#I also remember being like a weird sort of servant for this rich family on a steamboat

[mxtxfanatic]

Alright mxtx fandoms, let’s discuss class distinctions. I see a lot of people who discuss the theme of classism in mxtx works by collapsing all class groups into two categories: the ultra rich upper class who make all the rules and the poverty-stricken lower class who are oppressed by them. However, this is rarely the case in her books. The prime examples I can think of are in tgcf and mdzs.

In mdzs, a lot of people claim that Wei Wuxian and Jin Guangyao come from “similar backgrounds,” but this is most definitely not the case. Yes, Jin Guangyao went unclaimed by his father until later into his adulthood after his mother’s death, but Meng Yao did not grow up poor. Meng Shi was a famed courtesan with high-profile clients before she had her son, and having Meng Yao was a plan for her to be made into a mistress or second wife (which ultimately failed). Sisi was almost turned into a second wife, which is what caused her to be attacked and ruined her looks. Sex workers operated in a weird social space in ancient history where they existed as an industry, but class distinctions between different kinds of sex work still existed/exists and Meng Shi was definitely not on the low end of the scale. Even if Jin Guangyao had never been acknowledged by his father, he still found an honest job as a bookkeeper before meeting Lan Xichen. Meanwhile, Wei Wuxian was a street orphan with no family, money, status, who barely remembered his name, and definitely no benefit of an education due to how young he was orphaned, who was eventually taken in as the companion servant to a local lord-equivalent’s son. Neither of these characters started off as gentry, but they were not of the same class growing up.

In tgcf, Mu Qing is touted as a “poor”/working-class character by a large portion of the fandom, but… there’s no real evidence that he is? I mean, I have no doubt that, given the circumstances of his father’s death and his mother’s eventual disability, he was in poverty at some point, and this seems to be corroborated within the narrative by the fact that he is well-known and loved by the street orphans in the city. However, you cannot tell me that the personal servant to the crown (and only) prince to an entire kingdom is surviving off poverty wages. You’d be better-served making an argument to me about Anne Boleyn being an accurate historical representation of English serfs. Hong Hong’er, actual child living in poverty, is notably set apart from Mu Qing: from his fraying, patched clothes to his dirty hands to Mu Qing’s unwillingness to touch him… Mu Qing is set apart from the upper crust because 1) he is not of nobility but, more importantly, 2) his father was a criminal publicly executed for treason. And #2 is particularly damning for Mu Qing’s status amongst the nobility because Feng Xin, also not from a noble family, is (conditionally) accepted amongst the same elite snobs in a way Mu Qing is not (which makes sense since why would a noble like the son of a man who may have conspired against their rule?). Interesting to note, though, that the only time Mu Qing is unquestionably included in the array of the elite is when Hong Hong’er is being ostracized by the same group (minus Xie Lian). So while Hua Cheng and Mu Qing both had childhoods outside the nobility, Mu Qing was not anywhere near the level of poverty Hua Cheng had to live through.

I feel like svsss escapes this sort of broad-stroke application of class status to characters because most characters really do either fall into one of the two groups or we are not given background information on them at all. We know that Shen Jiu and Yue Qingyuan were child slaves, with the former being bought by a cruel master and the latter being able to escape and join a sect. We know that Luo Binghe, while not a child slave, was a child servant working with his adoptive mother under cruel masters who were directly the cause of his mother’s death. Slight distinction, but functionally not any different in their effects and outcomes. Shen Yuan is said to come from a wealthy family in his world, and Liu Qingge and Liu Mingyan do, as well. All the major demon characters are nobility. The only character we see who does not fit into this distinct divide is Shang Qinghua, but his background only becomes fleshed-out in the extras. Not to say that classism isn’t also a theme, but it’s function is used differently here than in the other two novels (especially since in svsss, we are working with parallels feeding into cycles of abuse and how to break said cycles rather than recreating them into infinity).

So with all this said, I think it may actually help discussions of the classism theme within these different mxtx fandoms to acknowledge and take into account the nuances within the class positions that these characters occupy. Why is it that the functionally middle-class characters, after gaining a crumb of acceptance from the elites, tend to turn against those lower on the rung? How do characters of the same background and class status interact with others of differing status, and what makes their reactions different from each other despite being raised under similar conditions? What is mxtx trying to say about class as a social or even moral divider by adding all these class nuances or (with svsss) lack thereof into her various narratives?

#mdzs #svsss #tgcf #human metas mxtx #just thinking out loud #i may have more to say after I officially finish tgcf again #but this is where I’m at

[dirt-grub]

Woke up thinking I was in another state taking care of a kid because I had such a vivid fucking dream about it WOW

#I remember everywhere I went and like the fake names I used #something happened and I had to run away and save this kid from a bad situation #and like I just remember driving my crap car (which I haven’t actually driven yet) and having to steal shit to survive #and I kept having to convince her when we get there it’s gonna be so fun! #it’ll be like a cute cabin in the woods with deer neighbors and little woodland animals! #meanwhile I’m trying to get this 20+ year old car across all of New England in the snow #it was wild #last I remember I was working for peanuts on an apple farm with a really strict overseer #she wanted us to count and keep track of every apple we picked to be sure we weren’t stealing #the name I was going by was Andrew Dixon and she always suspected me of stealing which sucked bc I was trying to feed the kid #I woke up this morning thinking it was 5am and I was gonna either haul off to work or keep moving north #wow. wow I just. holy shit #I also remember being like a weird sort of servant for this rich family on a steamboat #my name was Charlie then and I got very violently fired because they were being condescending to me and my kid #who I had to keep with me because there was no one to watch her otherwise #and they had two big dickhead sons that were around my age and they took me outside to the railing of the boat #and I still wouldn’t cooperate so they straight up shoved me off #just. goddamn okay #connor talks

[transgenderer]

I've never heard of the kite runner, can I get a rant (neat)

yes okay so my very vague recollection of the book is like... so this upper class kid in afghanistan is buddies with the son of his parents servants, theres like a yearly(?) kite competititon, which the main character is excited to participate in, it requires a multi-person team so he does it with the poor kid (iirc he's named hassan, i dont remember rich kids name), something goes wrong(? this part is fuzzy) and hassan ends up getting like, sexually assaulted by some random bullies (i think?), rich kid could have done something but didnt, from then on he doesnt talk to hassan and soon ends up having to flee iran b/c of the revolution, flash forward like 20 years, he has some nice job in the states, hes crushed by the guilt of what he did, he goes back to afghanistan (i think maybe for...a funeral?), sees hassan and his family, theyre doing well, but then hassan gets killed by like, an accident or terrorists or something, and rich kid gets convinced by some mentor figure from the past to adopt hassan's kid and take him to the US, like, and thats supposed to be closure or whatever.

but like...i cant express it right but the story is just so focused on the rich kids guilt over this terrible thing he didn but seems like, totally uninterested in hassan? yknow, the victim in the whole thing? it just like, the whole thing is so exhaustingly narcissistic, and the characters are really bland, and hassan is just this perfect angel and its just like. it sucks! like, its viewpoint is just this narrow little window buit it doesnt even DO anything with it, its just like, some tug-on-western-heartstrings bullshit. like, it feels like a story *about* guilt, both about being rich and about doing something shitty, but it doesnt really express any sort of interesting idea about guilt, its just like "stew in guilt for your entire adult life and maybe at the end youll be deus ex machinaed into a convenient way to make it up to a dead guy". argh

okay now i gonna go read the plot summary on wikipedia to see if theres stuff i forgot

oh right so amir (rich kid) also separately fucks over hassan by framing him for minor theft to get him to disappear because hes so guilty about the rape thing. and also hassan really is like a ridiculous perfect angel. also, theres a stupid ass plotline where it turns out hassan is actually amir's half brother, also the childhood bully who sexually assaulted hassan is now in the taliban and using hassan's son for sex. god what a stupid cliche book. god. also amir goes back to afghanistan when he's called back from a wise childhood father figure, rahim khan, to rescue hassan's son and bring him to america

anyway MY theory, to make the book un-terrible, is that rahim khan was lying. its established thats a thing rahim does, hell lie to make you a better person, so my argument was basically that rahim khan knew he could use this guys guilt to get him to save this kid in a terrible situation, so he was like "hey this kid is totally hassan's son, definitely the son of the guy you fucked over and also he's your half brother" as a ploy to convince him to risk his life for this kid. and then it becomes this weird story about like, the way people's neuroses can be turned to good if you manipulate the truth to fit the narrative, and like, basically coopting this rich idiot to save a child as a cool wise yoda guy.

[ninja-go-to-therapy]

Febuwhump 3: Imprisonment

I’ve been bugging my friends about how excited I am to post this one for so long awlkjfasdlkjf

Summary: Louie makes friends with the richest kid in Duckburg: Doofus Drake. But he quickly realizes his new friend isn’t entirely sane. Especially when he kidnaps him. The problem? His family doesn’t know where he is. He hates Only Child Day.

Trigger Warnings: kidnapping, forced feeding, beating, torture, light dehumanization, I’ve been told Doofus deserves his own warning, mentions of trauma, possessive whumper, imprisonment, strangling

3423 words

Louie had been a captive of Doofus Drake for no more than half an hour, and he was still failing to come up with a plan.

He had to get out of here.

He just... he had to think. Sure, he wasn’t smart, like Huey, or daring to a borderline crazy degree, like Dewey, but he was... uh... he was definitely... shit.

He was nothing without his brothers. 

He’d known this stupid only child thing was a bad idea, but Dewey had insisted. He, for all his siblings drove him crazy, actually liked being a triplet. Dewey, on the other hand… didn’t.

That kind of hurt.

But he didn’t have time for that, because what hurt worse than that was being stuck in some psycho’s house.

Some psycho who might hurt him if he didn’t get out fast. 

Louie should have ran the second Doofus had pulled a box out of his pants.

That had been so incredibly weird, enough to have him somewhat frantically spamming the down button on the elevator, but then he’d held out the box to him with nothing more than an easygoing “friend present!” and, well… the gold had enticed him instantly. He hated that it had been so easy to catch his attention.

Louie would admit it: he could be shallow sometimes. He liked money. But honestly, after growing up practically dirt-poor, he sort of thought he deserved to.

He knew how miserable a lack of money could be.

“Oh… for me?” Louie had asked.

“I like to play with my friends,” was all he’d gotten in return.

He’d slipped the bracelet easily over his wrist, admiring it. He’d almost forgotten that there had been a time when it wasn’t so tight. So disgusting.

“Alright, friend. Let’s play!”

Things had gone smoothly, for the most part, after that.

He’d been weirded out when Doofus aggressively sniffed his hair… multiple times… but he’d gotten over it so fast when he distracted him with pretty things.

Well, in this case, it was more the breaking of pretty things, but the point remained.

Surprisingly, tearing apart priceless items was actually a really good stress reliever, and Louie had quickly forgotten all his troubles.

Until he went to slash at a portrait of an old woman and was promptly tackled to the floor. 

And then, if he thought it couldn’t have gotten any more concerning, Doofus was throwing a full on fit, screaming and tearing shit up to an even greater degree than before.

Louie, so incredibly uncomfortable, had attempted to make small talk with Doofus’s “servants”, as he’d called them. 

“My butler’s a ghost,” Louie had said, “yup, he’s dead.”

“We’re dead inside. We’re Doofus’s parents,” the maid had revealed.

That… that was not good.

“The money and power changed him. Go. Before it’s too late!” His mother had urged.

Louie had backed towards the door, deciding that having rich friends really wasn’t worth… whatever this was. 

“What’s next friendy-friend?”

He’d stumbled slightly, but continued making his way to the door. It was just too much. It had been getting beyond weird and into straight-up freaky.

“Oh, well, you know, I just noticed it’s getting a little late. Uh, so I’m just gonna head home, and fondly remember all the good times we had. Cool? Cool, alright bye!”

He’d made to step out the door, heart pounding. He’d been so sure than in just a moment, this nightmare would be over.

But before he could even move, the bracelet had tightened until it dug into his wrist painfully, and then, if that hadn’t been bad enough, all at once it had gained this odd weight to it. He was on the floor in less than a second.

He’d gasped, tugging frantically, but the bracelet — cuff? — wouldn’t budge.

Drake had just smiled down at him innocently, but it had only made Louie feel sick to his stomach. “You are home, friend-present!”

He’d slammed the door before Louie could even begin to hope he could escape.

Only then was when he’d been starting to realize that this kid was fucking deranged. Like, absolutely out of his mind.

Why had Louie even wanted to be friends with him in the first place? He could have found other rich kids, ones who were just stuck-up and bitchy, instead of the absolute maniac who was standing above him! 

“Let me out!” Louie had demanded. “This isn’t funny!”

“Of course not,” he’d agreed, “it’s quite serious.”

“You do realize who my family is, right? In fact, you should probably just let me go right now, so you don’t have to deal with them.”

Doofus had laughed. “You are funny, friend-present.”

Louie had scowled at the nickname, if you could even call it that. “Why are you doing this?”

“It’s rare that I meet a friend as lovely as you,” he hummed. “I couldn’t just let you slip through my fingers, now could I?”

That had been… creepy. He probably should have expected, at that point, that it would only get worse. But the only thing he’d known right then was that he needed to get out of here. This kid was seriously disturbed.

“My family will come looking for me! And they won’t be happy!” He’d insisted. But that was also when he’d realized that there was one massive roadblock to the plan of waiting it out for his family to come. It was that stupid Only Child Day. Which meant that his brothers were still off doing their own thing, and likely wouldn’t even realize Louie had disappeared until late that night. Worse, he hadn’t opted to actually tell anyone where he was going.

They had no idea he was here. They didn’t even know who Doofus Drake was.

And now, he was stuck on some creepy platform thing. There were three of them. One for Doofus’s mom, one for his dad, and one for him.

Louie tried to ignore the fact that the third one was a clear indication that Doofus had been waiting for something like this. Louie had walked right into his open arms.

“The sooner you give up, the better,” Doofus’s dad was saying, “hope only makes it worse.” The poor guy looked… kind of traumatized. What had that man been through?

Louie was terrified to find out.

“No! If the three of us work together, we might just be able to get out of here!” he insisted, hope blossoming as a vague plan began to form in his mind. “Are you with me?”

The other two shared a look, before nodding their agreement.

And not a moment too soon, because just then, the door opened, and in came Doofus Drake. As he approached Louie, he could only look at him, attempting a poker face. It probably wasn’t working very well.

“The new one’s a traitor!” Doofus’s dad shouted within an instant. “But I stopped him out of loyalty. Because I love you, Doofus.” 

“You’re pathetic,” Doofus’s mom grumbled, glaring at him.

“No, he’s lying! I would never do that!” Louie cried, panic spiking through him. “I’m your friend!” he said with a forced smile. “...Present,” he tacked on, suppressing a disgusted shudder to the best of his ability. “Oh, gross…”

“I don’t think I like you anymore, new friend,” Doofus said, glaring at him. Before Louie could get his hopes up that maybe that meant that he was going to be let go, Doofus reached into a plastic bag he’d dragged in with him when he’d entered the room. “Maybe you need a lesson in friendship.”

“Wait,” Louie said as Doofus pulled out an umbrella, “What’s that for?”

Doofus didn’t answer him, reaching into the bag again and pulling out a smaller bag of walnuts. Louie had never thought such an action could be threatening, but oh boy… it sure was now.

“What is he gonna do with the umbrella and walnuts?” he asked desperately, frantically pushing himself as far back on his platform as the bracelet would allow.

Doofus approached him slowly and deliberately, eyes narrowed.

Louie couldn’t get any further away than he already was. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to prepare himself for whatever was about to come.

But then nothing came.

The silence was so loud. He could hear four sets of breathing, and that was it. Breathe in, two, three, him. Breathe out, two, three, him. Hesitantly, he peaked his eyes open.

Doofus stood directly in front of him, and, to Louie’s surprise, he’d set the umbrella to the side. It had seemed important just a moment ago, why had it been discarded already? Something wasn’t right about that.

“Here,” he said, holding out his hand. Louie glanced at it, confused. He was holding a handful of the walnuts.

He glanced at Doofus’s parents. “What exactly is going on right now?”

“Eyes on me!” Doofus yelled, his tone reminding Louie of earlier, when he’d been screaming about his dead grandma. Louie complied in an instant, terrified. Doofus took a breath, a calm smile slipping back onto his face. “That’s better.”

Louie just laughed nervously.

“Now,” he said, offering a handful of the walnuts in Louie’s direction again. “Eat them.”

“I — what?” Louie asked, another uncomfortable laugh spilling out. “You realize we can’t eat nuts, right?”

“Eat. Them.”

“I literally can’t, those things mess you up—”

“You’re going to eat them, Llewellyn,” Doofus said, threateningly. “I suggest you do it now.” 

As far as being taught a lesson went, this seemed too… tame. Louie didn’t understand it. Doofus was totally unhinged, and while Louie absolutely did not want to eat something that his body couldn’t handle, it just felt like a punishment that was far too sane.

Louie had always prided himself on being able to read people pretty well, but right now, he was just confused.

Still, despite the lacking severity of the threat, he was still afraid. He’d be concerned for anyone who wasn’t afraid of some kid who’d kidnapped them, to be perfectly honest.

When Louie didn’t respond, Doofus glared at him. “Alright,” he said, dropping the nuts back into the bag and grabbing for the umbrella again. “If that’s how you want to be.”

“I don’t — I mean — we can talk this out, can’t we?” Louie said, panic gripping his heart even harder as he realized that he had no idea how to manipulate him. He couldn’t talk his way out of this one, could he?

The metal (and sharp) tip of the umbrella came up harshly against his chin, jerking his entire head up along with it and effectively cutting off whatever else Louie could have possibly tried to say. The point dug slightly into his neck in a painful manner, but that was the least of his problems, right now.

“You’re a real bratty child,” Doofus said, considering him for another moment. Too fast for Louie to keep up, the umbrella had been yanked away from him, and then slammed against his stomach.

He doubled over with a pained shout, wheezing as breath left his body.

The other end of the umbrella — the curved handle bit, this time — was practically shoved into his mouth, prying his beak open.

One of the walnuts was pushed into his mouth, and Louie immediately gagged. He couldn’t do anything to get away, so he could only do his best to swallow it, trying not to choke.

Doofus smiled that stupid little bastard smile.

That look was probably going to be burned into Louie’s nightmares when he got out of here.

Another of the stupid nuts was shoved into his mouth. He gagged again, he swallowed again. His mouth was already getting uncomfortably dry.

If ever he’d had the urge to eat a nut (he hadn’t, because he didn’t have a death wish), this experience alone would have been enough to get him to swear them off forever. He didn’t even like the flavor, not that he had much time to give thought to that.

Doofus didn’t stop until the bag was empty, and by that point, Louie was beginning to feel cramps churning in his stomach. He knew it would only get worse from here.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Doofus asked as he finally took back the umbrella. Louie just worked his jaw, trying to lessen the stiffness in it. He didn’t have it in him to reply.

His lack of response only seemed to make Doofus angry again, and before he knew it, the umbrella was bashed against him.

Louie yelped at the pain it brought, using his one free arm in an attempt to block the next blow. It didn’t do much. 

“You will answer me when spoken to!” Doofus shrieked, practically stabbing him with the force of the next hit.

“I’m sorry!” Louie cried. “Please stop!”

Doofus did not, in fact, stop. He just kept hitting him mercilessly. 

Louie had been given his fair share of injuries in the months he’d spent adventuring, but regardless, this hurt something awful. He supposed being assaulted with an umbrella would do that to a guy.

But no matter what he was saying, Doofus wouldn’t cease. He just kept attacking him.

At some point, Louie remembered that Doofus’s parents were there. “Help,” he begged, his voice cracking slightly.

“Doofus, stop,” his mom demanded. “This has gone far enough!”

“Are you questioning me?” Doofus shouted, finally stopping with the umbrella so he could storm over to his mother. “How dare you!”

He screamed, throwing down the umbrella so hard it could have broken. Louie flinched away from him, though the bracelet wouldn’t let him get far.

“That’s it. That’s it!” Doofus said, growling. He stomped towards the door, leaving without another word.

“Why would you do that?” Mr. Drake asked nervously, glancing towards the door.

“I’m not just going to sit by and watch him torture an innocent young boy!” Mrs. Drake snapped. “Are you alright, dear?”

“I’m… fine,” Louie said, smiling semi-convincingly. They weren’t the worst injuries he’d ever received. He’d be fine. Probably. Though it certainly hadn’t helped the nausea he was already feeling from the walnuts. He was worried he’d end up vomiting them up pretty soon…

Something in his pocket buzzed.

Something in his… he had his phone. He could call for help! He could get out of here!

Frantically, he pulled his phone from the pocket of his suit, fumbling with it slightly.

“What are you doing?” Mr. Drake cried.

“I’m calling for help!” Louie said, cursing to himself as the screen remained unresponsive for a moment. It had a few cracks on it from his beating. “Come on, you stupid piece of junk! Work with me!” he begged.

He didn’t have long until Doofus returned, that much was clear. He had to be fast.

The phone nearly fell from his grasp multiple times with how bad he was shaking, but he managed to hold onto it, pulling up his contacts app. Before he could dial anyone, he could hear approaching footsteps.

Louie stuffed the phone back in his pocket, doing his best to look unsuspicious. 

“I’m back!” Doofus declared, already in a significantly better mood. He met Louie’s eyes, then frowned. He took a few steps closer, refusing to break eye contact.

Louie held his breath, doing his best to win the staring contest. He didn’t like the look he was being given.

In the corner of his eye, Louie could see Mr. Drake fidgeting anxiously. Oh god, if he ratted him out again, he didn’t know what Doofus would do.

“Servant!” Doofus snapped. “Is there anything I should know?”

Louie met the man’s eyes, pleading with him silently. Surely he wouldn’t do it. Surely he would see reason.

“The new one has a phone!” he cried. “He tried to contact someone.”

Doofus glared at Louie, storming forward and pulling the phone directly from his pocket. Louie cried out in panic, reaching for it against his better judgement.

“I was willing to forgive you for your earlier behavior,” Doofus said, “but this? This is unacceptable.” he pocketed Louie’s phone, then pulled out another golden bracelet.

“What’s that for?” Louie asked, eyeing it nervously. “I — uh — I already have one of those!”

Doofus laughed, standing face to face with his captive. “Not quite, my friend present.” Before Louie could do anything to stop him, he’d clasped the thing around his neck.

For a moment, he didn’t even process it. He just stared at his captor in confusion, then slowly felt the bracelet around his neck with his free hand.

“What?” he squeaked.

Doofus clicked something on the remote, and suddenly Louie — could move his arm? What the hell?

Before he could get any ideas about running away, however, Doofus grabbed him roughly and dragged him away from the front door and further back into the house. They took several twists and turns, Louie struggling the whole way, before eventually, he was pulled into a room just as fancy as the other rooms here. The main difference was that, in the very middle of the room, as if it was just another piece of furniture, was a large crystal cage.

“Wait, wait wait, you can’t just—”

His last ditch effort wasn’t worth anything, and he was thrown into the cage anyway.

Immediately, he was prying at the bars, but they wouldn’t give. There was enough spacing that he could get his arm through, but he was nowhere near being able to squeeze between them. On the “bright” side, the cage itself wasn’t really cramped, per se. He could sit up fully, though he wouldn’t be able to stand. The floor of it was big enough that he could sprawl out, at least.

“You’ll be staying in here until you learn to respect me,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some servants to tend to.”

He turned on his heel, leaving Louie all alone in the cage.

He put all of his strength into fighting against the bars, but for the life of him, they wouldn’t fucking budge. Shit.

When that didn’t work, he began to claw at his neck desperately in a poor attempt to get the newer band off. It was bad enough when it was just a bracelet, but now, with another piece of jewelry (this one seemingly functioning a little too much like a dog collar), it was only getting worse. And if the bracelet could prevent him from getting anywhere, who knew what this did?

He wasn’t making any progress.

“I hate only child day,” he declared to himself, trying to distract himself from his impending doom. “I’m never letting them do this again.” Assuming he had the chance to be angry with his brothers, that is.

No, no, he had to think positively. He was related to Scrooge McDuck! Not to mention his Uncle Donald. They wouldn’t let him rot here.

He hoped.

Some time later, Doofus returned.

Louie decided to try his luck one last time. “Please,” he said, “let me go. I just want to go home!”

“Oh, Llewellyn,” Doofus laughed, grabbing him by the tie and jerking him forward, his body slamming against the bars of the cage. He grinned darkly, taking another handful of the fabric in his fist until Louie couldn’t breathe.

He barely managed to get out a few choked sounds, unable to say anything coherent. 

“You need to learn your place,” he said, in the type of condescending way you’d speak to a pet that tried to bite you.

Louie decided he didn’t like that analogy. “Please,” he choked, his voice so raspy it could barely be understood.

“I do like when you beg me, friend-present.”

If there had been any oxygen actually going to his brain, Louie would have been disgusted. But he couldn’t breathe, and his vision was going fuzzy, and he didn’t have the energy to think about how psychotic this kid was.

He needed to breathe.

With the hand that didn’t have a hellish bracelet stuck around it, he weakly reached up, trying to push Doofus away. It only served to choke him further.

“I don’t quite think you understand,” Doofus said, jerking him forward again, the little bit of slack he’d managed to acquire now only working against him. “I own you. I wanted you the moment I saw you, and as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now — I always get what I want.”

And with those words, Louie had a horrible feeling that his fate was sealed.

#febuwhump #febuwhump2021 #febuwhumpday3 #tw kidnapping #tw forced feeding #tw beating #tw torture #tw dehumanization #tw trauma mention #tw possessive behavior #tw strangling #tw possessive whumper #kidnapping #strangling #forced feeding #beating #torture #dehumanization #trauma mention #possessive behavior #possessive whumper #doofus drake #imprisonment #whump #tw imprisonment #kat writes #ducktales #ducktales 2017 #decadent #the family tree

[dasphinxone]

I hope I'm not too late and asks are still open. But I wondered if you had any more thoughts/ideas/scenes/etc for the Mummy au? I totally love your contribution of Booker and Nicky as brothers and what that dynamic would look like. BAMF!Nile and Librarian!Booker give me life. Thanks for all your wonderful au ideas and fic!

Oh man, you are NEVER too late for Asks and they are currently open! In the meantime, allow me to ramble about my PURE AND UTTER LOVE FOR THE FRASER/WEISZ VERSIONS OF “THE MUMMY.” 

You see, I had a mad HUGE crush on Brendan Fraser when the first one came out. Except it turned out that the entire damn cast was so beautiful (OMG, the Oded Fehr hotness. So glad they brought him back for the sequel). They all have wonderful chemistry too, and rather similar to the group dynamics of The Old Guard. 

On top of that, I have always maintained that it’s Evie who is the real protagonist of the movie. Everyone else stays pretty much the same to their characters as when we’re introduced to them. Meanwhile, it’s Evie who goes from librarian to adventuress. She is thrown into all sorts of situations where she can prove to the world that librarians are just as damn smart and necessary as the brawns of Rick, the cunning of her brother Johnathan and the honorable warrior of Ardeth Bay.

It’s also Evie who comes out of the other end of the wild-ass adventure a changed person. It’s even more obvious in the sequel, where she takes a level in badassery. The best part about that? Rick adores her for it and they are clearly in a happy marriage versus the tired trope of married couples being all bitter. 

(I pretend the third movie NEVER HAPPENED, you hear me?!)

ANYWAYS, As Evie and Jonathan grew up rich (the museum curator clearly says to Evie that the only reason he puts up with her is that her parents were the largest donors to the museum), I figure Booker can grow up pretty wealthy too.

Sébastien le Livre is an only child who spends his life around his Action and Adventure!French Parents who have moved to Egypt to be archeologists. While they are world famous archeologists? They’re not the best parents. For they drag Sébastien along on their archeological excursions because they don’t know any better. So Sébastien spends all of his childhood time around his parents and their eccentric adult friends. Yes, they should have sent Sébastien to boarding school, like other rich folks of their time. But what kind of boring-ass education is that as compared to going out into the real world for field study?  

Sébastien’s field experience makes him brilliant child. Yet it also turns him into a socially awkward little boy. He’s rarely around other kids or attending school since he out on digs with his parents. On top of that, when his parents can’t bring him on digs, they leave him home in their great big house with his nanny, tutor and the servants for company. Since Sébastien doesn’t have kid friends, he’s always taking in stray animals, rescuing birds that fell out of their nests and doing precious sorts of things like that. He also LOVES reading. He’s fluent in French, English, Latin, Greek  and conversational Arabic. Oh, and he can also read hieroglyphs with ease.

Again, Sébastien is a weird kid.

When Sébastien is around say, nine or so, he catches seven year-old orphan Nicky in the parlor of his and his parent’s grand house breaking in and trying to steal things. His parents are out of town on yet another dig, so Sébastien’s randomly wandering around the house by himself. Instead of panicking, Sébastien just invites spooked Nicky to kitchen for tea and sandwiches out of the sheer delight of having another child to talk to. Thoroughly used to Sébastien and his soft spot for strays, the kitchen staff sits the two boys in the corner and lets Nicky wolf down whatever he wants. Nicky eventually leaves after Sébastien swears he won’t tell his parents about the stealing. But only if Nicky promises to come back tomorrow to hang out with Booker.

Nicky actually shows up the next day. Mostly due to the promise of food. While he thinks Sébastien is clearly odd, he also realizes he’s just as lonely as he is (after all, street kid orphan Nicky hasn’t survived this long on his own without being able to see people for what they truly are). But whereas Nicky is aggressive with acting out due to his abandonment issues, Sébastien tends to implode on himself due to his own parental abandonment issues. Basically, they balance each other out. 

Three weeks later, Sébastien’s parents come back from their latest dig down in Alexandria. They find Sébastien playing with this street kid out on the extensive grounds of their estate. Shocked at seeing their usually quiet and withdrawn son having a blast with this Italian ragamuffin of a child, due to being the impulsive types, Booker’s parents decide to adopt Nicky. So Sébastien gains a new brother. No matter that they’re not related by blood, Nicky is his brother.

Since Sébastien loves to read, he enjoys reading out loud to Nicky (who is nearly illiterate since he’s an orphan who never had formal education before being adopted). While Sébastien and Nicky have their own rooms at their parents’ estate, Nicky will often sneak into Sébastien’s room at night so that his older brother can read to him. Their nanny usually finds the two boys asleep together with a book sitting between them. Sébastien also helps Nicky learn to read far better than their tutor does. Mostly because Sébastien is so patient with his new little brother.

It’s because of this that Nicky comes up with the affectionate nickname of “Booker” for his new big brother.

Booker graduates from boarding school and attends The Sorbonne back in Paris. While he misses Nicky something fierce, everything will work itself out because he’ll be graduating from The Sorbonne at the same time Nicky will be finishing boarding school. That way, they both be archeologists together and follow in their parents’ footsteps. Booker plans to focus on the research side of things from either libraries or teaching. Nicky plans to actually go on digs and bring back things for Booker to study and catalogue.

Booker does eventually get sent off to British style boarding school in Cairo, as is expected of a wealthy child of his class. A couple of years later, Nicky is sent off to the same boarding school.

Nicky's always getting into fights. Mostly due to the other kids bullying him for his accent, heritage and defending Booker against bullies too. The only reason Nicky doesn’t’ get kicked out is because Booker is able to charm the teachers into looking the other way (remember, he was around mostly adults before he started attending school) when it comes to punishing Nicky. Also, their parents donate a ton of money to the school.

Except the Great War breaks out the same year Nicky graduates from boarding school. He signs up with his school chums for “a great adventure,” like all of the other young men of means did in the opening days of the war. 

However, Booker refuses to come along. He’s studied history all of his life and intellectually knows how terrible war can be. As far as he’s concerned, the war is stupid. People are going to get themselves killed over all of these royal families of Europe who refuse to apologize to each other over the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. He’s certainly not throwing his life away to get shot at, thank you very much. Besides, he didn’t grow up with much in the way of friends or camaraderie among the other boys while he was away at school. So he doesn’t feel like he’s going to miss out on anything. 

Nicky thinks Booker is a coward who has no appreciation for a right proper great adventure. Booker thinks Nicky is a headstrong fool who doesn’t value the opportunities their parents have given them. They part ways on bad terms. 

Booker eventually relents and writes to Nicky whenever he can. However, he never hears from his little brother. The only way he knows Nicky is alive is through their parents, who Nicky constantly writes to in Cairo. At the same time, Booker doesn’t  return to Cairo because it would remind him too much of how much he misses his brother. So he throws himself into his work at the Egyptian Antiquities department of the Louvre. He also tries to ignore the raging war moving closer and closer to Paris.

Wars come and go, antiquities do not.

Except Nicky suddenly goes missing during the Battle of Verdun.

Still in Paris, Booker is dealing with his side of suffering through the war as a civilian. He suddenly gets frantic word from his parents (who still live in Cairo) that Nicky is MIA. The panic immediately starts to set in. He regrets that he didn’t do more to communicate with his little brother while he was away at war. To assuage his guilt, he goes down to the war office every single day to find out where the hell Nicky is.

After a few frantic weeks, Nicky turns up alive but injured. As a result, he’s evacuated to a Parisian hospital. Booker takes a sabbatical at the Louvre to attend to his beloved brother there. Nicky almost dies of an infection but pulls through. Too weak to go back to fighting, Nicky is honorably discharged and goes to live with Booker to convalesce.

Nicky’s not the same vivacious, passionate young man he was before the war. He’s the only one of a handful of his unit to survive both death and not losing a limb or having parts of his face blown off. So there’s the survivor’s guilt. He constantly has nightmares about his time on the front and in No Man’s Land where he wakes up screaming. Bouts of rage and grief hit him without warning.

In order to deal with the crushing swirl of ugliness that’s festering within him, Nicky starts spiraling. He starts heavily drinking. He skips meals. He starts hitting up gambling dens and whorehouses that can make your every wish come true in Paris.

Booker has no idea how to cope with it all. So he once again throws himself into his work. He feels disgusted with himself for silently judging his brother’s actions all while he absolutely has no clue how to deal with his own guilt of not being by Nicky’s side during the war. Perhaps it would have been better to have died together than exist in the sea of darkness they are trapped within now.

Within two years, the war is over. Everyone celebrates only to see the rise of the Spanish Flu Pandemic. It ends up killing Booker and Nicky’s parents, who die within days of each other back in Cairo. 

Now, Booker and Nicky are alone in the world and with only each other to depend on. Wanting to escape all the pain they’ve seen in Paris, they head back to Cairo to put their parents’ estate in order. Since their parents split their inheritance evenly between them, they’ve inherited a hell of a lot of money. At the same time, money doesn’t fix their psychological problems.

Yet while they both have a difficult time dealing with their parents’ death and each other’s war trauma? It turns over a new milestone for them. For it allows Booker and Nicky to make their peace with each other since they're the only ones left of their family. They vow that they’ll try to go back to their dream of working together as an archeologist team.

Unfortunately, it never happens. Nicky is still dealing with the PTSD and acting out. Booker tries to manage his  brother’s psychological issues and balance his work at the Cairo Museum. Problem is, it’s a job he knows he only managed to secure out of pity since their parents were the largest donors to the museum. The nepotism stings and makes Booker feel inadequate. All despite that he's a damn good researcher and brilliant at languages and hieroglyphics.

Booker once again throws himself into his work at the museum. He has no social life, rarely goes out for fun and no relationship lasts for more than a few months at a time. For he’s grieving his parents and the shell of a man Nicky has become. Meanwhile, Nicky drinks, gambles and whores his way through Egypt in between digs with folks no better than grave robbers. But he always comes back home to stay with Booker in the nice house they own together.

Booker is always there for Nicky and vice versa. No matter how hard it gets for both of them to deal with the losses in their lives, they are and will always be brothers to the end.

And then one day, Nicky finds Booker in the Cairo museum after he’s been rejected by the Benbridge Scholars yet again. All after Booker’s ruined the library and knocked over all the bookshelves after he nearly killed himself trying to get off that damn ladder while filing away books.

Nicky reveals to Booker an odd little box that he found on a dig down in Thebes. Turns out the box contains a map to the lost city of Hamunaptra…

#Book of nile #my asks #booker le livre #nicolo of genoa #the mummy au #booker x nile #the great war #sadness #because even in AUs we gotta have that angst #fanfic #fanfiction #the old guard #why are my answers to my asks so damn long tho?

[kdtheghostwriter]

SNK 122 - Avalanche

Who would have thought when it happened that Eren kissing Historia’s hand would be THE moment of Shingeki no Kyojin. Imagine you’re picking up this lovely series for the first time. You see a fresh take on the survival-horror genre and think, “I could get into this.” A couple volumes in, you discover the zombie horde tale was a clever cover for a fleshy mecha gimmick. “Weird,” you think, “but ok.” Now it’s ten years and 130+ chapters later. We’re all reading a retelling of the Norse Myth of Creation wrapped in a cozy WWII disguise.

What do any of these words mean? Join me under the cut. It’s time for lore.

Thoughts on the chapter first. We finally get to see the life and times of Founder Ymir. Not surprisingly, she appears to be of vague Northern European origin in what appears to be the Middle Ages. The ancient Eldians were Vikings basically, but back then they weren’t even Eldian. They were human just like everyone else…until they weren’t.

Founder Ymir’s story eerily mirrors that of 104th Ymir. As a small child, she was nothing more than a scapegoat. Born a servant girl, she empathized with the group of pigs that had been captured. She released them, no doubt ruining someone’s feast in the process. A soldier asks who the offending party is and we see a great panel of Ymir surrounded by pointing fingers John Wick style.

Much like Mr. Wick, Ymir goes on the run only in a much different context. John Wick, in his universe, is the most prolific assassin alive. He’s on the run, but he’s not defenseless. Ymir is a child and is defenseless. The men (and I do emphasize the grown men) that chase after her never perceive her as a threat. They’re having a sporting time terrifying and slowly killing this innocent child. Running out of energy and time, Ymir happens across a humongous tree and decides an odd hiding spot is better than none at all. Entering the base of the tree, she falls down into an unseen hole – like Alice into the looking glass – and just as she’s about to lose consciousness, she comes in contact with what can only be described as…this.

A parasite? An alien lifeform? An ancient Eldridge manifestation? Maybe. Just like another old Myth there isn’t really a clear answer nor will there be. ‘Tis the Source of all Organic Matter and it was always there it was, lad.

We get several lessons here about how history can warp our perceptions of the individual players in both a positive and negative sense. Ymir never made a deal with the Devil to get her overwhelming power. She literally fell backwards into a divot and came out big as a mountain. On the other hand, the Founding Titan was not this ethereal being of divine beauty. The First Titan was grotesque to look at. It had no true face and its ribs were exposed, which I guess makes sense for a creature that large. Founder Ymir was a victim of circumstance and oppression. She has the power of nature and God at her fingertips but has only known servitude. That’s why there is no objection when she hears the following.

Not only is there CLEARLY no consent here, but I’m fairly sure Ymir is barely a teenager here so – Double Dose of Yikes!

Fittingly (or tragically, who can tell at this point), Ymir has three daughters: Maria, Rose and Sina. She raises her children while helping her nation conquer the lands around them with her unmatched power. However, thirteen years after her eldest child is born, a rogue soldier makes an attempt on the king’s life and Ymir leaps in front of the spear; one final act of indentured service.

Sort of. She is told correctly that she isn’t in danger. No doubt she has come back from far worse injuries than a spear to the collar. King Fritz tells her to get up and continue being a slave and Ymir says fuck you with her whole chest and gives up the ghost right there.

This shocking development leads to two things. First, we see the most graphic panel in a series full of gore and body horror as the children of Ymir are forced by Dear Old Dad to cannibalize their mother’s still-cooling corpse in order to obtain her power. Then, we see Ymir wake up in what we now know as the Paths dimension. Here she shall stay until a certain someone is able to receive and respond to her call for help.

That’s all for the backstory, now what about the source? It’s been documented well that Isayama loves myth and folklore especially of the Norse variety. Near the beginning of #122 we see Ymir fall into a tree that Momtaku and her co-host Luna succinctly describe as “both phallic and vulvic at the same time.” This seems like a clear reference to Yggdrasil, The World Tree. Yggdrasil is an interdimensional bridge with each branch connecting to a different realm, not unlike the branches we see in the PATHS dimension. Then we have the spine-like creature that latches on to Ymir like Symbiote under the tree. See if this looks familiar.

Nidhogg is a serpent that is known for eating away at the roots of the World Tree. It also has a famous rivalry with an unnamed eagle that sits atop Yggdrasil. A constant struggle between freedom and entrapment which is of course a central theme to this story. I’ve seen meta theorize that if the briny parasite represents the serpent of the Tree, that Eren Jaeger would represent the eagle the overlooks it and seeing how he’s spent most of this tale with wings on his back, that makes about as much sense as anything else.

It’s all a lead-up to Ragnarok: the End of the World.

Yup, that looks like the end to me.

When the First King lined up those Titans to form those walls, he couldn’t have known someone would find the one loophole to circumvent his failsafe. The reason the Coordinate Powers only fully activate for those of Royal Blood. It isn’t because of their genes alone. Ymir is a slave to the Royal Family, even centuries after her physical death. It isn’t until someone gives her a choice that she even thinks to take a different course of action.

What a charmer. This panel and the one that follows are both very important to me. Zeke, in his frenzy is a spitting image of King Fritz. Yes, the are directly related but also, I think there is something to be said of him taking on the form of Ymir’s greatest oppressor. After she hears Eren’s pitch to lend him her world-shattering power we see her eyes, full of tears, for the first time. Not an accident. It’s the first time in 2,000 years anyone has treated her like a person.

This is not an official theory or anything but it’s how I interpret this. The title of this chapter ‘From You, 2,000 Years Ago’ is of great significance outside of how it mirrors the title of the very first chapter. Ymir was sending a message and when we remember the Attack Titan’s special trait of moving (and looking) forward it’s clear who the messenger was. The question then becomes, was Eren the only one who was able to answer the call? Yes, just not for the reasons you would think.

 Technically, any of the Attack Titans (or any of them, I guess) could have unlocked the PATHS with enough work. The problem is, the only knowledge of Ymir’s story and the history of the Eldian people was with the Coordinate which, historically, was possessed by the Royal Line. It wasn’t until that fateful night when Grisha stole the Coordinate away that a very specific set of conditions could be met.

Once a single person of their own free will got even a glimpse of the tortured history and fate of Founder Ymir it was enough to set an incredibly complex series of events into motion. This is why the Attack Titan, even during the Great Titan War, can never listen to reason. They know what the end game is, thanks to Eren sending them snaps of that scenery.

Eren was special after all. Just not in the way we first thought. Funny that.

  Stray Thoughts

- Keep in mind that the final panel of Eren’s new Titan exploding out of his severed head happens the instant it lands in Zeke’s hand. How must Gabi be feeling right now? You think you’ve slain the Devil of the Earth and all you’ve done instead is give him immense power and an army of unstoppable giants. Someone get the Bart cake gif in the replys.

- The most impressive part of seeing Ymir’s backstory is that it was largely done with no dialogue. Almost felt like we were reading a scroll or ancient tome. Credit to the author for crafting such a deep, rich world to explore. Somehow, Shingeki no Kyojin isn’t the story he’s always wanted to tell but it will rightfully be the one he is best known for.

- Once again Zeke blows a 3-1 lead by being an entitled shithead. He and the rest of his family knew the story of Ymir and the fate she suffered and still saw fit to not only keep her imprisoned but to use her as a tool to subjugate their own people. No tears from me, muchacho.

#snk meta #shingeki no spoilers #snk 122 #eren jaeger #zeke jaeger #founder ymir #king fritz #congrats btw to the king #you have usurped capt gross for biggest heel in snk

[spectrvls]

— ✧ KEHLANI PARRISH ??  no, that’s just REEVA MZUZI SUMMERS !!  she’s the TWENTY FOUR year old adoptive daughter of SCOTT SUMMERS / biological daughter of T’CHALLA, and is, in addition to being an ASTRONOMY MAJOR & TA at paragon academy, a SHOP ASSISTANT at a local mystic store. i hear she’s RESILIENT & EMPATHETIC, but tends to be OBSTINATE & CHAOTIC. her file says that her powers are MYSTICISM & EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION. you can check out her stats HERE & her pinterest board HERE.

       she’s in to SUPERSTITIONS,                    black cats & voodoo dolls.

SECTION ONE OF THREE: BULLET POINT HISTORY trigger warning for talk of cults, death and mass suicide

she came into this world on the 22nd of december, 1994. the winter solstice. her lungs fillled with air for the very first time as the sun set upon eliye springs, kenya, and as she was laid upon her mothers chest, the group around mother and child chanted that MAUTI ( swahili ; death. fate. ) had arrived.

her mother was a charity worker. her father was a king. she was the result of sun meeting moon, gold meeting cubic zirconia, riches meet ruin. she was an accident. she was SPECIAL. the leaders of the “kanisa” prophesied the coming of a child born from two different worlds that would herald in the end of times. a child that was a reckoning, an end, the final death between two chubby fists. and they found their holy figure in her. 

her mother - she thinks of her this way, always ; her name is as lost to her as the lines upon her face, the only lasting memory being the way she held her a little too tightly, during prayer. she doesn’t know that once, she was soft - her mother was YOUNG. naive. alone. in the cult ( they don’t like this word ) kanisa, she saw a way out of a dire situation. when they approached her, too in the know for her to be comfortable, too in the know for her to think she had a choice, they promised everything that didn’t have for the life growing inside her womb. the master bedroom, at the commune. first pick of all the food, at meal times. pride of place, during prayer. a small bit of new world religion for a roof above her head and food to fill her stomach - she didn’t know the price she would really be paying until it was too late. 

they say that if you drop a frog into boiling water, it’ll jump right out immediately because it knows what you’re trying to do. but if you place the frog into colder waters, and gradually heat the pot - it won’t suspect a thing, and by the time it does, it’ll be too late. her mother was innocent once, a fact that the baby will never know. she didn’t believe in what they were selling - she was just trying to do what was right, trying to make something for her baby to be born into. nine months with the kanisa changed everything. nine months indoctrinated her. by the time her daughter wailed her way into this world, it was too late. 

she’s named mauti because bringing DEATH is her fate. her mother, once, wanted to name her asha. with group thinking, she never gets the chance. 

she, of course, doesn’t remember these early years herself. she gets flashes, sometimes, but she doesn’t feel a connect to them. it was a different time. a different life. the cult ( she likes this word, it grounds her past in a reality that she could never find, without ) believed in a lot of things. mauti was the bringer of death. if they served well, in life, then they would be the members of her spectral court, in the next. it was their responsibility to tend to her and nurture her and push her to her powers. the things they did to her as a newborn in order to make her mutations present were vile and cruel and the only thing that, now, she flinches when she recalls. but they WORKED, and with them a reality...- in their minds, it made the prophecy true. she was death. 

they did other things, too. horrible things, all in the name that they gave her. mutants that scouts found in nearby towns and villages were brought back to the commune. on the full moon, they were sacrificed. mauti would absorb their powers, at least, that’s what they believed, and their spirits would be bound to her, more unwilling servants, for the afterlife. it was the disappearance of mutants, too many to be anything but suspect, that led to the x-men traveling to eliye when she was just two years old.

they found the commune. the chaos of their arrival led the leaders to believe that the end was upon him far sooner, than expected. they gave the order for the group to follow what they had trained for, in this endgame scenario - and one by one, each died by their own hands. bodies began to drop within minutes of the x-mens arrival.

scott found her. he’s never said to this day - probably because he feels she couldn’t handle it - but, she doesn’t imagine anyone other than her own mother was preparing to take her life as well as her own, in that moment. he saved her. little mauti. bringer of doom. two years old and surrounded by so much death, just like had been prophesied. she didn’t cry. everyone on the plane back to the states thought that it was strange, she didn’t. instead, she remained nestled in scott’s arms - falling asleep before they had even taken off, and waking up somewhere over the atlantic with a smile, just for him. it was like the events of the night hadn’t even touched her. 

this was, for a brief time, the only quiet sleep that the baby he named REEVA and gave a home to had. in her dreams, she was tormented by the dead - the ones that had died for her, willing and unwilling. when she woke, it was all the same. she was too young to be able to communicate the hell that she was going through, but when she woke screaming and spent most of her days hysterical, it didn’t take long for certain telepathics to delve into her mind and see what it was she was seeing from her own eyes. she was being driven insane. tortured. she was too YOUNG for her mutations, and there wasn’t much that they could think to do.

scott wanted it to be jean. he just... couldn’t figure out how to ask her to do that, and knew without doing so what her answer would be. it had to be charles, and since he had done it before, placing a block on reeva’s mind so she could have a chance to live normally, for once, wasn’t a hard task. still. it never seemed to fully stick. she remained sane - saved from the worst of it. but as she got older, it was obvious that her interests lay in the OCCULT. she was always an odd girl, too much for many, too little for others - never entirely there in reality, always somewhat stuck to the other side. it was a joke, at first, when someone said that sometimes, they thought she might be more GHOST than she was girl. it lost its humor, over time.

but her father ( and she thinks of him, always, as this ) saved her. his action, while done without her choice, allowed her mutations to mature at a rate that would ensure her continued sanity. she owes him a lot more than just a home. she always will.

SECTION TWO OF THREE: HEADCANONS

because she still, technically, has something of a block on her mind, she’s yet to really realize that the fact she has actual SUCCESS with spells she casts / summoning partakes in / etc is because she’s got a secondary mutation in the form of actual mysticism. in reeva’s eyes, she’s simply harnessing a force that’s already present - she doesn’t realize she creates, too, and connects with a purer form of magic that only a select few can. her extrasensory perception is the only mutation she’s fully aware of, and with it comes the retrocognition and spirit awareness that she’s more KNOWN for.

she knows that t’challa is her biological father. if anyone else said they simply “saw it in a dream” it would sound insane, but when its reeva...- it’s usually something MORE. she doesn’t really have any feelings towards what must have went down between him and her birth mother. she doesn’t resent him, and she doesn’t really want to connect with him, either. she’d love to get to know her birth siblings - but she doesn’t want to get that skewed with inserting herself into their, or t’challa’s, NARRATIVES, either. scott is her father. kaia, amy and felix are her siblings. she was two years old when she joined the family, and they’re all she really KNOWS. 

like i said. for a lot of people, reeva is a lot. she’s far more in touch with “the other side” than she is with reality, and when she was in her teen years, people thought that was pretty weird - rightly so, though it led to her relying on the spirits more than she did real people. she tries not to be weird. she fails, but... that’s also because she stops trying pretty quick. she is who she is and she’s always been this way, so at this point she figures everyone else better just .. get used to that. 

she has two cats, salem and kyteler, and a single rat - his name is pistachio, because the spooky pet name trend only counts for cats, i guess. 

SECTION THREE OF THREE: WANTED CONNECTIONS

x-kids. she’s been in scott’s care since she was two and she’s turning 25 in a couple months, so... yeah. she’s been around the x-men FOREVER. come @ me

best friends. or just. friends, in general. reeva connected solely with ghosts for a really long time because her teen years were rough and people didn’t vibe with who she was - i still rly want her to have a few people who actually do like her tho, and actually ... are her friends. for better or worse.

worst enemies. this kinda connects to the next connection, but also, can be sort of on its own - there are probably so many people who just HATE reeva because of who she is or how she is, and she prob doesn’t feel too good towards them, either. 

disbelievers. is reeva full of shit? actually, no. she’s a little over the top sometimes just cause she can be, but for the most part, what you see is truly what you get - but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many people out there who think otherwise. give them to me.

regular customers. either they’re regulars at the mystic store she works at, or, they’re regulars on the side. for a small price, reeva will do pretty much anything - read your palms, look into a crystal ball, do a tarot reading, check the stars, let you choose a divination stone or three, interpret your magic 8 ball reading. it’s whatever, but it means she probably has a few dozen people she sees on a more regular basis - so hit her up !

coven. incls selene constantine. every witch needs their coven, and that goes double for reeva, who only really finds the likemindedness she’s searching for in other people who practice the craft. just imagine for a second the kinda sh*t this group could get themselves into because its spooky season and spells are ten times more potent...and then let me know if ya wanna be w the in crowd. ( thats us )

paranormal investigation squad / three spots ( one taken by jeannie drake kent ). this is separate to the above because its so wildly contrary to all reeva is. she BELIEVES. she knows ghosts are real. she knows that a lot of things are real, actually - and still, she’s got this little squad on the side. i actually kind of really want this to be a small group of friends ( i’m gonna say ... five people, incl reeva ) who are pRETTY tight knit and have been since they got into college ( slash... whatever. honestly, it’s not outlandish to say some people have known each other for longer than others ) and basically, they just... they visit haunted / spooky / folklore shrouded places together and investigate them. i hate to be that annoying bitch BUT i do kinda want reeva to be defacto leader because i have some neat ideas for threads we could do + i think ?? she could have been someone really gunning for this, herself??? but i’d be p open to seeing how it evolves and whatever, and there’s so many other spots that could be filled. think of the cute little gc we could have !! think about the way they could decide to become youtubers w this !! think of !! the threads !! and gimme. thanks ! 

#sidekick.intro #「 ･ﾟ ⁎ . ✴ ･ * some days she was more ghost than girl ― reeva mzuzi summers. 」

[johnny-writes]

Long Bio: Marcos was born to a family of 5 persons, his parents and two brothers, him being the eldest. His father is a repair technician and his mother is a housewife; his middle brother is an aspiring soccer player and his younger brother is autistic, but with an interest in computers.

Please note this is his “standard verse”, which I’ll be using in my original novel. Due to not having the results I wanted when I made verses, I don’t do verses for my OCs, I prefer to consider them more like “actors”, fitting in a setting. Any backstory in said settings will be a derivative of their “standard verse” backstory.

Until he was 14, he belonged into a Christian cult. His parents joined one year before he was born, attracted by the promise of riches and because they still believed in God. The doctrine of the cult was standard, but they were aggressive in the way they demanded tithes and donations; they were a very restrictive cult, consumption of media was strictly regulated, televisions, videogames and holidays were forbidden, women couldn’t wear pants and men had to wear suits on Sunday.

The leader, Pr. Ed, was a charismatic man, bald and chubby, capable of making people feels things. He incentivized the members to make ‘sacrifices’ with their money. The sermons consisted of cut parts of the Bible (outside their contexts) with an appeal to give money so that God would bless you, when in reality he never believed in God, and use it only as a means to extort money from believers.

Marcos attracted Pr. Ed’s attention. When he was seven, he started to be invited to Pr. Ed’s house, and his parents became deacons of the cult; he was trained by Pr. Ed’s himself to become one of his successors. There, he learned of a different side to his mentor: he taught him little about God, and more about how to make himself presentable, charming and how to manipulate persons. Things like flirting, voice modulation, flattering were things he knew how to use. He didn’t really understand for what purpose behind that training, so he just went on. During his early school years, he used these techniques to have safe school years, he wasn’t the kind that attracted bullies, but people always went to him for help with the homework, he just saw them as people to indoctrinated in the ways of the cult. He was a model student, even if the other kids considered him a bit odd because he never talked about the latest cartoons.

But there was one problem: his younger autistic brother, Ulisses. To say Pr. Ed didn’t like Ulisses it was an understatement. Due to not understanding social cues, he was somehow immune to Pr. Ed’s manipulation. He was a piece that didn’t fit in his perfectly orderly puzzle. Research on autism wasn’t as advanced, but he tried to convince Marcos’s family that there was a demon that could be exorcized.

The exorcism session was heavily advertised amongst the members. Ulisses could swing between hours silent and seemingly unending tantrums at random and there was little his family could do (also the cult didn’t believe in psychology). Then, after one hour of heavy prayers, Pr. Ed stared at Ulisses and he just laughed. Unable to contain himself, he punched him, claiming he was a piece that didn’t fit. Joana, feeling the maternal instinct kicking in, punched Pr. Ed back and it created a huge fight inside the church.

That day, Marcos learned of Pr. Ed’s true face. The man who mentored him for so long was...kind of a dick to say the least. His family left the cult (it would take almost a year for the cult to fully dissolve). Not only him, but the entire family realized that they never had meaningful relationships with people outside the cult and, not only that, the relationships with people in the cult were superficial ones.

They decided to try a new church. They were well-received and Marcos had a revelation: he learned that watching television, playing videogames and eating easter eggs wasn’t a sin. It was liberating for all of them, that’s why they remained there. The days in school were awkward. His grades fell and people stopped to go to him; he still had to deal with the fact he’d been manipulating all his colleague for years and that neither him nor them were even aware of that (he never dealt with bullies because he could more or less charm them). With that, he became more of a shut-in, also due to the fact that he was experiencing television and videogames without a weight in his conscience for the first time.

He spent a lot of time in internet forums, discussing shows and looking for good links for new shows. One show that he especially liked was an old 80′s show that could be described as a combination of Transformers with He-Man, about a group of refugee robots that have to deal with a fantasy world that they didn’t fit. He loved writing pretentious essays and fanfics in English in the forums, with mixed reception. He became some sort of meme in the forum, and he made one friend, a girl that liked his posts.

He decided he could use her to review his writings before he could post, since he always received complaints about his English. She didn’t contribute much, but decided that she could help him, without interfering in his essays. Everything failed when she couldn’t even use a simple copy-paste. He could either leave the girl alone or try to help her. He remembered of one of Pr. Ed’s tactics and shuddered, but given how desperate she felt in her message, he decided to do it. She wrote “I can’t even follow your directions, I’m the worst student ever!” He wrote back “if you are the worst student, I’m the worst teacher”. She felt her spirit being lifted with that, because she had such a bad self-esteem and felt cared by him.

Marcos felt ashamed because he used something he learned from Pr. Ed. And it worked, not only she stopped crying, but she also quickly became a friend of him. He never brought it again, but made an effort to be an actual friend to her, listening to her woes and issues, her ideas no matter how foolish she thought them to be, always giving an encouraging word. Never before Marcos had that level of intimacy with someone. He surely could learn a lot about people, but never before someone opened their heart to him like that. So he opened his heart in return, telling her about the years in the cult and how everything looked so bleak at that moment.

For a good time in a while, Marcos felt he could trust someone. Leaving the cult made him emotionally stunned and he realized how he just didn’t have friends, he just had a lot allies in the cult, but few ‘friends’ and the ones that he roughly could consider ‘friends’ went their separate ways. Surely, he could trust his family because they were family, and his therapist and pastor, because it was their duty – but trusting the girl with the flower avatar was different, because she gained nothing by trusting him. She just wanted to trust him, and that challenged everything he thought.

He just wanted to spend more time with the girl. They went on to play different MMOs together, watch the same movies, listen the same songs. By that time, he realized he stopped paying attention to the girls surrounding him. He never had problems with girls: during the cult time, he captivated them, even if they thought he was the weird religious kid and, after the cult, he kept his distance – even if he wanted to date a girl, he felt too guilty that he wouldn’t be ‘genuine’ so he avoided them.

Then he started to joke that he was falling in love with her. At first it was laughable – they lived thousands of miles away, this was obligatorily a stupid idea. However, the more he laughed, the more it hurt him. The straw that broke the camel’s back happened one time when his father asked him to practice an innocent exercise: imagining himself in ten years. Since he was 19, in 10 years he would be 29 and it meant that he had to think about his future, like job and marriage. He saw himself working as a public servant in the state government, a common, safe dream. However, when he saw himself married, he joked to his father, “Ha, who would be stupid enough to marry me?” his father answered, “You have someone because my father also asked this when I met your mother and I made exactly the same face you’re doing now”. Checkmate.

Denial wasn’t going to last forever, so he tried to share with people smarter than him this. He commented with people whose word he could trust, in a professional way, and they said to do it, because at least he’d have a friend. A man should be truthful to himself, so he went forward with his plan. He told her that he was in love with a girl. She asked ‘who’. He replied ‘you’.

The chat went silent for a good ten minutes.

Then she returned saying that she felt the same way, she had the same hopes and dream, she really loved him. When he asked about her future, she answered that she wanted him to be part of her future, but she knew it wouldn’t be possible. They both laughed at that and decided that even if they never have the opportunity to upgrade their relationship, they could still remain friends until the end.

They realized that they didn’t even know each other’s true name. That day he learned her name was Rebecca.

Their feelings diminished after that day, when they realized their folly, but they didn’t disappear. They remained friends, so if they found other people, they would understand. But both of them nurtured a subtle, strong desire to stay with each other.

A desire that wouldn’t go unnoticed by certain entities...

#muse: marcos #bios

[ruffoverthinksthings]

Polyamory Core 4 for ship meme?

1.Whois the most affectionate?:

Carlos.

Whilethe others have their moments of playful flirtations and teasing,Carlos is the one who does most of the clinging, the hugging, thetackling, the glomping, and snuggling.

2.Bigspoon/Little spoon?:

BigSpoons: Mal and Jay.

LittleSpoons: Carlos and Evie.

There’sa system, where the former two were frequently known as the group’s“protectors” whenever things got physical, and the latter two areall too happy to be in someone’s big, powerful arms, safely intheir grasp and protected from threats both real and imagined.

3.Mostcommon argument?:

Howto use their “all-in date night” about once or twice a month, ifthe stars align.

Theseare four very different people, of which they have very differenttastes and hobbies, and even something as neutral as dinner or amovie can get pretty heated, with them arguing over what sort ofcuisine to have together (fusions are considered a category all ontheir own, with Evie’s discerning tastes), what film to see, or ifthey shouldn’t try something completely different altogether, likegoing in a four-team battle at the local water park, and decimatingthe competition.

Itdoesn’t really help that, because of Auradon’s culture, there’sQUITE a lot of ways to spend your time leisurely if you have themoney and/or the connections, of which they have both.

4.Favoritenon-sexual activity?:

Commentingon how freaking weird and awful Auradon can be, either as complainingand stress relief, or just reflecting and observing their world andhow so many people can be so blind to how terrible it is, havingnever had their unique perspective.

5.Whois most likely to carry the other?:

Maland Jay.

Bothare the stronger of the two, there is no way in hell Evie will bedoing any sort of hard physical labour unless it was absolutely lifeor death, and Carlos is more agility and intelligence than strengthand endurance.

6.Whatis their favorite feature of their partner’s?:

Mal’seyes, brilliant like emeralds, glimmering with mischief, burning withanger, warm with love.

Evie’shair, flowing like a deep blue sea, soft as silk, always smellinglike the finest of flowers.

Jay’smuscular physique, useful for heavy lifting, having someone to getaround difficult to reach places, and for being held and carriedaround when either you don’t want to move, or the world feels tooheavy on your shoulders.

Carlos’hands, agile, skilled, well-worn with callouses, as capable of makingbrilliant machines from a spark of genius, as they are comforting andcaring for a weary soul, and other things better off not mentionedpublicly.

7.What’sthe first thing that changes when they realize they have feelings forthe other?:

How they hang out with each other and either casually date with one or two, or just be explicitly “friends” for that outing. It’s difficult to reconcile their growing feelings for each other given that Auradon has a very “pick one” culture, which I expound on at the end.

8.Nicknames?& if so, how did they originate?:

“LittlestSpace Heater.” After Mal starts to develop her dragon traits evenfurther from all the residual magic she is now exposed to, she startsproducing a constant, supernatural heat in her chest. For VKs whofeel the cold more strongly than others, it’s an extra lovelyfeature which makes Mal the center of their cuddle piles most nights,excluding summer.

“YourHighness.” To Evie, for obvious reasons.

“Mr.Magic Hands.” Jay, for his ability to make things appear anddisappear like magic with a sleight of his hands, with or withoutsleeves, along with his well known skills in applying that in asexual sense.

“Doctor”or just “Doc.” Used with Carlos as either teasing orencouragement during his college years when he was still working onhis undergraduate, his masters, and finally, his doctorate.

9.Whoworries the most?:

Carlos.

Asthe resident overthinker and “cosmic chewtoy” he’s more thanaware of all the various things and factors that could go wrong andmake life suck hard. Having been powereless to do much ofanything about them when they do actually come contributes to hisanxiety.

10.Whoremembers what the other one always orders at a restaurant?:

Carlos.

He’sa stickler for details and memory, having needing to keep a runningtab of everything in his mind due to the lack of papers and propermeans to document on the Isle—that his notes also tend to befrequently stolen out of spite or used for tinder really helpeddevelop his excellent memory.

11.Whotops?:

Mal,Evie, and Jay, though their switch. Carlos never does, though therewere some rare occasions where they do try and have him take thelead.

12.Whoinitiates kisses?:

Everyoneat some point, though the most shameless and constant are Jay andEvie, due to being flirts and no strangers to just going ahead andkissing someone for fun.

Malis reluctant to show affection still, Carlos prefers hugs and moreextensive physical contact than just lips-to-lips.

13.Whoreaches for the other’s hand first?:

Malin confidence, when they march forward without a care.

Eviein style, when her dazzling outfit is accentuated by the carefullycoordinated fashions of her companions.

Jayin coercion, when he pulls them off to some grand misadventure orinforms them that they’ve been roped into it without theirknowledge nor consent.

Carlosfor comfort, when he needs to feel that someone’s right therebeside him.

14.Whokisses the hardest?:

Jay.

Asa combination of physical strength, his usual enthusiasm, and thefact that boys on the Isle were expected to be macho men, he knowshow to steal anyone’s breath away with his lips.

15.Whowakes up first?:

Jay,Carlos, Mal, then Evie.

Respectively,“the first thief gets the loot,” “it’s time to get on thoseideas that have stewed overnight,” “gotta get to doingsomething,” and “need all eight-ten hours of beauty sleep.”

16.Whowants to stay in bed just a little longer?:

Evie.

Nowthat she has a proper bed as a guarantee, not a rare luxury, she isloathe to leave it by choice.

17.Whosays I love you first?:

Carlos.

Malhas trouble saying it, Evie’s concerned about the optics of it allhere in Auradon, and Jay has trouble actually saying the wordsdespite being quite the flirt, as it was “never a serious,committed thing.”

18.Wholeaves little notes in the other’s one lunch? (Bonus: what does itusually say?):

Maland Evie, as a consequence of the ones doing most of the cooking inthe relationship. Mal specializes in baked goods, Evie does moreday-to-day meal cooking along with special diets.

ByEvie are usually teasing witticisms.

ToMal: “Have a sweet and salty treat, just like you.”

ToJay: “Rich, dark, and smooth as silk, just how you like it~”

ToCarlos: “Sweet kisses for my sweetheart~”

ByMal are usually complaints and reminders, oftentimespassive-aggressive.

ToEvie: “I spent almost as much time making this as you did in thebathroom this morning, hope it pleases tastes as good as how late youmade me.”

ToJay: “Have one more, since you stole the six others from the tray,you greedy bastard.”

ToCarlos: “I lovingly mixed this by hand, because you stole thefucking blender again, you little shit.”

19.Whotells their family/friends about their relationship first?:

Maldue to the ease with which she can tell Maleficent that, trapped inher terrarium still and all.

20.Whatdo their family/friends think of their relationship?:

Maleficentthinks it’s even worse than when she fell for Ben. “Oh, at leastthere was just ONE tragic, easily abused weak point, but now you’vegot three!”

EvilQueen is quite disappointed Evie would sully her perfect reputationeven more than she already has by (publicly) engaging is suchscandalous “affairs.” “Evie, darling, I realize that royaltycannot be expected to be as perfect as they appear to the masses, butwe have a system about this, a certain measure of discretion andsecrecy.”

Cruellais really more pissed off by the fact that she assumes that she haslost her son and her personal servant a second time, and likely has astrong feeling of disdain for the other three for “leashing him.”It likely doesn’t register to her mind that a relationship couldever be mutually beneficial or purely for love.

Jafaris also disappointed. “People, my boy, I have always told you thatpeople will leave you, people will stab you in the back, people willsteal everything you own, your gold, your power, your influence—theonly three things that DO matter.”

21.Whois more likely to start dancing with the other?:

Jayand Evie.

Mallikes to maintain her cool persona as the “responsible” one ofthe team, Carlos is nervous about these things unless the dancehappens to involve dogs in some way.

22.Whocooks more/who is better at cooking?:

Asmentioned above, Mal and Evie, as a combination of either learninghow to combine and use many cooking-like processes for magic, or justbeing an excellent chemist who also had a lifetime’s worth ofdomestic training.

Jayand Carlos are serviceable in the kitchen, but Jay’s more likely toknow how to fry up eggs, pancakes (both regular flour andbanana-based), and bacon than pretty much anything else, and Carlosis more likely to experiment and use the kitchen tools for everythingbut cooking, and relies very heavily on “one-stepappliances” like waffle irons, food processors, and blenders to domost of the actual food preparation.

Inshort, with the boys, you’re either going to get a greasy,protein-packed meal with a side of toast and stupidly strong coffee,or a smoothie, or a mechanically tossed salad, or other rawingredient rich dish like ice cream—again, machine made.

23.Whocomes up with cheesy pick up lines?:

Carlos.

Malhas been the victim of cheesy, terrible one-liners from people she’sone-upped shortly after, Evie thinks herself beyond the lowest levelof Wit when there are much higher levels to aspire to, and Jay comesclose, but not quite.

24.Whowhispers inappropriate things in the other’s ear duringinappropriate times?:

Jayand Evie.

Shamelessflirts, both before and after the relationship, and the VKs have kepta LOT of habits from their time on the Isle.

25.Whoneeds more assurance?:

Carlosand Mal.

Theformer never had security, the latter was always told that she wasnever good enough.

26.Whatwould be their theme song?:

“TheKids Aren’t Alright” by Fall Out Boy.

Andin the endI'd do it all againI think you're my bestfriendDon't you know that the kids aren't al-, kids aren'talrightI'll be yoursWhen it rains it poursStaythirsty like beforeDon't you know that the kids aren't al-,kids aren't alright

Thishas been a tough life for all of them, to say the least. 16 to 15years of pure suffering, all because they were born to the wrongpeople, and because the world they lived in painted things in such astrict, black-and-white, “Good” and “Evil” way.

They’restill suffering. Life still isn’t perfect. Things could still getbetter in Auradon, and WAY better.

Butif they had a choice to live a “good” life at the cost of nevermeeting, they’d turn around immediately.

27.Whowould sing to their child back to sleep?:

Maland Evie having the best singing voices, as stereotypical as that is.

Malreally enjoys giving their kids a chance at a normal childhood seeingas Maleficent never did that or the many other things mother shouldbe showing their kids, Evie has been trained from a very young age tobe the perfect mother.

Jayis really more for physical playtime like upsy-daisy and horseyrides, and Carlos is all about creative and constructive play likecolouring, building PLUCKO block creations, and talking about how theinternals of their toys work.

28.Whatdo they do when they’re away from each other?:

Asalways, their respective jobs, hobbies, and social lives. I’vediscussed this so many times I really don’t want to regurgitatethat all over again.

29.oneheadcanon about this OTP that breaks your heart:

HowAuradon first reacts to it.

They’rea very conservative country who have very much accepted the idea thatthere’s only to be one love for one person each, andwhile they HAVE started to bend the rules towards same-sex couplings(dramatic age differences have historically never been an issue, nowthat new morals were instated), a polyamorous arrangement was justtoo much for them.

“Yes,but who will you pick in the end?” many a well-meaning associatehad asked.

“Allof them,” they replied.

“Butyou can’t do that! You HAVE to choose just one!”

“Butwhy can’t I choose all of them?”

“Becausethat’s not how we do things here in Auradon!”

30.oneheadcanon about this OTP that mends it:

They mope about it. They reflect.They take into consideration that Auradon will not agree nor acceptto what they’re doing.

Then they decide to just do itanyway.

“We’re VK, we never belongedhere in the first place, nor will they ever completely accept us forwho we are, what we do, what we want out of life. What’s one morething that’ll piss them off…?” Mal says, summing up theirthoughts.

[a-bunch-of-ghosthunters]

Despair

( prologue part 2 )

     The second Damien walked through the door, all hell broke loose.

     “HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIYAH!”

     He didn't even have time to breathe again before all the air was knocked right out of his lungs. He fell backwards and hit the ground hard, looking up with dazed eyes to figure out the identity of his attacker.

     Another relatively short girl with flippy hair stood above him, hands held up in front of her as if preparing for another attack. She wore an undone white button-up over a yellow tank top, a relatively short white pleated skirt, knee high white socks and brown boots. Her hair flipped upwards at the ends at strange angles, and had a sort of brown-to-blonde gradient to it.

     “Huh... you don't look dangerous..."

    The girl eyed Damien up and down before stepping away, shoulders relaxing a little bit - such a small change, Damien almost couldn't notice. "Whoops, shit. Sorry, bro! I heard the door opening and thought it was one of the people who kidnapped us." She chuckled, rubbing the back of her head.

     Damien gaped from his spot on the floor. Her very first instinct was to jab him between the ribs...? He supposed he could understand feeling desperate, waking up so suddenly in a place like this... he felt the same way, after all. So it wasn’t just himself and Jazz...? How many more people were waking up inside these classrooms?

     He was pulled abruptly out of his thoughts by a loud snapping in front of his face. “Hey, earth to pinkie! You alright in there?”

      Oh, right, she was still there. “N-no, yeah, I’m cool! Just thinking, is all. So, uh, did you wake up in a locker too?”

     “Yep, sure did! Hit my head pretty hard on the way out. But we’ve got some more important stuff to worry about, I think.” She grinned, holding out a hand. “My name’s Ryou Hanamura! Nice to meet‘cha, pinkie. Is it ok if I call you pinkie?”

     Damien took her hand and let her pull him to his feet. “It is absolutely okay, and also I love it. My name’s Damien.”

     Ryou slapped him on the back as a greeting, hard enough to nearly knock the wind out of him again. Damien wheezed. “Jeez, you got me good when I walked in. Pretty sure I lost the ability to see for a second. How much have you practiced punching people in the stomach?”

     Ryou shifted her feet, crossing her arms. “Eh, I do jiu-jitsu! Been practicing since I was six. I’m super good at it! I’ve gotta be, if it earned me an Ultimate title.”

     Ultimate...?

     Huh... didn’t Jazz say she had a title like that too? That meant Ryou was also a talented student... but last he heard, students with Ultimate titles were spread out across the country, and really hard to come across. Especially two in the same place. What were the odds of that?

     Now that he was up on his feet, Damien could see around the room. It was... completely identical to the room he’d woken up in, save for a few different posters hung up on the walls. It even had the same pair of lockers tucked up in the corner...

     Which began to rattle without warning.

     Ryou leapt about a foot in the air, screeching and clambering against the desk behind her. Damien stayed calm, knowing what was about to happen, until the door finally opened and another girl came tumbling out.

     She collapsed against the ground with a soft wheeze, long platinum blonde hair spilling across the tiled floor and draping in front of her face like a curtain. She had on a white oversized sweater and long blue skirt, plain black mary janes peeking out from beneath the hem. The girl propped herself up on her elbows and lifted up her head, looking around the room with panicked icy blue eyes.

     “Wh-wha- where- who- what?” she stammered, clearly confused beyond belief. Damien started forward a little.

     “Hey. Don’t worry, it’s okay! Take a minute to collect yourself.” he tried to speak softly, to not freak her out any more. Slowly, the girl’s breathing evened out and she picked herself off the floor.

     Or, well, she started to before Ryou rushed over to help, face flushed bright red. “H-Here! I’ll help you up!”

     The girl muttered a timid ‘thank you’ in response. “Wh-who are you?”

     Ryou shook her head and hesitantly stepped away from the girl. “My name’s Ryou, and Pinkie over there is Damien!” Damien gave a small wave.

     The girl brushed a lock of blonde hair from her face and smiled, a small but friendly gesture. “My name is... S-Serephina Halvorie. It’s a pleasure to meet you two...”

     “Ditto.” Damien replied. “Uh, this might sound like a weird question to ask, but... do you have an Ultimate talent, by any chance?”

     The surprise was evident on Serephina’s face, before slowly morphing to confusion. “I- um, well, yes, I do... I’m known as the Ultimate Therapist. Why do you ask?”

     Another Ultimate?

     Damien opened his mouth to respond, when suddenly-

     “AAAAAAAAUGH!”

     “I got one!!!!!” Jazz’s voice bellowed from the hall, following a shrill startled scream. Ryou shouted in surprise, and Serephina flinched at the noise.

     “J-Jazz? What’s going on out there?” Damien rushed out to the hallway, only to find...

     Another stranger, hanging from the ceiling from her ankle via a makeshift rope. She was trying desperately to keep her glasses from dropping five feet to the ground, with Jazz standing a little ways away looking both startled and incredibly proud of herself.

     “H-Hey! Let me down from here this instant!” she begged, “Please?”

     Jazz looked her up and down, before shrugging with a sleazy grin. “Hmmmm... yeah, okay! Only ‘cause you’re so pretty.” She winked, and the dangling girl flushed red. Redder than she already was from being hung upside down, anyway. Jazz kicked a rope somewhere on the ground, setting off a Rube Goldberg-like reaction ending with the bespectacled girl being unceremoniously dumped onto the hard ground. She groaned and put her glasses back in the right place.

     She had wavy brown hair going down to her mid back and a rather refined white blazer, collared shirt beneath tied with a green bow. Her knee length pencil skirt matched her blazer. “Thank you...”

     Damien raised an eyebrow at Jazz, who was too busy making eyes at the pretty stranger to notice him until he began to talk. “How the hell did you manage to rig up a trap like this so quickly?”

     “Ultimate Thief, remember? I know all sorts of tricks, and how to set up stuff like this using the most mundane shit! It’s pretty easy if you know what you’re looking for.” Jazz shrugged off the feat like it was nothing. “It’s easier to frisk somebody if they can’t move enough to stop you.”

     “I guess that’s true... rad.” Damien nodded, finding that response to provide more questions than answers. But he still had too much of a headache to dwell on it too long.

     Meanwhile, the glasses girl had stood up and begun to brush herself off. Jazz took notice and immediately scurried over to her side. “Soooo... what’s your name? I’m Jazz Bakshi, Ultimate Thief! Pleased t’make your acquaintance.”

     The girl brushed some light brown waves over her shoulder. “You’re an Ultimate student, too...? Very well, my name is... Amber Evergreen. I’m... well, you may call me the Ultimate Noble. It might sound stuffy and uptight, and I can’t deny that it really is, but... I suppose if there’s an Ultimate Gangster somewhere, then anything’s possible.” She gave a curt bow. Jazz’s eyes widened.

     “Ultimate Noble? You mean, like, from a family of nobility, right? Does that mean you’re super rich??? What’s that like? D’you have servants or whatever?” Jazz rambled, trembling with excitement. It was probably rare for her to meet a rich person who wasn’t also a complete sack of shit. Damien understood the sentiment.

     “Another Ultimate student...?” he wondered out loud. How many more kids were there in this school? Jazz, Ryou, Serephina, and now Amber... was he the only one without...?

     “What’s going on down here? Is everybody okay?”

(( continued in next post bc it got too... long..... for tumblr to post... hhh ))

#rip me #dr au #writing #damien #jazz #ryou #serephina #amber #ooc

[somuchkdrama]

Bride of the Water God Ep1 Pt3

We’re back with the third and last part of our review of episode 1!  

That One Scene - Part Two

dramajib: So my main big thing - that wild boar scene

rocknghorss:  lol I was wondering what you were going to make of it.

triangularlily: Yeah I was curious too

dramajib: I kinda skimmed through you guys talking about it, and I had no idea what to expect, but I laughed hysterically when it happened. Like I'm pretty sure I was laughing for all the wrong reasons. What the hell was that?! I legitimately feel like the second hand clasp (where he adjusts to take the lead and it becomes more "intimate") is probably WAY more uncomfortable for running away together. Also that pig was so cute. And non threatening, apart from being massive.

triangularlily: It also just occurred to me they must have put so much effort into doing the cgi of that… Like that of all things

rocknghorss: Right?!

dramajib: Also also, I've never actually tried to get in the boot of a car (do you call it a boot or a trunk? I get confused with British and American English because we use both here) but I'm very certain my car would NOT fit two people that comfortably, let alone leave room for snuggling.

rocknghorss:  Maybe in like an SUV that would've been possible, but in her little four-door Hyundai no way.  Especially considering how massive JooHyuk is!

triangularlily: Yeah that whole scene was so strange

dramajib: I don't know, maybe it's like the odd-end of korean humour that I never seem to get. Like the gag concert stuff

rocknghorss:  I call it a trunk btw, but wouldn't be confused if you called it a boot.

triangularlily: Same

Vanuatu and Fruit

dramajib:  Is Vanuatu Tourism a sponsor or something? Because that seems oddly specific. Also do dragonfruit actually grow in Vanuatu, or was that just like token exotic tropical fruit? Am I just ruined to fruit-fantasies because I live on the equator?

rocknghorss:  LOL probably you are ruined for them. But yeah the Vanuatu thing was very, very strange. It actually kinda reminded me of Healer and his obsession of going to that whatever island it was

dramajib: Oh God I forgot about that. Did they actually name the island??

rocknghorss:  I don't think they ever did!

Representations of Mental Illness

dramajib:  I foresee some poor representations of mental illness. Like when she repeatedly mentions how he looks perfectly normal on the outside but is clearly suffering from delusions. I want to believe that it's their way of saying "oh you never know who's suffering, it could happen to anyone" but I have doubts

rocknghorss:  Yep.  Also, the whole "are you really hungry thing?" kind of pissed me off.  I was like really, we're going to do fat jokes, really?

dramajib:  omg I didn't even realize it was a fat joke. I thought maybe his fly was open and they didn't do a good job with the camera work or something

triangularlily: I didn't realize either but I was confused with that whole scene

Speculation on who racked up those loans of hers

dramajib: Obviously some family sob story there, she brings up family like fifty times while talking to suspected patients.

rocknghorss:  I’ve perhaps missed something, but where is her family?

dramajib:  I'm thinking dead? Or abandoned her and left the country. Or in JAIL for DEBT. because of stupid Korean laws which is why she hates Korea!

rocknghorss: Lol

triangularlily: I feel like that's a new thing I haven't seen in a lead before.

rocknghorss: Ooh. Hating Korea you mean?

triangularlily: Yeah saying it so explicitly “I hate Korea”

dramajib: Yeah I don't think I've ever seen it expressed unless it's like a... war scene or something, by the opposite forces. Like even in Healer, since Marie mentioned it, he doesn't want to leave Korea, he just wants to leave everything behind, which just so happens to be in Korea.

rocknghorss:  Yeah, perhaps it's only because of the genre of show that we're watching. Like in Secret Forest (because I'm obsessed with that show right now) it's pretty blatant that nobody likes Korea but that's to be expected in that kind of show. Versus this kind of show where it's supposedly a fantasy romcom so you don't expect to hear people giving opinions on the state of the country. But who knows.

dramajib: Definitely something I'm gonna be keeping an eye out for, I don't think it's the sort of thing they'd just throw in there for the heck of it. Also you're doing a really good job of making me want to binge watch Secret Forest lol

rocknghorss: I'm trying real hard!!  Also, going back to her nurse. I actually really liked that he was super whiny. I mean it was irritating, but at least it was new and different

A Brief Digression

dramajib: True I guess. Speaking of supporting cast - was the portrait guy in heaven that musician? The one who's married to the singer who does ridiculous jazz? pause while I google this…. Jo Jung Chi, and yes, yes it was him

triangularlily: Wait in real life or the drama? I don't remember a singer.

dramajib: So like you know when we first see him in heaven, and he's getting his picture drawn? The guy doing the drawing is Jo Jung Chi, a musician. He's married to Jung In who sings really well. it's a weird cameo, because I'm pretty sure he's not an actor. Like at all.

triangularlily: Ahhh I see

rocknghorss:  Ohh lol. Maybe he's friends with some of the cast

That Buried Ring

dramajib: Why did she bury that ring? Why not just sell it at the time

triangularlily: Maybe she was better off before?? I mean her house looks nice but idk if that's just the typical kdrama "I'm super poor" but don't look like it

dramajib: I think her family was probably rich as hell and then she's started getting poor while trying to sort it all out by herself? There's some backstory with the nurse too, when she tells him at the bar that she doesn't want to talk about it. That probably plays into it somehow.

Overall Thoughts

dramajib: I'm confused, to be honest. Sometimes I thought the writing was really good. Like in her first scene with a patient, where they kinda twist it so we think for a moment that she actually understands alien speak, or that she can hear and interpret messages from other beings, because she's the god-servant-person-thing. but then they turn it around and it's just grammar and made up languages. I thought that was kinda smart, and a level of detail I don't usually expect to see from this sort of a romcom show. But then they do this whole pig-hand-holding-thing and I just... what?!

triangularlily: Yeah I think that's why I was so meh about it

dramajib: I'm not captivated by the show, but I'm not dying to drop it either. There are so many little questions to be answered. and also it's just SO PRETTY. That final scene by the road, where every time the light is on her and it's all colourful, but when it's on him it's dark... I bet we'll see so many photosets on tumblr

rocknghorss: Exactly. Also, because it was actually fairly OK, that makes it fun when talking about it with you guys.

dramajib: Yeah! I'm so glad we decided to do this, because I don't think I would keep on with it if I were watching alone. I can't imagine NOT having someone to thrash out that pig scene with. That would be tragic.

triangularlily:  Lol and I mean the writer and pd do have a good reputation so I'm optimistic

dramajib: I loved arang and the magistrate.

Next up: Bride of the Water God Episode 2 Part 1

#shin se kyung #nam joo hyuk #im joo hwan #habaek #bride of the water god #bride of the water god episode 1 #smk: the discourse #bride of habaek

[real-life-pine-tree]

Counterpart Cousins: Dance Lessons - Part 2 (2/?)

When Yuto discovers his connections to the Sakaki family, his once-bleak and lonely life becomes a lot brighter. A series of Yuya and Yuto familial fluff oneshots based on the Arc-V Aftermath series. Co-written with @violetganache42​.

Yuya has never been to Shay and Lulu's house before; he was aware that his cousin lives there, yet he hasn't seen it in person. He has been occasionally wondering what it might look like for the past weeks. Yuto reminded him that Orbital was still parked outside of the house, specifically in the driveway, so he'll take them back to Heartland. With Yuya's face expressing glee, he grabbed his shoes and quickly put them on as the two headed downstairs and informed Yoko of where they'll be going. She told her son to be back before dinner before seeing them leaving the house, forming a smile on her face knowing they're spending time together as cousins.

"What's it like living in a fancy place?" Yuya asked. "Are there peacocks in a garden?"

"It's nothing special," Yuto answered. "It's big, but not too big. The only main differences are that the rooms are more elegant in design and there are countless robot servants all over the place."

"That would explain the robot driving the car," Yuya commented.

"GREETINGS YUYA SAKAKI," Orbital said. "MY NAME IS ORBITAL 7. I AM THE OBSIDIANS' HEAD BUTLER."

Yuya waved "Hello" at Orbital as he was notified on how rich and elite people can afford robot servants, with the Obsidians being an example. He did remember something about the amount of money Shay and Lulu's parents made from their successful corporation—which was sponsoring the Team Duel Tournament—prior to the Invasion; many special events that occurred in Heartland were presented by ObsidianCorp and this one was unique because the familial wealth was in danger despite the company being fully restored, making this a useful tactic to regaining any lost profits.

Orbital had already gathered what Yuto and Yuya were talking about after they got into the car, meaning it was time to go. He shifted the car in reverse to back out of the driveway before changing it to drive and heading down the street to the Obsidian residence within the section of Heartland City.

"Why are you taking me over to your place?" Yuya asked.

"For suit measurements," Yuto explained. "The Obsidians have a lot of rooms for whenever they need to maintain their perfect image."

Yuya was baffled by that term. "Perfect image...?"

"I don't get it either," Yuto admitted. "But apparently being an Obsidian requires them to look their best all the time. Shay and Lulu can probably explain it better than I can."

A perplexed Yuya couldn't believe that there are families that have to sustain this "perfect image" everyday, even if there are no special events taking place. Then again, it would also explain why Yuto has subtle yet noticable differences, aside from the glasses. His hair looked softer, his skin felt smoother, and even the way he now spoke was very similar to Shay and Lulu's semi-formal dialect.

"You do realize you're not an Obsidian, right?" Yuya asked.

"Not yet," Yuto clarified. "Mr. and Mrs. Obsidian have made wedding plans for when I marry Lulu. They want me to get used to living in an elite environment, so I have been taking special lessons."

Special lessons? There are lessons involved in looking your best? Yuya grew surprised as he asked himself those questions. "So they tell you how to dress and act?" he asked.

"Sort of," Yuto answered. "Shay and Lulu also took similar lessons when they were growing up. It's so I would know what to expect in an elite environment once I'm married into the family."

He further explained on how he had trouble with getting used to living a wealthy lifestyle because he was born a commoner. He never worried about his appearance while growing up before moving in to live with them. Yuto did learn to have a clean look due to his noble behavior, but that was it. He didn't worry about getting his clothes stained or ripped. After dealing with Duel Academy's sudden Invasion and going through the Interdimensional War, he has gotten rather used to wearing tattered clothing, especially considering what happened with his rental suit. So with that in mind, suddenly having to worry about maintaining a perfect image initially felt weird.

"Was it easy to adjust?" Yuya asked.

"Not at first," Yuto admitted. "I had to use a lint roller and they didn't even have the type of shampoo I usually used."

He never forgot that day; trying to deal with a flatter-than-usual hairstyle was a hassle on its own, but the bangs were the most difficult because they kept blocking his eyes and he had to push them behind his ears to keep them in place. Fortunately, Kameron bought a shampoo brand called Thick and Spiky for him. It was a more expensive version of Spike and Curl without any damaging oils, so Yuto has used that brand ever since. As the cousins conversed with each other, Orbital drove up in front of the gate.

"HERE WE ARE, MASTER Y-YUTO AND YUYA SAKAKI," Orbital said, pressing a button on the steering wheel. "THE OBSIDIAN RESIDENCE."

The pressed button resulted in the front gate opening, allowing them to enter. As Orbital drove up to the house, Yuya was astonished at how everything looked; the huge front yard had a mowed lawn and well-trimmed hedges, but what really caught his eye was how large the house was. It wasn't as big as a mansion, but bigger than a regular house, much like how Yuto described it. It was hard to believe that his own cousin lives in something as amazing as this.

"Whoa..." Yuya said, noticing the robots that were maintaining the lawn and hedges. "This place looks pretty fancy."

For someone who's never been to the Obsidians' house, let alone visit an expensive and large house, it was breathtaking to him. The car then parked in front of the tall doorway, and as the three exited it, Yuya couldn't stop staring at how gigantic the doors were.

"ALLOW ME, MASTER Y-YUTO," Orbital said, then he opened the doors.

Yuto and Yuya walked into the house, with the Performapal user getting more starry-eyed at how beautifully elegant the place was. He saw more robot maids roaming through the halls to tend and keep everything clean.

"WELCOME HOME, MASTER YUTO," a robot maid with a vacuum cleaner said. "YOUR MONTHLY HAIR APPOINTMENT IS IN TWO DAYS."

"Thanks for the heads up," Yuto replied.

"All of these robots actually respond to you?" Yuya asked.

"All of the robots in the household obey everyone who lives here," Yuto explained. "Even me."

Yuya was intrigued by the thought of robots taking care of houses and he kind of wished he was born in an elite environment. But before he could continue with his thoughts, Yuto gave a hand gesture to indicate to follow him upstairs. The former quickly caught up with him, and as they walked through the second floor, he marveled at every detail of the halls and glimpsed at what some of the rooms were; he even pondered on the probability of a dueling room somewhere.  Pretty soon, they stopped at the tailor room so that suit measurements can be noted.

"HELLO MASTER YUTO," a robot maid in the room said. "ARE YOU HERE FOR SUIT ADJUSTMENTS?"

"Not today," Yuto answered. "My cousin needs a new suit for an upcoming school dance."

The robot maid looked at Yuya. "MY GOD, THAT LOOKS ATROCIOUS," she said, grabbing the tomato-haired teen by the arm. "YOU NEED A FULL-BODY MAKEOVER."

Atrocious?! That was a little too extreme to say about his outfit because he was dressed more casual than the Obsidians. "What?!" Yuya yelped.

"Relax," Yuto said. "These robots had the same reaction when they first saw me."

He recalled on the first day he moved in, which was the day after Leo's separation procedure; when Shay and Lulu introduced him to one of the robot maids, it took him over to the family spa room to give him a full-body makeover, surprising him in the process. He wore his pre-Invasion outfit and what he wore apparently led him to getting some… "much-needed pampering". He was treated with a warm bath with a few essential oils, a masculine manicure (similar to a regular manicure but without the nail polish), and a massage. Although it did feel nice, he had some difficulty deducing what was going on and why they were indulging him in spa treatments.

"So they're gonna give me spa treatments?!" Yuya asked.

"Not just spa treatments," Yuto explained. "Afterwards, they're going to work on your hair, face, and clothes."

"WHAT?!" Yuya asked. "But the dance isn't for a few days!"

How was he going to get out of this? He was here to get measurements for his suit, not receive a makeover. Unfortunately, much to his dismay, the robot maid dragged him out of the tailor room and into the spa room to carry out the procedure, regardless of his protests.

"Relax," Yuto said as he followed his cousin. "Struggling will only make things worse."

Yuya reluctantly stopped trying to break free from the robo-maid's grasp as they headed down the hallway. A couple minutes later, the boys spotted Shay approaching the salon room for a trim as part of his monthly hair appointment. "Yuya?" the older heir asked. "What are you doing here?"

"THIS BOY LOOKS ATROCIOUS," the robot maid answered. "HE NEEDS A FULL-BODY MAKEOVER."

"Help!" Yuya cried out.

"Sorry Yuya," Shay said. "Once the robots see an unkempt person, they won't stop until that person is dressed appropriately."

"Seriously?!" Yuya asked. "The school dance isn't for a few days! I can't get ready this early!"

Shay chuckled. "Fine," he said amusingly. "Activate Protocol NF-432."

The robot maid obeyed the command and let go of Yuya from her grasp. As he rubbed on the area where his arm was held on to, he wondered how the Obsidians even lived with them. Yuto explained how Protocol NF-432 was a recent program installed not long after he moved in because they wanted to make sure something like what just occurred doesn't happen to anyone if they're stopping by for a visit.

"He's half-right," Shay said, looking a bit embarrassed. "I originally installed that protocol when I was younger."

Yuya was in disbelief. "You?" he asked. "But you seem to like this kind of environment. Why would you install that kind of protocol?"

"It might be hard to believe, but when I was younger, I wasn't as civilized as I am now," Shay explained. "I wanted to hang out with normal kids and be a normal boy, so I created that protocol to avoid unneeded grooming and pampering. Ultimately I got rid of those childlike mannerisms and grew up. Mother and father uninstalled my protocol around that time, but when Yuto moved in, the protocol was reinstalled."

Yuya was admittedly glad that Shay created that protocol because the last thing he needed was to look dashing days before the night of the school dance. Maybe the thought of having robot maids around the house was a bit too much for him to handle.

"So what brings you here, Yuya?" Shay asked.

"I brought him here," Yuto answered. "He was thinking about wearing his dad's old tuxedo for a school dance."

Shay remembered seeing Yuya wear that same tux for Lono's funeral. "Then you came to the right place," the older heir said. "I'll teach you how to look nice for a basic school dance."

"Uh..." Yuya stammered.

"Relax," Yuto said. "I told you Shay and Lulu can explain what it means to have a perfect image."

The three headed into the salon room for Yuya's lesson; consequently, Shay's monthly hair appointment will be postponed for an hour, but he didn't mind. Unfortunately, the robot maid in the salon room did mind.

"WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG, MASTER SHAY?" the robot maid demanded. "YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE HERE EXACTLY THREE MINUTES AGO."

"I apologize, but I'm going to have to postpone my appointment for an hour," Shay explained. "For now, this guest needs some fashion tips."

As the robot maid looked at Yuya, Shay quickly activated his protocol, much to the tomato-haired teen's relief. "Thanks Shay," he said.

"No problem," Shay answered. "Now first of all, how often do you comb your hair?"

"Not very often," Yuya admitted. He rubbed the back of his head. "Only to untangle any snarls."

"Then there's your problem," Shay said. "Your hair looks too unkempt. For a formal setting, you need to make sure it's properly smoothed out."

"What about Yuto?" Yuya asked. "His hair looks too spiky."

"That's different," Yuto explained. "My hair is much thicker than Shay's." He further mentioned on how thicker hair results in spikier hairstyles.

"So if you could just sit in the chair, we can get started," Shay said.

Yuya sat in the provided chair in the room. "Now what?" he asked.

"Now we just need to find the right look," Shay answered. "Luckily the robot maid was programmed to know a lot of different hairstyles, so she'll be able to find the right one that works with your hair type."

Find the right style? Does that mean he was going to get…a haircut? Yuya grew worried because that meant scissors are involved and he's not a big fan of them, mostly because of how weird and painful it felt when the blades are near his skin.

"Uh... Could you not use scissors?" Yuya asked, getting nervous. "I really don't like it when the blades are so close to my skin."

"OF COURSE," the robot maid said, putting down some scissors and picking up a comb and dipping it in a canister of water. "MASTER YUTO HAS THE SAME PROBLEM."

Yuya looked back at his cousin, whose gesture said that it was true. He mentioned how the wet combs the robot maid was using helps part the hair into sections and untangles snarls and knots.

"YOUR HAIR LOOKS JUST LIKE A TOMATO," the robot maid commented as she styled the Pendulum Duelist's hair. "WHAT IS IT WITH KIDS THESE DAYS HAVING SALAD-BASED HAIR?"

Yuya wasn't sure how to respond. "She was just as alarmed when she saw my hair," Yuto clarified. He brushed a hand through his own hair. "It does look like eggplants."

Yuya held back a laugh because of how true it is; their hairdos do resemble food, even Yugo's banana-shaped bangs and Yuri's old cabbage-like haircut. As a matter of fact, they were obviously not the only ones to have wacky coiffures since a lot of people in the Original Dimension have bizarre hair in terms of shapes and colors. A "what if" scenario started to form in the Performapal user's mind and wondered how the robot maid will react if she ever met Yugi because he may be the undisputed champion of having an absurd hairstyle.

The robot maid used the comb to unwind any tangles that might have formed as the bristles glided and flowed through the strands and locks of hair while parting various sections to make sure the new look was consistently nice. Several minutes later, she completed the procedure by wrapping a hair tie around a section from behind and Yuya saw the finished results through his reflection in the mirror. It was similar to Yuri's new haircut: pushed back with a few red and green streaks separated but flowing in the same direction as the rest of his hairdo; the only differences being there is a small ponytail and his bangs were combed back.

"Whoa..." Yuya said. "I look amazing!"

The robot maid proceeded to install something into Yuya's Duel Disk. "THERE," she said. "I HAVE INSTALLED A PDF OF THE HAIRSTYLE PROCEDURE SO YOU MAY TRY IT OUT YOURSELF."

Yuya thanked the robot maid before getting off the chair to see what Yuto and Shay think. Needless to say, they both had different reactions.

"Not bad," Shay said. "You look pretty sharp."

Yuto smiled as he bowed. "Your highness," he said. With him already becoming a true knight, this was his way of telling his cousin that he looks like a prince.

Yuya seemed a bit disbelieved. "Huh...?"

Yuto stood to his full height. "That hairstyle makes you look like a true prince," he explained.

Yuya looked at his reflection once more. "Me? ...A prince?"

He never thought of himself as a prince until now. With his usual hairstyle, he looked more like a soon-to-be Dueltainer, but the new style he received made him see the resemblance, as if he was the prince and Zuzu was his Cinderella.

"Zuzu..." Yuya muttered, wondering what she'll think of his new look.

"We're not done," Shay said. "Now we need to work on a new suit for you."

"What's wrong with my dad's old tux?" Yuya asked.

"It looks old," Shay answered. "Trust me on this one. I grew up learning about different types of suits, so I know an old one when I see it."

Shay directed Yuya to follow him and Yuto to the tailor room that wasn't far from the salon room. He knew that the two cousins have the same body figure and share the same size when it comes to clothes, but it never hurts to double check; besides, not every piece of clothing were made with the same material, whether it's fabric, silk, or polyester. Unfortunately, Yuya couldn't tell the material apart.

"Is there really a difference?" Yuya asked, looking at the various material on the room's shelves.

"There is," Shay answered. "It all depends on your skin type. Since you probably have the same skin type as Yuto, you should have a silk suit."

Poor Yuya ended up drawing a blank. "Eh... No comment?"

"I don't really get it either," Yuto admitted. "Luckily Shay is good at this kind of stuff."

Before anyone knew it, another robot maid strolled her way into the tailor room to take Yuya's measurements…right after Shay activated the protocol, of course. "Thanks Shay," Yuya said when the Raidraptor user activated his protocol.

However, as the robot maid calculated Yuya's measurements, she got a bit confused. "MY GOODNESS," she said. "YOU INITIALLY APPEAR TO HAVE A SLENDER FIGURE, BUT YOUR LEGS ARE TOO BIG. WHAT KIND OF A MONSTROUS FRAME IS THIS?"

Yuya immediately knew what she meant and briefly indicated how his pants are poofier than most. "THEN I MUST ASK YOU TO TAKE THEM OFF SO I MAY RECEIVE THE CORRECT MEASUREMENTS," the robot maid instructed.

He became a little worried on why he should take them off in front of Shay and Yuto due to his low self-esteem with his body.

"O...Okay," Yuya said, slowly taking off his pants. "Here I go. Taking off my pants..." He gulped. "Right now..."

Yuto groaned in frustration. "Just take them off already," he said.

"That's what I'm doing," Yuya said. He had finished unbuttoning and unzipping, but he was hesitant to take off his pants.

Eventually, Yuto grew fed up with his cousin not taking off his pants. It's just three boys in one room; there's nothing to be embarrassed about. So he walked over to Yuya and lowered his pants for him, revealing his Hip Hippo-printed boxers.

"What was that for?!" Yuya asked, embarrassed.

"It's just Shay and me," Yuto explained. "You shouldn't get embarrassed."

"THANK YOU, MASTER YUTO," the robot maid said. "NOW I CAN GET THE RIGHT MEASUREMENTS."

She resumed taking down measurements as she used the tape measure to determine the length and size of Yuya's legs, much to his humiliation. He had a feeling he picked a wrong day to wear his favorite boxers.

"MY GOODNESS," the robot maid said after a few minutes of measuring. "YOU ARE MORE SLENDER THAN MASTER YUTO."

"But I thought we have the same body structure," Yuya recalled.

"Not quite," Yuto explained as he lifted the front of his t-shirt to reveal his developing six-pack.

Yuto had recently been working out not long after he moved in when he learned there was a gym on the first floor. Naturally, he admitted that the Invasion occurring at least did something good for his body: he had more muscle than his counterparts and past incarnation. However, since this was the first time Yuya found out about this, he was a bit envious of his cousin's developing build.

"That's... Wow..." Yuya muttered, sheepishly rubbing his thin arm.

"I used to have the exact same body as you," Yuto explained, lowering his t-shirt. "But when the Invasion happened, I ended up developing a bit of muscle. So I appreciate you and Uncle Yusho getting a new suit for me, but it felt a bit tight on me."

Yuya felt kind of bad about the revelation regarding the suit. He and his father have worked so hard to get that for Yuto for his LID dance do-over, but it felt tight on him this whole time? Before he could respond, the robot maid finished with the measurements.

"YOUR SUIT MEASUREMENTS ARE COMPLETE," the robot maid reported. "THE RESULTS WILL BE FINISHED IN A FEW DAYS, SO PLEASE BE PATIENT."

A few days? That means his suit will be ready around the time of his school dance…hopefully, before the school dance. "Thanks," the tomato-haired teen said as he put his pants back on. "I-"

"Shay, what do you think you're doing?"

The three teens turned their heads towards the tailor room entrance, where Kameron stood there to remind his son about his hair appointment. Needless to say, Shay looked deeply ashamed.

"My apologies, father," the older teen said. "I was helping Yuya prepare for an upcoming school dance."

"I understand your need to help your friends, but you cannot miss any appointments," Kameron said. "You're going to become the head of ObsidianCorp someday, so you need to maintain your perfect image. Do you understand?"

"Yes, father," Shay replied. But before he and Kameron left the room, Yuya stopped them.

"What's up with that phrase?" Yuya asked. "What's the big deal about having this 'perfect image'? I get that you're wealthy, but shouldn't you relax?"

Shay clenched his fists. "Having a perfect image was always important for my sister and I," he explained. "Obsidians always have to be absolutely perfect in everything, even after tragedy strikes. We can't let anyone else know we suffered."

"Anyone else?" Are they the only ones who are aware of the Invasion? Yuto explained that he and the Obsidians were in tight spots at the Kastles' party not too long ago. The elites judged him for being a commoner and rose discussions regarding Lulu's En Birds marking due to the Elite Duels until they revealed what happened to the siblings and they—along with their parents—need help and support in regaining their lost wealth.

"That's why having a perfect image is so important to you?" Yuya asked, sounding a bit sad.

"We were always obsessed with having a perfect image," Shay clarified. "The Invasion only pushed things further. It's not about simply looking good for the general public anymore. We need to recover everything that we lost."

"Is there anything I could do to help?" Yuya asked.

"I appreciate the concern, but that's something we must deal with," Kameron answered. "For now, you should worry about your school dance."

As Kameron and Shay walked to the salon room, Yuya was left saddened by what he was told about. "He's right," Yuto told his cousin. "I asked the same thing, but not even I can do anything to help."

"But there has to be something we can do!" Yuya exclaimed.

"There isn't," Yuto repeated, giving Yuya's hand a reassuring squeeze. "This is something wealthy people apparently deal with on their own. They don't need commoners to help out."

"This still doesn't feel right," Yuya said. "Are you sure you want to live in this kind of environment?"

Yuto closed his eyes. "I'm doing this for her," he answered. "For my beloved princess." He opened his eyes. "I love her and I'll do anything for her."

Yuya knew exactly who he was talking about. "You're doing this for Lulu?"

"Who else?" Yuto asked in response. "I'm still trying to figure out what my future is, but being with her feels right. I don't think I can live without her."

Yuya was a bit surprised. "That seems a bit extreme..." he commented.

"Need I remind you that I gave in to Zarc's darkness when I heard Lulu's screams?" Yuto pointed out. "I need her in my life. I absolutely adore her that much." He further mentioned how he can't bear to see her in pain or in danger and must do whatever it takes to protect her.

"That's why you gave in when-" Yuya started to say, but then he noticed Yuto's pained expression.

"I don't like thinking about that," Yuto confessed. "I nearly lost her that day. I can never lose her again."

Yuya gave his cousin a reassuring smile. "It's alright," he said. "Besides, you helped me prepare for the school dance. The least I could do is give you support. And who knows? Maybe I could be your best man on your wedding day."

Yuto let out a chuckle. "I'll keep that in mind," he said.

The two were glad to have each other and even felt content knowing how their bond grew. Their first meeting was like it happened yesterday, with them encountering Yugo shortly after that; due to their blind rage and accusations, it virtually set the stage for what was to come during and after the Interdimensional War. They never thought that they were more than just dimensional counterparts yet they easily accepted the information about them being cousins. It was kind of funny to learn how an unexpected chance encounter was actually fate all along and the heat of the moment was heavily focused on until it was finally situated.

#Arc V Aftermath #yugioh arc v #Yuya Sakaki #Yuto (arc v)

[captainkappa]

Fanfic- Tough Business to Get Into

(i s2g this is the last holiday exchange i do)

I have finally finished my secret tax goat for @hexmaniacinien !!! I had so much fin writing this, I hope all of you enjoy it as well! Thank you to @kyrfiore for betaing!

Gen. 1920s/Mob AU. Guns and alcohol a plenty (with a touch of angst, my apologies ^^;)

AO3 Link Here

The aftermath of a show was always loud. Giggling girls critiquing their performance based on both what they thought and what the director saw. The flurry of feet making their way to dressing rooms and removing make-up, getting out of those extravagant (and skimpy) costumes to more practical clothing (that was still called skimpy by some older people) in order to head out for the night. Cigarette smoke filled the air, the clear alternative ever since Prohibition hit for a legal means of winding down after a big show.

Within the chaos, Markus was always able to slip in. Not like he wasn’t allowed, he was the lights and effects director, but it made it easier when everyone was moving to go into his friend’s room without questions being asked, mainly, “Are you and Inien going out?”

Which was ridiculous, Inien had been his closest friend ever since he got into show business.

She was snarky and strong willed and would be the very definition of a flapper if it wasn’t for the fact she refused to cut her hair.

It was easier, however, to just leave people guessing about their relationship status so they wouldn’t question other parts about Markus’ life… and Inien’s, for that matter. Performers were far too nosy.

So, he would slip into her dressing room while everyone was too busy to notice.

Tonight, Inien was quiet, which in Markus’ experience was never a good thing.

Especially with that look on her face, that vacant stare that meant she was thinking of something.

She sat up straight in her chair. “I’m bored… let’s start selling liquor.”

He barely registered himself standing up as he tried to process what his friend just said, “Inien…”

“What?” she said, innocently fixing her hair in the huge mirror in front of her.

“You don’t just sell alcohol. And why would you even want to do that?”

“I told you, I’m bored,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“You’re on Broadway!” He gestured wildly at her dressing room around her. “How is that boring?”

She shrugged and turned her chair to look at him. “It has for me, and besides, I’ve already thought part of it out.”

“I… how?”

“My cousin, Colvin. Even though he’s still in far east, he’s just as annoyed about Prohibition as we are, probably moreso because the U.S. was a huge import for him.” She explained casually, reaching for a cigarette. “So we started talking about getting his product over here. At first, I would’ve been selling to other speakeasies and splitting the profit with Colvin.” A small flick and she lit her cigarette. “But I’ve been thinking, why not run it myself? Cut out the middle man, make more money overall, and maybe even get out of Broadway once I have enough dough.”

Markus pinched his nose and let out a breath. “Yes, that’s very business savvy and all. But,” he dropped his voice to a whisper, “You are still talking about illegal business! Who’s to say this doesn’t go completely wrong?!”

She shrugged, letting a stream of smoke pass through her lips. “I’ll never know if I don’t try.”

He sighed, lowering his head in his hands as she put on her coat. “You. Are. Incorrigible.”

She turned to him after straightening her collar. “And you are incapable of thinking outside the box.”

Looking up, he was just able to catch the door shutting behind her. “Oh no, no, no,” he muttered, grabbing his coat and following her.

She was easy enough to catch up with. She had barely made it outside the building when he caught up with her.

“So, what are you going to do now?” he asked, falling into step with her.

“I need to talk with someone.”

“Okay, if we’re going to do this, you need to be less cryptic. And tell me shit like this earlier.”

She looked up at him, smirking, “ ‘We?’ ”

“Of course, we both know I’m the better talker out of the two of us. And you need all the help you can get if you’re going to do this.”

“Alright, we’re meeting someone with experience in this business. He’s had brief interactions with my cousin, so that’s how I know him. He agreed to help set this up.”

“Wow, sounds like a good guy.”

Inien snorted loud enough for people passing by to look over at them. Markus stared down at her confused.

“What? What’d I say?”

“Oh nothing. You’ll see.”

“Again with being cryptic.”

-=-=-=-=-

The man lived in a tenement house, which was a fancy word for the shittiest apartments you could ever think of. Overcrowded, dark, and dirty, it ended up being the homes to most immigrants upon coming to the New World. Markus and Inien both glanced to each other, both knowing the other was thinking of their childhood spent in one. Markus had been the lucky one, only spending about eight years in one as his family moved upstate to work as live-in servants to a politician. Inien hadn’t been so lucky and spent her entire childhood in one till she was eighteen.

“Come on, he said he had the afternoon free today.” Inien bounded up the steps, the excitement of starting her own speakeasy overriding the memories that threatened to spill over. Markus followed close behind.

This tenement house was made out of an old, four story house that had been a rich man’s house before he moved out to the cleaner countryside. Now it was packed with mainly Russian immigrants. As Markus and Inien climbed the stairs, they couldn’t help being be jealous of how cleaner this house was in comparison to the ones they lived in. The government had made tenement housing more bearable to live in. Not comfortable by any means, but there were windows and it didn’t feel like the flu would wipe out an entire building in a night.

The man’s room was on the third floor, last door on the left side. After passing a large family loudly speaking in a language neither Inien or Markus could understand, they knocked on door marked 47 by two mismatched numbers.

There was a long pause as no one answered. Markus was about to knock again when the door flew open, revealing a man with slicked back, black hair and wearing a wrinkled white button up and vest.

“What do you want?” he asked, looking between the two of them unamused.

Inien stepped forward. “Hi, my name is Inien. My cousin told me to come here in order to start up my… business.”

“Ah, you are Inien, yes, yes, now I remember. But who is this man?”

Without skipping a beat, Markus took of his hat and bowed low. “Markus Tannhauser Velafi. At your service. I’m her… business partner.”

The man looked unimpressed by the grand gesture. “Yes, but how do I know you won’t sell us out.” At the confused looks he got from the other two, he stepped forward. I’ve talked with Inien, I don’t know you.” His Russian accent grew thicker with every word, every step he took. Before Markus realized, he was against the opposite wall with the Russian man’s stare keeping him in place.

“Look,” Markus started, “I’ve known Inien for a while. Even if I’m still unsure on someone who’s never had experience in this, throwing herself in the business, I’m not going to go behind your backs.”

It took a moment, but the man stepped away and walked into the apartment. “My roommates won’t be back until night, we’ll be okay.”

Markus gave Inien a worried look before she shrugged and followed. He took off his hat before following into the small apartment.

“Wait!” Markus said suddenly, pausing midstep. “What’s your name?”

A beat of silence. “Just call me Thog.”

Markus nodded as Thog started talking about setting up.

Even though he knew Thog didn’t trust him wholly, and Markus was still on the fence on the legitimacy of this mob business, he was still glad Thog was there, or else Inien would have no idea what to do. His knowledge was easily seen in his planning, how he seemed prepared for any situation; cops come in to the bar, being seen carrying crates after dark, all of it Thog had a way out which made this idea… feasible.

“Alright then, all we need is a base of operations, right?” Inien asked.

“Mhm, and I know the right place. It’s a coffee shop downtown called ‘Number Seven’.”

Markus and Inien exchanged a confused look.

“A coffeeshop?” Markus asked.

Thog grinned, for the first time since meeting them. “No one would suspect a thing. The owner is… a character.”

“But, is there going to be enough room in the basement?” Inien piped up.

“For now, we can out-source later, but this will be a good enough base of operations.” Thog leaned forward, seemingly growing more excited as the plan came together. “Now, if we send for the shipment this week, this means it’ll arrive in about three weeks.”

It was Inien’s turn to grin widely. “There’s a big opening night around then. Don’t you think the cast would enjoy some ginger water, Markus?”

Markus stared at her before slowly shaking his head, a small smile growing.

“Ginger water sounds like something I’d be more inclined to say.”

-=-=-=-=-

The cast did enjoy the alcohol, no questions asked. Markus didn’t want to say it out loud, but the successful first selling made him more confident in this speakeasy business. It still scared him that he now owned a gun and had learned how to (sort of) shoot it as per Thog’s request.

“Jobs can get… rough” was all Thog gave as explanation, rubbing his left shoulder. He and Inien had simultaneously decided not to ask.

True to his word, the job did get rough. Second time the trio went to fetch the shipment, cops were patrolling. Markus had broken into a cold sweat the moment a flashlight’s beam passed by his feet. Quick thinking and stuffing his’ handkerchief in his mouth to keep him quiet rewarded them with the alcohol they paid for.

The bakery had also proved to be a decent base. Ol’ Inny was the character Thog promised, his ramblings petering off from English into Swiss and then into a weird combination of the two languages. Those who entered often wanted to buy what they need and leave, ignoring any signs of illicit activity.

They were all happy their business was off to a good start.

Something had to go wrong eventually.

It was their first European shipment, the good stuff from Colvin. Thog had predicted their profits to jump after these wares were bought. They needed this shipment to really bring the cash rolling.

The night seemed perfect, enough moonlight so they could see in front of them, but not enough to be spotted by the passing cop on the street opposite from the wharf.

Inien managed a handshake between the people unloading the goods before Markus turned, a noise setting him on edge.

“Did you-”

“As wary as we should be, it was probably a worker dropping something,” Thog supplied, pausing before putting an uncertain hand on Markus’ shoulder. “You need a nap once we get this shipment in the basement.”

He could only nod in agreement before turning to help the workers load the wares in the trunk parked nearby.

Markus managed to lift one of the smaller boxes when they all heard a “Hey!”

All heads turned, to a cop, who couldn’t have been more than 25, holding a gun. HE looked more scared than they were.

“D-Drop it!” the cop yelled again, addressing Inien, about to pay the boat workers.

No one moved.

“I-I swear it!! I-I’ll shoot!” The gun was shaking. “3! 2!”

Markus couldn’t hear the rest, blood pounding in his head as he ran, going for his gun. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to do, just knowing there was no way this man was going to hurt Inien.

There was a bang! and Markus stopped.

He heard someone scream, but it wasn’t him. People were moving by him and when had he fallen onto the salt-encrusted wood of the dock? He only knew it hurt, oh Gods it hurt, how could something hurt this much?

He barely noticed the gunfire above him, only able to flinch every time he heard another shot.

Inien and Thog’s voices were muffled, like he’d been throw underwater.

From yards away, he could hear Thog yell, “I know where to take him!” before the pain brought him under.

-=-=-=-=-

It wasn���t clean, but it was clean enough. It wasn’t easy to get to, but considering how much blood was pouring from Markus’ hand, there was no other option. It wasn’t cheap, but it was better than explaining to nurses how he’d gotten a bullet in his hand.

The “underground hospital” actually just the basement of an abandoned building, the only traces of what it was were the chipped paint of “Alaran” on the front. They were allowed one day in this shit hole. One day before Markus had to give up the cot to another low life who couldn’t explain their injuries to professionals.

Inien stayed by his side the whole day, silently contemplating the bandages covering the 5 stitches in his hand. Thog, for once, was not so quiet.

“We weren’t ready. We should’ve prepared for. We need more people; people who know how to fight, at least one doctor…” He sat down on the other side of Markus, head in his hands. “Why am I even this concerned about you people? This isn’t my business.”

She glared at him. “Well, you’re basically family now after the shit we’ve been through. You’ve been a part of this since day one.”

He went quiet. They both did. They knew they had a lot to do; they had already lost money, only getting half the stock in the resulting shootout, recruitment of more people, selling what they could, establishing what exactly was this work relationship they had, but it could all wait.

-=-=-=-=-

Markus was now left handed now, still able to move his right hand, but the limits made it virtually impossible to use it for more than pointing and gesturing. For now, that was good enough as he and Inien descended the stairs to the club. Two weeks of scouting for new people led them to believe a man by the name of Gregor Hartway was the best for them.

He already had experience, being one of the front men for the Outriders, a notorious gang that had once ruled upper Manhattan, but one night had changed all that. Gregor was one of the few remaining people.

Markus and Inien gave the password and the entry fee as they entered. The place was huge, room for a bar, several tables and chairs, a dance floor and enough walk space to not feel crammed. Soft lighting gave the place a warm atmosphere despite the crimes everyone was committing but just standing there. The place was bustling, which was not a surprise for a Friday night.

The two walked toward the bar, eyes scanning the place for their man.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Markus stopped Inien with his good hand and quietly gestured with the other. “Is that him?”

He guided her line of sight to a shorter man with a ponytail sitting off in the corner, smiling to himself.

He wore simple clothes, a white collared shirt with pinstripes and brown slacks held up with red suspenders. From where they were, they could see the top of some blunt weapon leaned against an extra chair.

Inien nodded and the two started toward him. He only looked up when they were in front of him.

He smiled. “Hello.”

Markus smiled back, sticking his bad hand in his pocket. “Hello, my name is Markus Velafi, this is my associate Inien, and we were wondering if you’d like a job.”

Gregor paused. “That was a quick introduction.”

“We have limited time.” Inien said plainly as Markus picked up the conversation. “We need someone who can handle himself in a fight and we heard you were the one to talk to.”

The other man smiled. “What’s the job?”

“Helping to protect a bar like this, but better.” Markus winked.

“We want you in,” Inien deadpanned. “The pay’s good. What do you say?”

Gregor scratched his chin, considering it. “Can he come?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who’s he?”

“He means me.”

The sudden voice behind her sent her nearly twenty feet in the air. She stumbled into Markus, who was equally unprepared for the new voice. The man calmly walked to Gregor’s side, a wide grin on his face.

“W-Who are you?” Inien asked, setting herself right.

“I’m Zalvetta, a pleasure.”

Gregor piped up, giving no reaction to the surprise entrance. “We’re kind of a team. I’m good brute force-”

“And you can imagine what I’m good at.” Another wide grin.

Markus looked to Inien. “We do need people…”

Inien looked directly at the two of them. “You’ll have to split a paycheck till our… business gets rolling.”

Zalvetta looked displeased, but Gregor looked hopeful, which seemed to sway his friend.

“Deal.”

-=-=-=-=-

“I’m surprised that went so well,” Markus commented as they exited the club. “Two for one? I’m calling that a good day.”

Inien didn’t look so impressed. “We still need a doctor.”

He rested his good hand on her shoulder. “Inien…”

“Don’t!”

Markus paused. “I’m fine, you realize that, right?”

Silence. They kept walking through the streets like that, letting the sounds of the city wash over what had been unsaid between them since that night.

“I don’t want it to happen again,” Inien finally said.

“I know, but if we can’t find one soon, it won’t be the end of the world, okay?”

“…Okay.” Markus gave her shoulder a quick squeeze before shoving that hand into his pocket.

Luckily, they had found the person who they were looking for. She was spoken highly of, those in the Alaran hospital had attested to that. Her ability to heal was unmatched by any other person who bothered to lend a hand there. It was a shock that she wasn’t an actual doctor, but no one asked questions. It was part of the policy.

What they had been able to find out was she worked at a printing press near the outskirts of the city. Her specific job was unknown, but a building was all Markus and Inien needed.

Even more luck fell upon them when they found her loitering around the outside, on a lunch break. Her white hair was in disarray, with ink splotches all over her trousers. Despite that she still held herself with some air for authority. Out of all the workers walking around, she stood out.

As they approached, she looked up at them, narrowing her eyes.

“What do you two want?”

Inien shrugged, “We need a doctor.”

“ ‘ow good?”

“Excuse me?”

“ ‘ow good of a doctor? I never got my degree.”

“Kicked out?”

The woman grit her teeth. “Money problems. Father refused to pay the rest, I didn’t have enough, I dropped out just before I would ‘ave graduated.”

“Well, we don’t care about that.” Markus cut in, glaring at Inien briefly before putting on another charming smile. “I’m Markus Velafi and we’ve heard you’re very good at what you do.”

The woman stared at the two of them. “Who’s the patient?”

Markus gave Inien a quick glance. “It’s more so we want to hire you for when the situation is needed. We want you to be on hand in case we get hurt.”

Inien butted in, slipping Ashe the number for what could be her paycheck. The number made her eyes go wide, but she schooled her expression quickly.

“What’s the business?”

“It’s a speakea-”

“I’m in.”

Markus and Inien shared a look.

“Really?” Inien asked.

The other woman nodded. “I haven’t had a drink in forever. You bet your ass I’ll take the job.”

Inien grinned and held out her hand. “Alright then, what’s your name.”

“Aesling, but call me Ashe.”

They shook hands.

-=-=-=-=-

From there, their business only grew. The basement area under Ol’ Inny’s place was turned into storage as they found a larger place, under a bakery run by a woman named “Dont,” where they had plenty of room to turn it into a proper speakeasy.

Thog, while still essentially the co-head of the place along with Inien, ran the bar, ignoring Markus when he tried to get him to flip bottles and put on a show. He’d roll his eyes, but when the bar emptied, he’d try flipping an empty bottle, just to see if he could do it (He couldn’t). Ashe helped him on the busier nights, when she wasn’t stitching someone up in the back or threatening someone with surgical equipment (Inien hadn’t expected her to be so good at it. It both scared and intrigued her).

Gregor and Zalvetta turned out to be key as more shipments came in and they needed a path clear of police. Their skills also became useful as people started not keeping up their promises.

Markus turned to be the sole employer, finding more people to build upon their so-called “empire” as Inien liked to brag. He found Firi, a flapper and a girl good wit organization, at a dance class. Batty, their bouncer, he found in alley as she beat up the man who tried to rob from her. Moren… Markus never told them how he found Moren, avoiding the question with wild gestures and a blush across his face. He slipped dollars to the orphan kids so they would make quick deliveries and return with all the cash owed.

All the while Inien sat back on her throne (it was the least rickety chair in the place) and grinned, ecstatic her once crazy idea had pulled through.

It was good to be the Queen.

#thrilling intent #tifanart #ti mob au #ti mafia au #TI SECRET TAX GOAT 2K16 #kappa writes #my fanfic

[trendingnewsb]

5 Horror Movies That Made Up Rules Midway Through The Film

Any good movie needs to establish the rules of its universe. The viewer absolutely must know what happens if zombie blood gets in your mouth, or if you give a gremlin a boner. Unfortunately, not every movie can keep its own rules straight. Some make stuff up right in the middle and hope you won’t notice. Spoilers ahead, of course.

5

In Get Out, The Villains Must Vet And Seduce Their Victims Carefully … Or Just Kidnap Random People?

One of the major reveals in Get Out is that even white people who voted for Obama can be racist. Another big one is that Chris’s girlfriend, Rose, only dated him so that her family could hypnotically trap his mind and auction his body off to wealthy brain-rapists. It’s an amazing movie, is what we’re saying here.

Anyway, we’re first tipped off to the evil plot when Chris discovers a troublingly large stack of photographs of Rose and all her (black) exes, including her parents’ weird servants. You might not immediately think, “These are people she’s mentally enslaved,” but it’s worth bringing up.

Universal PicturesAlso, what’s with the box of physical photographs? Are you a hundred years old?

Rose has been dating Chris for five months. And judging from the intimate photos, she’s convinced over a dozen other people to fall for her. This means she has been in the family business of debauching African Americans since she was, at best, a teenager. Forget about how creepy that is; it’s sort of incredible. They’ve been asking this girl to constantly convince strangers to fall in love with her and then betray them since before she could buy beer. She’s the Meryl Streep of brain transplant crime.

Using Rose as a honeypot sounds extremely inefficient, but what else could the family do? The movie clearly establishes that they’ve got to get those people to their house somehow, and it’s not like they can simply abduct anyone on the street.

Except … wait, that’s exactly what they can do.

Universal PicturesTo this guy. This poor son of a bitch right here.

The man in the picture above is Andre. Andre is nabbed while wandering around an upscale suburban neighborhood, presumably looking for an Olive Garden. Rose’s brother, Jeremy, lacks his sister’s bubbly charm, so he apparently knocks out random black pedestrians and stuffs them in his car.

And it’s not like Jeremy’s method is any less successful than Rose’s. Andre was clearly hypnotized, brain-transplanted, and sold with no real problems. Jeremy achieved in a single night what took Rose five full months.

Read Next

6 Classic Movies That Get Ruined By Grade-School Science

On top of all of that, Jeremy’s method is significantly safer. While she was dating Chris for half a year, she met all the people in his life — like his friend, Rod, who might wonder why his friend didn’t come back from her house. A bisexual girl who dates only black people is already going to generate some gossip, but if every single one of those people mysteriously goes missing, it’s safe to say that story would get picked up sooner or later. And a string of abductions linked to the city’s most famous interracial sex addict is a much easier crime to solve than a few seemingly unrelated disappearances.

4

In Freddy Vs. Jason, Jason Randomly Becomes Afraid Of Water

Freddy Vs. Jason was supposed to be the horror villain smackdown to end all horror villain smackdowns. But before the two really go at it, Freddy enters Jason’s dreams to see what he fears most. After decades of murder, Jason has been beaten and mangled, sometimes to death, so obviously the thing he fears most is water. Wait, water!?

Specifically, harmless cascading water. It’s … it’s weird.

Later in the movie, Freddy uses this knowledge to his advantage. Right when Jason is about to machete the shit out of Freddy, a pipe bursts, spraying wetness between the supernatural forces of death. There’s nothing special about this water. It’s just water. And it stops Jason right in his tracks. Now, this rule makes sense on paper … if you’ve never seen a Friday The 13th movie. As a boy, Jason first died by drowning, so a phobia of water would not be out of the question. Now here’s a picture of a very relaxed Jason chest-deep in his greatest fear:

New Line CinemaOr maybe he’s scared? It’s hard to tell, of course.

Here he is in Jason Takes Manhattan, wherein he hitches a ride to the big city on a boat’s anchor with no problem whatsoever. This is almost certainly the wettest way to get to Manhattan.

New Line CinemaLook at the poor thing: Scared to death.

Even in a Friday The 13th video game, Jason has no problem getting in the water to do some good old-fashioned lake slaying.

Gun Media“Oh thank god! Rescue me!”

Is it possible Freddy reawakened some dormant fear in Jason? Maybe, but the more likely explanation is that there needed to be some kind of tension in a fight between two immortal fear monsters, and they didn’t hire the world’s most creative writer to develop the story every seven-year-old horror fan thought of first.

3

In It Follows, Shooting The Follower Doesn’t Work (Until It Does)

It Follows is about a monster that follows you if you fuck someone who was already being followed by the monster. Then, if the monster catches you, it fucks you to death. It’s uh … it’s better than it sounds. The whole thing is a not-so-subtle metaphor for STDs, so you would imagine the solution to the problem would be some kind of poetic, maybe metaphorical thing, like convincing teens to practice abstinence, or maybe burning off your genitals. But no. Instead they shoot it.

They straight up shoot the thing dead.

RADiUS-TWC

Now, shooting isn’t a bad idea if you’re looking to kill something, but they establish early in the movie that bullets don’t work on the Follower. Instead of getting on a plane to Australia to wait it out (because the entity can only very slowly walk wherever it goes), the main group of kids decide to hang out at a nearby beach and let it catch up. Naturally, the monster shows up, and the main character, Jay, shoots it in the neck.

This doesn’t keep it down for long. It gets right back up and continues following Jay. This should communicate that it’s a mystical being that can’t be stopped with mortal techniques, but it doesn’t. In fact, the movie soon gets straight up Scooby-Doo. During the big final showdown, the heroes attempt to electrocute the creature in a pool. But when that plan goes belly-up, they decide to finish it off once and for all … by shooting it. Again.

Maybe it’s not a metaphor for STDS, but for how nothing matters and everything’s stupid.

When the pool fills with blood, the kids decide the entity is defeated once and for all. Now sure, there’s a scene at the end which shows it may (or may not) still be following the characters, but the monster inexplicably showing up at the end of the horror film is a tried and true cliche. It means practically nothing. It’s as pointlessly ridiculous as having the monster leap out of the pool on a surfboard and go, “I’ll be back in It Follows 2: Beach Bods!”

2

In 2004’s Dawn Of The Dead, People Turn Into Zombies Just, Like, Whenever The Hell

A lot of zombie movies play their “zombie rules” pretty fast and loose, but the 2004 Dawn Of The Dead remake reeeally stretched the boundaries of zombification science. Basically, when people get bitten, they turn into zombies whenever it’s most convenient for the plot.

In the opening scene, Ana’s husband gets bitten in the neck by a zombified neighbor child and collapses on the bed. In the time it takes for Ana to call 9-1-1 and get a busy signal, he dies and pops back up as an undead maniac:

Universal Pictures“HEY! We’re out of toilet paper! I TOLD YOU YESTERDAY WE’RE OUT OF TOILET PAPER! YOU ALWAYS DO THIIIIIS!!!”

Later, when the gang is in the mall, they bring in a truck full of eight people, two of whom have been bitten. One is a lady in a wheelbarrow, best described as 300 pounds of moaning rotten meat long overdue to die from any number of things. The other is TV’s Max Headroom, who has a little bite on his arm.

Universal Pictures“Wait, in what zombie story do you bring me into an enclosed space!? This is fucking crazy!”

Universal Pictures“Wait, someone remembers Max Headroom? This is fucking crazy.”

Max Headroom dies very shortly, but another character, the pregnant Luda, has a similar wound on her arm, and she lasts days, maybe weeks? The movie doesn’t give a clear timeline, but within one montage set to a lounge cover of “Down With The Sickness,” it’s made clear the party is in there long enough to get suicidally stir-crazy.

The point is, Luda lives hundreds, maybe thousands of times longer than other people with the same wound. Maybe her pregnancy had an effect? Meanwhile, the lady in the wheelbarrow seemed to rot into a corpse puddle long before she hopped up as a zombie. Maybe her weight problem had an effect? Is diabetes the cure for zombism?

The characters spell it right out for the audience that bites transit the disease, and yet not a single infection seems to follow the same rules. For instance, the gun shop owner gets bitten on the arm, describes it as “not bad,” and turns undead in minutes. Can the zombie virus tell when it’s time to speed up the plot?

Universal PicturesZombie for “Wrap it up.”

So turning into a zombie can take several minutes, a few hours, or literally weeks, based on whatever reveal is coolest. Maybe the silliest dramatic transformation happens in the climax, when the Ty Burrell “rich dick” character gets jumped by a zombie and moments later comes back as a hissing monster. Which means that within seconds, a zombie kills him, decides to stop eating him, and leaves the area completely. This goes against everything we’ve learned about zombie behavior and most of what we’ve learned about bite timelines, but it allows him to get shot in the face for a callback to earlier in the movie, when Ana said she was going to shoot him in the face.

Universal Pictures“Ha! I knew that line about shooting me in the face would pay off!”

1

In Saw, Jigsaw Lets People Live If They Appreciate Life. Except No, He Doesn’t.

Saw‘s central villain, John Kramer, conducts sinister tests on human beings, only allowing them to live if they learn what life really means. The movies clearly want us to think of Jigsaw as a complicated character. Yes, he’s a murderous criminal, but also sort of a free life coach? Which may be how they justify letting him win at the end of every movie. (Sorry for spoiling Saw, Saw II, Saw IV, Saw 3D, and Jigsaw.)

There’s always some reveal to explain how all the people in Jigsaw’s traps deserve it, and unlike his insane proteges, Kramer himself has a single guiding philosophy he’s trying to carry out. Supposedly, he forces people to appreciate what they have, and if they demonstrate that they’ve learned this, he lets them go. But is that really what he does? Is all of this as stupid as it sounds?

Yes. In one movie, he forces a man to tunnel through a maze of razor wire to prove that he wants to live. The man in question does indeed want to live, and is so determined to do so that he slices his stomach open while fighting his way through. So he proves it, right? No, Jigsaw lets him die. It wasn’t any kind of test; it was a weird murder with torture and puppets that would have killed him less if he wasn’t so motivated to live. Enjoying life isn’t the same as being immune to barbed wire, Jigsaw!

The movie is full of traps built around how much damage a body can take, not how determined the body is to seize the day. For instance, the man covered in flammable jelly and made to tread on broken glass without flinching. Jigsaw watches that poor guy through a peephole and doesn’t once intervene, even as the guy clearly demonstrates his willingness to endure pain to save his own life. He passed, you dick! Call off the murder!

At one point, Kramer leaves a victim in a chair designed to drill into the man’s head if the detectives following him don’t call off the case. What kind of zest for life is that supposed to test? Drills don’t magically stop working when they hit a brain thinking about how it hates dying.

In the history of Jigsaw’s arts and crafts murder spree, only a small handful of people are actually tested on how much they appreciate life. The rest of them are killed in pointlessly unpleasant ways. It’s like Jigsaw created the world’s most infantile, half-baked philosophy solely to justify thousands of hours of death trap construction and bicycling puppet maintenance. How did they make eight movies about that, and only seven about an evil Leprechaun?

Jordan Breeding also writes for Paste Magazine, the Twitter, himself, and with a dirty, dirty spray can in various back alleys. Mike Bedard does a lot more than point out flaws in movies. He also makes his own. Here’s a short he made about Indiana Jones saying it’s okay to punch Nazis. If you like what you see, then follow him on Twitter. Dan Hopper is an editor for Cracked, previously for CollegeHumor and BestWeekEver.tv. He fires off consistent A-minus tweets at @DanHopp.

Get to writing your own horror-ific script with a beginner’s guide to Celtx.

Support Cracked’s journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more, check out 6 Hilarious Secret Rules All Horror Movies Obey and 6 Unspoken Rules Every Horror Movie Monster Always Follows.

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Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_25487_5-horror-movies-that-made-up-rules-midway-through-film.html

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[linssikeittomies]

VR Chapter 2 - 5 hours

Have fun trying to pronounce each name! Later chapters will have the correct spellings, though I haven’t worked in a scene where the pronunciation is elaborated. Until then, pronounce everything however you like. Masterpost <- Chapter 1 Chapter 3 ->

--

After a short nap in a guest room upstairs I felt a lot better. That unreasonable freaking out in the street embarrassed me now, lemme tell ya. I was basically dreading the second I had to see another person again, knowing how hysterical I had looked. Look, I’m borderline famous for my cool, I’m like a teenage Jeevesette, that’s how cool I am.

So now that you know how extraordinarily rare it is for me not stay in control, we can move onto more important things. After my breakdown, the girl and the woman showed me upstairs to the third floor. That floor looked a bit more like an actual living space instead of a display of wealth, with a semicircle of comfortable couches and reading lamps in the centre of the very large room, two giant bookshelves against a wall, a grand piano looking thing and string instruments against the opposite wall, and paintings of varying skill level all over the place.

The guest room I had been given was incredibly bare bones compared to the rest of the manor. A queen sized bed with a plain headboard, a small bookshelf with only three books in it, a medium-sized dresser, an L-shaped desk pushed into a corner, and only one painting. It was a family portrait. Of the strict blonde woman, a foppish black-haired man, a toddler with sandy brown hair, and a baby with large green eyes and bright blonde hair. So yeah, I’m guessing it was the mirror-image girl (pretty clearly the strict woman was her mum now that my brain was functioning properly, they looked too much alike to be anything but close relatives) with the dad and a sibling. I thought it was a little weird to have a family portrait in a guest room, but it was a pretty painting. I love me some details, and the amount of tiny details fit into the clothing of the family was simply astounding. It wasn’t a big painting, but it still must have taken years to complete, what with all the folds of the clothing and the vast amount of embroidery and shimmering gems. No one’s skin was an even tone, the natural coloration and the lighting was taken into consideration, jeez, you could almost see the pores! And the flower the older sibling was holding even had a minuscule beetle hanging out on it, how cute was that?

But enough fawning over a painting, it was dinner time. I decided to bear my shame for the sake of my despairing stomach, opened the door, and saw a young man clad in a grey-blue bathrobe-looking thing. He bowed deep to me, his long ponytail falling over his shoulder. When he righted himself, he beamed at me, he was ecstatic to have me here. What a weirdo. And the blonde girl was also there, backed by a young woman with a blunt bob cut that suited her terribly, wearing the same bath-robe dress as the male servant. The blonde girl’s clothes were just as folk dress -inspired: a cream tunic and harem pants with bright red patterns and embroidery. Her wavy hair was gathered on a poofy ponytail on the side of her head. Her face was still eerie to look at, it really was like a photograph of mine from a few years back. Well, her eyes were a bit rounder and wider, and overall her face was a bit plumper, but you get the idea.

She said something to the servants, and they left to mind their own business. Then the blonde girl waved at me to follow her, all the way down back to the ground floor dining room, where the huge table was set. I hadn’t paid much attention to it the last time, but it was covered with several tablecloths – but not in any semblance of order. Just every imaginable colour and a lot of different sizes, some of them plain, some striped, some embroidered, just thrown on it. And okay, they had smoothed out any wrinkles, but not straightened anything. It was a mess of a dining table.

The strict woman and the foppish man were already sat, at the end as one might have imagined. The blonde girl drew out a chair for me from the side closest to them, and herself settled down next to me. Scullery maids, or whatever they’re called these days, started bringing out plates and cutlery, and I was glad to see that at least these people ate with forks and knives, I wasn’t that good with chopsticks and never even knew about other types of utensils. I was examining the lacy border of the porcelain plates when a young boy burst in out of breath, apologizing for being late or something, I would imagine, and sat down next to his sister.

Sitting in the middle of a family felt so wrong, why was my seat set here? I mean, it would be rude to change seats now but I wouldn’t have minded being sat somewhere else from the start.

There was some small talk, and valiant but truly useless attempts to include me. The younger brother looked at me warily from behind his sister, and was the only quiet one. He said a few words every now and then, and most of them were “Oona”, which seemed to be the girl’s name. The oldest sibling was nowhere to be seen, possibly a rebellious teen or out of town for now? Probably wouldn’t be too far-fetched to assume she’d been sent to a boarding school, rich families like doing that.

The grub arrived on splendid silver trays, and interestingly enough comprised mostly of greens. Like 90% vegetables. There was some bread thrown  in there, and a cute little dessert pie, but only one roasted bird of some sort, too small to be chicken. Not sparrow-sized either. I followed the family’s example and piled on the greens, and only took a few slices of the bird. My watch said it was only four thirty, where were the filet mignons? I would have understood a light meal on the evening, but it wasn’t even getting dark yet. I think. The dining room seemed to be in the middle of the manor, all the windows were outside in the hallway, and my seat didn’t give me a view of one. Maybe my watch was broken.

Dinner was a noisier deal than the pre-dinner, oddly enough, but quickly finished. As the servants started collecting the dishes, the mum led everyone else to a study on the other side of the manor. The design of the place was pretty odd – the rooms were in the middle of the building, with the corridor running around them, so the study the family and I ended up in had no windows. There was one tall but thin bookshelf, and a large table surrounded by plush chairs. An old woman and a middle-aged man were sitting at the table with a small pile of books set to the side. They got up to bow to the family. The dad started talking with them quietly, while the mum finally decided it was time for introductions. Why those couldn’t be done at the dinner table was beyond me, but whatever. At least I could finally call them by name instead of position.

The mum was Alehleh. Easy enough name, kinda pretty, if a bit child-like. The dad was Soonee, you’d think also easy, but then he looked ready to cry when he heard me try it out. I really sucked at pronunciation, it seemed. The girl was Ritideea, not Oona, and her name was pretty difficult to say, but unlike her dad, she wasn’t bothered by the butchering of her name. The R rolled, and the stressing seemed to change every time she said it. But she recognized her name when I said it, so good enough. And finally the son, Keenahty. He was super shy, around ten years old, and looked as much like his father as Ritideea looked like her mother.

When I introduced myself as Mimi, they all smiled patiently but also shook their heads, and Soonee corrected me with “Rititeea”. I didn’t get what that was about, and had no theories. Soonee was crestfallen. Alehleh, apparently the head of the family, ceased the nonsense by calling the two strangers to action.

First went the old woman – she introduced herself as Kaorahtsil, and proceeded to speak. I didn’t understand a word, predictably. I wasn’t exactly on Earth anymore. But she changed languages two more times, expecting something, and I couldn’t explain she wouldn’t find a language I spoke a mere few light years away. So I just said “Hi, my name is Mimi, Earth is probably in another section of the universe.” Then she admitted to the family that mine was a language she didn’t speak.

Then went the man, Sessan. He didn’t try languages, but maps. That small pile of books was atlases. I leafed through all of them, already knowing England wouldn’t be in any of them, but wanting to please him anyway. Everyone was very surprised by this development. They had never met anyone who came from so far away. They couldn’t wrap their heads around how I got here. Sessan in particular insisted I must have come by ship, over and over, and it was only after I shook my head for the fifth time that I realized… I had zero clue what he was saying, but still knew he meant ships. Wow, wasn’t that weird? Was this that translation spell I vaguely remembered screaming about earlier? Pretty crude, not very effective, but a start!

Hey wow, would you look at that, I had gone from thinking this was a town of larpers to 100 per cent believing in magic. What the hell.

But the spell didn’t work both ways. I could somewhat understand the man, but he couldn’t understand me at all. Oh, he tried, again and again, first asking about ships, then flying(even though it was plain on his face he thought that was a laughable option), then he gave up travel altogether and instead tried to find out something, anything, about my home country. He picked up on the one-way nature his spell, frustrated and confused, but no one could explain it. After this he stopped the spell, leaving me completely out of the loop as the family held council. It took nearly forty minutes for them to come up with a possible solution, and none of them liked it. Ritideea was the one who came up with the idea, but despite that the only one who hated it even more was Soonee. And after a good half hour of arguing, they reached an agreement. And thank God for that, it was exhausting to just sit there as an outsider.

After that, the servant boy from earlier took me to my room, pulled a salty snack pastry out of hammer space and hovered behind me as I ate. What a creep. I had to shoo him out quite forcibly. A little later a tailor who liked grumbling to himself came in(allowing the servant to charge back in) and took more measures of me than I had imagined existed. He made a lot of notes, talked with the servant who smiled goofy the whole time, and grumbled all the way to himself. Then he took every single measurement again before getting the hell out. I didn’t need this crap at quarter past eight.

Ritideea knocked on the door, and wanted to give me a tour of the manor. Why not, it was a bit early to turn in. And the place was quite nice, it never hurts to look at pretty things.

The third floor was mostly bedrooms – a ridiculous amount of bedrooms. Each of the three wings had about five bedrooms, and their shared bathrooms. A few had their own, I supposed those were guest rooms. Starting from the base of the first wing, first there was a guest room, then a study, then from the corner Alehleh and Soonee’s bedroom, which shared its bathroom with Keenahty’s room. Then was my guest room, the bathroom, and Ritideea. After her was a store room, containing a veritable mountain of painting supplies and canvases of several sizes. There were even a few spare easels. Another sparse guest room ended that wall, after which the third wing started. Most of the rooms in the wings seemed to be in use, but none of their occupants were present. Gigantic manor and so few residents. Was it holiday season or something?

We went down the smaller set of stairs by the third wing, and came out to a hallway. This one also contained two nicer guest rooms, and a locked door to the third wing. What was more private than the residents’ bedrooms? Ritideea’d had no problem letting me peek in those. The other two wings had one guest room and one dormitory each. In the main part of the manor, behind the two guest rooms, was a library – my favourite room in the manor so far. Jam-packed full of simple shelves, themselves bursting at the seams from all kinds of books, like a struggling public library. It felt like home. Much better than the ridiculously huge, mostly empty ballroom. It was wood-pannelled of course, for that extra oomph of bragging. The grandest piano I had ever witnessed stood near the outer wall, and the loo was so fancy pooping in one would have felt like defacing an artwork. The living room with a big, round coffee table surrounded by plush pillows was a bit more to my tastes, but the balcony on the front of the manor offered the most boring view ever: a paved courtyard, the steel gate, and the streets and houses behind it. What sucked even more was that the larger balcony at the back of the manor was barely any better. These people just did not understand gardens. There was a pretty cool fountain at the centre of the courtyard, but as you might have expected, it was paved. There were some minor bushes hugging the walls, but nothing beyond that.

This time we used the bigger staircase, which brought us in front of the dining room. The ground floor had the weirdest floor plan ever – the rooms were in the center, while the corridor ran on the outside. The rooms got shitty lighting. Even the most open room, the drawing room at the end and adjacent to the dining room, with its three open archways had to rely on electricity. The kitchen didn’t even have a door to the corridor, the air must’ve gotten stuffy there quick. Ritideea let me take a look from the door in dining room corner, but since there were people working, I didn’t want to disturb them. We continued on, turned the corner, did not go to the third wing, and came to a Roman bath. The water was faintly pink, warm, and smelled of flowers. I might take a dip there sometime, even if it was clearly meant for the important guests. Some night when I couldn’t fall asleep, then.

The rest of the rooms on the main part of the mansion were the same kind of spartan meeting rooms that the interpretor and the mage had interrogated me in. The first wing had four very lavish guest rooms, both with their own ridiculously fancy bathrooms bigger than my bedroom, obviously for the important important guests. The second wing was much the same, except it also had an extensive jewellery display. Several kilos of precious stones and pearls, just sitting there. Hate to think how much money they wasted on the jewellery they did wear.

Come to think of it, the family dressed oddly humbly. Even Alehleh, the most high class and rich-bitch of them all, wore comparatively simple dresses and necklaces. She could have gone for ermine capes and ball gowns, worn fist-sized diamonds on both ears and a whole family of rubies on her neck, but she didn’t.  Sure, she did exude wealth, but you wouldn’t have guessed this much wealth. They were also pretty chummy with the servants, not dismissive and snobbish. Did that mean the actual masters of the manor were away right now? One of the lived-in rooms on the second floor had to her parents’, maybe they were the snobs. Though I didn’t remember any of the bedrooms being especially snobby. But who else but a tried and true snob builds a home like this to their family? Thus, someone had to be a snob, and I suspected Alehleh’s parents.

There was a lot of ground to cover in the manor, so I was sufficiently tuckered out once the tour finished. I couldn’t find a pair of pyjamas in the drawer, but I didn’t feel comfortable sleeping in my underwear in a strange place, so I just took off my bra and left the button-up on. It wasn’t the most comfortable shirt to sleep in, but I still did fall asleep pretty fast.

#VRbutnotlikethat #Mimi #Ritidia #Alele #Suni #Kinati #Asahana #Kika #wiptale #linssioriginals #original fiction

[heliosfinance]

Inverting the Money Problem

In the controversial movie, The Social Network, which supposedly portrayed Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook journey, Sean Parker’s character famously quipped –

“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”

It’s probably the most favourite problem that majority of the individuals in the world are trying figure out i.e., how to get rich?

So let’s investigate this problem by using Charlie Munger’s most cherished mental model i.e., inverting the problems to solve them.

One of the ways to invert the question of “How to Get Rich?” is to ask, “Is getting rich worth it?”

Before you decide to skip this article thinking that it’s another one of those “money can’t buy happiness” rant, just stick with me for few more minutes and I promise that you won’t regret it.

In fact, this is a good opportunity to wear our curiosity hats and look at the hardships that tag along with large sums of money. Now given the fact that the author, yours truly, isn’t super rich (money wise at least) and likely never will be, is it justified for him to comment on the problems of the rich?

In my defence, all I have to say is that I never let my lack of first-hand experience with a topic stop me from speculating on it.

Maybe, like the proverbial fox and his sour grapes, I am deluding myself with a story that I never wanted what I will never be able to get. Or maybe I belong to the camp of those cash-poor intellectual types who want to prove to the world that rich people secretly live a miserable life.

I am not ruling out any of these possibilities where my subconscious is playing a game.

Yet, it’s plausible that I am trying to squint your eyes a bit to help you discover a different perspective – a view from the other side of the fence where the grass seems to be greener and wealthier.

This article is inspired by a very interesting discussion thread on Quora. The participants in this thread include some well known, successful and rich people including folks like Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail. So it’s safe to assume that it’s not a pure thought experiment imagined by an armchair philosopher.

Although the Quora thread had a lot of abstract and philosophical arguments, I have distilled out the ones which appealed the most to the rational side of my brain.

Put simply, the question to explore here is this – How does an incremental money above a certain amount can actually subtract from your happiness through the additional hassle it creates?

Not every item that I am going to list here is a problem for every rich person, but some, even many, of these are possibilities. And let me remind you again that these are not my personal beliefs and I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, but they made me smile while thinking about them. Consider them my musings on the topic of unintended consequences of extreme wealth.

On a serious note, if you ever plan to amass wealth and fame, you should at least know what’s in store for you.

The first category of challenge of being rich is related to the social interactions i.e., your equation with people around you.

Your Right to Crib is Revoked

Now that you’re rich (and people know that you’re rich), you are not allowed to complain about anything. Ever.

Since you’ve just achieved the financial nirvana, you’re no longer allowed to have any human needs or frustrations in the public eye.

Yet, you are still a human being. Aren’t you? But most people aren’t going to treat you like one.

This may not really be that big a problem because, when you’re rich, you probably won’t care much as to what people think about you.

But here’s the catch.

When you find yourself struggling with a nasty problem, which obviously can’t be solved by throwing money at (remember you’re rich), and you’re desperately seeking help from your family and friends – your folks won’t believe that you’re helpless.

You’re pretty much on your own.

Unrealistic Expectations

Your relationship with your friends and family will change. It may not necessarily turn sour but it will surely get harder to deal with. Not because of money but because of change in expectations.

Since you’re the superman now and have large resources at your disposal, it’s expected out of you to rescue everyone.

You may be expected, not by all but by some family and friends, to dole out interest-free – give it and forget it – loans. And it doesn’t stop there. You aren’t allowed to get away by giving modest gifts on special occasions.

“C’mon man! You’re a millionaire. Don’t be cheap. Shell out some moolah for an expensive gift.”

Hidden Intentions

Wealth makes you more discoverable unless you put a lot of efforts to lay low. Which means it attracts attention from all sorts of people – genuine and not so genuine.

Genuine people may want to learn from your wisdom, experience and skill but there would be many whose sole interest would be to shake loose some money from your pockets.

Point is that most people now want something out of you, and it can be harder to figure out whether someone is being nice to you because they like you, or they are being nice to you because of your money. This is especially true of strangers who know more about your wealth than about you as a human being.

A typical solution for this problem is to create a screen to ensure that only genuine people get access to you. But this screen will invariably filter out some good people also. Which means you’ll still be interacting with a mix of people, it’s just that the scale of this problem will be bigger because you’re rich.

A side effect of this strategy is that it can often cause wealthy people to cut themselves off from the larger society, out of fear that they will be exploited by selfish motives. As a result, the richness and variety in your social circle may become very limited.

Whoever said, “It’s lonely at the top,” probably was referring to this effect.

The next category of challenge of being super rich is related to your relationship with yourself i.e., the psychological effects of getting rich.

Amplification Effect

Wealth removes constraints, which means becoming wealthy has the potential to mess with you. But it depends on what type of person you are. In general, it makes people more of whatever they already were.

For example, if someone has a serious alcohol or other drug addiction, wealth could be fatal for him. On the other hand, if a person is generous, polite, and resourceful, money will amplify those qualities in his or her behaviour.

David Foster Wallace said, “Happy people are often still happy when they become millionaires. Unhappy people are often still unhappy when they become millionaires.”

Freedom Brings Dilemma

Money can give you the freedom to focus on the things that truly matter to you. But that comes with the assumption that you already know what truly matters to you.

Most people work hard and money keeps them focused on earning more, doing the career-ladder thing and working towards their goals, but when they finally attain that money-goal, it gives birth to weird issues.

The void created by financial freedom could be a difficult one to fill. Which is why many supposedly rich people continue to work hard at earning more money because it keeps them busy.

The most profound effect that becoming financially successful can have on someone is the task of answering the question – “I wonder what am I supposed to do next?”

Ironically, the ability to pursue activities that you find meaningful and bring you happiness does not depend on getting rich. Albeit insufficiency of funds calls for some resourcefulness on your part to continue pursuing your passion.

Many people subscribe to the belief along the lines of Charlie Sheen’s in the movie Wall Street, when he’s asked what he’s going to do when he makes his millions and he says, “I’m going to get a motorcycle and ride across China.” Rolf Potts,  author of Vagabonding, points out that you could clean toilets in the US and save enough money to ride a motorcycle across China. 

Today, you don’t need a million dollars to travel the world.

The Paradox of Desire

Now, this could appear as an entirely unanticipated downside of getting rich.

Being rich is better than not being rich, but it’s not nearly as good as you imagine it is.

All of the things you want to buy one day, are only valuable to you because you cannot afford them yet (or have to work really hard to acquire them). Maybe you have your eyes set on the new Ferrari but once you know you can easily afford it, it just doesn’t mean as much to you anymore.

It’s basic human nature that the things which are just out of reach seem desirable. The moment an object of desire becomes easily available to you, its charm loses grip on you. This is especially true for things which are your wants, not needs.

Realising that your dreams aren’t always what they were cracked up to be can bring in severe disappointment. Following which a boredom could quickly set in.

Diminishing Marginal Utility

Human mind is not good at evaluating things in absolute. It needs a benchmark or something to compare with to assess the value of something. Using this insight let’s see what The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility says –

For each additional unit of a good the added satisfaction, you receive from consuming the good, decreases.

Yes, the first month you drive the Audi or eat in an expensive restaurant, you really enjoy it. But then you quickly get used to it. And then you are looking towards the next thing, the next level up. The problem is that you have bumped up your expectations, and everything below that level doesn’t entice you anymore.

Calvin and The Law of Diminishing Returns: Source: Bill Watterson Ben Cosnocha, in his deeply thoughtful article The Goldilocks Theory of Being Rich, writes –

[As super rich] You’ll fly private jets, yes. You’ll eat nice food all the time, you’ll have aides and servants who will save you time. Problem is, we quickly adapt to these material comforts—what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill.” The private jet doesn’t feel so special the 20th time you’re on it.

A research was done on two sets of people. First group consisted of those who experienced a personal tragedy like losing a loved one or even becoming physically handicapped (losing one or more limbs) which diminished their ability to function normally. The second group of people consisted of those who suddenly became rich.

The research revealed that in both the groups, people returned to their base level of happiness, one year after the fortunate/unfortunate events.

Jason Zweig, in his wonderful book Your Money and Your Brain, summarized all the above points brilliantly. He writes –

Becoming a lottery winner takes only an instant; being one lasts the rest of your life. People who actually win the lottery are often shocked by the aftermath of their lucky draw. There are plenty of thrills from suddenly making a fortune, just as the winners expected. But there are less obvious and less predictable consequences, too. The phone rings off the hook with calls from crooks and desperately friendly acquaintances. Ensconced in your new mansion, you no longer see your old neighbors as often; instead, you are besieged by long-lost relatives who should have stayed lost. Everyone you ever rubbed the wrong way files a lawsuit against you. Quit your job, and you miss your friends and go crazy with boredom; keep it, and your co-workers all seem to hate you or hit you up for money. It becomes hard to tell who your real friends are, so you spend more time alone. At home, you bicker constantly with your spouse over what to do with the money.

Conclusion

I read somewhere, “Money doesn’t necessarily wipe out all your troubles. It just changes the kind of problems that life presents you. The only people who are completely trouble free are buried in the cemetery.”

If one is not happy now, chances are that he won’t be happy even when he is rich. I am sure there are many super rich people who are happy and maintain a healthy inner peace.

I suspect that it’s nice to be super rich but maybe not for the reasons many of us think.

Kevin Kelly, who is known as the most interesting man in the world, in his interview with Tim Ferriss, reminded –

Great wealth, extreme wealth, is definitely overrated. There’s nothing that you can really do with it that you can’t do with a lot of less money. The things that you want to do, the things that will make you content, the things that will satisfy you, the things that will bring you meaning … is usually better than having money.

…if you have a lot of time or a lot of money, it’s always better to have a lot of time to do something. If you have a choice between having a lot of friends or a lot of money, you definitely want to have a lot of friends.

…the technological progress that we’re having is actually diminishing the role of money. And I want to be clear that I’m talking about money beyond the amount that you need to survive. So in a certain sense, most people see money as a means to get these other things, but there are other routes to these other things that are deeper and more constant and more durable and more powerful. Money is a very small, one-dimensional thing, that if you focus on that, it kind of comes and goes. And if you … whatever it is that you’re trying to attain, you go to it more directly through other means, you’ll probably wind up with a more powerful experience or whatever it is that you’re after. And it’ll be deeper, more renewable, than coming at it with money.

Let me repeat, the intention in this post is not to pass judgement but to look at a situation from a different vantage point. And my goal for compiling these thoughts was more with an intention of exploration than preaching.

If you have any interesting dimensions to add to this line of thought, feel free to leave your thought in the Comments section of this post.

Also Read – Is getting rich worth it?

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