I Just Came Up With The Most Devasting Wolf359 AU Today And You're All Gonna Hear About It.

📢 I just came up with the most devasting Wolf359 AU today and you're all gonna hear about it. 🚀

My brain really chose VIOLENCE coming up with this AU on father's day.

Here is the set up: the crew gets themselves into a stalemate with Cutter and Pryce that lasts a REALLY long time. The crew can't make it to Earth without getting blown up, but Cutter and Pryce can't get what they need from the crew without gambling too much. The stalemate lasts a long time. Like a REALLY long time, at least a decade. And this is when Cutter decides to play dirty. Well, dirtier than usual, even for him.

Basically, Cutter finds Anne (Doug's daughter), and very much appeals to her the same way he appealed to Miranda, through showing her support, promising her a way to help her disability and make her even "greater" and praising her potential and accomplishment in spite of the adversity she's suffered. He also connects with her via speeches about how his (Cutter's) father never saw the potential in him either. Cutter becomes a sort of mentor to Anne under the guise of "oh look this nice science man is tutoring deaf kids. What a philanthropist!". If we want to go really dark, Cutter has Kate and the rest of Anne's family killed in a terrible accident and adopts her, but he could also just be a mentor to Anne. Either way, she ends up trusting him, and seeing him as more of a father to her than Doug, and starts growing bitter about what Doug did to her and believes that he doesn't care about her at all (Anne thinks he never called, wrote home, or anything, and Cutter stages a whole thing where Anne finds some fake recording he made to make it sound like Doug never cared about her at all so that Cutter can come in and fake comfort her).

Anyway, flash forward through the decades long stalemate between Cutter and the Hephaestus crew, and now Anne's a college student who works for Goddard Futuristics (she's considered one of the higher ups/part of Cutter's inner circle). Like Miranda has her glow in the dark eyes and night vision, Anne has specially made hearing aids created by Goddard Futuristics that allow her to hear whisperers on the other side of the ship and very subtle sounds. Anne's relationship with Pryce and Cutter would be interesting. I can see Pryce being jealous of her (for obvious reasons not to mention that fact that she gets Cutter's attention), but I can also see Pryce finding common ground with her since they have similar backstories that Cutter can't relate to (though Pryce would deny it and whenever Cutter refers to Anne as their little girl, she rolls her eyes and say something along the lines of "for the last time, I'm not playing house with you, Marcus. She's a tool. Like the rest of them."). If Pryce did go with the common ground route, it would be interesting to see if they ever ended up ganging up on Cutter for any reason (I think they'd do this if they were both mad at Hera and Doug at the same time and insisted on making decisions based on this anger), and whether Cutter would find this alliance amusing and endearing or threatening.

But back to the story. So Anne works for Goddard Futuristics now, and the anger she has towards her father has led her to buy into Cutter's philosophy of survival of the strongest, immortality/new bodies, a better future, all of it (though obviously Cutter is lying to her about some stuff because...well he's Cutter, he lies to everyone). So Doug and the crew finally have a show down with their enemies after over a decade in space and who shows up to torture them but Anne. Doug doesn't even recognize her at first, because she's an adult now, but when he does, he's devasted. Anne doesn't believe he's sorry about what he did and insists that this is what she wants now and that Cutter has been a better father to her than Doug ever could be. The crew becomes very conflicted because while they were prepared to fight Cutter and Pryce, nobody wants to kill Anne because despite what she's done, she's Doug's daughter (which is what Cutter was counting on).

Anyway, flash even more forward to Anne discovering recordings that prove her father cares about her and that Cutter is a horrible person, and she eventually breaks down and flips sides. I don't think Pryce would be sad to see her go, and if she was, she'd either get over it, or get angry at Anne for her "betrayal". Cutter might also have more complicated feels by that point if Anne reminds him of Pryce, and I could see him trying to force her to stay. Also at one point, Anne's special hearing aids break, and that's when she discovers that Doug learned sign language for her, just in case he ever got the chance to see her again.

Anyway, feel free to lmk what you think!

The fact that Fabian hating Gilear is probably rooted in the values Bill taught him, that he's trying to deconstruct, is so fucking interesting. He spent his entire life being told the only way to live up to his father was to be powerful, to be LEGENDARY. Now here comes Gilear; incompetent, and weak, and loved. Not only is he cared for by Fabian's friends, he literally lives up to Bill Seacaster by going out with his widow. He's the antithesis of everything Fabian's been taught, and god, that has to be devastating.

On top of that, Halariel was absent from his childhood, and as soon as he turns 18, she leaves him alone to go gallivanting around with Gilear. In Fabian's eyes, Gilear isn't just replacing his father; he's replacing HIM in his mother's affections. Now he has a little sibling on the way, and you KNOW Halariel is gonna be active in that kid's life. With two loving parents and no pressure to be great, this kid will grow up with everything Fabian didn't get to have. No WONDER he's pissed.

Autism diagnosis? Yeah I’ve got a dropout subscription

Sobbing

i feel like this is,, WAY too short to be my first post on ao3 but it’s short enough for people to decide if they’d want me to post on there at all or not so hear me out—

this is a little rough draft based on an idea i had of minkowski transmitting lil messages to eiffel after the events of episode 28 to cope with,, all the stuff while he’s missing, since she found out he’s been transmitting his own logs to deep space and she just wants to try any way of getting to him, lmk if it sucks or not—

. . .Before you say anything. . . I know how touchy you get about other people messing with your equipment. I’m sorry. I just. . . needed someone to talk to about. . . all of the other people I have to talk to.

. . . Does that make sense?

. . . I don’t know why I’m asking, it’s not like you can give me an answer. Even so. . . I hope you hear this. I hope you’re in a place where you. . . could hear this. If it ever finds you. I don’t exactly know which direction of deep space this is going, but. . . I really hope it finds you.

I’m sorry about teasing you for that, by the way. Transmitting your logs. I guess it’d be a lot easier to feel ridiculous not knowing if the countless hours of you talking to yourself actually ended up somewhere or not. At least this way you know it’ll be heard. Eventually.

. . . Things are a lot different around here without you. It’s funny. I used to joke about how much I’d like the quiet when you weren’t around, anymore. Turns out it. . . isn’t as luxurious as I’d imagined. When you aren’t here to break the silence, it gets. . . heavy. Tense. I guess that’s why you never shut up. Maybe I should be thanking you for that.

. . . I don’t wanna get too. . . sappy, or whatever, in case this actually does manage to reach you. I just. . . hope you’re doing okay. That’s all. We. . . I would really like to have you back. And we’re doing everything we can to make sure that happens.

I’m gonna stop transmitting, now, okay? But. . . maybe I’ll stop by tomorrow, if things keep going the way they are. We’ll see. Until then. . . just try to hang on. We’ll see you soon.

. . . Goodnight, Eiffel.

Depends where you're coming from! Here's a goofy little guide:

If you know nothing about D&D, start with Fantasy High

If you know nothing about D&D but you watch RuPaul's Drag Race, start with Dungeons and Drag Queens

If you're coming from Critical Role, start with Escape the Bloodkeep

If you're coming from The Adventure Zone, start with Tiny Heist

If you're coming from Dungeons and Daddies (or prefer other TTRPGs over D&D), start with Mentopolis

If you're coming from NADDPod, honestly pick any Intrepid Heroes season (that's Fantasy High, A Crown of Candy, Unsleeping City, Starstruck Odyssey, Neverafter)

If you're an old school College Humor fan (or if you joined Dropout for Game Changer first), you could start with Mice and Murder

If you're big into comics, sci-fi, etc., start with Starstruck Odyssey

If you like D&D for its fantasy settings, start with A Crown of Candy or Escape the Bloodkeep

If you were a Percy Jackson kid, start with The Unsleeping City

If you were a Harry Potter kid, start with Misfits and Magic

If you were a classic lit kid, start with Burrow's End

And if you prefer really long campaigns over shorter seasons, I'd go for the Spyre series (in order: Fantasy High, Fantasy High: Sophomore Year, optional Pirates of Leviathan, optional The Seven, Fantasy High: Junior Year)

There's also quite a few I WOULDN'T start with. For example:

-Fantasy High Sophomore and Junior Year, The Seven, Pirates of Leviathan, Unsleeping City live season (all sequels or expansions on established universes)

-Coffin Run (awesome season, just a slightly different vibe from many of the main seasons)

-The Ravening War (a prequel! Technically you could understand it alone, but I would watch A Crown of Candy first, especially since they're DMed by different people, so the tone is slightly different)

-Shriek Week (fuck Gabe Hicks)

real talk where do I start d20. there are so many campaigns

Okay but it's so interesting either way-

If it IS a namecloak, that means she chose to qualify her relationship with magic and the world as one of hope. She's named for the new day, the herald of a bright dawn to end the darkness. She is the song that brings forth the light, that wakes people from their slumber and makes the world alive.

If it's NOT a namecloak??? Then by golly that's a naming convention we Have Not Seen Anywhere In Umora Yet. I strongly doubt "Wrensong" is a surname in the traditional (Western, at least) sense, because her full name is a sentence. She is morning wren song. And I, for one, want to know more about where she came from or at the very least who named her, if not herself.

The fact that Morning Wrensong's first name is just a noun is NOT a coincidence. It is clearly some kind of namecloak. Brennan I am NOT deceived I have SEEN THROUGH YOUR SCHEME