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Neither of the agents are from Pokemon, but that's where the Omanyte is! Nautilus is a semi-fic blip in a MAJOR way, while Peri is the result of a (hypothetical so far) Young Wizards mission with an in-fic exorcised Power!Sue. (No, Peri's not the Sue; he just internalized a LOT of glitter during the process. Detoxifying him was... a trial.)

And the HTML markers are fairly simple - as long as you remember to close them, they'll work! The one I use for the whispering is < small > < /small > (spaces added so you can see the format, of course!) Other possibilities include italics (< i > < /i >), bold (< b > < /b >), and strikethrough (< strike > < /strike >).

Since you’ve commented on my last three prompts, it’s about time I returned the favour.

I really enjoyed this - I like the small font for whispering (not something I’d use myself, as my HTML isn’t great!)

I don’t know the agents or fandoms, so I’m not really sure what an Omanyte actually is, but it’s still amusing.

And yeah, prompt two probably was a little easy. But my brain wasn’t working that well at the time!

*e

Poor Rosie.

Good thing they're not Agents, though - because if by 'going home' it meant seeing it in a badfic, they wouldn't be able to see Kiera! Let alone save her.

I wish them the best. ^^

"Now, staaay."

"Omanyte!"

"Hahah! No, no, you stay. Go on, girl, staaay?"

"O-man-YTE!"

"Good girl!"

It was dark in the RC, and for the moment Peri preferred it that way - it was better than having to watch Nautilus overplay the caretaker role.

Just listening to the cooing was bad enough, given his headache.

"Some of us are still recovering. Can you please keep it down?" He hissed, trying not to add to his own pain.

"Oh! Sorry, Peri." The other man amended - given his color and height, it was hard to pick him out at the other end of the darkened RC, so he was stuck working from voice alone. Nautilus had lowered his volume, but it still felt like it wasn't enough.

"Now, see if you like eating this..." There was a pause.

"PLEH!" Something small and oddly shiny in the minimal lighting flew all the way across the response center - on Peri's arms.

"Gah!" he reacted, flinching, and the unsteadiness of the world around him suddenly grew worse. Quickly moving the pillow he was resting on to being on top of him, he closed his eyes and tried to focus on breathing.

It was supposed to have been a normal mission in the Pokémon continuum - a whole host of minis and other typos, a main character who was both barely a rounded personality and a textbook Black Hole Sue, and at one point an inexplicable My Little Pony cameo.

If Nautilus had wanted a pet, he should have kept one of the minis - but instead, they'd found an Omanyte, and the other agent refused to pass up the second-degree pun.

Back in the present, Peri removed the pillow once he felt like he'd regained some control - a sign that it was okay for Nautilus to approach, now.

"Sorry about all of that," he said quietly, as Peri peeled the rejected - seaweed? Really? - off his own dark skin.

"Probably should keep him in the bathroom or something..."

"If you're going to keep him, we'd need to fit an aquarium in here," Peri retorted.

"I'm not saying you can't keep him, just- I've heard stories."

Nautilus shrugged, grinning wryly.

"Hey, if it better reflects his natural habitat.."

"Have you even named her?" Peri sat all the way up now, looking over with suspicion.

"I was thinking it'd have to be a word we don't use normally, so - Curlicue?"

"Omanyte!"

Peri hit Nautilus with the pillow.

Rosie smiled. She was finally going to where she wanted to be. Maybe she could finally find Kiera again.

“Tell me,” said Clara, “why do you want to do this?”

Rosie shrugged. “You know why. It’s where I grew up. We have to do something!”

“There’s something more than that, isn’t there?”

Rosie quite often thought that Clara was far too perceptive. This was definitely one of those times.

“Maybe…” she said slowly. “What makes you think that?”


“Well, since you arrived you’ve been going on about it, all the time, for five years. There’s got to be something more, because from what I’ve heard it wasn’t exactly the best place ever.”

Rosie was silent.

“Come on! Spit it out!”

“Fine,” said Rosie sharply, trying to work out how best to phrase this. “The day before I arrived, I went to see this play with some friends. Thing is, it was technically illegal, and…” She tried not to think of Imogen. That memory was too painful. “There was a raid, and the government came, and my friend… her name was Kiera – her name is Kiera.”

Kiera wasn’t dead. At least, Rosie didn’t think she was, and she was determined not to.

“She… she wanted to help us escape… so she got herself caught instead. I’ve been feeling bad ever since.” Now she had begun, she might as well reveal the whole thing. “The person who told the government… was my other friend. Imogen.”

Clara nodded. “And now you want to save your friend?”

“If she’s still… still around to be saved. It’s been five years, but I’ve got to try. I know she would have done the same for me.”




Note: if you read my prompt from a month ago, then yes, this is the same Clara.

Well, let's get straight into the prompts.

Prompt 1: One of your characters gets a pet

Prompt 2: One of your characters reveals a secret

Go mad with them (maybe not literally), let's see what you come up with.

Novastorme

It's been a while since I've watched Doctor Who, but I know that it's hard to make a costume look like actual clothes. I've spent much fruitless time trying to figure out what makes the "patina of the real." Maybe I should eat more fruit.

I like the first one with the coattails billowing in the wind.

Also, both of you look very nice in your costumes.

And when multiple people are Anonymous on a frequent basis, it's easy to get confused. And if one of them is nasty and one isn't, that escalates things.

Forgetting to type in one's name is one thing, but leaving it blank habitually is another, and while I too do forgive one-time mistakes, I think we should encourage people not to do the latter.

So yeah, that's why I did that. I get your point, but better safe than sorry. :P

-Twistey

Thank God that man doesn't have any follo- oh who am I kidding.

-Twistey

This is, in my opinion, one of the best things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzmnPs64K74

This is the sequel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNuHV-iLBRw

Forbidden is a full-length (ninety minutes!) musical on YouTube. I will link to it in a moment, right after I warn for language and sexual innuendos in one song. Language warning, and one song contains sexual innuendos! Okay, here it is.

So the set-up here is that we're in an alternate history 1980s America, named Nacirema, where black and gay culture became dominant, rather than white and straight culture. Just as in real life, the Bible is used to justify the dominant culture's oppression: there are three commandments in this version, the first of which I couldn't actually understand because they were delivered through song lyrics. Eh, we're on the internet, I guess I'll just listen again . . .

Ah, okay. The first commandment is the one that gets broken by society constantly in both worlds: Love your neighbor. It's the one that shows the people in the musical's society to be hypocrites, because of how straight and white people are treated. Interesting that this was composed as the first commandment in the song, almost as though the singer/narrators are "getting it over with" so they can move on to the two commandments that are clearly more rigidly followed.

The second commandment I'll quote verbatim: "Turn your back on things you don't understand." This is essentially a direct contradiction of the first, as you can't love your neighbors if you turn your back on them; it implies that the community's love is only valid for those who follow the majority baseline. It's also a reflection of our world's tendency to give more attention to problems affecting the majority, and overlook the suffering of minorities.

And the third is basically the one that says that only same-sex partnerships are acceptable. (The wording in the song is a little clunky to fit the meter, but that's what it's saying.) I naturally would have loved to know more of the history of this setting, how their system of continuing the species works mechanically, though I understand the focus of the album is on injustice rather than world-building. I got the gist of it: that children are born to some women (must be through artificial insemination, since "breeder" is a slur applied to straight people), then taken away and given to married gay couples to raise. But I only saw couples with one child each throughout the whole video, which implies the population would drop by half with every generation, which isn't sustainable. Maybe I just wasn't meant to think about it that closely, or maybe it's a literal degeneration meant to be a metaphor for the other failings of this society tearing itself down.

But that's not to say there isn't any world-building. It's dropped through many minor details throughout the video, and they're all clever and fantastic. Nacirema's flag is the U.S. flag with the red and blue colors reversed, and we get to hear what's essentially an alternate universe version of the real U.S. national anthem. The protesters at the end bare signs that say "God hates straights" and "Split and quit." A white singer who performs a beautiful melodic song with undertones of equality barely gets any applause or other reaction from the all-black audience before her, but the following performance of black singers doing a very bland and simplistic pop song that only talks about general life gets the audience dancing and clapping along. The main character, Noooolan? I think I forgot his name, but he becomes the only black person in a prison filled with white inmates. All these little moments feel normal and natural; I only recognize them as off by comparison to my own experiences in our world.

Particularly chilling are the moments where a upbeat, peppy song is undercut with a moment of grim prejudice.
One of these is when the song-and-dance routine in a diner is cut off completely when a white server spills coffee on a black woman's lap. The entire diner, black and white, freezes to watch what happens—all knowing the power the black woman can potentially bring to bear over the white woman. When the black woman sees that no one else is going to support her, she contents herself with storming out after calling the server an N-word variant. (I don't care it's not the N-word; I'm still not typing it out.) Another was the scene where a black police officer guns down a white man who was innocently walking through an all-black neighborhood, all to a backdrop of jaunty harp and brass music, then proceeds to have a happy song-and-dance number with the black home-owners while the white man's body lays on the sidewalk at the side of the frame. Towards the end of that song, the camera cuts to a close-up of a broom sweeping dirt under a rug. These are great metaphors for the fact that while this society appears happy and friendly on the surface, there's some seriously dark happenings going on underneath that everyone would rather ignore than confront. (By the way, that scene of police brutality takes place, appropriately, on Novyart street.)

I also love the contrast between the costumes of the accepted gay community and the refuge for straight people. The gay people dress in either bright colors or pastels, and in impeccably smooth 50s/60s dresses and suits. The straight refugees dress in more modern clothing, with a lot of loose cloth, torn knees and elbows and uneven styles, and all in scales of grey. Not only is grey the color born of mixing black with white, but it's also a drab color that blends in to the background. It shows that when the straight protagonists were still trying to pass as gay, they had to put on a front that was meant to stand out and be seen by the rest of their community to match everyone, rather than be their base selves. It's also representative of how minorities sometimes have to hide themselves from the view of society, blending in unseen to avoid being attacked.

There are a couple of songs about money that didn't really feel like they belonged. I mean, they fit with the story line's progression, but not with the overall themes. Or maybe I missed part of their point by not hearing all the lyrics? Either way, it's still a strong musical, even though I could have done without those two. There's also a bit of a weird plothole in that Nolan-if-that-is-his-name and Elle-I-did-remember-her-name-for-some-reason are both accused of heterosexual activity, Nolan is jailed and eventually hanged, but Elle is allowed to return to her wife and live on like nothing happened. I mean, this isn't a big complaint, because I certainly didn't want her to be killed, it's just . . . it kind of leaves some questions, you know? The wife must have had some reaction to everything going on, but we don't get to hear it. It does feel a little missing something there. But overall, it's a very creative and thoughtful musical that I heartily recommend.

—doctorlit has been a fan of Todrick Hall for a while now

♪I've got a big black thick spoiler and I'm not afraid to use it♪ ♪I've got a big black thick spoiler and I'm not afraid to use it♪ ♪I've got a big black thick spoiler and I'm not afraid to use it♪

(For the record, the word I replaced there is "card," as in "credit card," not whatever you were just thinking it was.)

Though if you want a good laugh...

Tenth Doctor: The Musical!

Warning for use of the f-word, so this might not be appropriate to listen to near small munchkins.

But that's just my opinion.

What sort of fix should I do? There are multiple valid options.

And my inner Slytherin just realized that, if I ever wanted a promotion, I could just claim that Hieronymus the hermit is legitimately a journeyman, because he journeyed to Manyuel to learn from Master Huinesoron the Historian how to do the (insert plortification of mouseover text) and generally maintain a Cyclopedia.

But eternally being a humble apprentice may actually be more fun.

HG

... there's a compilation video out there of the Doctor(s) saying 'Run!'.

[Checks]

There is, and it's 20 minutes long. :D

hS

Aegis has always been a fan of Ten—we actually met at a cosplay ball where he was rocking a suit that he'd bought from a cosplay shop—but it wasn't entirely screen accurate and he wanted one of his own.

I just wanted a swishy coat, so it had to be Jack. :P

I particularly liked the second running image - I guess that tells you what I think Doctor Who is about, right? ;)

hS

We don't actually come down like Mjolnir on anyone who forgets to put their name in; we're discerning types who only bring out the war-hammers when strictly necessary. :)

hS