From Me, Wth Love

“THE MAN DOWNSTAIRS IS VERY CLEVER…CAN HE HIDE HIS PLANS FOREVER?”

At one point the idea of a Gravity Falls movie was being thrown around…so I decided to have a little fun with it. :P

I’ve been picking at this comic for over a month now, scratching away at it when feeling absolutely blocked as a means of therapy.

Eleven year old Sirius trying to juggle with oranges he stole at breakfast. He accidentally throws one right at Lily Evans’s nose. She takes her new wand, waves it a bit and accidentally gives him horse hooves

This is how they become bros

Thirteen year old Sirius black getting his ass whipped by thirteen year old Lily Evans in wizard chess

Lily and Sirius partnered for charms where they’re meant to be summoning cushions and it just ends in them starting a class pillow fight

Fourteen year old Sirius taking really ugly close-up photos of lily while she sleeps and she wakes up like sirIUS I’m GOING TO SHOVE THAT CAMERA DOWN YOUR THROAT YOU PIECE OF SHIT

Sirius and lily taking the piss out of James because of his stupid hair thing and his freaking walk that looks like he’s dancing

‘it’s like he’s prancing or something’ ‘yes lily.. He really is prancing. Rather like a deer I would go as far to say, don’t you agree Evans?’

Lily and Sirius sliding down Hogwarts banisters screaming

Twelve year old losers want to prove that they’re not scared of the forbidden forest so they both go out there in the middle of the night like: ‘first one to come out is a WUSS’

It ends with McGonagall finding both of them in her dressing gown half way up a tree, with lily writing her will on a piece of bark and Sirius waving a large stick screaming ‘THIS WAS A MISTAKE’ repeatedly

Drunk Lily in sixth year and an even drunker Sirius Black gives her piggyback across the grounds while she stretches her arms wide and screams

‘Mr Black, Miss Evans, your homework answers are exactly the same, I suspect one of you copied the other. My money is on Mr Black’

‘PROFESSOR IT WASN’T ME I DON’T DESERVE DENTENTION IT WAS FREAKIN LILY I SWEAR’

It was Lily but who would believe him

No one

He got detention and Lily laughed about it for two weeks.

Lily taking toast up to Sirius when he doesn’t wake up in time for breakfast

Sirius with his head on Lily’s stomach watching as Remus gets utterly thrashed by Mary in Gobstones while yelling unhelpful things like: ‘YOU SHOULD TRY AND WIN THIS ROUND’ and ‘PUT HER SHIRT OVER HER HEAD AND STEAL HER STONES YOU’LL FOR SURE WIN’

For her birthday Lily gets a shit-ton of daises because (ironically) they’re her favourite flower and she grins because she knows exactly who they’re from

Mulciber calls Lily a Mudblood at the end of sixth year and Sirius Black emerges from nowhere and punches him so hard in the mouth he loses four teeth and his gums forever look a little lopsided

Being partnered for potions like:

‘this goes in here’ ‘no it doesn’t’ ‘LET’S FIGHT IT OUT’

It all ends in them wrestling on the table while Remus laughs, Peter gawks and James feel conflicted about who to cheer for

Sirius getting a letter from his mum and when Lily reads it, then picks it up and throws it into the fire before saying ‘you’re more than that’

Lily refereeing him and James wand-sword fights like SIRIUS YOU CAN’T JUST TAKE AWAY HIS GLASSES EVERY TIME BECAUSE THEN HE FALLS OFF THE TABLE THAT’S CHEATING

Fourteen year old Sirius-no-one-is-better-at-pranking-than-me-Black laughing his ass off when Lily makes the board disappear, flips a desk, breaks a window by throwing a vase through it and turns a third of the class into rabbits before climbing on James’s desk and screaming ‘FUCK GOBBLINS’ and prompts the only reaction out of Professor Binn’s on record.

‘Black, late to class again I see. Probably doing your hair, am I right?” “yes in fact you are Evans. I care about my appearance, clearly you do not”

Lily flips him off and McGonagall is in disbelief because she is head girl and Miss Evans I expected more.

‘Alright so there are goose feathers everywhere, which one of you three did this?’ *both point simultaneously to James*

Sirius citing Lily as a source on his witches in the 1700’s and by source he means she ranted to him for thirty minutes about the treatment of witches by not only muggles but WIZARD MEN and he wrote it all down and turned it in

Fifteen year old Lily really likes coffee but never knows how to get it and Sirius showing her how to tickle the pear and OH MY GOD THIS IS FANTASTIC and she hugs him and he sort of… stands there like so shocked before wrapping his arms around her waist and his mother pretended like she didn’t know who he was at Hogsmede yesterday but everything seems a little better now

‘Evans look over there’ *smears peanut butter down neck and turns around pretending like he didn’t*

‘Oi Black look over here’ *produces scissors and threatens to cut off his eyebrow while simultaneously throwing cornflakes *

They always talk each other up to their crushes like ‘yeah Millie Sirius DOES have huge muscles’ and ‘James I heard that Lily has THREE BOOBS. Evans would you stop kicKING ME PLEASE’

At graduation right after Sirius gets his certificate and he grabs the magical megaphone like ‘SUCK IT EVANS I GRADUATED BEFORE YOU’ and Lily’s all ‘Black that’s just because ‘B’ is before ‘E’’ but he’s too busy yelling ‘THIS IS A SIGN I BLOODY KNEW I WAS SMARTER THAN YOU AND THE SAME GOES FOR YOU MOONY’

#DAD VOICE

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…

and when he finally gets to do it its like

Sticking a landing will royally fuck up your joints and possibly shatter your ankles, depending on how high you’re jumping/falling from. There’s a very good reason free-runners dive and roll. 

Hand-to-hand fights usually only last a matter of seconds, sometimes a few minutes. It’s exhausting work and unless you have a lot of training and history with hand-to-hand combat, you’re going to tire out really fast. 

Arrows are very effective and you can’t just yank them out without doing a lot of damage. Most of the time the head of the arrow will break off inside the body if you try pulling it out, and arrows are built to pierce deep. An arrow wound demands medical attention. 

Throwing your opponent across the room is really not all that smart. You’re giving them the chance to get up and run away. Unless you’re trying to put distance between you so you can shoot them or something, don’t throw them. 

Everyone has something called a “flinch response” when they fight. This is pretty much the brain’s way of telling you “get the fuck out of here or we’re gonna die.” Experienced fighters have trained to suppress this. Think about how long your character has been fighting. A character in a fist fight for the first time is going to take a few hits before their survival instinct kicks in and they start hitting back. A character in a fist fight for the eighth time that week is going to respond a little differently. 

ADRENALINE WORKS AGAINST YOU WHEN YOU FIGHT. THIS IS IMPORTANT. A lot of times people think that adrenaline will kick in and give you some badass fighting skills, but it’s actually the opposite. Adrenaline is what tires you out in a battle and it also affects the fighter’s efficacy - meaning it makes them shaky and inaccurate, and overall they lose about 60% of their fighting skill because their brain is focusing on not dying. Adrenaline keeps you alive, it doesn’t give you the skill to pull off a perfect roundhouse kick to the opponent’s face. 

Swords WILL bend or break if you hit something hard enough. They also dull easily and take a lot of maintenance. In reality, someone who fights with a sword would have to have to repair or replace it constantly.

Fights get messy. There’s blood and sweat everywhere, and that will make it hard to hold your weapon or get a good grip on someone. 

A serious battle also smells horrible. There’s lots of sweat, but also the smell of urine and feces. After someone dies, their bowels and bladder empty. There might also be some questionable things on the ground which can be very psychologically traumatizing. Remember to think about all of the character’s senses when they’re in a fight. Everything WILL affect them in some way. 

If your sword is sharpened down to a fine edge, the rest of the blade can’t go through the cut you make. You’ll just end up putting a tiny, shallow scratch in the surface of whatever you strike, and you could probably break your sword. 

ARCHERS ARE STRONG TOO. Have you ever drawn a bow? It takes a lot of strength, especially when you’re shooting a bow with a higher draw weight. Draw weight basically means “the amount of force you have to use to pull this sucker back enough to fire it.” To give you an idea of how that works, here’s a helpful link to tell you about finding bow sizes and draw weights for your characters.  (CLICK ME)

If an archer has to use a bow they’re not used to, it will probably throw them off a little until they’ve done a few practice shots with it and figured out its draw weight and stability. 

People bleed. If they get punched in the face, they’ll probably get a bloody nose. If they get stabbed or cut somehow, they’ll bleed accordingly. And if they’ve been fighting for a while, they’ve got a LOT of blood rushing around to provide them with oxygen. They’re going to bleed a lot. 

Here’s a link to a chart to show you how much blood a person can lose without dying. (CLICK ME) 

If you want a more in-depth medical chart, try this one. (CLICK ME)