Also Side Note - Blog Posts

I am back with my, 'Odile gets stuck with Siffrin after Sus event' AU, which will now be referred to as the Suspicion! AU

Basically, Siffrin, of course, loves handing the flowers out to his family. One of the few things they do take joy in. But, since they all react the same, it becomes less fun. Siffrin still does it, of course, but less frequently and it's one less thing that make them happy now.

Until Odile is stuck. At first, Siffrin just gives Odile a majority of the flowers since they have Endless Amounts of Guilt, and while he can't do much, he can give out flowers which seem to make Odile happy (they do, they very much do. Odile every now and then will give one back since they both go to the shop as a thank you). However, it also very quickly rekindles the love for flower gifting, since Odiles new reactions to them make Siffrin like it again. AKA, it forces them into the awareness that if the others could react differently and have a silly amass of flowers, they would.

Eventually Odile asks why Siffrin is basically giving Odile a flower collection even if she can't keep them every time, to which Siffrin responds that it's fun.

laying alone on the floor is weirdly life affirming, I highly recommend

the fact that Luna Maximoff was literally born before Billy and Tommy but bc of the retro-reincarnation* the twins are full grown adults and Luna is still a middle-schooler.

*nobody in the mid-2000s was playing close enough attention to the timeline, also because Luna is the Franklin Richards of Atillan and will never age.

Ight I hope you don't mind me putting this here but-

BAM!

This is my oc for your fallen gabe Au if that's alright!

His names Enoch (no relation to the book of Enoch) he's a throne angel so about one rank or two above Gabriel. Hence why his face is a bit more humanoid

Also side note he is a fallen angel of wrath but I haven't finished the drawing for that yesterday and this one's been done for awhile and I reaaallly wanted to show him off so I'll be talking more about him pre fall.

Basically after God's disappearance he was one of the founding members of the council (though not for long).

During the Sisyphus insurrection he lead the charge against Sisyphus unfortunately permanently loosing the use of his wings, rumor states that his wings were torn off by Sisyphus himself but the validity of this statement is iffy. Though it was confirmed they where torn off in the battle

Part of the reason he didn't get his wings back is because he's from one of the oldest generations of angels makeing his wings extra fragile (plus eh, more of a head cannon to me that angel wing are so fragile it's hard to heal them from terrible injuries like that)

Both before and after the Sisyphus insurrection though he was an avid believer in the "ferryman have paid for there sins" and to let them into heaven (part of the reason he's now fallen). He's also had a tendency to yell when he got angry (and he got angry a lot).

But the thing he's most famous for is haveing either A. Brought the idea of tearing the light from angels as a punishment to the council or B. Taught the council how to tear the light from an angel without God's assistance (like god had to approve of an angels light being torn from them before hand). But I'll let you decide whatever.

And he was all for this "tear the light" out of the heretics bodie's". At first the council didn't agree but once they realized how useful it was to keep people in check they also went full force on it.

Part of me is thinking he either went a bit Robespierre and went crazy with tearing the light from people he thought was heretics or he thought the council was going crazy with tearing the light from people (probably the ladder)

Eventually though the council got tired of Enoch yelling about how the ferryman should be forgiven. And whatever stance he had on the councils use of tearing the light out of people. and in turn used the very punishment he brought to the council against him, tearing the light from his body. Over the years heaven forgot about him and the council said he retired.

He became a fallen angel of wrath and there's a lot of ideas I have there but this is already a wall of text so I apologize. In short as a fallen angel of wrath he went a bit crazy from the constantly drowning.

Final notes,

He probably knew our favorite archangels, maybe interacted with Gabriel a couple of times from being on the council, and Raph from haveing lost his wings in the insurrection (the one patient he couldn't heal other then Micheal)but I don't think he was to to close to either of them. Part of me wants to think of Enoch as a kind of mentor to Uriel but that's up to you. I just think it would be neat since Enoch Pre fall and after the insurrection was a pretty decent guy typically spending most of his time trying to find ways to make heaven better overall, once haveing been this source of enlightenment turned into this monster of rage and anger.

It would probably hurt Uriel to see what Enoch becomes but not destroy him completely. But that's more for when I get fallen Enoch art finished.

Ight, thank you for dealing with my ramblings and this monster of an ask I just really wanted to show my boy off.

OOOOH i really like the idea that he introduced light being torn from angels and so, whether he knew it or not, he ushered in the age of the council's tyranny once they realized how useful this could be. tbh it's interesting to consider a council corruption arc, although i do think they were at least already halfway there just from assuming god's throne (they 100% encouraged michael to leave and i think that was the tipping point into "anything goes" for them to maintain power) also attached to the idea of a primordial angel, sort of one of lucifer's time, who were made before much of creation and act as advisers to all the younger sets (CUTE to have him know and work with uriel) makes it all the more intriguing in a character sense when the wiseman falls as an angel of wrath...falling deeper and deeper into that pit of concern over heresy, what he brought into heaven, and the denial of the repentant. poor guy ;o;

Yes. Please. I, personally, need to see how much more detail can be put into the disheveled downfall of that Quizboy. It's good for the soul

BOY GENIUS | Prologue | Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3 | Ch 4 | Ch 5 | on AO3

↓ Chapter 1 below the fold ↓

↳ BACK TO FAILURES OF SCIENCE INDEX

I've been drawing my theoretical concept for a Conjectural Technologies: ORIGINS spin-off for months, so I finally committed to putting words to it. Your eyes will be better off reading on A03 but I'll post chapters here if it gets it to people who'd want to read this sort of thing.

Fifteen years pass (more or less). Norman has Stormed. The Man from Hope gets inaugurated. Downtown LA smolders while the Balkans are sparking. And then this shit...

Chapter 1: I'm A Loser, Baby

“Fffzzztttt… just your average kids but--- chhhhh…. their parents say there’s a problem! Help! They’re teenagers now and wow, they’re out of control!”

Plink! A bottle cap ricocheted off to the upper left. Jenny remained unfazed, being as she was pre-recorded a thousand miles away in Chicago.

“Fffzzztt… to a MAKEOVER or it’s off to BOOTCAMP! Today, on the Jenny Jones Show….fzzzztt….”

A second bottle cap grazed Jenny Jones’s shoulder as she turned to a stage full of stewing parents sitting next to children in corpse paint, 12” platforms and spiked mohawks straight out of central casting for “miscellaneous dystopian thugs” in a Chuck Norris film.

Another bottle cap arced high and dinged off the bent-wire-hanger aerial, the static finally consuming the image entirely.

“Got it. Pretty fucking good for having no goddamn depth perception,” Billy slurred to an empty trailer, cracking open the last of the Zima four-pack. He rubbed the eyelid over his missing eye, no idea where his eyepatch went but didn’t care.

“’Zima’ means winter in Polish, Slovene, Slovak, Serbo-Croat, and Czech? There’s some fucking trivia for you,” he mumbled while choking down his 4th bottle of the day, trying not to think about how tasted like drinking scotch tape soaked in air freshener. Or like flat Sprite mixed with aluminum foil and rubbing alcohol. Zima was clear (all the best products were these days) and it was cheap. The TV commercial for Zima showed irreverent hip young people laughing with some loser in a dumb hat who couldn’t pronounce his esses right so maybe the product spoke to him. Most importantly, the product made him drunk. He laid back in his nest of empties and snack food and trash on the couch.

The door squeaked and rattled as Pete White struggled to open it with his foot, his arms full of packages. He staggered a few feet and he released his armload onto the kitchenette counter into a postal landslide. He turned back to notice Billy on the couch where he had left him— unshowered, unshaved, in the same dirty clothes, scowling with a smoldering cigarette hanging off his lip.

“Encounter: level 12 Alcoholic Divorced Dad Dwarf of Middle Earth. Plus-one against child support.”

“Ugh. Shut up,” Billy muttered as flicked ash into a branded Conjectural Technologies coffee mug. One of 500 White had ordered to “get their name out there,” and then left in a pile in the storage closet.

“Aw, Jeeze,” Pete grumbled, fanning the smokey air with last month’s issue Sassy from the mail pile, “You know it’ll be impossible to get the smell out of the curtains. Do you have to smoke in here? Huh?”

“Do you have to put magnetic poetry all over my hand when I’m sleeping?” Billy angrily raised his magnet-crusted mechanical hand, shedding “majestic” “symphony” and “purple” as he moved it.

White smirked, internally delighted, “I couldn’t find a pen so I was leaving you a note reminding you to get a haircut. I feel like I’m living with a scale model of Snake Pliskin.”

“WhatEVER,” Billy snarled. He didn’t disagree his long greasy hair made him look like an Irish Setter drowning in Crisco but what did it matter? Nothing mattered.

White frowned. “You’re really harshing the dynamics of our double act, pally, with this self-pity thing. I can’t play dryly acerbic without a naive optimist to play off of, y’know.”

“I’m just…” Billy killed the last of the bottle and pitched it weakly into the pile, his anger drained, “You know if I went to MIT like I planned to I would have graduated this summer.”

He flicked “languid” and “cacophony” off his wrist, “Maybe I’d even have a doctorate, too. I dunno.”

White busied himself with the mail. Billy wasn’t throwing out accusations yet but his train of thought could turn ugly for him depending how the ZIMA hit him.

“I was the greatest mind in a generation. What am I doing with my life?” Billy muttered, staring at the burning end of his cigarette. Melancholy, “I shelve books part-time at a public library! An ape could do my job,”

“An ape would probably do it better! Because they have longer arms. Oh, and they could climb the shelves!” White chimed in, “But they’d probably, like, crap everywhere so that’s a minus.”

“Nights I wash fucking dishes at a ‘50s-themed diner in a mall.” A sudden rage, “A WILDLY INACCURATE ‘50s-themed diner!” He jumped to his feet.

“We Built This City on Rock & Roll — released 1985 by Starship — does not belong on the house music! ‘Chicken fingers’— invented 1976 in Savannah, GA — do not exist in 1955! I tell the general manager all the time, but does he care? Where’s the stifling suburban malaise? Where’s the simmering feeling of nuclear dread? This so-called ‘theme’ your institution perpetrates is willful disinformation!”

White relaxed; this rant could go on for hours and he wasn’t the target.

Billy concluded, “Being an adult SUCKS.”

“Takes most people more than a year into it to figure that out. Still a genius. Congratulations, Billy,” White said.

Billy sighed, exhausted again. He crawled back to the couch.

“I finally cleared out the PO Box.,” White said, indicating the packages on the kitchen counter.

“Mine. Mine. Mine,” White claimed a stack of music mags and mailers from bedroom record labels out of the mail pile. He tapped a box from a scientific supply warehouse, “That’s probably the catalyst solution we ordered for the mind control experiment.” He found a couple padded envelopes in the pile and shook them, “VHS tapes. From your internet super highway nerd friends. Go soak in nostalgia. Get the stink off you.”

Billy perked up slightly. White raised his arm to toss them over but Billy shrieked, “No! Don’t! You’ll damage them.”

White rolled his eyes, and walked the packages to the couch, “They made it through the mail from —” he checked the labels “— Murfreesboro just fine. They’re not going to break eight feet from me to you.” He stacked the envelopes on the top of Billy’s head and joined him on the couch.

White sorted the remaining mail into piles. More supplies for Conjectural Technologies projects. Bills. Catalogues. Another letter from Billy’s mother — oof, save that for later. He wanted to keep Billy’s mood up for as long as possible. He pocketed it.

“Whoa,” gasped White.

“What?” muttered Billy, tearing open the first envelope.

“We got an invitation from the World Super Science Forum,” White said, puzzled. A glossy brochure as nearly big as a Trapper Keeper slid out of the envelope, sparkling with metallic ink. It looked like a wedding invitation for a giant who also happened to be an art director.

“As if,” Billy scoffed without even looking up from his coveted “105: The Ticking Monkey. Long Edit. KTLA Cartoon Cavalcade. NOTE: Missing Closing Credits'' VHS tape. All the heavy negotiation on the alt.fan.rustyventure USENET group to set up this trade had finally paid off.

“It’s gotta be the sign,” White gestured to the ceiling, above which $700 ($1344 today) of neon he commissioned to flash their company name to a rarely-traveled back road in the middle of the desert, tripling their electricity bill. “Neon demands respect.”

Billy was a million miles away, squinting at the tape’s edges for potential cracks in transit and mentally tabulating how many more episodes eluded his decades-long quest for a complete collection of the series.

“Word must be getting out about our…,” White beamed in salesman mode before stumbling on the landing, “Uh, work?”

Conjectural Technologies didn’t do shit and both of them knew it. But here was an invitation to the premier professional Super Science conference in the US.

“It’s in Seattle this year. That’s like the coolest city in the world right now.”

“Frasier lives there,” Billy said flatly. He was still woozy. Zima-drunk.

“It’s basically the new Vatican,” White agreed, “Ground zero for both the tech and expensive coffee industry and the home of ‘the Seattle sound.’”

“They throw fish. In the market,” Billy said, suddenly very sleepy. Why did he drink so much Zima? Oh, he remembered it was because he hated himself and his garbage-failure life.

White read through the brochure like a kid tearing into a Sears Christmas Wishbook, “Technology demos. Lectures. Hey, we’d get to go to an awards dinner at the top of the Space Needle. This looks so cool.”

“We should go,” Billy said, drifting into semi-consciousness.

“Yeah!” White turned to the final page of the invitation. Early registration - $550* a person. Does not include airfare. “Oh.”

He showed Billy the price without speaking. They both sat silently. Living paycheck to paycheck, that was astronomically outside their budget.

“THIS is why Super Science is dying out,” Pete said angrily, slapping the brochure, “It’s like, you gotta be a legacy or already have a compound or a ton of government contracts to even pay for this shit. It’s MORIBUND! The same old scientists. Same old IDEAS. What about the scrappy independents on the fringes! THAT’s where the next big thing is coming from.”

“A lot of passion from a ‘scientist’ who does jack shit,” Billy snickered, half-asleep.

Pete looked at the brochure again, “It’s too bad we didn’t get invited earlier. It says here ‘Boy Genius’ admission is half-price.”

“Makes sense,” Billy muttered, “Trying to stem the tide of potential future science geniuses defecting to Silicon Valley. No kid even thinks about going into Super Science anymore.”

“AND their parent/guardian/sidekick/lab assistant can plus-one for free — I’m at least two of those!”

A pause.

“Just tell them I’m a kid.”

“Huh?”

“Register me as a ‘boy genius’ and take the discount.”

White was shocked, “You want to lie?”

“If they find out what can they do to us? Kick us out?”

“Did your high horse bolt the stable? Dishonesty from Baby Billy “I Never Do Anything Wrong” Whalen?”

“JUST LIE!” Billy shouted, “Register Conjectural Technologies for the Conference. One Boy Genius. One… whatever you are.”

Billy rolled over, looking green, “I think I’m gonna throw up.”

____

↳ BACK TO FAILURES OF SCIENCE INDEX

BOY GENIUS | Prologue | Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3 | Ch 4 | Ch 5 | on AO3

*$1044 in today’s money