Steve had to admit that he had some reservations about how the New Century handled the social balance between alphas and omegas.

Alternate names – ‘this human emotion called ‘butt-touch,’’ ‘but who tops,’ ‘parkourstuck’ Steps 1. Be Dave Strider, human, tricker extraordinaire and minor GrubTube sensation. Meet some douchebag at a practice session. 2. Be Karkat Vantas, troll, traceur with a few tricks and an ornery fucker with something to hide. 3. Step into the trick, keep your core tight, and flip. 4. Keep flipping. 5. Now kiss. Tips -Drink plenty of water. -Don’t slow down as you’re approaching the obstacle! That’s stutter-stepping, and you will fuck up hard. -Knees up, shoulders back. -Quit worrying already and touch his hot butt.

Teasing can be frustrating, but it will all be worth it in the end - right?

The halls of the Gods are empty, echoing with unheard prayers. The forces of corruption and decay are growing in power. Soon they shall sweep across the world like an unholy plague. From the deep caverns beneath the majestic Dragonshard Mountains, across the mighty Greenweald Forest, to the fair city of Porthaven on the storm-wracked coast, there are fourteen people with the mark of a divine ruler on their skin. They do not know it, but they and only they can save the world from apocalypse and ruin. So naturally, they're going to spend as long as possible arsing about slaying monsters and looting ancient temples. 'Cos, you know, adventurers.

Companion Pieces to "In Which Tony Stark Builds Himself Some Friends (But His Family was Assigned by Nick Fury)" Sometimes I write foolish things (disclaimer: I always write foolish things) and sometimes there are lines, or actions, or interactions that only make sense to me. Because I have reasons for almost everything. And some part of me is waiting for someone to ask me about the bizarre little things I put in my stories. Occasionally, someone is dumb enough to do just that, and then I babble at them on my Tumblr (http://scifigrl47.tumblr.com). I BABBLE SO MUCH. This is a compilation of all the short stories of why characters react the way they do in my stories. Some are drabbles, some are character studies, some are short stories. Some are edited, some are stream of consciousness. All are foolishness. I like it that way. And I love answering questions. 8)

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and nobody is more desperate than a troll facing the Imperial Drone at collection time. Unfortunately, anonymous sex isn't so anonymous when you run into someone you know.

There was no good way to say it: sorry about your surprise sex swap and your nonconsensual werewolf bite also rearranged your butt plumbing and congratulations, I've probably destroyed your sex life forever were not exactly Hallmark sentiments.

It is important to keep in mind that when a human says, "I hate you," it is most certainly not a come-on. The only thing more horrific than human apathy is human hatred. They do, after all, have two words for friendship. Or so we thought.

“See? I need my daisy crown or I won’t get Chased.” Stiles frowned. “And then I’ll have to do it again next year. I really don’t want to do it twice.” The good and the bad of getting Caught this year included not having to do it again and the bad was he’d have a werewolf mate for the rest of his life. Stiles is seventeen. He has a lot of life to live. Unless his wolfy mate has no sense of humor or a temper. Those with no sense of humor and tempers tended to hate Stiles the most and wouldn’t that suck? Being tied to someone for the rest of his life who hates him. That actually sounds like his type of luck. “You’ll be fine.” Allison beams because she’s a sweet person and can obviously read Stiles like a picture book aimed at toddlers. Series

I feel pretty strongly that the second half of Naruto diverted all the momentum of the first half, where what I wanted to see was what would happen if it speeded up instead. This arc is an AU of canon, in which Kakashi dealt with Sasuke differently after the first fight with Itachi and Sasuke never left Konoha. Changes spiral off from that point. This is also the arc where I change all the things that truly made me tear my hair in canon, such as the carbon copy generations, the sidelining of the women, the apotheosis of Naruto as a solitary hero, and Itachi turning out to not be a villain. So none of that happens. There is, however, Sakura/Sasuke/Naruto goodness. Also featuring a dash of Kakashi/Iruka and a side arc about Hinata and the Hyuuga clan that somehow shoehorned its way in while I was innocently contemplating ninja sociology.

It's the hazards of having so many omegas in close proximity for so long. They tend to synch up.

Erwin believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Levi had climbed that wall.

Erwin believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Levi had climbed that wall.

A musing on the social and legal construction of childhood in hidden villages. Downbeat and philosophical.

Team 8 in a quiet moment during the timeskip, with lots of speculation about the origin and nature of the Aburame clan's bond with their kikkai. Fluffy enough to rot your teeth.

He keeps the aqun-asala powder in a jar on his dressing table. Every three months he spoons some of it into a mug and mixes it into the water with his finger. It's supposed to be tasteless, but when he swallows it down it lingers on his tongue, affects the taste of anything else he eats for the next couple days, mutes everything. He gets a kick outta eating spicy shit all lackadaisically and offering it to people, and acting surprised when it burns their mouths. (When he explains it to Sera, after she's stopped crying and threatening to stab him with one of his own horns, she thinks it's hilarious — tries to talk him into letting her have enough to prank people, actually. He knows exactly how much is left in the jar though, and he's not sure he's ever gonna get more... so she has to make do with sitting next to him and watching.) "So it keeps you from losing it, huh?" she asks, glaring down into her empty flagon like she doesn't know where the beer got off to. "No squishy pffff—" she puffs up her cheeks and sets the flagon down, curving her hands into a circle and then moving them apart, "—for the qunari pokers?"

On any given day, Sherlock might come out of the bathroom smelling like an Alpha on the hunt (Alpha #8) or an Omega in heat (Omega #9), a Beta brooding (Beta #3), or like no gender at all. The last one was his actual scent, which wasn't so much scentless as confusing. At least in an adult. If Sherlock and John were the sort of people to read Mills and Boon novels, they could have said that what occurred was because destiny intervened and set two destined lovers in their one true pairings' path. It was the lasagna.

Fenris has kept busy since the events at Kirkwall. Tracking Tevinter slavers in the South leads him to the Temple of Sacred Ashes the night before the Conclave. From there, everything begins to fall apart. OR: Fenris is the Inquisitor and he has no patience for Venatori bullshit.

A refugee ship from a dying planet crash lands on the Southern Continent during the Ninth Pass. Can a handful of troll kids and a former Empress carve out a Hold and Weyr for themselves without giving too many hidebound Holders heart attacks?

Everyone's born with their soulmate's first words to them written on their skin, and that should make things easy, but it really doesn't. "Roy has alternatively despised his mark and clung to it like a lifeline. Colonel. Just one word, right at the back of his foot. His literal Achilles’ heel."

Hyper Intuition isn't always a gift. Reborn contemplates what it might mean for someone to be born with it.

When the Leverage team runs into a mark with a very distinctive ring, Eliot has a phone call to make. On the other side of the country, Magnus’s night just got Interesting, the headache-inducing way.

"Reborn!" "You weren't taking your training seriously, and I decided to take a leaf out of your current favourite manga, Dame-Tsuna. You should recognise the game." "You didn't." He'd been reading Sword Art Online, and of course Reborn would think that full immersion into a video game was a fantastic idea.

All Might runs into a strange hero in his younger years. Or, maybe, this hero runs into him. At high velocity. In the face. Oops.

In one world, the Tenth Generation escape to a world of heroes. In this reality, they flee to a world of Pokemon.

Dragon's fire is not so easily extinguished; when Zuko rediscovers a lost firebending technique, shifting flames can shift the world...

In which 'Adaar' is totally not a desire demon from the Fade, because Haven is a camp filled with Templars. Also morals and mortals are both confusing, and he would really just like to go home now please.

or, Catharsis: The Fic In which Wei Wuxian, shortly after being called into Mo Xuanyu’s body, is further forced into the past, where he proceeds to tumble his way into absolutely nailing a time travel fix-it.

The clans have secrets. Fire that does not burn. Light held back by a cloth. Spirits bound. Dreams of what is to come. Water that heals.

Wei Wuxian was fully prepared to be rejected – no matter what Jiang Cheng said about the Sunshot Campaign caring more about defeating the Wens than anything else, the fact remained that his cultivation was most decidedly abnormal and unorthodox, the sort of thing the cultivation world most scorned. He’d already decided that if they did that, he would return to his previous approach of stalking the Wens from the shadows, fighting them in his own way, on his own. Instead, he walked into the command tent, Chenqing gripped tightly in his hand, and Nie Mingjue didn’t so much as blink, just said, “Can you do anything but ambushes?” and the next thing he knew, it was three shichen later, he’d shared far more than he’d meant to about his new cultivation style, and there were eight different plans of attack that would greatly increase his effectiveness on the battlefield. It was – exhilarating, actually. (in which Nie Mingjue and Wei Wuxian become sworn brothers)

Nie Mingjue leaves his first Discussion Conference as a Sect Leader early, desperately needing to find some fresh air and possibly something to hit. Instead he finds a small, dirty child that reminds him of his brother, cowering away from some dogs - Maybe he should take him home.

Everyone has their own theories about how Jiang Cheng, of all unlikely people, got the opportunity to become a god. They're all wrong. It started with a kind act - and a story.

Nie Huaisang rather liked their Neighbors. He was aware that that was widely viewed as being a little bit odd of him, but it wasn’t any more odd than his general distaste for training his saber – though combined with his passion for pretty things, fans and clothing and paintings and birds, more than one person had not-so-subtly implied that they thought Nie Huaisang might be a changeling. (They only ever implied it once – Nie Mingjue seemed to have an extra sense for finding out when people were being cruel to his brother, and no hesitation whatsoever about beating the living daylights out of them when he did.)

"I will live in thy heart sleeve, (never) die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes, and moreover, I will go with thee to the extremely boring cultivation conference." –The Yiling Laozu, probably. Wei Wuxian needs a new workshop. Lan Wangji has room in his qiankun sleeves.

It had always been something of a behind-closed-doors debate – a chicken-and-the-egg problem, what came first, what was the cause and what was the symptom. Was the Nie sect’s atypical cultivation method the reason behind the notorious Nie temper? Or were they born with the temper, and the cultivation method merely built upon that? Which one was the reason for their clan’s tendency towards early qi deviations? Nie Huaisang usually threw his money on the “blame the cultivation style”, almost entirely for the sake of pissing off his brother. He was starting to think, though, that he’d been wrong.

There has always been a divide between the sect and the clan. The clan flows through the male line, heritage and paternity, but it is the wife who comes from outside that rules the sect - a measure, Lan Xichen thought, put in place to prevent war between the sects. Who would want to risk antagonizing someone who might end up running your sect some day? And then Nie Mingjue's father died.

She has no throne. Girls without thrones should not have knights, but hers won’t go. Princess Zelda – the girl who killed Calamity – would love to fade into legend, but Link’s bought a house, he’s fighting off monsters, and he’s selling giant horses to strangely familiar Gerudo men. She'll never have any peace now.

The thought had been niggling at the back of his mind quite a bit lately. He wasn’t showing Shang Qinghua proper obeisance, was he? They’d grown so comfortable in their roles - Mobei-Jun as Shang Qinghua’s king, and Shang Qinghua as his dutiful servant - that they hadn’t thought to… stop. It was how it had always been. But things were different, now, weren’t they? They’d been different for a long time now. To ignore that wasn’t proper. That stops now, Mobei-Jun decides. His ancestors would be rolling in their graves to see him ignore the proper rites of courtship - the fact that he and Shang Qinghua were already mated besides. He was not raised to be some kind of country rube, as much as being sequestered so far up north might imply otherwise. Shang Qinghua was his partner, and, with all factors properly calculated, the more powerful of the two. It was only proper that Mobei-Jun display an appropriate level of submission to his better. -- Mobei-Jun realizes with increasing clarity that he wants to serve Shang Qinghua. Shang Qinghua does NOT pick up on it.

No one knows what the Council is hiding, but the effects ripple throughout the galaxy. Anakin knows he is loved. Former slaves are freed. A long-lost Master and his Padawan are returned to the Temple. No one understands how Obi-Wan Kenobi does these things, but they are grateful for it anyway. A time-travel story from the points of view of everyone but the time travelers.

“- and in one generation, they were all women, every single one of them!” “That seems remarkably unlikely,” Wen Ruohan remarked, and looked sidelong at Lan Qiren. “Don’t you think, Sect Leader Lan?” Lan Qiren had no idea the trouble his answer was about to cause.

Quinlan finds a man frozen in carbonite on Geonosis. That's just the start of his problems.

Proud Immortal Demon Way's fanfic selection is vast, terrible, and filled with things much worse written than the original work itself, and that's saying something. Shen Yuan was just enough of a masochist to willingly, after another stupid update where Luo Binghe has to papapa another sister for some ludicrous reason that doesn't even make any sense, decide to delve into that lurid cesspool of creative death and unbeta'd pornography far more explicit than anything Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky had ever written. Which is how he finds himself in a fanfic called Proud Immortal Demon's Milky Way.

Shang Qinghua goes to take a self-indulgent peek at his baby protagonist son and gets a kick to the shrivelled heart for his troubles. He gave up on changing the story years ago! Yet he finds himself helping his protagonist son's adoptive mother anyway. Just this one change won't matter too much, right? One little change leads to more. Shang Qinghua never meant to care, but he becomes invested in making sure that his new family survives the looming plot. With the changes to the world cascading around him, with his position as a traitor pulling him between his sect and a certain ice demon, and with the protagonist growing up so quickly, how is one displaced author meant to ensure that everything turns out all right? A Pre-Canon to Canon Divergence story.

During his time rebuilding the Jiang sect and the Lotus Pier from the ground up, Jiang Cheng meets a lot of people. Some of them he keeps. (5+1 Jiang Cheng adopting stray cultivators after the Sunshot Campaign)

High Sage Kenji blesses Fire Prince Zuko with the resilience of the reed, who bends in the wind and never breaks. When he is done, Fire Prince Ozai narrows his eyes, seemingly displeased by this blessing. But Kenji does not speak for himself; he is only a vessel. * The newly-crowned Fire Lord Ozai offers his firstborn son to service in the temple. This turns out to be a catastrophic mistake.

Prompt: We keep hearing little bits about the Nie bros dad, but what about their moms?

“Clan Wren sends its regards,” Ursa says, bowing, and by all rights Jaster should be paying attention to the Countess’s daughter, should pay his own respects to the heir to Krownest, but— He only has eyes for Ursa's brother, steady at her side.

In the first months of the war, A'Sharad finds a whole tribe of his people viciously slaughtered, with only one survivor. What begins as an investigation to find the culprit and a mission from the Council to support Tatooine's petition to enter the Republic rapidly turns into something else entirely, though, and A'Sharad, his padawan, and their tiny clone squad find themselves caught up in mysteries that can be traced all the way back to the start of the Republic.

Maria can’t recall the last time she slept.

AU based on The Dreamer in the Spring Boudoir (familiarity with that story's not required). Wherein Shen Yuan transmigrates into a harem intrigues romance novel (gay edition), Yue Qingyuan really fucks up, Liu Qingge is not suitable for his job, and no one even remotely sees Luo Binghe coming.