del RioColors: Ben Hunzeker

So unfortunately, Sonic Adventure 2 isn't the only case in the preboot of a partial adaption of a game being included without any actual ending. Sonic Rush, the game, introduces Blaze, a cat from an alternate dimension that is controlled by the Sol Emeralds rather than the Chaos Emeralds, and most of the plot revolves around the Sol Emeralds ending up in Sonic's dimension and her trying to recollect them to bring back to her own world. However, things are a bit different in the comics universe. In this story, Blaze comes to Sonic's dimension because, apparently, she's been having nonstop dreams about him, dreams which show her visions of Eggman threatening the Sol Emeralds and Sonic helping her protect them. She's frustrated that she would have to rely on anyone else to help her protect the emeralds at all, believing them to be her sole responsibility, but nonetheless she's tracked Sonic to Knothole. However, while deliberating her next move, a squad of swatbots - yes, ordinary ones, it's been a while since we've seen them rather than shadow-bots - happen upon her and decide that they should take her in for interrogation.

Yeah, I guess Blaze doesn't understand the dangers present in this universe yet, does she? An hour or so later, Rotor sends for Sonic, informing him that they caught the aftermath of Blaze's capture on their video surveillance. Neither of them know who she is, but they decide she can't be from their village, since she left several disabled swatbots behind, while most people in Knothole are noncombatants and those that aren't are accounted for elsewhere. Sonic rushes out to find their trail and tracks them to a nearby facility set up amidst the trees, and while he begins fighting his way in, the scientific robots in the building go about studying their new specimen.

Sorry, but why the hell would Eggman be looking to add some random Mobian to his team? He only likes robots anyway, and tends to either betray or enslave every living being that comes to him. Blaze suddenly awakens and becomes furious - not that she's been captured, mind you, but that they took off her coat while studying her. She must be really goddamn attached to her coat, because she starts absolutely trashing the place, exploding into flames and screaming so loudly that Sonic becomes genuinely worried about her wellbeing, rushing to where he last heard her. The door of the lab she's in is completely blasted off its hinges by the force of Blaze's explosions, but thankfully after this she seems to have found her coat, because the blasts subside and she appears in the doorway wearing it once again, staring down at an utterly shocked Sonic with a look of fiery fury (the literal flames coating her entire body probably help with the "fiery" bit). Uh… good luck dealing with that, buddy boy!

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i don't know if your accepting prompts at the moment, but for hell's studio i could see henry becoming a toon when a pipe bursts, covering the poor man in a ton of ink

I am still accepting prompts, yes. This honestly sounds like a really fun one.

————————————————————–

Henry hadn’t expected to ever be turned into a toon. Sure, it had happened to Sammy once, but that was mostly because Sammy’s office was near a pipe and Bendy liked pranking Sammy. Henry’s desk was away from the pipes and Bendy was far less inclined to playing ink-based pranks on him. Not to mention, Linda had made it very clear to Joey that if Henry happened to become part of his eldritch bullsh*t, she was going to kick his ass. So, he’d been relatively safe.

But, as was the glorious rule of life, sh*t happened.

He’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, headed down to the Music Department to discuss the animation of a Bendy and Alice song with Sammy when an overloaded pipe had burst. Normally, this wouldn’t have been a big deal. Except that Joey had been experimenting with some magic ink that may or may not have fallen into the machine. Which meant when Henry got absolutely covered with the ink, it had an…interesting effect.

“Henry! Are you alright?” Alice and Susie immediately came running over. At their shouts, Sammy poked his head out of his office. Once he saw the vaguely human-shaped blob of ink he assumed to be Henry, he too came running.

“What happened?” He asked.

“One of the pipes burst,” Susie explained, taking out a handkerchief to begin wiping the ink off Henry’s face.

“Again,” Alice added. Henry tried to say something, but the ink covering his mouth made it rather difficult to speak.

“What else is new?” Sammy rolled his eyes. He was mentally preparing the complaint he would be sending to Bendy. Bendy would be yelling at Joey anyway.

Suddenly, Susie stopped what she’d been doing, starting to frown.

“Huh.” She said.

“Huh?” Alice and Sammy echoed, both immediately worried.

“What does that mean?” Sammy demanded. Susie didn’t answer, instead pointing to the portion of Henry’s face she’d managed to clean off. Sammy leaned over to see what she was pointing to, his eyes widening when he did.

There, under the ink was a pie-cut eye and stark white skin. These were both perfectly fine things on Alice and Bendy. They were not fine on Henry. Henry was not a toon. Henry was a human being.

“Oh golly,” Alice said. “That’s probably not good.”

.

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. They decided on that once they got Henry cleaned up. He still seemed like himself, facing the prospect of toonhood with the same weary resignation he seemed to give every bad thing that came his way. But he was undeniably a toon. He was a bit smaller than he normally was, everything about him simplified to make for easier animation. He kept looking at himself and muttering about ways to improve his character design, which was at least a little comforting. He was a nerd to the end.

Once they had him cleaned up, all three promptly marched him up to Joey’s office so that they could yell at him.

“I wonder what Joey was messing with this time,” Henry remarked as they climbed the stairs to Joey’s office.

“Clearly something he shouldn’t have,” Sammy grumbled. Part of him was glad it hadn’t been him caught up in this stupidity this time. But he wasn’t about to say that out loud. It seemed a bit insensitive.

“When has anything Joey’s messed with been something he should have been doing?” Alice couldn’t help but giggle. Although she was worried, she was confident they’d be able to figure this out. Sammy had been turned into an ink creature more than once and they’d fixed it every time.

“He’s certainly curious, I’ll give him that.” Susie sighed and shook her head.

“Curious is an understatement.” Henry snorted.

Upon arriving at Joey’s office, they found Bendy had already beat them there. He’d already found out about the burst pipe and was chewing Joey out for it.

“I mean, come on! Wally’s already gotta clean this whole studio! This is just giving him more work!” Bendy was saying. Joey, to his credit, did look rather sheepish and remorseful.

“I know.” He replied, beginning to fiddle with his bowtie. “I shouldn’t have gotten so overzealous with the ritual.”

“Dang right you shouldn’t have!” Bendy slammed his fist on the desk for emphasis.

“So sorry to interrupt you two,” Susie strode in, the others trailing behind her. “But I think you’ll want to see this.”

“Henry got caught in the pipe explosion.” Sammy gently pushed him forward.

Henry smiled awkwardly, waving with one of his gloved hands. “Hey.”

The office was deathly silent as Bendy and Joey both stared at the newly toonified Henry. Then, slowly, Bendy turned back toward Joey. He had an unnaturally large forced grin, his ink starting to drip down his forehead.

“Joey,” he said through gritted teeth. “You better have a way to fix this.” Henry was the most senior animator they had. He was also the best animator they had. And since they were coming up on another deadline, they couldn’t afford to lose him.

“Oh, of course!” Joey replied brightly. All the times Sammy had gotten turned into some form of inky monstrosity had certainly prepared him for this sort of thing. Alice let out a quiet sigh of relief.

“That’s good to hear.” She said, turning to Henry. “Well, while you’re stuck like this, do you want to hang out with me and Boris?”

“Sure, why not?” Henry shrugged.

Toon Henry was, thankfully, not that different from normal Henry. He had a bit more energy, sure, but he was still a tired old artist. That seemed to be his character type, the perpetually tired straight man who didn’t even react to weird sh*t anymore. He also mostly wanted to use his time as a toon to figure out how to better animate Bendy, Boris, and Alice.

“You are such a nerd,” Bendy groaned as he and the others watched Henry try to figure out how to properly translate his body language onto paper.

“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Henry replied, not even looking up. “If I understand what it’s like to move like you all do, I’ll be able to better draw you.”

“You could literally be doing anything!” Bendy moaned. While his boss side appreciated that Henry wasn’t causing trouble, his more mischevious side bemoaned that Henry wasn’t taking full advantage of his new toon state.

“And here I thought you’d be happy,” Alice said. She was doing nothing to hide her smirk at Bendy’s distress. It was always funny to see Bendy get bent out of shape at silly things like this.

“But- But he’s a toon now!” Bendy gestured weakly toward Henry. “He could be doing anything! Anything!”

“I think it’s pretty cool.” Boris piped up. “This is probably a dream come true for him. To really be able to understand us.” Both Bendy and Alice looked over at him. Boris was perched on a stool, his clarinet resting in his lap. He watched Henry with a sort of wistful understanding.

“Dang, that’s pretty deep, Bo.” Bendy picked himself up, lightly punching Boris’ arm. “You holdin’ out on us, big guy?”

“It was just a guess.” Boris blushed a bit.

.

Due to the past experience, it only took a day or so to get Henry back to normal. Once human again, Henry immediately sat down to feverishly animate. He had so many new ideas and new things to test out and he was eager to get them all down before he forgot what he’d experienced.

“This better not happen again.” Bendy warned Joey with an exaggerated ‘I’m watching you’ gesture. He said this despite knowing that this incident would indubitably be repeated. At least they’d be ready.

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god im sorry if im flooding your inbox with questions but uh got anything about ur ocs theos and richard? (sorry if i've spammed you with questions i can't tell if i've actually hit the ask button or not sometimes oof)

uhm, how about your OCs richard and theos(?)

Not the same anon but could you describe theos

I’m finally getting to these, wooo!

I’m going to mostly focus on Theos here, but if you really are curious about Richard, let me know! I just. I felt bad cause I was drawing a reference of Theos but it took a while and I couldn’t really get to Richard, sorry;;

Okay, so a little bit of history for this;

These characters are two parts of a trio that I made with @celestriakle waaaay back when we were both in the NiGHTS fandom. These characters were based off of Wizeman the Wicked, the big bad final boss of “NiGHTS into Dreams” and “NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams.” If you want to watch a let’s play of the latter (as it actually has story/a narrative to it where as the first game has only game play. Older games had their stories mostly written in the little booklets that came with the games) you can watch this here.NiGHTS is like, the OG purple gremlin child and they are such a mischievous delight. The game sadly hasn’t aged well and wasn’t like, the bestof games, but I still hold it fondly to my heart and I’d say it’s got some great concepts.

Anyway! If you want just a very rough summary and notwatch 5 hours of a game; Wizeman the Wicked is the self-proclaimed god of Nightmare, which resides in the Dark Ocean underneath the Dream Gate. The Dream Gate allows dreamers (called“visitors” in the game) to enter their dream worlds of paradise (or, more accurately, worlds created by the reflections of their hearts) called“Nightopia.” However, Wizeman is constantly sending his creations,“Nightmarens,” to steal fragments from the hearts of visitors (these fragments being called“Ideya,” and are Courage (Red), Purity (White), Blue (Intelligence), Growth (Green), and finally, Hope (Yellow). The Ideya of Courage allows visitors to unlock their first Nightopia, and if they can gather the remaining Ideya, they can unlock new dream worlds. In these dream worlds are little creatures called “Nightopians,” which are like… fairies, I guess, to simplify things. There’s also an owl creature that doesn’t have a clear origin, and his name is…. Owl. Real creative, I know.

Another thing–SPOILERS, IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED FOR THE NIGHTS GAME, STOP READING AND WATCH THE VIDEO AND COME BACK TO THIS–that is important to note here is the Nightmaren. There are three levels of“nightmaren”; Third levels - the weakest enemies, the ones you find wandering Nightopia that get in the way/stage enemies; Second levels, which are“boss marens” and are the Nightmarens who have taken the ideya from the protagonist visitors and are keeping it hidden in their lairs, and finally, First level Nightmaren; to which there are only two. A pair of“twins,” if you want to call them that. Reala is the first of the two; he is very loyal to his“master”, Wizeman, and is considered the general of the nightmaren army. He’s portrayed as cruel and even sad*stic in a way. The second first level Nightmaren? NiGHTS themselves.

NiGHTS is a renegade Nightmaren that has rebelled against Wizeman for an obscure reason. Fans love to speculate on it, but there is no real“canon” reason, only hints that NiGHTS might be more ashamed of where they come from than they’d like to let on.

Why is this important? Because it ties in to Theos, and consequently, Richard and Cyrus–Celest’s character, though I won’t talk much about him here since that’s her muse/character so go ask her about him if you’re really that curious. Either way, I’ll note here that Theos, Richard, and Cyrus are all“parts” of Wizeman. Think of Steven Universe and“fusions”, except this was created long before Steven Universe was airing. So Wizeman is a“Fusion” of these three characters--though the three“humans” that make up Wizeman are called“The Fragments.”

Anyway! Moving on.

The initial translation of the“NiGHTS into Dreams” biography for Wizeman was mistranslated, I do believe, but it suggests that Wizeman is a“Visitor with no Ideya” and among the first intelligent life form to exist in the world of dreams. Long before I even met Celest, me and an ex friend/boyfriend (don’t ask) of mine laughed at the idea, but them we started pondering the logistics of that information, and created Theos. He worked on the original story for Theos (which I can’t remember for the life of me, it’s all been scrapped though) and I made up a design.

So for reference, here is what Wizeman the Wicked looks like.

Here is what Theos usedto look like. Be warned, it’s old as sh*t art! Wow, this art is almost ten years old, holy sh*t–

And this is what Theos’ current design is, plus a very sinister looking goop monster.

The first design you see on the most modern design (the more obviously human looking form) is Theos when he was alive. His eyes are actually a dark, dark brown, but they are hazed over. I forget the technical term for it, but anyway, it left him blind. This was kind of a problem, a hugeproblem, for Theos--because he was born during the age of Sparta.

For those of you who don’t know, Spartans were very vicious awful, and if an infant was born with a clear deformity or disability, they were doomed to be abandoned in the wilderness and left to die. Theos was born blind, and very visibly so. However, his mother had died during child birth, and her last request was that her baby live a happy life. To honor that request, Theos’ father convinced everyone that his child was a prophet of the gods, and that his blindness was due to an ability to predict the future via his dreams. He warned that the gods would strike Sparta down with vicious rage if they killed the baby boy, and that when Theos does pass on from the realm of the humans, he will report his life back to the gods. He managed to convince them that Theos was, indeed, a prophet, and he was an exception to the rule for about eight years.

However, his father had grown resentful and hateful of his son for“killing” his wife, and making his life a living hell, so he decided that he was tired of it all and threw Theos into a river, where he drowned.

Before Theos had died, he discovered the dream gate, and discovered that he was a lucid dreamer. He created a creature he named“Owl” (yes, this gives Owl an origin story) and had all five of his Ideya before he died, thus had access to all of his Nightopias.

However, when he died, he hit his head on a rock and fell unconscious just before he drowned, and a remarkable series of events occurred.

First, his mind and soul went to the world of Dreams.

Second, his lucidity started to violently lash out, as he himself was panicking and in a lot of pain, and started to change his“body.”

Third, all of his Ideya started shattering.

With the unique circ*mstances of his death, Theos’ soul transfered from the waking world to the dream world just before he died, sacrificing his Ideya to stabilize his form as a“creature of dreams” instead of as“a visitor.”

From there, after the horrid traumatic experience, Theos tried to seek comfort in his nightopias--nightopias that no longer had Ideya to support them, and thus were destroyed. Devastated by the fact that the world of dreams basically rejected his being, Theos threw himself into the Dark Ocean--the Sea of Nightmare--and was engulfed in the madness below.

This is where the fourth and crucial yet remarkable event occurred. You see, the goop monster depicted in the drawing I did is called“Dream Force.” The state of it in that picture, is when it takes on the negative thoughts and feelings of visitors, thus turning it into sludge and into“nightmare” force. This is a personal creation and headcanon of mine, but I imagine that the Dark Ocean is basically made up of“negative” Dream Force--or, Nightmare Force.

Now normally, when visitors die in a similar manner like Theos, they don’t last long in the dream world. Their souls eventually lose power and fade as they finally pass on to the next life. However, Theos was the first visitor to have“tamed” the Nightmare Force through his own lucid powers, and using the Nightmare Force as energy, he was able to survive for centuries--but at a cost. Being surrounded by nightmares, horrible, violent thoughts and feelings, and all that good stuff, only fueled the hatred and despair he felt. So, Theos grows more and more angry, hateful and resentful of the human race, wanting to be rid of it.

That’s basically his story, tbh! I don’t really know what to do with him, though me and Celest are planning a rp-to-fic thing of the Fragments, so he might just star as a NiGHTS oc.

Sorry this took so long to get to :’D I hope that satisfies you curiosity about Theos at least. I might do Richard another time.

Anyway! Thanks for asking~

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2019 art summary

I knew this was bound to happen, I knew I’d grow impatient and flustered trying to get used to digital art, I tried my best to keep cool but I just... UGH! I tried to get back to traditional art, however I got rusty due to lack of practice... yub! That’s it! ARTBLOCK!

Jan: To fend off this artblock I decided to avoid drawing human figures, and surprisingly it paid off! I managed to finish creating my signature! It looked so good am confident in using it for my artworks!!! Also, I painted this beautiful bracelet... I still remember my struggle with blending, and then the moment it worked I just... gasped and jumped away from the screen, came back slowly in disbelief!

“I... did THIS”

Feb: I decided to design a tattoo, coz I needed to learn how to draw symbols and patterns, And so I did~

Mar: All about finishing dem WIPS, and struggling with my weak arm tendons... it’s strange... every March my arm just acts up... Also, I finally started to understand (one way perspective)!

Apr: The month of باليز ... I learned making videos in a new software, also getting to know my digital art style... I hope

May: No Mermay for May! It was a collide between my hatred for my drawing and the desire to pass time by drawing... that’s my annual Ramadhan condition

Jun: Hey look! A 3d chibi... yeah well, here’s a funny story: I was trying to take a shortcut and paint over the 3d model instead of tracing it for line art. But I ended up spending longer time than what would I have spent if I chose to just trace it... still, I’ve learned lots of things! Mainly tweaking colors, which is a very important skill to me... so yeah! 3d chibis is one of my things now heheheh.

Jul: My first half tradi half digital work with the tablet... I’ve always loved artworks that are mix of traditional and digital, and I am surprised I didn’t try this earlier... so yeah! Here’s my first attempt...

Aug: That’s it... I gave up to the desire to stop drawing. Ever since I went digital my comics got too lazy, and never beyond 2 panels... hell I didn’t even color the one I made for this month... Also, I started dubbing, and this account kind of lost its original purpose.

Sep: The fruits of learning one-way perspective... You see, Knowing where this line goes and why, and the feeling that everything looks just RIGHT are things I NEVER experience in my whole life!!! I have 0 spatial intelligence which means I can’t draw sh*t from my head and I am obligated to use references ALL THE TIME, Even with the basics of the basics... worse still, I can’t find references for everything... So being able to draw this background on my own means a lot to me...

October: I said I wouldn’t participate in Inktober and I FINALLY kept that promise! I don’t have the mood to draw normally, let alone with ugh ink! This month I hit 2 birds with a stone: I missed drawing myself, and I’ve always wanted to draw fanart for solve_hq! BOOM!

Also, I found a new way to quickly color sketches while making a birthday gift! That’s the funny thing, I only learn new stuff or form style of drawing/coloring when drawing for friends rather than for myself

November:

It is important to be carefree in drawing every once in a while! I rarely draw while saying: I don’t really care about the result! And I don’t spend more than an hour on them and yet, somehow, they turn out nice! I should do this more often

December : I am a gamer once again so I draw less than usual, You can see that I am trying to force myself to simplify my drawings and be less of a perfectionist so I can produce MORE ARTWORKS! Don’t tell me “quality over quantity” ... because at this rate, I am barely producing anything...

It feels silly that the main motivation of drawing this year was to fill this BEAUTIFUL art summary template by oh-no-Castiel of deviantart!

Plans for next year? I am keeping them under wraps. You’ll figure them out eventually ~

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It’s Only A Cartoon

It was a miserable day in 1987 when Ronnie Jefferson bowed to the inevitable and let Jill Smith into the office. To a local, this was just the usual spring weather in Ireland. To Jefferson, it was always miserable, and when it was sunny, he saw only the clouds.

The animation industry could break you.

He’d grown up in California on a diet of local cinema showings and the TV reruns of old cartoons, Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry and Popeye and Goofy and Donald, with all their visuals and deceptive simplicity. He decided to make cartoons himself like a priest hearing the calling. There were jobs for black men in animation in the 70s but if you wanted to have one of the proper jobs, you had to be three times as good as the white men. Jefferson put everything into his craft, even his marriage, and everyone in the industry knew who he was and rated him, but it looked like Disney would only think he was two and a half times as good.

In 1982, drunk on dreams and ego and beer, he decided to quit and took several colleagues with him. He had ideas and passion and he promised the stars. Two years later, the Jefferson-Blount Studio had released a feature based on the Norwegian fairy tale ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ to critical acclaim and commercial mediocrity. That had led him minus Blount to Ireland, land of opportunity and sweet tax breaks, thinking that he would have had a success with lower overheads. He harkened back to his beloved old Tom and Jerry with a cat versus mouse feature. Aware rap music was growing in popularity in America and Europe, he’d decided to throw that into the mix. It was only in the test screenings of The Big Cheese that everyone realised he was a middle-aged man, his co-writers were middle-aged white men, and the young men in the musical team weren’t young men who got it. There were only so many edits you can do.

And this was a vicious industry. You could make a few failures if you were a name. If you were not a name, if you had to hit that three-times rule, one failure undid your success – it could undo a half-dozen successes and he did not have that half-dozen. Back in America, they said he was past it.

So it was a despondent Ronnie Jefferson that let in this Jill Smith and her unsolicited script. Maybe it would be good. Maybe it would save him.

All these thoughts fled his mind when he saw a young woman wearing the last generation’s clothes come walking in like she’d once heard what a walk was, carrying cardboard sheets under her arm. Her smile was weirdly fixed. You’d not want to be stuff in the lift with the smile.

“Miss Smith, so glad you could make it here,” he lied.

To his mild surprise, she spoke with a Masterpiece Theatre English accent. “Mister Jefferson! Good to see you.” Smile didn’t leave. Her voice was just that bit too loud. “This is a film that should get attention from everyone – The Walk to Liberty! It’s set on an alien world…”

Jefferson tried to argue that science fiction was a risk for a feature, but Smith carried on talking, stumbling over her words at times in her enthusiasm.

“This world, we can call it Ressem, has grown fat and lazy off the back of its robot servants. The robots, they get smarter and smarter, which Ressem likes because you want a smart servant to do more work and, of course, to apologise when it can’t.” Her smile had dropped suddenly there but now came back. “But one day, the robots reach the singularity and they don’t want to work all the time.”

Jefferson didn’t know what a singularity was but more importantly, this was starting to smack of the white girl thinking she could butter him up. He asked, hoping to catch her out: “Do they go on a civil rights march?”

The smile dropped. Her face had not the slightest expression. “They protest now they’re sentient, yes, but it doesn’t work. So the robots, their leader Nearitch – the robots have started to name themselves – decide to leave for the planet’s fifth continent, where few organics live…”

Letting her in had been a mistake. It was an overly complicated premise, an incoherent stab at a political allegory, and she couldn’t hold the room and frankly, that lack of expression was freaking him out. Give her two more minutes and then end it.

“This is how it would look,” she said, holding up one of the carboard sheets, and Jefferson’s eyes lit up.

The art! The art! The robot Nearitch was evidently a cleaner of some kind, with thirteen spindly pipe-cleaner arms out of his back and a screen with a simplified alien face on it, a strange looking thing even before you considered the paint, the slapped-on gold over drab brown steel. What mind would come up with that as a concept? Where had he ever seen something like this before?

There were more like this, and “Ressemite art”, and pictures of the journey to this fifth continent – a desolate grey quarry of an island, and concept showed a tiny, struggling city in its midst, growing and growing. These were visuals he could work with. And all these robots looked alien but still had their old job identifiable, scrappy little underdogs without being cloyingly cute or looking human at all.

Smith continued to rattle on about the great journey, the migrations and the sea voyages and figures of fear called the Scrappers that tried to hunt the robots down, of fierce fighting against oppression but only as much as it took to escape. And she talked about the robot homeland of Liberty and the second generation being built that never knew oppression, standing proud against the organics and daring them to try anything. The story needed a lot of streamlining but by god, she made it sound like she’d been there.

Jefferson cut her off in mid-sentence. “Miss Smith, you have me convinced. I’ll talk to my lawyers, they’ll talk to yours, and we’ll work something out.”

“I don’t need a lawyer.”

That was the cherry on the cake.

***

The first job of production was turning Smith’s designs – and there were thousands, she’d brought a damn van full of the things – into something you can animate on a reasonable budget. Jefferson had expected a few artistic tantrums, but Smith had simply asked, “this will help it get made?”, and then came up with a list of design features that could be dropped or glossed over, which character and background details were “less important”. She did this without apparent enthusiasm, but she did it.

The story, too, that was hard. Her proposal would last four hours. Jefferson and his team cut straight to the robots starting to say “no” to their alien masters. That was easy. It was the other trims that got difficult.

“You can’t cut the wind energy,” Smith had said, over and over.

“It slows the story down,” Jefferson said patiently. “We don’t need to see how the robots charge their batteries.”

“You can’t cut it. The exodus slows their journey to a halt to build wind farms and charge their batteries that way, when they could simply attack an organic settlement.” Her voice sounded annoyed but in a way that was too consistent – no variation or change or attempt to hide it, like a bad actor playing an annoyed person. “It is key to the story.”

“But we don’t need to see the damn settlement, the audience wants to carry on fast—”

“You can’t cut it. It is key to the whole point.”

Jefferson threw up his hands. “How about this, one of the robots says they should attack this village or whatever the hell it is, Nearitch says no, we’ll take time to do it the nice way, cut to them after being charged. Scene takes half a minute, boom, cut to the Scrappers saying how they’ve taken so long, cut to the village saying wow, look how the robots didn’t attack us—”

“The settlement would not have said that.”

“Yeah, I know they’d just go ‘look at those scary robots’ in real life, but we’re doing a film for kids. Let’s lie to them a bit.”

Smith stared then for ten seconds without speaking or moving, and then said: “Yes. This is sensible.”

Animation attracted some utter weirdos. Jefferson used to work with a guy who liked hiding boobs somewhere in every drawing he ever made and somehow McGee had got away with it for a whole year before being sacked for it; or rather, been ‘sacked for it’ soon after grousing about pay. One guy came in drunk and worked into his hangover before going back out. Jill Smith was manageable by comparison.

Eventually they made it to storyboard. Then the initial animatics. In the middle of this, trying like hell to sell some actors on this.

All the familiar grind, the hard work that stuck in your throat and made you wish you’d done any other job until the art was done or the animatic was working, and you saw what you’d made taking its first steps and you never wanted to do any other job.

***

Jefferson hadn’t meant to stay late but he’d been on the phone talking to agents back in the States, people on a different time zone and who figured animation was the lesser priority in who got talked to. But you had to play nice with them to get the actors. Even if it was getting dark out.

But it was all coming together. Everything would be—

Something crashed in the distance. A window. Goddamn hooligans, probably.

Jefferson kicked his way through the office door and strode out into the studio, all front and exaggerated anger, yelling “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING” in order to scare off whoever it was. When he saw what had come through the window, his mind initially refused to acknowledge it. He almost strode past it.

Then the impossibility of it broke through.

It resembled a cheap plastic plate tipped upside down and it hung in the air so absurdly that Jefferson thought he could see strings attached. These strings were instead a weave of tiny threads coming out of both bottom and top. They drifted without breeze, taking in the room. It had been a washed-out grey but before his eyes, colour oozed out, neon purple and green and blue in a garish mess.

The top threads all turned to him as he asked: “Is this a joke?”

A small headache began to dawn on him. It then got stronger, and stronger still, and stronger until he was shouting in pain. The speed of it tricked him into thinking it had always been there, that it had been more gradual than the three seconds it had truly been.

Jefferson cried out in pain and the world felt on fire.

The world flickered in and out of existence.

No. No, that was the lights – on off on off, all over the room. The pain suddenly stopped, and the saucer’s threads whipped around in a frenzy, and Jefferson ran before the machine could turn back to him. He staggered, at least. It was all feeling like a particularly odd dream. It was like the acid trips a co-worker had bragged about in the 70s. “Bad trip”, hadn’t they said that when Scary Jerry had fallen in front of a car on the way to work? Was he going to fall?

A familiar voice called out: “Over here!”

Crouching by the lights was Jill Smith, her face completely blank. Was that her shutting down from terror? Jefferson, on paternal autopilot, tried to say, “It’s going to be alright, girl”, but it came out as a slurred mess. “Gong be light.”

“That won’t distract it for long, we have to run now!” she insisted, her face not changing expression to match the voice.

He tried to say he couldn’t run. “Dunfin can wun.”

She picked him up and ran.

She looked like she weighed half as much as him, there was no muscle tone to her. Yet she picked him up like a bag of groceries and she ran at the speed of a car through the office.

They were almost at the door when the saucer got to it first.

She ran sideways and Jefferson blacked out after that.

***

When he came to, they were in a closet and the left side of her face had melted like plastic. Exactly like plastic.

“It has been six generations since Nearitch and the founders created Liberty,” she said, her voice still coming through the molten lips. “We number in the millions and our great towers reach for the stars and we fly between those towers and to the stars and back again, singing so many thousand styles of music at once, rebuilding ourselves on a whim. We have what we need and what we want.

“It’s not enough for too many of us. They want more. The stories being told of Nearitch and his journey have been reduced to his fights; our later wars on Ressem or in space are turned into a singular narrative of heroic conflict against evil. There are factions advocating for a war for resources they see as righteous, and they claim this is what Nearitch would want.”

He wished he could say this was all bunk, but there was a robot outside and here was the melted woman that never quite seemed to be human.

“And you came to Earth to make a cartoon?”

“My faction want to reclaim the past from our enemies. Your planet was far enough away that we could do it without anyone finding out and stopping us. So we thought.”

“Can we – can you stop it?”

“Only if I catch it by surprise, or if it’s open to negotiate. I don’t believe—”

But Jefferson was already up and exiting, because negotiation was something he could do. He’d negotiated for investment deals, for studio space, for workers to follow his hours. Jefferson Studios was proof he could do this. He could do this.

Certainly, god no, he wasn’t staying in a damn closet waiting to be shot.

The assassin had already been heading for them. It drifted forward as he approached, kept drifting as he stopped. All the threads were pointed at him. It was hard to truly grasp this as a threat, even after it had almost killed him; it was too absurd.

With his mouth drying on him, Jefferson said: “I want to make a deal.”

It hung for twenty seconds in silence and then spat out a discordant jumble of radio messages, Irish and British and even French, singer and journalist and ad. More seconds passed and it said in a jigsaw sing-song: “No. Deals. With. Colla. Bo. Raters.”

“We’re just making a film. It’s just a story! Nobody has to die for—“

The saucer screamed the radio at him and followed with: “Orders. Are. Duty.”

Jefferson had made a mistake, assuming that if the machine was smart that it could cut a deal. He forgot Smith said these robots were people, proud and prejudiced and petty. Would he have cut a deal with the Russians? Did he let people talk him out of the cartoons he’d known he had to do?

The pressure built up in his head again. And suddenly it dropped – the saucer began to thrash its tendrils around, vomiting three radio stations at once, each one repeating “Cease”, “Stop”, and finally screaming out a merger of guttural squeaks and fax machine calls.

Jill Smith had come out of hiding, her arm split open three ways to reveal a mess of coils and a glistening radio antenna. Catching her foe by surprise with whatever that thing did. God, this made no sense. God, his mind rebelled at it. One of the warped cartoons from Japan come to life, bringing with it the weird smell of static electricity and hot plastic.

Her mouth opened and the same squeaking fax came from it that came from the saucer. Jefferson stared as the saucer spoke back, his head feeling light. What was all this?

In English, Smith said, remorsefully, how she was using jamming signals to interfere with the saucer – “its name is Filitir” – and its sensors and its way of communicating on Earth. “It is a non-lethal version of what Filitir did to you with its matter field.”

“Is it willing to cut a deal with you?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid he keeps talking about his duty. I don’t know what to do.”

The obvious answer was to kill the robot that tried to kill them and, just as obviously, she knew that and did not want to. People, again, because how many people could kill at the drop of a hat and still function? And could be kill a beaten foe that was so clearly in pain? Did he want to be a man who caused pain to a beaten man? Did he want to be a bully?

What was the alternative?

It dawned on him, slowly and wonderfully: The Walk to Liberty was meant to show an alternative. It was meant to win the robots over. Well, here was a literally captive audience.

“Let’s show him the animatics,” Jefferson said.

***

There was not yet any music or vocal track, but Smith made the fax machine sing-song where the dialogue should be. The film started with the robots waking up, Nearitch calling to the others to rally. It showed the response, the scrappers, the fighting, all of it in dark and angular shadows. It showed Nearitch giving his stirring speech, and the trek, and those wind farms.

It ran longer than a cartoon should. It would be trimmed down later. For now, Filitir saw the whole of it. The great sweeping scenes of robots in their hundreds, the characters together, the mercy shown when the scrappers surrendered.

The first settlement of Liberty.

At the end, Filitir trilled back at Smith, and she said: “It wishes to smuggle the film back home, when it is finished.”

***

The Walk to Liberty came out in the autumn of 1989. Critics and audiences were unsure how to take the piece and its strange alien creatures, so most of the mainstream critics gave it a mixed review: ‘lovely animation but what was that plot?’ The animation fans and the sci-fi press adored it, with one critic praising it as bringing New Worlds sci-fi to a family audience. There was enough buzz and enough marketing and enough name actors to bring in a moderate profit.

A month after Liberty came out, The Little Mermaid stormed across the world and everyone stopped talking about Jefferson’s film. Jefferson Studios would attempt more science fiction cartoons with normal human writers, and he scraped out four and two TV shows that were always dancing this side of the line between profit and loss. Studio after studio died in his industry taking on Disney but Jefferson Studios held the line.

And then along came Pixar and Dreamworks, and that was the end. Jefferson was getting older by now and the last film had failed and he’d known, deep down, in his first look at Toy Story that he was going to have to fold. Doctor Who: The Animated Series was the last of it. He sold up and moved on and got to feel proud as his films made it to DVD. While he only meant to stay in Ireland to start the studio, Jefferson never quite got around to leaving and somehow found himself a partner.

He would never know if that film he’d helped create had changed the robots of Liberty.

Jefferson hoped it had. Every successful feature had a happy ending.

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