“Consider me alerted,” Pepper said wryly. “This is going to be an interesting problem for Legal. Aliens. And a whole bunch of MBI personnel we need to pin down, if we’re going to keep them from providing support to the Discipline Squad and anybody else trying to drag the Sekirei back to Japan….” She trailed off, gaze going distant and thoughtful, and started tapping a search on her tablet.
Tony raised a finger to his lips. Careful, genius at work!
He might as well not have bothered. Bruce was still catching his own breath, surreptitiously glancing at his hands as if to make sure they weren’t green. “What happened to Homura?”
“Kagari,” Tony said firmly. “At least if we see him out of uniform. Call it a hunch, but it looks like that’s what his friends call him.” Uzume was a friend. Damn.
…That’s what his friends call him. Oh my god.
Minato and his buddies had already pulled off one escape out of Shinto Teito. Kagari, in that kid’s voice….
That waterfall might not have been Minato as another Ashikabi coming in on the hunt. It might have been the freaking cavalry.
Hope hurt. It hurt a lot. But Tony shook out his shoulders instead of wincing, assuming the jaunty mega-billionaire pose that had always given Obie ulcers. “Looks like Kagari survived.”
Bruce blanched. “One of Minato’s Sekirei. Willing, or not?”
Jarvis cleared a nonexistent throat. “Dr. Banner, I can only deduce based on known data. But the facts I have are that Minato Sahashi was willing to suffer second-degree burns to prevent his friend from committing suicide.”
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
Yeah, people don’t usually risk death and disfigurement for “things”, they do that for people.
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There are exceptions, but you can usually tell who can/will maim themselves for a goal.
He’s got the signals of “I will maim myself for the goal,” yes, but that goal is very much caritas rather than any of the other possibilities.
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Being Winged by a Nice Guy is preferable to the alternative. Correction: Alternatives. Plural. Least we not forget the many, very bad options which were available.
(In my opinion? When suicide is a legit option, you know you’ve hit the Nightmare Fuel station full on.)
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Indeed. Brr.
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Take out all the lovey-doves fluff and the near nudity and that manga is more a nightmare scenario than anything else. Pity it wasn’t written like that in the first place. I would have enjoyed reading it framed that way.
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Okay, looking back over it that comment was probably worded badly. What I meant to say was, ya know, tastes in genre, etc.
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The fact that it was sugar coated actually makes it worse once it hits. And if you aren’t used to deconstructing stories (or anything else), that can take a long time.
I mean, fireball spells. Very flashy, very effective, and a staple of many fics involving magic. Everyone wants to be able to throw one, because it’s cool. Until you realize that the target or victim of the spell was burned alive, and it would likely be a mercy if they died from it- because surviving it is often worse.
Yeah, that particular thought hit me late, as it was always played for laughs in cartoons. We do not live in a cartoon, and as far as any anime character is concerned? Neither do they.
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Part of what got me hooked on Embers was that fire was treated like– well, FIRE.
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Thanks! 🙂
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Well, I’ve got a bit of a project… Implementation is ongoing, and horror isn’t currently a deliberate goal of mine as a writer. Some of what I like is pretty unpleasant, and some of my need for catharsis is informed by really horrible parts of history. One antagonist is the ghost of a man who, among many other acts, once personally murdered thousands of people in a single month.
(Another is a legend explicitly described as essentially violent, lawless and unstoppable. He is slowed down in the epic is when he loses his temper and throws a tantrum.)
I’m planning to put up an AO3 account once I have something ready to show. Does anyone know if non-Latin alphabets can be used in tags for English language stories?
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I am very curious now! What’s the title going to be so I know how to look for it? 🙂 I wish you the very best of luck on your writing!…By non-Latin alphabets, did you mean something like French?
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I will probably mention something here when.
French is written in a Latin alphabet, one derived from the one used for Latin. So, like English, German, Spanish, Romanji, etc… (Though Shavian is a non-Latin alphabet that someone created for use with English.)
Unicode has a bunch of symbols used for other languages like Hangul (Korean), Katakana(Japanese), Hiragana (Japanese), Hebrew, Aramic etc… The Russian alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Korean and Japanese symbols on tags for English stories, but am not sure how wide the support is. Or if any common browsers break it.
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I mean, some tags auto-populate with non-Latin characters, usually in the Fandom tag space; Fandoms like Boku no Hero Academia appear as a dual tag a la [Title in Japanese] | [Title in English], complete with the vertical separator. As far as the Additional Tags field is concerned? I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think it would be a problem as long as your keyboard is set up for it. Might want to get the opinion of an actual Tag Wrangler, though, which I am not. 😉
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That and check the documentation. Thank you.
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That waterfall might not have been Minato as another Ashikabi coming in on the hunt. It might have been the freaking cavalry.
That is exactly what it was.
Minato just wanted to save Kagari’s life. That was the primary goal. If he could have saved Kagari’s life without winging him, Minato would have. Kagari is the only Sekirei that didn’t kiss Minato themselves to wing themselves. But the others also weren’t dying with their powers that out of control and actively attempting to kill themselves.
But the facts I have are that Minato Sahashi was willing to suffer second-degree burns to prevent his friend from committing suicide.”
Yep.
And risk said burns trying to TALK Kagari out of said suicide first. The winging without his direct permission was kinda, one last desperate attempt to save Kagari’s life.
And Minato, if remember correctly, did apologize for kissing Kagari without permission and seemed to be expecting and fully willing to take said Sekirei punching him in the jaw again.
Granted, the Avengers don’t know a lot of that. Largely because getting that good of a grasp on Minato and his temperament would require actually meeting him.
Still, it’s hard not to bristle when people assume his behavior is anything like certain Ashikabi who wing people against their will all the darned time.
Through I think his Flock would also bristle at the implied or outright comparison of their Minato to those Ashikabi.
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*Wry G* I think Tony might point out the proof Minato isn’t like the others is, he planned for them all to get away!
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