OK Rhacktober challenge: I was going to do Rhys and roboJack physically together for the ‘heat’ prompt, but after several failed attempts I changed tack and went for robojack phoning up Rhys’s brain from a few km away for a bit of one-on-one time.
I got introduced to the setting of rogue-lite game Void Bastards, and was just ‘yeah, that sounds like the kind of doomed-by-punitive-corporations-and-a-dodgy-AI type situation Rhys would find himself in. Basically a draw-over of the game mugshot thing.
To ruin/improve your day: even more old pictures of Rhys smuggling AI Jack out of Atlas in the form of an increasingly massive and assholish Handsome Ratch.
ALT
ALTALT
Smuggled Ratch Jack: Small; cuddly; easily concealed in carry-on luggage; snores cutely; kind of like a cat
Smuggled Ratch Jack + 6 months: Enormous; covered in horns; impossible to hide; snores like a giant ratch; kind of like having a huge ratch tread on your face every night at 3am while warming the nest to a cosy 40 degrees celcius; … also still kind of like a cat.
ALT
TFW you spent 40% of the R&D budget building a brand new Jack, and now Mr ‘put me in a ratch and I’ll use your intestines for dental floss’ won’t wear it, because no level of human Handsomeness can ever match the sheer body-confidence, contentment, and ability-to-eat-concrete of being a Massive Ratch.
Also when ratch who used to be alllll buddy buddy with Jack come round and echolocate Rhys and are all “scrrrrrrrrrsccrreeeeeeeshhhhhhhhkkrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” and you just don’t say shit like and get away with it.
But sometimes you just have to adapt to these things.
Glad everyone came out of this with no issues whatsoever.
“Wait, come'ere.” Rhys says. Tim moves a bit closer but it’s evidently not close enough because Rhys pulls at the front of his jacket until they’re nearly toe-to-toe and presses his forehead to the glass front of Tim’s helmet.
“What—”
“Yeah,” Rhys breathes, fogging the glass, “I knew it’d be cool.”
He’s close enough that Tim could count his eyelashes, close enough he could kiss him if the glass wasn’t there, close enough he can probably hear Tim’s unsteady breathing—
Trade with @snailpdf 💖Did a scene from chapter 4 of his lovely fic ‘The Devil Doesn’t Bargain’
(My drawing brain wants to spend more time endlessly fiddling with this, but I’m making an executive decision here, and it is going out the door into the world!)
i have concluded that tales from the borderlands, by amazing means of deduction, is the story of several hyperion infants dumped on pandora to look for their dads car keys