#Also we have no evidence that what he wears is a disaster in-universe. for all we know he's an IconTM a TrendsetterTM

[deepspaceclawstation]

Julian Bashir is a fashion disaster to YOU I would wear each and every one of his little outfits

#Just saw a poll about fashion disasters with him as an option #Ridiculous. #Also we have no evidence that what he wears is a disaster in-universe. for all we know he's an IconTM a TrendsetterTM #The Risa outfit was bomb 10/10 I'm not taking any criticism #As for the racquetball outfit it wasn't any weirder than what fencers wear. Sports uniforms are just Like That #Fascination outfit another classy fit. I don't like the vertical colourblock but it seems to be a fashion trend in the Federation #I would have made it more form fitting but I have seen Picard and Riker with similar fits #DS9 #Star Trek #Mine

[nintendoteuthis]

An Overly Comprehensive Revision of Splatoon's History and Lore

In this extremely long post, I set out to put together a rewrite of Splatoon's backstory and lore. Tying together pieces of lore from all three games, the goal here is to arrange a cohesive (and more scientifically plausible) narrative to serve as a backstory to the Splatoon we all know and love. Alterna, Inkling evolution, Mr. Grizz, the Great Turf War, Judd, Tartar - all of it is incorporated here in some form.

Disclaimer: THIS IS NOT CANON. Although it incorporates a lot of official lore, the end result is effectively headcanon/fix fic. It contradicts the official lore in several places; you don't need to bring that up in the notes. This is not intended to be "better" than the canon lore, this is just stuff that I personally think would be cool. Maybe you will too.

Since this post ended up going well over 4,500 words, I'm putting it behind a Keep Reading for your dashboard's sake. But please give it all a read!

Log 1: Eve of Destruction

We start our timeline in the not-too-distant future, perhaps in the late 22nd century.

The fall of humanity was not quick or painless. Nor was there a singular cause - rather, humanity's demise was multifaceted. Human overharvesting had put a major strain on ecosystems. Shortages of certain vital resources like oil and water fueled the outbreak of multiple nuclear wars. Nuclear fallout made large tracts of land almost uninhabitable. Global warming had been building up for the past couple hundred years, wearing away at glaciers worldwide and slowly raising sea levels. And during World War V, a stray nuclear warhead hit Antarctica, melting far more ice than would naturally. These raised sea levels by over 15 meters, flooding many coastal cities.

To make things worse, an unprecedented geological disaster would soon strike. With no warning, the Toba supervolcano in Sumatra, which had nearly driven humanity to extinction during the Ice Age, erupted again with a violence not seen since the invention of agriculture. This eruption exacerbated the worst effects of both the climate change and the nuclear war. This combination of blows would ultimately lead to an extinction event the likes of which had not been seen for over 65 million years.

[Editor's note: Toba erupted 74,000 years ago, and there's genetic evidence for an extreme reduction in human populations around that time. I feel it would be fitting if the same volcano that may have shaped humanity as we know it would also be the one to destroy it.]

In the face of these disasters, human civilization tried its best to survive. But as the surface of the Earth became more and more uninhabitable, it became clear that staying here was not a viable option. What remained of the international community put aside old rivalries and came together for the greater good, and soon two initiatives were simultaneously launched to try and preserve humanity elsewhere.

Log 2: Time We Left This World Today

One major player in these decisions was biotechnology extraordinaire Prometheus Manning. A professor at a prestigious university, he made waves in the biology community for developing an "uplifting" process. Building on developments in gene therapy and treatment of Alzheimer's disease, Manning developed a plasmid of DNA that, when entered into an animal's cells, could make it intelligent and biologically immortal. This process was proven viable with the uplifting of his pet cat, Judd, who became an international celebrity in the waning days of human civilization. An optimist even in the face of a collapsing planet, Manning thought that humanity could find ways to pass their legacy forward into the future. He believed that everyone, from humans to the lowliest squid, was a part of something bigger than themselves. He acted as a consultant in both initiatives.

[Editor's note: Yeah, I didn't forget about this guy!]

I shall make a minor digression here. As these projects got Manning thinking more about the conservation of humanity's knowledge, he began to worry that even these would not be enough. He was eventually driven to bioengineer an organism - a biological computer, if you will - to store it. DNA is perhaps the most reliable form of long-term data storage, the only risk being the occasional mutation. The resulting organism, an uplifted slime mold nicknamed Tartar, had a gargantuan amount of knowledge - texts, data, images, sounds, even DNA of other organisms - encoded into its genome. While the two grand initiatives would preserve the planet's species and civilizations, this lowly amoebozoan would preserve the planet's knowledge, even long after humans were gone. Perhaps, he hoped, it would even be able to transmit this knowledge to the next intelligent species.

[Editor's note: I still like my old "Commander Tartar is alive and also the ooze" headcanon, and I think it works really well with the rest of the stuff here, so I'm keeping it.]

Manning opted to partake in neither of the preservation initiatives. Instead, he decided to send himself, Judd, and Tartar into ColdSleep, a patented form of extremely long-term cryogenic freezing, one that could theoretically last millennia. He was hopeful that, eventually, all three would wake, on a planet that had recovered.

[Editor's note: The Art of Splatoon and the Alterna Logs both use the phrase "cold sleep" to refer to cryogenic freezing. Let's roll with that.]

The first of the two preservation initiatives was the Ark Polaris. A spacecraft loaded with samples of Earth's biosphere, it was designed and launched with the intent of finding another planet to live on. Many specimens of animals, plants, and fungi were sent into ColdSleep for the duration of the journey. Of all the individual organisms loaded on the Ark, perhaps the most influential would end up be Bear #03 - an uplifted grizzly bear, nicknamed "Mr. Grizz". But nobody knew that at the time, as he lay in ColdSleep.

The second was a closed underground environment in which human civilization could survive until the Apocalypse had ended. Alterna was the name given to this underground stronghold, planned and designed by the greatest scientific minds left. Located in a geologically stable inland area, the outer walls of Alterna were fortified to be as durable as possible as possible, to withstand anything that could be thrown at it. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, flooding, nuclear bombs - all of it could be shielded. Inside, a closed ecological system kept the air and water stocked with oxygen and carbon dioxide. As most of the land surface was dedicated to human activities, most of Alterna's food came from the waters, which were richly stocked with representatives of whatever marine life was still alive (and some cloned representatives of some that weren't). There, a small fraction of humanity could survive, prosper, and continue innovation and progress as best it could.

[Editor's note: Most extinction events hit marine life just as bad as land life, oftentimes even worse. Ergo, I doubt that the sea life around Alterna would be quite as flourishing as they were before the Apocalypse. I think it was stocked by humans as a food source. Also, I'm not sure that Alterna would be built beneath the crater of a volcano. You'd think that a long-term safe haven would want to be built in an area UNlikely to have disastrous geological activity.]

Log 3: When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around

The society of Alterna was led by scientists; having finally learned from their mistakes, the remaining humans opted to let the most intelligent and idealistic minds lead them forward. Technological innovation continued underground. Massive 3D printing operations were implemented to recreate some artifacts from the surface. The Omniscient Recording Computer of Alterna (O.R.C.A.) was developed to log all the data, history, and records that would be produced as a result. And eventually, they would even learn how to recreate the sky.

"Liquid crystals" was actually a euphemism. The screens lining the internal walls of Alterna are alive. Chromatophores, if arranged in a layer like in the squid of a skin, can effectively create a surface that changes color in response to neural input. The bioengineers of Alterna realized that, if the color-changing ability of squids could be harnessed, it could be used to produce images from thoughts.

[Editor's note: I highly doubt that liquid crystals were developed from squid bodily fluids. If you're going to figure out how to get images from thoughts using squids, the most obvious way to do so would be harnessing the functionality of chromatophores. That's one argument in favor of making the "crystals" into something biological, engineered from chromatophores, but not the only one...]

Thus, a new organism was designed. A biologically immortal human cell line was used as the base, and modified with DNA from many other organisms - squids, of course, but also bits of DNA from yeasts, algae, slime molds, bacteria, and Manning's uplift plasmid. The result was a single-celled organism that could, when grown in a mat, change color in response to electrical signals. Mats of these organisms, which for the rest of this post I'm calling "crystalloids", were grown and then installed into screens. When backlit, the colors of these crystalloids can be seen as on any other screen. If these screens were hooked up to the human nervous system, they could project any image that they could think of. A screen that could read minds.

[Editor's note: Immortal cell lines are a real thing! They're usually derived from cancer cells, which do not age and so can keep dividing indefinitely. They're often used in biomedical research.]

Eventually neural interfaces were implanted in all the residents of Alterna. Their collective thoughts, memories, desires, were collected, processed by O.R.C.A. and fed to the crystalloids lined in the screens - and it resulted in beautiful blue skies. For the first time in 25 years, the residents of Alterna could see the sky once again.

Log 4: Epitaph

The years passed prosperously. But man grew proud. As generations grew, living their lives entirely in the safety of Alterna, the apocalypse began to fade from living memory. The new generation of leaders became ambitious. They wished to see the world beyond Alterna. This led to the construction of a rocket, in which they would escape the confines of Alterna and get a look at the Earth.

Despite the warnings of Alterna's elders, the rocket neared its launch date. And then disaster struck. As in the Nedelin catastrophe so many years earlier, the rocket boosters were ignited prematurely. Alterna had been fortified against shock from the outside, but nothing could protect it from something happening on the inside. The resulting explosion not only killed hundreds of personnel, but it effectively created a self-contained earthquake. Many Alternan structures collapsed, and the screens forming the Alternan "sky" were shaken loose, raining down metal and broken glass upon humanity's last stronghold. Those few who escaped the carnage ended up unable to support themselves with whatever remained; the systems that kept Alterna functioning had become irreparably broken. In the wreckage they scraped out a living, until they too died out. Humans finally went extinct, with both a bang and a whimper.

As the screens forming the Alternan "sky" broke, the mats of crystalloids fell apart, and the individual organisms tumbled into the waters below. And there they persisted. In order to avoid needing to feed the screens, they had been engineered with chemosynthetic abilities, added to their genome from bacteria. Thus they could produce their own food using chemicals in their environment. The biologically immortal nature of the base cell line not only meant that the screens never had to be replaced, but it also meant they could reproduce indefinitely. And so they survived, and continued to propagate themselves in the waters below.

The lights were off in Alterna, but the compound was not breached. The outer walls - built to withstand volcanism, tectonic activity, nuclear war - proved to be extremely durable. Impenetrable by anything larger than gaseous molecules, Alterna soon became a closed ecological system. Once Alterna's energy source failed, the screens went dark. With no light, the base of the Alterna food chain died out, and with it most of the marine life. But the few organisms that could live without light, those that could make food using chemosynthesis and those that preyed upon them, continued to survive in this environment.

So there the crystalloids stayed for thousands, even millions of years.

Log 5: Echoes

Meanwhile on the surface, life proved resilient. Adaptable disaster taxa - weeds, pests, and generalists - were the first to take take over the ruined land, now scrubbed of almost all traces of human existence. It took millions of years for life to rebound and reach its former levels of diversity, but that it did. And so life continued evolving for millions of years. The continents continued the movements they followed for millions of years. The climate warmed and cooled naturally. Organisms came and went. More minor extinction events occurred. Mammals, the dominant class of animals, saw their time as rulers of the planet come to a close. Consult this video for one possible way this could play out.

Eventually, after over 100 million years, enough niches on land had become vacant, their former inhabitants having gone extinct, to encourage new groups of animals to fill them. Perhaps cephalopods, one of the taxa that survived the extinction, could make the leap...

After miraculously persisting on the scales of geologic time, Alterna's outer walls were eventually compromised by the sheer force of the earth. The seal lasted far longer than initially anticipated, but eventually something cracked. Perhaps an inland sea had flooded the continent and eroded the surrounding rock around Alterna, leaving it exposed. In any case, it became possible to enter and leave Alterna. So the descendants of the crystalloids escaped, and eventually made it into the surrounding waters.

It has now been many millions of years since the apocalypse that wiped out humanity, and the oceans were thriving once again. The crystalloids, being microscopic and unicellular, were barely noticed by the life in these seas. They soon filled the seas around Alterna, but as it turned out, one of the most comfortable environments for them was inside organisms. The crystalloids formed commensal relationships with many species of marine life: living inside the host, causing neither benefit nor detriment to them.

And then something happened.

Log 6: Into the Light

Many of these marine organisms started picking up DNA from the crystalloids. This is a process known as horizontal gene transfer, and it happens in nature with surprising frequency. In animals, this DNA could be picked up through gametes, or from parasites or other organisms living inside the body. In any case, that's what happened here - DNA was passed to the host animals. Even after hundreds of thousands of generations, parts of the crystalloids' initial cocktail of DNA was conserved. Remarkably, DNA from Prometheus Manning's uplift plasmid and even human DNA from the base cell line had survived over the aeons. And it is these fragments that were introduced into the genomes of the marine life. Although it wasn't much, the combination of these two genetic influences, when expressed in the marine organisms, was enough to spur the development of high intelligence, pulmonary breathing, the the move to land in a wide variety of species. Some of them even gained a more anthropomorphic body plan from the human DNA. In a way, they were all uplifted, just like Judd.

[Editor's note: Rapid evolution/mutation COULD happen in response to abiotic factors, like radiation, pollution, maybe even liquid crystals. But it'd be impossible to guarantee that different organisms would mutate in the same way. The only way that you could guarantee multiple organisms evolve along the same path is with genes. That's why the screens are alive - to facilitate DNA transfer.

As a side note, evolution is not goal-oriented. It is an act of random mutations being selected for and against, as a result of what increases reproductive success. So the move to land being "driven" by feelings inherited from humans... rubbed me the wrong way. The parallel expression of genes would eliminate the implied "motivation", while still providing a tangible influence originating from humans.]

As all these newly sophont species of marine life crawled onto land, they found out they weren't the first ones there. As it turns out, the entire time cephalopods had been evolving naturally down a similar path. These cephalopods, the ancestors of the modern Inkling and Octoling, had separately colonized the land and evolved intelligence. Thus, they have numerous differences from all the other sophonts. Instead of having a singular anthropomorphic form, they have two separate forms. One of these forms, the "swim form", reflects the what their ancestors were like, and the manner in which they crawl on land is as a result different from everything else. Their ink-based physiologies and transformation ability are new evolutionary innovations; these probably can't have been picked up from Alterna, or else they'd be far more widespread. Numerous other details of their evolution also made them stand out from all the other species. That's why Inklings and Octolings had the "fresh vibes" that allowed them to become the apex species; their evolution had more natural influence.

This isn't to say that they didn't feel some influence from Alterna, though. The ancestors of Inklings and Octolings did come into contact with DNA from the crystalloids, but that had very little influence on them. There was no uplifting to be done - by this time they had already developed intelligence, were living on land full-time, and even evolved the ability to transform. Instead, the only crystalloid DNA taken in were tiny fragments of the human DNA, and all it did was make their terrestrial form a little more superficially humanoid. Perhaps this is related to the cephalopod ability to edit genes before they are expressed: maybe the rest of the incoming crystalloid DNA was snipped away before it was taken into the genome.

[Editor's note: As well as the above-mentioned differences from the other marine life, I have a few other reasons for separating Inkling/Octoling evolution. First, this is my way of reconciling Splatoon 1-era lore on Inkling evolution with what the Alterna Logs tell us about the marine life as a whole. Second, I have a lot of evolution headcanons for Inklings and Octolings that I don't want to jettison. Third, I think it would be funny if the most humanoid-looking species (well, half of the time) were the only ones NOT uplifted.

As for what happened to Inklings/Octolings: I'm basically saying that their humanoid forms naturally evolved looking "xeno", and all the Alterna DNA did was push them to what they look like ingame.]

(Now you may ask, if Inklings and Octolings were not uplifted the same way as the rest of the marine life, what would a cephalopod that did get uplifted look like? Well, consider the nautiluses. Like all of the other marine life, they resemble an anthropomorphic "adaptation" of their ancestor. Their limbs are more clearly derived from nautilus tentacles. Gnarly Eddy's "arms" aren't even attached to the rest of the tentacles he's using as limbs)

(Honestly it would probably look like Octodad.)

As a side note, Salmonids evolved completely naturally. They seem to have a biological immunity to taking up the Alterna DNA, and thus saw none of the uplifting the other marine life experienced. Instead, they're going down yet another evolutionary path towards life on land; they're roughly at the Tiktaalik stage. Thus, Salmonids retain a much closer link to the water and have a very different form of intelligence from everything else.

Back on topic. As these newly-sophont marine species spread across the globe, inhabiting every environment from temperate rainforest to tropical desert, distinct cultures and ways of life developed. But predominant above them all were the cephalopods. Indeed, most of these species soon melded into the dominant Inkling culture, most notably jellyfish. Inklings had soon become the dominant species on the planet.

Log 7: Ebb & Flow

One day, three curious compartments began eroding out of a wall of mudstone. Unbeknownst to the now society-forming marine life, these were ColdSleep chambers, sent into cryostasis eons prior by Prometheus Manning and buried, perfectly preserved, under rising seas. Unfortunately, Manning's ColdSleep chamber had become compromised before burial - he died peacefully in his dormancy. By the time that Inklings discovered these chambers, the one containing Tartar had long since cracked, and it had escaped. But one remained intact. When it was opened, out came Judd - now the last mammal living on earth. The uplifting process, millennia spent in ColdSleep, and the intricacies of the feline brain mean that this intelligent cat had picked up a new ability - telepathy. The local cephalopods soon realized the value of this cat's brain. Judd soon became the arbiter of victory in the activity that would eventually become the modern Turf War. This event became commemorated as Year 0 on the Mollusc Era calendar.

Tartar, the intelligent blob that had slunk out of the now-open ColdSleep chamber, moved forward with its prime directive: pass on its knowledge to the next intelligent species. According to its observations, the smartest species present on the planet were the cephalopods - the Inklings and Octolings. But although initially pleased with their candidacy as a successor to humanity, as it watched their culture and civilization developed, Tartar developed a deep loathing for them. How could such an intelligent species be so focused on such superficial matters? Perhaps Tartar's view of humanity was skewed by its hard-working, forward-thinking creator. Spurned by these developments and thousands of years of loneliness, it developed a new objective: create its own intelligent life. To do this, it would need to collect DNA from a wide variety of organisms. After a long, long period of planning, Tartar eventually moved into a network of subterranean caverns - which became the Deepsea Metro - and from there developed its plan, taking the guise of an old telephone to avoid suspicion. It would convert the Metro to its own testing grounds, designed to select the most viable marine organisms. It would then blend them up and absorb their DNA into itself, taking whatever the best pieces were. Eventually, he'd have a complete genome, from which it could spawn a new super-organism...

Log 8: Muck Warfare

As Tartar developed its plans, life for the marine organisms continued blissfully unaware. Over the centuries, the Inklings and Octolings learned how to develop weapons with which to fire the ink their bodies produced. Zapfish were domesticated as a source of electricity. The salvation of the Splatlands from a great flood became commemorated in local folklore, which gave great importance to three prominent families: the Shark, Moray, and Manta Clans. Mass Salmonid migrations (known as the Big Run) came roughly every 70 years, wreaking havoc on cephalopod settlements that happened to be in the way. Major cities were established: Inkopolis, Splatsville, New Sardine, Tailfin City. And Judd oversaw this all.

[Editor's note: These events are all based on Sunken Scrolls.]

In roughly 1914 ME (Mollusc Era), border disputes arose between the rival states of Inkadia and Octaria, exacerbated by a massive flood that devastated a lot of Octarian territory. This strained their formerly-amicable relationships; in particular, the leader of the Octarians, DJ Octavio, sought to take Inkadia's resources by force to replace what was lost in the disaster. The resulting military conflict became known as the Great Turf War, and it was ugly. Though the Octarians had the upper hand at first, the Inkadian military, lead by Second Lieutenant Craig Cuttlefish and the Squidbeak Splatoon, proved victorious in the end. The Octarians were driven to a rocky "wasteland" to the north of Inkadia, scarred by flooding and warfare. As the surface of this region was not an ideal place to live, many Octarians moved to underground settlements, accessible through a series of pipes and kettles. Because racism did not go extinct with humanity, most Octolings were expelled from Inkopolis, explaining their rarity there. The Splatlands, meanwhile, remained a neutral party; hence, Splatsville has a longer history as an integrated city.

[Editor's note: Sea level rise couldn't happen fast enough to cause a war to rapidly break out. A huge flood - perhaps something like a glacial lake outburst flood - seems like a more likely explanation. It would explain why Octo Valley is surrounded by water, yet is seemingly inland.]

Log 9: Ever Further

One day, not too long after the Great Turf War, a curious object fell from the sky, crash-landing in Salmonid territory. Though these fish wouldn't know it, this was the Ark Polaris, the ambitious biological preservation initiative launched by humans millions of years ago. Near the edge of the solar system, its navigation system had become damaged, and after running out of fuel it drifted aimlessly in space for millions of years. By chance, it eventually floated back into the pull of Earth's gravity, and from there slowly careened to impact. The only survivor of the crash was Bear #03 - Mr. Grizz. He came to a terrible realization - he was on Earth, alright, but one ruled by marine life. And he was, as far as he knew, the only mammal left on this planet of the squids.

In his search for other surviving mammals, he came across the ruins of Alterna. It was a dark, corroded, and partially collapsed wasteland, but a few things still remained - including some of the crystalloids. With knowledge and skill developed over years and years of being alone with his thoughts, Mr. Grizz repaired Alterna's facilities and began researching the crystalloids. Upon discovering their potential for horizontal gene transfer, and spurred by his extreme loneliness, he had an idea. An awful idea. Mr. Grizz got a wonderful, awful idea.

He could use these to make more mammals.

Mr. Grizz further engineered the crystalloids, splicing in his own DNA. The result was a pathogenic organism, one that could induce the development of hair in any organism that touched it. This became known as "Fuzzy Ooze". Again, it moves, indicating that it's alive. You know how the Fuzzy Ooze is multicolored? That's what remains of the crystalloids' color-changing ability, gone haywire after Grizz's experimentation. Some Octarians that lost their way acted as test subjects, and as Mr. Grizz hoped, the gene transfer worked successfully - they grew hair.

[Editor's note: Again, it makes the most sense if the ooze makes you hairy through DNA. More support for it, and the Alterna "liquid crystals", being living things.]

(A quick side note: Remember above how I said that Salmonids were immune to the Alterna DNA that uplifted the other marine life? Because the Fuzzy Ooze was engineered from the crystalloids, Salmonids are also immune to the Fuzzy Ooze's hair genes. Hence why New Agent 3's Smallfry can eat Fuzzy Ooze and be completely unaffected, but if they touch it themselves they grow hair.)

But Mr. Grizz couldn't proceed far at first. In order to make the process actually feasible on a large scale, it would require require golden eggs, the fertilized eggs of Salmonids. Golden eggs served as both a power source and a conduit for the development of Fuzzy Ooze (and he also though they tasted good). Though he first acquired these by hunting Salmonids himself, he eventually settled upon a better idea. He could have others do the dirty work. Thus, he started paying locals to go into Salmonid territory and collect Golden Eggs for him, with the excuses of harvesting food and keeping Inkling society safe keeping regulators off his back. Grizzco Industries, as this business was known, became a wildly successful venture. The destruction caused by a previous Big Run had instilled an anti-Salmonid sentiment in much of the populace, and the average Inkling couldn't resist some extra cash. And so he sat back and watched the profit roll in...

So there remained three surviving organisms from the time of humans. Judd lived among the Inklings, providing wisdom and judgement. Tartar lurked in the depths of the Deepsea Metro, actively furthering its plans. And Mr. Grizz remained hiding in plain sight, biding his time.

(Lil Judd does not count as a survivor; he was cloned in the Mollusc Era from Judd's ColdSleep chamber, which Manning had retrofitted before sealing. This would ensure that, in case he didn't make it, Judd wouldn't get lonely when he woke up.)

Log 10: Fresh Start

And this is where we set our scene. After decades of neglect and DJ Octavio's poor leadership, the power grid within Octaria finally began to give out. Pressed to find an energy source, Octavio made a rash decision - steal the Great Zapfish providing a large amount of Inkopolis's power. This action caught the attention of the until-then-retired Craig Cuttlefish. Remembering his history fighting the Octarians, and after a complete lack of action from the authorities, he set out to form an independent vigilante group to invade Octarian territory and recover the Zapfish. He called it the New Squidbeak Splatoon - and one of the recruits was an adventurous youth from Inkopolis. Thus sets off the events of Octo Valley, and from there Octo Canyon, Octo Expansion, and Return of the Mammalians.

I hope you enjoyed this all! I'm happy to talk about anything mentioned (or not mentioned) above.

#splatoon #splatoon 2 #splatoon 3 #splatoon headcanon #splatoon theory #my headcanons #oc

[blueboxphenomenon]

The Turmezistan Pyramid

As China, Russia, and the USA prepared for a three-way war around the contested territory of Turmezistan, their fingers on the triggers, the leaders of the three most powerful militaries on planet Earth unexpectedly declared peace. What lead to this welcome turn of events? What miracle averted a potential third world war? Most will tell you it was an act of incredible diplomacy on behalf of the UN Secretary General. The truth, however, is much stranger. Because in 2017 a pyramid that was over 5000 years old was discovered in Tumezistan.

With military eyes constantly scanning the entire area, a pyramid appeared right in the middle of three military powerhouses ready to converge. It seemed to be ancient, and all tests concurred that it was. However, the structure had not been there the day before. It simply appeared there, as if it had always been there. This triggered a state of crisis.

The world's press flocked to the area, but soon the United Nations pushed them back. Barricades were erected and journalists were encouraged to keep clear.

The situation was tense. The Secretary General himself arrived, and was accompanied by the leaders of the three military operations and three unknown individuals.

For some reason, one of the unknowns was allowed through the UN barricade. He was seen to approach the pyramid. Using telescopic lenses, it became apparent that he was greeted by entities wearing red shrouds. What was said is unknown, but it appeared he was sent away.

Some time later, the pyramid seemed to be declared a hostile target and a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress and ocean-to-surface missiles. The pyramid is said to have deployed a beam of light to neutralise the threat. No humans were harmed, but this show of power was absolute.

So what happened next?

Ten months later, the pyramid was gone, and all mentions of these events were scrubbed. A few people remember seeing the news reports, some conspiracy theorists - like myself - kept screenshots and newspaper clippings, but overall public knowledge of these events faded rapidly. Nobody can even tell me what the broken statues used to be. You know the ones. You never noticed them but they appeared recently. The plinths are huge and you can see the remains of a symbol that looked like this:

Not one person can explain them.

So unfortunately, I cannot tell you what happened next. However, you may have noticed a few things about the archived photographs I shared here. A blue police telephone box appears in some of them. The box is different from the patented designs, and appears in slightly different locations between photographs. The man who approached the pyramid might also look familiar, especially to students of St Luke's University. I believe this to be an example of "the Doctor" arriving alongside the "blue box" to help humanity. It is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that the blue box and the Doctor are connected, something I think most of us take for fact by now but some still doubt.

I really wish I had solid answers but it appears whatever method of suppression was used to hide these events affected myself and many of my contacts. However, I think we can all be grateful that disaster was averted. The pyramid is no longer present in Turmezistan, and neither is the looming threat of war. At least, not that war.

#bbp-blog #blue box phenomenon #BBP #other #unit archive #featured

[jackfrostsander]

Wednesday 16:36

This truly is one of the sweetest and softest scenes ever! 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍

They are so in love and everything shows that. Their chemistry is undeniable… Another masterpiece of film history!

Sander who prevented that Robbe’s head would hit the side of the bed by gently putting his hand behind it. Foreshadowing Friday 21:21 🤯

Sander wearing his Bowie shirt ⚡️ I definitely think that despite being a disaster in the kitchen Robbe will bake lightning bolt cookies one day… And even though they might not be perfect, Sander will enjoy them like no other food he ever ate. Because he knows that Robbe made these specially for him…

How Robbe was smiling when Sander showed him that drawing. But he probably never believed that Sander would actually fulfil his promise to paint it on a wall…

Robbe bumping Sander’s nose… So cute… And then Sander feeding him crisps… Just like he fed Robbe a croque at the sea… Also a nice parallel to this is the cafe scene in which Sander acts as if he’s going to feed Britt but then eats it himself… A bit symbolically saying that he cares and loves Robbe but not Britt. Then Robbe playing with Sander’s hair 🥺 After Sander yesterday hold on to Robbe’s hair 🥺

Them playing with the camera… Robbe trying to hide… Brings back memories of my childhood and trying to film my granny… 🥺

I agree with Sander’s theory. Sorry Robbe. I think we all have the ability to shape our own lives as we want… Due to external factors this may be harder (sometimes significantly so) for some people to accomplish than others but we all can do this! Nothing is predetermined. Robbe’s multiverse theory might sound more “sciency” but in reality it lacks any empirical evidence. That said, I am still getting crazily emotional when I think of Sobbe in all universes 😭 Robbe also gets the physics a bit wrong but ok that’s not of importance here…

Yellow curtains… Another iconic one-liner from Sander. Seriously, how many iconic one-lines did we get from Sander? 🥺

Sander briefly got a bit hyper as he was talking about tracing his thoughts back… Notice how Robbe calms Sander down by saying “hey” while touching his hair 🥺 Here Robbe demonstrates why he’s Sander soulmate. Even though he doesn’t know anything about Sander’s MI he reads the boy like an open book and knows instinctively what to do. Just like in Monday 11:03 where he knows exactly how to reassure and comfort Sander… Soulmate energy!

I love how Sander panicked a bit at Robbe’s surprising action of sitting on top of him… And Robbe giving a playful slap on Sander’s cheek as he knew Sander was having dirty thoughts 🤣

Sander answers with another iconic one-liner to Robbe’s question of when he first fell for him… The moonlight was shining on you and I immediately knew: he’s the one! Stop! Soon we’re able to fill a book with your one-lines… I am sure Robbe already could… 😉

A ping on Sander’s phone interrupts them. While Sander goes up to read it, Robbe turns into a total baby koala who hangs from Sander’s back. Something he’s going to do often in the future… Like after their date and at the sea in s05… Imagine how often Robbe does this??? I am sure Sander loves every second of it…

It’s Britt and the happy atmosphere is immediately ruined. I believe that Sander is honest with Robbe when he says that he has told Britt. But we know how Britt is… She doesn’t seem to take anything that Sander says seriously. To be honest, I really think the first thing she asked after Sander said that he wanted to break up with her was: “Did you take your pills this morning?” In Britt’s mind it’s unthinkable that someone would want to break up with her and so she must have blamed his MI… This is confirmed by the fact that even weeks later at Saturday 00:57 she still remained convinced that Sander was her boyfriend…

Robbe is annoyed but notice how sweet Sander is as he puts his head on Robbe’s shoulder??? I love that soooo much. And the way Sander looked at Robbe with such love and conviction! There clearly is no doubt in his mind about the choice between Robbe and Britt. He’s happy that he lives in this universe! 🥺

#happy 2 year anniversary #rewatch s03 #wtfock s3 #s03: robbe #robbe ijzermans #sander driesen #sander ⚡️ #sobbe #robbe x sander #wtfam #wtfock #perfect love #soulmates #Youtube

[maswartz]

Collection of my Weird Dreams

1. I had a weird dream last night. I was reading a (very very nicely drawn) King of the Hill comic where Dale got bit by a vampire. Soon Lauane was too and either turned or killed Peggy. I don’t remember seeing Bobby. But I know it ended with Dale biting and turning Hank as fangs emerged from Hank’s teeth. The weirdest part was it was on tumblr and I could see all the details of the blog it was on. 2. I don’t know why but for some reason lately I’ve been having dreams about a TV show that was basically a live action Superfriends. It stared Sinestro (in a heroic role and a really weird costume) and a cast of DC heroes. It aired in the gap after Smallville ended but before the Arrowverse began. I even remember the title “Sinestro and the Corps of Justice” The really weird thing is that in the dream I just had last night the description for one of the episodes (which I just realized I shouldn’t have been able to read in a dream) mentioned Squirrel Girl and I saw Deadpool in it. I still remember the intro from last nights dream too. It started with animated versions of the heroes floating in space rising up as they turned into the live action versions. 3. I had a strange dream last night, it was a zombie apocalypse but it was in the Monsters Inc. universe and the monsters were using the closets to save the children. 4. I had a weird dream last night. Basically it took place in one of those idealistic 50-esque towns but everyone had a dark secret. It begins and ends with the town’s greatest actor dying in the center of town. Eventually it’s revealed he hid evidence that would have cleared the main character’s brother of a crime. As he died he confesses. This is where it gets weird. There’s also some deep rivalry/conspiracy between people who wear dog shirts and people who wear cat shirts. Oh and did I mention that everyone was either a barbie doll or a ken/GI Joe doll? Basically by the end the town is torn apart by all the secrets. 5. I had a weird dream last night, basically it was one of those festivals you see in RPGs celebrating the defeat of some ancient evil, only it was like a modern carnival with tacky stands and food and rides and stuff. And in the middle of the carnival the evil guy was inside a room with glass windows so people could look at him inside the seal. And at one point he’s going on the usual “if i were free I’d turn this mockery into a crater” until a staff member just hands him cotton candy. 6. I just had a weird dream It was like a combo of Earth D and the DCAU/batman beyond. Here’s what I remember Robin was an indian version of Tim Drake and his daughter was a new heroine and he had a job making historical holograms Supergirl was asian or something and her son had a crush on the daughter of Robin Aquaman was older and a bit chubby but still kicked ass when an atlantian tried to attack the surface world he led the army against them Aquagirl was the same as Batman Beyond Terry apparently was a brat before but through time travel or something had gone through what we saw in BB and become a better hero for it and for some reason had a sword and was in a semi relationship with Aquagirl. The joker was still alive and somehow got all the heroes to surrender there was a subplot about a spikey nut thing one of the batmen (bruce was still batman too) kept dropping and a villain telling another villain not to let a monster dog eat them During the climax Terry drops a gas pellet, bruce throws a flash bang and terry uses one of the nut things to set it off near Superman recharging him and that’s where it ended. 7. Every time I hear this song I can’t help but think back to a dream I had once. There was a massive giant who walked across the world until they noticed small creatures suffering. They taught the creatures how to farm, how to build, how to craft weapons to ward off predators and so on. One day there was a terrible disaster (right as the song reaches the zenith) and the giant protects the small village with their body dying in the process and their body becomes a tall mountain that watches over the village for all time. 8. I had a weird dream once where it was a horror movie that took place in a mansion, it was haunted by a banshee but the banshee was summoned by a teenage girl to save her from other teens at a party gone wrong. Basically it ended with the girl becoming the new banshee. 9. I don’t know what reminded me of this but a few years ago I had a dream about a kid about 5-10ish who carried around a stuffed bear dressed like a knight. One night the kid and his mom are attacked by a mugger and the bear begins to glow and grow until it’s about 6-7 feet tall and it attacks the mugger. It turns out the kid has the power to bring the bear to life to create KnightBear! That’s pretty much all I remembered 10. I just had a dream where I was watching an LP/playing one of those “found journal” games. I mean I remember seeing the progress bar at the bottom, I even skipped ahead a few times.

The journal belonged to a boy at one of those troubled boy places decades ago.

It kept talking about some imaginary friend thing trying to pressure him into horrible choices.

Then it got weird when the journal revealed a nerf gun you had to use to spell the name of the “friend” and a creature appeared and had the player use various objects to play pranks on other boys and the staff.

However the pranks get more and more violent as the creature gets more and more demented looking. Then the journal reveals why the boy/you were in this place, with a bloodstained page and a photo. 11. I just had a weird dream it started with a newspaper comic crossover that somehow involved Yogi Bear and turned into a zombie outbreak. Then for some reason four old comedians including Bill Muray were tasked with stopping it but they failed however it turned out to be a groundhogs day loop. I know at one point Murray is talking about the last loops failure and it involved a showdown on a bridge where they all died and zombiefied and destroyed the bridge. That's when I woke up 12. Last night’s dream was about a group that was pretty much the Voltron Force/Power Rangers. It began with something about time travel where it was revealed things hit the fan bad! Some evil parasite that for some reason looked like the leg of a horse or a moose had taken over all but one of the team. The lone survivor managed to free two of the others so it was the leader, the comic relief and the brooding one against the second in command and the gadget genius. During the battle the gadget genius revealed they had rebuilt a ton of previous versions of the mecha only for the comic relief to remind him that he helped build them all so he took them all down. The parasite was having them use their space station to super heat the earth so they could thrive on the planet and after all five were free they formed the mecha and were forced to destroy the station but for some reason the mecha began to tear itself apart. Only the leader survived and used some gadget to go back in time and stop it all from happening but one of the last surviving parasites infected him and his past self had to kill him… 13. It’s 4 am and I just had a weird dream about a body horror game. The premise is a couple (randomly generated each play through so one play through is MF another MM and so on) are in an accident and found by a mad doctor who attaches them at the pelvis (Barbie/ken anatomy, the whole thing is played for horror) and the couple must adapt to this in order to escape.   It’d control like a two player QWOP.   I just had to get this idea out 14. I had a weird ninja anime dream last night. Basically it was one of those realistic anime styles. The main character was a female ninja who trained to be the best of the best for the usual reasons (fighting evil) but the twist was when she actually got to the battle this super deformed ninja guy was wiping the floor with them. He pledges himself as her pupil. The SD Ninja would be one of those “how scary a comedy character would be if their abilities were taken seriously” situations but he’d still act like he was in a comedy anime. At some point the female ninja’s friend is revealed to be a centipede themed monster. Oh and the female ninja managed to convince one of the monsters that hurting people was wrong and they started to teach that to other monsters. But they had to keep up appearances in front of the boss so they’d threaten people only to let them go when the boss wasn’t looking. 14. I had a weird dream last night.It was about a cartoon superhero, a boy whose powers had something to do with animals. He was fighting a supervillain who was the big bad and had a medallion that allowed him to steal the power of animals. The villain realized that people count as animals and tried to steal the boys powers but ended up draining a side character to death. The opening was then changed to include a bit with their face included among the various beings the villain stole the power of. The finale then had the villain somehow puppet the rest of the side characters to prevent the boy from attacking. Seeing the boy risk his life gave them the courage to fight the control and create an opening for the boy to strike. 15 A. I had a double whammy of weird dreams last night.The first was about Ducktales and I remember the most about it. It started off with the main cast in an amusement park playing a life sized board game thingy (Duckworth won right before someone else could) But during it they’re confronted by animatronics of themselves that FOWL had turned evil. The stinger revealed that the Louie one was turned good but thought it was the real Louie. Then it cut to Louie, Fenton, Della, and somehow the HDL father in a cave trying to escape. Part of it had caved in causing Fenton and Louie’s eyes to glow green revealing Fenton was a robot too. He had one hand as a chainsaw to clear the rocks and offered to help unlock some of Louie’s programming to help escape. But Louie was scared so he pushed him...right into Della. It cut away to the father and Louie screaming. 15 B. The next dream was RWBY with elements of Miraculous Ladybug. This one was all kinds of jumbled up. It involved Ruby dressed as Tinkerbell going mad with jealousy until an Akuma/Grimm Yang broke in the room? Then it cut to Ruby being freed from the same state? Then it cut back to Ruby actually being possessed? 17. I just woke up from another weird dream It was basically Teen Titans/Young Justice + A bad B Movie The lineup was Robin/Red Robin/Red Bird? Starfire Cyborg Superboy And Mammoth of the Fearsome Five joined the team As it went on however Robin went way off the deep end and even attacked his teammates. Starfire revealed that he’d been working solo more in secret and doesn’t even talk to the cops about the other members. Meanwhile there was a subplot about two hazardous material disposal workers who had a drum of material get stolen/fall off the truck. It ended up in a pond behind someone’s house. Superboy talked to a teenage boy genius who was either Blockbuster or some Hulk rip off who had a notebook with a bunch of notes until it was just “Blockbuster” over and over. As Superboy was confronting him two women (I think they were Titans) for some reason were in the pond and got a face full of chemicals and began throwing up. That’s when the hazardous material guys showed up and helped them not die. Then I woke up. 18. I had a freaking weird dream last night I was trapped in an anti-sexual assault PSA video. Like literally inside it. It was in universe in the MCU and Natasha was there but every time someone touched her it tore away to reveal a scared little girl inside her. Then I was running down a hallway and I could literally see the cast and crew filming the PSA, like I could see a guy in the ceiling working on lights. And the hallway kept repeating until I jumped up and grabbed the guy’s arm. That’s when I woke up and went back to bed. I legit have NO idea what spawned this. 19. It started with a skeleton villain voiced by Mark Hamill (so either Skeleton King or Skeletor) marching down the street ranting about the positive values of revenge. Going to confront him was the girl from Two Stupid Dogs (aged up to like middle school age) walking the skinny dog. The dog got scared and refused to go any further. (Apparently the dog had somehow wronged the villain) The girl was about to give up hope when a high school version of Bayonetta showed up next to her and put a stencil on the fence next to her. It was of magic words arranged in a magic shape. As she penciled it on another girl, a high school version of Zatanna helped activate it forming a seal to protect the girl and dog. That’s when I woke up. 20. I had a weird ass body horror nightmare last night. It started as a Doctor Who/Ben 10 crossover thingy with the “plot” being a musical as everyone got ready for Gwen’s wedding. Then it took a turn as along the side of the “screen” cartoony veins went up and these worm like things popped out of them and started singing. Then the person’s hand pulled on one and I could FEEL them all moving inside. Then it cut to a person searching TVTropes for more info on it and it was like the first step of some horrific transformation into a parasite monster. I full on woke up after that. 21. I just had a really bonkers dream Already forgetting small details It was some kind of movie trailer, the star was done woman in her 20s who reminds me of Frankie Foster. She was visiting some weird store with a Seussisn/willy wonka vibe to it there was some kind of secret passage hidden via a special combo on a vending machine that had some Suessian monster guy inside near the machine was a taxidermied elephant man (actual humanoid elephant) nothing graphic but their skin was red and leathery and was apparently the dad of the guy in the vending machine the skin of the elephant guy was apparently a clue in some big treasure hunt too it ended with the woman leaving to go home and the monster guy saying something like “everyone needs a vacation or you’ll work yourself to death like my old man” pointing out the elephant guy at that point she asks if he was dead when they taxidermied him and the monster just shrugged and I think it was implied he wasn’t even dead but was totally fine and that’s honestly all I remember

#weird dreams

[cybernaght]

Guardian rewatch: episode 12

We start the episode in the Snake Tribe territory, which is supposedly still somewhere within the confines of the Dragon City. It is baffling that it took citizens of this place so long to figure out that there are mysterious beings and demi-humans living among them, it truly is.

While the scene is mostly centred around the conflict between Zhu Hong and her tribe, and the ominous warning of the war brewing, it also does a really lovely joy of showcasing, yet again, the fierce loyalty not only she, but Guo Changcheng have to the SID. This boy remains the most precious muffin of a human.

At the SID, Sang Zan is learning to write under a loving watchful eye Wang Zheng. The once fierce and ruthless warlord is now the softest archivist. On a separate note, I am not sure how good of an archivist he might be considering that he is evidently illiterate.

Anyway, it’s heart-warming to see those two happy together. I sure hope nothing terrible happens to them in the future.

Our actual power couple, on the other hand, have done a full reversal into the relationship they had in the beginning; only it’s somehow even worse now. Shen Wei, who properly messed his cover up during the last adventure, has his guard up as he is being questioned in relation to a case. Zhao Yunlan, who grew to see this man as a friend and partner, is no longer amused by secrets, nor intrigued by them. He is now furious at their existence, upset at what he must perceive as lack of trust on Shen Wei’s part.

Shen Wei serves Zhao Yunlan a cup of tea with a side order of avoidance, hoping that by ignoring the subject of himself it will go away.

When in the previous scenes together they were always across the desk from each other, or next to each other, leaning in closely, body language open, there is now a rift between them. It’s awkward; neither of the men want to be here, but their needs are the opposite to each other, and neither of them are willing to back down.

Shen Wei goes on explaining in great detail his connection to the case and to the victim, despite Zhao Yunlan’s attempt to change the subject with a very unsubtle, “your body surely recovered fast”. The latter then proceeds to stubbornly talk about Shen Wei’s archaic ways, which earns him an incredulous “Are you even listening to me?” from the professor. The incredulity is wonderfully misjudged, considering the circumstances.

“I only want to hear you tell the truth”

We rarely see Zhao Yunlan open and vulnerable. I can’t off the top of my head remember him ever being open and vulnerable with anyone who is not Shen Wei. Zhao Yunlan operates on false bravado, aggressive charm, weaponised smiles. But with this man, he purposefully lowers his guard. I trust you, he seems to say, and I always have. Why can you not trust me?

Shen Wei gulps.

He then continues talking about the case, which is the last straw for Zhao Yunlan, who explodes, smacking his palm hard on the desk.

Shen Wei startles, looking hurt. I just… don’t understand what he was expecting. Once again, this is a man who, from Shen Wei’s perspective, has unmasked him on the first day they met. This is a man who has been poking and prodding him for weeks. And I get that it is hurtful when someone you care about does not respect your boundaries, I do, but truly honestly hoping that the same someone will just accept the relationship terms that have never even been discussed is a little bit unrealistic, especially when Shen Wei is not divulging anything.

Shen Wei is bad at communicating. Which is, I suppose, not news to anyone.

“It seems that Chief Zhao still hasn’t given up on suspecting me.”

“Not suspicion, but lack of understanding.”

Zhao Yunlan is trying very hard. He is trying to close the rift between them: by pulling the chair over next to Shen Wei’s and settling down on it, by reminding Shen Wei how much they have been through together, by telling the man that he is being perplexing. Shen Wei, on the other hand, has raised his barriers all the way back up, smoothly explaining that he is just a normal man who ends up being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He has got a polite smile playing on his lips, his mask fully in place.

Zhao Yunlan does not even pretend to have believed Shen Wei, he gives up on the conversation with a dejected “Fine, forget it.”

He makes his excuses and pulls his phone out to make a call to Wang Zheng to check up on the rest of the team. Just as that happens, the SID gets attacked by the magical sound waves, and Zhao Yunlan sprints into action.

Shen Wei calls after him, and then asks to come with. Considering they have just spent some very awkward time together, more or less fighting about Shen Wei lying an awful lot, Zhao Yunlan would be well within his moral rights to reject help. He doesn’t, however. Even now, the trust he has in Shen Wei  - in his good intentions, in his friendship - is unwavering.

At the SID offices, Tan Xiao is using his sound device to get past the two ghosts energy beings, and break through the safety measures protecting the Hallows. In other news, apart from being susceptible from curses or poisons slipped through the letter box, the SID HQ also does not have anything that might stop a human from breaking into it. How those people survived for this long is a mystery.

A point of complete diversion from me: I am currency watching a contemporary drama entitled To Dear Myself. It’s about young professionals in Shanghai who get their lives broken in about ten different ways; Zhu Yilong’s the leading man; there will definitely be a lengthy think-piece on it here. But the reason I’m bringing that up here is that it also has Chen Weidong, the actor who plays Tan Xiao, as a contextually neurodivergent rich boyfriend of one of the protagonists.

It’s kind of surreal seeing him here; there’s only been about two years between the filming of those two shows, but he looks so different. Oh, and, he is very  good as well.

Back in the world of Guardian, we see Sang Zan shaking off the sound attack and attempting to stop Tan Xiao. He does not succeed as such, but manages to pull a string which activates the Indiana Jones-style set-up with loaded crossbows. It’s very silly; I kind of love it.

While evading the arrows, Sang Zan flings the Awl up in the air, Zhao Yunlan catches it. How close is the University to SID? He took about five minutes to get here! The chief gets a barrage of premonitions which include Zhu Hong knocked out in the future, as well as in the present, and a little sneak-peak into the Disaster Wedding incident.

He then proceeds to pass out into Shen Wei’s slow motion embrace.

There is nothing wrong with this. This is beautiful.

Shen Wei checks on Yunlan briefly, but Tan Xiao goes on the offensive, which deserves him: a) a shot of dark energy right into his chest, which flings him across the space, b) the meanest of Hei Pao Shi’s death glares. This is the moment Tan Xiao earns an uncharacteristically rough treatment he’s going to get at the end of this episode.

She Wei carefully places unconscious Zhao Yunlan next to the wall, calling out his name. We can only presume that the lab has a second exit, as Tan Xiao manages to get away despite the two men currently being more or less in the doorway.

An indeterminate amount of time passes, and Zhao Yunlan wakes on the sofa, Da Qing in human form miaowing at him, his team and Shen Wei nearby. The team goes into a full debrief mode: Wang Zheng reports that she is generally able to repel sound waves, but was taken by surprise; Da Qing and Lin Jin speculate about the shield being affected by the waves as well, since an apparent Undergrounder managed to get through it.

Zhao Yunlan notes that the sound waves ability seems to be doubled, and used for both attack and suggestion. He notes that the powers can be numerous, while grinning conspiratorially at Shen Wei.

Shen Wei quietly despairs. He probably genuinely thought that this conversation was truly over. He takes a few seconds to come to terms with Zhao Yunlan actually teasing him about him maybe being an Undergrounder, before composing himself and stating that compound abilities don’t actually exist.

Da Qing, who doesn’t necessarily pick up what this conversation really is about, but does note that *something* is up with those two, comes to his own conclusions, asking Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan to stop flirting.

Lin Jing comes up up with this.

“Comrades!”

Thank you, Viki subbers, for notifying the audience that the word “Comrade” is also a slang for “gay”.

Lin Jing springs to his feet, saying that he needs a sample test of a human consciousness - presumably to create that clever brain chip of him which would make one immune to the wound wave powers. Zhao Yunlan very theatrically feigns a big scary headache to see whether Shen Wei would volunteer to take the test in his stead to spare him the pain. It’s an underhand move, but it works nonetheless.  

We briefly return to the Snake Tribe, or, more specifically to Zhu Hong’s Fourth Uncle asking whether she is still mad at him, while she is forcibly restrained and bound to a pillar. What is it with this show and binding people to pillars? In reality, the one bound to a pillar is actually Guo Changcheng, which the Fourth Uncle doesn’t pick up on even through Xiao Guo is not actually wearing the clothes Zhu Hong arrived in. Zhu Hong springs the trap, plies her uncle with the same wine, and then goes to regroup with the others, leaving Xiao Guo behind for the time being, because, I guess, it makes more sense for Zhu Hong to be alone when she gets hypnotised later in the episode.

Honestly, it’s easier to not think about too much about this scene, so let’s return to the main characters.

Lin Jing is just finishing the experiment on Shen Wei, who is lying on the lab bed in his undershirt, seemingly asleep. I would assume that Shen Wei has gone into some kind of a meditative trance to try and affect the way his own brain works and emulate the human activity. He does not stir when Zhao Yunlan walks over, and call him.

“Shen Wei? Professor Shen?”

Having received no response, Zhao Yunlan leans in to…

... Count this man’s eye lashes? Admire the effects of his skincare routine?

Oh, no, sorry. Here’s the excuse.

Thank you, Guardian, for this moment.

As Shen Wei wakes up and rises, he lets Zhao Yunlan know in no uncertain terms that he did see through his ruse.

“You don’t have a headache anymore?”

This snaps Yunlan out of gazing at Shen Wei with barely contained lust to pretend that his head indeed still hurts. Considering that Shen Wei does not look concerned, and knowing that Zhao Yunlan’s health and well-being is his number one priority in life, we can conclude that he did know that a headache was just an excuse to get Shen Wei out of his shirt check Shen Wei’s brain activity. Our professor collects his things and leaves with a brief goodbye.

Lin Jing is staring at the readings, checking that the computer has worked properly. Noticing that something is wrong, Zhao Yunlan asks, “Did you see live pornography in his head or something?” Not that I blame his for his mind being the gutter, but also, wow Zhao Yunlan’s mind is in the gutter.

Lin Jing dismisses the idea of mind reading as a whole, and shares his findings that Shen Wei’s consciousness was unwavering, like a dead man’s. Unfortunately for Shen Wei, whatever it was that he did to appear human has not worked well at all.

Zhao Yunlan smirks.

Outside of the SID building, Shen Wei is still frozen in place, contemplating his future actions as he is thumping the Pendant of Pining.

“Should I tell him after all?”

Yes, Shen Wei, you should.

“If I tell him, will that put him in danger?”

I am afraid the the good ship Zhao Yunlan Being In Danger sailed the day Zhao Yunlan became Lord Guardian and Chief of the SID.

(Am I again getting unreasonably frustrated with a fictional character of a show that aired several years ago? You bet I am.)

What follows in the episode is a brief interlude of Zhu Jiu being horrible to Tan Xiao, and making inappropriate comments about him and Zheng Yi. We also learn some of Tan Xiao’s backstory, which expands on his character and explains that the reasons he felt so protective of the little girl was because she reminded him of a sister he once had.

Back to SID offices.

Zhao Yunlan is doodling Shen Wei and the Envoy as he tries to reconcile the two in his mind.

It does sound like he still has doubts that the two are the same person, despite the overwhelming pile of evidence that made him draw to this conclusion in the first place. If anything, it is quite surprising that it took him this long to figure out that the enigmatic mysterious handsome professor and the enigmatic mysterious handsome Envoy are the same person. It is also curious that he seems to think the Envoy is much taller.

Da Qing watches his friend’s mental agony in absolute bewilderment.

Very shortly, they will get a ping for the sound wave energy from somewhere close to Zhu Hong’s home and rush to the scene to find that Zhu Hong has, indeed, been put under mind control, as she attacks Chu Shuzhi.

Here’s another piece of fight choreography for me to tear into.

Okay, good things first. I really like that the actors are doing their own fighting. Jiang Mingyang is generally looking good in combat, and his reactions continue to be on point. Gao Yuer is very flexible, and her kicks are great.

The fight itself however, is another example of the time/money constraints.

The opening punch is… fine. They do lock arms for a split second, which indicates that Zhu Hong properly swung that in rather than stopping the energy, but they are also out of distance, so safety-wise that’s okay-ish, and at full speed it looks alright . But the way Lao Chu is sticking his thumb out and then wraps that around Zhu Hong’s wrist just gave a full body shudder. This is how one gets they thumb dislocated (which I have never done myself, but I hear is very painful) and/or gives their partner a nasty bruise. For anyone out there who needs to hear this, if you ever perform a fight, please tuck your thumbs in line with your fingers and avoid hurting yourself and others. Doing otherwise adds nothing apart from a small but completely avoidable risk of injury.

Then there is this kick-punch-kick combination.

The three moves in isolation are good, but they don’t flow together, at all. I think, and this is pure speculation, that the sweeping punch in the middle was actually meant to follow the previous two moves, then the kick would come next, leading into Chu Shuzhi restraining Zhu Hong. That first kick (which is the same as the third kick, shot from a different angle) just does not belong there as a follow-up to the two punches. I can speculate that it was cut there because it looked cool - which it does - but it also sacrifices any hope this fight had for coherent storytelling.

Then there is a capture and a swivel, very similar to the finishing move used in Zhu Jiu/Sang Zan fight in episode 11. Zhu Hong gets pressed against the tree, and the team shows up to sedate her and bring her back to the headquarters.

Tan Xiao and Zheng Yi watch this scene unfold at a distance, as Zhao Yunlan appears behind them. The SID chief calmly lets Tan Xiao know that he’s been abandoned by Zhu Jiu, and the other man offers no resistance to being captured.

The narrative brings us to the boxing ring, introducing us to it as Zhu Jiu’s energy farm, and then briefly cuts to SID, where Chu Shuzhi realises that they have not retrieved Guo Changcheng. The puppet master springs into action, leaving Lin Jing to wonder since when his friend is so protective of the rookie. If he paid attention, he would have noticed that Chu Shuzhi was protective of the rookie since day one.  

We then move to the interrogation of Tan Xiao, which is happening in the hospital set, with Zheng Yi tucked into the hospital bed, even through it was never established that she would need medical attention, and, considering that she would have no issues walking out of the hospital very shortly, she clearly does not. Here, we see some more flashbacks, detailing Tan Xiao and the girl’s backstory, the abuse she suffered, and the bond the two forged. The young man is admitting to all the crimes he had not committed to protect her, and Zhao Yunlan is honestly moved. He sounds almost regretful when he lets Tan Xiao know that he will still be persecuted for his crimes.

Right on cue, Hei Pao Shi portals in.

Zhao Yunlan greets him with a customary “long time no see”, but the most acknowledgement he receives from Shen Wei is a side-eye which does not even focus on his face.

In fact, the Envoy is doing as much as he can to avoid even turning to Zhao Yunlan. He simply announces his purpose to the room in general and teleports Tan Xiao away. It’s easy to see what he is doing. In Shen Wei’s mind, the less communication he has with Zhao Yunlan as Hei Pao Shi, the better are his chances to separate his two personalities in the eyes of the other man. That said, showing an abrupt and uncharacteristic change of behaviour is the opposite of suspicious.

Even Da Qing notices the change Hei Pao Shi.

“Lao Zhao, what did you do to upset him? You used to do small talk, not anymore?”

Zhao Yunlan smirks, replying that he knows the reason why. He then notices the little girl crying, and goes to comfort her the only way he knows how, with a lollipop. When that does not work, he gestures for Da Qing to leave with him, and returns with a familiar black cat and an adorable “ta-dah”. It’s so sweet it makes my teeth hurt.

As this is going on, Hei Pao Shi is being his glorious over the top avenging self. For one, he is actually floating above Tan Xiao, which I don’t think he ever seen him do before. He then proceeds to throttle the young man, lifting him in the air and throwing him back on the ground.

He does so in order to shake the sound wave equipment out of him, sure, but it is easy to assume that Tan Xiao also brought the Envoy’s wrath onto himself by his misguided attempt to hurt Zhao Yunlan earlier that day. It’s deliciously petty; we know that the best way to earn Shen Wei’s ire is by threatening his companion. And, to be fair, Shen Wei had a bad day: this is as good a way as any to get some of that ancient anger out of his system.

As Hei Pao Shi realises that the man he arrested is a simple human armed with some clever technology, and the real homicidal Undergrounder is the girl he is protecting, so does Zhao Yunlan. Even miles away, even when they are having arguments, their analytical brains still work in sync. And, as plot twists go, this one is neat, albeit not entirely unpredictable.

Unfortunately, realising that the girl is dangerous, brings along a realisation that Zhao Yunlan left his friend in her care. He rushes to the hospital to check on Da Qing, finding the ward empty. If this was Zhu Jiu’s plan all along, it’s a good one: having access to a brainwashed SID member would also spell easy access to the headquarters and the Hallows - which is exactly where Zheng Yi leads Da Qing, taking the Hallows and leaving the Yashou to go into a berserk mode as he imagines or remembers Zhao Yunlan/Kunlun saying “I will abandon you”

Next up, episode 13: The Disaster Wedding.

——

Notes.

Every time Shen Wei lies my brain supplies me with Why You Always Lying song. Every. Single. Time. Which means I sing it a lot around the flat, to my partner’s great chagrin.

Whoooo boy and I thought the Episode 10 recap was the crackiest one I’ve done.

#guardian #recap #rewatch #zhao yunlan #shen wei #now with gifs #sometimes my brain is like this #I'm not sorry

[outlanderalien]

@fullheartedlyprovocative

Very good point! Many people who aren’t from the UK are probably not aware of the impending disaster that is Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

I keep describing him as a clown, incompetent and overall destructive to society as a whole, but i’ve failed to go into detail. And the reason is simple: There’s just far too much to cover in a concise and efficient way. It is very literally a massive rabbit hole that knows no end.

But i should probably collate some of his more memorable moments, so that everyone can get a rough idea about who he is exactly and why we’re all dead inside. 

Bojo is often described as clownish, but don’t let that fool you into thinking he’s harmless. He’s as Machiavellian as a politician can get, and he weaponises his clownish behaviour in order to cover up his corruption. He has this down to an Art. 

A recent example of his perception manipulation:

During the Brexit referendum, Boris was heavily campaigning for Leave, and he infamously commissioned a big red Bus with this message on it, claiming that the 350 million currently going to EU membership will be redirected to the UKs NHS (National Health Service), this was a massive deal and fueled the leave campaign. 

This was also a massive lie, and he was (rightly) hated for it.

The Bus Lie hung over Boris long after the referendum. When you’d type up Boris Johnson on Google, it would suggest the Bus scandal as an auto-complete search, bringing up countless articles on the lie that had clearly tarnished Boris’ reputation.

However, during the leadership campaign, Boris did something extraordinary. While being interviewed about his leadership bid, he was asked what he does for fun. This was his response:

Hilarious. Ridiculous. Blustering. Making it up as he went along. It quickly became an interview widely mocked across social media and news outlets. Why did he make himself sound like such an idiot? Why buses? This is why:

He is not only immune to being mocked, he has weaponised it to cover up his biggest controversies. Typing up “Boris Johnson Bus” now yields funny clips of him struggling to get through an interview talking about painting little buses. His Bus Scandal has almost been entirely pushed out of the picture.

That is only the tip of the Boris shaped iceberg. 

His clowning has gotten him national and international mockery. Who can forget that time Boris (while Mayor of London) got stuck on a zip-line because he was too heavy?

Or that time that he got overly competitive in a game of rugby against kids and tackled a child.

Or that time during a recent Leadership debate where he pulled out a literal Kipper and waved it about, declaring that “we will get our Kippers BACK when we leave the EU!”

What a silly man. How completely harmless he must be.

Well while the nation struggles to get these images out of their heads, collectively we have forgotten many of his greatest sins.

One sin still hangs above him... An ongoing scandal that has endangered the life of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. 

In 2017 Nazanin had travelled to Iran from the UK to visit her parents, when she was detained by authorities under suspicion of coming to Iran in order to train journalists. In 2017 when Boris was Foreign Secretary and during Nazanins trial, Boris made this statement to the news:

“When I look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it,”

This was considered damning evidence that was used against Nazanin. She is still imprisoned today. Her husband in the UK has been tirelessly campaigning for her release, going on a joint hunger-strike with her. Boris refuses to take any responsibility for his comments or apologise for what he has caused.

This isn’t the first or last time Boris has been reckless with his words.

Very recently, Sir Kim Darroch (the UKs (now former) ambassador to the US) suffered a memo leak, in which unflattering remarks regarding Donald Trumps presidency surfaced. The leak was unfortunate, but the comments made were not unprofessional and entirely expected from a foreign diplomat. But Trump wasn’t happy and applied pressure to the UK government to fire Darroch for doing his job. The entire UK government united behind Darroch and supported him...... well... almost the entire government. During a live debate, the final two leadership candidates were asked about the Darroch situation, and whether Darroch would remain in his job if they become PM. Boris refused to comment and avoided the question as usual. However since Boris was the favourite to win, Darroch realised he had no hope, so he resigned. Boris was cited as the main reason and was widely criticised. 

Before Boris was a politician, he was a journalist. And in recent years, a very unsavoury recording surfaced from his time as a Journalist in 1990...A phone recording between him and Darius Guppy, where the two conspired to have a reporter physically hurt. (Somehow this is the only youtube video available on this...)

Boris has also been known to have absolutely no filter and speaks before he thinks. Such comments are a result of this.

He had referred to black people as “Piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”

In 2018 he had referred to Muslim women wearing burkas as looking like “letter-boxes”

At a conference on Libya in 2017 he claimed that the country could become a thriving luxury resort once they “cleared the dead bodies away”

In 2013 he claimed that Malyasian women went to University because they “have to find men to marry”

In 2006 he claimed that Barack Obama had an “ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender”

All of this... and we haven’t even covered his politics yet.

This is the big reason why he’s becoming PM and it’s simple. He’s lying to everyone.

He’s promising everything to everyone. He’s promised a soft brexit to some, a hard brexit to others. But he refuses to explain how he would achieve either. He’s only now clearly settling on the side of a hard-brexit, or what’s considered a No-Deal brexit (walking away from the EU without striking a trade deal), but he has no answers for any questions posed to him. 

His debating strategy, and interview strategy is to make people laugh until they forget what they asked him.

When asked "Is austerity a dead duck at this point?” he ended up rambling about ducks for a solid minute and making the audience giggle before giving a very vague and nothing answer

When debating with leadership rival Jeremy Hunt, he won over the audiences heart by interrupting Hunt with immature jokes.

After declaring that he knows exactly what he’s doing in regards to a No-Deal brexit, he tells everyone that he will follow “Paragraph 5B” of a document that will supposedly solve the Brexit crisis. He repeats “Paragraph 5B” constantly, giving the impression that he’s a man of detail and knows the entire document like the back of his hand. When asked if he knew what was in Paragraph 5C, he simply states “no” and tries to play it off like it’s funny. Without a studio audience to laugh at him, he was simply left in the silence of an astounded interviewer. This is one of the many reasons why he had avoided as many interviews as possible during his leadership campaign.

The fact is, no one knows what he really stands for, no one knows what he’ll really do. He’s a wild-card, or more appropriately, the Joker card. He seems crazy enough and chaotic enough to go through with No-Deal that people are voting for him. But so many people are going to be disappointed. This is a man who says he’s always wanted to be Prime Minister ever since he was 15. He wants power for the sake of power. And for some reason, the Tory party are handing him that power.

There’s so much more to go into, but this is a good initial crash-course into Bojo, the literal clown.

#Boris Johnson #uk politics #brexit #uk #politics

[keenress]

Dreaming of you...

The first day in the office with Ressler was tensed, and as his recruit she felt like all eyes were on her, this case they were working on had so many twists and turns, she felt she could not keep up with.

They started early in the morning, as he picked her up from the University to take her to the Blacksite. They walked in his office where they were supposed to do all the work 

,,I analysed all footages and evidence you gave me from the last scene..I know the place was clean, I would say way too clean, so I thought, maybe, I could compare evidence from the previous potential crime scenes...5 hotel rooms so far

,,What have you got in mind?

,,Well they all have something in common

,,What is that?

,,A bathroom, a bathtub(not a shower room)

,,Yes...

,,I know it sounds crazy, but what if all our bodies left the room through the sewage system?

,,To do that you need to first dissolve the bodies

,, Yes, I believe as we never thought of this, we should definitely check it out, it’s worth giving it a try

,,Good work, Keen

Then Liz saw Ressler taking a call, he mentioned something about taking out the bathtub for the last crime scene and check any possible traces of chemical substances, other than cleaning ones, on the drains

He then came closer to her and watched together trough all the evidence they had to find some more supportive information to back this new lead up.

[..she found his scent distracting, as she found herself closer to him and she was no expert , but generally a perfume can turn you on or off...and his, his was making her imagining things..’’his skin must smell really good with that scent on, imagine wearing his shirt on my naked body, being wrapped in that scent of his, or waking up next to him as he is wearing nothing, but that smell in a set of cold bed sheets]

When he was teaching at the University she always thought there were flames and sparks between the two of them, and ever since, her imagination would lit up in his presence...

Today she was slipping down on this imagination lane again, when suddenly awaken by a loud phone call.

He had to be somewhere, him and her partner investigating this drug dealer that was related to this new case they were working on, who had been released from prison because the witness that was suppose to turn him in had vanished mysteriously from Court in that same day.

 They had a lead about an operation under the name of Lorca, guns and drugs involved, plus fake passport to leave the country, so this was their only chance to drain him for some intel over his protected killer

,,Would you like to come with us?

,, Yeah, sure thing

,, You will have to put your Kevlar vest on, I ll help you with that!

[..first time touching her, as he was adjusting the vest, made her body shiver, his fingers were sending electric shocks throughout her entire body, making her heart skip a beat]..

As they stepped into the Warehouse, where the exchange was due to happen he asked her to stay behind him at all times. The SWAT team was in place with Ressler coordinating everybody in their position

 The next thing she knew, all Hell broke lose, and everybody was firing at everybody. This was her first raw field experience that she had, and she felt scared and unprotected

Her and Ressler were hiding behind a van when the bullets started flying towards them, literally drawing wholes into it like they were shooting at a piece of cardboard.

,,Get down, get down, Ressler shouted, so she threw herself on the floor. The next thing she saw was him throwing himself over her, grabbing her hands, and shielding her entire body with his, while sheltered glass and bullets were falling all over him.

His mouth was over her forehead , his lips touching it , his arms positioned on both sides protecting her head and his body was pressing hard over her. She felt breathless, but safe, a man she didn t know for long was protecting her with the cost of his own life.

Then the bullets stopped and she could hear  ,, on your knees, arms behind you head, now..the SWAT  team had taken over the warehouse and arrested the shooters.

She was in shock, the sound of the glass and bullets made her ears hurt and the smell made her dizzy . Ressler was still on top of her and slowly started to move his arms and body.

,,Are you ok, Keen talk to me, please, he sounded desperate..

His hands started touching her for injuries and blood, and as she managed to lift her heard up, he grabbed her face gently , but with desperate looks in his eyes.

,, I am ok, are you? she said with a shocked expression on her face.

Next she found herself in the sweet embrace of his arms and he was squeezing her like he was afraid of losing her

That’s how his partner found them both safe in each other’ s arms

,,That was so stupid of me to drag you into this without protection, you could have been killed, I am so sorry..

,,Yeah , but I didn t, because you protected me

,,Still, you could have...[ she could read the pain into his eyes]

,,I didn t, I m here, I am safe because of you

HALF HOUR later

Cooper ,,Agent Ressler, a word...

 ,, What the hell were you doing? How could you take a recruit from the Academy with you in the middle of the disaster  that happened today. You broke all protocols, you could have had her killed and yourself too

 ,,I know, I am sorry Sir, it will never happen again

 ,,Sure as hell it won’t or I ll put you up for suspension...DISMISSED

He went back to her in the ambulance to check her out again

,, At least we got Lorca

,, Yes , but we nearly paid a bigger prize for it

,, It was worth it, Liz said

[..to me the only thing worthy today, he thought, was being able to feel you even under such horrendous circumstances being able to feel your skin on my lips, your perfume, your curves, that I have touched in the most intimate moments of my imagination, trapped under my roughness , you in my arms, SAFE, that is my victory for today].He said nothing, but his eyes were telling stories, stories of what he felt and what he was feeling for her.

He drove her home that night, after first going by the office to grab her stuff. As he parked in front of her apartment, he asked her again if she doesn t want to go to the hospital to get herself checked

,, I will come with you

 ,,No I am fine, I just want to go to bed, it has been a long day

,,Good night, he said!

 ,,Good night! 

That night he dreamt of her, everything was so real, so genuine.. the clock was showing 9 o clock and the Post Office was slowly turning silent, Cooper was off and Samar and Aram left half an hour ago. He was sitting in his office, alone, studying some cases when she stormed in his office. Her looks was a combination of office and sexy, a black pencil dress embracing her curves perfectly with a long split on her left leg showing off a pair of black tights wrapping her fit, sexy pair of legs .She was also wearing a pair of high heels black shoes and a vibrant, seductive red lipstick, to match her daring outfit.. her hair was loose... 

She stormed in without saying a word and pinned him in his chair with her longing looks. She came closer, pushing the chair back in the corner of the office.. slowly she started lifting her dress up, not enough to see her panties, but enough to make him swallow hard and throw her thirsty looks, She was ready to dominate him,so she parted her legs a little as she climbed over him to sit in his lap. Her legs wrapped in those beautiful black tights were incredible. He touched them looking at them first, then shifted his eyes to meet hers

She took his hand and started caressing her body , starting from her lips, going down on her neck,  then mischievously held his hand longer before touching her breasts 

He swallowed hard and bite his lower li which made her wanting to kiss him badly.. so she leaned over and sensually grabbed his chin and she clenched his top lip with her teeth and then his bottom.. he tried to pull her close to force her into a deep kiss, but she wouldn t take it, so she drew back

She carried on seducing him while she was touching herself with his hand on every curve of her body.. she carried on and on, while looking at him, his hands were on her legs feeling the heat of her body, as her blood was boiling in his veins

He tried to kiss her again, but she pushed him back, as she went to kiss and lick his neck, right there next to his ear, where his soft spot was.

Now she was getting closer to his mouth, wanting to reward him for letting her seduce him mercyless, boundryless with him not being able to do anything to her[..and the things he wanted to do to her..] The way he felt her burning lips getting closer and closer to his was the most seductive act he d ever experienced... she looked in his eyes first.. then her looks shifted to his lips devouring them 

Their lips were burning as their tongues met one trying to dominate the other, one of his hand was on her back pulling her closer to him , while the other was grabbing her neck so that he could feed himself with the passion that was only growing between them. Her tongue in his mouth was sending vibrations through his entire body , making it harder to keep himself under control while playing this game.

He wanted her out of that little dress of hers, and with that in mind he started unzipping it.. his touch was electric, making her kissing him deeper while rubbing her body of his. He took the top part of her dress off and with gentle moves he started touching her skin up and down, up and down....

He then broke away from their kiss and effortlessly lifted her up forcing her to sit up face against the wall, lifting her hands up, one hand holding her hands upon the wall so she can t move them, while the other shifted her hair on one side so he can devour her neck fully with his tongue .He positioned himself closer to her and he could feel her bottom hitting his joints hard, so now he freed his hand so that he can explore again , this time her naked breasts, moving swiftly down there, in her intimacy, making her curve her back and bottom even harder against him

...It was so erotic and intense switching the poles so that the dominant became the dominated..she rested her head back lying it on his shoulder

,,Please...I beg....she said

,,Tell me....he said

Before she could say anything, the fine blurs of reality were intruding the intimacy of his dreams..and he was trying to chase the away so that he could.. he could....but his  consciousness was stronger and he woke up with the sun rays caressing his face, all flushed, wet and hard with an immense desire to have her

#keenler #nomoreselfdoubtingishere #fanfictionkeenler #ilovekeenlerfans #keenlerthirsty

[mycatshuman]

Castle of Devils

What's In The Creepy House? It's a Ghost! Its a Mummy! No! It's a Trash Man!

Prologue | Previous | Next | More | Masterlist

Word Count: 2,167

Pairings: Eventual Prinxiety

Warnings: self hatred, talking of murdering a vampire, ghost, not eating, let me know if I missed any.

Thank you to @icequeenoriginal for reading through this for me!

--------

Today was the first time since Roman had gotten back that Logan, Patton, and Roman all had a free day. So, the three were going to spend a day out on the town, hitting the mall, spending time in the park, shopping, and eating their meals together. They had even promised to go with Roman to see Frozen II in the theater one last time. The day was supposed to be perfect. 

The three friends were walking along the street to get to their favorite pizza shop for lunch when it happened. A dark figure clad in purple plaid patches and white stitching walked past them on the opposite side of the road. It was pure coincidence that Roman looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of the figure's face before he moved out of sight. Roman stopped dead in his tracks, Patton and Logan nearly bumping into him. 

"Roman!" Logan shouted. 

"What's wrong?" Patton asked carefully, the fear on Roman's face an unusual expression for his friend. 

"It-its him!" Roman yelped. "I- he followed me here!"

Logan frowned and turned Roman to face him only for his friend to continue staring off into space as if looking at the last spot he saw whoever it was who frightened him so much. "Who did you see?"

"Virgil! It's him! The vampire! He's here," Roman cried out terrified. 

Logan thanked the universe there weren't many people near them. 

"Roman, breathe. You need to breathe. What do you mean he's here?" 

"I-I-" Roman paused, finally blinking as he tried to ground himself and bring himself back to the present. "I just saw him. He must have decided to move into the house I helped him purchase." Tears filled Roman's eyes. "We have to stop him. We can't let him kill anyone." 

Patton stepped forward. "Roman," he started carefully. He didn't want to tell his friend he thought he was crazy. Because he didn't, not really. Patton just didn't want to be rash. "I think we should give it a few days…" 

"A FEW DAYS??!?!?!" Roman exclaimed. "HE COULD SUCK THE TOWN DRY!" 

Logan pinched the bridge of his nose. "Roman, we can't go to the police without solid evidence. If we go up to the cops right now with nothing other than your statement and the fact that you think he's a vampire, they could carry you away in a straight jacket. If we really want to get 'rid' of him legally, we have to wait until we have a least an attack, it's not the best but without one, that's all we can do." 

Roman frowned. "What if we found a vampire hunter instead?" 

Logan sighed. "Sure, if we found a vampire hunter and got their 100% guarantee that this 'Virgil' is a vampire then we can see where we will go from there." 

Patton frowned. He knew his husband didn't believe Roman. He probably knew that Roman wouldn't be able to find a real vampire hunter willing to help them if he could find a real vampire hunter at all. And he hated the false hope it gave Roman, but if doing this could provide closure, then he was all for it so long as nobody got hurt. 

Roman bit his lip. "Okay, I'll start looking tonight." Then the three were back on their way to lunch. Now, Roman was not stupid. He knew his friends thought he was crazy. But he was going to prove it to them once and for all. And on another note, maybe it was time to pay a certain someone a visit.

------

Remus Mort was an odd little fellow. He had unruly hair that never looked like it was brushed. Not that Remus actually brushed his hair. There was also a streak of white in his bangs while the rest of his hair remained a dark rich brown similar to that of a freshly disturbed grave. His mustache was particularly villianly with their handlebar shape and only added to his gremlin appearance. His clothes hardly took away from this either. They were ripped and rumpled, looking as if he had just crawled out of a dumpster. Maybe searching for new clothes, they would certainly be better than the ones he was wearing which were covered in so much grime that one could hardly call it a shirt. Rags would be more accurate. But if anyone were to ask he would reply with a grin saying no one would suspect a doctor dressed the way he was. The occupation differed each time but the result was the same. People just assumed he was happily living the life he was living even if it looked like he didn't own a home much less the amount of money he truly had. 

Remus Mort lived in a big creepy mansion up on a hill surrounded by many trees. He bought the house after his first best seller, If Dr. Hyde and Mr. Jekyll: The Twisted Truth. It turned out, a lot of people were curious what would have happened if society was okay with man's more primal instinct (as if a lot of society didn't already try to place the crimes of men on others.) Remus went on to continue his dark series of stories earning him enough money to live comfortably and still give close to 40% of his earnings to different causes. Lots of them having to do with the ocean and a push to find the delightfully mysterious creatures yet to be found. 

All of this displayed Remus's personality very efficiently. A gremlin dressed as a gremlin. It was very fitting. Remus was also very unpredictable. But those who knew him, even those who didn't would brush whatever he did off as normal for him after the initial shock. He was predictably unpredictable. However, the one thing that was truly unpredictable for Remus was something even he had no control over. His brother was practically his complete opposite. 

Those who knew both Roman and Remus were equally stunned when they first learned that the two were brothers. They were two opposites and as different as day and night, water and fire. Polar opposites. A person learning the two were brothers would have them sitting in an existential crisis for a few hours. 

The two brothers did not talk often, preferring to keep to their own lives with an occasional call to make sure the other was okay. Roman wanted nothing to do with his brother's habits. It was one of the reasons the two drifted apart. Past Roman never would have expected to end up here any time soon. But past Roman didn't know the things present Roman did. Did experience the things present Roman had experienced. 

Roman sighed and turned off his car before climbing out. He had been sitting inside for a while, staring up at the old house as he debated his decision before he decided it was now and never. And he couldn't bear to think what his stubbornness would do to the innocent people back home with that monster running around. With determined steps, Roman walked up the stairs and rang the bell. It's loud dreadful sound resounded throughout the home. Roman was surprised to find the tall door opening in front of him and he stood face to face with his brother for the first time in years. 

"Roman!" Remus exclaimed. "So glad to see you here! It's been a while hasn't it!" Roman blinked as his brother quickly yanked him inside and started dragging him into the living room, which looked surprisingly clean and organized. Remus shoved Roman down onto the couch before he dropped down beside him. "So, what has you dropping by, bitch?" 

Roman grimaced. "Well, I.." He paused. Did he really want to admit to his brother that he drove all the way to New Jersey just to ask him for help regarding the same topic he told him he was stupid for believing years ago. Roman bit his lip and wrung his hands, his confidence fading. 'I-I.."

Remus frowned as he took in his brother's reaction. "Hey, you know I'm not going to make fun of you, right? Tell me what's wrong." 

Roman let out a breath and then told his brother everything. From arriving in Transylvania to falling in love to finding out that he was a vampire and returning home only to find that vampire had followed. Throughout the story, Remus stayed silent. Which was a completely new thing for him. But while he didn't exactly get along with his brother, he did care for him deeply and seeing how his brother nearly broke out into tears as he recounted everything. Afterwards, Remus and Roman sat in silence for a few minutes to let the air clear and to let Roman compose himself. 

Now, Remus would say his brother was very predictable. He always loved the idea of romance and love and would often wax poetry to whoever was his crush. (Not that it always worked out in his favor.) But Remus could tell what his brother was here for. He wanted him to be his wingman! To help him woo Virgil properly. He wanted Remus to tell him how vampires behaved and the things they couldn't have so Roman could plan a surprise picnic. And they were twins, when they were in the same room, they almost always seemed to know what the other was thinking. So, Remus would say he knew his brother pretty well.

"I want you to help me kill him." Wait, what?

Remus blinked. "What?" 

Roman gulped. He really didn't want to have to repeat it. Just trying to say it the first time was like pulling a tooth. He didn't want to kill Vir- the vampire. But, he had given his word that he would rid the people of the monster. And that's what he had to do. "I need you," Roman pushed out. "To help me...I- I need to get rid of the monster. I made a promise to do so." 

Remus blinked. "You want me to help you kill a vampire?" Roman nodded. Remus bit his lip. He could work with this. Sure his gay disaster if a  brother wouldn't be much help but he could work with this. 

"Yeah, don't worry, I'll help," Remus replied, his mind already whirling with different plans. His face twisted with gremlin-like glee. 

Roman sighed. "Thank you, Remus. Thank you." 

-----

Virgil laid faced down on his new bed and groaned. "Uggggggghhhh. That was so much work." 

Valak chuckled as he floated above Virgil. "Perks of being a ghost, got an excuse not to do chores." Virgil rolled his eyes and turned his head to stick his tongue out at the ghost. They existed in silence for a few moments before Virgil sat up against the headboard and pulled his knees to his chest. Valak paused in his floating to look at him. 

"What if...what if he hates me?" Virgil asked, his voice sounded small. 

Valak hummed and gently floated down to land beside Virgil. "I don't think he does." Virgil hummed in acknowledgment. Valak frowned and tried again. "I think, if he truly hated you, he would have killed you as soon as you told him." 

"He couldn't have, there was nothing he could use to kill me," Virgil mumbled. 

Valak sighed. "Well, we'll have to see about that." Silence settled over the room until Virgil's stomach grumbled. Vievil frowned and shoved his face into his knees. The ghost frowned. "Virgil." The vampire ignored him. Valak rolled his eyes. "Come on, Virgil. You can't do this." 

Virgil's face twisted in anger. "You can't stop me." 

Valka let out a sigh. "Virgil, you have to eat." 

Virgil shook his head angrily. "No." 

Valak and let out a sigh. This wasn't the first time Virgil refused to eat. Virgil didn't know it, but Valak had witnessed every time Virgil had stopped eating. Luckily, Virgil always pushed through it. The only problem was he didn't know when Virgil would eat again. And they were in a new country. They didn't know where dangers lied. For all they knew, a vampire hunter could be living just down the block. Valak highly doubted it but he knew you could never be too careful. 

"Virgil," Valak started. 

"No!" Virgil shouted. "No! I'm-I'm a monster! All I do is suck the life out of people! I'm a monster! I'm a monster! I'm a monster!" 

Valak sighed. "Fine, okay." Virgil huffed and went back to stewing in his self hatred while Valak floated out of the room to explore the house for a little bit. He really hoped Roman loved Virgil. He didn't want to think of how much damage it would cause Virgil's mental health if he had someone he grew close with running after him with a steak trying to kill him. If only there was someone who would help me convince Virgil that he isn't bad.

--------

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[kirch]

WHEN ATLANTIS RULED THE EARTH [A Film Synopsis]

The title appears in letters that look like blocks of stone piled on top of one another to form a kind of step pyramid. It is followed by shots of the earth as it looked thirty thousand years ago, during the great ice ages, showing woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and Cro-Magnon hunters, while a narrator explains that at the same time the greatest civilization ever known by man is flourishing on the continent of Atlantis. The Atlanteans do not know anything about good or evil, the narrator explains. However, they all live to be five hundred years old and have no fear of death. The bodies of all Atlanteans are covered with fur, as with apes.

After seeing various domestic scenes in Zukong Gi-morlad-Siragosa, the largest and most central city on the continent (but not the capital, because the Atlanteans do not have a government), we move to a laboratory where the young (one hundred years old) scientist GRUAD is displaying a biological experiment to an associate, GAO TWONE. The experiment is a giant water-dwelling serpent-man. Gao Twone is impressed, but Gruad declares that he is bored; he wishes to change himself in some unexpected way. Gruad is already strange—unlike other Atlanteans, he is not covered with fur, but has only short blond hair on top of his head and a close-cropped beard. In comparison to other Atlanteans he seems hideously naked. He wears a high-collared pale green robe and gauntlets. He tells Gao Twone that he is tired of accumulating knowledge for the sake of knowledge. "It's just another guise for the pursuit of pleasure, to which too many of our fellow Atlanteans devote their lives. Of course, there's nothing wrong with pleasure—it moves the energies— but I feel that there is something higher and more heroic. I have no name for it yet, but I know it exists."

Gao Twone is somewhat shocked. "You, as a scientist, can talk of knowing something exists when you have no evidence?"

Gruad is dejected by this and admits, "My lens needs polishing." But after a moment he bounces back. "And yet, even though I have my moments of doubt, I think my lens really is clear. Of course, I must find lie evidence. But even now, before I start, I feel that I know what I will find. We could be greater and finer than we are. I look at what I am and sometimes I despise myself. I'm just a clever animal. An ape who has learned to play with tools. I want to be much more. I say we can be what the lloigor are, and even more. We can conquer time and seize eternity, even as they have. I mean to achieve that or destroy myself in the attempt."

The scene shifts to a banquet hall where INGEL RILD, a venerable Atlantean scientist, has called together prominent Atlanteans to celebrate a space research achievement, the production of a solar flare. Ingel Rild and his associates have developed a missile which, when it strikes the sun, can cause an explosion. He tells the marijuana-smoking gathering, "We can control to the second the timing of the flare and to the millimeter the distance it will spring out from the sun. A flare of sufficient magnitude could burn our planet to a crisp. A smaller flare could bombard the earth with radiations such that the area closest to the sun would be destroyed, while the rest of our world would suffer drastic changes. Most serious of all, perhaps, would be the biological changes these excessive radiations would bring about. Life forms would be damaged and perhaps become extinct. New life forms would arise. All of nature would undergo a tremendous upheaval. This has happened naturally once or twice. It happened seventy million years ago when the dinosaurs were suddenly wiped out and replaced by mammals. We still have much to learn about the mechanism that produces spontaneous solar flares. However, to be able to cause them artificially is a step toward predicting and possibly controlling them. When that stage is reached, our planet and our race will be protected from the kind of catastrophe that destroyed the dinosaurs."

After the applause, a woman named KAJECI asks whether it might not be disrespectful to tamper with "our father, the sun." Ingel Rild replies that man is a part of nature and what he does is natural and can't be construed as tampering. Now Gruad interrupts angrily, pointing out that he, an unattractive mutation, is the product of tampering with nature. He tells Ingel Rild that the Atlanteans do not truly understand nature and the order that controls it. He declares that man is subject to laws. All things in nature are, but man is different because he can disobey the natural laws that govern him. Gruad goes on, "With humanity we can speak, as we speak of our own machines, in terms of performance expected and performance delivered. If a machine does not do what it is designed for, we try to correct it. We want it to do what it ought to do, what it should do. I think we have the right and the duty to demand the same of people—that they perform as they ought to and should perform." An aged and merry-eyed scientist named LHUV KERAPHT interrupts, "But people are not machines, Gruad."

"Exactly," Gruad answers. "I have already considered that. Therefore, I have created new words, words even stronger than should and ought. When a person performs as he or she should and ought, I call that Good; and anything less than this I call Evil." This outlandish notion is greeted with general laughter. Gruad tries to speak persuasively, conscious of his lonely position as a pioneer, trying desperately to communicate with the closed minds all around him. After further argument, though, he becomes threatening, declaring, "The people of Atlantis do not live according to the law. In their pride, they strike the sun itself, and boast of it, as you have, Ingel Rild, this day. I say that if Atlanteans do not live according to the law, a disaster will befall them. A disaster that will shake the entire earth. You have been warned! Heed my words!" Gruad strides majestically out of the banquet hall, seizing his cloak at the door and sweeping it about him as he leaves. Kajeci follows him and tells him that she thinks she partly understands what he has been trying to say. The laws he speaks of are like the wishes of parents, and, "The great bodies of the universe are our parents. Isn't that so?" Gruad's naked hand strokes Kajeci's furred cheek, and they go off into the darkness together.

Within six months Gruad has formed an organization called the Party of Science. Their banner is an eye inside a triangle which in turn is surrounded by a serpent with its tail in its mouth. The Party of Science demands that Atlantis publish the natural laws Gruad has discovered and make them binding on all with systems of reward and punishment to enforce them. The word "punishment" is another addition to the Atlantean vocabulary coined by Gruad. One of Gruad's opponents explains to friends of his that it means torture, and everyone's fur bristles. Ingel Rild announces to a gathering of his supporters that Gruad has proven to his own satisfaction—and the demonstration runs to seventy-two scrolls of logical symbols—that sex is part of what he calls Evil. Only sex for the good of the community is to be permitted under Gruad's system, to keep the race alive.

A scientist called TON LIT exclaims, "You mean we must be thinking about conception during the act? That's impossible. Men's penises would droop, and women's vaginas wouldn't get moist. It's like—well, it's like making the shrill mouth-music while you are urinating. It would take great training, if it can be done at all." Ingel Rild proposes the formation of a Party of Freedom to oppose Gruad. Discussing Gruad's personality, Ingel Rild says he checked the genealogical records and found that several of the most agitated-energy people in all Atlantean history were among his ancestors. Gruad is a mutation, and so are many of his followers. The energy of normal Atlanteans flows slowly. Gruad's people are impatient and frustrated, and this is what makes them want to inflict suffering on their fellow humans.

Joe sat up with a jolt. If he understood that part of the movie, Gruad—evidently the first Illuminatus—was also the first homo neophilus. And the Party of Freedom, which seemed to be the origin of the Discordian and JAM movements, was pure homo neophobus. How the hell could that be squared with the generally reactionary attitude of current Illuminati policies, and the innovativeness of the Discordians and JAMs? But the film was moving on—

In a disreputable-looking tavernlike place where men and women smoke dope in pipes that they pass from one to another, while people grope in couples and groups in dark corners, SYLVAN MARTISET proposes a Party of Nothingness that rejects the positions of both the Party of Science and the Party of Freedom. After this we see street fighting, atrocities, the infliction of punishment on harmless people by men wearing Gruad's eye-and-triangle badge. The Party of Freedom proclaims its own symbol, a golden apple. The fighting spreads, the numbers of the dead mount and Ingel Rild weeps. He and his associates decide on a desperate expedient—unleashing the lloigor Yog Sothoth. They will offer this unnatural soul-eating energy being from another universe its freedom in return for its help in destroying Gruad's movement. Yog Sothoth is imprisoned in the great Pentagon of Atlantis on a desolate moor in the southern part of the continent. The Atlantean electric plane bearing Ingel Rild, Ton Lit and another scientist drifts, trailing feathery sparks, to a landing in a flat field overgrown with gray weeds. Within the Pentagon, an enormous black stone structure, the ground is scorched and the air shimmers like a heat mirage. Flickers of static electricity run through the shimmering from time to time, and an unpleasant noise, like flies around a corpse, pervades the whole moor. The faces of the three Atlantean sages register disgust, sickness and terror. They climb the nearest tower and talk to the guard. Suddenly Yog Sothoth takes control of Ton Lit, speaking in an oily, rich, deep and reverberating voice, and asks them what they seek of him. Ton Lit lets out a terrible shriek and claps his hands over his ears. Froth slips from the side of his mouth, his fur bristles and his penis stands erect. His eyes are delirious and suffering, like those of a dying gorilla. The guard uses an electronic instrument that looks like a magician's wand topped with a five-pointed star to subdue Yog Sothoth. Ton Lit bays like a hound and leaps for Ingel Rild's throat. The electronic ray drives him back and he stands panting, tongue hanging loose, as the Pentagon first and then the ground begin to soften into asymptotic curves. Yog Sothoth chants, "la-nggh-ha-nggh-ha-nggh-fthagn! la-nggh-ha-nggh-ha-nggh-hgual! The blood is the life ... The blood is the life ..." All faces, bodies and perspectives are skewed and there is a greenish tinge on everything. Suddenly the guard strikes the nearest wall of the Pentagon directly with his electronic wand and Ton Lit shrieks, human intelligence coming back into his eyes together with great shame and revulsion. The three sages flee the Pentagon under a sky slowly turning back to its normal shape and color. The laughter of Yog Sothoth follows them. They decide that they cannot release the lloigor.

Meanwhile Gruad has called his closest followers, known as the Unbroken Circle of Gruad, to announce that Kajeci has conceived. Then he shows them a group of manlike creatures with green, scaly skin, wearing long black cloaks and black skullcaps with scarlet plumes. These he calls his Ophidians. Since At-lanteans have a kind of instinctive check on themselves that prevents them from killing except in blind fury, Gruad has developed these synthetic humanoids from the serpent, which he has found to be the most intelligent of all reptiles. They will have no hesitation about destroying men and will act only on Gruad's command. Some of his followers protest, and Gruad explains that this is not really killing. He says, "Atlanteans who will not accept the teachings of the Party of Science are swinish beings. They are a sort of robot who has no inner spiritual substance to control it. Our bodies, however, are deceived into feeling as if they are our own kind, and we cannot raise our hands against them. Now, however, the light of science has given us hands to raise." At this meeting Gruad also addresses his men for the first time as the "illuminated ones." At the next meeting of the Party of Freedom the Ophidians attack, using iron bars to club people to death and slashing throats with their fangs. Then the Party of Freedom holds a funeral for a dozen of its dead at which Ingel Rild gives an oration describing the ways in which the struggle between Gruad's followers and the other Atlanteans is changing the character of all human beings:

"Hitherto, Atlanteans have enjoyed knowledge but not worried over the fact that there is much that we do not know. We are conservative and indifferent to new ideas, we have no inner conflicts and we feel like doing the things that seem wise to us. We think that the things we feel like doing will usually work out for the best. We consider pain and pleasure a single phenomenon, which we call sensation, and we respond to unavoidable pain by relaxing or becoming ecstatic. We do not fear death. We can read each other's minds because we are in touch with all the energies of our bodies. The followers of Gruad have lost that ability, and they are thankful that they have. The Scientists dote on new things and new ideas. This love of the new thing is a matter of genetic manipulation. Gruad is even encouraging people in their twenties to have children, though it is our custom never to have children before we reach a hundred. The generations of Gruad's followers come thick and fast, and they are not like us. They agonize over their ignorance. They are full of uncertainty and inner conflict between what they should do and what they feel like doing. The children, who are brought up on Gruad's teachings, are even more disturbed and conflict-filled than their parents. One doctor tells me that the attitudes and the way of life Gruad is encouraging in his people is enough to shorten their life spans considerably. And they are afraid of pain. They are afraid of death. And even as their lives grow shorter, they desperately seek for some means of achieving immortality."

Gruad tells a meeting of his Unbroken Circle that the tune has come to intensify the struggle. If they can't rule the Atlanteans, they will destroy Atlantis. "Atlantis will be destroyed by light," says Gruad. "By the light of the sun." Gruad introduces the worship of the sun to his followers. He reveals the existence of gods and goddesses. "They are all energy, conscious energy," says Gruad. "This conscious and powerfully directed and focused pure energy I call spirit. All motion is spirit. All light is spirit. All spirit is light." Under Gruad's direction, the Party of Science builds a great pyramid, thousands of feet high. It is in two halves; the upper half, made of an indestructible ceramic substance and inscribed with a terrible staring eye, floats five hundred feet above the base, held in place by antigravity generators. A band of men and women led by LILITH VELKOR, chief spokeswoman for the Party of Nothingness, gathers at the base of the great pyramid and laughs at it. They carry Nothingarian signs:

DON'T CLEAN OUR LENSES, GRUAD— GET THE CRACK OUT OF YOUR OWN

EVERY TIME I HEAR THE WORD "PROGRESS" MY FUR BRISTLES

THE SUN SUCKS FREEDOM DEFINED IS FREEDOM DENIED

THE MESSAGE ON THIS SIGN IS A FLAT LIE

Lilith Velkor addresses the Nothingarians, satirizing all Gruad's beliefs, claiming that the most powerful god is a crazy woman and she is the goddess of chaos. To the accompaniment of laughter she declares, "Gruad says the sun is the eye of the sun god. That's more of his notion that males are superior and reason and order are superior. Actually, the sun is a giant golden apple which is the plaything of the goddess of chaos. And it's the property of anyone she thinks is fair enough to deserve it." Suddenly a band of Ophidians attacks followers of Lilith Velkor and kills several of them. Lilith Velkor leads her people in an unprecedented attack on the Ophidians. They storm up the side of the great pyramid and throw the Ophidians down to the street, killing them. Amazingly, they succeed in wiping out all the Ophidians. Gruad declares that Lilith Velkor must die. When the opportunity presents itself, his men seize her and take her to a dungeon. There an enormous wheel has been constructed with four spokes in the shape [of a modern "Peace" sign]

Lilith Velkor is crucified with ropes, upside down, on this device. Several members of the Party of Science lounge about, watching her die. Gruad enters, goes to the wheel and looks at the dying woman, who says, "This is as good a day to die as any." Gruad remonstrates with her, saying that death is a great evil and she should fear it. She laughs and says, "All my life I have despised tradition and now I despise innovation also. Surely, I must be a most wicked example for the world!" She dies laughing. Gruad's rage is unbearable. He vows that he will wait no longer; Atlantis is too wicked to save and he will destroy it.

On a windswept plain in the northern regions of Atlantis a huge teardrop-shaped rocket with graceful fins is poised on the launching pad. Gruad is in the control room making last-minute adjustments while Kajeci and Wo Topod argue with him. Gruad says, "The human race will survive. It will survive the better purged of these Atlanteans, who are nothing but swine, nothing but robots, nothing but creatures who do not understand good and evil. Let them perish." His finger strikes a red button and the rocket hurtles on its way to the sun. It will take several days to reach there, and meanwhile Gruad has gathered the Unbroken Circle on an airship which takes them away from Atlantis and into the huge mountains to the east in a region that will one day be called Tibet. Gruad calculates that by the time the missile strikes the sun, they will have been landed and underground for two hours. The sun rides blinding yellow over the plains of Atlantis. It is a beautiful day in Zukong Gimorlad-Siragosa, the sun shining down on its slender, graceful towers with spiderweb bridges spiraling among them, its parks, its temples, its museums, its fine public buildings and magnificent private palaces. Its handsome, richly furred people gracefully stride amidst the beauties of the first and finest civilization man has ever produced. Families, lovers, friends and enemies, all unsuspecting what is about to happen, enjoy their private moments. A quintet plays the melodious zinthron, balatet, mordan, swaz and fen-drar. Over all, however, the great eye on the side of Gruad's pyramid glares horrid and red.

Suddenly the sun's body rages. Coiled flames, balls of gas, roll out. The sun looks like a giant fiery arachnid or octopus. One great flame comes rolling toward the earth, burning red gas which turns yellow, then green, then blue, then white.

There is nothing left of Zukong Gimorlad-Siragosa, except the pyramid with its upper segment now resting on the base, the antigravity generators having been destroyed. The baleful eye looks out over an absolutely flat, burnt-black plain. The ground shakes, great cracks open. The blackened area is a great circle, hundreds of miles in diameter, beyond which is a dark brown and still desolate wasteland. Thousands of cracks appear in the brittle surface of the continent, the strength of whose rocks has been destroyed by the incredible heat of the solar flare. A tide of mud starts crawling over the empty plain. It leaves only the top of the pyramid, with the great eye, showing. Water sweeps over the mud, at first sinking in and standing in pools, then rising higher so that only the tip of the pyramid sticks out of a great lake. Under the water enormous parallel fissures open in the ground on either side of the blackened central circle. The midsection of the continent, including the pyramid, begins to sink. The pyramid falls into the depths of the ocean with cliffs rising on either side of it to the parts of Atlantis that still remain above the ocean. They will remain for many thousands of years more, and they will be the Atlantis remembered in the legends of men. But the true Atlantis—high Atlantis—is gone.

Gruad stares into his crimson-glowing viewplate, watching the destruction of Atlantis. The light changes color, from red to gray, and the face of Gruad turns gray. It is a terrible face. It has aged a hundred years in the last few minutes. Gruad may claim to be in the right, but deep down he knows that what he has done isn't nice. And yet deep down there is satisfaction, too, for Gruad, long tortured by unreasonable guilt, now has something he can really feel guilty about. He turns to the Unbroken Circle and proposes, since it appears that the earth will survive the cataclysm (he was not really sure that it would), that they plan for the future. Most of them, however, are still in shock. Wo Topod,; inconsolable, stabs himself to death, the first recorded time that a member of the human race has deliberately killed himself. Gruad calls upon his followers to destroy all remains of the Atlantean civilization and then, later, to build a perfect civilization when even the ruins of Atlantis have been forgotten. The great beasts that inhabited Europe, Asia and North America die off as a result of mutations and diseases caused by the solar flare. All relics of the Atlan-tean civilization are destroyed. The people who were Gruad's erstwhile countrymen are either killed or driven forth to wander the earth. Besides Gruad's Himalayan colony there is one other remnant of the High Atlantean era: the Pyramid of the Eye, whose ceramic substance resisted solar flare, earthquake, tidal wave and submersion in the depths of the ocean. Gruad explains that it is right that the eye should remain. It is the eye of God, the One, the scientific-technical eye of ordered knowledge that looks down on the universe and by perceiving it causes it to be. If an event is not witnessed, it does not happen; therefore, for the universe to happen there must be a Witness. Among the primitive hunters and gatherers a mutation has appeared that seems to be spreading rapidly. More and more people are being born without fur and with hair in the same pattern as Gruad's. The Hour of God's Eye has caused mutations in every species.

From the Himalayas the rocket ships of the Unbroken Circle, painted red and white, swoop out in squadrons. They sweep across Europe and land on the brown islands where Atlantis used to be. There they land and raid a city of refugees from the Atlantean disaster. They kill many of the leaders and intellectuals and herd the rest aboard the ships, fly to the Americas and deposit the helpless people on a vast plain. Far below their route of passage lies the Pyramid of the Eye at the bottom of the Atlantic. The base of the pyramid is covered with silt and the break where the upper part of the pyramid had floated on antigravity projectors is also covered. Still the pyramid itself towers over the mud around it, taller by three times than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, the building of which lies twenty-seven thousand years in the future. A vast shadow descends upon the pyramid. There is a suggestion in the darkness of the ocean bottom of giant tentacles, of sucker disks wide as the rims of volcanos, of an eye as big as the sun looking at the eye on the pyramid. Something touches the pyramid, and enormous as it is, it moves slightly. Then the presence is gone.

The pentagonal trap in which the people of Atlantis had heroically and brilliantly caught the dread ancient being Yog Sothoth has been, amazingly, undamaged by the catastrophe. Being on the southern plain, which was relatively uninhabited, the Pentagon of Yog Sothoth becomes the center of a migration of people who survived the disaster. Emergency cities are set up, those dying of radiation sickness are treated. A second Atlantis begins to take root. And then, from the Himalayas, the ships of the Unbroken Circle come swooping down on one of their raids. Lines of Atlantean men and women are marched to the walls of the Pentagon and there mowed down by laser fire. Then explosive charges are placed amid the heaps of bodies and the masked, uniformed men of the Unbroken Circle withdraw. There is a series of explosions; horrid yellow smoke goes coiling up. The gray stone walls crumble. There is a moment of stillness, balance, tension. Then the piled-up boulders of one side of the wall fly apart as if thrust by the hand of a giant. An enormous claw print appears in the soft soil around the ruins of the Pentagon. The masked men of the Unbroken Circle race frantically for their ships and take off. The ships dart into the sky, stop suddenly, waver and plummet like stones to explosive crashes on the earth. The surviving refugees scream and scatter. Like a scythe going through wheat, death sweeps among them in great arcs as they run in massed mobs. Mouths open in soundless screams, they fall. Only a handful escapes. Over the scene a colossal reddish figure of indeterminate shape and number of limbs stands triumphant.

In the Himalayas, Gruad and the Unbroken Circle watch the destruction of the Pentagon and the massacre of the Atlanteans. The Unbroken Circle cheers, but Gruad strangely weeps. "You think I hate walls?" he says. "I love walls. I love any kind of wall. Anything that separates. Walls protect good people. Walls lock away the evil. There must always be walls and the love of walls, and in the destruction of the great Pentagon that held Yog Sothoth I read the destruction of all that I stand for. Therefore I am stricken with regret."

At this the face of EVOE, a young priest, takes on a reddish glow and a demoniac look. There is more than a hint of possession. "It is good to hear you say that," he says to Gruad. "No man yet has befriended me, though many have tried to use me. I have prepared a special place for your soul, oh first of the men of the future." Gruad attempts to speak to Yog Sothoth, but the possession has apparently passed, and the other members of the Unbroken Circle praise a new beverage that Evoe has prepared, made of the fermented juice of grapes. At dinner, later that day, Gruad tries the new beverage and praises it, saying, "This juice of grapes relaxes me and does not cause the disturbing visions and sounds that makes the herb the Atlanteans used to smoke so unpleasant for a man of conscience." Evoe gives him more to drink from a fresh jar, and Gruad takes it. Before drinking he says, "Any culture that arises in the next twenty thousand years or so is going to have the rot of Atlantis in it. Therefore I decree a noncultural time of eight hundred generations. After that we may allow man free reign on his propensity for building civilizations. The culture he builds will be under our guidance, with our ideas implicit in its every aspect, with our control at every stage. Eight hundred generations from now the new human culture will be planted. It will follow the natural law. It will have the knowledge of good and evil, the light that comes from the sun, the sun that blasphemers say is only an apple. It is no apple, I tell you, though it is a fruit, even as this beverage of Evoe's that I now quaff is from a fruit. From the grape comes this drink and from the sun comes the knowledge of good and evil, the separation of light and darkness over the whole earth. Not an apple, but the fruit of knowledge!" Gruad drinks. He puts down his glass, clutches his throat and staggers back. His other hand goes to his heart. He topples over and lies on his back, his eyes staring upward.

Naturally, everyone accuses Evoe of poisoning Gruad. But Evoe calmly answers that it was Lilith Velkor who did it. He was doing research on the energies of the dead and had learned how to take them into him. But sometimes the energies of the dead could take control of him, so that he would be just a medium through which they act. He cries, "When you write this tragedy into the archives, you must say, not that Evoe the man did it, but Evoe-Lilith, possessed by the evil spirit of a woman. The woman did tempt me, I tell you! I was helpless." The Unbroken Circle is persuaded, and agree that since Lilith Velkor and the crazy goddess she worshipped were responsible for Gruad's death, henceforward women must be subordinate to men so such evils will not be repeated. They decide to build a tomb for Gruad and to inscribe upon it, "The First Illuminated One: Never Trust A Woman." They decide that since the lloigor is loose they will offer sacrifices to it, and the sacrifices will be pure young women who have never lain with a man. Evoe seems to be taking control of the group and Gao Twone protests this. To prove his dedication to the true and the good, Evoe declares, he has had his penis amputated as a sacrifice to the All-Seeing Eye. He pulls open his robe. All look at his truncated crotch and immediately retch. Evoe goes on, "Furthermore, it is decreed by the Eye and Natural Law that all male children who would be close to goodness and truth must imitate my sacrifice, at least to the extent of losing the foreskin or being cut enough to bleed." Kajeci comes in at this point, and they plan a great funeral, agreeing that they will not burn Gruad as was the Atlantean custom, signifying that one is dead forever, but will preserve his body, symbolizing the hope that he is not really dead but will rise again.

There follow several thousand years of warfare between the remnants of the Atlanteans and the inhabitants of Agharti, the stronghold of the Scientists, who now call themselves variously the Knowledgeable or the Enlightened Ones. The last remnants of the Atlantean culture are destroyed. Great cities were built, then destroyed by nuclear explosions. All the inhabitants of the city of Peos are killed in one night by the eater of souls. Chunks of the continent break off and sink into the sea. There are earthquakes and tidal waves. Finally, only outcroppings like the cone-shaped island of Fernando Poo rise alone from the sea where Atlantis had been.

About 13,000 B.C. a new culture is planted on a hillside near the headwaters of the Euphrates and it starts to spread. A tribe of Cro-Magnons, magnificently tall, strong, large-headed people, is marched at gunpoint down from the snows of Europe to the fertile lands of the Middle East. They are taken to the site chosen for the first agricultural settlement and shown how to plant crops. For several years they do so while the Unbroken Circle's men guard them with flame throwers. Their generations pass rapidly, and once the new way of life has taken hold the Illuminated Ones leave them alone. The tribe divides into kings, priests, scribes, warriors, and farmers. A city surrounded by farms rises up. The kings and priests are soft, weak and fat. The peasants are stunted and dulled by malnutrition. The warriors are big and strong, but brutal and unintelligent. The scribes are intelligent, but thin and bloodless. Now the city makes war on neighboring tribes of barbarians. Being well organized and technologically superior, the people of the city win. They enslave the barbarians and plant other cities nearby. Then a great tribe of barbarians comes down from the north and conquers the civilized people and burns their city. This is not the end of the new civilization, though. It only revitalizes it. Soon the conquerors have learned to play the roles of kings, priests and warriors, and now there is a kind of nation consisting of several cities with a large body of armed who must be kept occupied. Marching robotlike in great square formations, they set out over the plain to find new peoples to conquer. The sun shines down on the civilization created by the Illuminati. And below the sea the eye on the pyramid glares balefully upward.

THE END

Copyright © 1983 by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

#Discordia #Erisians #Atlantis #Illuminati #Illuminatus #Graud

[starman-john-tracy]

Radiation Poisoning | Chapter One

by @starman-john-tracy and @asteria-star

In which John Tracy gets exposed to uranium and nearly dies, The Hood is evil, and Star generally freaks out a lot.

[Chapter Two]

It's a straightforward kind of situation, as their kind of situations usually go. John's been up in the Comm sphere three hours now, monitoring the reconstruction of an old, 2040s satellite. No rescue call yet but John was grim faced and bleak as he reported to his brothers that it was only a matter of time, and that when things go wrong in space, things tend to go wrong fast - so it's best to be prepared. It's not far out from Five though; he and Star can handle anything that might arise, but Alan downstairs has got Three idling on Standby just in case.

Speaking of Star, the station's resident jailbird is making her way up from the galley, a plastic, lidded mug of hot tea and a bagel in hand - because lord knows John-beanpole-Tracy doesn't have the sense to go get such things for himself when he's all mission focused like this. 

Star is bored, and John is busy. She knows this, but she also knows it’s been too long since he’s eaten, and he’d been awake before she had, so she was well within her rights to start working her way into his space. The 2040s satellite gives Star the creeps, and she’d much rather it be over and done with so they can go back to their usual menu of natural disasters and idiot brothers… things she can help with… things that don’t mean disaster if things go tits up.

“Oi, John,” Star calls into the Comm Sphere, hovering in the doorway. “I have food and tea, which you are going to eat. You wanna do it up there or are you gonna come down here?” 

His head turns toward her, surprised to find an invader in his little bubble. His hair, that's grown out a little longer than he usually keeps it, bounces around his head in the OG. It's been a busy week. 

"Ah, thanks Star." He flicks a schematic away, long fingers dissolving it into blue particles, evidently of no more use to him. Like this, he seems as much a part of the sphere as his floating blue holograms are. "We've got some suspicious activity around the station. I've been unable to find an official statement or licence for its reconstruction, though my readings have had two heat signatures working over there since 1400 Eastern Standard."

Not many people have the funding or means to re-build a space station for the fun of it though, so it seems likely that it's a perfectly innocent endeavour. A lot of the old, 2040s materials the station was originally built with remain a cause for concern though. Especially as John hasn’t been able to identify the boarders to find out if they have a licence to handle them safely. It's easy to see why him suspects something could go wrong. The GDF have been alerted, but Colonel Casey has yet to get back to him about it. 

Pressing his worries down to focus on the present, John kicks off the side and glides gracefully over to Star like it's nothing, taking the tea mug with a warm, grateful smile.

Star pulls a face at John’s suspicion, relinquishing her hold on the tea and food absently, as if the news had put her on autopilot. She knows where the other brothers are, and where they themselves sit in the universe, and it is an undeniable fact that if something were to go wrong -under suspicious circumstances or not- she and John would be the next closest people to go and help. Star has a love-hate relationship with space rescues. On one hand; sure International Rescue is there to save everyone, but on the other… this isn’t a natural disaster or an accident. If anyone is dumb enough to be out of atmosphere, that was their call. She’s definitely gotten better at space, several spacewalks now tucked under her belt from various repairs (including the infamous one in which John broke his arm) and the general sightseeing she let the red-headed astronaut drag her on from time to time. If she was being honest, she’d do it any time he asked, if only for the way his eyes light up, in awe of the stars. 

“John, that is the exact opposite of what I want to hear up here,” she moans, peering over his shoulder at the glowing red-orange-yellow of two people in a sea of cold blue. She tears her eyes away to give John a once over -dark under-eyes and too long hair and all. “What exactly are you worried about? What could go wrong?”  

"What would I do without you?" He jokes, "I'd better stay up here and keep and eye on it," he takes a large mouthful of tea, eyelashes fluttering as the caffeine hits his system. "Mmmm, perfect."

“You’d starve,” she tells him, not for the first time. And it’s true. 

John gives her a more amused hum, already leaving the lidded mug floating in OG beside him so that his hands are free to card through his schematics. The bagel makes its way to his mouth, though it almost seems like he forgets it’s there as he plunges his fingers back into the world of glowing blues and green and lines and data and the little triangular logos that warn him about everything going on in the world, anything that could be a situation. There’s at least a hundred of them, and it’s a quiet day. Just because a situation has the potential to turn dangerous though, doesn’t mean it will.

So it’s strange that John seems to have fixated on this one.

“Unclear.” He rolls his shoulders back, unconsciously trying to relive some of the tension in them. “I have a…” His nose wrinkles, unhappy, “Mm, don’t tell Gordon, I don’t want to confirm his squid sense thing, but I’ve just got a feeling about it, is all.”

John is the last Tracy who’d ever run on pure feeling alone, but a Tracy’s a Tracy and all of them have good instincts, at the core of it. Squidsense or otherwise.

He grabs the tea mug again, eyes still scanning the screens, for something to do with his hands more than anything. 

Star chews on her lip while he takes a drag of the tea and finishes his mouthful of bagel and- John is looking at her. Star see’s the red-flashing warning in his Comm Sphere before he does, moments before what could only be an alarm starts blaring through the speakers. 

John reacts like lighting - it’s perhaps the fastest she’s ever seen him move. One jumble of holographic letters gets shoved out the way and another one is pulled up in its place, then another, then another, all in rapid succession. He skim reads everything so quickly that it makes Star’s eyes hurt, and then he’s discarding his tea and the rest of his bagel in favour of grabbing his helmet. 

Star is still hovering, watching him with her mouth opening and closing like a landed fish, searching for words her brain can’t seem to catch before they skitter away. In the end, she settles for swearing. John reaches for his helmet, and Star is suddenly very aware that she is (as usual) not in her uniform, the cool recycled air raising goosepimples on her arms and legs, bare of her pyjamas. 

“We’ve got a situation.” John announces to whoever he’s got listening, brusque and professional, “Eos, update Tracy Island for me will you? Me and Star are gonna take the gear and go EVA to…” He pauses for a second, and the actuality of things seems to catch up with him, “Uh... you ok with that?” He checks, looking back over his shoulder, as if he’s suddenly realised that she might not want to go out there, to a dangerous, unknown station right in the middle of bloody open space. At some point, he seems to have gotten so accustomed to having her at his side, he’s started taking it for granted. He looks guilty about that.

“It’d be good to have two of us out there,” He backpedals, worried she won’t agree to come with him, “You know, for if either of the workers on board have been injured, or if they become hostile. I mean, I don’t think they’re up to anything legal… but if they’re in danger then, well, we’re International Rescue, right?” He says, like everyone possesses the same mad heroism the Tracy’s do. He shines her one of those sweet, spaceman smiles of his for good measure, though he’s got no idea how goddamn effective those really are. Boy doesn’t know the power he wields. “Our scanners picked up some kind of explosion over on that old space station,” John goes on, “it looked pretty severe and, if these readings are right, she’s still got a belly of old, radioactive fuel that could be a problem. It’s definitely not the kind of stuff we want leaking out into orbit. Could pose a threat to everyone up here.” He says, like that’s the reason she’d go with him.

He’s really impressively oblivious to the fact he needs someone looking out for his ass.

It’s right then and there that Star comes to the realisation that she much prefers it when John doesn’t ask. Following blindly is easy, going along with whatever half-baked plan he’s got in his head to make sure it doesn’t end in tears, or at the very least, John comes out of it alive. Star’s good at that, the sudden appearance of a disaster, a problem that needs to be solved, and she can ride her way out of it on a wave of adrenaline, sarcasm, and the need to make sure John’s dumb ass is alright. It’s an expectation that is relatively easy to live up to. 

Choice, though… that is something else. Star doesn’t understand what’s flashing across the screens, but it is an awful lot of red and urgency and its

space

. She doesn’t know if there will be artificial atmosphere in the station in need, or if it will be little more than a dead hull haunting the universe like a ghostship, but she can’t even think about it because the empty expanse of

nothing

between it and them makes her want to curl up and hide. The rabbit-fast thudding of her heart in her chest threatens to choke her, but it doesn’t matter. 

There was never really a choice. She’s not ever going to leave John alone. 

“What kind of a question is that,” she murmurs, trying to force a full breath of air into her lungs. “What do you think I’m going to do, sit here and watch?” 

 “I just need to…” Star gestures to what she’s wearing. “I think I’m going to need my spacesuit.” 

John barks out a laugh at that, startled and sweet, and he’s smiling as he waves her away.

“Thanks Star. Suit up, quick as you can.” He’s already running a pre-flight safety check of both his and Star's Exosuits, “Make sure you grab a full O2 tank.”

While he’s waiting for her he discards multiple alarms and pulls up the schematics for the station they’re hopping across to. Screens show a large portion of her aft hull blown open and the fuel tanks are giving off enough cosmic background radiation to confirm his theory that they're probably leaky. John checks his tool belt, finding the small, compact welder securely in its place, ready for use. He doesn’t anticipate any problems sealing the tanks back up, just as long as whoever’s on board over there allows him to do his job. Hopefully they listen to reason. If not… well that’s what he’s got Star for, right?

Star shimmies into her spacesuit, still reluctant about owning the damn thing, despite the fact it clearly comes in handy. She keeps her NASA shirt on underneath, soft and too big which probably means it's actually John's, but he’s long since given up trying to reclaim his clothing. From across the station, she can hear John talking to EOS, professional words sprinkled with tolerant laughter that manages to rub Star’s already prickly temper up the wrong way. But she’s ready in no time, standing in front of John covered neck to toe in the strange wetsuit looking spacesuit, her helmet tucked under one arm. The oxygen tank was already sitting with the suit when she put it on, the little dial as close to ‘full’ as it was going to get. 

“Anything else you need me to bring?” she asks him, noting his little stash of tools. It makes her feel strangely naked, like she’s forgetting something. She coaxes her head at the screens behind him. “Anything I should know? About what we’re walking into?” 

John runs his eyes over her speculatively, considering. She looks small and skinny in her spacesuit, all nobbly knees and elbows and even the deep, navy blue sash doesn't help bulk her out like John's does for him.

Instead of the thick stripe of sunny orange John's got, Star's is thinner and flatter, with a different method of strapping around her littler torso. It's a much lighter, easier thing to carry around but still, like John's toolkit, it has enough pockets and pouches for anything they might need: pressure resistant emergency suit patches, super strength glue, a small medikit and a whole bunch of pliers and zip ties and thingamabobs and there's even a small hammer, tucked into a zipped seam opening. She's not got the same wires and solder and electronics communications gear that John's got, her design is far more streamlined - stripped to the essentials. 

"Here," John tosses her three small grapple pack cable cartridges, knowing just how bad it can be to run out mid EVA and have no way to propel yourself across the void and wanting to prevent that for her.

Star catches the packs… barely. Her fingers are clumsy and uncoordinated in the confines of her space suit. She can see what John is doing, always stocking her up with the tools to escape, but he doesn’t know about the knife she’s got tucked away in an extremely reinforced pocket of her sash, the pocket she tries to keep conveniently turned away from him as she stands patiently and lets him check her over. She just hopes he’s prepared himself as well as he has her.

He spares a second to safety check her suit seals and helmet, but they have little more time to spare and so he's pushing off the floor of the Comm Sphere and gliding up toward the hatch for the Exosuit assembly rig, talking as he goes.

"The station is an old Xz197 craft, decommissioned following the Global Conflict after the upsurgence of the green energy movement. There's no place in space for nuclear energy these days." He smiles warmly down at her as the assembly rig snaps the pieces of the Exosuit on around him. "It was deemed far too dangerous for them to send anyone up to clean it out, which begs the question, why is it inhabited now, and what are they doing aboard when I can't seem to find any kind of permit for them to be there?" It's clear this has been bothering him for hours, but without a good excuse for Colonel Casey, like an explosion apparently, he could do nothing but watch.

Star raises an eyebrow at that, waiting as John gets himself into the exosuit. Her breath makes a little circle of condensation in her helmet, a constant reminder that she’s alive in her peripheral vision; that space hasn’t gotten her yet.

‘And how would you feel about me bringing a crowbar along?’ She asks, and it’s only half a joke. She’s a barely useful second pair of hands in a repair situation, being half decent security is the least she can do. ‘I’m assuming you’ve got some kind of scanner, so we’ll be able to tell what’s radioactive when we get out there? So we’re not flying blind?’ 

Star grew up with criminals, she knows whoever these people are, their cooperation is unlikely. It brings her heart rate back down to a reasonable level. People, she can deal with, she can protect John from. 

Before she knows it they’re in the airlock, and Star has never hated EOS’ voice more than when she is counting down the door opening. Then, just like that… what Star has only ever been able to think of as freefall into the great unknown.

John quirks a ginger brow at her, uncertain if the crowbar thing is a joke or not.

“If you think we’ll need one.” He concedes, though he’s fairly certain there’s no such thing onboard. “Scanner’s on your wrist,” John takes a moment to demonstrate, sliding two fingers along the black panel that takes up half the length of the back of his forearm, so that it lights up with schematics. “I’d never leave you to fly blind.” A quick flick of his wrist to the left and the jumble turns into a simple meter, green at the moment, though with the potential to rise through the traffic light to a bright, alarming red, the more radiation is detected. “Don’t worry,” He tries to reassure, “Our suits will protect us as long as the radiation level doesn’t exceed the dark orange. And we won’t be over there long enough for that to be a problem.” He sounds very certain about that. A simple in-and-out rescue. 

As if anything for them ever stays simple.

#under the cut for length #wanted to add this to the John blog bc i like having everything together in one place #and bc i like to think we made some good words together hehe #This is ongoing but really fun #RadiationRPwithStar #thunderbirds #thunderbirds are go #if anyone was wondering why i'm behind on Snow Blind this is why XD

[howrry]

when you need me pt.2

a/n: its 4 am, i just got back from a SUPER lit house party, i'm lowkey dying, here’s part 2 of wynm. part 1 here. don't think i can write anymore of this because it just makes me hate y/n more. also this is my 10th piece yaaay! enjoy <3

w/c: 3.4k

warnings: smuuut, mild dub con

***

Lit homework had to be one of the biggest wastes of time Harry’s ever partaken in.

He’s a psychology major, for crying out loud! Why does blocking and typecasting and the use of the Stanislavsky system matter to him? It doesn’t! But his uni required him to take the class, and if nothing else, he could appreciate it for being a GPA booster.

The only sound in his dorm was the squeaking of his mechanical pencil on the homework and his roommate Ashton’s music softly beating out of his Alexa. He was playing some soft XXXtentacion, which repulsed Harry. Just because his songs were good doesn’t mean it excused the rapper’s behavior—but he digressed.

God, Harry and Ashton were so different, it’s insane how his school’s roommate matching algorithm put them together. At this point, he wonders if he’s even enrolled in the university—he’s never seen him study or go to a class. It’s not like Harry’s a purist or anything; he loves a party and a good beer like any other college student, but Ashton was just buck wild. He even tried to hit on Gemma when she visited for a weekend, but that was shut down when H threatened to castrate him.

"I'm going out," Ashton announced on his way to the door, checking in the hall mirror to see if his hair was up to snuff and fluffing out the collar of his coat.

Shocker. This didn’t even warrant a glance up from the homework. "Where?" Harry didn't really care, but it wouldn't hurt to pretend he did.

"Y'know Meghan from Kappa?" Ashton asked, twirling his keyring around his fingers.

"Yeah?"

"I'll be at her place," he explained simply.

This got Harry’s attention. "But isn't she dating that rugby player? Matthew, or whatever?"

Ashton laughed and clicked his tongue. "So naive! Cheat or be cheated on, Styles. What's that phrase about not hating the player?" He shot finger guns at his roommate and bounced, slamming the door behind him without turning off the music.

Gross.

“Alexa, turn that shit off,” H mumbled, and the robot obeyed, not bothered by the profanity.

So that's how Harry ended up in his dorm alone for the night. Once he was finished up with his lit homework, the raw boredom really kicked in. He supposed he could go out, but he wasn't really the solo type and finding someone to go with him was more trouble than it was worth. At one point he even eyed the Tijuana cigar box Ashton kept under its bed, thinking that he could probably raid its contents for a night and Ash wouldn't notice, but the risk of an RA busting him wasn't super appealing.

He accepted defeat, and decided to simply call it an early night. He changed into flannel pants to sleep in and was brushing his teeth when his phone started buzzing. It was Y/N.

Questions started flying through his brain. Why was she calling him? And at this hour? His anxious side flared up as a million nightmare scenarios flooded his thoughts. Once he’d rinsed the toothpaste out of his mouth, Harry scrambled to swipe his finger across the screen and brought the phone to his ear.

"Y/N?" he tried to hide the urgency in his voice.

"Harry!" she blurted.

"Is everything alright?" he asked, not waiting for her to explain herself.

"Fuck, Harry I'm sorry," she started, "this is so weird to ask of you but I need your help."

A pit formed in his stomach. "What's wrong?"

"I'm in your city right now and my car broke down. Triple A is on their way and they're gonna fix it up tomorrow, but I totally don't have a place to stay. Can I crash at your place?"

Relief washed over him. Yeah, this wasn't exactly an ideal situation for her, but it was better than the kidnapping and murder scenarios he'd already painted in his head. "Of course. Y'know how to get to campus?"

"I've got a phone, don't I?"

Harry's eyebrow shot up involuntarily. Okay, bold. "Settle down, pet. I live in Taylor Hall, room 208."

"Taylor, 208," Y/N echoed. "Thank you so much, H. You're a lifesaver. I'll be there in 15 or so." She hung up without waiting for his goodbye, and Harry was left in his now-uncomfortably quiet room.

He scrambled around the dorm trying to hide any evidence that two boys lived there. Ashton was a bit of a disaster, but fortunately had an aversion to mold and other gross things so it was more about tidyingthe room than it was cleaning. Harry shoved dirty laundry into Ashton's closet and struggled to close the door on it before making both of their beds. He figured he could muss up the sheets after she left in the morning to avoid any taunting from his roommate. He practically broke a sweat struggling to make the room presentable, and managed to finish just in time before two solid knocks landed on his door.

"Harry! Long time no see!" She wasted no time stepping up and throwing her arms around his neck. He was taken aback by her affection, and paused for a minute before snaking his hands around her waist. "You sure look a lot better than the last time I saw you," she cheekily noted once she pulled back.

"Probably because m’not runnin’ around getting my arse kicked anymore," he bantered nervously. She looked great as well. Her face was a bit pink from the weather, and she seemed so much older despite it only being a year since he'd last seen her. Her black trench coat cinched gracefully at her waist and her jeans were tucked into also-black heeled boots. In all the years he'd known her, he couldn't think of one time she wore heels before now. What's changed?

Fortunately, she laughed at his awkwardness. (Since when did he feel so apprehensive around her?) "That's probably it." Y/N shrugged off her coat and hung it on one of the hooks by the door, leaving her in a plain red t-shirt. She fluffed her hair out and turned to him. "I thought ahead and grabbed some pajama shorts out of my car before the insurance people took it to the mechanic. Now I don't have to sleep in jeans." Sure enough, she pulled thin pair of shorts out of one of the coat pockets.

"Yeh just keep pajama shorts in your car?" he asked dubiously, sitting on his desk chair and rubbing his cold hands on his thighs.

"Yes! I keep plenty of spare clothes in my car for a situation just like this one!" she defended. "I'm gonna change real quick." She dipped into the bathroom and emerged shortly after wearing the shorts. Judging by the ball of clothing she haphazardly tossed in the corner, she'd taken off her bra, too.

Harry eyed her from his spot at the desk as she comfortably moved around the room, like she’d been there a hundred times. "Why are you here?" he asked suddenly, making her jump a little.

Her arms lifted to tie her hair up. "Have you already forgotten? You're a real nut, H. Car troubles? Ringing any bells?"

"No, no," he rubbed a hand down his face. "Why are yeh not at your own uni? Why are yeh in my city?"

"Oh." She hesitated before answering, climbing into his bed. "I'll be honest, it was a booty call. I called the other guy first when my car started acting up, but another girl answered. Figured he must have accidentally overbooked his evening and I remembered you go here, so here I am." Y/N sat cross legged and rested her chin in her palm, dazedly staring at Harry.

"Oh, wow. Sorry to hear that," he awkwardly mumbled.

She snorted. "I'll be okay. S'not like I had feelings for him."

This made something twist in Harry's stomach for some reason. Quiet, sweet Y/N that he'd known for years was just looking to get fucked and didn't care about feelings. This was a totally different person from the girl he grew up next door to. Who was she?!

"Either way, I really owe you one. I'll buy you a meal in the morning, but for right now, I'm exhausted." Y/N stood up and stretched an arm over her head. "Do you want me to take that bed?" She pointed towards Ashton's only recently made bed.

"No!" Harry barked suddenly and her eyes widened. "God only knows what's livin' in those sheets. I worry about what m’roommate does there when I'm not layin' in the same room next t'him."

"Gross," she responded around a laugh.

"My thoughts exactly. You can have my bed, and I'll just sleep on the floor," he decided, going to look for another blanket to lay on the ground.

Y/N scoffed. "You'd rather sleep on the ground than get in your roommate's bed?" Harry simply raised an eyebrow at her as an answer. "Again, gross. I wouldn't feel right kicking you to the floor. Are you trying to avoid sleeping with me?"

The wording threw Harry off, and he unfortunately stammered over his response. “I—no! I just—”

“Then we can share a bed.” She was matter-of-fact and didn't seem like she'd take no for an answer. It's not like he would've declined anyways, but she didn't even give him a chance before making herself right at home in his bed and patting the space next to her for him to join. He chortled and shut off the lamp, making his way in between his sheets by the light of the moon.

"Oh, and I'm a bit of a cuddler. Warning you now," she whispered with a wink before nuzzling into the pillow and falling fast asleep.

He couldn't complain.

***

Harry woke up in the middle of the night from the discomfort of not being alone.

It wasn't that Y/N was a bad person to sleep with, of course. He just was used to having the whole bed to himself and having a second human in his space made it hard to totally expand and take over the whole surface. Once he remembered specifically whowas with him, though, he didn't feel as bothered about not being asleep.

Y/N was tucked up closely to him, clearly having no problem making herself comfortable. He laid on his back, and she was on her stomach halfway on top of him. Her cheek was comfortably nestled on his chest, and her hand softly rested a few inches from her face. One of her legs was thrown over his own, and her mouth was popped open just a bit, breath fanning across his body. The two were laid up like they’d done it a million times. He smiled a little at how cute she was when she was sleeping; he couldn't help but gently rub a hand up and down her back. He was so cozy, he probably could've slipped right back into his doze if it weren't for her starting to talk.

Yes. Sleep talk.

"Harry," she drawled, almost whispering the name.

In his sleepy state it took a few seconds to make the connection that she was actuallydreamingabout Harry. In her defense, she was in his bed and called him for help after a mildly stressful situation, so it wasn’t totally weird that he’d be paying her a visit in her REM cycle. Regardless, a strange feeling swirled in his stomach at the mere thought of what was happening.

His ears were pricked up on full alert and his eyes snapped open to stare at the ceiling fan. He was too afraid to reply, and thus waited for her to say something else before he even dared breathing. "Let's... go," she finally finished.

He chuckled, chest rising a bit but not letting his gaze move from the fan. "Go where?" he whispered, humoring her sleep talk.

"I... I don't know. Wanna..." followed by a deep exhale.

Harry found this quite endearing. He allowed her to continue softly babbling little snippets of sentences, trying and failing to piece them together into coherent thoughts. Again, he almost let himself drift off again until one of her words had much more conviction than before.

"Please."

He could feel her lips ghosting across his body where her head lay. This felt different than her previous mumbling-- she knew what she was trying to say in her dream.

"Yes, Y/N?" Harry got out softly, eyes fixed steadily on the ceiling.

"I need--" She's still not super great at finishing her sentences while sleeping, apparently. "Harry, please."

Then talking just wasn't enough for her- she started to move. First her fingers dug into his chest a bit, nails intending to grip him but not quite enough to be felt through the cotton of his shirt. Then her lower body shifted where the apex of her legs was pressed against his hip, moving up and down ever so slightly without ever losing contact. Her breathing became heavier until it turned into an unabashed, shameless moan. A moan!

That's when it clicked. She was grinding on him, and the spot where the two of them were connected sent sparks through his entire body. "I-- Y/N, are you having a dirty dream about me?" he asked dumbfounded, even though he already knew the answer.

She let out a whine at the sound of his voice. "I need you," she said, dragging her nails down into his skin even harder than before. Her pathetic hip movements sped up as well. "Please touch me."

What the fuck? Is… Does… Would this even be ethical? She’s asleep! Can she even give consent? Does it matter if she’d already started grinding on him? Was this something she really wanted or was it just a snippet of her dream making its way into reality?

"I-I can't," he confessed. What the hell was he supposed to do? Not only did their relationship go too far back for this to not be weird, but his mum once told him something about not waking someone while they sleep walk or talk or it might give them sleep paralysis. He chose to stay stone fucking still, simply lying there and watching one of his childhood friends using his hip to make herself cum.

It was sloppy and desperate, her hips rocking against him. She stopped scratching to brush her hands against the swell of his chest muscles, separated only by the thin t-shirt. "P-pull my hair," she begged.

And he was fucking torn. Of coursehe wanted to give into her request, but what if he woke her up? How could he explain what he was doing, or the hard-on he was sporting? His lip was trapped between his teeth, gnawing away as he thought it over.

Screw it-- he could pretend to be asleep if she stirred. Harry creeped his hand up and threaded his hand into her hair, tugging at the roots and almost lifting her head. "Like that, baby?" he cooed. A porn star moan slipped from her lips and her movements faltered for a second. He feared he'd pulled too hard and stayed completely still, leaving his fingers bunched up until she slowly got back into the swing of her pitiful thrusts.

"Fuck… me harder," she whimpered, and Harry thought he was going to fucking die.

Honestly, he was a little pissed. Where the hell did she get off thinking she could kick him out of her home after kissing her, only to show up at his doorstep a year later and dry fuck his leg in her sleep? The audacity!

His thoughts were interrupted by her choking out a "g'na cum," and he pulled at her hair again. Oh right, this is where she got off.

"Yeah pet? G'na make a mess for me?" he spurred on. He knew he shouldn’t be doing this, and he’d probably feel like garbage about it in the morning, but that sounded like a problem for morning Harry. He had to see what she looked like when she finally got her release.

She lost her smooth rhythm again and was now scrambling to hit her high—all he could do was watch. When she finally did cum, it was mesmerizing. She cried out his name before cutting herself off and freezing for a moment. Once the peak hit, her legs trembled as she continued dry humping him until she'd fully ridden out everything.

It was, without a doubt, one of the hottest fucking things Harry had ever seen. Her nails dug into him once more as she let her heart rate settle down. Eventually, she sighed and nuzzled her cheek into his body.

As if all of that wasn't torturous enough, she had to top that entire performance by mumbling out a soft, "Thank you... daddy," and Harry almost let out a fucking groan. Her breathing soon evened out as she drifted back into a dreamless sleep, and he guessed there wouldn't be any more speaking for the night.

So much for falling back asleep.

***

The next morning, Harry was perfectly content with pretending that the events from previous night had never happened.

By the time he’d woken up, Y/N had retreated to her side (well, not really her side—it was a twin sized bed, so more like her “corner”) and was facing the wall. She wasn’t asleep for much longer than that, as she soon stirred and moved to climb over Harry.

When she was fully straddling him, he froze and made awkward eye contact with her. “Settle down, tiger, I’m just getting up.” He almost laughed at the irony. If only she had any idea what she put him through the night before.

Y/N changed back into her jeans in the bathroom and swished some of Ashton’s mouthwash. Harry watched her fluff her hair in the mirror with his arm tucked behind his head.

“I want pancakes, thoughts?” she suggested, coming back in the room and plopping down on his desk chair.

Oh right. She’d offered to buy him breakfast last night. Harry wasn’t sure he could be around her any longer without things become suffocatingly awkward. “Oh, yeh don’t have to do tha’ for me,” he countered, shaking his head and getting out of bed.

She watched him scramble about the room, focusing on everything except her. Her eyebrows shot up when he shamelessly dropped his flannel pants to the ground and shoved on some dark jeans from his drawers. He couldn’t care less, though; the events from the night before had erased any modesty he may have felt in her presence. “Really? You’re gonna give up free breakfast just to kick me out?”

“I’m not kicking you out!” he protested, though she had no room to talk. Their last encounter ended with her literally slamming a door in his face. Before he could even argue with her, he was interrupted by keys in the lock. Fuck.

Ashton sauntered in with the confidence of a king, hair mussed and shirt obviously on backwards. “Hello, London, how are we doing this fine mor—” he stopped his weird greeting (a la Harry’s accent) when he realized his room had more occupants than just his roommate.

Harry wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Ash’s eyes drifted from Y/N in the chair, to Harry untimely zipping up his pants, to his own made-up bed, and everything clicked in his mind. The pieces didn’t go together but they made a puzzle nonetheless. A slow smile curled up on his face as he made a beeline for her and stuck out his hand. “Well hello, I’m Ashton, Harry’s roommate.”

“Y/N, charmed,” she deadpanned, extending out her own hand and grinning at Harry when Ashton kissed it. “I’ve heard plenty about you.”

“All bad, I hope,” he returned, making Harry snort.

Y/N stood up and retrieved her coat from the hooks near the door. She shrugged it on and tossed the hair that got stuck under the collar. “I’ll catch up with you later, H. It was nice meeting you, Ash.” She politely nodded to the boys and was out before Ashton could say a “likewise”.

The second the door slammed, the onslaught started. “I didn’t think you had it in you, Styles. I was almost starting to think you were a eunuch or something, but apparently not! She’s cute too, is she blind? Or did you pay her to come here?” Ashton poked and prodded at H as he undressed and went to take a shower.

Harry’s phone buzzed, and the text he received made his roommate’s taunts sound like rushing water in his ears. It was from Y/N.

Next time, don’t pull so hard.

#harry styles #harry styles fan fiction #harry styles one shot #harry styles writing #harry styles smut #harry styles masterlist #permanentcross #majorharry #jawllines #harryforvogue #haroldloverboy #:~))

[erideights]

Everything that we never get to say.

Request by @lady-of-black-roses : Our best angel x reader, the moment they met, their relationship through the years and a kiss in the end.

Pairing: Aziraphale x Fem!Reader (Good Omens)

Word Count: 2066.

Warnings: SO MUCH ANGST. Death. War.

A/N: I'm totally fucking sure this isn't what you was thinking this would be, but you wanted angst and I had this horrible idea and... I'm so sorry.

''—and then I said ‘Pardon me, what!? No way.’ My Bentley! Buy MY Bentley! Can you believe it?"

Aziraphale's gaze was lost in the distance through the transparent and clear glass of the window of the back room of his shop, where his most precious books were safely kept in his old desk.

He heard Crowley's voice, but he didn’t listen to him, so when the silence fell, almost like a cue to give his opinion, he just hummed.

It was raining, and the drops of water that slid down the impeccable surface before him were reflected in his eyes, eyes that for the first time in oh, so many years, mirrored a regret, sadness and longing the demon would never have believed possible in the angel.

But he was watching his back, so, in any case, he didn’t witness such an atrocious image.

"—angel, angel! You're listening? Where the fuck are you? Get down from the clouds."

But again, the blonde platinum angel didn’t answer, just sighed deeply and allowed his whole body to rock to the rhythm of that breath.

Only the red-haired demon's hand on his shoulder, who had been forced to leave his comfortable seat in search of his friend's attention, was able to tear our Aziraphale from his daydream.

"Hey, you okay?" Crowley asked when through the eyes of the angel crossed confusion and bewilderment. Question to which, quickly but worse pretended than he would have expected, Aziraphale replied:

"Of course, of course I am! I was just trying to imagine a world in which you existed without the car. But it has been in vain, certainly. I can not visualize you without it."

But it was evident that he was lying, and Crowley knew it.

The sad story our beloved angel was reviving begins a few years before the outbreak of the Second World War.

We are in London, on a lost street in a neighborhood not very rich but not poor either, where sad gray buildings stood to the sky and people walked down the street as if life had been taken from them.

The atmosphere was tense, there was no doubt about it, with the war about to explode at any moment, to allow oneself to be happy and to wear a smile was complicated to see.

But even so, there were always those special individuals, unique in their kind, who with only a slight upward curve of their lips, seemed to radiate their own light and bathe in it all who came and wanted some of its warmth.

She was just like that.

Y/N, a young librarian who worked day and night in the most lost and desolate of libraries in all London, but for some reason, was always surrounded by children hungry for her charisma, her love and, above all, her stories.

The first time he saw her, Aziraphale was desperately searching for a book of prophecies that, people told, had been discovered a few years ago in an attic of an abandoned building by the area, and like most books lost and/or without owner with real value for the state, it ended up in the town hall or in the closest library to his find.

That same day he crossed two large wooden doors, worn, scruffy by time but cozy in its tender, eccentric and strange way. And there she was, hair tied in a bun that after so many hours of work was practically undone, smile in a mouth full of white pearls for teeth and eyes that could make the most insensitive of men fall in love with her.

She chatted animatedly with a group of what Aziraphale considered mothers, their children not many meters away, huddled around a round table like knights in shining armors, reading similar books that they would later exchange and use to create a story to be able to play in the park.

The angel Aziraphale would swear he had never experienced what love was, but the moment their eyes met, the common description of that emotion was the closest thing he could feel in his more than 5,000 years of life.

She was Heaven in Earth.

But as it was habit for him, those feelings that seemed to surface in his skin were completely ignored, buried at the end of a dark chamber that until a few years later he wouldn’t have the audacity to open.

Not until it was too late.

With an affable smile and his hands, nervously playing with the end of his cinnamon-colored vest, the thousand-years-old angel made his way to the counter of the small, old but cozy library, interrupting —without wanting to— the conversation between his charming and mysterious unknown woman and the mothers of the neighborhood, who soon began chatting between them several meters away.

"Good Morning!" she chirped happily, as charming as he had imagined her. He found himself sighing and drawing the most beautiful of his smiles just for her. "How can I help you?"

Over a few years, their relationship developed between —not so— random fortuitous meetings in the library, all caused by Aziraphale under the pretext and the excuse of enjoying the calm that reigned there —he assured that, in other libraries, ‘’the tumult came to overwhelm him’’— and other approaches not left to chance itself, but by the initiative that the young Y/N showed in order to spend more time with him.

She would be lying if she said that after some time she hadn’t fallen in love with those eyes that seemed to hold all the love in the world, that tender and adorable giggle that rang in his throat when he was nervous or how he seemed to treat her as if she were the most precious thing in the universe.

His heart, his lovely personality, his empathy and how extremely intelligent he was also helped to shape those feelings that often reduced her sleep hours and kept the girl away from reality and in a constant daydream.

Oh, c'est l'amour.

But no matter how hard she tried, how many hints she dropped or how much effort she put into it; her feelings for Aziraphale didn’t seem to be reciprocated.

And that was good! She was satisfied, —or so she wanted to think—, with the shelter of his friendship with the angel.

That was enough.

But the war came to London, and one is unable to appreciate and understand the treasure that is the calm of a simple life until something like this explodes in front of you and plunges you into the flames of despair.

Chaos, destruction and crying soon seized the streets of the largest city in England.

The families were divided, the great national treasures were lost among the most atrocious fires, innocents died, and among the ashes, one couldn’t even find consolation in mourning those who lost, because in reality, there were no bodies left to mourn.

Events like this didn’t harm or disturb in the least celestial beings free of all guilt and exempt to die, anyone could think, but from the corner of one of the most lost streets in the whole city, where a small and cozy library used to be, an angel began to cry.

Aziraphale found rubble where walls and shelves once stood up to join the roof and collect all the knowledge that such a place could hold; ashes where thousands of books used to rest, waiting for someone to read again what they had to teach; a huge void in the counter from where, he then knew, the love of his life used to smile at the sight of him arriving.

A sharp thud on the ground, —a huge leather bag full of books of ancient prophecies— signaled the exact second when Aziraphale, in shock, began to walk and enter the chaos he once considered a home.

His lips trembled as did his hands and practically the rest of his body.

No, he didn’t even want to think that...

''Y/N?'' He asked in just a broken whisper, unable to raise his voice, unable to verify whether or not she had been a victim of that disaster.

Please, God, do not let her be a victim of this disaster, he thought.

'’Y/N? '' He tried again, this time louder, so the pain in his voice was so obvious that anyone who could get to hear him would know, in effect, that the soft angel was crying.

The bomb couldn’t have fallen more than a couple of hours ago. He knew it because he was there, with her, begging her to hide and search for refuge before what he thought would be a furtive meeting to hunt the enemy.

Please, God, I hope that she has listened to me, he prayed again.

But soon he would find out that God didn’t have mercy for anything and anyone. That no matter how much Aziraphale prayed, he had no greater power over the grand plan.

Because it was ineffable, right? Everything had to happen for a reason in order to achieve a specific goal.

But why, of all the millions of people that existed on the planet, of all those who perhaps deserved it, his blue eyes, sad, crystalline with tears, had to rest on the unconscious body of the woman he loved?

''No, no, no, please, no.'' He muttered in a choked way and so quickly that he couldn’t even understand himself, rushing to reach the body and hold it in his arms while his corduroy pants were destroyed by the ashes on the ground.

''Y/N...'' he begged, caressing her face, brushing the strands of hair that had clung to her sweet features from the sweat of her skin

She was breathing, but not for too long.

Her heart was beating, but his heartbeat was numbered and the clock was only moving forward in time.

''It's okay.'' she suddenly murmured, her voice no more than a barely audible whisper between her forced breathing and the silent crying of the blond angel.

She couldn’t open her eyes, her body didn’t have the strength to do it, but she could recognize that warmth anywhere; after all, she was in love with him, right?

''It's okay.'' she repeated, knowing that from her first two words, Aziraphale's eyes had been fixed on her face and that he was probably afraid to blink and that when he opened them again, she would no longer be with him.

‘’I’m sorr—’’

‘’I love you, Aziraphale.’’

His breath stopped, he was frozen in place, unable to look away from the lips that, after her confession, had drawn a tired smile.

She should tell him, right? She couldn’t leave without telling him at least once.

''I'm sorry I took so long to tell you.''

Prey of his own panic and everything that perhaps he wanted to say choked at the beginning of his throat, the only way out that Aziraphale found to give free rein to the feelings that for years he repressed in his little Pandora's box was to kiss that smile that so many times it had stolen his breath.

And he did.

Then a blink.

He, again, had allowed himself to be carried back to that memory of more than 70 years ago.

His hands caressed, distracted, the green cover of an old book that Crowley had never seen before and that he, at that moment, peeked curiously from the shoulder of the angel, wanting to ask for it but knowing, inside his chest and for some unknown reason, that he shouldn’t.

If he had, Aziraphale would have replied that it was simply a gift from an old friend.

Actually, it was the first gift he received throughout his long life.

''Do not tell anyone, but I stole this book from some archives of the Senate House Library when I was a child and I have always kept it as a treasure.

It has not prophecies, or stories of religious interest, but I think the love story it contains could make you smile on a dark and rainy April afternoon.

With all my love for my guardian angel,

Y/N.''

#aziraphale x reader #good omens #aziraphale #good omens one shots #good omens imagine #so much angst #I'm crying so much #aziraphale x fem!reader #crowley is here too

[deltaengineering]

Summer Anime 2019 Part 1: no more intros

Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo. / O Maidens in your Savage Season

❓ There’s an outbreak of puberty in a high school literature club and things get really awkward really fast.

✅✅ This doesn’t pull any punches with the horny content and it’s hilarious.

✅ I like the characters as well, they seem to have a bit more to them than normal but they’re still likeable.

✅ Nice looking and well directed.

♎ Mari Okada’s trademark blunt writing is still there, though it works better here than it usually does. She really has gotten a lot better since she started writing more personal stuff instead of just vague supernatural seishun feels.

 Dr. Stone

❓ A mysterious disaster turns everyone on earth into stone. Several millennia later some shounen characters are the first ones to awake and they do some caveman chemistry.

✅  The idea is pretty novel by Weekly Shounen Jump standards.

♎ I have to say that for a WSJ joint, the writing is fairly tolerable as well. It’s still dumb, but not insultingly so.

❌ But in the end, it’s still WSJ and you’re still just watching a bunch of terrible looking meatheads doing basic science on the level of a YouTube primer and shouting about how awesome that is using assorted catchphrases.

❌ And it’s on the same day as another shounen-ass shounen, to which it is inferior. More on that later.

Dumbbell Nan Kilo Moteru / How Heavy are the Dumbbells you Lift?

❓ Doga Kobo x bodybuilding

♎ This is possibly the least surprising anime of the season, because all you need to know is what the Japanese bodybuilding meme is and what Doga Kobo usually does. Well, there’s no loli this time at least.

✅ Not surprising + Doga Kobo = looks good

♎ It’s not exceedingly funny but it’s competent enough at comedic timing.But some one-note jokes (such as Akemi being thirsty for muscle) get old.

✅ Doesn’t rock my socks off but it’s alright for the time being. Pretty competent and with room for improvement with more characters.

Enen no Shouboutai / Fire Force

❓ A boy with a hero complex becomes a firefighter. Since this is a shounen universe by the author of Soul Eater, this is rather literal: Get ready to punch fire demons.

✅ You ready for some DUMB ANIME SHIT? Because this is a lot of that, in a good way. In particular is gets the tone right and is neither too clowny nor too grim. Mostly.

✅✅ Looks amazing. The production is top notch and the fire is especially impressive - it better be, because there’s a lot of it. The design is also good.

❌ Shounen writing rears its ugly head again. I don’t expect subtlety, but a dozen flashbacks to Shinra’s not-very-complicated backstory plus his incessant insistence on being A HERO are not a good sign at all. At least this time the blah is limited to the thematic core instead of everything.

✅ I was entertained for now, but I’ll have to see if the good production values can keep it up and make up for the simplistic core in the long run.

Granbelm

❓ Average girl becomes magical, summons a mecha and gets involved in a magical mecha fighting ring.

✅ This looks pretty neat, seeing as it is made by the Re:Zero team.

✅ Since it’s an original, there is much less LN jank in the writing though.

♎ Still feels mostly like a mashup of very generic anime tropes - reminiscent of Mai-Hime, of all things. It might go somewhere, but might just as easily not.

♎ In particular, it might start copying Re:Zero’s derpier aspects. It already has a fondness for the ragefaces.

✅ Since it’s not in fact isekai, it is allowed to throw shade on isekai.

Joshikousei no Mudazukai / Wasteful Days of Highschool Girls

❓ Some highschool girls chat about boys and whatnot.

♎ There really isn’t much to say about it, to be honest. The characters are okay but very archetypal, it looks average, and the humor is neither amusing nor particularly annoying. It seems to have a severe lack of personality - especially compared to Maidens, which is this show with the safety off.

❌ It is, however, just far too long. These kind of mild 4koma antics wear out their welcome at full length and without anything else it becomes tedious. All the segments feel disjointed and random anyway, so there’s really no upside to yawning through 24 minutes of it.

Kanata no Astra / Astra Lost in Space

❓ Several anime characters get lost during summer camp on a distant planet and have to find their way home in an FTL spaceship they stumble across.

♎ Speaking of archetypal characters - you couldn’t put together a more anime cast together if you were making a parody. You got your spiky-haired protagonist, dim genki girl, big boobed shy fujoshi, sparkling ikemen, brooding rival, androgynous twink, glasses wearing supergenius, a tsundere and a loli. They work very hard to establish this too.

✅ Apart from this ridiculous assortment of memes, Astra leaves a solid impression. The scifi universe isn’t completely nonsensical, and the concept has potential.

✅ It’s well put together too, with good direction and high production values.

❌ The only real negative is that Astra can’t shut up about its protagonist’s backstory. There were about as many repetitive flashbacks in this episode as in the first episode of Fire Force, and it’s only not as bad because Astra’s was double length. If this remains persistent, it may be more annoying than it’s worth.

Katsute Kami Datta Kemono-tachi e / to the Abandoned Sacred Beasts

❓ In a grimderp version of the American Civil War, nobody stops to think that turning people into murderous animal hybrids might not be a good idea and might leave some grudges after the war is over.

♎ Looks average at best. If it’s trying to be Fullmetal Alchemist, I have some bad news for everyone involved.

❌ This definitely can’t be taken seriously, because it’s so contrived and on top of it the tone is all over the place. It can turn from graphic massacres to funny hijinks to inhumane experiments on a dime. To work as intended, it would need a far more delicate hand on all levels.

♎ That said, by the end of it, when there’s a pileup of tragic betrayals and one CAIN MADHOUSE turns out to be a moustache-twirling villain with a cackle to match, it comes close to being the entertaining kind of schlock.

♎ Since this was only the setup, it might be worth it to find out what the actual plot is like going forward.

The Case Files of Lord El-Melloi II: Rail Zeppelin ~grace note~

❓After getting punked in the fourth Heaven’s Feel, Waver decides he wants to try his luck in the viper’s nest that is the Clock Tower (if you did not understand any of that, this show is not for you)

✅ Fate has the moneybags and moneybags make shit look good

❌ I would like to watch a dark comedy about the backstabbing and incompetence at the Clock Tower - The Death of Kayneth, if you will. However, there are only the mildest traces of this in Case Files and it takes itself far too seriously.

❌ Since I bounced off this show the second time now (there was an episode 00 a few months ago) I don’t know if I want to give this show even more chances to prove to me it’s not heartachingly dull. It’s not really funny and there’s barely any action.

♎ That leaves character drama. I do like Waver but not enough to watch him mope about his bro Iskander being dead all day. The rest of the characters are a mixed bag and evidently not good enough to keep the show going on their own.

Maou-sama, Retry!

❓ 💩

💩💩 100% of all the isekai shit and nothing else. This is highly derivative and amateur even by the standards of highly derivative amateur isekai LNs.

💩💩 Looks like absolute garbage even at ep 1. I should be happy that no talent is going to waste here.

💩 The least offensive aspect is that our MMO-reborn haxlord picks up a tiny Ramrem for casual dadfeels. It still sucks and there’s another show this season that does this better.

Sounan desu ka / Are You Lost?

❓ Comedy short about girls stranded on a remote island learning basic survival skills.

❌ One girl is hypercompetent at survival, the others are not. Hope you think this is comedy gold cos it’s all we got.

❌ show bad

Tejina-senpai / Magical Sempai

❓ Girl with breasts is an enthusiastic amateur magician and is so bad at it that every attempt ends in some compromising position.

❌ We can only afford one joke per comedy short, okay? Do you think we’re made of money and/or talent?

❌ This one is quick on the draw with the segments at least, and crams in 6 instead of the usual 2-3. So it’s theoretically less tedious, but in practice it’s all a blur of unfunny either way.

❌ show bad

Uchi no Ko no Tame naraba, Ore wa Moshikashitara Maou mo Taoseru kamo Shirenai. / If It's For My Daughter, I'd Even Defeat A Demon Lord

❓ Handsome young adventurer finds an orphaned devil child in the forest. Dadfeels ensue.

✅ So this is the one that does Maou Retry’s core aspect better. And it does it quite well, in fact; it’s cute and wholesome.

✅ Basically it’s Sweetness and Lighting with JRPG questing instead of cooking. That show was alright.

❌ However, to make up for being good at something, know that it has absolutely nothing else. The setting is off-brand JRPG mush and not even attempting otherwise, the production values are pedestrian.

♎ Apparently this turns into a fantasy version of Usagi Drop down the line. I’m not one to mark it down for that now, but that doesn’t sound too great. However, it’s questionable if 1. the anime gets there 2. the anime goes there and 3. I watch the anime enough for the problem to even arise. It’s not that good.

#anime #impressions #summer2019 #Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo #Dr. Stone #Dumbbell Nan Kilo Moteru #Fire Force #granbelm #kanata no astra #to the Abandoned Sacred Beasts #The Case Files of Lord El-Melloi II #Maou-sama Retry #Sounan desu ka #magical sempai #Uchi no Ko no Tame naraba Ore wa Moshikashitara Maou mo Taoseru kamo Shirenai. #If It's For My Daughter I'd Even Defeat A Demon Lord #Joshikousei no Mudazukai #Enen no Shouboutai

[iol247]

The careful massacre of the bourgeoisie

By

Ivo Vegter

-

May 19, 2020

Government’s own advisors called the extended lockdown ‘unscientific and nonsensical’. Unicef warned it could kill more than Covid-19, including 1.2 million children. StatsSA reported the crippling business impact. By any logic, the lockdown must be ended, but it won’t, because it suits the ANC’s agenda to sustain it.

As long ago as the middle of April, the chairman of the Ministerial Advisory Committee and the country’s epidemiologist-in-chief, Professor Salim Abdool Karim, first mooted the idea that the lockdown had achieved its purpose of postponing the peak of Covid-19 infections – giving the healthcare sector precious time to get ready – and that extending the lockdown would not produce significant additional benefits.

On 6 May, health minister Zweli Mkhize reiterated this view: ‘In terms of our scientific focus, we were able to push the peak. If we were to prolong the lockdown, it would not have delayed the peak substantially.’

Still, we’re stuck at a level of lockdown that isn’t much different from the hard lockdown of the first five weeks, and is in some respects even stricter, until at least the end of the month.

Even then, it is possible that major metros, where most of the country’s economic activity happens, will not see any relief. And when the anticipated peak does come, in August or September, higher lockdown levels will again be imposed.

The government keeps insisting that it is acting according to the best available science, but, as Steven Friedman wrote last week in the Mail & Guardian, government’s Covid-19 science mask is slipping.

The available science is not very good, as we saw with the unravelling of the vaunted Imperial College model upon which many lockdown decisions were based.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, in his speech to the nation on 13 May in which he infamously announced basically nothing, did say Cabinet is ‘determined and committed … to be transparent, to take the nation into confidence and to do so regularly…’, and other such niceties.

Still, however, the deliberations of the National Command Council remain ‘classified’, the epidemiological model projections that would trigger lockdown level changes remain secret, and only the most basic of data have been released to the public.

The government has not taken the nation into its confidence at all. It has merely dictated the terms of lockdown, often in farcical detail.

‘Unscientific and nonsensical’

Government has been quick to administer a public spanking to several of its top science advisors, including Dr Glenda Gray, chairperson of the South African Medical Research Council and head of the research division of the Ministerial Advisory Council (MAC), Dr Ian Sanne, associate professor at the clinical HIV Research Unit at Wits University and CEO of Right to Care and a MAC member, and Professor Marc Mendelson, head of the Division of Infectious Diseases and HIV Medicine at the UCT Department of Medicine and head of the clinical division of the MAC.

All three spoke to News24 to express harsh criticism of the government’s lockdown strategy, saying that it is ‘unscientific and nonsensical’. Gray said the lockdown should be lifted completely, in favour of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as handwashing, wearing masks, social distancing and prohibitions on gatherings. ‘[It’s] almost as if someone is sucking regulations out of their thumb and implementing rubbish, quite frankly,’ she told News24.

In a recent StatsSA survey on behavioural and health impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, almost everyone knew the main symptoms of Covid-19, and almost everyone was able to minimise their risk of infection through hand washing, social distancing, avoiding crowds, and remaining at home. This demonstrates that non-pharmaceutical interventions could be very successful.

Sanne told News24 that the lockdown was having a negative effect on the country’s healthcare system, and that between 40% and 60% of patients with chronic diseases such as HIV and diabetes were simply not being seen to. There had also been a substantial decline in childhood vaccinations, he said, raising the spectre of deadly epidemics down the line.

In the StatsSA survey, 54.1% of people who wanted to visit healthcare facilities but decided against it did so out of fear of contracting Covid-19, while another 25.5% feared they would get arrested or fined for being outside their homes.

‘Infections are inevitable. Sixty percent or so of our country will become infected over the next two years, but limiting the rate of infection is not going to come through lockdown,’ Mendelson told News24, adding that there should be a ‘rapid de-escalation’ of the lockdown to Level 1.

Sacrificing the young to protect the old

Gray warned that malnutrition cases were beginning to arrive in hospitals, for the first time in decades. According to Dr Stefan Peterson, chief of health at Unicef, the blanket lockdowns imposed in countries like South Africa are not an effective way to control Covid-19. He told The Telegraph that the risk of children dying from malaria, pneumonia or diarrhoea in developing countries is spiralling due to the pandemic and ‘far outweighs any threat presented by the coronavirus’

Unicef warned that 1.2 million children could die as a result of lockdowns across the world, which would outweigh the likely Covid-19 deaths. A study by researchers from Johns Hopkins University likewise found that disruption of health services could have a catastrophic impact on maternal and child mortality.

Essentially, we’re trying to protect old people and people with pre-existing conditions at the cost of killing young mothers and children, instead.

Economic toll

Meanwhile, the economic toll of the interminable lockdown, now in its eighth week, is evident in the Business Impact Surveys conducted by StatsSA. The second such survey was published on 14 May 2020, and covers the last two weeks of April.

Only 14.4% of businesses said they were confident they had the financial resources to survive the pandemic. Only 6.7% said they could survive more than three months of lockdown.

Eighty-three percent of survey respondents said they expected the economic fallout from the lockdown to be worse than the 2008/9 financial crisis, and 75.7% said it would be substantially worse.

More than half of surveyed businesses indicated that they were unable to get the required material, goods or services to conduct day-to-day operations. Almost half said they expect their workforce size to decrease, and 14.9% had already made 80% or more of their workforce redundant.

By the end of April, the lockdown had already cost South Africa 8.6% of all its businesses. Small and medium-sized businesses were hit the hardest. Fewer have been able to continue trading, more have had to close temporarily, and more have closed their doors for good.

In its behavioural and health impacts survey, StatsSA found that by far the biggest concern among respondents about the pandemic and the resulting lockdown was that it would ‘contribute to economic collapse’. More than 99% of respondents said they were somewhat, very or extremely concerned, with by far the majority being extremely concerned.

Lockdown must be lifted

So we have a situation in which the government’s own advisors oppose the continued lockdown, health authorities are warning that lockdowns could kill more (and younger) people than Covid-19 will, and the economy has been critically damaged, and most of what’s left can’t survive further lockdown for long. The biggest concern among the general population is no longer health, but economic survival.

On top of that, there are various Constitutional questions surrounding the legitimacy of the National Command Council, the lack of parliamentary oversight of the Executive, the secrecy of government’s data and deliberations, and many of the specific regulations. A State of Disaster does not suspend the Constitution, which means that the entire project of locking people in their homes, imposing a military curfew, requiring pass books for movement, and shutting down businesses violates numerous rights conferred upon citizens by the nation’s supreme law.

The president declared that government would ‘ensure that all government decisions are taken in good faith, that they are reasonable and based on empirical evidence, and that they do not cause more harm than good’.

A continued lockdown violates all of these criteria. It must be lifted, as rapidly as is reasonably possible.

It won’t be, however. And the reason is that this plays right into the playbook of the ANC.

‘Class suicide’

I’ve pointed out before that Ramaphosa is a committed socialist. He told the nation: ‘We are resolved not to merely return our economy to where it was before the coronavirus, but to forge a new economy… to restructure the economy and to achieve inclusive growth. … [W]e will forge a compact for radical economic transformation… Our new economy must be founded on fairness, empowerment, justice and equality.’

That is the blueprint of a socialist economy. His former – and probably current – rival for the presidency, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, was also clear: ‘…COVID-19 also offers us an opportunity to accelerate the implementation of some long agreed-upon structural changes to enable reconstruction, development and growth. These opportunities call for more sacrifices and – if needs be – what Amilcar Cabral called “class suicide” wherein we must rally behind the common cause’.

Cabral was a revolutionary socialist and leader of Guinea-Bissau’s liberation movement, who was assassinated only months before achieving this goal. According to Tom Meisenhelder, writing in 1993, Cabral believed that ‘real social change involved winning indigenous control over the forces of production while mere political independence would result in the continuation of imperialism as neocolonialism’.

Socialist revolution, according to Cabral, requires that the petty-bourgeois leadership of the liberation movement, which otherwise would act in its own narrow class interest and perpetuate the monopoly of capitalism as a privileged class, must commit a kind of ‘class suicide’.

That is, the leadership class must surrender its class position, privilege and power, both political and economic, to the working masses. Only then can true socialist democracy, in which the means of production are owned by the proletariat and the state withers away, be achieved.

Of course, all of that is a pipe dream. It has never, ever happened. However, establishing a socialist or ‘state-capitalist’ state under an authoritarian government certainly has. In fact, that has historically been the outcome of every socialist revolution.

The careful massacre of the bourgeoisie

The ANC is committed to a second, socialist revolution, through the communist-penned National Democratic Revolution to which the party recommits itself at every Congress.

Whether the ambition of individual factions are to create a ‘developmental state’ in which market forces are harnessed in the interest of the collective, à la China, or an authoritarian state-capitalist society ripe for looting and corruption, à la Russia, an agrarian paradise à la Cambodia, or a socialist utopia à la Zimbabwe or Venezuela, the power of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, the middle and upper classes, must first be destroyed.

The Covid-19 lockdown is doing exactly that. As early as 9 April 2020, President Ramaphosa looked forward to ‘a process of fundamental reconstruction’. That, too, requires destruction.

All the signs of socialist zeal are there. The government has become autocratic, xenophobic, paranoid, and repressive. With apologies to Mr Robot, what we’re witnessing is the careful massacre of the bourgeoisie.

The end goal appears to be to destroy the vibrant market economy over which the state has no control, to make the poor masses dependent upon government for basics such as their income and their food, extend government ownership or control over increasing swathes of the economy, and harness big business in service of the state.

All the supposed mistakes, such as ordering companies to employ a majority of South Africans, denying food aid to poor white communities, imposing BBBEE requirements on business support packages, imposing onerous permit requirements on private charities offering food aid, and making regulations that seem specifically targeted at crushing the spirit of the middle class, play into this agenda.

Pusillanimous and obsequious

The people and small enterprise have hardly any voice in this matter. Their concerns and proposals are routinely ignored, under the guise of ‘consultation’.

Big business, which is least impacted by the lockdown and stands to profit even under a new socialist or state-capitalist regime, has been pusillanimous in resisting. Witness the obsequious gratitude and praise expressed by the clothing industry when Trade and Industry Minister Ebrahim Patel graciously permitted them to sell T-shirts, provided they were intended to be worn for warmth under other clothing.

The extended lockdown, during which all commerce will likewise be planned by capricious communist nincompoops, will not be lifted, as scientists, business lobbies, academics, and the general public have implored.

It will be continued, not despite the damage it will do to the economy, but because of it.

Viva la revolución!

https://dailyfriend.co.za/2020/05/19/the-careful-massacre-of-the-bourgeoisie/

[purpletigertaetae]

Welcome to the Magic Shop!

Pairing: Platonic!BTS x Reader

Word Count: 1916 

Genre: Slice of life

Rating: PG

Warnings: So much fluff, I mean TOOTH ROTTING fluff

Tagging: @taetaesbaebaepsae, @illneverrecover, @triheartedhero, @lvupmushroom, @thiccasswonhoruinedmylife, @thecozywhaleshark and the rest of Cirque or course!

Notes: So recently, I’ve had the worst week and then burst into tears yesterday when I listened to Magic Shop. Turns out, this week had been bad for almost all of my friends as well. This is how I imagine our boys would take care of us. It’s a little out of my comfort zone, I’m not the best at writing fluff (I’m not the best at writing in general), but here you go! Hope you enjoy!

          It had officially been the worst week of your life. It had seemed to go on and on, one disaster after the next, happening back to back. God definitely had it out for you this week. Monday had started off okay, until you left your apartment. What was supposed to have been a sunny day led to sudden downpours and you were wearing a white shirt. Upon reaching the office, the coffee machine had exploded and your previously white (see-through, at that point) shirt had turned a splotchy brown. Tuesday, your computer broke down and your 25-page proposal for your client had been, unbelievably and shockingly, erased. Wednesday, the printer malfunctioned and broke right as you were printing an important document to submit. Yesterday, your apartment had flooded, and you had to fork over a couple thousand dollars you didn’t have, to get it fixed. Today had been the worst day of all. A friend had created unnecessary and mind numbing drama, your boss had decided that your rewritten proposal wasn’t good enough and you had to listen to an hour lecture about how he expected more from you, and while at lunch, your high heel had broken, snapping clean and twisting your ankle in the process. At this point, you couldn’t wait until 7 to get home, eat some ice cream and cry in bed.

          At 4:45 you got a text message from Jungkook, Noona, are you coming over after work?

          Every Friday you went over to the boys’ tiny, four-bedroom, apartment. In this big city away from your hometown, they had become your family. Your best friends. Seeing them always brightened your day, but recently they had been very busy. They were gearing up to release their album and, in that hassle, it had been a full week since you had seen them last. Today, however, you didn’t want to see anyone. You figured you wouldn’t be good company, especially because a mental breakdown was imminent.

          No, Kookie, not today. I’m really tired. Maybe next week. Honestly, you were just going to go home, get into some sweats and cry a river.

--

           Jungkook knew you well. In the group of the seven and you, he was your best friend. So that text threw him off. He knew that something had gone wrong, and he also knew that you needed your friends. He came out of his room, his phone in his hand and walked into the living room, kitchen area. Namjoon, Yoongi and Hobi were lounging around on the sofa and Jin and Jimin were meddling in the kitchen, figuring out dinner. Namjoon noticed Jungkook walking in and asked, “Kook? What’s wrong? Why are you frowning?”

“Noona’s not coming over tonight.”

“YAHH, why?” Jin yelled from the kitchen, “What’s wrong? Is she busy?”

          At the yell, Hobi and Taehyung came out from their respective rooms into the living room.

“What’s going on? Why is Jin Hyung yelling?” Hobi asked, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

“Noona’s not coming over, Jungkook said.” Jimin replied, worry evident in his eyes.

“I think she’s had a bad day at work, or something’s gone wrong. We should go over and comfort her, Hyungs.”

“That’s a good idea Kook, but I have a better idea.” Hobi replied, “Let’s make her weekend magical. We’re taking her to the Magic Shop.”

Yoongi groaned, “Oh man, that’s going to take a lot of work.”

“Come on Hyung! For Y/N! Let’s do it!” Tae grinned and the boys began preparations.

--

           At 7:30 you finally reached home. You stood outside your apartment rummaging in your bag for keys, but you couldn’t find them. Brows furrowed, you cursed angrily, realizing your keys were sitting on your desk at work. This day literally could not get any worse.

           Taehyung from inside heard you curse and whispered, “Hyungs! She’s here!” But when the door didn’t open, he realized you couldn’t find your keys and yelled, “Y/N, come inside! The door is open.”

           You looked at your door in shock. Someone was inside? That voice sounded an awful lot like Taehyung. You cautiously opened the door and entered, your eyes widening and jaw dropping in the process.

           When you stepped inside, you were greeted with a transformed apartment. Your couch had been pushed back and there were blankets and pillows littered everywhere. A soft gauzy tent had been set up with pink and white cloth, creating a beautiful shimmering pillow fort. All along the entrance and on every available surface, candles were lit, casting soft light into the otherwise dark apartment. When you looked at the center of the apartment you saw seven smiling faces: one boxy smile, one eye crescent smile, one gummy smile, one bunny smile, one soft lipped smile, one cheek dimpled smile and one sunshine smile. Looking at them, and your apartment, you promptly burst into loud ugly sobbing tears.

           At your response, the boys all looked at each other and then at you in shock. You just kept crying into your hands. Jimin, Taehyung and Jungkook jumped up and scrambled towards you, trying to console you.

           “Shhh jagi, no crying.” Jimin wrapped his arms around you in a back hug while Tae extricated your hands from your face, wiping your face in the process. Jungkook stood behind his two Hyungs jumping on the balls of his feet, “Noona please don’t cry! You’ll ruin the surprise!” At their tender touches and caresses, you let out a mixed sob laugh and finally tried to quiet down.

           “Wh-wha-what is going on?”

           Jungkook and Tae took your hand while Jimin and Hobi got up and opened the entrance to the fort. “Welcome to the Magic Shop!” All the boys chorused.

           “We got to take Army to the Magic Shop, but jagiya you didn’t get to come. This is your personal Magic Shop! We’re here to take your worries away!” Namjoon gave you another dimpled smile and you gave him a teary smile in return.

          Jin got up and looked at the maknaes, “Boys, take her to her room and get her dressed in the softest clothes you can find, while I set up here.”

          You numbly followed as the maknaes took you to your room and picked out your favorite sweats and hoodie. “Noona, we’ll be right outside okay? You come out when you have changed and are ready!”

          Jimin and Tae followed Kook outside and waited patiently, while in the living room, Yoongi fiddled with the stereo system, testing to make sure his back track was working. In the kitchen, Jin pulled out the snacks and warm food he had made and carried it into the living room. Namjoon threw a couple of blankets into the dryer so they would be fluffy and warm and brought them back out into the living room. Once you came out of the room, the maknaes led you to the fort and placed you right in the middle. “Here’s your seat of honor, now relax, have some food, and enjoy the show okay?” Yoongi tucked a warm blanket around you and put a cup of piping hot chocolate into your hands. He got up and pressed play, while all the boys got into a half circle around you. Your eyes widened again as they began playing their entire setlist for you. Some songs were cut in half so the personal concert wouldn’t go on and on, but they also included some of your favorites like Paradise, Let Go, and Love Maze. Your eyes lit up in wonder and amazement as you watched your favorite boys perform your favorite songs for you. They danced around you, making you laugh so hard you couldn’t breathe and making you blush when they danced suggestively, winking and cracking up along with you.

          Every once in a while, they would sit down and say a couple of comments, just like they would in their concerts. Except these comments were different. Each comment was about you, your character, your personality. Namjoon commented on your cunning intelligence, and your ability to find the answer no matter how difficult the problem. Seokjin commented on your beautiful face, laughing, “It’s even prettier than mine jagiya!” Yoongi commented on your sharp wit, making him laugh when no one else could. Hobi praised your beautiful spirit making even him, Mr Sunshine, happy when he felt down. Jimin commented on your resilience, “Jagi, you can withstand anything the world throws at you! You’re so strong!” Tae complimented your ability to let loose and be childlike, willing to have fun even with little kids. “Plus, Yeontan loves you!” At each comment, your heart lifted, your eyes growing softer and softer until they were filling with unshed tears.

          Finally, Jungkook spoke. “Noona, you’re my best friend, my older sister. I was gifted with six older brothers, but not a sister until you came into our lives. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the day that you spilled that coffee over me was the best day of my life,”

          “YAH WHAT ABOUT WHEN YOU MET US?!” The boys’ yelled, making you giggle.

          “Okay, okay, one of the best days of my life. Noona, you’re the strength behind us, BTS and I hope that we can be the same strength for you! This is the last song of the night! Hit it Yoongi Hyung!”

          Yoongi hit play one last time and the opening tune for Magic Shop began playing. At the soothing melody, your heart began to sing, and your tears spilled over onto your cheeks. The comfort they sang about was one you had been searching for all week. These boys, these seven, loud boisterous boys had shown you comfort when you were fresh out. They had seen you at your worst and they still loved you, cared for you and showered you with affection. They were your universe, your galaxy, your entire life. As they sang, you sang along softly, swaying gently, tears still streaming down your cheeks.

“You gave me the best of me, so you'll give you the best of you… So show me…”

“I’ll show you”

“So show me”

“I’ll show you”

“So show me, I’ll show you, show you!”

          As the song came to a close, you let out another mixed sob laugh and all the boys turned towards you.

“Uhhh, hyungs? Why is she still crying?” Jimin whispered, “I thought she was feeling better?”

“Jiminie, these are happy tears. I love you all so much. So so so much. Thank you.” You choked out.

          At that, all the boys rushed to you and enveloped you in a huge, bone-crushing hug. Your cheeks were smothered in light kisses as they all, even Yoongi, kissed your tears away. “Jagi, we might not be with you all the time, but we’re always in here.” Yoongi touched your heart and looked you deep in the eyes. You nodded, wiping your tears away.

“Hey! No crying now! Time for the encore! Waiting for you Anpanmaaaaaaaan!” Hobi jumped up and took up the superman pose.

“Hyung that’s my line!” Tae pulled him down and got up.

“Hey, no! I want to open the song!” Jimin pouted. From your position in Yoongi’s arms you chuckled at their antics, the stress of the week gone. You relaxed deeper into Yoongi’s arms as Jungkook pulled a blanket around you, and Joon lightly kissed your cheek. Your eyes fluttered shut, finally, finding the rest you had craved.

The Magic Shop always came through in the end.

A/N: So, I wrote this yesterday, and I didn't edit it, so excuse any errors. I’m cringing so hard as I write this because I honestly don't think I did a very good job. But I’d love to hear your concerns, critiques or questions! Back and Forth part 3 will be up on Friday :)

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