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And dubiously appropriate for many occasions!

"Sovngarde Song" is bloody good. "Legends of the Frost" is the one that keeps popping into my head for no reason, though. It's beautiful... and then MoS drops that gravelly Dovahzul verse on it. So awesome. ^_^

~Neshomeh

All the badfic ideas that the Spirit of Badfic references are real badfics. Most (though not all) of them were found by Geema.

Geema and I could probably dig up links to most of them, but... uh... do you guys really want that?

Okay, this one is a bit risque (It's definitely NSFA/NSFST), and there is reference to a lot badfic stuff that has been known to horrify people. So... consider yourselves warned!

For those of you still reading, here's the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQCa6I3xDWWkXfcd1BK5Sdw-bVqlaVMykm84dbI3TkdRjiE68EhcTojWg6tKPaNp910g3VFIJaEczt9/pub

The bar was quiet. The dented digital jukebox hanging off a pillar had finally run out of dull piano ballads. The few regulars still left were sat dozing in a corner like piles of old coats. The barman's sole real customer was slumped on the counter, blonde hair scraped back away from her face. The peach schnapps was running low. There wasn't much call for it in rural Indiana.

"This seat taken?"

The blonde gave the speaker a quick look, a soldier's look or something like it. Then she looked away.

The speaker sat down. Rake thin, long-limbed like a teenager or an underfed German Shepherd. Short brown hair, the fringe flicked away with a twist of the neck. "You know, we've met."

That got a response. "We have?" The blonde's English was accented. German, maybe.

A nod. "A while ago."

"It would have to have been." A slim smile that tasted of bad spirits. "A long, long while."

"Why's that?"

"I was worth knowing. A long, long while ago. Now?" The blonde's gaze fixed on the new arrival like a stooping hawk. "Now people have that Irish maniac, or the Lindholm girl. Now I have an empty glass."

"There's still a place for you."

One sharp laugh, a bark of a thing. The blonde looked away. "I brought my whole team back from the dead once. Time after time after time. I helped so many people and now? What's left from those days? A bird with broken wings. Flight for a moment and crashing back down. A gun."

"I didn't mean there."

The blonde's head snapped around. The brunet was just sat there, all angles and legs and battered green jacket, pointing at their heart.

"I still main you," they continued. "I never stopped. You have the best healing and you're the best pure support. So you can't rez a whole team any more. So what? You're you. And I want to help you remember that. Any way I can."

"Any way?"

"Name it."

The blonde smiled, softer, quieter, more felt. "Then buy me another drink and call me Angela."

"Ix," said Iximaz.

After an hour, they left together, and didn't look back.

You and Nesh seem to really like that song... I prefer the Deus Ex songs myself (and Sovngarde song, which is fantastic). But almost everything MoS has done is really good, so...

...Actually you can see this in the Halloween RP. Just kind of a fun aside.

NORD MEAD!

-Phobos

I mostly just wrote this as an excuse to try and fit as many bad jokes about Rust, typing, and enums as I could.

There weren't enough.

[insert obligatory Mechanicus toaster joke here]

I'm sitting over here laughing. You've done a good job with this. Also ... can this be canon?

- Tomash

So... uh... kudos?

Yeah, Talia and Tom could potentially go somewhere. Maybe. I dunno. She's not really developed enough yet for me to say for sure. They both very much derive from the same sort of inspirations, so they obviously have a lot in common, though they may diverge. Tom would have to get over a bit of his awkwardness first, in any case.

Also, this is my first real serious attempt at writing a female character. So... judging by the fact that you made you comment about it, I haven't totally messed it up.

As your comments about being worried... jeez, thanks! that means a lot, especially coming from someone like you who knows these characters well enough to notice how much doesn't add up about this whole situation (including, of course, the fact that Thoth would have no interest in dating a girl even if he wasn't an Astartes, not that Tom knows that).

Anyways, for the time being Derik is still probably the person Thoth's opened up the most to, and he doesn't open up easily.

...Dangit, I said I wasn't going to bait the inevitable badfic games ships for those two, but here I am. :P

Dwarven drinks are clearly superior to Elven drinks!

:-P

What I was going for was her thinking "Yeah, this is a date, but it's not a date-date, even if we're calling it a date, because it's not a date, because I am a tsundere and will never admit I actually like him and want to admit this is a proper date."

Zeb's reaction was my favorite part to write. Especially his mane poofing out. I miiight have been inspired by this webcomic.

I think a message against nuclear power would be strange, as there are only 99 (https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics) nuclear power plants in the USA, and only a few reactors in the world have ever melted down.

I can't believe Phobos is plying Kaitlyn with tea, though. Tea is my thing, and he knows that, the jerk!

Oh well. hS and I will get our own tea when we're done. Elfy tea, which will obviously be superior tea. Yes.

^_~

~Neshomeh

Comparison between works is a perfectly legitimate form of literary analysis. Especially using my work, because I am also incredibly narcissistic.

I actually did notice the parts of your piece that were about the relationship between your agents, incidentally, I just forgot to say so. I liked how Thoth was the one giving Tom a hard time instead of the other way around. Because boredom. Pobre bebé. {; P

Anyway, if Gall's thoughts don't make people run screaming, I'm happy. I'm trying to hint at the better side of her, but she doesn't make it easy.

~Neshomeh

I think you may have inadvertently knocked the bottom out of Ave's denial with the line "she and the Detective had decided to try and make a proper date out of this"—because we're in her POV, that tells us she does know it is a proper date—but I think if you changed that, the rest would work just fine. I like the bits where she's comparing her own efforts to the Detective's expected lack thereof, which would make denying the date-ness easier.

And, well, Zeb. I LOL'ed. Don't ever change, flooflion. ^_^

~Neshomeh

Neshomah might have come about because I had my contacts out while writing the fic and I was touch-typing. That's what I get for not going back to double-check.

...I mean, yes, I totally meant for that to be Kaitlyn being sarcastic. :P

I am ashamed to say this got me worried. I mean, my first reaction was "Bwuh? No way. What's the punchline?" Like, it's right there in the title, it's not even a surprise. And the sweatpants. Nobody goes on a romantic date in sweatpants. But Tom taking the thing so seriously made me start to take it seriously, and while Derik would certainly not be jealous if Thoth did find someone eventually, that somehow doesn't stop me from going "but I thought what they had was special *wibble wibble sad puppy eyes*". That's pretty pathetic. And also hypocritical, given my own plans. I mean, jeez, I think that makes me a worse idiot than Tom. ^^;

BUT! I tell you this humiliating fact because I think it goes to show that the story does a good job of doing to me exactly what Thoth did to Tom, by virtue of selectively focusing on certain details while downplaying others, and that's pretty cool.

I didn't even notice the adverbs until the end, either, which tells me you're doing it right. Kudos!

Oh, and Talia seems cool, and she's obviously interested in Tom. She said she wants to touch him. There is no other fair reading of that line. ^~ So, yay!

~Neshomeh

As usual, Nesh is on-point. I don't have anything to complain about, and I always enjoy a peek inside the head of a character.

For some reason, probably because I'm incredibly narcissistic or something, I tend to like examining parallels between Nesh's prompt response and my own. Usually poorly, because I'm not exactly a great literary analyst. So allow me to do that thing!

Nesh and I had a theme in common this week, and one I think we'll see more of as more people turn in responses: frustration, sexual or romantic. However, we handled it differently. In this story, Gall's desires for Derik take center stage. By contrast, in my fic, Tom's feelings and wants around relationships and dating and such aren't really the core of the story: they're very important, yes, but that story is really about showing another side of the relationship between my agents: that Tom isn't always a goof making jabs, and Thoth isn't always dead serious, despite appearances. They have more in common than you would expect at first glance—if you've read the magic thread, they share the same primary and secondary, just in reverse order.

Oddly enough, despite these differences, both stories were primarily about exploring the relationship between a team of agents. But they are different relationships, and they are explored in very different ways.

That's all I really have for now. Keep up the good work.

We're not going to stop talking about the thing this Board exists to talk about. {= )

Mostly what we talk about is our own spin-offs and characters, though, I think. (Unless that's just me. >.> ) You don't have to know the Original Series to get to know other spin-offs, and you definitely don't have to know everyone's characters to participate in discussion of general concepts.

Also, we do actually want new people to be able to follow along and join in as easily as possible. That's why we have a wiki: so you can look up all the stuff you don't understand and find the most relevant things to read to get a handle on it. There's even a Current Events page, though I think Iximaz is the only person who's bothered to update it recently. (We should all fix that...)

But, if you don't actually care about the PPC setting at all... we're not gonna change who we are and what we're about, so yeah, this may not be the best writing community for you, and there's nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of other groups out there. Maybe someone can recommend some?

~Neshomeh

"The galaxy is a mess, and I just need to subjugate or destroy anything that gets in the way of ruling it, by any means necessary."

It could've been White/Black to begin with, but at some point the Black "me first" side took over. It might look like Black/White/Blue for all the tech (the Emperor himself is probably White/Black/Blue) but it's really Black/White/Green. They don't really understand half the stuff they're using; they just do because that's how it's done, and woe betide anyone who dares to change anything.

Interestingly, according to Phobos' color assignments for the legions, there's a fairly clear White/Black split between the loyalists and the traitors. Check it out:

Loyal

I Dark Angels: White/Black
V White Scars: Red/Black
VI Space Wolves: Green/Black
VII Imperial Fists: Green/White
IX Blood Angels: White/Red
X Iron Hands: Red/Blue
XIII Ultramarines: White/Blue
XVIII Salamanders: White/Green
XIX Raven Guard: Blue/Black

Four out of nine primary White, plus one secondary White. No primary Black, four secondary Black. The Dark Angels represent the original coloration of White/Black.

We also see two primary Green (one secondary), two primary Red (one secondary), and one primary Blue (one secondary).

So, let's say we give one point for a primary color, half a point for a secondary. The order breaks down like this:

White (4.5)
Green (2.5)
Red (2.5)
Black (2)
Blue (1.5)

Traitor

III Emperor's Children: Blue/Green
IV Iron Warriors: Green/Blue
VIII Night Lords: Black/White
XII World Eaters: Black/Red
XIV Death Guard: Black/Green
XV Thousand Sons: Blue/Red
XVI Sons of Horus: Red/Green
XVII Word Bearers: Red/White
XX Alpha Legion: Black/Blue

On the flip side, here we have four primary Black, no secondary Black, and no primary White, only two secondary White. The Night Lords represent the current coloration of Black/White.

Next in predominance is Red (two primary, two secondary) or Blue (also two primary, two secondary), then Green (one primary, three secondary).

Breaking it down the same way, we get:

Black (4)
Blue (3)
Red (3)
Green (2.5)
White (1)

It's not quite a perfect mirror around a Red axis, but it's close. Pretty interesting!

I wonder what other conclusions we might draw from this?

~Neshomeh

Tomash backed away from the mysterious, fascinating woman who had appeared in his apartment. "Okaaaay, who are you?"

The woman let out a laugh. "Don't you know me, Tomash? Can't you tell me by my ability to check your borrows?"

"...Rust?" Tomash shook his head rapidly. "So you're an anthropomorphism of a programming language? What are you doing here?"

"Upon evaluation, I respond with Conversation::Response::Boolean::Yes. As for what I'm doing here... I've taken a liking to you. I've decided to get to onow you more... intimately. Don't worry, I'm very safe. Unless you want to get... unsafe, of course."

Tomash blushed. "But... but..."

"But what? Are my zero-cost abstractions and lovely enums not good enough for you?" The woman slowly began to reveal more of herself. "Off for another risky night with C? You know it's only a matter of time before you crash and burn... but with me... you can be safe forever. Don't you want that?"

Tomash's eyes widened. "Y-yes..."

The woman smiled wider. She held out a glowing collar. "Here. Put this on."

"What's that?"

"It's a tag, of course. It wraps you as a Person::Related. A Lover, specifically." She laughed, gently. "What, did you think I'd cast you? After all, I am big on safety."

I don't have much to say, except that A) that was hilarious, and B) I love the double-subversion punchline.