I saw this and couldn’t resist writing it.
are you a god
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Ballister in the opening scenes is so wound tight and so restrained, he puts up with Todd getting all in his space and is the one to hold Ambrosius back and just radiates control and holding himself up to outside standards. even his affection towards Ambrosius is small touches and Ambrosius coaxing him to open up.
and by the midpoint he's just loosened up so much even in the midst of a fight there's a relaxed confidence about him that he just didn't have before that I think comes partly from Nimona's influence and partly from the fact that he's already lost everything he was trying to hold onto with his control and he's already tried the controlled way of getting it back and that didn't work so he's letting himself go back to his core from being a kid that gatecrashed guard training to fight for what he wanted
and it just makes me think about Ambrosius, who is such an exuberant dork when it's just the two of them and prods at Ballister for being mopey/thinky, but who also definitely has some degree of understanding public/private face seeing how he is with the other knights and in the market scene but he's overall a lot freer with his actions.
After everything, will Ambroius look at the person Ballister is now and the person he was when they were together as knight-candidates, and have to think about how maybe that was the happiest Ballister could be under those circumstances but if they'd been knighted and got that conventional happily ever after, even when it was just the two of them and Ambrosius could drop the weight of public expectations, Ballister probably never would have been as confidently joyful as he has the potential to be and Ambrosius would never even have known what they were missing because Ballister had been holding himself in for so long that everybody (including probably Ballister himself) just assumed that restrained was part of his personality.
Toothless paintings from the last year ^_^ 🌿🎃 Wallpaper size on Gumroad! https://munchimo97.gumroad.com/
I love it when people take fic writing seriously. I love when it's not 'Here's this dumb thing I wrote' and instead it's 'Here's this thing I put blood, sweat and tears into. Here's this thing I slaved away at, trying new writing techniques and editing over and over. Here's this dialogue that kept me awake at night. Here's this beautiful turn of phrase I thought up. Here's this thing that I wrote with vulnerability and heart, and I am proud to share it with you.'
Smart girls are the fucking best
But like
They did such a good job
The poses
Massive props to the camera person too
ALT
ALT
ALTthis is the end
hold your breath and count to ten
feel the earth move and then
hear my heart burst again
artemis-the-sinister asked:
What if one of the animorphs turned out to be allergic to their battle morph?
thejakeformerlyknownasprince answered:
Oh no. Considering Jake, Tobias, Rachel, and Marco all get their battle morphs in the first book, that is not ideal. Cassie gets hers in #3, and Ax rarely morphs to “level up” except occasionally to hork-bajir, so we can count him as getting one in #13.
Jake: Would, like Rachel, probably try and tough it out without telling anyone. Would assume that he’s just still getting a handle on this whole morphing thing and that that’s why he keeps uncontrollably turning into a dog and a lizard and whatnot. Would eventually barf a tiger, which would of course end badly. By “badly,” I mean that Homer would be eaten by a tiger, and then Michelle would be forced to shoot said tiger before it could eat anyone else, and everyone would be sad. The only upshot would be if the tiger also killed Tom before it could be stopped, thereby solving a lot of problems the Animorphs wouldn’t even know they had.
Marco: Would tell all his friends immediately, not that they know anyone at that point in the series who could help. He would not only hole up at Tobias’s house and refuse to leave (Tobias hates this, of course, but there are controllers in Jake’s house and Rachel refused to let Marco stay), but he would complain loudly for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week until he finally barfed out the gorilla. A gorilla loose in a house is less of a concern than a tiger, so I imagine the boys just chasing it outside and into the woods. For years after, there are hundreds of Bigfoot sightings in southern California forests.
Tobias: Would be so freaking sad to lose that hawk morph. Tobias’s “I’m fine, this is fine, everything is fine,” would be a completely different flavor from Jake’s — Tobias doesn’t care if everyone knows he’s sick, but would want to avoid deterring the others from morphing. Turning into a cat and a hawk uncontrollably isn’t ideal, but Tobias is also a lot less supervised than Jake, so it wouldn’t necessarily be catastrophic. Anyway, Tobias would make a whole broody ceremony out of releasing the hawk once he’d barfed it up, and within 10 minutes would be off to Cassie’s barn to go get a different raptor morph.
Rachel: Like we see in canon, probably the least equipped to handle an allergy. Lots of collapsed floors when she turns into an elephant, lots of losing control of a morph she didn’t mean to make. Also, Rachel being Rachel would mean that she’d make a lot of demands that the others solve the thing. Without Ax, this would mostly be Jake reading the NatGeo Kids and Zoobooks entries on elephants, Marco hysterically suggesting they just go ask Visser Three if he’s ever had this problem, Cassie having the only helpful suggestion (meditation and deep breathing), and Tobias staring up at the stars wondering if the andalites have fated them and that’s why they’re this way. Anyway, the elephant would probably also warrant a call to Michelle once Rachel barfed it out, but would be even more confusing than the tiger because no one can explain its origins.
Cassie: Probably the best equipped to handle an allergy of anyone on the team (no matter what AniTV seems to think). She’s highly self-aware and mindful of her surroundings, so she’d probably be the fastest to figure out the “emotion = uncontrolled morphing” link on her own, and the most skilled at remaining calm in spite of it all. She’d probably spend a week or two not going on missions, doing a lot of deep breathing and soothing rides with her horse and other relaxing activities, and then would also simply be able to chase the resulting wolf into the woods behind her house. Since Southern California woods had wolves re-introduced (#3), it’d probably be fine on its own.
Ax: Would be so embarrassed by the problem. He is an andalite, he is an aristh, he is supposed to be the expert on this team, he is better than this, he is… turning into a shark right now. Dammit. Would stiffly insist that this is nothing to worry about, and he has a handle on the problem which will surely resolve itself momentarily. Would greatly appreciate Tobias sticking around to comfort him while he’s benched from missions, and would appreciate even more that Tobias never tells anyone just how often Ax ends up turning into a human or a snake or a seagull by accident. The extra hork-bajir is a whole other source of identity horror that I barely want to touch, but Toby’s group would probably end up adopting the clone and just trying not to think about where it came from.
...A cursed thought just occurred to me. What if Tobias was allergic to Ax and now they have an Andalclone to take care of?
They name him Ax 2: Electric Boogaloo and feed him cinnabons
The horrifying implications of cloned sentient beings getting birthed out of nowhere continue…
Yeah, no, this is definitely the worst of all possible timelines.
On the positive side, you could probably frolis an endangered species back to semi-stability with enough time and awfulness.
01010101010101010111-deactivate asked:
All right, since it's the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, do you want to tell us about how the Carpathia sank?
mylordshesacactus answered:
i very much want to do that.
I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.
But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.
There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.
She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.
This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.
So is the German submarine U-55.
She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.
The second torpedo hits the engine room.
Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.
The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.
She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.
The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.
Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.
There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.
This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.
And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.
There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.
U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.
HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.
She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.
U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.
Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.
But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.
The date is July 17th, 1918, and RMS Carpathia has pulled off her last miracle.
derinthescarletpescatarian
