cryptkeeperkain - ♤Kain♤
♤Kain♤

Just an artist out here vibing 19 He/Void/Rot Asexual

150 posts

(points) HOW DID YOU FIND ME

(points) HOW DID YOU FIND ME

Op, you post links in halfstack that show your account AND you like or reblog 80% of the halfstack posts. I like checking the tags

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    la-bruja reblogged this · 2 years ago
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More Posts from Cryptkeeperkain

2 years ago

me wanting to make writing and art for Halfstack

Its Annoying When This Happens.

It’s annoying when this happens.

ADHD Awareness Month

2 years ago

Reblog to put one of these in your mutuals’ pocket when they’re not looking

Reblog To Put One Of These In Your Mutuals Pocket When Theyre Not Looking
Reblog To Put One Of These In Your Mutuals Pocket When Theyre Not Looking
2 years ago

sobs,,, i love it so much, yaya beloved

The Most Human Color

She is going to take a seat next to an entire bird and hope friendship happens.

Content: picnics, festivals occuring, fruit sando, stealing ahba's wallet (ahba was prepared for this), friends being physically affectionate, a giant woman, The Gang Makes Friends At School

TW: Depressive thoughts

Screen reader's note: Contains Hokkien English.

Read from the beginning

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There’s a saying that goes something like this- The mountains are full of bones, and if you walk long enough, you start stepping on teeth.

Sometimes stepping on teeth means the eggs of an extinct animal getting caught on a fishing net and hatching two weeks after they’re pawned off on the market as dead novelties. Sometimes it’s a dead man crawling out of his grave like a groundhog. Sometimes it’s digging out the roots of a really stubborn azalea tree and finding cave systems that span cities.

But sometimes, stepping on teeth is having to fight unlawful possession charges in court after following a recently unearthed “self-articulated art model” schematic and accidentally completing a fully sapient construct in the process, because the original designer liked to hide quirks like an original spark of the Flame of Creation in their designs.

Azure never really asked how it worked out for the poor bastard that completed her. She’s pretty sure it turned out fine? Maybe. Definitely. Absolutely. She- listen, she was mostly told not to get involved in that case. It wasn’t her responsibility! The Halfstack mountains are full of bones, sometimes those bones have teeth, and this has happened enough times that most of these teeth just get sent to calibrator school.

It’s like kid school, kind of. Except for adults. But not adult school. University and stuff like that assumes you’ve been to other forms of school. Calibrator school assumes you’ve literally been under a rock for the last century and adjusts accordingly. It’s not exactly hyperlunar quintessence. Just- this is what a sporophone is, this is how to use the motem, here’s how to get a library card, don’t try to fight the train, yes we can all see the zombies crawling out of the ocean every night, if you need to learn what a language is you can talk to the language department.

Azure didn’t need help in the language department, thank you very much. Fully pre-built Anglos slot right there, just needed to work on a few months of grammatical updates. What she definitely did need, however, was a Basic Cues and Conversation unit, so there was no avoiding that… or her fellow students.

Some of them are alright. There’s the akero- they’re probably an akero, they’re the same floating-whale-slug-cuttlefish thing the teacher is, and the teacher is an akero. There was two very cute and tiny fairies that had a matching pastel vs goth thing going on while they threatened to eat each other’s tails for taking up desk space, a dead guy who might be the youngest looking grandpa alive, and a glasses wearing bruin with one hell of a tattoo sleeve showing a burning field of flowers.

This is just normal now, or something.

And then there were these two who just came in. A green draconis with unkempt horns so branching and knobbly he almost scraped the doorframe on the way in, half hunched as he hovers over a very pale looking bird fellow with dark wings. Not the feathered pale of a white bird, or the pinkish pale some humans could get- silver and piercingly inorganic, knobbled blue collecting on the fingertips like a bleeding porcelain glaze. Honestly, that’s not too far out from Azure herself, and she’s literal painted porcelain with the cobalt patterns stenciled on her body.

She would like to pick up this person and rotate them a little bit. So small. So round. So not as liable to bite her hand off as the other ones. She is going to take a seat next to an entire bird and hope friendship happens.

Ravenslove/烏鴉愛 (it/its)

Huh. Pretty on the nose name. Its head swivels this way and that, eyes jumping between the other students but never settling until it turns to her and it does this- this little tiny jump, like it hadn’t expected her to be right there.

“Hello!” What’s that thing people do to be less threatening? Be smaller? Somehow? If Azure just… leans back a lot in this seat to be closer to the floor, does that count as smaller? Probably. “I’m new here! Your wings look very-”

“Th’ new coat jus’ came in, le,” Ravenslove interrupts. Its eye squints and it tilts its head. “Y’ weren’t done talking. Paisei.”

“Your wings look very soft,” Azure starts again. “Are they soft?”

“They are…” Ravenslove pauses for a long time. “...very… not sharp. Like hair-” It suddenly stops. “-why are you blue?”

Azure blinks. “I’m sorry?”

“Your hair is blue and-” Ravenslove gestures around its head in a circular motion. “Like putting th’ sky around your face. Only I see that in one person.” The stiff smile on its face pushes a squint into its eyes. “Piao liang de.”

“Oh! Well, I- uh-” Azure’s dialogue tree seems to wither by the second as she scrambles to formulate a response. “-you… you too!”

Ravenslove’s wings sink down as its shoulders drop with surprise, and then it lets out this abrupt, barking sound, almost like a laugh. Azure thinks they might be friends now.

(And yes, it was true.)

Turns out they were both still figuring out the whole people thing. But a construct and a former raven aren’t exactly learning the same things, so Azure didn’t get to see Ravenslove in class much after that first semester. They both still liked to have lunch in the same Aspenbone park by the campus, though, and neither of them really stopped showing up, so they sort of… talked.

“Fadir’s not really my name,” it says one day. “Is just word for ahba. They put it in there t’ make my name sound more real. It’s not my name.”

“Does Ravenslove feel more like your name?” Azure asks.

“It is… correct, I think,” Ravenslove haltingly allows. “It translates better, le. Before I had papers, I use the Guanhua words for it. Wuya Ai.” It ducks its head. “Och, I sound like a light novel chara, ne? Some kind of brood-ing dark hair girl on th’ covers.”

Azure briefly imagines some flowery titled romance piece with suspiciously Ravenslove-esque art on the cover. It would be a little funny.

Ravenslove looks off to the side. “Mostly, ah- I know my name is short for something, but I didn’t really think about it until the long one was the only thing they use for me.” Its wings curl tighter around its shoulders. “Fadir Ravenslove makes Yaya feel small, sometimes.”

“My built-in serial name matched the hexadecimal for the color Azure,” she admits. “I kind of bullshitted Azure because so many people were asking me for my real name.”

Ravenslove almost laughs. “We’re terrible at being people!”

“Maybe not too bad, right?” Azure tilts her head as she looks down. “People are supposed to choose names out of love. Even if I kind of made it up, blue’s still my favorite color.”

Ravenslove stays silent for a long while- staring up at the sky, golden sunlight dancing on its bright clothes.

And then there’s a soft voice, softer than anything Azure had ever heard.

“It’s my favorite color, too,” Yaya whispers.

=[]=

“OI, AH-YUN!” Fadir waves over at the distant shape. “LIHO!”

“Yaya!” Azure stands up from her picnic blanket and waves the group over. “Liho! Who’s this?”

Fadir bounces the baby in its arm and pats Lynel’s shoulder. “My children!” It blinks. “This is new.”

“Oh! Hello!” Azure kneels down a bit to try and meet Lynel’s height. “I’m one of Yaya’s old friends. It’s nice to meet you!”

Lynel stares drily past Azure to level Fadir with a judging look. “Why do we always run into your weird friends?”

“I have many friends!” Fadir happily chirps. “Be-cause I am so very old.”

“Ah.”

Lynel doesn’t seem upset, but they do sound a little bored with the introduction- or at least, more bored with Azure than the prospect of the dragon boat race about to happen by the riverside. This is their first time seeing a loong festival, after all.

Let them have fun. Nothing bad happens today.

Fadir takes a small coin purse out of its coat sleeves and drops it into Lynel’s hands. “I saw a tangren stand on the way here. Pick up some for everyone, okay?”

“Tang ren.” Lynel frowns. “Sugar people?”

“Oh, those little sugar dolls!” Azure realizes. “They’re so cute. I wish I’d remembered to try one earlier.”

Fadir chuckles. “Alright, get one for her, too. I unpack lunch while you’re gone.”

Vis squirms as Fadir sets down the picnic basket, reaching for the contents inside. Fadir sighs, taking one of the sugarcane stalks out, and Vis is immediately distracted by the chance to chew on a random, vaguely edible plant object.

“I thought you said you were done having kids,” Azure gently says.

“Having kids,” Fadir specifies. “I didn’t have them, really. It just sort of… happened.”

Azure snorts at the mangled phrasing, watching Fadir unpack the food. It’s nothing special, really, just some meat buns and fruit sando, and a bunch of sweet rice crackers for Vis. Just enough to tide everyone over during the parade before heading to the food stalls of the festival proper later on.

A white hand reaches through the down of Fadir’s hair, a golden wrist joint barely visible as she tucks a crooked strand of feathers back into place. For a moment, things fall out of place. Fadir sees the needle that felted her cloche hat, the hand that ironed her blue curls, the chisel that broke to detail the iris of her eyes, the stencils that painted the cobalt on her-

An allay slaps Fadir’s nose. Right. Lunch pack. Dragon boat parade. Azure is here.

“I almost forgot how soft you were,” she murmurs.

“I can’t really tell,” Fadir jokes. “Same to me as always.” It arranges the wrapped food neatly on the blankets. “How’ve you been?”

“Well… I kept going to school,” Azure starts. “You were a lot farther along than I was. And I just- I sort of didn’t stop? I like learning new things, and the classes are basically free anyway.”

“I might go back an’ learn t’ sew,” Fadir tentatively reveals. “We’re gonna be wearin’ out a lot of clothes soon.”

The sugarcane Vis is chewing on is wearing down. Fadir gently grabs it to peel away more of the skin, but Vis just growls and keeps tugging on it with their teeth.

Welp. Vis has herbivore bits anyways. If Vis wants to chew on a stubborn plant, Fadir can’t really stop them.

“Well, if you do come back to the school,” Azure says, a secretive smile breaking across her face, “you should stop by my class. I’m teaching the construct unit for Body Coordination now.”

Oh. Fadir remembers that. One of those movement and reaction time classes for people put into new bodies. Fadir never took those classes. Its problems weren’t exactly fixable. (Not by the time the rest of the world found it, at least.)

You’ll upset her if you say something like that.

“Y’ sound happy,” Fadir decides to say.

“I thought about being a dance teacher,” Azure continues. “Cus I was a dancing model, y’know? But I kind of want to keep that for myself. I like this too! It’s nice.”

“You’ll be a good teacher.”

Fadir doesn’t know if it sounds more like a platitude or a prophecy, but neither of them really need to know. It’s just true. It makes sense, perhaps, that Azure is simply kind enough to be good.

Azure looks at Fadir from the corner of her eye, a growing frown on her face. “Yaya, are you happy?”

Huh.

Is it happy?

It’s never really… thought about that. It’s never really had to think about that. It doesn’t think of itself as unhappy.

(But is it happy?)

It wants to say it is, but it can’t stand the idea of lying. Diviners have no proof of the past, present, or future but their word of mouth, they cannot become liars of any sort, and the Sunraven most of all.

(But is it happy?)

Azure must catch something in the look on Fadir’s face. Her frown softens into a more patient smile. “I tripped you up again, didn’t I? That’s okay. We can wait for you to come back.”

Fadir mutely watches Vis waggle its fingers around, and wonders if it’s happy. It is- it is a happy thing, that these children have a home. It is a happy thing that Corvo gets to fly in a world of people like himself. The Tower is a good thing, isn’t it? Slovenguard is a home, as- as few people as it shelters. It was made to be a home.

Does any of this make Fadir happy? This stone smile carved into its face, the leftovers of flesh and bone irrevocably changed, does it mean anything at all?

But Azure wasn’t exactly asking for a profound answer. Just if Fadir was happy- that doesn’t need to be something grand. So Fadir turns away from that bigger picture and makes something smaller.

Is it happy right now?

=[]=

Sometimes Fadir takes a long while to think about things. Maybe it’s the prophetic condition, maybe it’s the eternal hesitation of a mind not born to think about abstract things, maybe it’s a combination of both.

Azure finds she doesn’t really mind. Constructs have the patience to wait, and it’s nice, kind of, that it takes its time to say something honest instead of producing an immediate answer. It’s doing that thing with its eyes- pinprick pupils turning into wide gaping chasms, and back again. Processing.

They’re both so equally transfixed by this that neither of them notice Lynel running across the grass and ramming into Fadir’s body. Vis squeaks loudly as they tumble over.

“AHBA, I RAN INTO A BUNCH OF KITE FIGHTERS-” Lynel throws a paper bag at Azure. “I got the sugar things-” Lynel shakes Fadir’s shoulders. “AHBA, THEY HAD KITE FIGHTERS AND ONE OF THE KITES GOT CUT BUT I CHASED AFTER IT AND THEY DIDN’T LET ME GIVE IT BACK SO I GUESS I JUST HAVE A KITE NOW-” Lynel stops. “You should have told me to stop shouting by now. Ahba, you okay?”

“You’ve never called me that before,” Fadir whispers, eyes wide.

Lynel’s cheeks flush with mottled dark red. “It’s not that big of a deal,” they mutter. “It just makes sense.”

Vis, apparently discontent with no longer being the star of the show, follows Lynel’s example and slaps Fadir’s belly. “Ahba! Baba!”

“Hey! You can’t just steal my words, you cheater!” Lynel baps Vis’ chubby toddler face. “That’s illegal. You stop that.”

“Baba.”

Fadir takes a wheezing, rattling breath, and for the first time its smile actually wavers. Its frozen expression wobbles in place, friendly squint rendered jarringly open.

“If that’s what I am, that’s fine, le.” Another breath. “It’s fine.”

“Did- was that bad?” Lynel hesitantly asks. “You sound sad.”

“No. No, I’m not sad. I- ah-” Fadir stiffly pats Lynel’s head. “I’m happy. I’m very happy!” It looks up at Azure. “I’m very happy.”

Azure gently smiles and smooths Fadir’s ruffled feathers a bit. “I’m glad.”

Lynel looks between the two of them. “Are you two flirting in front of me or something? That’s gross.”

Fadir clicks loudly as its wings puff with surprise. “HEH?”

Azure draws her hand back and slaps it against the picnic blanket. “Who says we’re flirting? Nothing happening here, nope, not at all-”

“Gals bein’ pals,” Fadir says.

“JUST GALS BEING PALS!” Azure shouts in a jaunty voice. “WHAT COULD BE BETTER THAN THIS?”

“You guys are so weird. Gimme all your food. I’m hungry.” Lynel stuffs a pork bun in his mouth and grabs a rice cracker for Vis. “I’m stealing the money you gave me and buying the first things Vis stares at. You can’t stop me.”

“That’s why I gave you all that money,” Fadir easily reveals. “Go have fun.”

Azure holds back her laughter until Lynel disappears into the crowd with both the childrens’ lunches in one arm and Vis in the other. “Did you actually pre-budget your kids stealing from you?”

“Yes,” Fadir bluntly responds. It pushes a pork bun and fruit sando into her arms. “Jiak, le.”

“I don’t even need to eat,” Azure reminds it, as if this exact thing hasn’t happened every other time they’ve met up.

Fadir makes direct, unblinking eye contact as it slowly drops strawberry milk candies on top of the wrapped sandwiches. This is a war of attrition that cannot be won. Azure eventually accepts defeat, and the fact that the cut fruit sandos will be shaped like her favorite flowers on the inside.

(There are worse things to live with, and excess candy is not one of them.)

“You silly, silly bird.” Azure leans her head against her hand. “I’m glad to see you again.”

2 years ago
Most Childhood Friendships Dont Last To Adulthood, But Ones That Do Are Stronger For It.@halfstack-smp

most childhood friendships dont last to adulthood, but ones that do are stronger for it. @halfstack-smp


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2 years ago

POTS makes me nearly pass out at physical activity and causes me to be tired all the time but this mentality is what made me hesitate about using the word disabled for myself

sometimes i see posts that reduce physical disability to chronic pain or otherwise being in pain / seem to operating on the assumption that pain is integral to the physically disabled experience so...this is a gentle reminder that there are plenty of chronic physical conditions (illnesses or no) that don't inherently or always involve pain but can still be incapacitating nonetheless. being deaf or HoH don't (always) involve pain. blindness or other vision problems don't (always) involve pain. paralysis, numbness, weakness, and coordination problems don't (always) involve pain. not all deformities involve pain. lacking a limb doesn't always involve pain. additionally, a physically disabled person not (or only sometimes) experiencing pain due to their condition(s) doesn't always mean being better off than those who do experience it.


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