#cineresis

(I tried to avoid that last one. I tried. It just...happened. The very instant after those preceding it occurred to me. Now we can both suffer.)

LMAO. no, i refuse to suffer from the birdplay. i deflect it all onto bruce wayne. he can suffer for me, as is his cosmic duty.

okay okay let's see. i like the 'tell me about' because there's no way i can just drop a summary for this and make sense.

so this fic would obviously be in continuity with the rest of my earth-3. wherein, as you almost certainly recall, jokester has been meddling with owlman's attempts to stamp out rival organized crime boss oswald cobblepot since he was still the red hood; that was the context of their first ever encounter, even.

because while he doesn't like organized crime exactly, he thinks local groups that know not to shit where they eat are highly preferable to monopoly by a megalomaniac (support your local small businesses!) and as far as allies go beggars can't be choosers.

what you almost certainly do not know because i never published that fic is that eventually, owlman will be killing penguin.

this was obvious, within the story; everyone was expecting it. the astonishing thing is it took him over 20 years. however, his timing is so bad that it winds up inciting riots.

so what we'd have here is something from in between those two points. probably the only time they've been in the same room in 'costume,' not that ozzie wears one. but he and bruce wayne have probably been seated at the same restaurant and stuff, and for secret identity reasons no violence took place.

bird puns are such a penguin staple, he's got to be the one making them. so like.

Oswald in a room with Owlman and Talon, he is so fucked, his only hope is to talk his way out of this corner. And he opens his mouth and makes a bird pun. Bam. Diplomatic options dead in the water. Owlman's lips are basically inside-out.

Well, the only thing worse than dying because he made a bird joke at a humorless man in a bird suit under stress would be dying apologizing for making a bird joke. So he doubles down. He just starts reeling them off in a kind of slaloming paragraph of possibly the most clownish swan song ever. Important to note that he declaims it like it's very serious business though.

This is a terrible way of buying time because like, it's just a minute straight of provocation, but luckily for Penguin Owlman has developed a counter-reflex of not going for the throat when someone starts making annoying jokes, because he allowed himself to be baited way too many times for several years there.

Jokester and the circus intervene before he dies, a scenario so recurring I kind of got tired of writing it even though it's What Superheroes Do, A Genre Staple. And someone cracks a joke about 'birdplay.'

“You’re not the boss of me,” Superman says, which is the most convincing argument yet of the many, many arguments that superseded it, one of which included the phrase, make me, old man.

Batman narrows his eyes and it would be intimidating if he hadn’t spent the last three minutes lecturing The Man of Steel about, essentially, the content of his Twitter feed. 

△: Jokester – If you could remember how you got to where you are now, would you? What if there was a good reason to forget it? What if knowing made the difference between life and death?

△: Harley – If you had to trade the life of someone you care about for someone else you care about, who would you pick?

△: Ed – If you had to suffer permanent brain damage, which part of your brain would you pick?

△: Ultraman – You can never be hurt again either physically or emotionally, but can only pick one at the cost of the other. Which do you choose?

△: Jason – Say you never met Owlman, but never met J or the rest of the circus, either. Would you go for it?

△: Lex – Deepest fear? What would you sacrifice never to have to face it? What wouldn't you?

🤣 This is SO MANY dflkasdfklfsd. And so profoundly invasive! Very nostalgic woo, Earth-3 brain go brrrr. (My Earth-3 on AO3.)

Oh, they have to answer, like in-character. Implicitly they aren't capable of outright lying, because then this would be no fun; most people would just lie.

Owlman: Reluctance to answer 10/10.

Dementia, or any similar mental condition. Control is everything, and control of the self must come first; then, leverage of one's capacities to control that which lies without. To lose both, still living--intolerable.

[This isn't even interesting or hard to guess, he's honestly a little shallow as a person when you come right down to it and it's a common and reasonable fear, but ig it's not weird that he still didn't want to say.]

Jokester: Reluctance to answer 8/10, purely on the basis that it's none of your business. He's probably like 12 years post-amnesia here; he would have been much less reticent the first few years.

I wouldn't. I can't go back like this even if I did remember, and even if there's anyone to remember me, and I have too much going on in my life to pencil in grief for something I lost a lifetime ago. And yeah, there might have been a very good reason! If you gotta you gotta, though. If I have the key to saving a life buried in there then of course yeah, magic wizard whammy my brain. I'd get through it. I mean, as long as it doesn't mean swapping me-now out for that other guy. We're going to pull real hard for a third option before killing me, thanks.

Harley: Reluctance to answer 7/10, actually clocking lower than her husband on reticence, mostly because that was one of his most delicate personal issues and this is more of an uncomfortable intellectual exercise.

Who would I choose? To sacrifice? To kill? Out of everyone I care about? That's such a broad category I'll have you know, but it would be cheating to try to choose the stranger I care about the least while still caring. Besides, that wouldn't even be the true answer, if I did manage those calculations somehow. It's my mom. Kill my mom. Obviously I care about her still, but the only person who would miss her is my baby brother, and he'd be so much better off if she dropped dead.

Ed Nigma: Reluctance to answer 6/10, he loves answering questions so even though this feels like a trap...

The part that keeps you from shouting insults at stupid people. It's not like I have a job to get fired from or anything.

Ultraman: Reluctance to answer 9/10 he feels so threatened right now and would like to kill you about it.

What do you mean at the cost of the other? Do you mean I get more vulnerable to the thing I don't pick? Fuck that??? I'm already the toughest man on Earth, why would I take a hit to either one? If you just meant I can only pick one and were trying to be a fancy-pants about it, hnh. I. Was going to say I would totally pick physically because closing the Kryptonite loophole would solve most of my problems, but that. Is not fucking true. I guess. Bullshit! I never get my feelings hurt already! I'm not some kind of pathetic--

[Yeah this man lies to himself so much I had to bring in diegetic truth compulsion to get that one answered. Did Wonder Woman cross dimensions to conduct this interrogation or what lmao.]

Jason: Reluctance to answer 9/10 mostly because you're making him think about it.

Uh--yeah, totally. I think. I really want to have not killed all those people. It's not even a question if I'd give up my family to fix that? Except. Someone still would have been Talon, so me not being there wouldn't actually save a lot of lives. Unless the replacement was supremely incompetent, or way better at getting around having to put the knife in than me, or something. So I'd be giving up the Circus and my work here in order to avoid all that torture and pass the buck to some other kid, which is kind of a different complexion of question. Guess it depends on who would have taken to the electrum if I'd never got got by the Owls, but also probably not. Heck.

Alex Luthor: Reluctance to answer 9/10.

You sent me a like seven-parter for the latest ask game and I remembered I got stuck on this one because it was three and that was confusing, and it was just sitting in my drafts like 85% done. So this first!

~~~~~

I'm supposed to do summaries per the ask game this is for, but realistically these are more explanatory excerpts, rather than being necessarily the excerpts I would actually choose to use as summaries, if I wrote the whole thing and was trying to present the complete and tagged fic. Because Ao3 tags allow me to leave a lot of important information out of the summary.

"The Shadows Have Dispersed" works for mdzs. I'll do:

When the allied forces of the righteous sects stormed the Yiling Burial Mounds, they found them altogether empty.

Idk if Wen Qing made a different choice or Wei Wuxian retained more of his sanity or they teleported to hell, to be quite frank with you.

"Redder Than Red Roses" is just asking for blood, and not mdzs i think because the preeminent cultural importance of the red rose among flowers is of european origin--well, maybe persian depending on how you count. And I would feel like a hack using it in a period chinese context without a very particular reason.

I kind of want to go back to my roots (i.e. high school fic patterns) and do Kurama YuYuHakusho and his mom. Here:

When the door gave way and let Minamino Shiori out into her own back garden, she thought at first her son's rosebushes were suddenly in bloom, though it was not the right season. Indeed, there were scattered across the thin dusting of snow some dozens of scarlet petals. But most of the red blots were not flowers at all.

Kurama's favorite weapon is a whip made from rose vines because(?) he's secretly a plant-controlling fox. He gets hurt a lot. In the anime he has bright red-not-orange hair, which surprised me a lot although it does look good. Maybe the red is invisible to people with low spiritual power, so everyone at school thinks it's black.

"Man of Rust" is giving me trouble because it's such a clear play on Man of Steel i can't pretend i don't see it as a Superman prompt. You could do Iron Man, but I wouldn't. Doesn't fit most versions of Ultraman (earth-3) in my opinion, wrong type of decay. Superboy Prime, maybe, or a depressing future fic for some other superboy.

You could make it work for Luthor. Yeah. Luthor who fucked up real bad even for him.

(engagement: hacked!!!)

hahaha hacked! i mean i can't complain given i reblogged the thing and then went away to let my head recover enough i could read the questions so i could ask you. 😂 and then i got this which was yay! this is exactly the wrong ratio of expectation to structure for me though, i get choice paralysis.

fortunately i already answered two of these so the negative space they created will guide me.

i'll do three questions for Owl and Duluth both, they being the less-developed members of the 'main cast.'

1. What’s your chosen OC’s favorite color? Least favorite?

Owl's favorite color is the specific silvered green of a sort of lamb's-ear-like nettle native to her home range--it's a color produced by having little silver hairs covering a certain green and scattering the light, so it can't exist as a pigment.

Duluth's favorite color is a deep golden bronze. He likes really saturated oranges and yellows in general, but there's a technique for gilding bronze that makes his absolute favorite color in the world.

Also not doable as a pigment?? Huh. A commonality.

Her least favorite color is. Hm. Probably some variety of rust-red. Duluth's least favorite color is black, mostly because it's what the cops used to wear.

14. Does your OC have any superstitions? Good luck rituals? Do they believe in and/or practice the arcane arts?

Neither of them does anything really magic, and to the extent that they believe in that kind of art it's mostly in a pretty pragmatic way, because on the one hand sun-stealing wizards are a real problem in the world and on the other their setting's magic system mostly runs on using written language to reinforce physical objects in specific ways, and isn't a whole lot more mysticized in that function than high-level craft techniques are in general.

Like, more, but it's a sliding scale. I think most people would consider geometry way more arcane than the more basic kinds of enchanted objects.

Owl is a werewolf and Duluth knows a little bit about runework, but those are categorized as 'having an ethnicity' and 'having a little bit of a practical education.'

Owl is very religious. I'm not sure at what point that shades into superstition? A lot of her religious obligations aren't really doable away from her family because it's a very communal practice. But there are for example words she says when she has to kill a person and different words she says when she kills for food. (Important note because there's a certain line of hysteria that insists werewolves are given to cannibalism.)

She keeps track of the moon and makes a point of laying eyes on it every night that it's visible. Technically her policy of sharing food and shelter with anyone in need is a religious principle, although no one would really even notice that. She absolutely believes the moon is aware of things to come and will communicate about it, mostly in dreams and portents. One of her parents is a respected religious figure in their community.

There's not a lot of expectation in her religion that failing to do the right things will carry consequences, and only a moderate one that doing the right things will improve the chances of good fortune--I think over time they've reacted away from that transactional kind of cosmology specifically because it's popular with their neighbors, and people do like to define themselves relative to who they're not--so not much in the way of doing specific things for luck.

Duluth is not religious at all, really, having grown up in a society where the mainstream religion was suppressed from achieving organized expression and not fallen in with any covert groups or anything growing up, but he's very polite toward anything even mildly divine just in case, basically. Which includes politely adding a pebble to a cairn in honor of a mountain any time he passes one and dropping flowers in streams and rivers to ask not to be drowned, so I guess what that works out to is he's intensely superstitious.

He worries a lot about luck and ruining it by doing the wrong things, which is largely a childhood trauma thing tbh. I hadn't thought about giving him any ritual behaviors around that anxiety but it's a good idea. I'm sure there are a lot available.

18. How does your OC feel about education? How much education do they have? Are they studious or a slacker?

Owl comes from a prominent family so there were very high expectations and a lot of access to instruction. Her astronomical knowledge is very good and her history is extensive, as is her herbalism. She can't read. She has become numerate since leaving home, but only for very basic arithmetic; she can only do the common-sense sort of division and she does that in her head.

Owl's a very determined person with a good memory and control of her focus, and learns fairly quickly, but is only moderately adaptable and (especially as an adult) isn't highly motivated to learn new things just because they're new.

Duluth was the youngest of six children, but all his older siblings and mother were dead by the time he was four, and his father had married late to begin with and started having chest pains, so he saw the writing on the wall that he'd probably die before Duluth was up to working the farm alone enough to make rent or old enough to marry, and started selling off the tenancy rights to various plots of land to the neighbors, until he had the cash in hand to buy his nine-year-old an apprenticeship to a whitesmith in the nearest medium-sized town. (I have in mind the sort of whitesmith who works mainly in pewter, rather than in modifying forged iron with things like files and engravings, but for plot reasons may switch to the latter.)

That went pretty well until his master's former apprentice and only son went missing on the road, presumed dead, and the couple started taking their grief out on Duluth. So he broke his contract and ran off at eleven, leaving him with two years' worth of training. Didn't get past the basics, really, but he did pick up some advanced things from being around and observing, which is one of the purposes of apprenticeship as an education style. This is where he gets most of his grasp of runework, the kinds of virtues his master often had occasion to set into metal.

Later he tried to steal from some people he found camping, who turned out to be wanted criminals, just like you'd expect from people camping in some woods in a society where no one had decided this was a leisure activity somehow.

This got him adopted, and Elaine made sure he learned how to read because as a fugitive it had turned out to be a valuable survival skill. (She'd resisted being taught herself lmao.)

His writing is much weaker than his reading--they're not actually the same skill for all we tend to learn them together. He also learned sword-fighting and various survival skills from his new crime family. He isn't really numerate.

Duluth is very weird about education because he associates it with both acceptance and rejection in elaborate ways. So his level of effort is often less tied to the material than his relationship with his instructor.

He got really good with a sword because Marl was his main instructor with it at a time when Marl was pretty emotionally unavailable to him, because he takes a while to warm up to people and Elaine had kind of really shaken up their whole lives by suddenly adding a twelve year old just when she was finally an adult. So Duluth got it into his head that if he was good enough at swording Marl wouldn't turn against him.

The only source of formal education, in our terms, on the continent are currently the Colleges at Glissare, on the Sun Coast. Duluth would actually do really well in a couple of those, if he filled in some gaps in his learning first, and is technically qualified since Prince Barisson knighted him for his war service, but the normal age to start there is fifteen or sixteen after private tutoring and he's twenty-one with a shoddy educational base, so it can't really happen.