Been catching up with Air Gear over the past few days, and this has been stuck in my head and just begging to get out and wreak havoc upon fanfic readers. Beware.
Summary: Combat is not a 'fine' art. AT combat even less so.
Screw-ups aren't uncommon. 'Controlled' injury? What a fucking oxymoron. Emphasis on _moron_.
Borderline darkfic warning.

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***
Tell me what the rain knows
an Air Gear AU shortfic
by Griever
***
Put them on.
"Ya sure about this, ki ... nah. Ya sure about this, Crow?"
Lace them up. Make sure it holds. AT. The source of it all. What started it all.
"No. Fuck, Sora, how'm I supposed to be _sure_ about something like this?"
Stomp, well and hard, and hear the squeal of tearing floor.
"Yer set on doin' this. Enough to make people think yer sure."
Yeah, the knee still hurts, but to hell with it.
Too angry to give a damn. Too angry to care. Too angry to notice the pain.
All it took was a single phone-call to his cell, and the photo sent along with it.
Kazu ... should he hate him for that? He sounded all kinds of messed up, and Ikki doubted it was because of what he'd seen. But he wasn't talking.
Not.
His.
Problem.
Kazu'd always been too tough to break. He'd work through it, and come out stronger after, whatever the hell he's going through.
Ikki ... with Ikki, it was always less a matter of working through a problem, and more one of coming at it head on, and then soaring away straight over its head.
That ...
... that wouldn't work this time.
"Why the hell ain't you stopping me, ossan?"
Takeuchi Sora frowned, then shook his head. "Yeah, I could ... but, ya gotta do what ya gotta do, I'm thinkin'. What, I'm s'posed to stop you from tryin' ta follow yer Road?" The wheelchair-bound onetime Wind King sighed. "Wind's a fickle thing, Crow. Ya know that. I know that. It can be the gentlest thing in the world. But there's times ... there's times it's the most unforgiving sonuvabitch out there as well. And yer the Wind, bird-boy. That's just the way it is."
***
The flames shot upwards with unholy glee, staining the night sky crimson.
That was the first thing she saw.
And when she realized just _where_ those flames were coming from, she didn't even stop to consider before she was running, vaulting, sprinting over and past whatever got in her way.
When she laid eyes on the scene, she felt relief. They were out.
Huddled together, shaken, and in their sleepwear, but they were out.
"Mikan, Ringo, Shiraume!" She shouted. Her sisters, the only true family she'd ever had ... she didn't know what she'd have done had something happened to them.
But that still left ...
"Ikki! Where's Ikki?!"
Mikan shook her head slightly, and Noyamano Riku's heart stopped ...
"Broken kneecap."
... until the voice came. Harsh. So very, very harsh and unforgiving was the tone, that she didn't recognize it until she looked up.
"Fractured hip, multiple fractures to the pelvis," Ikki. Minamo Itsuki. Crow. Her 'little brother' that she wouldn't have exchanged for anything in the world. Not that she was demonstrative about that.
"Fucking _nerve damage_, an' they're sayin' she'll likely have to learn how to _walk_ again. That she'll never _run_ again, much less anything else. Hell, they don't even know if she'll _wake up_ at all!"
That look on his face, as he stood there, scowling, staring down from a perch on top of a streetlight, straight at ...
"You know, you should have just fucking killed her. Instead, you were so fucking _magnanimous_ about it, so fucking _arrogant_ ... I don't know you at all, do I? And what I'm seeing? It disgusts me."
... her sisters?
"You took her sky."
He reached into his jacket, drawing something out from beneath. Scattering metallic bits and pieces that hit the ground ... very familiar bits and pieces.
Bits and pieces that, when they'd still been together, Riku had worn and used.
"So I'm takin' yours."
The Thorn Regalia ATs. Mark of the leader of Sleeping Forest, the Queen of Thorns.
"And your precious Sleeping Forest?"
He flicked his free hand, that she realized wasn't free at all ... but holding a lighter.
"I'll fucking _burn it_ to the ground."
Just like that, he was gone. A shadow in the darkness, on silent crow wings.
And Riku, though she knew she wouldn't like the answer, still had to ask. "Ringo ... what have you _done_?"
The only things that broke the silence of night were the roaring flames, and Ringo's sobbing.
***
END tell me what the rain knows
***
---
That's right. What if Ringo messed up and Simca really _was_ in as bad a way as the chapters where she'd brought to the hospital indicate at first.
And what if Kazu had caught the whole thing on camera?
I'm thinking, Ikki'd be going apeshit.
And yeah, I'm channeling my own feelings here, because this more recent Sleeping Forest? It makes me sick.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm

Dennou Coil is Hayao Miyazaki does Serial Experiments Lain.
It's cute yet has that "lurking horror" tone that you expect for a Lovecraft tale - all in a well-animated bundle.
Project Blue is over a year old and I still wonder why no one's picked up more than one episode to fansub. It's pretty much Johnny Quest mixed with everyone of Gerry Anderson's shows: Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and UFO. Human super-science goes up against alien invaders while two plucky kids, Billy Kimura, a Richie Rich type science detective, and his rival, Penny Carter, who is Johnny Quest with a dog named Washington, go around investigating mysterious disappearances of G-reactor powered vehicles. Lotta Brest, the requisite scientist's daughter, tags along, while a masked guy flying an advanced fighter named Sky Knight armed with Tesla cannons kicks UFO butt.
It's so retro-60's it even has the soundtrack:
youtube.com/watch?v=vyjUdYYBdPc
ureshii fansubbed the first episode and there's an episode 2 raw floating around but I can't find the last 4 episodes.
But the two I watched were satisfying in themselves. I'll have to hunt around for a DVD, even if I have to pay out of my nose for it.

Feel free to contribute, critiscize, or simply lol. This is an exorcism of a bunny that's been sitting in my head for a couple months now - what if vampires invaded, modern day Alaska, via dimensional portals?

Kenneth Elm opened his eyes and blinked the sleep out of them. He didn't move anything else, and lay in bed silently, feeling the alarm roll across his nerves. The darkness of his bedroom resolved, the small lights of various pieces of electronics providing a night-light level glow.
His bedroom door was open a few inches, thanks to the cat, and the shimmering light from his father's old and much-repaired plasma globe filtered in through the gap.
Ken blinked again, preperatory to going back to sleep, and saw a shadow cross the light from the globe. Focussing on his ears, the best way to determine who was moving about the house in the night, Ken couldn't hear his father's slightly clumsy, heavy steps, or his mother's more pointed tapping, or even his sister's whisking shuffle.
Ken tensed slightly, readying himself to sit up and go investigate, and his door started to open. Abandoning movement, he shuttered his eyes and peered through the lashes at the door. The light from his stereo and computer monitor's power lights and whatnot was sufficient to reveal a tall, oddly built figure, with no definition to his sides.
The figure opened the door fully, and the light was just barely sufficient for Ken to see a face directly out of a bad vampire movie. Ken rolled off the bed and fell to the floor, screaming. As Ken rolled under the bed, the bed rocked as the intruder grabbed the mattress and flung it aside, repeating the act with the box spring to reveal young Ken.
When the box spring came out, Ken shot his hand to the shelves of junk that every young boy has, his was at the head of the bed, and his hand closed around something. Relying on tactile memory and blind luck, Ken stabbed at the figure, and was rewarded with a squawk of surprise as a spare whip for his amateur radio antenna poked the dark figure in the mouth.
The figure reached up and flew backwards, as Eric Elm, Ken's father, grabbed it by the back of the neck and threw it down the hall. The figure crashed into the shelves that the globe sat on, and the globe wobbled, tipped, and fell down into Eric's hand, as he stepped forward and kicked the figure in the ass, rescuing his plasma globe on the way.
The globe was tossed to Ken, who set it aside, and Eric turned the light on. The figure on the floor, struggling to pull it's head out of the tangle of steel that had resulted from its initial flight into the shelves, screamed. The scream was quite loud and quite high pitched, and must have been trapped and reverbrated fairly effectively by the steel panels of the shelf unit, as the scream immediately stopped, replaced by a hiccuping groan. The figure was revealed to be a slender man in a rather tattered suit, all in black, with a flowing black cape, now crumpled about it's shoulders.
Eric kicked the figure again, then turned to his son and made a pistol gesture with his hand. Returning his attention to the prone figure, Eric stomped down, his oil-field toughened foot landing in the small of the figure's back, just as it attempted to push off the floor and pull it's head out again. Ken showed back up out of Eric's bedroom, his hand full of big black pistol.
"Got it, dad"
Eric removed his foot from the figure, and reached down again. grabbing one scrawny wrist in each hand, he pulled backwards, one of his legs between the legs of the prone figure, one outside. The figure was jerked out of the shelf unit and slammed into Eric's ankle with a sensitive spot, and howled again. The horrible sound made both men grimace, and Ken took a step back into the doorway of his bedroom, but ceased when Eric thoughtfully bounced the face of his captive off the floor.
"OK, loser, this is what's going to happen" Eric pronounced, his voice steady, but hot with anger. "I'm going to let go of one of your hands and set you up against the wall, you're going to behave, or my son's going to shoot you."
Eric paused in his speech, and Ken racked the slide on the pistol, making his own audible punctuation. The figure hissed, and Eric bounced it off the floor a few more times before releasing it's left hand. That hand immediately swept around to grasp Eric's right wrist, and squeezed hard enough that Eric grunted. He forced the figure into a sitting position against the wall, kneeled in front of it, and recoiled in shock. The face confronting him was a realization of the 1970's cliche movie vampire, red glaring eyes lit from behind, white leathery skin, enlarged batlike ears, sharp fangs bared in a hissing snarl of rage.
Eric pushed his recoil further, surging back to his feet and taking the vampire with him. The vampire cooperated, lunging forward and leading with the fangs, but Eric slipped sideways and slammed the vampire into the wall behind them, jarring it momentarily, allowing Eric to smash one beefy pipeworker's fist into it's leprous face. A look of shock remained when the fist retracted, and Eric changed his grip to the vampire's neck.
"You got one fucking chance to explain yourself, asshole!" Eric shouted into the vampire's face. The vampire lunged forward again, fangs snapping at Eric's face, and Ken pushed the barrel of the pistol into the thing's ear and squeezed the trigger.
The explosive crack of the pistol round slapped into the ears of both men, nearly deafening them to the scream of the vampire as the powder burns, instead of being mere scorches, caught and burned, burning the vampire like a cannon fuse.
When the burning was done, nothing remained but a pile of ashes, scorched paint, a disgusting stench and a pile of dust. Ken safed the pistol, looking at it like he'd never seen it before, then looked up at his father, confusion on his face. Eric returned his look with equal puzzlement, then shook his head like a dog coming out of water.
"What the fuck was that, dad?"
"Damned if I know, son. If I didn't know better, I'd have said it was a vampire."
Ken opened his mouth to reply, and the phone rang.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

Reusing the extra-creepy head from Number A, here's Doctor Whiteface.

--Sam
"I reasoned that if a normal-sized clown was funny, a giant clown would be even funnier."

Since we have a free slot over in the Arcane Teleporter area, can we get a porter to Boomtown in the Legendary Base?--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel
"Camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel. The stuff of legend! Right, Boo?"

www.starcraft2.com/--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel
"Camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel. The stuff of legend! Right, Boo?"

My latest recommendation has inspired this question.
Bob, how do you see Doug and the Twins getting along?

So, what with everyone having all sorts of pictures of thier toons like Bert ;-) I decided to have one commissioned as well. It arrived yesterday :-) -C-
Oops, forgot to say; the artist is Jeffrey Moy.
Behold!
Morgan and Bella Tango!

Reposted by request:
A good Teleport bind for Warshades:
/bind lalt+lbutton powexec_name Shadow Step
Hold down the left ALT key and click on a location with the left mouse button and you TP. Also works great with regular Teleport, just change the power name.

Tray binds:
Basically the bottom and middle trays hold my main attacks, defenses, and these 3 macros -

/macro human "powexec_toggle_off Dark Nova$$powexec_toggle_off Black Dwarf$$powexec_name Gravity Shield$$goto_tray_alt2 3"

(Tray 3 has my non essential human powers, temps and recall here)

/macro nova "powexec_name Dark Nova$$goto_tray_alt2 4"

(Tray 4 has your Nova powers in.)

/macro dwarf "powexec_name Black Dwarf$$goto_tray_alt2 5"

(Tray 5 has your Dwarf powers in.)

So when you press Nova, you shapeshift and Nova powers appear in the top tray. Same with Dwarf. Press Human to go back to normal with human powers in the top tray and turn on Gravity Shield.

These are easy to adapt to a Peacebringer, just change the appropriate power and form names.

Global: @Jimmy Amp
"Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow's too lazy to form an opinion." -- Will Rogers

Come one, come all - the Facets of the Yrmaw are going to try and hit the town with a blast! Saturday night, 10:30-11 pm, PST! Welcome to the shining road!

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"I'm terribly sorry, but I have to kill you quite horribly now."