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Monthly Word Count - January
TOTAL: 22 912 words. Woooow. :O
It's pretty much mostly Homestuck. Um. >_>;
*sigh* I promised myself I'd write some Teamwork this month. I seem to have failed. Gnargh. *guiltflops*
POSTED:
-Homestuck: Amateur Palemates Smuttin It Up!! (2 955 words)
-Homestuck: Back To The Garden (15 189 words)
WORKS IN PROGRESS:
-GW: the psychic wolves bonding story (3 114 words)
-FF7: daemon AU, Cloud/Tifa/Aeris divergent timeline, City of the Ancients (1 654 words)
And I just realized I forgot to add yet another homestuck thinger last month, John Gets Turned Into A Troll, 3 652 words. Argh, that's gonna mess up my yearly wordcount. Then again it's not much in the end, oh whatever.
--
GW psychic wolves
--
The scent of ozone and burn wires was so strong it had his head jerking up, instinctively scanning the office and its littered paperwork for the engine in mid-overload before he realized. He groaned, threw a sideway look at Killer's massive head, lifted just enough to give him an unimpressed honey-gold stare over the doorstep. "We gotta see about changing my scent name, buddy. One of these days I'll be working in the yard and something will blow up in my face because I'll think you're just nagging at me again."
The wolf snorted, flicked a dismissive ear. Ozone and burnt (plastic-and-copper) wires and a sparking engine was pressed onto his mind again with mulish determination and a tiny pinch of offended hurt. Duo sighed, turned in his chair, foot tucked under his thigh, leaned sideway against the backrest. Sorry, he sent back, and hot asphalt and rust on steel and mineminemine and his love, as a better kind of apology, because mouth-noises just sucked sometimes.
Killer's tail thumped once in the dirt, half-hearted. Duo's vague smile fell.
"I'm the shittiest brother, ain't I."
Squirrel running in circles and chittering, and smacking straight into a glass door. Stop talking bullshit again. He let out a dry chuckle. "Okay, okay."
"What are you beating yourself up about now?"
Hilde was coming from the yard, machine-grease-splattered and several wrenches and spanners stuffed into various pockets of her overalls. She didn't even clink as she walked somehow, which meant she'd been practicing her stealth on him. And it had worked, which meant he and his brother were falling asleep on the job. Duo groaned and let his head thump against the backrest. "Nothing, nevermind."
He glowered a bit at Killer for not warning him; Killer returned something like a mental raised eyebrow. Of course Hilde was around, where else would she be? Did Duo want him to track her like she was prey?
"How'd the call with the Colonel go?" Hilde asked, as she grabbed the edges of the door so she could step over Killer's head and haul herself in.
"How do calls with ancient evils ever go? Even just chatting with her it feels like I've sold my soul already."
Hilde snickered in her hand. "I'm pretty sure she's not that much older than we are. Maybe in her mid-thirties?"
"Not disputing the evil part, I see."
"Trying to convince you someone who blew up your Gundam back in the day wasn't evil? I don't like beating my head against walls that much."
He tracked Hilde by ear as she crossed to the partitioned room in the back, the one they'd dubbed the archives. Water -- hand washing? And then cloth and muffled metallic thumps. Probably getting out of her overalls. He didn't even want to bother teasing her about it. Ooh Miss Schbeiker, not even closing the door, adventurous aren't we?
Mating?
Not in the mood.
... Sick?
Oh, fuck you too.
"Blargh. Everyone has a place in the Preventers, Mister Maxwell, even ex-terrorist child soldiers who were on the opposite side from, oh, just about everyone else, this will not cause any problems at all the Preventers are not a military organization Mister Maxwell or even a paramilitary one for that matter just think of us as an international police force true there's a lot of ex-military in our ranks and also half the people there still call me Colonel even though I'm technically not anymore but honest this is not the Organization of the Zodiac bis repetitate--"
"Duo, stop being a melodramatic ass one minute, if you can. I know it's hard, but honestly!"
Killer snorted. Wolf howling at the sky, flying boot to the head!
Yeah, that's about it. I get no respect here, do I?
Hmm. No.
Asshole.
Killer lolled his tongue at him.
--
Daemon AU: City of the Ancients
--
She was so tired. The great glass walls kept rattling overhead with explosions and crackles of power; it sounded so far away. Bad sign. She was cold, cold, cold...
"There we are! There, turn a bit, give her to me."
A drop of water landed on her face. Tifa blinked up at Nanaki's big muzzle, hovering over her and dripping merrily. He'd found... she looked to the side. It was a tower, she thought, narrow and round, and maybe the water didn't use to be so high (or maybe Cetras just liked weird architecture) because there was a sort of tall window opening right there onto a landing for stairs that spiraled up inside the tower, delightfully dry.
She and Breon turned somehow; she shuffled onto his back to prop up Aeris' limp body, to allow Nanaki to sink his teeth in her red jacket and haul her out of the water. Tifa felt strangely bereft for a second, arms empty.
"Tifa?" Breon said, startling her. He sounded like he'd called her before already. She'd been drifting, hadn't she?
"Sorry." She reached for the edge of the landing and tried to haul herself up. She couldn't close her fingers. Breon paddled closer, allowing her to put a knee on his back and bounce herself up, though she winced when that briefly pushed him farther underwater. She scrambled the rest of the way out and flopped down right there, panting, for a second, before she turned around to help her daemon out.
He outweighed her by several hundred pounds. "Regretting that I didn't settle groundhog yet?" he chuffed, front hooves skidding on the rock for a brief moment before his weight dragged him back into the water. She had to let go of his antlers before he dragged her overboard with him.
She could only grit back "Never" and brace a foot against the stone doorway to try again.
Failure, again. She looked around for inspiration, brain slow and exhausted.
Simon had been left like a soaked pile of rags on a higher stair, out of the way. Nanaki had propped up Aeris next to him; she bled sluggishly, head lolling back, limp all over.
"Maybe with some lever," Nanaki mused to himself. "Ah! Take her vest, put it around Breon's neck; I'll pull."
Tifa eyed Nanaki. He only came up to the top of her thigh, but his body was long and all over muscle. "Okay," she said, and went to work the jacket off Aeris.
--
bonus! Homestuck: troll!John
--
"Okay, Egbert, you in there, then? Nice to know."
Dave crouches in front of you. (The background gurgly-thud turns a bit louder, but a bit more squashed down too. No, there's several of them. You can almost separate them into maybe four or five lumps. It's like feeling something's size and weight and, you don't know, texture with your ears, except it's not hearing, it's silent, and besides your normal hearing also works fine. Just. Kind of too much right now. Bandwidth limit exceeded, sorry chaps, porn another day.)
He crouches in front of you and that's fine, and then he reaches out for you and it's not. You slap his hand away, kind of before you can think. You just -- there's metal at your back, a wall, you know exactly how solid it is and how much it's not going anywhere, and he's looming a bit and, and you don't even know, it's just, no.
"Back off, you stupid--"
"--what's your--"
"--told you -- what the everpitying horrorterror-endowed dry tentaclefuck--"
You laugh under your breath at that one, eyes scrunched closed, forehead pressed to your knees. More thuds -- you think you hear Rose speak, but she's farther away and her words come through echoed in distracting buzz. It sort of pings off more hard-cold-sharp farther away, all around and up and down too. It's the room, you're feel-hearing the room, and the empty spaces in it, and everything in it that will be convinced to echo.
"--out, out, everyone out --"
No more gurgly-thud. You keep carefully still, barely daring to breathe. Things are slow to settle down around you.
Okay. Okay, what just happened.
Weird lab-thing. Okay. You remember that. You think you were goofing around, oh man are you going to catch hell from the fussbrigade. Haha um. Cautiously, you open your eyes.
The colors are a bit weird, not as vivid; the ceiling light is harsh enough to make you squint. Maybe they fixed the power or changed the bulb because you distinctly remember you had to strain a bit to see where you were putting your feet.
The door of the lab is closed but a black-clad human-shaped smear is still standing there. You squint.
"Karkat?"
You wince a bit at the cascade of echoes, but you're calmer now and you expected it, and when you keep your voice hushed it's not as bad. More wind in forest leaves than "oops dropped all the pots and pans."
"I, uh, didn't notice you were still here."
"Obviously," he retorts, but mindfully quiet. "I wasn't moving and your eyes were closed." A pause; you wait for the echoes to die. Maybe he was waiting for you to speak, but when you don't he starts up again. "Still freaking out?"
"Um, no. I seem to have stuffed all of my freak back in."
"If only. Alright. Get up and come here, you lazy asshole. Anything hurts?"
You don't want to get up. You're not sure the floor will stay where it should be, now that you can feel it creaking and moving under you. "Aw, come on, Karkat. If you're my designated nurse," (come to think of it, why him and not Rose?) "you could at least come closer, why do I have to move?"
He makes an irritated little clacking noise, tongue against teeth; it pings fast across the room, it's like being flicked in the forehead. Not real pain, but startling anyway. "You clawed the hell out of Strider, moron, I'm not cornering you."
"... I what?" You stare at him, eyes open wide. The lower half of him is blurry in a way that makes your eyes feel tight -- ah, your glasses! You nudge them back up -- they're hanging weird -- but it makes things even worse. You swipe them off and stare some more; weirdly you see better that way, if not very much.
Karkat just looks back for a small century without saying a thing, which is really kind of terrifying, because, well, Karkat.
"Right. Knowing you, Egderp, let's take it very slow and from the very basics. Do you even know what just happened?"
"Uh. I can say with pure certitude that I have none of the clues. None of them. Like, negative clues, I just, Karkat, something's wrong with my -- my ears?" You guess, you don't know, and fuck if your voice doesn't go tight with fright for a minute. You brace against the wall and you stumble your way up, and the whole room starts whirl-shivering all around you, you have to lean hard so you don't just go straight back to sitting and hugging your knees. "--My senses, they're all scrambled, oh god this is so weird."
The voice-echoes, you're getting used to, but moving yourself at the same time? It's kind of like stepping down from a roller coaster; even if the floor doesn't really move under you, you still feel like it's about to scamper off and dump you on your ass.
"Look at your hands, dumbass."
You look at your hands.
Well, mostly the one pressed against the wall by your head. Which is good enough.
It's a darkish sort of colorless, but for the nails, like a shitty photoshop gradient from sunset-orange nail beds to curvy, pointed hooks in pale gold, except for the few of them stained in vivid, fluorescent, holy-hell-look-at-this, fire-engine red.
Maybe redder than that. You bet it'd glow in the dark.
You would think there's a ninja troll behind you and that's his hand, totally his hand, except when your own hand spasms in surprise you can feel the way the claws catch on the wall and go skreek.
The noise manages to be even more cringe-worthy than nails on a blackboard somehow. Even Karkat twitches.
Holy mother of god you're a troll.
It's pretty much mostly Homestuck. Um. >_>;
*sigh* I promised myself I'd write some Teamwork this month. I seem to have failed. Gnargh. *guiltflops*
POSTED:
-Homestuck: Amateur Palemates Smuttin It Up!! (2 955 words)
-Homestuck: Back To The Garden (15 189 words)
WORKS IN PROGRESS:
-GW: the psychic wolves bonding story (3 114 words)
-FF7: daemon AU, Cloud/Tifa/Aeris divergent timeline, City of the Ancients (1 654 words)
And I just realized I forgot to add yet another homestuck thinger last month, John Gets Turned Into A Troll, 3 652 words. Argh, that's gonna mess up my yearly wordcount. Then again it's not much in the end, oh whatever.
--
GW psychic wolves
--
The scent of ozone and burn wires was so strong it had his head jerking up, instinctively scanning the office and its littered paperwork for the engine in mid-overload before he realized. He groaned, threw a sideway look at Killer's massive head, lifted just enough to give him an unimpressed honey-gold stare over the doorstep. "We gotta see about changing my scent name, buddy. One of these days I'll be working in the yard and something will blow up in my face because I'll think you're just nagging at me again."
The wolf snorted, flicked a dismissive ear. Ozone and burnt (plastic-and-copper) wires and a sparking engine was pressed onto his mind again with mulish determination and a tiny pinch of offended hurt. Duo sighed, turned in his chair, foot tucked under his thigh, leaned sideway against the backrest. Sorry, he sent back, and hot asphalt and rust on steel and mineminemine and his love, as a better kind of apology, because mouth-noises just sucked sometimes.
Killer's tail thumped once in the dirt, half-hearted. Duo's vague smile fell.
"I'm the shittiest brother, ain't I."
Squirrel running in circles and chittering, and smacking straight into a glass door. Stop talking bullshit again. He let out a dry chuckle. "Okay, okay."
"What are you beating yourself up about now?"
Hilde was coming from the yard, machine-grease-splattered and several wrenches and spanners stuffed into various pockets of her overalls. She didn't even clink as she walked somehow, which meant she'd been practicing her stealth on him. And it had worked, which meant he and his brother were falling asleep on the job. Duo groaned and let his head thump against the backrest. "Nothing, nevermind."
He glowered a bit at Killer for not warning him; Killer returned something like a mental raised eyebrow. Of course Hilde was around, where else would she be? Did Duo want him to track her like she was prey?
"How'd the call with the Colonel go?" Hilde asked, as she grabbed the edges of the door so she could step over Killer's head and haul herself in.
"How do calls with ancient evils ever go? Even just chatting with her it feels like I've sold my soul already."
Hilde snickered in her hand. "I'm pretty sure she's not that much older than we are. Maybe in her mid-thirties?"
"Not disputing the evil part, I see."
"Trying to convince you someone who blew up your Gundam back in the day wasn't evil? I don't like beating my head against walls that much."
He tracked Hilde by ear as she crossed to the partitioned room in the back, the one they'd dubbed the archives. Water -- hand washing? And then cloth and muffled metallic thumps. Probably getting out of her overalls. He didn't even want to bother teasing her about it. Ooh Miss Schbeiker, not even closing the door, adventurous aren't we?
Mating?
Not in the mood.
... Sick?
Oh, fuck you too.
"Blargh. Everyone has a place in the Preventers, Mister Maxwell, even ex-terrorist child soldiers who were on the opposite side from, oh, just about everyone else, this will not cause any problems at all the Preventers are not a military organization Mister Maxwell or even a paramilitary one for that matter just think of us as an international police force true there's a lot of ex-military in our ranks and also half the people there still call me Colonel even though I'm technically not anymore but honest this is not the Organization of the Zodiac bis repetitate--"
"Duo, stop being a melodramatic ass one minute, if you can. I know it's hard, but honestly!"
Killer snorted. Wolf howling at the sky, flying boot to the head!
Yeah, that's about it. I get no respect here, do I?
Hmm. No.
Asshole.
Killer lolled his tongue at him.
--
Daemon AU: City of the Ancients
--
She was so tired. The great glass walls kept rattling overhead with explosions and crackles of power; it sounded so far away. Bad sign. She was cold, cold, cold...
"There we are! There, turn a bit, give her to me."
A drop of water landed on her face. Tifa blinked up at Nanaki's big muzzle, hovering over her and dripping merrily. He'd found... she looked to the side. It was a tower, she thought, narrow and round, and maybe the water didn't use to be so high (or maybe Cetras just liked weird architecture) because there was a sort of tall window opening right there onto a landing for stairs that spiraled up inside the tower, delightfully dry.
She and Breon turned somehow; she shuffled onto his back to prop up Aeris' limp body, to allow Nanaki to sink his teeth in her red jacket and haul her out of the water. Tifa felt strangely bereft for a second, arms empty.
"Tifa?" Breon said, startling her. He sounded like he'd called her before already. She'd been drifting, hadn't she?
"Sorry." She reached for the edge of the landing and tried to haul herself up. She couldn't close her fingers. Breon paddled closer, allowing her to put a knee on his back and bounce herself up, though she winced when that briefly pushed him farther underwater. She scrambled the rest of the way out and flopped down right there, panting, for a second, before she turned around to help her daemon out.
He outweighed her by several hundred pounds. "Regretting that I didn't settle groundhog yet?" he chuffed, front hooves skidding on the rock for a brief moment before his weight dragged him back into the water. She had to let go of his antlers before he dragged her overboard with him.
She could only grit back "Never" and brace a foot against the stone doorway to try again.
Failure, again. She looked around for inspiration, brain slow and exhausted.
Simon had been left like a soaked pile of rags on a higher stair, out of the way. Nanaki had propped up Aeris next to him; she bled sluggishly, head lolling back, limp all over.
"Maybe with some lever," Nanaki mused to himself. "Ah! Take her vest, put it around Breon's neck; I'll pull."
Tifa eyed Nanaki. He only came up to the top of her thigh, but his body was long and all over muscle. "Okay," she said, and went to work the jacket off Aeris.
--
bonus! Homestuck: troll!John
--
"Okay, Egbert, you in there, then? Nice to know."
Dave crouches in front of you. (The background gurgly-thud turns a bit louder, but a bit more squashed down too. No, there's several of them. You can almost separate them into maybe four or five lumps. It's like feeling something's size and weight and, you don't know, texture with your ears, except it's not hearing, it's silent, and besides your normal hearing also works fine. Just. Kind of too much right now. Bandwidth limit exceeded, sorry chaps, porn another day.)
He crouches in front of you and that's fine, and then he reaches out for you and it's not. You slap his hand away, kind of before you can think. You just -- there's metal at your back, a wall, you know exactly how solid it is and how much it's not going anywhere, and he's looming a bit and, and you don't even know, it's just, no.
"Back off, you stupid--"
"--what's your--"
"--told you -- what the everpitying horrorterror-endowed dry tentaclefuck--"
You laugh under your breath at that one, eyes scrunched closed, forehead pressed to your knees. More thuds -- you think you hear Rose speak, but she's farther away and her words come through echoed in distracting buzz. It sort of pings off more hard-cold-sharp farther away, all around and up and down too. It's the room, you're feel-hearing the room, and the empty spaces in it, and everything in it that will be convinced to echo.
"--out, out, everyone out --"
No more gurgly-thud. You keep carefully still, barely daring to breathe. Things are slow to settle down around you.
Okay. Okay, what just happened.
Weird lab-thing. Okay. You remember that. You think you were goofing around, oh man are you going to catch hell from the fussbrigade. Haha um. Cautiously, you open your eyes.
The colors are a bit weird, not as vivid; the ceiling light is harsh enough to make you squint. Maybe they fixed the power or changed the bulb because you distinctly remember you had to strain a bit to see where you were putting your feet.
The door of the lab is closed but a black-clad human-shaped smear is still standing there. You squint.
"Karkat?"
You wince a bit at the cascade of echoes, but you're calmer now and you expected it, and when you keep your voice hushed it's not as bad. More wind in forest leaves than "oops dropped all the pots and pans."
"I, uh, didn't notice you were still here."
"Obviously," he retorts, but mindfully quiet. "I wasn't moving and your eyes were closed." A pause; you wait for the echoes to die. Maybe he was waiting for you to speak, but when you don't he starts up again. "Still freaking out?"
"Um, no. I seem to have stuffed all of my freak back in."
"If only. Alright. Get up and come here, you lazy asshole. Anything hurts?"
You don't want to get up. You're not sure the floor will stay where it should be, now that you can feel it creaking and moving under you. "Aw, come on, Karkat. If you're my designated nurse," (come to think of it, why him and not Rose?) "you could at least come closer, why do I have to move?"
He makes an irritated little clacking noise, tongue against teeth; it pings fast across the room, it's like being flicked in the forehead. Not real pain, but startling anyway. "You clawed the hell out of Strider, moron, I'm not cornering you."
"... I what?" You stare at him, eyes open wide. The lower half of him is blurry in a way that makes your eyes feel tight -- ah, your glasses! You nudge them back up -- they're hanging weird -- but it makes things even worse. You swipe them off and stare some more; weirdly you see better that way, if not very much.
Karkat just looks back for a small century without saying a thing, which is really kind of terrifying, because, well, Karkat.
"Right. Knowing you, Egderp, let's take it very slow and from the very basics. Do you even know what just happened?"
"Uh. I can say with pure certitude that I have none of the clues. None of them. Like, negative clues, I just, Karkat, something's wrong with my -- my ears?" You guess, you don't know, and fuck if your voice doesn't go tight with fright for a minute. You brace against the wall and you stumble your way up, and the whole room starts whirl-shivering all around you, you have to lean hard so you don't just go straight back to sitting and hugging your knees. "--My senses, they're all scrambled, oh god this is so weird."
The voice-echoes, you're getting used to, but moving yourself at the same time? It's kind of like stepping down from a roller coaster; even if the floor doesn't really move under you, you still feel like it's about to scamper off and dump you on your ass.
"Look at your hands, dumbass."
You look at your hands.
Well, mostly the one pressed against the wall by your head. Which is good enough.
It's a darkish sort of colorless, but for the nails, like a shitty photoshop gradient from sunset-orange nail beds to curvy, pointed hooks in pale gold, except for the few of them stained in vivid, fluorescent, holy-hell-look-at-this, fire-engine red.
Maybe redder than that. You bet it'd glow in the dark.
You would think there's a ninja troll behind you and that's his hand, totally his hand, except when your own hand spasms in surprise you can feel the way the claws catch on the wall and go skreek.
The noise manages to be even more cringe-worthy than nails on a blackboard somehow. Even Karkat twitches.
Holy mother of god you're a troll.