My hot take for this game is that I don't think people draw Ayre scary enough.

A slightly later snippet from the Passcode sequel for you!

“Okay! Okay, let’s all calm down for a minute,” Hunk says.

“Look-” Pidge says, at the same time Keith starts in with, “We could just-”

Hunk holds up his hand, looking slightly pained. “I mean this in the kindest possible way, but have the two of you ever come up with a plan that wasn’t, technically, a crime?”

Her mouth snaps shut. Keith glares mutinously beside her.

“Right,” Hunk says briskly. “Taking other suggestions.”

For Persona:

“Don’t tell me you’re taking the cat to school with you.”

Kurusu visibly considers for a moment, and then nods. “All right,” he says agreeably, and steps out the door.

It happens so quickly and smoothly that it catches Soujiro flat-footed. By the time he recovers, the door’s already shut. Through the window, he sees the tail zip back into the bag, as if the cat knows it’s been made. Soujiro watches them go and finally snorts softly. He should probably take Kurusu to task for that later. But a little backtalk is perfectly normal for a kid that age. And against his better sense, he likes the kid a little more for it.

(I like a lot of this one - someday I'll get back to it.)

For Passcode:

Hunk and Lance move off towards the middle of the room. Pidge thumps down on the bench they’ve vacated with a grunt. “Well, that sucked.”

Keith sinks down next to her with a grimace. “It’s going to get us killed if we can’t get a handle on it.”

“Which do you think will get us first? The galra or Allura?”

“Allura,” he says, deadpan and without hesitation.

(This is in progress! Just... slow progress.)

"Tagreau wants the body back."

"Fuck that, we tossed it two cycles ago. It's gone."

Attha shrugged, a motion with the nonchalant gravity of a boulder settling in place. "He's paying."

Anyways, Black Hole is about a ship whose crew makes a dubiously-legal living out of disposing of things people never want to see again in the eponymous black hole.

Alien Monoculture is mostly a bunch of disconnected notes at this point, but it's about a situation where the space-magic translators stop working, which is fine for the Paladins, but disastrous for both the Empire squad they're up against and the people they're trying to help.

I knew I could count on you all asking about the Naruto thing.

I have no excuse for this! I don't even like most of Naruto, but somehow I entered a fugue state and wrote a complete outline for the world's most cliched Naruto time travel premise (Sasuke gets inexplicably dumped back into pre-massacre Konoha).

No prose written for it, but something something unpleasant, traumatized people being forced to contend with an environment where the thoughts and habits they learned in order to survive are suddenly detrimental to getting them what they want.

I dunno! Maybe it'll get written someday! The fact that there's a complete outline is more than you can say for most of my WIPs.

"Give it to me. I will carry it."

"Tchk. A waste of time." Lae'zel stops nevertheless, and Verrin watches, his heart cold, as she reaches for her pack.

He grasps her wrist before she can complete the motion. She breaks his grip easily, a curse on her breath, but he pulls the map from his pocket before she can retaliate. He is careful to keep his body between it and the rest of the group.

"What-"

"You gave it to me this morning." He says it in gith, conscious of Shadowheart's footsteps behind them. "You don't remember, do you."

During my run, Lae'zel took a permanent hit to her intelligence in the Zaith'isk. I was thinking about that manifesting as difficulty with short-term memory, and wondering how people raised in githyanki society would navigate a "weakness" in someone they cared about.

@fourthage, like a dweeb I replied to you but didn't elaborate!

She might have thought it was her mind betraying her at last. An old woman out in the woods alone might imagine all sorts of things. But one cold morning, she found the tracks crossing the bend in the creek path. Something two-legged, child-sized, dragging bare feet with long toes through the snow. It had come out of the woods and lingered, circling the little bend in the track where she sometimes stopped to catch her breath, before retreating back into the woods.

She made do with yesterday’s leftovers that day.

I should come back to this one and clean it up.

Lina is beet red, and standing on the tips of her toes. He thinks it’s an unconscious thing to make herself look bigger. “I am a master in this Guild,” she hisses, “and I have never canoodled once in my life.” She digs in her pocket and smacks a badge down on the table.

Zelgadis is pretty sure she and Gourry got up to some canoodling, but he’s not about to correct her.

The woman at the desk glances at it cursorily and stamps the book. Her eyes drift to him.

“I don’t have a badge,” he admits. As an afterthought, he shrugs. “I’ve never canoodled either, though.” This is definitely a lie, but he’s willing to join Lina in solidarity.

This is a bunch of vague ideas about professional adventurers with outsized reputations approaching middle-age in search of a plot, but I keep poking at it, so maybe there's something there.

Tagged by @mystery-moose!

Calling some of these WIP is maybe kind of generous, but hope springs eternal. (Also my writing directory is a mess, so assume all of these are nested in weird ways in subfolders or sub-documents that make no sense.)

Looking at these does make me want to work on them again, so maybe progress will be made!

Consider yourself tagged if you would like to do this!