The artificer promised he would return before the last light faded. Centuries later, the little golem still waits, carefully guarding a promise only he remembers.

A study on thirst traps. No caked on makeup, normal complexion, compromising position, attractive woman, why isn't it a thirst trap pic? Is it?

"She had been told that Death came for everyone. Nobody had thought to tell her that he could be lonely."

Ascension

Stop staring and buy your fav gyaru a drink already~ Or are you too shy to walk over? #AIイラスト

QT egyptian beauty

The Shape of the Numbers Mew found the place because something beneath the mountain was dreaming. It had felt the presence for three nights before it understood that the sensation was not memory. The signal came faintly through stone and root, buried beneath the old forest where the war had passed and left nothing visible behind. No roads remained. No fences. No warning signs. Trees stood where armored convoys had once climbed the ridge, and moss covered the concrete mouths of ventilation shafts until they resembled ordinary rocks. But beneath them, something waited. Mew circled the mountain at sunrise, drifting between the upper branches while mist gathered in the valleys below. It could feel minds at great distances when they were awake. These were not awake. They pressed against the world like figures beneath ice—present, silent, indistinct. There were many of them. Mew tried to reach down with its thoughts. For one instant it found fear. Then nothing. It fled the mountain. The old human lived two valleys east in a house built from reclaimed stone, corrugated metal, and the ribbed frame of a transport hangar. His name was Elias. He repaired radios, pumps, and field generators for the scattered settlements along the river. He was not truly old, though Mew thought of him that way because his hair was gray and he moved carefully when the weather changed. He had been born eleven years after the armistice. The war existed in his life as murals, ruined rail lines, memorial ceremonies, and the uneasy silences of people who had survived it. His parents had told him about nights without light, Pokémon stampedes driven ahead of advancing armies, cities evacuated because something legendary had been sighted over the horizon. They had never told him everything. No one had. When Mew appeared at his window before dawn, Elias knew something was wrong. It usually announced itself with mischief: a cup lifted from a table, a radio dial turned by an invisible hand, a laugh from an empty room. That morning it hovered motionless beyond the glass. Its tail hung low. Elias opened the window. “What happened?” Mew projected no words. It rarely did. Instead, Elias felt wet earth, roots gripping stone, and a cold pressure deep underground. Then came the impression of rows. Repetition. A heartbeat slowed almost to silence. And beneath all of it, a sensation he could not immediately place. Kinship. “You found something like you?” Mew recoiled from the question. Not like itself. Made from itself. The understanding arrived incomplete, carried more through revulsion than language. Elias packed before sunrise. They entered the facility through a drainage tunnel half-collapsed beneath the roots of an ancient cedar. The outer grating had rusted away, leaving bent iron teeth around a black opening. Elias carried a lamp, tools, two days of food, and a pistol that had belonged to his father. Mew carried nothing. The tunnel descended farther than the geography of the mountain seemed to allow. At first they found only water, mineral stains, and pale insects scattering from the light. Then the walls changed. Stone gave way to poured concrete. Concrete became ceramic panels. Corroded cables appeared overhead in bundled arteries, disappearing through sealed doors marked with symbols faded beyond recognition. Power still moved somewhere inside. Elias heard it before he saw evidence of it: a low electrical hum traveling through the walls. The sound seemed impossible. The war had ended forty-seven years ago. No grid remained here. No maintenance crew had visited. Yet old emergency lamps flickered awake as they passed, one after another, bathing the corridor in weak blue light. Mew stopped at the first security door. Its tiny body stiffened. The steel panel was warped outward from the center, as though something on the far side had once struck it hard enough to bow the metal without breaking it. Elias ran his fingers over the deformation. “Maybe we should go back.” Mew looked at him. The sleeping presence beneath them shifted. The door opened. Not mechanically. Mew peeled it aside with a small movement of one paw. Hinges shrieked, bolts tore through corroded steel, and a gust of stale, antiseptic air rolled into the corridor. Beyond lay the observation gallery. Elias raised the lamp and forgot to breathe. The chamber extended beyond the reach of the light. Glass cylinders stood in two descending rows, each large enough to hold a person. Thick cables climbed from their crowns into the darkness overhead. Tubes entered through the bases and coiled across the floor beneath a film of dust and dead leaves. Most of the tanks were empty. Some were cloudy. Some had cracked. And some still contained shapes. Pale limbs curled against narrow torsos. Long tails drifted in colorless fluid. Fingers ended in rounded pads. Eyes remained closed beneath heavy brows. Elias had seen Mewtwo only in photographs. The official photographs showed a single creature standing over the ruins of Cerulean command, one hand lifted as tanks burned behind it. In schoolbooks, it appeared as a silhouette under the chapter title The Final Escalation. Museums displayed fragments of containment armor, fused restraint collars, and sections of battlefield glass vitrified by psychic heat. No photograph had ever shown them like this. Small. Folded. Unborn. Mew floated toward the nearest occupied tank. The creature inside was larger than Mew but much smaller than the towering weapon Elias remembered from history. Its knees were drawn to its chest. One hand rested against the glass. The fingertips had left no print, but Mew raised its own paw to meet them. The chamber changed. A tremor passed through the fluid. Every tank answered. Not with motion. With presence. Elias felt the pressure of many minds brush against his own, too faint to form thoughts yet too organized to be mistaken for machinery. He staggered backward, one hand against the wall. Mew did not move. For a moment Elias sensed what it sensed: a vast, submerged awareness divided among sleeping bodies. Fragments touching fragments. Fear without an object. Pain remembered by minds that had never opened their eyes. Then the connection withdrew. Mew turned toward him. Help. That was why it had brought him. Elias swallowed. “I don’t know how.” Mew looked toward a darkened bank of consoles above the gallery. Humans made this. A human could understand it. He wanted to explain that this was not how humanity worked. The hands that built a machine were not interchangeable with every hand born afterward. Knowledge vanished. Institutions died. Language itself changed. But Mew had already moved toward the control room. The first terminal took Elias three hours to wake. Its storage system used military architecture obsolete before he was born. Half the interface was corrupted, and the other half required credentials no living person possessed. He bypassed the authentication bus, found an emergency diagnostic port behind a sealed panel, and linked it to his field reader. The terminal came alive in shades of green. The screen displayed a crest Elias recognized from memorials: the Defense Continuity Authority, an organization formally dissolved after the trials. Beneath it appeared a name. PROJECT ORISON SUBLEVEL 7 — DEVELOPMENTAL VIABILITY ARCHIVE Elias sat very still. Mew hovered at his shoulder. “I’m going to read this,” he said. “I don’t know what it will feel like to you.” Mew drifted closer. The link formed gently. It was not mind reading. Mew did not see words through his eyes or hear the silent voice with which he read. It felt what the words did to him. The first reports were clinical. Batch 1: forty-eight embryos. Viable at seventy-two hours: eleven. Viable at full development: one. The file marked the result in red. SURVIVAL RATE: 2.08% Batch 2 adjusted protein sequencing. Batch 3 modified growth medium. Batch 4 introduced synthetic psychic suppression during cortical development. Survival rose to 3.1%. A note beside the figure called the improvement encouraging. Mew felt Elias’s confusion before it felt his horror. Three percent was merely a shape to it, a human abstraction. But the next page contained individual subject records. OR-04-017 showed stable cardiac development before catastrophic neural activity on day 109. OR-04-022 became responsive to external voices and died during transfer. OR-04-031 survived long enough to demonstrate object recognition. The report described the subject following a technician with its eyes. It was terminated twelve hours later because of skeletal malformation. Elias stopped scrolling. The room hummed around him. Mew touched his shoulder. He continued. The language became easier to read as the files grew newer. The procedures became more efficient. The euphemisms became cleaner. Nonviable. Developmental loss. Material disposal. Post-conscious termination. One early technician had written the word death in a margin note. Someone had deleted it and replaced it with failure event. Elias’s stomach tightened. Through him, Mew felt the meaning of the rows beyond the glass begin to change. They were no longer repetition. Each empty tank had once held a mind struggling toward existence. The numbers climbed slowly. Three percent. Four point six. Five. A breakthrough in neural dampening raised viability to eight percent, though nearly half the survivors displayed what the reports called “persistent distress behavior.” The facility responded by increasing sedation. At ten percent, the project received expanded funding. At eleven, the command staff authorized industrial production. At twelve point one, the report praised the team for exceeding strategic readiness projections. Elias’s hands began to shake. Mew felt the reaction before it understood why. The fear beneath the mountain was no longer distant. It passed through Elias as nausea, grief, and a kind of shame so deep it seemed to have no rightful owner. He had not done this. His parents had not done this. Most of the people who had were dead before he learned to speak. Still, the files had been written in his language. The machines had been built by hands like his. He opened the termination logs. There were thousands of entries. Not hundreds. Thousands. The project had not produced twelve viable subjects from a hundred. It had produced twelve from every hundred, again and again, for years. Mew left his shoulder. It floated to the observation glass and looked down across the chamber. Elias felt its awareness stretching outward, touching the occupied tanks and the empty ones alike. Mew did not understand percentages. It understood absence. For the first time, it perceived the facility not as a place full of sleeping relatives, but as a place full of the dead. Its cry did not enter the air. Every loose object in the control room lifted at once. Tools, chairs, broken panels, fragments of glass—everything rose a few inches and began to tremble. The observation window groaned in its frame. Far below, fluid sloshed violently inside the tanks. “Mew.” The lights brightened. “Mew, stop.” Not a command. A plea. Elias forced himself out of the chair and approached slowly. His own fear fed the link, but beneath it he tried to hold something steadier. Not forgiveness. Presence. He placed both hands against the glass. “I know.” He didn’t. Not fully. But Mew felt that he wanted to. The objects settled. One by one, they struck the floor. For a long time neither of them moved. Then a warning appeared on the terminal. PRIMARY RESERVE BELOW SAFE THRESHOLD CRYOGENIC SUPPORT ESTIMATE: 19 DAYS Elias read it twice. That was the final cruelty. The facility had survived for half a century, waiting until someone arrived just in time to inherit its decision. They could not simply leave. The occupied tanks held thirty-seven viable subjects. Their files identified them as late-production models, grown after the survival rate had reached twelve percent. Some had completed behavioral conditioning. Others had been suspended before testing. The awakening protocol was fragmented across several classified partitions. Entire sections had been deliberately erased during the retreat. What remained was contradictory. One file warned against waking subjects alone. Another warned against waking them in groups. One procedure required a psychic stabilization team. Another listed the psychic team itself as the leading cause of violent emergence. Every subject had been designed to exceed human containment once fully conscious. Their bodies were weapons, but their minds were more frightening. They could break walls, stop hearts, seize memories, perhaps communicate across miles. And they had never seen sunlight. Elias searched until his eyes burned. Near midnight he found a recording. A woman appeared on the screen wearing a technician’s gray uniform. Blood had dried along one side of her face. Alarms pulsed behind her. “If this archive is being accessed under continuity failure,” she said, “do not follow the military release protocol.” She glanced over her shoulder. “They wake afraid. Command believed fear increased compliance after imprinting. It does not. It increases power output.” The image distorted. “Do not restrain them when they wake. Do not surround them. Do not tell them what they were made for.” Her voice faltered. “And do not wake Subject Thirty-Seven first.” The recording ended. Elias looked through the glass. Thirty-seven occupied tanks. He returned to the files and found the numbering scheme. Subject Thirty-Seven was not the final tank. It was the first. The one Mew had touched. A new tone sounded from the gallery below. One slow pulse. Then another. The nearest tank illuminated from within. Mew was already descending when Elias reached the stairs. “Wait.” It did not. The creature inside the glass had opened its eyes. Purple light leaked from beneath its lids, faint at first, then bright enough to cast shadows across the chamber. Its hand remained pressed against the glass opposite Mew’s paw. The fluid began to drain. Elias ran to the manual controls and stopped. Every surviving instruction warned him to intervene. Every instinct told him that touching anything would make it worse. The tank emptied with a sound like heavy rain. The Mewtwo’s feet touched the base. Its legs buckled, but invisible force caught its body before it fell. Bolts turned by themselves. Seals released. The glass split down the middle and opened. Cold vapor rolled across the floor. Mewtwo stepped out. It was thin, unfinished-looking, its body marked by old sensor scars. Cables slipped from its spine and struck the ground. It stared at Mew first. Then at Elias. The psychic impact dropped him to his knees. It entered his mind without violence because violence was unnecessary. His memories opened. Childhood classrooms. Memorial walls. His mother turning off the radio when war-crime testimony began. His father saying there had been monsters on both sides and refusing to say more. The Mewtwo searched faster. Cities rebuilt. Fields replanted. Children playing with Pokémon beneath monuments bearing the names of the dead. It searched for uniforms, laboratories, commanders. It found none. Only stories. Sanitized, incomplete stories inherited by a man born after everything ended. The pressure withdrew. Elias remained kneeling, blood warm beneath his nose. Mewtwo’s voice entered both their minds. Not spoken. Not heard. Known. Did we win? Elias looked at the rows of tanks. At Mew, hovering between them. At the thin creature trembling in the cold, powerful enough to destroy the mountain and young enough to have asked the question sincerely. “No,” Elias said. His voice broke. “No one did.” Mewtwo stood motionless. Behind it, thirty-six dormant minds stirred in their glass chambers. The facility lights flickered. Nineteen days remained. Mew reached for the creature’s hand. After a long hesitation, Mewtwo allowed it. For the first time since entering the mountain, the fear beneath the earth changed. It did not vanish. But it was no longer alone.

The father didn't have the maternal posture but lacked none of the protective instinct.

She had seen it before. He sees the love of his life. She sees a creature suffering from an enchantment he cannot overcome. All she can feel is pity. Maybe remorse.

“One grants wishes. The other collects payment.”

"The phoenix chick sleeps soundly, unaware of the thousands of lives it's lived and will yet live"

"The fae stops for a moment of melancholy to mourn the ending of the summer"

"Despite her formidable appearance, the female remains remarkably attentive to her clutch, rarely leaving the nest during the final weeks of incubation."