Windows Let You See Sunshine (draft)

Kim breathed in the flames. The assurance this hell could never hurt the kid again… That whoever built it wouldn’t even be able to make something of the ashes.

---

[wonder if i can cut out the car ride altogether??? i do like the car ride sequence though…]

[let’s try it!]

You wake up on something soft. And… warm? Warm. It’s been so long, you forgot what warm’s like. It’s not dark either. There’s lots of light shining in through the window.

The window??? You don’t have windows.

You have a window!

Did the Future Man bring you somewhere new? Maybe if you’re good, he’ll let you stay here.

No, Scorch brought you here, remember? They look younger than the footage the Future Man showed you. And quieter. They always roared so much in battle. Snow was the quiet one.

Where is Scorch? Is Snow here too?

[i forget what codename i gave Ben, I’ll check after this battle. Although I do like the appeal of a one-syllable cold-related name. maybe snow? to get the quiet part in. snow isn’t noisy at all]

You sit at the nook by the window. It’s cloudy outside, but a very wispy cloudy. Like the sun’s wearing a veil. It’s beautiful. And very, very warm.

And you’re not in pain this time. That’s the best part. You aren’t stuck on itchy grass. You didn’t twist your ankle on your own super speed.

[goddammit i keep forgetting to start another kai >:U ]

[okay just seven more of these bastards to go]

[NINJA, GO!!!]

You wonder why Scorch didn’t watch… that place… burn. They watch everything burn.

---

Ben had finished his first piece of bacon, and Kim had finished their second stack of pancakes. Meanwhile, the new guy was nowhere to be found.

[i’m not sure i’m liking this direction either actually… it’s going too fast]

[who says you gotta finish a whole draft before starting a new one? that shit’s for amateurs XD ]

[oh my god just have solnishko wake up in the car lmao]

[making everything harder than it has to be]

You wake up… hugged? What is this???

It’s a coat!

It’s not at all like the coats the Future Man wears. It’s brown and dusty and huge! It looks familiar…

You’re in a truck! Being driven somewhere. Who’s driving the truck?

Scorch???

Why would Scorch be driving you anywhere? You’re enemies, aren’t you? Well… the previous you and the previous Scorch were… This is very confusing…

---

[maybe cut that previous segment out? i’m not liking it either… we’re not really gaining any new insight from this, and it’s not moving the plot forward. i think we need a little bit more from Kim’s pespective (especially an introduction; as the previous Kim went by he/him and this this timeline, Kim uses they/them) before we switch over to Solnishko]

The truck grumbled awake. Kim didn’t blame her. They thought they were gonna be there for a while, too. Probably woke her up from a nap.

[personify everything, that is my advice to you all]

Still, the fire was dead, with only its ashes remaining. And the kid was beat. He needed a bed. A real bed. Not some army-looking cot.

Kim followed the curves of the road, trying to drive gently over its many bumps and bruises.

Taking him to the hospital was out of the question. Whoever had the resources to build that hell had the resources to keep on the look out for anyone matching the kid’s description. And Kim wouldn’t call the pigs if they were paid to do it. Kim would set the offering and the offerer on fire.

[whatever. offerer’s a word now]

Blanket burrito. Never let go.

It wasn’t a Ben-level plan, but it was a good plan. Fuckin’ flawless. Kim grinned, proud of themself.

[remember to stay hydrated and rested, everybody ❤ ]

<They started seeing a lot less mountain and a lot more ocean. Less trees and twigs, more waves and rocks. With how hot it was supposed to get, Kim would be more surprised if Ben wasn’t swimming. Or at least that whole lying in the shallow end Ben called swimming. It was more sitting in water, but whatever made their partner happy. Seemed pretty nice, actually. Letting the waves roll over him.

And then Kim remembered that Ben also called it a massage.

This was their partner. Kim chose to live with this man.>

[getting my drink open and then i’ll be back to writing]

[oh i was supposed to shake that before serving XD oh well]

[well if i finish off my gatorade, i can dump it in that and shake it up then XD ]

[hmm i got a lot of gatorade left…]

They started seeing a lot less mountain and a lot more ocean. Less trees and twigs, more waves and rocks. With how hot it was supposed to get that day, Kim wouldn’t be surprised to find Ben letting the waves roll over him. Maybe with an umbrella stubbornly shoved into the mud for shade. Ben called it a massage.

Ben liked what he liked, Kim admired that.

<And Ben had brought their other two kids home with no warning, it was his turn this time.

Kim could hear Ben saying, “I didn’t bring Rosy, Buddy did!”

And if Buddy was there, she’d say, “I was ten weeks pregnant! Of course I was bringing her along, you goof!”

And if she wasn’t, Kim would say, “She was ten weeks pregnant! You knew what you were getting us all into, ya lil shit.” Punctuating it with a noogie for old time’s sake.>

[look up when pregnancy is typically visible]

[i forget how many irsea i need exactly]

[damn. to be able to draw something as tortured as a ridan. like it’s a good design but damn what the hell happened to it??? is it okay?]

[why the hell did it start a ridan battle? fuckin’ 4thewords XD whatever]

[ahhhh why is this next sentence being so damn difficult?]

Kim took a quick look at the kid before getting back to the road. He was dead to the world, like he was sleeping for the first time in days. ?

A couple minutes later, though, the kid’s eyes started opening up. His nose did some little twitches. Trying to take in all the new shit, Kim figured.

“Hey, there,” Kim said.

He didn’t seem to notice Kim had said anything yet. Better than being scared, Kim supposed. Kim worried there wasn’t that much more scared he could get, though.

He pulled Kim’s coat around him tighter. It reminded them of Ben and Rosy in an overload. Kim didn’t like how likely it was that their coat probably was a weighted blanket to him, that small. If there were any blankets in hell, he couldn’t get to them.

Kim growled. Locking up food was bad enough, but locking up blankets? Fucking bastard.

Blanket burrito, definitely.

The kid was watching him with wide eyes.

Shit, he probably thought they were growling at him.

“You’re alright, bud,” Kim said, in a soothing tone they fought their smoky rasp for. “Just scheming up how to murder whoever had you last.”

Kim supposed murder wasn’t a soothing subject.

[alright i’m gonna try to beat these last two kai, but i can feel myself getting tired]

[alrighty 129 words in 16 minutes let’s goooo]

[do you ever think about how horrible teeth are? apparently they can explode. like wtf how did our ancestors ever survive??? run out of dynamite, just throw some teeth out XD ]

[alright 79 more words let’s go]

[another thing 4theword does fairly frequently is they offer a quest that’ll get you crystals if you make a couple forum posts. i don’t really do those anymore. like i know i’m streaming this all to y’all, but i like the solitary aspects of writing. i don’t have to stream to write if i don’t want to. but i like streaming for y’all.]

[but the forums i’ve been in, it feels like everyone’s making LITERATURE, and i’m just here doing whatever it takes to hold my interest in a story long enough to finish it. And to be fair, i haven’t partaken in every forum category yet, but i just don’t have the social energy to prowl through them all to find my crowd, ya know? like i already have me crowd. and i get that part of it’s probably them trying to incentivize everybody to get to know each other, but i don’t really benefit from artificial socialization like that. to me, it’s like messaging some random person cuz we both happen to like pokémon. like that does nothing for me but NTs act like that makes us friends, like no.]

[lemme check the laundry real quick i might keep going if the machinery is going to keep me awake anyway]

[ugh everything has to dry that’s gonna take forever]

[welp. perfect excuse to beat this rudakai. i actually worried about putting rudakai in the title cuz i didn’t have any quests that actually had one, but now i do! life just works out swimmingly]

[plus: Queer Eye for a Rudakai, how can any Dust Warrior resist that title? :3 ]

[ugh i just committed to writing over 1300 words what am i doing with my life XD ]

[not sleeping, that’s what!]

[is the laundry ready to switch over now?]

[i have really good ear plugs in, so i can’t tell. i can’t hear anything, and it’s amazing!]

[maybe Rosy’s sensory detox of choice is ear plugs rather than weighted things…]

[okay okay okay thought BUT kim with a tiny baby rose napping on his chest. goddammit. these assholes are going to make me write their prequels and shit. i fucking hate writing things out of order! XD]

[okay only 1219 more to go, not bad. plus i got 6 hours to do it, even better. well not better. if i am still streaming in six hours, that means either 1) i haven’t gone to bed yet or 2) i forgot to turn the stream off XD “uhhh dieDoktor can you cut like a billion hours off the end of my last stream?”]

[oh bunnies… i should add some bunny characters. maybe solnishko’s original family has a bunny sibling or something. ooooh or a bunny dad! 😀 bunnies…]

[what else amongst my stuffed animals should i use?]

[i mean i generally want to 1) stick to mammals (unless pigs aren’t mammals; they shall be the exception) and 2) stick to animals found in North America. Just to give it a bit of local flavor. Also trying to stick to NH animals when possible. I don’t think we have otters up here, but i’m not giving up Scuttle the Otter. like, nah. actually, i should probably update the character sheet; Rosy and Buddy are Canadian lynxes now. I looked up wilds cats in North America, and we have lynxes 😀 like i know there’s the Spanish lynx, but that’s more in Central America, as the name implies (assuming i’m recalling correctly, which i might not be. it’s been a while). Like i said, i’m looking for more northern flavors. mountain lions might be in washington though. for some reason, i think it’s more a west coast animal, i don’t know why i have that assumption. i mean they’re mountain lions, and there are definitely some mountains in New Hampshire.]

[i might adjust lalitha’s pronouns too. she’s feeling more they/them to me than she/her. but maybe she uses both. she’s definitely a demigal, for sure. like i cannot see her being entirely comfortable with womanhood.]

[i also like the idea of their main antagonist (well maybe not in terms of the story overall) but in terms of their business life, i guess; being a young wealthy person who wants to do good but is ultimately very sheltered and thus has not been exposed to why black and white doesn’t work in the real world most of the time. like yes, there are some instances where there is a clear good person doing clearly good things and a clear bad person doing clearly bad things. but evil is a lot more subtle than someone proudly monologuing for all to hear. sometimes, evil is a whisper. sometimes, evil is language that you don’t know the history of, yet it’s so normalized, people completely dismiss the harm such language has done.]

[sometimes, evil is someone just like you.]

[i also like the idea of a lone hero versus a team of supervillains. and how the supervillains get more done than the hero. the hero is too distracted by all these weirdos breaking the law, that it doesn’t occur to him to examine why people are breaking the law in the first place. or how said laws came about.]

[don’t be surprised when people call you a demon after you sell your soul to the devil]

[damn we still have six hours to write a little under 600 words]

[the superhero genre, i think, more than any other genre of literature, allows for a very direct examination of what is good and evil.]

[i think in this updated version of the series, i want play with how good can be misguised; and how the appearance of evil is not always evil, depending who is judging the appearance. if you’re the kind of person who acts like they’re about to hit someone, and then says “i didn’t actually hit them”, you’re an asshole. but if someone’s raised their arms in self-defense after you fucking attacked, and you have the nerve to say they were scaring you, you’re an asshole.]

[maybe hell is being forced to live a new life, but you have every evil you inflicted upon others, inflicted upon you. it’s nice to think about, but it still feels wrong. it doesn’t account for people who haven’t done anything wrong. people who just exist differently than their oppressors do.]

[no vengeance does as much good as protecting victims from their abusers. abusers still need to account for their actions, of course; but not at the expense of their victims’ peace of mind. The victims need to be involved in this accounting, i think, ideally.]

[can i just call a knight of the Order of the Sun, Sunny? XD ]

[i have too many WIPs already, i shouldn’t be starting more.]

[but i really like my dawn-painted avatar and i wanna use him in something. i can’t even decide if i want him to use she or he pronouns. i think she’ll be bigender. maybe she’ll discover that her order isn’t doing as much good as it claims to be. maybe instead of bringing light to the world, it’s showering it in fire, going against the Sun Goddess’s wishes. god i wanna draw all this shit so bad]

[aw, yeah! 171 words left!! whoo!! hooray for rambling! who needs storytime when you have philosophy, literary analysis, and plot bunnies? 😀 ]

[yeah it is definitely time for me to sleep after this. it’s getting to the point where the first sentence curse is affecting every sentence now XD ]

[caaaats. i’m starting to think yarina cat isn’t a cat. she might be a raccoon. she has the black tail stripes of my other raccoon plushies + the black and white mask patterning of my other raccoon plushies… yarina catrac!]

[i should change my stream background and icon and everything. maybe i’ll work on that for my art stream! thank you all so much for showing interest in that ❤ it was very important to me to have my community’s desire for that. if it goes well, i’ll do more, i’m sure. whoo!! rudakai down!!]

[think i’ll hold off on buying any festival stuff until the final two areas unlock]

[well the good news is, there’s only the dryer left. and the dryer isn’t nearly as obnoxious as the washer, it just takes a while.]

[belay that order, we’re fucking up some irsea!]

[no sleep, only write!! god the stream docs for today’s streams are going to be obnoxious.]

[alright well we got 30 minutes to write 185 words, i think that’s doable, even in this state]

[oh my god we’re about to take a three-hour tour. does anyone even watch that show anymore? gilligan’s island. i had think what the title was. i’ve never seen it myself. it’s kinda like james bond for me. the most exposure i’ve gotten to it is everyone making parodies of it. like obviously less for gilligan’s island than for bond.]

[it was so funny that scene in the first kingsman when samuel L jackson and that guy were talking about how the spy genre is so drab and dreary. when most of my spy shit has been like spy kids, perry’s segments of phineas & ferb, and other fun things. the only difference is kingsman is marketed to adults. like that scene didn’t land the way the writers intended because they didn’t account for someone like me being in their audience. although i suspect the special effects people did! those head color explosions yes please. and eyepatch daddy! the friend who recommended definitely called some of my reactions to a certain character… XD and i’m glad i got the sequel, for sure.]

[8 more monsters in the battle list, huh? erm no i don’t i’m writing over 2000 more words tonight. like i said, i gotta catch up on some sleep that was stolen from me by the morning shift XD let’s at least beat this irsea tho. maybe we’ll get back to the story i set up two whole 4thewords files and a project to write on stream XD instead of just losing it all in my daily entries. gonna check on the laundry]

[wow. it has been a lot less time since putting the laundry in the dryer than i thought. and this shit’s prolly gonna need two cycles. i don’t wanna beat another irsea tho. after this, we’re definitely done]

After that, the kid seemed more confused than anything. Kim wondered what he was thinking. Kim probably didn’t wanna know. They didn’t know who put him in there and why.

He seemed to settle. He looked out the window. A couple curves later, Kim noticed his eyes were following the sun. They were going to say a joke about how that was dangerous when he started flapping his hands.

[see this is why i should’ve ended the stream like i said i would. i’m getting everyone’s pronouns mixed up XD not that i was doing so great about that earlier. to be fair, it can be a little hard to keep track of everyone’s pronouns when you can’t make up your mind XD and when some characters use entirely different pronouns than they did when this was fanfiction, which you then threw in a little gag about via the timeline differences.]

[alright 112 more words let’s go. then we’re packing it in, no excuses! we have teeth to brush!! mabus is counting on us >:3 ]

[definitely read the city of brass some more tomorrow. oh my pillows sound so good right now. y’all are lucky i can’t comfortably type in bed, otherwise even less things would get done around here XD oh thank god 39 more to go. less than 40!! whoo!]

[oh no i only have 26 minutes to write 25 more words whatever will i do? i can’t possibly write over one word per minute. fantastic, we did it XD ]

[alright laundry, shut up, i have sleep to get!!!]

[thank you for raiding me miktastic and hachikoexe! let’s pass that love along to somebody]