#That's totally not a overshadowed corpse or anything...

[genko-yoru]

Day 22: Cryptid AU

I know Danny Phantom is a kid's show, but I like the idea that Danny's world is filled with hidden, extremely terrifying spooks. That the ghosts we see in the show are more like modern-day ghosts, but there are older, more powerful ancient ones lurking around. Like all our folklore and Cryptid legends actually exist as creepy ghosts. ( and why the GIW was founded in the first place)

This is a scene from Day 26's fic, which is also today's prompt. I sooo wanted to draw the actual ghost's form because it's creepier- but I haven't got to that chapter yet, so that'll have to wait till Friday.

You can read the spooky fic Here.

#dannymay2023 #danny phantom #fanart #digital art #danny fenton #cryptid #fanfiction #That's totally not a overshadowed corpse or anything...

[koukaaa-descent]

thinkinh about the world building im trying to hit indigo&monsoon's world with .. collection of little lore snippets.

totally fun facts about my ocs

Monsoon dies in order to carry a star onto Gordion. The star itself is contained inside of its ribcage, quite literally burning it from the inside out. In order to get it there, Indigo fed the star to Monsoon.

The star in question is used to 'wish' Gordion out of existence.

In my interpretation of lore, Gordion is the name of a universe-devouring beast (also using the moniker 'Death'). Same appearance as it as ingame. As in; huge planet.

Sigurd has both a lesser and greater role. He is one out of a few others who have left logs & things that one can find. At the end of his logs, he instead expresses a wish to see Death's death. (Regarding Gordion; Gordion is meant to be widely regarded as death itself, here.)

The company creates 'employees' via piecing together usually mindless drones out of the corpses of entities, humans, and other odd things. A great majority are simply brainwashed into believing that they are human, despite anything that may prove otherwise. Since the company itself is rather lackluster in enforcing the brainwashing, there have been numerous cases wherein entire crews have gone into it entirely conscious of themselves. It is an incredibly flawed process.

Think of the company as a hive & the employees the worker bees. They are an attempt to lessen the universe's slow death in the maw of Gordion, for those who no longer exist to have a greater amount of time to search for a solution that, too, does not exist anymore. There was an entire workforce dedicated to slowing & ceasing the consumption. They are all dead and gone, and with their disappearance leaving behind objects that eventually became known as Comedy/Tragedy masks. Their purpose is unknown, as there are no traces of information regarding them and their creation left.

Indigo dies nearly immediately after Monsoon does. Monsoon disintegrates in his arms.

The only reason that Indigo does not immediately disintegrate beneath the star's power is because of his biological makeup. To keep it simple, he's closer to a bracken & a corpse than he is to a living being; he lacks several organs crucial to life and is mostly patchwork on the inside. Thus, he also burns like wood. Wet wood. It doesn't make it any less painful, though.

Nutcrackers, coil heads, and Masks/Masked are regarded as human creations. This does include the parasites within the nutcrackers. This does have 'lore' relevance.

Indigo is an unfinished product. He basically got sent through the creation process as if it were a blender. Thus, while he does not entirely believe himself human or retain the loyalty to the company, he does retain a need for purpose. That need tends to overshadow everything else. It can consume him, in a way, just as Gordion has consumed everything else.

If given more time, Monsoon could have become indigo's 'purpose'. I dare to say even a week more spent oblivious to Gordion's existence would have let him fixate entirely upon Monsoon. The unfortunate thing is that that's not how it happens, nor could Indigo change his purpose after he became fixated on the first initial purpose. It would be similar to taking away the thing a robot is meant to do; sure, it could do other things, but never will it retain the same ease, passion & desire to do those things as it did its initial thing.

Many species have been behaviorally changed in accordance with the story. For example; Nutcrackers actively guard specific areas within the facility/mansion. Their patrols are consistent rather than erratic, and rather than play their music only during confrontation, they continuously play the music at a low volume. (Something about war machines that sing). They are semi-sentient and intelligent enough to recognize humanoids and discern whether or not said humanoids are intruders upon the area they guard. A nutcracker will still shoot to kill if you are within its guarded area, but it will resort to warning shots if you are either nearby or bordering its area. They also recognize that the mansion itself is something to be protected but are designated to specific spots and, therefore, do not stray outside of those spots.

Coil-heads were once people (of many species) who had been eroded into what they are now. I will not be clarifying much on this. However; I dare say that attempting to trap and contain a star is a deeply terrible idea, even if it is in the attempts to erase a greater evil. Do you think a star cares for the guilts and grievances of such small beings? Of course not.

Indigo's skeletal structure is more 'animal' than it is human. In fact, he is actually missing some bones in some places, as there was either no need for them or the species used to form those parts simply didn't have bone. He can look directly behind him by looking directly upward and opening his mouth. (Image below.)

It looks about as odd as you'd expect.

His neck situation is kind of frightening. He is missing most of the vertebrae in his spine above the ribs, and it's mostly just cartilage and... stuff, going on in there. You could probably just reach in and take a wad of suspicious flesh out, bare handed. That's how loose and tender everything is in there.

Monsoon is very sensitive to heat and light, as one would expect a plant based creature to be. I suppose this makes the impact of its willing act of holding a star all the more important; even without sentience, without understanding, its faith in Indigo was so awfully strong that perhaps the agony meant nothing to it.

Monsoon's anatomy is odd, as it does not actually have bones. 80% of its body is simply solid fibers or material resembling cartilage. Its skull is the most solid thing inside of its body, as it is roughly 75% bone.

#oc lore #oc monsoon #oc indigo #loredropping about my oc's world is drving me nuts #i will continue this lter i tjink #reminder to self elaborate regarding the creation & purpose of the Masks #lethal company #lethal company oc #refinng this latwe i wrote all of this on the verge of sleep

[thevindicativevordan]

I really like this blog, your analysis and ideas for Superman and his characters was great to read! I hope you don't mind, may I ask what do you think about Hank Henshaw? Do you have any ideas for him?

I think he needs to be radically changed in order to keep working, because as of right now his entire character is "hey remember Reign of the Supermen? That was cool amirite?"

Henshaw was created in an era where the editorial mandate was "the only survivor of Krypton is Clark", and that meant Superman didn't have an "evil Superman" counterpart Rogue in the Post Crisis era the way Pre Crisis did. So the writers had to come up with ways to get around that, some of the workarounds I liked such as Bizarro becoming a clone that Lex makes, and some of which were just so goddamn stupid like the Pocket Universe. But all of the Post Crisis evil Superman counterparts got killed off relatively quickly, including both Bizzaro and Zod after they were used.

Henshaw though was in one of the most popular Superman stories of all time, and he was Jurgens baby, so he got to stick around. But he was a character who was created to serve a purpose in that one specific story, and outside of that what does he have to offer? Disguising himself as Clark and setting out to ruin Superman's reputation since Doomsday robbed him of killing Clark was a great motivation, but once Clark returns and exposes him as a fraud, Henshaw just doesn't really have the character potential to justify keeping him around as is.

Henshaw wants to kill Superman. Great! That sums up the complete motivations of 90% of the rest of Superman's Rogues (which is in part why they aren't on the same level as Batman or Spider-Man's). Henshaw is really strong and tough and can hurt Superman with brute force. Again, a lot of Superman Rogues can do that too. Henshaw is an "evil Superman" design wise. Putting aside the multiple evil Supermen we get these days, most of them just variants on "real" Superman gone bad, Zod and Bizarro are better known and more popular. Henshaw can manipulate technology and rebuild himself from anything. Brainiac, Livewire, and Metallo also do that. Henshaw can't die? Well he's eclipsed in that regard by Doomsday.

He's overshadowed in the aspects that most people focus on by multiple other villains, with only his ties to Reign keeping him relevant which is why Jurgens always calls back to that storyline with him. His motivation is just generic revenge which doesn't work because if he has no goal other than killing Superman, all he can do is fail. His name "Cyborg Superman" is dumb because it only works within the context of Reign when people thought he might be the legit Superman reborn. It's just not a particular inspired name for him to keep using anymore.

If it sounds like I'm just ragging on him I totally am. He just doesn't work for me in his current role as 90s nostalgia. But I do have some ideas for how he could be reworked to be better utilized in the modern day.

What I Would Do With Hank Henshaw

So first we need to change a lot about him while still working with what came before. Right off the bat I'm having Henshaw ditch the "Cyborg Superman" name and form, and use that all too brief "data form" he had in Action Comics Rebirth.

That looks cool! Now we need to address Hank's biggest problem: what does he want exactly beyond just killing Superman? What are some goals he can feasibly achieve that make him a compelling threat? They've tried giving him a new motive a couple times, such as making him a nihilist who only wants to die in Sinestro Corps War, but ultimately he needs a reason to keep existing. If he just wants death he can track Doomsday down or throw himself into a black hole. I've got two roads to take Henshaw down, one that's pretty simple but justifies keeping him around as a threat and allows him the ability to maybe "win", the other more complex.

The simple route is that we merge Henshaw with the Metaleks. These guys were an army of xenoforming robots who were sent out by some unknown alien race to transform planets into something that's more to that race's liking.

Their creators are long dead, but the Metaleks continue the task they were built for. Henshaw catches wind of them, decides they'd make for an excellent army to do his bidding in the same way the Manhunters were, and attempts to seize control. Instead he gets absorbed into their collective hive mind, his hatred infecting them until it warps their programming, his malevolent mind guiding them and lending them his intellect. Now the Metaleks are a swarm of locusts, out to cleanse the entire galaxy of all life, with Henshaw as the Metalmind behind it all (yes that is his new name, shut up I'm not getting paid for this). With Clark going cosmic, this makes for a good way to keep the two foes fighting each other. Henshaw doesn't have enough control to make the Metaleks focus solely on killing Superman, but his upgrades and coordination means the Metaleks are a much greater threat to other planets than they were previously. Henshaw can now potentially "win" by cleansing a world of life, something that is going to hurt Clark bad given Clark's entire background, and because anywhere not named Earth gets wrecked all the time.

That's the simplistic route. Upgrades Henshaw as a threat while reducing his motives to "kill everything". The more complex route leans into Henshaw's origins as a Reed Richards expy, by basing him off that other evil Reed Richards:

Jurgens had Superman imprison Henshaw within a fake life with his family and friends who died in the accident that gave him powers. I'd have that fake life knaw at Henshaw until ultimately he realizes that his feud with Superman is a pointless waste of time, and what he really wants is his family back and his status as a respected leader restored. But he's a mass murderer and there's no redemption for him at this point, so Henshaw embarks on a quest to build his own little world for him to rule over.

First he seizes control of the Metaleks as in above, but in this route he manages to bring them under his control, christening himself their Metalmind. With an army of terraforming robots on his side, Henshaw begins terraforming his own world. He also retrieves the corpses of his family who died from their mutations and begins working on resurrecting them. At this stage you can have Henshaw in any number of schemes to acquire the resources or tech he needs to build his own kingdom, or to acquire the bodies.

At the second stage once he's got what he needs, he'll start building. First he revives his family (while ensuring that they will be loyal to him above all else). Then he starts creating his "children":

He's been around long enough to know either Superman or someone else will come after him eventually, and Hank Henshaw is prepared. He creates a race of beings who view him as both father and god, who will give him the adoration he craves and showcase his intellect. At this stage you can have stories involving Henshaw where he dispatches his "children" on missions to prove their worth and test their capabilities. Clark has to find and stop these agents while also trying to figure out where they're coming from.

The final stage is when Henshaw is confident that his forces are powerful enough to take on Superman, and then he does the unthinkable. He petitions the United Planets to join as a member. To Clark's horror they accept, and as the head of a planet Henshaw now enjoys intergalactic diplomatic immunity. His creations are now seeded inside the United Planets itself, and Henshaw can put his efforts wherever he wants. He can run twisted science experiments with his family, be the fist of the United Planets alongside Zod, helping the organization grow in ways Superman would abhor, he can try to kill Superman whenever Clark attempts to block his schemes, with his ability to still wrangle concessions from the UP as a way to keep him from just losing all the time. He can be Clark's Dr. Doom in other words, that long term opponent who is always working an angle, and has an entire nation/world behind him he rules as a god.

To me that's a much more interesting angle than him talking about that one time back in the 90s when he was cool anyway.

#superman #cyborg superman #dc comics #hank henshaw

[jean-does-not-have-a-horseface]

Before Dawn ~ Pt2~

Hii!! This is part two of my new series. I hope every one of you like it, I'll be tagging the story with it's title so it's easier to find.

Warnings: mentions of attempted murder

@wakatosji I figured I should tag you but if you don't want me to tag you its alright, I don't want to be annoying ❤️

Comfort tea

"Ew?" First goes Lynne. Her face is contorted with a puzzled expression as she lifts her eyebrow to Petra's sudden requiry.

"Well, yeah, kinda" Nanaba shoots a glare to Nifa, as if judging her for her choice of words before she simply brushes the question with waving her hand. Seconding that, as if she knows what you were about to say a few moments before she sets her blue set of eyes on you. A gulp finds its way down your throat as her cold gaze pierces through your body and it's not long until you get the message. The girls' voices echo through your head as if you're listening from afar for you're drunk in your own thoughts.

For instant, you hate the fact that the first time you try to willing open up about a new feeling, you're overshadowed. The urgent need to spill your guts on the subject becomes more prominent by every single minute passing and yet you force yourself to keep it in. You're not about to physically burst your guts like a corpse under the hot summertime sun because of your emotions, so you should be fine if you collect your impatient self.

"Shut up Petra, I'm serious." A playful chuckle leaves Lynne's mouth.

Maybe, it's the fact that Nanaba knows you too well that lifts some weight off of you for now when at the same time she's stopping you from saying something you'll regret. And thus, you bite your lip and reluctantly decide to ignore the throbbing of your own thoughts.

"He handpicked me for his squad!"

:readmore:

Oddly enough you don't feel any jealousy creeping in your system by hearing Petra's words thanks to Nanaba putting you in your place. Even though, you're sadly reminisced of various scenes of your past where you've been in this very position after your mother has barked at you to stay in place you utter not a single word. Your head almost always automatically goes blank so you're not taken aback by your lack of reaction. Whatever Petra says you're sure going to overthink later, when sleep won't be willing to take you for the night.

"Captain really needs someone else in his squad right? Everyone has five members and he has four. (Y/n) why are you even in Mike's team, you could fill this blank right?"

"It's a special operations squad Nifa you dummy! He handpicked everyone!" Petra's adorable bunny smile is directed towards Nifa this time who gives her a cute puckered smirk of approval in return. It's almost too precious of an interaction for you to miss.

"Mike handpicked (y/n), right after me." Nanaba's voice bores casually into conversation while she takes her eyes away from her plate and lands them onto you. "So, what were you about to say?"

"Uhm" Your mind trails back to today's most random event "Henning imitated Tomas after I said good morning and scream 'nice tits (y/n)'. I totally gave him the finger." This simple choice of words helps avoid any unnecessary drama in your girls group. At least you had some dignity not to throw hands over a man anyways.

_____

"Hange stop squishing my cheeks, I can't sit with the higher ups."

"But you did last week!"

"You dragged me!"

Hange's response is only a silent hmf followed by her ever so memorable toothy mischievous grin. She begins taking steps towards you that only increase as one foot follows the other. Despite not being in a playful mood, you decide that running seems to be the best thing to do in the moment to get yourself away from her. If she catches you, she's dragging you with her once again.

Your heart is erratically pounding in your chest as you sprint down the many hallways of the headquarters, out of breath and dizzied by hunger. You reluctantly pause for a second to catch your breath amidst waiting for the inevitable to happen. Devil sure works hard but Hange and her determination work harder, you're reminded of that everyday, you tell yourself, not only when her hand lands onto your shoulder. You mentally punch yourself in the throat for not keeping your body in a better shape.

"I am not letting you starve again, let's go!"

All while during dinner you converse with Mike and Erwin on shortage of hygienic and sanitary products, something that concerns the commander excessively. Soldiers' access to basic necessities is always a top priority in the Scouting Region and commanders are to always tend to their needs. Erwin is and should be no different.

Levi seems to have his mind in your conversation and ignores Hange entirely while she's speaking some Titan nonsense to him. His eyes often widen when Erwin expresses concern on lack of soap and talks about his predictions on its practical annihilation, but it's only what you utter next that grabs his attention enough for him to turn his head in your direction.

"We can make soap. We don't have to keep putting orders for it to be made. I was taught to make soap at home and I'm sure many other girls know."

Silence spreads fast as if a traveling shadow on sunset on the table after you speak. Erwin's batting his eyes in yours, Mike too and Levi looks at you with that usual unamused expression of his. How come they had never thought about that?

Well probably because it wasn't always that there was such shortage in almost fucking everything.

"My office after dinner, cadet." Levi speaks, breaking the silence with his stern sounding voice. "There's something I need to discuss with you."

__

"Yes sir!" You reply in a heartbeat with a small bow of your head.

Not long after, the distinguishable tone of the curfew bell fills the air, making most soldiers get up from their seats instantly. Levi sits still in his spot as his fellow higher ups bid him with farewells and goodnights to which he replies with casual, nonchalant hums. Upon seeing most of the plebe has left he orders you to stand up and follow him.

He can't help but take a few vague looks of you with the corner of his left eye and he wonders if you do the same from time to time as you march behind him. It doesn't take long for the two of you to reach his quarters, but when you do he takes a stand to unlock the door before proceeding to let you in, him following asuit behind you.

"Here have a seat." He offers unsure of where to point to except for the dark colored loveseat near his desk. "I wanted to know how you even took the knife out of my hands." He watches as your facial expression turns into something along the lines of an almost undetectable disgust and sorrow, your brows forrow and your lips pucker. You couldn't hide it even if you wanted to and maybe the fact that he provoked such reaction from you bit suddenly on his gut and kept chewing on it.

"Just because you were a thug, doesn't mean you're the only one who gets to handle a knife you know." You finally answer, scratching and scrunching your nose in uneasiness. Almost mechanically, the next question comes out of his mouth without remorse.

"Oi what does a brat like you want to do with a knife. You don't strike me as the thug type. You're too uptight for that." A few moments later his gut is going to make him regret ever asking you in the first place.

"Uptight? Ugh, why would you even care, I bet your mother didn't try to murder you in your sleep or with any chance she could."

He grits his teeth inside his mouth and immediately closes his eyes in horror. That horrible feeling of his gut being chewed forms into bits and pieces of wild inner comburst within his organs. Though he cannot phantom what you have been through, he is able of making vivid potential images in his mind that will probably contribute to another sleepless night.

He turns to face you in hopes of being able to mouth anything that could cut through the uneasy tension he's created but at the sight of you he's overthrown. That heart breaking sob that leaves your lips, those thick streams of tears down your cheeks, he won't make it if he keeps looking at you in this condition, all he wants to do is scream, for he's witnessed enough cruelty and damage in this world and it seems that it's never enough. Human bloodlust is never enough.

"I'm s-sorry. I just. Why did I say that?" You faintly utter with uncertainty masking your shaky voice.

"It's fine, as long as you get over it." He definitely despises himself because of that line because in the name of heaven and hell how do you simply ask someone to get over such trauma without sounding like an entitled asshole. The motions that his eyes catch in the dim light of his office are skinny, hard but fragile at the same time and they all hint to you wanting to leave, presumably due to the lack of consolation on his part. He just determined he'll do better. You helped Isabel back on the day so he lets you this one.

"I-I'll excu-"

"Do you have any prefered beverages?"

"M-milk tea" you quietly huff. He's not quite sure whether a drink will ease your boiling pain, but at least he's hoping it'll soothe your current state.

His heart is officially aching with agony and pain that refuses to mellow even a notch, even if he begs to any profoundly selfclaimed wall God. Ever since a year ago he's been living within the heart of crime and downgrade garbage, respected for his violent ways and easily feared for his inhuman skills. In that dirty, shit smelling drain, overpopulated with humans or rats -or probably both, he can't possible distinguish them- who piss in any corner they find, he thought he'd seen any gruesome thing a man can do, but that rough melancholy in your eyes convinces him he's so casually wrong.

"I apologise for bringing such subject up, (y/n), here's your tea. Though due to shortages we don't have any milk." You matter him a word of gratitude as he sets the cup next to you. He'll never let you know, but he notices you're surprised by his actions even in that state you're in.

"She's dead. My mother. She died last month and-" you trail off your words "I guess it's more of me being emotionally chained to my abuser." Levi just pops his head in his palms and sighs deeply at the sound of that but never comes to find the right line up his textureless thoughts should take for him to form a sentence.

"Kinda looks like piss don't you think?"

"Huh?" If he could hear your words correctly and not partially because of the turbulence in his mind he would have thought of an instant smart come back.

"The tea, it looks like piss." At the sound, he barely manages to hold in a chuckle.

He knows yet he manages to only scoff in response. "I had to tremendously water it down, be mindful." He opts to suggest always in that bland tone of his.

"Do other people except from us drink it like that?"

"I desperately want to doubt that anyone cares to provide for your golden shower enthusiasm, so no. This is some of my personal stash."

The two of you enjoy your comfort tea in sheer silence. Levi can't take his eyes off of you, not that he's trying to, but he tries to convince himself it's only because you've verbally shared your trauma with him. In return, for some of his, he didn't have to share, you were there to see Isabel's head laying on the blood stained grass with Farlans upper body accompanying it. He wants to speak up, but his mouth is seldomly never in a place to voice out the exact thoughts in his head, so even if he tells you about Kenny and his childhood you never get to hear it. In addition, he's not the one to try and overshadow somebody who speaks about themselves by sharing his experience so the comfortable silence that has sprawled in the whole of his office is more than enough.

______

Here's the deal. Henning likes Lynne, Lynne likes Tomas, Tomas likes you and you like Captain Levi, not that hard to grasp right? As long as no one neglects their soldier duties everything is fine.

It's a plain sunny Sunday in the Survey Corps headquarters. Mike is on a day out, perhaps strolling around the city of Trost in chance of finding any merchant to provide for soldiers necessities, while you're assigned with cleaning his office.

Levi is standing at the doorframe, back pressed upon it with his hands crossed over his chest as he supervises the six of you go. He promised the blond squad leader to keep an eye on his team seeing that things would get heated up pretty easily nowadays, ending up in heated arguments most of the time as well.

Every time his eyes meet yours you avert your gaze away, specifically to the floor you're set on scrubbing until your hands bleed. He can't help but notice it. Small little movements of awkwardness from his part make you tense even if you're oblivious to his awareness of the fact.

"Tch" He tries his best to shake you off the territory you're occupying in his mind. It's not right for him to endulge in something frowned upon after having just received a position as a high rank. That's not his purpose here. Emotions should never color your judgement in battlefield.

"I'm taking a break." You call to the others as you stand from your kneeling position. You pat your hands dry on the sides of your hips and you hope Levi doesn't notice, because you won't see the end of this.

"I'm coming with you! Wait for me." Tomas announces and you respond a soft 'sure' along with a warm smile. "Ah God, I'm so thirsty!" The two of you walk past Levi at the door, but you never spare him a look, in fact you're too invested in your small talk with Tomas to even ask for permission to excuse yourselves.

"Love birds, huh Nanaba?" Gelgar elbows the blonde with puckered his lips, a ridiculous expression plastered on his face. "I wonder how long until we get the good news-"

"Gelgar just shut up."

"What Lynne? Poor Tomas might finally get his chance with the kid."

Lynne loves you and your group of friends deeply. She and Nanaba are probably the big sisters of the group. They've stuck with you, Nifa and Petra through thick and thin, through bloodshed and tragedy, so she's not mad at you for having caught Tomas' attention. With your melancholic youthful face, (h/c) hair that blows softly in the wind, with the way you pucker your lips when you're determined or angry. She's probably mad at herself for never acting on that cadet trainee crush she had on Tomas. She sets her mind on recovering quickly from it.

Despite opening her mouth to speak, she notices it's not her voice that's heard, but in fact it's a deeper, almost nasal one.

"Set to work, tch, don't waste your energy on royal teenage drama."

"Sir! Yessir!"

Irritated, Levi bites the inside of his cheek, without ever changing the look in his eyes. You were kind and behaved well mannered to everyone, that was all. That was was led you to act nice to Isabel and what led her to speak highly of you to him. Nothing more. Nothing less.

 

"It's alright! Get up" with your eyes shut, you smile at the redhead who's sprawled across the grass while holding out your hand to her. Isabel smiles back and she proceeds to take your hand, taking another chance to spare with you again.

For a few nights she won't shut up about you. How you don't look down on her like other girls do, how you iron her clothes just like her big bro does.

"I'm going to miss her when were free of here, Farlan!" The red head takes a bite of her bread and munches softly on it. Before she even has a chance to speak another word she feels a hand ruffle her hair but notices that Levi's hands are concentrated on the simple task of feeding food in his mouth. She spares you a heart warming smile and wave but you fail to reciprocate as your friends gesture you to sit.

"You're gonna make me miss her too and I don't even know her." Farlan says and places a hand at the top of his head, scratching a soft spot.

"Ahh, big bro! Can we kidnap her!"

"We're not kidnapping anyone. We need to focus on our mission alright Isabel?"

Isabel shushes at this but doesn't fail to shoot you a glare. And this time you respond with a wave. Whatever you lack in word choosing skills you make up for kind acts. She wishes they kidnap you, she needs a female friend anyways.

Hey you there, yes you, thanks for taking time and reading this, I appreciate it more than I can express. If you want to see me write something for you make sure to leave a request in my askbox! Any comments on how you're enjoying the story are also very appreciated. Much love until next time 💕

#levi ackerman x reader #snk x reader #aot x reader #levi #levi x reader #shingeki no kyojin #levi ackerman #attack on titan #snk #aot #fluff #angst #drama #rivaille #rivaille ackerman #before dawn #hange zoe #erwin smith #mike zacharias #nanaba

[hotel-japanifornia]

Like, I love Miles Edgeworth, but he's overshadowing literally everyone else. Like he's not overrated since he actual holds up to his love, but damn, there are so many fics on him and his story from the og trilogy only. Miles has grown up beyond it and I love him for it since it makes him three dimensional.

Ok, you wanna know what greatly amuses me about you mentioning how people only pay attention to him and his story from the og trilogy only?

Edgeworth plays an important role in 4 of the 5 cases in the original game (3 of 4 if you really hate RFTA and want to exclude it from your mind. Feel free to do so but you’ll be hella frustrated when you play AJ. Unless you liked Ema.)

He only appears in 1 of the four cases in JFA and is mentioned in 2 and cameos in 1. If you don’t count the cameo, which I do, that only adds up to 1 case. Comparatively a small role, but he has a big impact on Franziska’s motivations and is the reason she wants to crush Phoenix so badly. Points to Takumi for not doing a generic “avenge my father” plot. Respect him (and Franziska) for that. He does play an extremely important role in the one case he appears in, so don’t think I’m trying to downplay him or anything.

Edgeworth is majorly absent in the third game. He prosecutes in only one case and that’s his annoying 20 year old self. He comes back in the fifth case to fill in for the defense and does play a hand in Iris and Dahlia switching places. Had it not been for that earthquake, he wouldn’t have freaked out and lost sight of Iris in the first place. He doesn’t do a whole lot else after that though. 

I say this because if you think about it, Edgeworth is only in 7 of the original 14 cases if you count physical appearances only (6 out of 13 in the OG trilogy). While I won’t argue that Edgeworth isn’t important in the cases he’s in because he is totally, I will argue that it does feel odd how the focus is on him so much of the time.

And the thing is, I can see how people would argue how Edgeworth is the central character in the first game. Edgeworth is the character we see grow throughout the course of the game. We learn the most about him than any other character and the events of the game revolve around him (Turnabout Goodbyes, the DL-6 incident, etc) more than other characters besides Maya who shares a connection with him as they both lost parents to the DL-6 incident (how have those two not had more interactions, honestly?) and loses her sister in the second case.

I would argue however, that Edgeworth isn’t the character at the center of the second game although we do see him mentioned in conversations by Franziska and Phoenix. I don’t know why people will acknowledge his “Miles Edgeworth chooses death” note but absolutely refuse to acknowledge how awful of a move that was. The reason being is that it was cryptically worded and anybody reading it would think he killed himself which Franziska and Phoenix did, while Gumshoe was the only one who knew what really happened. I know what the note actually meant (i.e. the death of the prosecutor Edgeworth once was) but still, it was poorly worded. 

In actuality, Phoenix is the protagonist and central character of the second game. He’s the one who goes through the most growth as we see him face a huge moral dilemma in the fourth case where he has to choose between saving his friend or sending a truly guilty man to prison. It’s absolutely interesting to see him in conflict with the character he was up to that point (someone who believed his client was genuinely innocent) and it’s something I think needs to happen more often. By that I mean, defending truly guilty defendants. While I don’t think they should be like Matt Engarde necessarily, it would be interesting to see more truly guilty defendants. (I know there’s one in DGS but not everyone has played that one so I won’t spoil.)

As for the third game, it’s pretty obvious who the main protagonist in that game is. It’s the Fey Clan obviously. Specifically, we learn more about Mia Fey, Phoenix’s mentor, through getting to play as her during the tutorial case and the other tutorial case both of which are short but help us get to know Phoenix’s wise and calm mentor. We see her during her first two cases and even get to witness her taking down Dahlia Hawthorne in an amazingly cool manner (by asking her to prove her innocence by taking Phoenix’s cold medicine which she poisoned). We also see her during her first case which was mentioned in Turnabout Memories and was said to traumatize her so badly that she felt like she was never going to step into court again. Since her opponent, Bratworth, had never lost a case before Turnabout Sisters, we know that the case won’t end well. But even so, it’s what actually happens that makes the case so gutwrenching. Seeing Terry Fawles kill himself on the stand to protect his former girlfriend who was the true killer makes for a saddening end. Regardless of what you think of him as a character, seeing Mia so distraught over not being able to prevent Fawles’ death tugs at your heartstrings. 

What’s even worse is that six months later, she loses her boyfriend when he gets poisoned by Dahlia. Which does raise an interesting question: did she see the case against Wright and take it because she saw Dahlia mentioned in the case files and thought she might be connected to it? It’s likely, seeing as she brought the article talking about Diego’s poisoning with her but who knows? Either way, seeing her so determined to take Dahlia down that she’s willing to have her badge revoked is sincerely cool to watch.

And even in the present day case that Dahlia appears in, Bridge to the Turnabout, Mia doesn’t stop being rivals with Dahlia. When Maya channels Mia to ask her what she should do after Dahlia attacks her, Mia advises her to lock herself up in the Sacred Cavern in the Inner Temple and channel Dahlia in order to protect herself. It’s an extremely risky move on Mia’s part and had Dahlia not been so stubborn in seeing Maya’s corpse for herself without considering that she might be channeling her, Maya could have died of hypothermia in there (which isn’t something I had considered until the last year or so). Still, it works out in the end and Iris and Dahlia-in-Maya’s-body switch places during the second investigation period. Mia then proceeds to exorcise Dahlia out of Maya’s body with Phoenix’s help:

Dahlia: …Grr…Mmm…Nnnn… Grrr… Ahh! M… M… Mia F… F… Fey Mia Fey! Mia Fey! MIA FEEEEY! You… You… spinster!! I was supposed to kill Maya Fey like I swore I would! And if only you had gotten this spiky-haired jerk the guilty verdict… …I wouldn’t have been hanged to death!

Mia: …… True.

Dahlia: …!

Mia: But I think you finally understand, Dahlia Hawthorne. …You will never defeat me.

Dahlia: Wh-What…!? What did you say!?

Mia: Whether you’re alive, dead, or somewhere in between, you will never defeat me. As long as I’m around, you’re destined to lose for all of eternity!

Dahlia: Grrr… Grrrr… Grrrrr…

Phoenix: …I remember what you said earlier in the trial. You said there was no way we could punish you… …because you were already dead.

Dahlia: What about it!?

Phoenix: Then you said… “Even when the body dies, the spirit, the ego, it lives on… forever.”

Mia: …That’s very true, Dahlia. And that’s exactly the punishment you’ll never be able to escape from.

Dahlia: …!

Mia: For all of eternity, you’ll have to remain as Dahlia Hawthorne. A miserable, pathetic, weak creature who can never win at anything… And for you, there is no escape from that. No hope of freedom. Since the day you were executed… …the narrow bridge that once stretched out in front of you has burnt to a crisp!

This causes Dahlia to freak out and pop out of Maya’s body with a extremely loud scream. It’s extremely chilling and awesome at the same time. 

One thing that stands out though, is that defeating Dahlia never stops being Mia’s personal victory as Godot mentions later on.

Godot: The woman who had spiked my scalding hot coffee… Dahlia Hawthorne! Ha…! Good ol’ Mia. She didn’t let me down. She got her revenge before she checked out. In the end… There wasn’t anyone waiting for me when I woke up.

In a way, the way that Mia Fey and Diego Armando go about taking revenge against Dahlia serves an interesting contrast to each other. Mia, although angry at Dahlia for sure, never let her anger consume her when trying to take her revenge on Dahlia. The only thing that Mia sought out to do was to make sure that she received justice for her crimes and upon finally getting Dahlia convicted of murder, moved on with her life. Mia even took Phoenix under her wing, despite his past connection to Dahlia. Even though he really had nothing to do with her crimes and even was supposed to be one of her victims, you can’t help but admire her for that.

On the other hand, Diego Armando never let his hatred of Dahlia Hawthorne go. Even after waking up from his coma and realizing that Mia had gotten revenge for him and got her sentenced to death. He was so blinded by hatred that upon encountering her at the Inner Temple Garden, he stabbed her with the cane sword, killing Misty Fey in the process. And unlike Mia, Diego hated Phoenix and even blamed him for Mia’s death. There’s also a line that suggests that he knew that Phoenix was the one that inadvertently helped Dahlia hide the bottle necklace containing the poison:

Godot: …… I never liked you. Six years ago… …you helped the woman who put me to sleep by hiding her bottle of poison. 

It’s an interesting line, indeed, and implies that Diego’s hatred of Phoenix went beyond Mia’s murder. Because Phoenix “hid” the bottle of poison, Dahlia was never able to be caught for Diego’s poisoning and thus escaped justice. In summary, Mia was able to move on with her life after Dahlia got caught while Diego wasn’t which ended up being his downfall.

I can also see how some people might make a case for Maya going through development of her own throughout Trials and Tribulations. During the second and third case, we see her express doubts about her own abilities as a spirit medium and it’s implied that she’s still shaken up by the murder in Kurain Village to the point that she hasn’t even returned to the village in a while:

Maya: Well, I’m kind of taking a break… I’m having a bit of trouble right now, you know?

Phoenix: (Last year’s incident must still be on her mind… I haven’t seen Maya train at all since then. I think Mia said it’s because Maya’s “at a loss these days”…)

It’s an interesting line, and is definitely one that people seem to overlook while playing through the game. Despite her lack of training however, Maya is still able to channel Mia during the last portion of the Stolen Turnabout. The conversation the two of them have reveals that Maya is going through a dilemma currently.

Mia: I’m just joking, Phoenix. Don’t take everything so seriously. But on the other hand, Maya… She seems kind of lost these days.

Phoenix: You mean about becoming the Master of the Kurain Channeling School?

Mia: Becoming the Master… means saying goodbye to our mother.

Phoenix: You mean Misty Fey…?

Mia: …Watch over her, will you Phoenix?

One thing I find interesting though, is that Maya’s dilemma about becoming the Master isn’t overly prevalent in dialogue. Sure it’s a part of what she goes through over the course of the game but it doesn’t take a huge focus. It’s certainly unique. Here’s one such example in Recipe for Turnabout 

Armstrong: You ‘ave la perfect face for a waitress, you know.

Maya: Um, thanks. I guess if things don’t work out someday, then maybe I’ll be back.

Phoenix: (What things? Is she talking about her being a spirit medium…?)

I honestly appreciate it for it’s subtlety; little character moments like this one, is what adds to the replay value of the games. True, you can just breeze through them, but taking the time to present random things to people can also reveal tons of interesting dialogue that can reveal more about the characters than if you were to do a regular playthrough and do what you need to do to progress further through the case.

All of this culminates in the last case when Maya goes to Hazakura Temple with Pearl and Phoenix to do some training which as mentioned before, she hasn’t really done much of since the Kurain Channeling incident. And unfortunately for her, it ends in disaster with her nearly being murdered by the ghost of her cousin, Dahlia and also witnessing Godot stab the spirit to death which kills her mother in the process.

When we first see Maya in the last trial portion of Bridge to the Turnabout, she’s more traumatized than we’ve ever seen her. And through this line, we get to see how she feels about the Kurain Channeling Technique in her current situation:

Maya: … I… I’m frightened. The Fey clan… I don’t want any more to do with it.

Now, let’s think about what this line means. Maya has dealt with a horrible amount of tragedy in her young life due to her heritage. She lost her mother, her sister left the village partly because she didn’t want to feud with Maya over the title of Master; her aunt plotted to have her convicted for murder and later tried to murder her through her beloved cousin, Pearl; and the one time that she decides to start training again, another tragedy occurs. Her mother was killed right in front of her by a man who was blinded by hatred towards the spirit possessing her body. It’s hard not to see why Maya would not want anything to do with her heritage after all the grief it caused her, so then, why does Maya decide to inherit the title of Master anyway?

Well, here’s the deal: The Fey Clan is extremely screwed up and has caused many of its members grief over the past two years. It’s no secret that the branch family has plotted against the main family before and has done so throughout its history:

Bikini: There is only one heir to the title of “Master” at any time, and it’s usually the eldest. That child becomes the new Master of Kurain, and her daughters, the main family. All other mediums become branch family members, with no hope of controlling the clan. That’s why nothing has changed throughout the history of the clan… Branch families always have and always will plot to erase those of the main family line.

However, Pearl doesn’t hold any sort of resentment towards Maya despite her being the heir to the title of Master. In fact, Pearl adores Maya and vice versa. The only reason she ever went with Morgan’s plan was because she thought by “It’s for the good of the Fey Clan” that her mother meant that her plan would benefit Maya and Pearl both. Maya similarly doesn’t hold any resentment towards Pearl  when she tries to blame herself for the death of Maya’s mother.

If you think about it, the fact that Maya stays and decides to become Master could also considered to be not only a result of her strength but a result of her deciding to fix the screwed up legacy of the Fey clan. As two of the people hurt most by the rivalry between the main family and the branch family, Maya and Pearl could work together to fix their family’s screwed up background and restore the Fey clan to its former glory. That’s the way I see it anyway.

Sorry for my long rant there, the Fey clan is very interesting to me. Honestly though, I’d argue that Edgeworth is more like a tritagonist. He’s extremely important at first but he becomes relatively less important over the course of the trilogy to the point that he’s only ever in one case in his present day form in the last part.

Maya is more or less the deutragonist of the games. She’s in 10 of the 14 cases in the trilogy and 6 of those cases (1-2, 1-4, 2-2, 2-4, 3-2, and 3-5) have her involved majorly in the plot whether it be her being accused of murder, dealing with her and her family history, or kidnapped (in which we get to control her too!). While she isn’t involved in the plots of 1-3 or 2-3 directly, she is the person who convinces Phoenix to take both cases and she even helps Phoenix out in the latter by raising the question of where Max’s bust is located which helps him catch Acro as the true murderer.

However, despite Maya’s overall importance to the trilogy, what stops her from being the main protagonist like Phoenix is that we don’t get to go into her head very often. We see Phoenix react to the situations around him, we get to see his thoughts while dealing with crazy witnesses and when he’s having a difficult time trying to prove something in court. Through this, we get to know Phoenix and in a sense, feel like we can connect with him. Even Edgeworth gets to be played during the first investigation and trial day of Bridge to the Turnabout where like Phoenix, we get to go inside his head and see how he thinks and how he feels about what’s going on around him.

With Maya, the time that we do get to control her in 2-4 is extremely short and doesn’t exactly allow us to get into her head. That’s not a point against her however as we do see her react to what’s going on when we aren’t in control of her. It makes sense that it would be extremely short though, as Maya is currently kidnapped when we do control her and the areas you can have her go aren’t very numerous. 

Still as much as I argue that Phoenix fits the central character and protagonist mold more than Edgeworth and Maya do, I believe that all three characters are important in their own unique ways.

#ace attorney #maya fey #phoenix wright #miles edgeworth #mia fey #diego armando #godot #god this got long #ask

[fcarher]

A DEEP-DIVE INTO YUNA’S HISTORY WITH NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

yuna has a hard time with positive emotions; they do not feel as natural as negative ones, that’s why you’ll often see her not responding to positivity, apart from compliments regarding her looks. she knows what she is & what she isn’t & is set on these beliefs, thus sees statements like “you’re so nice.”, “thank you for helping me. “ & more as blatant mockery. she can’t seem to grasp why SUDDENLY people were nice to her; she sees herself as a strong & capable fighter, not a friend, lover or wife. she sees herself as a calculated woman; not one that would get out of their way to help somebody. but why is that so ? what brought her to think that way ? there are a lot of instances that have solidified these beliefs but significant events, the origins of such thinking, have been FOUR in total. ( this is VERY long but i’d really love it for you guys to just skim through everything, at last. under the read more, you’ll find four stories/events within yuna’s past.  )

HER FAMILY 

i think i have already established the fact that yuna’s father was far from a good parent & while her biological mother never had a real moment within her life, there are other people, seen as family, who have made her life even harder. for once, she had an elder biological sister who was born 4 years before her. her name was myra & she was the opposite of her sister; she was very polite towards her elders, cooked well & cleaned the house, could sew any garment one desired; a perfect wife through the eyes of the villagers; a desired woman. & yet, it was always yuna who was talked about; even if it was negative attention; she got it. myra got nothing. & of course, there was more that let jealousy poison her completely; yunaeisha’s looks. she was beautiful, so beautiful that everyone, even if they didn’t like her & wanted her gone, still admired her for her appearance. 

next to her; she felt overshadowed. yuna’s eyes were a beautiful warm brown whilst hers were dark, almost black; her hair was unruly, dry & an ashen brown whilst yuna’s was black, yet sparkled within the sun as if each strand was infused with diamonds. it was always yuna who would take the spotlight; be it people commenting on her long silken hair or how bad she behaved; no one had time to spare for myra. & over the years, as both of them got older, myra let her frustration become aggression towards her sister, who was seemingly indifferent to everything; she cut her hair, stabbed her skin, so it would become scarred & not as beautiful anymore; punched her face, so it would become deformed; ANYTHING would she do, so that her sister, for once, would not be the sister everyone talked about it. but nothing worked; everything healed perfectly & yuna didn’t seem to care. & when myra noticed; she became even angrier; more aggressive. she talked her down; everytime yuna would smile or laugh, even for one second; she would belittle her, mock her laugh & expression, make her feel little. & it seemed like those WORDS hurt her more than her punches could ever. & thus, she put everything down what yuna liked; 

she got a new dress ? well, she looked like a clown in it. & oh, i heard some boys talking about how much weight you gained, it sure seems like that. her favorite color was pink ? you look ridiculous. you’re not even a real girl, are you ? i mean, i saw you; you were a faceless monster. she wanted to learn more about her mother ? weren’t you the reason why she killed herself ? i wouldn’t question it if you were to cause even more suicides. nobody can be happy around you. 

& while, yuna was a demon; not quite human; she was still a child, impressionable with toxicity around her. & she took everything to heart because somewhere, deep within her; there was love for myra. & that’s why she thought; yes, she was right. i am just that. 

HER FIRST COMRADES

yuna doesn’t talk about this, these moments haunt her the most; sometime after leaving russia, she found herself in the middle of germany; a small village build around a river. it seemed nice, the villagers were friendly; seemingly, the world “evil” had been completely wiped out of their dictionary. well, so it seemed. the female was taken in by a nice lady, the keeper of a hotel for travelers & of course, yuna had never thought that she would stay there for more than a week or so. & soon, more travelers came to visit, all seemingly ignoring yuna while she was preparing herself to leave; she came to this village basically on bare foot with nothing else to call hers; there was no way she could have survived like this for far too long, she needed humans; their life; their energy.  & there, she would meet a small group of ex-mercenaries; frank braun, ludwig aue & augusta aue. they were quite known here as it seemed; everyone loved them, gave them free food, free alcohol. yuna wanted to take part in this,too, because she knew, she was capable enough. 

& as days passed; the four of them would become great friends. frank braun was a skilled archer; he could seemingly kill everything, no matter how fast they were. he had been in love with a girl called anneliese, a lady in waiting for a king in the north & his childhood friend; it was bittersweet because he knew, they could never be happy together; she was tied to the palace, he was tied to the streets. ludwig & augusta were siblings, orphans, whose parents have died when their hometown was set on fire; nobody really knew who the arsonist was, though, there had been many theories; an exiled nobleman, a widow angry at the village, a dragon or even a demon.  both, brother & sister, had been trained in swordsmanship by a man, an exiled knight, while staying at the orphanage. even though, a woman was not allowed to wield a sword against another man, the knight, eren bräuer, did not care & trained them equally. yuna showcased her own abilities, though, withheld the information about her supernatural powers from them; she loved them dearly, thought of them as family & didn’t want to lose them. the reason why she thought that she could potentially lose them for not being human ? they despised everything supernatural. all of them, seemingly, had their negative experiences with demons, elves, werewolves & more. she was scared & thus, only showed her inhumane strength which all of them admired.

after a month; the three of them took yunaeisha in as their fourth member & thus, traveled further south, leaving the small village behind them. frank trained her in archery & soon, the female developed her own technique & style when it came to shooting arrows. the female even began experimenting with knives & took a liking to throw them even more; it fascinated frank & he asked her to train him as well. augusta & ludwig also practiced with yuna, giving her swordsmanship capabilities the finishing touches to perfect them. within a few months; all of them became better versions of themselves in terms of power & skill. 

however, the peace, the laughter, the happiness; it shouldn’t last for so long. after a year of traveling, the small group were tasked with a mission that seemed like any other mission; nothing out of the ordinary. the jewelry of a young maiden was stolen by a middle-aged woman. & through a very detailed description of the criminal; she was easy to be found. nevertheless; there was a certain uneasiness within yuna as they approached her hunched over form within the middle of a clearing; augusta & ludwig were to accompany her while frank hid within the trees to eliminate her from a distance if needed. with each step the female took; she saw the forest in flames; corpses of her friend laying to her feet; her hand bloody; a vision ? it was a trap ! but it was too late for her to react; the sky above them darkened & within seconds had the middle-aged woman changed her appearance to a tall young woman with black hair, chopped off irregularly. a eye-patch; a familiar scent; no. the surprise had been on both sides. it was darrsha. 

malicious intent turned to surprise & then, at least for the large woman, happiness. yuna’s companions didn’t understand anything; this demon was happy ? the brute took a step towards the back as darrsha approached her; augusta & ludwig were both ready to attack but the demon ignored them; she rather run towards their newest member & gave her a hug ? 

how wundervoll, yuna ! you’ve lured these hunters right into my trap. but she didn’t, did she ? something told her that this whole mission seemed wrong but she didn’t tell anyone. but what does this mean, yuna ? are you a traitor ? are you a demon ? she is my sister. a demon. a traitor. 

& then; a bloodbath ensued. she had to fight against her own kin; fight against her friends; against her family ? within the last seconds of the fight; she stood before a decision; who would you kill ? your sister ? your loved ones ? your family ? they were all the same; she couldn’t. & thus, her sister did it. she killed both augusta & ludwig only inches before her. 

to this day, she can still feel it on her skin; the warm blood that splattered onto her face; the hatred within their eyes; the sadness; everything. you have gotten weak, yuna. never will i have to see you like this again; strengthen your heart, don’t become weak for these humans. 

were these her words or those of her sister ? she doesn’t remember. she hopes frank escaped safely. she isn’t sure. but she hopes. 

THE VALLEY OF THE GODDESS

some years after the events within south-germany; yuna was once again alone. she left for greece this time; a beautiful country as it seemed. however, before doing so, she changed her appearance; a tall, slender figure with tanned skin; big ocean eyes & long, blonde curly hair that would reach her calves. everything of her former identity was erased; she could start life anew. however, her preparations would not suffice; she was still yunaeisha adynora, brood of lilith even with a new appearance. 

this time, she would avoid any sort of contact with humans. she settled down in a valley where the sun never set; the moon engulfed this place with so much light that it seemed like the sun. it was beautiful; not one human hand had ever touched these parts of the land. she became one with the plants, the flowers, the trees; she studied them, learned from them, gave & took. the animals were not afraid of her; as time passed, they became her companions; they crowded her whenever she was awake, loving her warmth. deers would rest with her; birds would sit upon arms & locks of golden hair. her clothing was reduced by a white loose dress; nothing special. & while she was happy, she also grew weak; there were no humans to feast on. the only vital energy she could harvest was from her own nightmares; it was too little. & thus, she had to visit the town nearby; she had to be careful not to get caught. 

with that, every night that would come, the female escaped the valley & would visit the people while they slept. with her other-worldly looks, she would appear like a deity within their chambers; a deity that needed their sexual energy to survive. & while, yuna herself, never spoke to be a goddess, the town’s people perceived her as such; gifted with euphoria & erotic energy when they slept with her. soon; the word would spread that this town was under the blessing of a demi-goddess. they would build a small shrine to cherish yuna within her new form, claiming that she was the child of himeros (son of aphrodite, god of sexual desire) & named her PHILE ( trans. to love ). & whilst, she would never speak to them; they loved her dearly. 

every night would the town relinquish in the erotic energy the “goddess” provided & sleep with their partner to sacrifice their sexual desire to phile. yunaeisha, as her other identity, would grow stronger & stronger through that. however, as the blonde woman, as every night, would wander the streets something out of the ordinary happened; the town was set on fire. a monster; a demon ! it was attacking the town; & while the woman swore to never soften for humans; she felt the urge to protect them from this monster. 

this time; she didn’t knew the demon that dared to harm the people of this town; it was an amalgamation of terrified souls, having multiple human heads & yet, the body of a lion as it crawled around & set everything on fire. as she stepped forward; all the people cheered for her. she felt strong; she felt loved; she felt powerful. with ease had she created an invisible shield out of energy; summoning parts of broken houses with her telekinetic abilities, only to throw them at the monster. but as they screamed with joy; she could hear terror, pain & wailing. wait...it was coming from this monster! suddenly, she would stop her attacks, withdrawing her shield. everyone became terrified; screaming that the gods & goddesses had forsaken them.  she stepped closer; on barefoot; the loose white gown trailing after her. it was scared; it was a helpless soul. & as she touched its middle; leaning her forehead against his grey skin; she could understand it. 

the pain. the torture of this animal. it all seemed so familiar. tears would flow; she spoke to this being, a tortured soul but not of a human; it was a lion cursed with the souls of these humans who have tortured this poor animal to death. & for what ? the fur, the meat. it was disgusting. & as they screamed for her to kill the monster; she felt her soul rumble. she turned towards the town & screamed; it shattered everything in its path. her eyes were ridden of her blue irises; they shone like two stars. because while she posed as a demi-god, yuna forgot that, truly, she was also born from a goddess. the love for this poor creature had awakened it; her purifying powers. she hated this town; she hated the people; she hated everyone. how could they have betrayed her like that ? she could hear the thoughts they had while killing this poor soul; die ! die ! die ! die ! monster ! monster ! beast ! & she would let them feel the true power of such a beast. 

& the next morning; she was awoken by the smell of smoke; she laid within her white dress, though, her hair was once again black. she was back in the valley & next to her laid a white lion. she smiled & went back to sleep. 

HER FIRST LOVE

a hundred years later, perhaps even more, perhaps even less; the 1970s were a blessing, better than the 1870s, at least. no more wars to fight, as it seemed. the female decided to break free from her comfort zone & travel to another continent; asia & to be precise, japan. there, she would start working for a modeling agency. she was not crazy popular but a small celebrity, indeed; the opinions on her would differ into both extremes; some would love her & die for her & some hated her so much that they wanted her to die. however, the female didn’t care so much about that, she just wanted to have fun.  

on a cold day within july; a bad omen; her life would change. she was asked to model for a campaign that would promote the MMA fighters of japan; at first, yuna didn’t like the idea & turned it down. however, later agreed on it as the money she would get was raised. also, she found all of the males she would pose with quite attractive, therefore, it wouldn’t be such a bother. & yet, not one of them would speak to her on set; it didn’t upset her as much as she would let on to. & as everything was about to be wrapped up; the blonde one of them would walk up to her & speak with her in Japanese. yuna just looked at him quite perplexed, not understanding one word & asked in English what he was saying. oh, she wasn’t Japanese ! but your name..yuna. it’s actually yunaeisha.

he was quite embarrassed & the laughter of his mates would not aid him in any way; though, yuna found this quite cute, therefore, she would offer him a date to compensate for this little ordeal. he agreed in broken English; at least, it was understandable & quite cute. 

needless to say, one date turned to a couple hundred dates. shisui takeda, 26 years of age, a heartthrob within the MMA community. who would’ve thought that such a dorky personality would every become a couple with yunaeisha ? nobody, thus, quite the outrage ensued within gossip magazines & tabloids, belittling yuna & saying that she was not good for shisui. well, the whole relationship wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for shisui’s stubbornness; quite surprising, considering that the female never thought that there was a human who could match her within that trait. whenever there was an interviewer or paparazzi asking about his girlfriend, the male would speak highly of her, talking about future plans; having a big family. & while yuna was angry about his openness; she found it endearing. he was the first person that would openly praise & flaunt her to everyone. & he understood, that her harsh remarks & her teasing; they were substituting the “i love you” he never got. 

when he was in bruises, she kissed each & every one of them. when she awoke from a nightmare, he would hold her until she fell asleep again. when she told him everything; what she was, what she did; he still loved her. when he told her about his rough childhood; how his father died in a car-crash & his mother was always shunned for being the single parent for him, not wanting to marry again because she still loved his father, yuna smiled & kissed his tears away. they were happy within these five years; so happy that he wanted to propose to her, making her his forever. shisui knew that there would be another outrage, but he didn’t care. he just wanted to be with yuna. 

& on the night of their five-year-anniversary; they met within a fancy restaurant. yuna would once again complain that he was not wearing a suit & his hair was slicked back; she loved his natural hair much more & he loved his biker jacket with the matching leather pants much more. & as the desert drew near; shisui started to become nervous, suddenly starting to talk about how much he loved her & how beautiful she looked. yuna was confused & asked what was wrong. however, just before he was about to get down on one knee, his eyes saw a red spot on her forehead & he jumped in front of her, knowing what that was. 

blood. blood everywhere. screams. tears. pain. EVERYTHING came crashing down at once as shisui laid before her, blood pooling beneath him as his hand pushed against the wound. the bullet had entered his chest. so much blood. yuna panicked; she screamed for a doctor. she didn’t know what to do. her own blood. it didn’t work ! why ? why ? WHY ? a bullet engraved with bible phrases ? a demon hunter. yuna saw shisui’s face; it was wet. wait, was she crying ? but he only smiled. he knew what was coming. but she screamed again. she didn’t even notice how the hunter entered the restaurant; how he stared at her, pointing the gun at her. she couldn’t tear her eyes off shisui. he was everything. he was her past. he was her present. he was her future. i love you he said, coughing up blood, tears starting to form within his own eyes. he raised his arm; something sparkled between his fingers. a ring. oh no. oh no. no no no no no NO NO NO NO NO ! she felt the weight of this; he was going to die. she could feel it. it was too late & with his last breath; he asked her to marry him. 

                                  “ YOU IDIOT ! OF COURSE, I’LL MARRY YOU ! “

& he was gone; his soul, she couldn’t feel it anymore. she could only feel this rage. she was never allowed to love. the last thing she heard was the sound of the gun & the laughter of the hunter. it was all gone. you were alone again. happiness was not for you. never. 

#˗ ˋ † ʟᴏʀᴇ ﹕ does it haunt you any longer; the oldest of evil ! #( OKAY I SPENT 5 HOURS ON THIS OR SO ) #( its so fucking long ok ) #( basically four stories ) #( its all sad ) #( nothing positive ahashahshas ) #( 3.500 words & almost 20.000 characters ) #( fuck me ) #( nobody is going to read this right ? yup ) #ask to tag.

[tumblunni]

Misc thoughts of rambling development for my new yokai watch ocs family of hugs and sadness (blythe the Dimmy and amber the Gorgeous Ambassador)

* Amber was totally still Gorgeous Ambassador at heart even back when he was human. I feel like he probably dressed very plain and was very self concious for a long time, as well as also being poor as dirt so it wasnt really easy to be super fashion time. Perhaps the only way he was really able to be remotely flambouyant or pretty was just having a long ponytail that he was very proud of. It would have been easier to maintain a shorter hairstyle when you're struggling to even find somethibg to eat each day let alone a bath, but it just helped him hold on to a tiny bit of confidence. Even when he reincarnated as Gorgeous Ambassador he was still unconfident for a long time and it took all these centuries to fully embrace The Power Of Gorgeous. He was probably really shocked when he got his medal registered and heard his new yokai name, like uhh excuse me "must beautiful man who spreads beauty through the world with his smile" are you sure there hasnt been a mixup??? And nowadays he's become so happy with himself that he maybe dresses a little bit gaudy sometimes, but if you saw how he used to feel then you'd absolutely be cheering for him!

* he was probably worried that Blythe wouldn't recognise him when he finally managed to reunite with them, but i think the lil shadow ghost instantly knew it was their brother and ran straight into the biggest hug ever. "Im worried they'll think im all cringe and gaudy" NO UR LIL SIB IS IN AWE OF YOUR FASHION POWER AND HAPPY FOR YOUR CONFIDENCE

* I also think Amber would absolutely be proud of how much confidence Blythe has gained through travelling with the protagonist and co. Like "aaa the last time i saw you you were so tiny and shy!" "Yes, now i'm tall and shy!" "NUUUU STOP PUTTING YOURSELF DOWN"

* basically they are absolutely Shyness Fam, and Amber just approaches his anxieties differently with over-the-top fake boasting about his greatness instead of being honest about how bad he feels. So thats why itd be so heartwarming to see him genuinely making progress and genuinely seeing good parts of himself. ALL THANKS TO THE INTERNATIONAL GORGEOUSNESS ASSOCIATION OF THE AFTERLIFE, YES *cheesy makeover ads fly by in the background*

* Dimmy's fave food is rice balls not just cos ninja monster = rice balls, but cos for Blythe specifically it brings back happy memories of backstory ninja Amber in ye olden days packing lunches of love for his tiny friend. He was always broke in between finding bountys to hunt, so he was never able to cook anything too fancy, but those simple meals became associated with childhood in Blythe's heart. All the times this big strong human swordsman would have a moment of gentleness and offer his last bit of food to a useless little yokai like them. ("No!! You're a valued part of the team!! And growing children need this more than i do!! Besides, i'm so tough i don't need to eat." *stands up for a minute and blacks out*)

* Since this backstory took place before thee yokai watch was invented, you cant technically say Amber was Blythe's previous watchholder but like.. He totally was? Same formula of being a human you partner with and then go around fighting/befriending other yokai. I like to think that maybe before yokai medals became the latest trend and they set up the whole official regulated medal registration process, yokai would still give their human friends some sort of token of their friendship but it was just less organised. Like imbuing their soul energy into all sorts of shit like This Leaf I Found or One Shoe. Which could be used in the same way to summon them but obv was less conveinient, haha! I'm thinking maybe Blythe's bond object was just a neat rock, cos they were so young and didnt really own anything else to gift to this human. Like all they had was the coal from the hearth in the house they used to haunt, but thatd be too crumbly so they dug through to find the sturdiest and prettiest rock and Amber was like straigjt up crying from how touched this whole thing made him. I WILL TREASURE THIS PEBBLE MY TINY MONSTER CHILD...

* oh but just to rub salt in the wound i think he couldnt find it again when he woke up floating over his own burned corpse in the wreckage of his final fateful battle. There uhh..wasnt much of himself left, let alone anything he was holding. Itd kinda have to be that way cos if it worked like a yokai medal itd mean Amber could have instantly reunited with his friend and cut out all of these years of sad backstory, alas

* ok but imagine the cute and sweet emotionalness of then being able to swap medals when they see each other again, and have an actual magical guarantee of never losing their family ever again.

* I feel like Amber only initially agreed to join the Gorgeous Association because he wanted to get a job in the yokai world and save up to buy a decent house and decent level of income so that there would be a hapoy home waiting for his child whenever he finally found them. He didnt really believe that he had the potential to be a fashion icon, he just went along with it as an employment opportunity in his weird new ghost life. But OH NO, accidental self confidence!! (We are all very proud of him)

* oh and the Gorgeous Association doesnt work 100% identical to the anime version, i just like the anime's general concept. I feel like Gorgeous Ambassador is indeed a yokai species and not just a title, its less 'you were chosen by random lottery' and more 'you were chosen by destiny'...? Shy people who have potential to be fashion icons just tend to end up becoming the shy-people-with-potential-to-become-fashion-icons yokai, aka this. And the Gorgeous Association takes responsibility for finding all new Gorgeouses and training them to use their new powers instead of just staying in their shyness. Its more of a self help club? Oh and also the membership is full of other types of fashion yokai too, its not just Gorgeous Ambassadors. Just its only Gorgeous Ambassadors that get visited by the president as soon as they die and given a special invitation to join. So basically interpreting Gorgeous Ambassador as more 'this yokai is named that cos its powers are about encouraging people to be more confident aka introducing them to the world of fashion'. And less the idea that all Gorgeous Ambassadors used to be a different type of yokai and you can only become one by being picked by the club lottery. And also that its just a costume with no actual powers?? That was funny in the anime but i prefer if they actually could inspirit people and make them more confident and stuff.

* I FEEL LIKE IM EXPLAINING THIS BADLY, SORRY! Ok so uhh like yknow some clubs are all exclusive entry "you are not this thing til you join"? Like you cant be a country club member til you join the country club, and the sense of comeraderie there is just all being rich enough to pay for membership rather than having anything in common. But then there's stuff like lgbt groups or mental health support groups where youre all already the same thing and thats WHY you join the club. Anime version had Gorgeous Association be a country club and Gorgeous Ambassador be just a membership name rather than a real yokai form. Which, again, was really funny but i feel like it only works in a more gag focused series like the anime. Here i'm interpreting it that you can just be born in the species Gorgeous Ambassador, same as any other yokai like jibanyan or whatever, and it actually does have its own special powers and stuff. And its just that the Gorgeous Association sends out invites to any newborn yokai that have fashion related powers. So not all Gorgeous Ambassadors actually join the Gorgeous Association. Oh and Kageusuo is the actual yokai species name for those unaffiliated ones. The anime seemed to say that kageusuo was an unrelated new yokai that isnt in the games, that was just invented to have a form that Gorgeous Ambassador had before he became Gorgeous Ambassador. But i have Other Ideas

* i'll make it a new bullet point cos im getting all disorganized now aaaa

* ok so Kageusuo (or my fanmade eng dub name Shamshade) is Gorgeous Ambassador. Same thing. Same species. Kageusuo is a yokai personifying the idea of a fashionable beautiful person who never reached their potential in life due to social anxiety/bullying. Like an 'ugly duckling' story. Their default form is this shadowy looking depressed dude because their power is that they drain shadows from people, vampire style. This makes you 'less overshadowed", so you become more confident and people notice your unique style! But kageusuo cant use its powers on itself, so a lot of them stay in this shy form forever and just continue repeating the same overshadowed life they have as a human. The fabulous form that Gorgeous Ambassador has in the games is just simply the same yokai dressing differently- a kageusuo that managed to conquer its anxieties from its past life and take steps to embrace its true self! But theyre not actually any different in terms of powers, theyre still shadow vampires and their power to make people fabulous is just them eating your shadow. It was something they could already do before they became fabulous themself, now theyre just confident enough to match their powers, yknow? And also unrelatedly there's a club called Gorgeous Association that this particular kageusuo joined, which personally helped him in his journey of self confidence so he goes by the nickname Gorgeous Ambassador to advertise it. (Which is even more nicknamed into Amber cos he thinks it sounds cute)

* WHY ARE MY HEADCANONS SO OVERCOMPLICATED AAAaa

* anyway just imagine a vampire movie but its a supermodel lurching out of the shadows groaning "I VANT TO SUCK YOUR ANXIETY" and then when he bites you you become more confident. This is a Good Concept so i will somehow find a way to use it, dammit!! *b movie music* "OH NO THE MONSTER GOT TERRY" *terry suddenly wearing applebottom jeans*

* also imagine all of that but also the dude is a weird samurai being all "wow the wonders of the future" about thos applebottom jeans

* why do all my headcanons start as angst and end up as nonsense like this

#bunni plays yokai watch

[theeurekaproject]

Fracti Loca

As an Imperatrix, Acidalia should not have been afraid to go to any part of her own planet. She was their servant of state, their protector, their liberator—there was no justification for being scared to go near those she was fighting for.

As an ordinary human being, Acidalia was terrified.

It probably said something about Eleutheria that she was more confident waltzing into an alien starship and telling them that fine, sure, she’d help them, but she had to settle her own little war first, than she was wandering the Underground. Her own planet and its people were scarier than the Mira, and that unsettled her.

And Lyra… Lyra couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Acidalia had gotten involved with the Revolution earlier than that, but she also had much more of a general idea of what she was doing. The Eleutherian court was filled with contempt and lies and secret plots, and she knew well how to navigate the tangled web that was politics. She didn’t doubt Lyra’s intelligence, but she knew that Lyra didn’t have any of the experience she had, nor did any of the other girls. Athena, Carina, Cressida… they had no idea what they were doing. They’d never seen how ugly war could get. If they knew more about the Revolution, Acidalia doubted they would all be so eager to join.

Then again, what would happen to them if they didn’t? The planet had quickly descended into open war. They’d be dead if they didn’t pick a side.

Still, it felt wrong, somehow, to have people so young in a conflict so big.

Acidalia knew she was only a few years older than the girl she called young, but she didn’t quite feel young anymore. She certainly didn’t look like a teenage girl. Without the makeup and the regalia, she looked like a woman who’d been through too much. Her left wrist kept swelling and, from the pain, she could tell it was either sprained or broken. Those goddamn shards of glass were still biting into her foot, though the pain had gotten duller—or maybe she’d just stopped feeling it so badly. Everything hurt and she knew she should see a medic, but that was impossible right now. There was no time to stop, to take one breath, no time to do anything but keep soldiering on, because so many couldn’t. Because T couldn’t.

She was so close to the place where he died. His corpse was so near, and she wanted to recover it so badly, even though every last vestige of sanity in her body was screaming at her that this was a very bad idea. The soldiers had their traditions—they spaced bodies, so they could be among the stars, return to the elements they were created from. It could give Ace some closure—Ace, who broke Acidalia’s heart every time she thought of him. What had happened? Were his last memories of his best friend T running off with a quick goodbye, hoping he’d be back soon and knowing he probably wouldn’t? What was he thinking? He’d lost a brother just like she’d lost hers; he couldn’t have been remotely okay. She wasn’t okay, either, but she’d had years of political training to hide it.

And that’s what scared her most about the Underworld—that political training wouldn’t help her even slightly.

Everything about that place was so foreign to someone like her. Even the colors were unfamiliar. It took her over an hour to hunt down the only black thing she owned—the military uniform she was supposed to wear when she wanted to be be addressed as the commander in chief—and take all the colorful parts off, and even then it didn’t look right. With a helmet and a visor on, and her hair pulled back into a ponytail, Acidalia hoped she’d look enough like an ordinary person to pass for any other fleeing footman, but she’d never been able to take off the Imperial crown before—at least, in a metaphorical sense. How did normal people even talk to each other? Acidalia couldn’t come off as normal if she tried.

Maybe if she ran quickly enough and brandished her gun a lot, nobody would ask her any questions. One could hope.

Wincing because the boots pressed right against the arch of her foot—she’d given herself a glass splinter at some point, probably when she was running from Cassiopeia—,he stood and opened the door. Andromeda and Lyra stood against the wall, Andy clearly bored and playing games on her metadit. They’d swapped clothes; Lyra was in Andromeda’s black evening gown, but she’d hiked up the front with very visible safety pins to make it several feet shorter. She’d also found body glitter and put so much of it on that she literally glowed, and the amount of makeup on her face could have worked for six people. Acidalia didn’t even know she owned lipstick that color purple or eyeshadow that bright—the sheer, eye-bleeding fluorescence of it almost felt sacrilegious, and it made Lyra look like a very young child who had gotten into her mother’s makeup bag. The overall effect was enhanced by the fact that she was wearing Acidalia’s bronzer, which was in a tone that very much did not match her skin color. On a Martian woman, it worked; on a Terran woman, it looked like a spray tan. It was smart, though; Lyra looked like a regular teenage girl who was making poor fashion decisions. Acidalia felt too polished.

Andromeda looked at her for a minute. “No,” she said definitively after a couple of seconds. “No what?” Acidalia asked.

Andromeda sighed. “No. Just… no. No one dresses like that, ever. You look like you belong on a propaganda poster. That makeup and that uniform… no.”

Lyra bit her lip. “She’s right.”

“Explain to me what I’m supposed to look like, then.”

“Shorter hair-“ Andromeda began.

“Not happening, next point,” Acidalia interrupted.

“-torn up clothes, worse makeup. Well, it depends on whether you’re trying to be a Labora or a Cantator, because-“

“We don’t have time for this,” Acidalia decided. “I don’t have any other clothes, and we need to get going.” “At least take off the corset,” Andromeda said.

“How can you even tell I’m wearing a corset?” “Because you always wear corsets? Seriously, you look nowhere near what a normal Cantator looks like. You look like an escort, not a hooker.” “I wasn’t exactly aiming for either of those things,” Acidalia replied. “How do I look like an escort?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Lyra interrupted.

“She does look like an escort, right?” Andromeda asked.

Lyra looked at Andromeda in that way people did when they weren’t sure what to say, confirming in Acidalia’s mind that she did indeed look like an escort. Fantastic, she thought.

“We should get going,” Lyra said quickly, obviously not wanting to offend anyone.

“Yes, we should.” Acidalia tightened her top around her waist, now mildly self-conscious about the fact that she had inadvertently dressed herself like a semi-classy prostitute. Then she was annoyed at herself for even caring about how she looked when they were facing interstellar war.

“I’ll have the smaller ships trail you,” Andromeda said, “but not far up enough to make it obvious. We can’t let people know who you are.” “Got it,” Lyra replied. “It shouldn’t be that bad. This is where I grew up; I know these streets like the back of my hand. Just as long as the Imperatrix can get into the Terminal-“

“They scan for DNA, irisis, fingerprints, et cetera,” Acidalia said. “My mother couldn’t lock me out if she tried—the system knows I’m a Cipher. There should be no problem with me getting in, the issue lies in getting there in the first place. Every second we stand here is a second we waste. We should leave.”

“All right,” Lyra said, swallowing. “Let’s… leave, I guess.”

“Let’s leave, indeed,” Acidalia replied, as Andromeda called “no normal person says ‘indeed!’”

***

Acidalia hadn’t prepared herself for this blinding panic.

She felt as if she’d been dropped in the middle of a battlefield—which, to an extent, she had been. The very instant her feet touched the ground, she was surrounded by total chaos. Screaming people climbed over each other in tidal waves, running from something miles away. They were cursing, yelling in vulgar Latin, begging those around them to move! and get down! before they fell victim to the fires. Smoke rose to the sky in plumes of gray, pale and ghostlike against black buildings.

Lyra seemed barely surprised.

“It’s messier than usual down here,” she yelled over the din of the crowd.

“Do you think?” Acidalia asked.

“I can’t hear you!” Lyra shouted.

“Never mind-“ Something erupted in front of them, and white smoke rained down from above. Acidalia’s throat stung and her vision turned blurry. She pulled the visor and mask of her helmet down and stood up tall as the gas began to settle towards the ground in a thick, smoggy blanket. It had to be a type of mild irritant, she surmised, blinking to clear it from her eyes.

“You good?” Lyra called through the helmet’s mic, only visible as a shadowy, black silhouette. “This stuff looks dangerous.”

“I’m fine, you?” Someone pushed her to the ground in a blind panic. She rubbed her head and fought her way back up again.

“I’m okay, but we need to get out of here. Go left.”

“Which left? I can’t see anything.” She could make out the tiny, holographic numbers displayed inside her visor, and some brief flashes of neon light, but nothing substantial. Switching it to heat mode only showed the bright red bodies of people, crawling and stumbling over each other in pale blue-green clouds of gas.

“Hold tight. I’ll come get you.” Lyra’s voice sounded distant again, almost overshadowed by the screaming and coughing. Acidalia tugged her helmet down again, making sure that it was fastened tightly. Someone collapsed behind her, and she realized that this had to be much more than a mild irritant.

A tiny, black-gloved hand gripped her shoulder.

“Lyra?” she asked.

“Yeah, come with me.” She pulled Acidalia’s shoulder, seemingly confident in her ability to lead. Acidalia followed her, still trying to make out anything over the smoke. How did Lyra know exactly where she was going, navigating the piled-up people and the dilapidated chrome buildings like she’d been here a thousand times before? While Acidalia stumbled, trying to figure out where she was going, Lyra glided over everything effortlessly. Not being the one in charge for once felt strange.

The roads got less crowded suddenly, and living people were quickly replaced with corpses. The streets ran red with blood, literally—it poured from the mouths and eyes of the dead, coating the concrete in slick, half-clotted fluid. Coagulated reddish-brown goo clung to Acidalia’s boots. She couldn’t smell anything with her visor on, but she didn’t need to—the scent of death was in her mind anyway.

“In here,” Lyra said, entirely unaffected. She pulled Acidalia under the awning of a dilapidated building and pressed herself up against the wall, effectively fading into the background. “We’re the only two people standing up right now,” she said breathlessly. “We can’t just be running around—we’re going to get shot.”

“Right.” Acidalia leant against the wall, but it crumbled away partially when she put her weight on it. “Is this place stable?” Lyra shrugged. “No idea. It’s pretty old, I wouldn’t go up any higher.”

Acidalia surveyed the building quickly. It was all broken stone—stone that hadn’t been used in building material for eons. The top had long since fallen apart, and the rest of it looked like it was about to. This place was beyond dilapidated—it was a ruin, easily thousands of years old. Judging from the amounts of faded preservative on the stone, she could assume it had been restored a few times, and then built over and forgotten over centuries. The entire structure shook uneasily as the sound of a bomb run out a few miles away.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Acidalia decided. “This is about to crumble to pieces.”

“Good luck finding anywhere else,” Lyra replied. “This whole section of Appalachia is like this. Skyscrapers built over by starscrapers, I mean.” “Haven’t any of these buildings ever fallen and killed someone?” Acidalia asked.

“Sometimes. That’s why you’re supposed to steer clear of the ruins and stay underground, but a lot of people don’t do that. It’s probably fine-“

The building swayed again. A giant golden letter T fell from the heavens and landed a few hundred feet from their heads.

“I stand corrected, let’s get a move on,” Lyra said.

They started moving again, less quickly than before, trying not to upset the delicate architecture—though Acidalia supposed two people wouldn’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, considering all of the bombs that were going off around them. Any misstep could result in a fiery death, but she decided to pretend that wasn’t true for the time being. Drawing a straight line is easier if you focus on the endpoint instead of the pen, she reasoned. Missions are like that. Think about the future, not the now. And hopefully, if death came crashing down from the heavens, it would happen too quickly for her to notice or care.

Lyra led the way, her tiny black boots dancing across the bloodstained streets. She was lighter than Acidalia, significantly so—she had no cybernetic implants or metal bones to weigh her down—and her footsteps didn’t cause as many tremors. The two walked on, the Imperatrix and the Cantator, for a mile or so, until Andromeda’s crackling, mechanical voice sounded in Acidalia’s headset. “Turn back. You’re heading straight into a massacre.”

“Wonderful,” Acidalia sighed. “We’re what?” Lyra asked. “I know this place, there’s nothing that would fall right there-“ “No, a bunch of people just got shot. Those outfits don’t protect you from laser blasts, you know.”

“Got it,” Lyra said, like she wasn’t even surprised. “How’s the deep underground?” “You’re thinking about going down there?” Andromeda asked. “Christ, I haven’t been in those tunnels in decades. I have no idea.”

“We have to,” Lyra replied. “The buildings up here are too shaky for us to get any higher, and the ground is a battlefield—did you see that gas they just released?”

“Fine. But be careful,” Andromeda warned, sounding like she didn’t actually care whether they were careful at all.

“What is she talking about?” Acidalia asked. “How do we get to the deeper underground?” In hindsight, she should have thought of the tunnels earlier; they were filled with factories and water treatment plants, the sorts of places whose only purpose was to supply the people who lived above them, and there wouldn’t be as many soldiers down there—just dangerous machinery. But she had no idea how one would even go about getting down there, and the tunnels were like catacombs—an inexperienced person could easily get lost.

“We find a transit station,” Lyra said. “There’s one a bit east of here, just a few blocks away. It might be flooded—sometimes the walls that hold the rivers back collapse—but it’s our best shot.”

“Flooded? Can you swim?” Acidalia asked. Lyra didn’t answer the question

Another blast rang out.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lyra said, almost defensively. “Time to go.” She grabbed Acidalia’s hand again and started to run, kicking up shiny glass dust from all the broken windows.

***

The “transit station” was a hole in the ground, a few feet in diameter, with a broken ladder swinging precariously, attached to the wall by only one side. It looked like death and smelled even worse, and it appeared to be designed so that very few people could enter or exit the darkness beneath. It was exactly the type of thing Alestra’s extensive taxes should have fixed… if they hadn’t gone towards buying another mansion in the South Seas.

“Are you sure going down here is a good idea?” Acidalia asked. “Can it support our weight?”

“It’s our only option.” Lyra grabbed onto the ladder and started to descend, eventually giving up and just sliding down on the exposed side like a child on a playground pole. Acidalia tried to do the same thing, landing with considerably more grace than her partner before immediately collapsing as something sharp dug into her foot.

“You okay?” Lyra asked.

“Yes, it’s just the glass in my boots. I’m fine.”

“Glass?” “Long story.” Acidalia stumbled to her feet and adjusted her shoes. Her socks felt hot and sticky with blood, but it was still better than wearing heels.

Unlike the surface, deep underground was quiet and empty. The sides of the main room were covered in grime-speckled, once-white gray tiles and signs reading the names of neighborhoods that didn’t exist outside of history books. A framed, stylized map on the wall showed a spiderweb of multicolored lines connecting places marked by numbers, like a graveyard of forgotten places and long-dead civilizations. Maybe, a thousand years ago, this had been a train station, and maybe, two thousand years before that, a subway. There was no sign of a struggle anywhere, no strange gas or fluid on the ground—just memories of antiquity. It wasn’t that the place was clean—far from it—but the lack of hysterical, wounded men and women made it look like heaven in comparison to the nightmare world above.

As they progressed ever-onward, walking on paved-over tracks, the walls turned to durametal, the floors to steel. Some of the small lights above were broken, shrouding the entire hall in a sort of dusky twilight. It was slightly claustrophobic down here, and very dark.

Lyra looked around for a few seconds before deciding on a direction. She pointed down a hallway and took off, dodging obstacles—tiny sets of cleaning equipment, tiny tool kits. She threw open a door with a loud clatter, and rows of tiny people dropped their tiny hammers, startled.

Five hundred pairs of pretty brown eyes belonging to five hundred sickly-looking little girls stared at the two of them. Their hair was cut short and their skin was a lackluster pale. None of them said anything. Like small robots, they went immediately back to what they were doing—mostly hitting the same spot with the same hammer over and over again before the conveyor belt moved, and they hit a different spot on the next metal sheet.

“Labora kids,” Lyra said.

“I know.” Acidalia knew exactly who they were, but something about seeing all of these children living like prisoners for no reason other than the crime of being born Labora made it a hundred times worse. There was no time for contemplation, though. Her feet moved more quickly than she did, and she found herself in the next room—five hundred barebones bunks and five hundred storage compartments filled with five hundred tiny, tiny uniforms.

A very small sniffle ran out through the room, echoing around the metal walls. One child, small enough to barely reach Acidalia’s waist, wiped her nose and pushed a broom. She looked dizzy, like she was about to collapse.

Acidalia was about to ignore her and leave- there was no time for any of this- but Lyra reached a pale hand out to the girl. “Are you okay?”

The child didn’t answer, looking fearfully at the both of them.

“It’s all good,” Lyra said. “I’m like you. In black, see?”

The girl relaxed slightly. Acidalia didn’t move, not wanting to be recognized.

“What are you doing?” Andromeda’s voice hissed in her ear.

“Lyra met a child,” Acidalia whispered.

“Listen, I know it sucks down there, but you can’t be doing this. Literally everything about this is a bad idea.“

“I know,” Acidalia said. “I have a feeling it wouldn’t go over well if you told her that, though.”

Lyra reached for the fastener of her helmet and pulled it off slowly, not wanting to startle the little girl. Evidently she’d frightened her anyway, because the child leapt backwards the minute she saw Lyra’s face, backing up against the wall.

“I’m not dangerous,” Lyra said. “I’m not going to hurt you-“

“Get away from me!” the girl shrieked in a voice not befitting one that small. “Leave me alone, meretrix!”

“We’re not-“

“I’m going to call the magistratum if you don’t get out! People like you aren’t supposed to be down here!”

“Lyra, let it go.” Acidalia put a hand on her partner’s shoulder.

“She’s sick,” Lyra said.

“Go!” the girl screamed. “Go! Get out! Even I won’t talk to a lupa like a cantrix!”

“All right, all right.” Lyra stumbled back nervously, like she was afraid of this tiny, sickly child. “We were just trying to help-“

“We don’t want the help of you people,” the girl snapped, and glared at the two. Acidalia pulled Lyra’s arm and dragged her towards what she assumed to be the exit.

The entire underground was a labyrinth of walls and long rooms, staffed by people as young as six years old and as old as around fifty. Acidalia was fully aware that none of these women could afford anti-aging genetic mods, and she didn’t want to think about why not a single person seemed over half a century old. Lyra, meanwhile, had seemingly lost her concentration. Andromeda was lecturing her in the headpiece, and Acidalia wasn’t paying much attention to her spiel, trying to focus on her objective. Get to the Terminal, send out the virus, get back to safety. It sounded so much simpler, listed out in her head like that. Three steps. Three things. It should be easy.

The stark black linoleum tiles creaked beneath her feet. Blood sloshed in her shoes, red-hot, weakly metallic and sickly-sweet. The factory machines whirred and whistled, emitting LED-lit smoke that rose up in the chambers like a ghost. Broken lights cast shadows on every piece of dust. Acidalia’s mouth and eyes still stung slightly from the gas, and she wondered again what type of poison it was and who had unleashed it. Every bone in her body hurt. It was sensory overload and sensory deprivation at the same time—there was almost nothing around, nothing to see or touch, but she noticed everything so clearly it was borderline overwhelming. Her breath picked up, even though she wasn’t sprinting or doing anything really strenuous, and the world felt hot, even though the deep earth was cold for the sake of keeping the machines functioning.

She recognized the sensation of panic immediately, and slowed her breathing, taking long, deep breaths. I can’t afford to panic right now. Her mind jumped back to her childhood, the way she’d have nervous breakdowns before every speech, the way she’d bottled everything up for the sake of being the perfect princess the world expected her to be.

Except this was much more dangerous than making a speech in front of a crowd of thousands. Now the risk wasn’t of embarrassing herself in front of a planet of trillions and disappointing her entire family—it was of getting killed and destroying everything her own movement had worked for. She couldn’t just be a perfect princess anymore. She had to be the perfect empress.

#on the edge of eureka #POV Acidalia #Acidalia #Lyra

[alabasterswriting]

In A House Without Doors

Hello! This was written for @elevenknope who came up with the idea, and @itcouldbendoritcouldbreak and @1980s-jean-ralphio who both came up with the idea of El’s room and Mike not wanting to leave Will’s side. I hope you guys like it! Thank you for letting me use your brilliant minds! Enjoy!

Hawkins National Laboratory was too sterile for its own good.

The cloying scent of antiseptic and overpowering blast from the air conditioner were more than enough to set Mike’s teeth on edge as he sat at Will’s bedside. It was cold. There was a blanket across his lap that was far too thin and his sweater did little to keep out the chill. Idly, he wondered why all medical facilities found it necessary to freeze their occupants to death. Did they think it was funny? Were they trying to grab more patients by inducing hypothermia? It seemed like such an unwarranted use of funding that could have easily gone towards providing more comfortable furniture. His chair, for instance, was a rickety old thing, cushioned only by cheap styrofoam covered in plastic, and his butt ached from the stiffness. He’d long stopped being able to process anything from his fingers.

But that part wasn’t from the chill.

Will’s grip was vice-like - a trembling, desperate attempt to keep hold of something, and Mike wasn’t about to tell him to let go. If anything, he held on just as eagerly, hoping to transfer what little body heat he could manage to his friend in an effort to induce some type of coloring other than chalk. Will was nothing more than a still-breathing corpse. 

They were alone.

For the first time in what felt like years, the room was devoid of other people. It was almost a relief to be free of the questions and the shouting and the nonstop conversations he wasn’t allowed to have a voice in, but with that loss came the all-too unsettling void of sound only broken by the beeping of Will’s heart monitor. Mike would have been tempted to turn it off if doing so wouldn’t bring a stampede of people back into the room.

He’d much rather be alone with Will than surrounded by adults who couldn’t understand that the more incomprehensible words tossed into the aether the more terrified Will got. Mike wasn’t about to put his friend through that. He already had enough shit on his plate.

“Mike?” Will’s rasping call snapped his attention away from his discomfort and back into the real world.

Condensation had gathered along the inside of Will’s oxygen mask, and Mike struggled to smile as he leaned in. God, it was so hard to hear him. “Yeah, Will? I’m still here.”

Will smiled - tremulous, as if he had to put in all his energy just to make the effort. “I-I know. I c-can feel your h-hand.”

“Heh, is it warm?” Under normal circumstances, Mike would have made a joke about how at least one of them could, but Will was the type of person who would instantly let go after that, and Mike knew Will needed the connection more than he needed the circulation.

The smaller boy nodded. “Y-yeah. Really w-warm.”

“Good. I’d turn off the air conditioning, but knowing me I’d probably set off some sort of alarm.” 

Will’s eyes brightened, overshadowing the fog for just a moment, and a tiny weight lifted from Mike’s chest. “Y-you would.”

“And they’d definitely throw me out after that,” he continued, hoping to keep the joke alive.

“Can’t h-have that.”

“Nah,” Mike shook his head. “So holding hands is really the best we’re going to get.”

“I-I don’t m-mind. It’s nice.”

Nice. Mike had to swallow back bile. He could see the way Will’s body quivered under the blanket. His friend was in agony. It wasn’t hard to notice, and the doctors (the horrible, evil doctors who didn’t have an ounce of compassion anywhere in their horrible, evil bodies) refused to give him anything for the pain, citing they didn’t know what type of effect the medicine would have on him.

Bullshit, Mike hissed in the back of mind. They just wanted to study him. They didn’t want Will to get better because if Will got better they would have to let him leave, and if Mike knew anything it was that the scientists of Hawkins Lab never let anyone of interest leave. No, they locked them away and kept them separated from their friends and family and any inch of happiness and - no. Stop.

It wouldn’t happen. Not to Will. He’d never let it happen to anyone else. Will wouldn’t be like-

“Mike?” Will shook his hand weakly. “A-are you okay?”

Shit, he really had to work on controlling himself better. He tossed Will another smile, hoping it looked real. “Yeah, I’m okay. How ‘bout you?”

Will shrugged one shoulder. The sleeve of his hospital gown pulled awkwardly to reveal a bony shoulder. “O-okay,” but his body must have chosen that moment to remind him that he was anything but because his face contorted in obvious pain and he sucked in a whistle of air through his teeth.

His grip tightened.

“Will?” Mike half-stood from his chair. He was ready to sprint across the hall and grab a doctor if need be, no matter how convinced he was of their malicious intentions. 

An eternity of harsh breathing passed before Will finally shook his head and relaxed his hold. “I-I’m alright. Really,” he added upon seeing Mike’s disbelief.

“You’re not alright, Will.” As if that wasn’t evident enough by the oxygen mask, hospital gown, and current location.

God, Mike wanted to get out of here. 

This place just…he shivered. Chills ran down his spine.

“H-hey, Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Ca-can you t-tell me something funny?”

Mike could feel the way his brow furrowed in confusion. Funny? It was hard to think of anything funny right now. Granted, that was probably why Will wanted it; anything to take his mind off the pain if only for a second.

But what could possibly be funny at a time like this?

He looked around the room. All fresh white paint and bright lights and beeping machines. Everything was new, as if the old was something to be washed away. It was hardly the most delightful atmosphere. The air was stale with the scent of illness and the video camera hanging from the ceiling didn’t so much as make the room feel secure as it did a cage at the zoo. For all Mike knew, there were a dozen Hawkin’s scientists on the other side of that camera just watching them, recording everything they said and did for future analysis.

For perhaps the first time, Mike understood what it meant to be completely on display. Enough so, at least, that a little girl felt perfectly okay with undressing in front of a total stranger.

He ground the thought to a halt with enough speed to leave skid marks.

Nope. Not going there again.

It wasn’t funny.

But what to say? Will needed this. He couldn’t leave him hanging, but this place just seemed to sap happiness right out of the air as if it were a vacuum of depression. No wonder El had been so-

Shut. Up.

But the thought wouldn’t leave. El not understanding privacy. El not knowing what a friend was. El’s fear of adults. El not knowing how to tell time or articulate or even speak to them about what hell she had gone through.

El smiling.

Her tiny, tinny laugh as he made her swing back on the La-Z-Boy in the middle of his empty living room. The way her eyes glazed over with unfamiliar happiness as he said goodnight to her. Heck, even her complete lack of enthusiasm for his Yoda impersonation was endearing in hindsight.

A light went on in his head.

“I once did my Yoda impression for El before we, you know, knew. She, ah, wasn’t impressed.” Was that funny? He hoped it was funny. He hadn’t done humor in what felt like years.

The snort that erupted from under Will’s mask was enough to send Mike’s heart soaring. “I w-wonder why,” his best friend teased, and Mike rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.

“I didn’t know, okay?”

Will raised a delicate eyebrow. “You h-had a real J-Jedi living in your house and you did y-your Yoda impr-pression?”

“What part of ‘I didn’t know,’ aren’t you getting?” Mike glared, but it was the teasing sort that had his friend not even bothering to hide his grin.

Not that it would have mattered. It was hard to see Will’s mouth behind the fog gathered along his mask anyway.

Once again, this place sucked the joy out of everything.

Will must have sensed it because he was suddenly silent, sunken eyes focused on Mike as if trying to find something buried there. His fingers - so cold, so skeletal - squeezed around Mike’s warmer ones.

Mike almost couldn’t feel it and it wasn’t because his fingers were numb.

Will was getting weaker.

It was a shattering realization. His breath was stolen from his lungs as if ripped out by some otherworldly force and Mike had to physically restrain himself from bolting out of the room. He was selfish. So, so selfish, he thought, as he held on just that much tighter, gluing his hand to Will’s so that the doctors here would have to use a crowbar or some sort of strong acid to make him let go. Anything to keep himself anchored to this room. How could he think to run? How could he possibly contemplate leaving Will here at the mercy of people who only saw him as a walking cadaver and not a living child? He bowed his head to keep himself from throwing up.

Oh God, he really might vomit.

“Mike?” But the voice wasn’t Will’s. Will was as quiet as the corpse that had been dragged out the quarry all those lifetimes ago. No, this voice was softer, higher pitched even though Will was the only one of their friends who’d yet to reach puberty.

It was fleeting, too. Incomprehensible, like a whisper that had traveled too long in the breeze.

Or, more to the point, a ghost left haunting the halls.

He could see her, curled up in the corner like some sort of phantom. Dressed in a hospital gown to match Will’s, she had never looked smaller. Her smell, usually maple syrup, had been replaced by rubber and metal and nothing, and the warmth Mike had always associated her with now surrounded him only with the bone-aching chill of absence.

She was everywhere. Her feel, her smell, her image. She was imprinted into this place as much as any tile or brick - as much a part of the building as an inanimate object. Because that’s all she’d ever been here: an object.

One who could do extraordinary things. One who could help them win a war. One who could move things with her mind and tear holes between worlds. She was an object, an experiment, a nameless subject. 

But never, ever a child.

She screamed. It bounced off the walls and traveled through the halls in an unearthly wail that only served to rip his heart from his chest. He bit his lip so hard it was a wonder it didn’t bleed and Mike belatedly wondered how Will couldn’t hear it. She was so loud; how could everyone else be so deaf?

And then she was gone.

Wait, no. She was next to him. Beside him. Across from him. She was curled up on Will’s bed, bony fingers clinging to the little stuffed lion toy Jonathan had grabbed in his rush for something to help his brother. They were sharing it - two messed up lab rats garbed under the disguise of children. 

Maybe it was the other way around.

Mike tried to shake the image away. It wasn’t real. She wasn’t here. He knew that because he knew where she was, and she had hair now, and living people didn’t leave ghosts behind.

So why wouldn’t she go away?

Why was she here - in this too small room, with its too small bed and a lion toy made for toddlers?

“Mike?” She called again, sound absorbed into the walls so that no one from the outside could ever hear her. 

Why did -

Mike stopped. He was suddenly inextricably struck by how at home she looked. She knew this room. She knew Will’s room as if it were own.

Unbidden, the thought came. This was El’s room.

The fresh paint suddenly made a terrible sort of sense.

Mike started, leaning forward towards the phantom of El, but the words died on his lips. She was gone, vanished as if she’d never been there to begin with.

This time she didn’t come back.

“Mike?” That was Will this time. His brows were scrunched along a forehead dotted with too much sweat - a feat considering how cold the room was - and he eyed his friend with open concern. “W-what’s wrong?”

Everything. Mike wanted to shout it from the rooftops. Everything was wrong.

Because how dare they? How dare they place Will in this room? A room where the men and women here only ever viewed an experiment. How dare they make El live here for so long that even alive she haunted the place?

Anger coursed through his body like an inferno, and he sent a glare to the camera that would have melted the skin off a Demogorgon. He hoped someone was watching. He hoped they knew exactly what they’d done.

He hoped they regretted it with every fiber of their being.

It’s your fault, it’s your fault, it’s your fault, he repeated in his head, even as he calmed his expression so as not to worry Will. “Sorry, just tired,” he reassured, and it wasn’t even a total lie. He was tired, but he was tired and terrified and so goddamn angry that it hurt to breathe.

But Will didn’t need to know that. It wasn’t Will’s fault. It was this place. It was the people in this place - the people who came here every day and thought it was okay to experiment on children like something out of Nazi Germany. It was all their fault. It was their fault El had been used. It was their fault the gate had been opened. It was their fault Will was suffering. It was their fault El had been forced to sacrifice herself to a literal monster.

It was all their fault. And they thought it was okay to place Will in this room where only an experiment had ever lived.

Mike seethed.

Eleven had been a test subject. Test subject number eleven. What did Will’s chart say? Was it twelve? Thirteen? Fourteen? Was it higher or lower? Or maybe because he was so different they’d moved onto using Greek. Test subject alpha. Test subject beta.

He slid his eyes surreptitiously to Will’s uncovered forearm.

Still unmarked.

Good. It had better stay that way.

El haunted these halls. He didn’t know the specifics of what had been done to her, but then he didn’t need to. This room told him enough. She had been an experiment, and as Mike held tighter to Will’s trembling hand he made himself a promise.

No matter what happened, no matter how much he was threatened or coerced or pushed, he would not leave. He wouldn’t so much as budge.

El had never had anyone to help her, but Will Byers did.

Mike would make sure of that. 

#stranger things #mike wheeler #will byers #eleven #stranger things fanfiction #this took so long to write #like why am i so slow #not sure how i feel about the ending but oh well #thank you for reading! #and yes i know in one of the stills will is obviously not in el’s room #but let’s pretend mike was very vocal about moving him #posting this before heading to work:)

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

The Greatest Year in Horror Film History Part III: 1979

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The Greatest Year in Horror Film History Part III: 1979

Imagine you are in a restaurant. You sit in a dark corner booth and check out the menu. The faint smell of cigarettes smoked long ago fills your nostrils and Thelonious Monk tickles your eardrums. Now, this isn’t some posh bistro in Paris or somewhere “Midwest fancy” (like an Arby’s) it’s just a no-name corner spot in a no-name town. At this restaurant, you order yourself the classic three-course meal of an appetizer, entree and dessert. You have done this hundreds of times in your life, but this time is different. This meal just so happens to start off with THE BEST chicken wings you’ve ever eaten. That’s followed up by THE BEST cheeseburger you’ve ever had, and you end the meal with THE BEST piece of apple pie you’ve ever tasted. Using basic logic, that would make this the greatest restaurant you’ve ever been to, right? So what does this have to do with the greatest year in horror film history?

Now imagine that this restaurant represents 1979, the number one year in horror film history. We can call it the greatest because it features three best-of-all-time films in their sub-genre, all packed within one magical year. Within its 365 days, this year gave us the best vampire, zombie and science-fiction horror films that have ever been made. Some may try to debate these claims, but luckily for us, we have the math to back us up.

Over the past few weeks, we have examined the #2 (1986) and #3 (2017) best years in horror film history. This week, as a final gift from me in 2017, we will be looking at the films that make 1979 the greatest year in horror film history. For those of you unfamiliar with our process, here’s a quick refresher:

OUR METHODOLOGY OR: HOW WE LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE EXCEL

We took a look at all of the horror films from 1970 to 2017. (The early 1970’s were a starting point for us because A) We needed one and B) The frequency of quality and iconic horror films really picked up during this time).

To determine a “score” for each year, we took a look at 5 different rating sources-

Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer Score

RT Critic’s Average Rating

RT Audience Score

RT Audience Average Rating

IMDB Viewer Ratings

– These ratings were averaged to find the “Fiend Score” for each film. We then combined the Fiend Score of the top three horror films from each year to give that year a total. I admit, the selection of the top three films was sometimes difficult. It was necessary to take other factors into account, such as the size of release, box office total and iconic status to determine which films were included in the top three. These three films were totaled and given an official number which we are calling its “NOFS Score”. These NOFS Scores ranged anywhere from 142 (Ouch) to 255.

So, without further ado, The Greatest Year in Horror Film History is:

Part III- 1979

NOFS Score- 255

The 1970’s were a tumultuous time in the United States and abroad. This was especially true at the end of the decade, where marginalized groups struggled to find their place in society and were denied basic rights from the newly galvanized conservative movement. This directly led to an influx of horror cinema across the country, packing small-town theaters with those wishing to escape. The 1970’s produced some of the finest horror films ever made, like The Exorcist (1973), Halloween (1978) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Everything culminated in 1979, however, and we were given the greatest year in horror film history.

The horror films of 1979 are an amalgamation of the societal fears and attitudes toward authority the population felt all through the decade. Although horror has been an effective mirror for society throughout history, this is especially true for 1979. Here are the films with the top three Fiend Scores from that year:

  #3- Nosferatu the Vampyre

Written and Directed By: Werner Herzog Starring: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz

Fiend Score- 82

Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre is the best adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that has ever been made. Officially, it’s an adaptation-of-an-adaptation, but either way it far surpasses any other attempt at the story. Nosferatu (1922), directed by F.W. Murnau is gorgeous and iconic, but Herzog’s direction, cast and setting puts his version above the original. It is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful horror films ever produced.

Bruno Ganz, a man that has somehow found a way to look like Javier Bardem but talk like Tommy Wiseau, plays Jonathan Harker, a man sent to Count Dracula to sell a house. He and his beloved Lucy, played with an angelic ethereality by Isabelle Adjani, are thrust into harm’s way as the Count makes his way to town to set up shop. They are fine representations of their characters but are ultimately overshadowed by the performance of Kinski as Dracula.

He is not an attractive man who just happens to enjoy dark castles and dope capes. You cannot walk past him on the street and mistake him for yet another aristocratic gentleman. He is an animal, an apex predator than needs to hunt. Kinski plays the character with a hunger and a pent-up power that is unrivaled in the Dracula filmography. Herzog lights his sets so perfectly that even his bright-white complexion can be hidden from you if he so chooses. It is shown in several scenes that Dracula is capable of forcing you to do as he wishes. Harker is twice attacked and is unable to fully resist or remember it in the morning. Kinski’s vampire doesn’t resort to glamour or hypnosis, however, as he chooses to take what he wants and stare directly into your eyes as he takes it. The scenes where he enters the bedchambers of both Harker and Lucy are so chilling because of the hunger in Kinski’s eyes. It bores into the screen and creates an uneasiness in the viewer, almost as if he has triggered our prehistoric fight-or-flight response.

Nosferatu the Vampyre is required viewing for fans of vampires or horror in general. The film begins with actual mummified corpses from Mexico and only gets darker from there. Herzog fills every frame with a physical weight, forcing the audience to gasp to keep from asphyxiating. The scenery surrounding Harker as he journeys to Dracula’s castle, in any other film, would be gorgeous. In Herzog’s hands, however, every crag and rock looks like it is trying to keep Jonathan from finding the way. The wet trail would rather make it’s hiker slip and die than reach their destination. For to reach the castle they seek is a fate far, far worse than death.

#2- Dawn of the Dead

Written and Directed By: George A. Romero Starring: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reininger

Fiend Score- 84

I remember the first time that I ever saw this film. I was way too young to be watching it, but when you’re in grade school and home alone sick with the flu, you watch whatever VHS tapes are at your disposal. Feeling OK (maybe I was just playing hookie? I can’t remember, but I wouldn’t put it past me), I made myself some lunch and popped in Dawn of the Dead. Many of the film’s central themes went way over my head, but the gore definitely did not. I distinctly remember feeling physically sick after watching the movie. So, I may have been faking my illness at first, but I was most definitely ill afterwards.

The film seems almost tame by today’s standards, but in 1979 it was a gore-fest unlike anything else in theaters. George A. Romero took what shocked audiences in his classic Night of the Living Dead (1968) and turned those scenes up to 11 and shot them in living color. Tom Savini, now regarded as one of the finest effects artists in horror film history, was still a young Vietnam War Veteran when tabbed for this film. His practical gore effects have gone down in history as some of the finest ever filmed, even with the crazy-bright fake blood that he hated so much.

The blood and guts made the film stood out for 8-year-old me, but its central theme of commercialism and the dehumanization of its survivors are what make the film so special today. Everyone knows that setting the film in a shopping mall was no accident, and Romero wanted to make a statement about how the need to buy material things turns us into inhuman beings. That message still works today, only you can now replace the shopping mall with the endless shelves of online shopping experiences. We stare at our screens and drool over (BRAINS!) digital images of things we absolutely must have or else we will surely perish. I like nice things, so I don’t really care what Romero has to say about my shopping habits, but the hedonism and greed that the survivors show is what interests me.

The ending of the film is almost inconsequential. It is the behaviors shown by the survivors of the worldwide epidemic that is what makes this film so powerful. The actions of the initial survivors and the stupid desperation of the motorcycle gang shaped what zombie films and television eventually became. At a certain point, it’s no longer about the reanimated dead, but how we interact with one another as survivors that makes zombie cinema so interesting. Without Dawn of the Dead, the zombie genre would have died out long ago and the horror genre as a whole would not be the same.

  #1- Alien

Directed By: Ridley Scott Written By: Dan O’Bannon Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt

Fiend Score- 89

Priority one: Insure return of organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable.

So reads Special Order 937 from the fine folks at Weyland-Yutani. These fourteen words are the central driving force for an entire franchise that has now reached an incredible 8 films. It is also indicative of a sentiment many people felt in 1979. The government and corporations cannot be trusted and will do anything to further their reign and expand their power.

The film itself is a perfect horror movie. Some have called it a slasher film in space, likening the Xenomorph to everyone’s favorite terrestrial killing machine, Michael Myers. They have even compared the Nostromo to a haunted house. While this is completely valid, I have recently run across a point of view that paints the film in an entirely different light. You see, Alien isn’t a slasher, its a possession film.

The haunted house is not the freighter Nostromo, but instead the planet LV-426 where the crew encounters the abandoned alien spacecraft. They are sent to the ship because of a mysterious beacon, luring them in even though some may see it as a warning. The crew investigates the ship, then something attaches itself to Kane (Hurt). The others rush him back to the mother ship, which only allows it to spread and evolve, putting everyone else on the crew at risk. The Nostromo represents a host body, and the Xenomoph a possessing entity. Once invited in by the foreign agent Ash (here an android, but in other films shown as a demon or Satan himself), the entity systematically destroys everything that made the host unique and independent. As the final battle between Ripley and the beast showed us, the only way to survive a possession film is through exorcism.

Whatever lens you choose to view the film through, Alien remains one of the finest horror films ever made. It is tied with Silence of the Lambs (1991) as the film with the highest Fiend Score we calculated, and it launched the careers of Scott and Weaver. Although the on-board “computer” looks a little silly by today’s standards, the rest of the film holds up and is just as terrifying today as it was in 1979. Scott’s ability to film in tight, dark spaces is unparalleled, and the creature design by H.R. Giger is still regarded as the finest in horror film history. The bio-mechanical quality of the Xenomorph makes it difficult, especially when the ship’s lights begin to strobe, to distinguish what is ship and what is alien. This forces the audience to stay on edge and to constantly search behind the characters and down the dark hallways for the creature. It is a masterclass in film-making and suspense-building, and it led the way in making 1979 the greatest year in horror movie history.

Honorable Mentions:

We’ve determined that 2017, 1986 and 1979 were the top three years in horror film history, but what was the top decade? According to our calculations, the 1970’s carry the highest average NOFS Score at 224. Even though the current decade started poorly, 2016 (224) and 2017 (234) may be a sign of what’s to come in the next few years and it may push the 2010’s over the top.

Even though it is considered an all-time classic (for some reason), 1979’s The Amityville Horror didn’t quite crack the top-3 for the year. It finished with a lowly Fiend Score of 50.

1979 also gave us David Cronenberg’s The Brood (Fiend Score– 71), Phantasm (Fiend Score– 69) and When a Stranger Calls (Fiend Score– 52). Not all of these are are earth-shatteringly good films, but all have become iconic movies that are must-watches for horror fans.

Although it was only a made-for-TV miniseries, Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot also premiered in 1979. I mention this exclusively for the bedroom window scene. I still have nightmares about that one.

Dis-Honorable Mentions:

Whenever you are crunching the numbers, looking to find the “Best Of” anything, you inevitably discover the “Worst Of”. Here are the worst years in horror film history-

Although 2015 gave us The Babadook (and we say thankya), the year as a whole came in as the #3 worst year of all time with an NOFS Score of only 152. The other films from that year were poorly received, including Annabelle (Fiend Score– 44) and Ouija (Fiend Score– 31).

The number two worst year in horror film history was 1989, which finished with an NOFS Score of 149. The top-three films for that year ended up being Pet Sematary (Fiend Score– 58), Puppet Master (Fiend Score– 48) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Fiend Score– 48).

Last and definitely least, the worst year in horror film history was 1995! Demon Knight (Fiend Score– 55), Species (Fiend Score– 45) and Village of the Damned (Fiend Score– 41) were the top three films of the year, totaling an NOFS Score of only 142.

Join the Discussion:

So, there you have it! 1979 is officially the greatest year in horror film history. What do you think about our findings? Head over to our Official Facebook Group and let us know! Where would you rank these years? What do you think makes the 1970’s the best decade for horror? Do you think the 1980’s should be above it? Put on your thinkin’ caps and tell us your opinions!

#alien #amityville horror #dawn of the dead #demon knight #george romero #greatest year in horror film history #horror #horror films #nosferatu the vampyre #phantasm #ridley scott #Salem's Lot #sigourney weaver #species #the brood #village of the damned #werner herzog #when a stranger calls

[artificialqueens]

Withstanding The Test Of Time Ch2 - Shalaska - pureCAMP

A/N - thank you so much to everyone who voted for me or nominated me in aqficawards!! i’m stupidly flattered and i love you all, this long one goes out to you and also to my lovely “clique” <3

Two excruciating weeks was the exact length of time Sharon was forced to stay in the Belli residence. Though she felt bad for it, she’d felt as though she was counting every hour until she was allowed to leave. Willam and Courtney were fun for nights out, and Farrah was cute in the occasional visit, but two weeks of domestic life in a suburban home had cemented a few new facts in Sharon’s mind.

One, Willam and Courtney were a disgusting couple. Since Courtney had worked from home for a while, she would see Willam out of the door each morning, baby Farrah balanced on her hip, both of them waving as he left. When he came home, she greeted him at the door with a lingering kiss and a smile, excitedly telling him about her day and listening to him talk about his. Their eyes seemed to sparkle whenever they looked at one another, and even when they argued – a domestic argument about washing up duties, no less – it still ended with kisses and hugs. All of this was within view of Sharon, stranded pathetically on the couch, unable to escape the suffocating atmosphere of love and family life.

Second, if she thought daytime TV was bad, children’s TV was infinitely worse. In fact, she needed to backtrack. Daytime TV could be quite enjoyable, and Sharon was partial to some Nancy Grace or Jeremy Kyle if the occasion arose. But children’s TV was quite honestly the most over-produced, artificial garbage her eyes had ever looked upon. If one more skinny, pig-tail wearing brunette grinned whilst inches away from the screen, or terrifying alien-like creatures pretended they couldn’t find their friends, she was going to explode. How could there be so many identical programmes on TV? Little Farrah giggled and clapped at all of them, thoroughly enjoying herself, and even whilst working Courtney would chuckle a little here and there.

Third, and possibly the most significant thing Sharon had learned, was that she was positive now that the soulmate life wasn’t for her.

Willam and Courtney were just so perfect. They were a hive mind – what one wanted, the other wanted too – and had this amazing team dynamic where things just seemed to get done equally, and fast. They were affectionate and beyond in control of their lives and twenty four years old living the American dream of sorts.

Sharon knew she wasn’t ready for anything like that. Nor would she ever be.

It was a relief to be back at work – and that was something Sharon thought she’d never feel. Despite hating her co-workers, being able to stand up on her own and be in an environment of entirely adults was completely refreshing. She probably shouldn’t have been in heels so soon after recovering, but it was really all or nothing. Surviving in the office with the Real Housewives of Office 7B was a fucking challenge, and the last thing Sharon needed was to deal with their obnoxiousness and be shorter than them. At the very least, she needed to match their stiletto-boosted height.

“Hey, Sharon Needles!” A lazy voice called. “You look so pretty today! I heard grey is a really in colour for fall this season. Seems like your corpse-spinster complexion will finally be cool.”

Kimora seemed impressed with her own read, subtly high-fiving Pearl as the other girls around them started to laugh. Honestly, it was like Sharon had suddenly regressed back into fucking high school, only these girls were richer, prettier, and smarter.

“Oh, fuck you.” Sharon dismissed her, ducking her head down on her way to her desk as the girls jeered at her lack of a response. She really didn’t have the energy to fight back against their cattiness, and the days usually went by quicker when she managed to grin and bear it.

Thankfully, no one pursued her, and Sharon made it to her desk in one piece. The surface was definitely tidier than she’d left it – the scattered pens had been replaced into their stands, the assorted paperwork was neatly ordered in a pile, and the endless amount of post-it notes that were stuck all around her monitor had been neatly stuck in a row along the bottom of the computer screen. By the looks of things, Sasha had taken the liberty of tidying her things whilst she’d been away.

That wasn’t the only thing Sasha had done. Carefully placed in the middle of the desk was a small card, most likely handmade, with Sasha’s swirly handwriting on the front. Sharon smiled briefly as she sat down, opening the card to read the sweet ‘get well soon’ message that had been written inside, along with a few scribbled hearts and a short message from Shea too. She made a mental note to thank her as she switched on the monitor, shuffling her chair closer and relaxing a little. At least Sasha wouldn’t make the day hell for her.

Sharon’s desk was right next to Sasha’s, which was a total polar opposite to how Sharon’s usually appeared. Her desktop was messy, disorderly, and stained with coffee. Her computer screen still had the generic company background, overshadowed by the plethora of tabs and documents that she had open, which she’d rapidly switch between during the rare times she was actually at her desk. The only personal items she had was a small bottle of sun lotion in her drawer and a former Halloween decoration that was supposed to dance once activated, but hadn’t worked in years.

Sasha on the other hand was the epitome of organisation. Everything had its place and was just so, prettily organised in colours and everything stacked neatly where it needed to be. She’d personalized her computer screen to show a photograph of her and Shea on a vacation to LA the previous year, and her desk may as well have been a second home. Sharon envied Sasha’s ability to make anywhere feel homely, but she imagined it was a skill the woman had been born with.

It wasn’t long after Sharon had switched on her monitor that Sasha arrived, professionally dressed with her own quirky flare and warm smile to match. She greeted Sharon with a lingering hug and one of her famous smiles, before sitting at her own desk to begin her latest article.

“I’m so glad you’re back, Sharon, it’s been so boring without you. The office feels wrong without you being here.”

Sharon suspected Sasha was just being kind – as was in the woman’s nature – but nevertheless she appreciated the compliment. With a wry smile, she ran a hand through her hair and nodded.

“I bet the bitches have missed me so much. Having to make their own coffee? Oh, the horror!”

Sasha laughed. “To think I had to deal with them alone, I can never come up with mean comebacks the way you do. I’m glad you’re doing better now, though. I nearly had a heart attack when I heard you’d been hit.”

Sharon hummed. “It was awful. Not so much the accident, but spending two weeks with Willam, Courtney, and Nugget. I miss my crappy apartment and being alone. I’m pretty sure being surrounded by happy families is only making me more and more certain that it’s not the life for me. I swear Willam and Courtney wake up happy. I’m a monster morning and night.”

“Oh, Sharon,” Sasha chastised jokingly. “I’m a monster too, you and me both. Monsters can be happy too, you know. It takes time and hard work but it can happen. And if you’re worried about…” She trailed off, her eyes drifting down to Sharon’s arm, still wrapped in a bandage but thankfully out of the sling. “…you know… you still have time. Things can change.”

Time. Sasha was well-meaning, but she couldn’t have picked a worse word to say. Fucking time. As if it wasn’t bad enough to hate timers, now the very word made Sharon dizzy and nauseous. Even when she’d had to change bandages or shower, she’d kept the accusing timer firmly covered, not even peeking at it once. She couldn’t bring herself to look at it.

“I-I… I don’t –”

Before Sharon could elaborate any further, a voice from across the room started yelling.

“Sharon! Hey! Sharon! Decaf, no sugar or milk! And be quick about it!” Sharon stood up to see Violet, a couple of rows of desks away, her sculpted eyebrows raised expectantly. Sasha rolled her eyes in sympathy.

Although she’d been half tempted to deliver Violet a fully caffeinated, sugary mug of coffee, Sharon had less of a death wish than her wilful running in front of cars may have suggested. For the sake of a quiet life, she kept her grumbling to a minimum as she played barista, watching out for stray heeled feet in case someone tried to trip her once again. Violet, as usual, accepted without any thanks and simply flicked her wrist to dismiss her. Normally, Sharon would have argued, but she didn’t have the energy.

“Ugh.” Sharon groaned, sinking back into her seat and continuing her pointless article about celebrity relationships – because of course, everywhere she went, the topic of love had to haunt her. “Fucking Violet. She treats me like I’m some eighteen-year-old intern with zero qualifications other than coffee-making. I fucking can’t with her.”

“She’s so rude, I have to agree. It doesn’t take any more energy to be kind than it does to be mean.” Sasha added thoughtfully. “What were you saying before she interrupted?”

Sharon blanched. “I – uh – not here. I don’t wanna… not right now. M-Maybe we can talk later?”

“How about lunch? We can talk then.”

-

For the most part, the morning had passed smoothly. Nobody else made Sharon chase drinks and documents – except for Gia, who asked for a drink and decided after one sip she didn’t want it after all – and she actually managed to get a little bit of work done. Soon enough, Top Ten Celebrity Soulmates That’ll Melt Your Heart would be published to the company website. Sharon was embarrassed to even have her name on the tagline; it was a poorly devised Buzzfeed parody-wank. Even the language used in the article was painful, the words having a gloriously artificial, joyful tone to them that was utterly foreign to Sharon’s dialect. Still, she reasoned, it had to be something.

Even so, her eyes had been constantly drawn to the small digital clock at the bottom right of her computer screen. The ticking of the wall clock in the centre of the room had seemed louder somehow, slicing through time with each tick. Sharon was suddenly hyper-aware of time passing, and everything seemed to be happening too quickly.

Sasha had left a few minutes earlier to collect her lunch from the communal fridge, and the office was empty with the exception of Sharon at her desk. She’d been mindlessly refreshing her emails, zoning out at the depressingly barren inbox, hoping someone wanted her to write something. Anything.

“Hey, girl. You wanna join us for lunch?” Sasha called, pulling Sharon out of her thoughts. She turned, spotting Sasha stood nearby with Mrs Taylor, one of the assistant managers.

After a moment of thought, Sharon shook her head. “I’m okay. I think I’ll just eat at my desk.”

Sharon ate at her desk nearly every day. It was lonely, and a little awkward, but she’d rather deal with the silence than the grating vocals of Gia, Kimora, Violet and anyone else who found amusement in Sharon’s discomfort.

Sasha seemed to murmur something to Mrs Taylor, and with an encouraging nod, abandoned the assistant manager to sit next to Sharon at her desk. She offered another of her warm smiles as she approached and fixed Sharon with her usual concerned gaze.

“Are you okay to talk now? If I’m pushing you then please let me know because that’s not my intention at all, I just want to find out if you’re okay. You seem quiet today.”

Avoiding Sasha’s gaze was impossible. The woman was so genuinely, sincerely caring that trying to hide anything from her just felt wrong. Sasha wanted to help. She was the only person Sharon saw on the regular who had time for her and her life.

Sharon pursed her lips as she tried to think of where to begin. “I… can you keep a secret?”

Sasha nodded. “Of course.”

“It’s…” She trailed off. “I’m sorry. I don’t talk about this, but I guess… You’re really the only person who takes the time to understand my stance on things… you don’t judge me, you listen. Sorry, I’m rambling.”

Sasha placed a hand reassuringly on Sharon’s shoulder. “Don’t apologise, I’ll always be here to listen if you need me. I’m guessing this is about timers?”

Unsuccessfully, Sharon tried to control her involuntary wince. It was blatantly obvious that she’d reacted to the word, but thankfully Sasha was kind enough to ignore it and pretend she hadn’t noticed. Sharon knew there was no way she hadn’t – Sasha was easily one of the most perceptive and intelligent people she’d met, perhaps ever – but she appreciated her efforts in covering for her.

“Yeah. Yeah. Did yours… ever change?” Sharon bit her lip. “Other than just counting down?”

“Never.” Sasha shook her head. “It just went steadily down to zero, and then a month later I married Shea. Wh-”

Before Sasha could finish her sentence, Sharon swore loudly, cutting her off. Within seconds her palms had grown sweaty, her skin flushed red as her heart beat rapidly.

A month.

How could she have forgotten? It was one of the things Sharon despised the most, one of the laws she protested the most fiercely. So long as you were over eighteen, you had to marry your soulmate within a month of your timer reaching zero! The law had never been changed, regardless of how much Sharon and Bianca had poured their time into arguing against. How, how, how it had slipped her mind?

“Shit. Shit shit shit fuck fuck. Sasha! A month. A fucking month. Holy shit.”

She was trembling, hardly able to breathe. Sasha noticed her beginning to panic, her chest rising and falling too quickly, her breaths becoming short and shallow. She was becoming more and more frantic by the second.

“Here,” Sasha said quickly, grabbing Sharon by the hand and supporting her practically limp body as she dragged her towards the toilets. Once they were inside, Sasha furtively checking that the stalls were empty, she forced Sharon to drink from the small fountain in the corner and gently splashed her face with a little bit of water from the tap.

“Breathe, breathe,” She murmured calmly, rubbing soothing circles on Sharon’s back. “You’re okay, don’t panic. Everything’s gonna be alright.”

Sharon wasn’t sure when she’d started crying. She hadn’t even noticed, what with the water being splashed on her face, but the unmistakably hot, salty tears had started to flow beyond her control. She hiccupped slightly and rubbed her eyes, doubly certain that for once, Sasha was actually incorrect.

“No it’s not.” She sniffed. “I completely forgot. A month, I-I don’t even have that. Sasha, what –”

Sasha interjected as politely as she could. “Sharon, Sharon, girl. Take a second to breathe and think, you can do this. I want to help you.”

Sharon remembered one of her old high school teachers giving a famous lecture to the school. They happened frequently, they were boring, but one of them had stuck with her ever since it had happened. The woman had stood in front of everyone, leaning closely against the podium before her, and told them all about courage. She probably had rambled on for longer than Sharon cared to listen to, but at the very least she’d remembered the key message. All you need is five seconds of courage to get you into a situation. Then you have to push through it because you’ve made it happen.

“My timer ran out two weeks ago.”

You have to push through it.

Sasha listened intently, shock evident in her wide eyes, as Sharon talked. It was the first time Sharon had actually recounted the full story out loud, rather than mulling it over in her head like some sadistic form of self torture.  It felt more than ever like the number two was haunting her. Two years had decreased to two minutes. She had a marriage approaching in two weeks. Soulmates were everywhere, the fundamental idea of two hearts joining to make one. When was one decided to be not enough?

It was happening. In a mere two weeks, Sharon would have to get married. She couldn’t refuse, she couldn’t not turn up, she couldn’t fight against the law she’d protested so often. No amount of signs or slogan t-shirts could get her out of this one. Whether she liked it or not – in this case, not – in two weeks time she would be a married woman.

At the end of it all, Sasha pulled Sharon into a tight hug and squeezed her, one hand rubbing her back as she let her friend bury her face into her blazer. Sharon had long stopped crying but that didn’t mean that she was calm by any means – her breaths were still shorter and quicker than ever before. Sasha herself bore no ill-will towards soulmates at all, but she took care to understand everyone’s view and knew just how deeply Sharon hated them. She knew her co-worker had been secretly hoping that those two years would never come, and now she had to get married in a fortnight. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how she was feeling.

“Do…” Sasha approached the subject cautiously. “Do you know who it is?”

Sharon shook her head. “I haven’t looked. I-I can’t. There still t-tape over it.”

“Right.” Sasha fell silent. “Can I?”

“A-As long as I don’t see it, I guess… But you can’t tell anybody. This – this has to stay quiet.”

It only took a moment for Sharon to close her eyes, roll back her sleeve and allow Sasha to peel back the tape and have a look. Once she had the name memorised, she covered the timer up again and pulled Sharon into yet another hug. They lingered for a little while longer that time, Sasha waiting until Sharon’s breathing had started to return to normal before releasing her.

“You wanna head back to the office? Lunch break is nearly over, you haven’t even eaten.”

Sharon shrugged. “I’m not hungry anyway. Let’s just go back.”

People were beginning to filter back into the office in dribs and drabs when the pair emerged from the bathroom. Sasha had done her best to help clean Sharon up, wiping away smudged makeup and tidying up her appearance, but it was still glaringly obvious from her red eyes that she had been crying. Regardless, Sharon sat down at her desk and waited for someone to give her an order, knowing she wouldn’t have time to get started on any work before the demands came flooding in. Meanwhile, Sasha was scrolling through a variety of social media pages and Google results, muttering under her breath as she worked.

“Sharon? Will you come here please?”

Just as she’d predicted. Although the voice sounded sweet, the owner of it was anything but. Behind her artificial smile lay a venomous tongue and her immaculately painted eyes masked a cold, unfeeling stare. Sharon rose from her seat and made her way over to the Latina beauty, mentally preparing herself for the faux niceness.

“What do you want, Val?” Sharon deadpanned, too drained to bother injecting a note of happiness into her voice.

“It’s Valentina.” She corrected, baring her teeth in her trademark perfect smile. “I need you to take these papers for me and deliver them to the managers on the top floor. Quick quick.”

Sharon rolled her eyes. “Which managers?”

Valentina’s eye twitched. “Mrs Moore and Mrs Hides.”

Sharon probably could’ve prolonged the strange, forced conversation between her and Valentina – for example, asking why she referred to them as Mrs Moore and Mrs Hides when everyone knew them as Peppermint and Charlie – but the few short minutes of it were painful enough. Valentina directed Sharon towards a tall stack of papers to the left of her desk and then tapped away on her keyboard with her long nails, leaving Sharon to lift the gigantic stack and attempt to balance it against her chest.

After staggering towards the elevator at the far end of the office, Sharon readjusted her stance so she could try and press the buttons on the wall, her chin steadying the mountain of files clutched precariously in her other arm. Once she’d finally reached outwards, she heard a snigger and a voice.

“The elevator is broken, by the way.”

Sharon didn’t even bother looking at Violet before making her way over to the stairs, cursing under her breath. She was in heels, for Christ’s sake, and trying to carry a ten-ton stack of filed paperwork on a recently-healed broken arm. Was there no sympathy? Then again, nearly everyone in the office was absolutely ruthless. Considering all they did was produce articles by typing at computers all day, Sharon had no idea where all the anger came from. Nevertheless, what she did know was that it was all directed at the fucking intern.

At the end of the long journey up the flights and flights of stairs that the office possessed, a red-faced, exhausted Sharon reached the top floor, managed to palm off the stack of papers to Peppermint’s assistant, and made her way down all of the stairs and into her seat before anyone else could heckle her to do something for them. She’d been given permission to leave work early due to her so-called precarious state, and if she could get through her last hour with minimal movement, her weakened legs would thank her.

“Hey… Sharon?” Sasha greeted her as she sat back down. “I hope you don’t mind that I did this, I looked up the name that’s on your timer.”

Sharon stiffened. “And?”

“Do… do you wanna know anything about her? I won’t mention any names if you don’t want me to.”

Sasha chewed her lip, looking so uncertain that Sharon relented. They were friends, after all, and Sasha only wanted to be kind.

“Okay, why not.”

“Hm…” Sasha pondered as she stared at her screen, choosing select pieces of information. “I think she works as some sort of counsellor, by the looks of things. She’s tall. Blonde, very very pretty…”

She trailed off, gently touching Sharon’s arm. “The two of you might get along really well. You never know until you try, Sharon.”

Sharon sighed. “What does it matter? I have to marry her in two weeks whether I like her or not.”

At that, Sasha fell silent. Part of Sharon wanted to be satisfied that her pessimistic argument had won, but she often relied on Sasha to help lift her mood when she felt down. Silence meant that there wasn’t a way Sasha could use her big brain to twist the words into something a little more positive.

-

She worked her final hour in a glum silence, fetching and carrying a little, but mostly chipping away at another small and pointless article. At least it was work, she reasoned. It was mind-numbingly boring, and more than once her mind wandered down to the accusing piece of glass implanted into her arm.

Tall. Blonde. Pretty. Admittedly, she did sound like a catch. If Sharon was allowed to date freely and love whoever she wanted, rather than be forced into marrying the name on her timer, she’d probably be head over heels for this mystery woman. But on principle, she found herself disliking the image in her head. It didn’t matter how striking her looks may be, it was wrong that they had so little time to know one another before the nuptial agreement took away their freedom.

As it struck one, Sharon gathered her things and hastily made her way out. Willam’s car was in the car park – which was confusing, since he hadn’t said anything about picking her up. He stuck his head out of the window as she approached, waving wildly and only ducking inside once Sharon had climbed into the passenger seat.

“Good afternoon my wonderful, wonderful best friend.” Willam said sweetly. “Thought I’d be a good Samaritan and drop you home, save you the effort.”

Sharon was instantly suspicious. “Alright, cut the sh-” She looked behind her, spotting baby Farrah in the baby-seat and hurriedly backtracking. “Nevermind. Why are you being fake nice, what do you want from me? What have you done?”

“Sharon!” Willam sounded affronted. “Don’t accuse me of wanting something from you! I would never do something like that.”

“Spill.”

“…Courtney is having a party tonight with some friends from her work and I need someone to be there that I can hang out with without wanting to die. Please show up or else I’ll die.”

Sharon started to laugh. Willam always cracked so easily, the pair knew each other too well to keep up any charade for longer than a minute. Even though he was laughing too, there was a hint of begging in his eyes as he started the car and begin driving towards Sharon’s apartment.

“Please? I won’t make you look after Nugget, I won’t bully you, you have to do this for me. Come on, common ground. I may have changed but I hate those women as much as you do.” He pleaded.

Sharon had to give him that one. Courtney worked as a marriage therapist, a unique and fairly well-paying job in their society. They dealt with ‘problem’ soulmate cases – anything from felons and victims to anti-timer people who found themselves trapped in a wedding band. In rare cases they allowed divorces to happen, for example if abuse or any other factors were causing harm, but most of the time the therapists worked through couple’s issues so they could be the perfect little soulmates they were intended to be.

In fairness, Courtney was one of the nicer ones. She wasn’t obnoxious about her own marriage, or her job, but some of the people she worked with were downright revolting. Even though Willam had changed his tone on timers since his had ran out, he still bore an old hatred for those therapists.

Sharon nodded. “Fine, deal. But –” She held up her index finger, ready to make her terms. “Next time the two of us go out and get fully smashed, you’re paying. Uber and all. And you’re not allowed to cop out at 11pm claiming that you’re needed at home. Deal?”

Willam grunted. “Deal. I hate you.”

“How do I need to dress for your fu – for your party then?”

Willam shrugged. “Just look smart, that’s all you need to do. I’ll pick you up at 7?”

“Shi – wow, you really are desperate for my company. It’s nice to be wanted. I’ll be ready by then.” Sharon snorted, a touch of sympathy entering her words.

“Great.” Willam finalized. “Now get out of my car.”

-

Seven o’clock rolled around depressingly slow. Sharon supposed that was the result of being bored and alone in a shitty flat, so she’d spent the last few hours taking her sweet time getting ready. It wasn’t like she was going to put much effort in anyway; Courtney would always upstage her and besides, the women she worked with were bound to make sly comments anyway. Willam owed her one.

Naturally, he turned up ten minutes late with a well-fitted suit and his hair neatly combed back, making Sharon’s short dress and black purse look ridiculously cheap – which they were. Before he pushed open the front door, he warned her of Courtney’s tipsy state, wincing as his wife pulled Sharon into a tight hug and thrust her into the room. Wine glasses were scattered around the place and predominantly women seemed to fill every space. Despite Willam’s attempts to tug Sharon into the kitchen away from the hubbub, Courtney insisted on forcing her to meet everyone before letting her go.

“-who else have I missed, hm…” Courtney stared around the room, trying to find a face she hadn’t forced Sharon to speak to yet.

“Oh! I know!”

And then Sharon saw her.

Tall. Blonde. Pretty. Worked in counselling.

Alaska.

All of the pieces suddenly came together.

“What a horrible first impression for a s-”

“Shh!” Willam hissed, cutting the girl off. “Whatever you do, don’t say the s word around Sharon. Look, she’s alive. Don’t stress, Alaska.”

It was so obvious now.

“Sorry, sorry,” Alaska murmured profusely. “I’m trying to stop getting upset. That’s such a bad first impression and they always say first impressions matter and I always wanted my s-”

How hadn’t she seen the signs?

“No, no, listen to me. I’m saying this because I care about you, Alaska, but I also care about Sharon. I hate having to burst your bubble because I know how you feel about all this, but Sharon does not feel the same way. Look, I agree with you, I personally think it’s dumb, but she’s extremely set in her ways. If you even wanna be her friend, you gotta tone it down.”

Of course.

Her vision tunnelled, her gazed fixed on the eyes of the woman who couldn’t help but stare back, transfixed. Her mind ran at a mile a minute.

Alaska knew. Courtney knew. Willam knew and had purposely kept it from her. In two weeks time, she was the one Sharon would have to marry.

“Excuse me.” Sharon muttered tersely, and dashed out of the room.

#purecamp #withstanding the test of time #shalaska #sharon needles #alaska thunderfuck #sasha velour #willam belli #courtney act #witney #valentina #rpdr fanfiction #submission #soulmate au #lesbian au

[freechaosgames]

Narcosis Review

When developing the 2001 PS2 cult classic, Ico, director Fumito Ueda followed a design strategy that he would later refer to as “design by subtraction.” Summarized, it essentially means doing one thing well instead of multiple things poorly. Decide what you want your game or story or film to accomplish and then remove anything that does not contribute to that vision. 

For a recent example, let’s look at Doom 2016. That game is about being the Doom Marine, relentlessly tearing through hordes of demons and feeling like an unstoppable force of nature. Every design choice contributes to this vision. The player never has to stop to reload meaning they never have to back out of the action to pause. Likewise, health is dropped by enemies when “glory killed” encouraging players close to death to run into the action instead of away from it. Each of these design choices factor into the overall sense of power and excitement that Doom very successfully elicits.

Narcosis is a first person survival horror game released in 2017 by Honor Code Inc. and it is the perfect example of what happens when this advice isn’t followed. The immersive and intricately crafted setting as well as a compelling narrative are constantly overshadowed by poor gameplay and other design choices. While beautiful and atmospheric, no story is worth the pain and frustration you will experience playing Narcosis.

Gameplay

Narcosis includes combat, stealth, platforming, and puzzle sections and fails miserably at every one of them. The most confusing decision made by the developers has to be including an oxygen meter that has to constantly be refilled. Its obvious that some poor 3D artist and level designer put a ton of effort into creating an atmospheric and realistic world for the player to explore, but the O2 meter ensures you will not get to see any of it. For some reason, the developers built a gorgeous and intricate environment just begging to be explored and then added mechanics that force the player to run through the levels as quickly as possible. To make things more frustrating, any time the protagonist sees anything even remotely cool, he starts hyperventilating, using up his oxygen faster. See a dead body? Critical oxygen consumption. A giant squid? Critical oxygen consumption. An old timey scuba ghost? Oddly, he seems totally fine with that.

The combat consists of flailing your arms while holding a knife, but judging distance is near impossible and it seems like the knife only works half the time anyway. Your character is unable to strafe left and right so stealth sections force you to avoid enemies without looking at them, which is irritating when you’re maneuvering through small hallways and you only have to stand somewhat near an enemy to be killed by it.

The platforming sections are the absolute worst, though. Whoever decided this game should include platforming was definitely a serial killer. There is no other explanation. The slow, imprecise movement, the jump that has to be charged before you use it, your inability to look down. Every decision seems to have been made in an effort to make this game the least fun it could possibly be. To make things more frustrating, you are often required to jump on oddly shaped models, like sofas and desks, but your character is barely capable of walking over small rocks let alone an upside-down office chair. This ensures that you will get to play the same platforming section over and over and over until you finally make it through or decide to kill yourself.

Story

The story and worldbuilding of Narcosis is where the game is at its best. Much of the lore and exposition can be found through exploring the levels, which really adds a feeling of immersion. Unfortunately, you often won’t have time to appreciate this aspect of the game because you’ll be too busy searching for another oxygen tank. 

You will encounter the corpses of your various crew mates while exploring the facility and finding them unlocks information about who they were. The fact that every dead body has a name and a story adds a lot of weight to the catastrophe you currently find yourself in. Though, again, looking at these bodies for too long increases your oxygen consumption forcing you to spend no more then a second looking at these gruesome, but well crafted, scenes. The story of Narcosis is decent and the ending was a surprise, but it just isn’t worth the effort to play through the entire 3 to 4 hour campaign.

Final Thoughts

To be blunt, Narcosis is not good. It isn’t fun and I’m pretty sure the level “The Water’s Edge” gave me an ulcer. The never-ending frustration of trying to navigate the game’s mechanics outweighs any feelings of fear or suspense. Narcosis should have been a 45 minute walking simulator without any combat or platforming, but instead Honor Code padded it with annoying and counterproductive mechanics that absolutely ruin the experience.  

Purchase Narcosis from Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/366870/Narcosis/

#video games #video game review #narcosis #survival #horror #survival horror

[theunwrittenones]

Prompt #3

„Dude, we are not asking the dragon for directions.”

“Dude, we`re not asking the Dragon for directions.” He slammed the warning down on her, like a sledgehammer to an anvil.

“Alright, alright. I got it, ok?” Ferroy brushed the dark leather-gloved hands off her collar and took a step back. It was bad enough that people talked about them already. A scene was the last thing they needed right now.

“Look Vince, it’ll be easy peasy lemon sqeezy, I tell you!” The bald man called Vince gave her a look, that told her exactly how not amused he was about her flippant attitude.

“Don’t yer fucking ‘Vince’ me, Roy!” He knew how much she despised it when he abbreviated her name like that. “Listen Girl, you go down that stinking hell hole of a dungeon and all sorts of crazy shebang is going to happen to you.” He couldn’t see her rolling back her eyes behind the giant brim of her hat, but he knew her to well, to pick up on it. “Roll those squinty balls back a little further and maybe, just maybe, you can see the sun shining in your arse!” He put his hands on his hips and averted his eyes.

She leaned in to him and spoke through gritted teeth: “Vince, do you think that I -of all people- don’t know how fucking dangerous that damn manor is?” He didn’t look at her, but ever so slightly shook his head. His skin was unnaturally pale, so that the red-brown scars, traced all over his face in their crisscross pattern, became even more obvious.

“I wouldn’t have accepted, if we had a darn choice, now would I? Guess what, dear brother, we don’t have a choice, not anymore.” Vince stared at the ground, as if he expected to find the right argument hidden between dusty wooden boards. She relaxed and put her hand on his shoulder. He wanted to do right by her, she knew. After all, they only had each other.

Their parents and friends were simply gone, devoured by the blight. Growing up in an orphanage was tough. The Mistress and Director had a deal with the local farmers, so they were raised in slave labor. Working children still were a viable currency back then.

The streets took them, as soon as their teenage years began to dawn. The unmitigated gateway to a life of crime and violence. Ferroy then, discovered her unhealthy affinity to knives. It didn’t take her long to work her first wet-job. In the beginning, she was sloppy. Her Targets got away sometimes and her clients tried to ditch her on occasion, but she was a quick learner. Vince on the other hand had a nag to acquire all sorts off dangerous friends. Often the wrong types of people in wrong types of places, but always high up in rank and unhinged in all the bad ways.

Their wild years began shortly after they carved a market for themselves. Leviathan Bay was a candy store and no one said no to the ‘Grimm Twins’. One slip up, however, is often enough to send your luck straight down the toilette bowl.

Ferroy owed money. To the wrong people. People introduced to her by Vince.

“You’re right.” Vince wiped invisible mud off his face. “Of course, you’re right. Just promise me, don’t do anything rash!”

She shrugged: “You know me.”

“Damn right, I do.” His tempered flared up again, but he fought it down.

“The bastard is here, brace yourself.”

An incredible fat man made his way through the crowd. His gestures, as he greeted several townsfolk, were relaxed and aloof. Rakash-Tai Vun, ‘caretaker’ of most known and unknown gambling houses in Leviathan Bay, effortlessly split the groups of people that stood in his path. It took him a few moments to spot them, but when he did, a smile began to crack his face.

Talking to Rakash was every bit as disgusting and loathsome, as she imagined. Even now, Ferroy felt ice sliding down her bare back. There were the usual threats of skinning and bone breaking, of course. Talk that seemed to come so natural to people with deep confidence issues. However, the price to pay was much steeper this time around. The way he looked at them made her knife hand itch. ‘Forced employment’ was the term, Rakash used. Vince, despite all that, kept his head cool. He never apologized or begged. He simply offered the plan Ferroy had pushed on him earlier and wrapped it up like the deal of the century. Rakash took the bait. He knew the risk, but craved the reward even more. Their debt was mere formality to him, but meant all to them. Now, there was a unique opportunity, each man of the business dreamed about.

She departed to her very probable doom around noon the next day. Leviathan Bay was but a speck in the distance. A grey wound in the spotless golden fields behind her. In front of her rose the ‘Chocking Hills’. Covered almost to completion with thick forest, that held bandits at best and unspeakable horrors at worst. There was however, an upside to her situation. Her two traveling companions were over all quite pleasant. There was almost no talking. Their only exchanges were social grunts, when task needed to be performed or hand signals, when they were hunting and navigating.

It took them the better part of the afternoon to arrive at their destination, the serpentine, narrow path up to ‘Raven Barrow’.

Never had her eyes seen more dilapidation then here. Corpses, bloated out of proportion by unknown diseases, littered the streets. Nearly all houses appeared to be caved in and inhabitable. Gallows hung right in front of her, holding lifeless forms gently swaying from the tireless arm of the giant scaffold, built in the town square. There was madness in the serenity of this horrific landscape. From the farmstead to her left emanated a sick purple glow. She knew it to be there, because of the stories she heard when she was quite young. Something from the depth of the ‘Wailing Forest’ took quite literally roots there. Last but not least, the manor house itself. Its quite, ominous presence overshadowed the whole of ‘Raven Barrow’. Built on the highest location just outside of town. Like a dark sentinel, always watching. Ferroys heart took a dive into her stomach. The pure rawness of death all around almost made her dizzy. Her two companions urged her forward and she was glad they did, for she wasn’t sure what she would have done. Her instincts screamed flight, but flight was not an option.

So she braced herself, for there was only one way to go…

“We are not asking the dragon for directions!” Jimmy says. I loath him for being a coward. Being a coward myself, naturally, I don’t say anything. Instead I step back, out of the streetlight and closer to the forest. The ‘dragon’ was the one that yelled insults at us, but Jimmy had been stupid enough to reply. We’d almost made it home after our D’n’D session at Kim’s.

“This isn’t D’n’D, Jimmy.” Mona says and pushes her elbow into Jimmy’s side. Mona is fierce. One day I want to have the courage to ask her out. I could take her up the mountain and map out constellations at night. I think she would like that.

“This isn’t D’n’D, Jimmy.” Our enemy grunts and his friends join the laugher. Wonder who the ‘dragon’ is? It’s George the dumbest and meanest guy from school. Walking cliché and quarterback of our school team the ‘Mighty Smallville Dragons’.

Finally, Mark, our Dungeon Master each Friday night and king of the nerds (he gets beaten up the least at school), steps forward.

“We don’t want any trouble.” Mark says, and George cocks his head like he’s just warming up. Mark is tall, but in a stretched out lanky way. He doesn’t stand a chance. George and his friends laugh. There’s us, Mark, Jimmy, Mona and I. Four nerds against four of the dragons. They are going to beat the shit out of us.

“Fucking dumb asses.” George says and lets his fist crack against Jimmy’s head. Jimmy goes down like he rolled a critical one.

“No!” I shout and step forward on impulse. I’m next. My lip splits when George’s fist collides. My hand goes up to my jaw on instinct and warm blood spills into my mouth. It dribbles down my chin as I stagger back. I feel around my teeth with my tongue. My incisor cut into my cheek, but all my teeth are okay.

“Shit. What the hell is wrong with you?” Mona aims at George and the dude is too surprised or too dumb to move. She bitch-slaps George. I’d swoon if I weren’t occupied with the pain in my face.

“You’ll regret this.” George says. “Cunt.” He adds, and I see how Mona’s face scrunches up in anger.

“We gotta run!” Jimmy says. I grab Mona by the elbow. Jimmy helps Mark back to his feet. George looks like he might murder Mona. You don’t hit girls. Maybe George abides to that rule, but better not risk it.

“God, I wish we could do something against that guy. He’s such a dick.” I exclaim, when we’re far away from George and his cronies, close by my house.

“What happened to you, Andy?” My mom asks when she opens the door. I’m dragged into the kitchen, where she and grandma make a fuss. Grandma dabs my lip with something that makes my eyes water.

“Was it that big boy George Miller?” Mom asks, but I shake my head. I’m not a traitor. Guess the heat in my cheeks is telling enough.

“You know how those dragon guys are.” I say, and my Mom puts a band-aid on my face. Come Monday, let’s hope I’m all healed up. I don’t want to look like a total looser at school. Mom steps away from me and gives me a worried look. I’m glad Dad is still at work, because he would be angry at me for not fighting back. Dad was never a nerd, he was one of the cool kids. He’ll never understand.

“They are bullies.” Grandma says. “When you’re ready, come upstairs. I have something to show you.” She adds with a sad smile. Avoiding eye-contact, Mom and I exchange a few platitudes about how our day was, before I head upstairs. I scratch at the congealed blood that dribbled down my neck. Yelling for Grandma I follow her voice into her bedroom. I’m never in here, it’s too stuffy and just like I don’t want Grandma to invade my privacy and hang out in my room, I never stay long in hers. She’s sitting at her dresser, the yellow lamp light smooths out her wrinkles. Something glistens in her palm.

“Take it!” She says when I reach her. I look at it, it’s a small green carving of a dragon. Too heavy to be plastic. There’s a hole going through its middle, like you are supposed to wear it on a chain around your neck.

“It’s made from jade.” She explains. “Your Grandpa brought it back after ‘Nam.” She says.

“Uh, thanks.” I say, unsure what to do.

“Your Grandpa said it was for protection.” She says and folds her hands over mine to wrap around the jade dragon. Her hands are wrinkled and dry, but warm.

��I think you should have it.” She says and I pocket it.

“Thanks, Grandma.” I want to turn around and leave, but Grandma stops me with a hand to my forearm.

“You’re a good boy, Andy. I just wished you would believe in yourself.” I swallow hard. Suddenly I feel not only embarrassed, but crushed. It’s like she can look right behind my eyes and into my thoughts.

“Promise me, next time you and your friends meet the Miller boy you’ll try to talk to him.” Grandma continues and lets go of my arm.

“There’s no point talking to them. They’ll- you know how they are- they’re-.” I stop and she finishes for me: “They’re violent. At least, I can tell you this: high school doesn’t last forever. Once you went to college, and Miller and his friends are still stuck in Smallville, you’ll have the upper hand. And because you’re you, you won’t hold it against them.” She says it with a fond smile, that makes me look at my shoes.

“I think I understand.” I mumble, without looking up.

“Good night, Andy.” Grandma says.

Lying awake for at least an hour, I imagine all the things I could have said to George Miller to keep him from hitting my friends, but every time it ends the same: I am the one that gets beaten up, even more than today. Curled into a tight ball, I stare into the darkness. All the other guys at school make fun of me too, even the girls. They always find a reason: my glasses, my fat ass, the cheap T-shirts my Mom buys me. Every time their jabs hurt just as much as a physical beating. There are tears in my throat. Gulping, I remind myself that I am too old for crying.

The moonlight glistens on the little jade dragon I put on my night stand. It’s cool to the touch and I curl my hand around it in a tight fist and press it to my chest. It calms be down, I think, but maybe I am just exhausted. I’m so, so tired. The stone warms to my touch until it becomes a pinpoint of fire. The dragon is scourging my chest, but after all, I am only dreaming.

I wake up and double over coughing. The smell of smoke clogs up my lungs. I take a deep breath, arch my back. Fire, I think, and jump to my feet. There’s a fire in the house. The jade dragon falls to the floor with a clink. I’m halfway down the steps, before I realize the smell of smoke is gone. Maybe a remnant of a dream. Slower, with my heart beating fast in my eardrums, I walk down the rest of the stairs.

The TV‘s on mute in the living room. I expect my Dad to be sleeping on the couch (he doesn’t like to wake up Mom in the middle of the night). But Dad isn’t there. There’s noises coming from the porch. Following the commotion, dread drops into my stomach. My parents are outside, talking in hushed voices with our neighbor through the fence. Grandma is probably still sleeping upstairs. Dad has his arm slung over Mom’s shoulder and she’s huddled close.

The wood creaks under my feet. Their heads turn. My neighbor says his goodbyes and vanishes back inside.

“Go back to bed, Andy!” Dad tells me, but my eyes find Mom’s.

“What happened?” I ask.

She shakes her sleep tousled head. “There’s been a fire in town.” She stops, swallows, like she needs to find the right words first: “George Miller’s house burned to the ground.” She finally settles for the truth.

I feel an odd and disconcerting mixture of fear and excitement trickle down my spine.

“Is he dead?” I ask and hold my breath. My lungs feel hollow, like someone scooped them out like ice cream with a big spoon. Dad clears his throat. Mom pushes out of his embrace.

“He’ll know from the newspapers anyway.” She says. “George, his parents and his little sister Jody didn’t make it out alive. The smoke suffocated them, before the fire reached the upper level of their home.” I immediately wonder if they woke up first and weren’t able to get out of the house.

“The firemen came in too late.” Dad explains. After I say nothing for several seconds, he asks: “Son, are you okay?”

I nod, but it’s automatic.

“I feel- I feel sorry for them.” I stutter, cross my arms around my chest.

“Go back to bed! Try to sleep if you can!” Mom says and steps closer. She wants to hug me, but I step out of her reach. It feels like her touch would burn me to a crisp.

“Sorry.” I mumble. “Good night Mom.” I say and exchange a look with my Dad, before I turn on my heals and go back inside. In my room I close the door behind me and lean against it for a moment. I try to take even breaths, but it doesn’t work. George was a bad guy, a bully, a total dickhead, but him and his whole family didn’t deserve to die.

There’s something on the edge of my awareness that comes into focus now. A small stabbing pain right in the middle of my chest where the breastbone is. As I think about it the pain intensifies. My hand is shaking as I inspect my shirt. There’s a burn mark right where I pushed the jade dragon against my chest.

“Shit.” I cuss and repeat the words so much it becomes a litany. I stumble over to my wardrobe and open the doors to look at my reflection. I look like a wax puppet. My skin’s shiny and sweaty. My mouth snaps shut. With clammy fingers I lift my shirt. It drops to the floor and I see the red burn mark on my chest. The skin is alleviated where the jade dragon touched down. On closer inspection I can see that the outline of the dragon is drawn in red angry lines, like it literally burned my skin away. It’ll scar. It’ll stay for everyone to see. I gulp. It’s evidence of what I did. Whatever my Grandpa brought back from Vietnam is dangerous. It killed George and Jody and their parents.

I search for the dragon. It fell under my bed. It’s no longer calm and cool, but hot. I close my fist around the pendant. With my eyes shut, I am certain it pulses in sync with my own heart beat. For a moment I feel like I am the one in control for once in my life.

I take the hike up to the mountain, the jade dragon sleeps in my pocket. All thoughts of taking Mona up here are pushed aside. I need to see with my own eyes. I looked at George’s house on Google Maps. It’s one of those two story block buildings, unspectacular, except it wasn’t the only one like it build in that street. After checking the weather and reading up on how fires develop and behave under certain conditions, I am certain the other houses should have caught fire too. Additionally, it had been a fairly stormy night. From up here I can see the building. It’s easy to find among the strong colors of spring. The Miller house is a black burned hole. I got my binoculars with me. I check the surrounding ground. Not even the grass around the building is burned or the least bit dried out, but lush and green. It’s like the fire came from inside the walls itself.

It’s a curse, is it not? I try flinging the jade dragon down the cliff. I don’t want it anymore. But it stays in my palm like it has been glued to it. The whole next week I attempt to get rid of the damn thing. But it’s no use. I thought about giving it away as a gift, because that is how I got it from Grandma, but I can’t do that to the bullies at school, least of all my friends. A rumor starts, about me paying someone of the dropout kids in town to burn down George Miller’s building. I try laughing it off, but to my own ears it’s a bitter laugh. Guess the others know I had something to do with the fire one way or the other. Even my friends start avoiding me after a while. Maybe they can sense something isn’t right with me. For a while, things stay quiet. Soon the kids at school forget the whole affair and George Miller becomes an anecdote, nothing more. That’s how the bullying starts up again.

It’s not the same. The fire changed something inside of me. The night of the dragon let me get my revenge on George. This time, when someone tries to get under my skin, I know what I can do to make them regret it. The worst thing is that I like the thought. I like the idea of power. I don’t know what the dragon can do. But the bigger question is what I am capable of. That scares me most of all. Grandma was wrong, I am not a good boy. I’m afraid one day I’ll have enough. I’ll snap and use it again on someone else. I fear for that day to come.

„Dude, we are not asking the dragon for directions.”

“But it’s so cute and fluffy.”

“Are you out of your mind? It’s huge. Has scales and fucking spits ice.” My friend hissed under his breath, pointing with his swords towards the beast.

In between the tannin-brown forest, the icy-blue dragon wasn’t able to hide very well. The grass was crisp under my feet. I looked up and the trees were skyscraper tall, reminding me of home. My view went between my friend Leroy and then back to the dragon. The beast really looked cute, with round little ears and blue sparkling scales. Maybe he was not fluffy but I knew deep down, that this dragon had to be a good guy. Someone we could trust. You just had to look at those feline eyes, they were gleaming with cunning and somewhat kindness. He wasn’t aware of what would come for him. It made me trust him on the spot.

“I’ll go talk to him.” I let my companion know. Hands traveling down to my battle-ax. “You think I should leave my ax here? It would show I come in peace. He might not attack me right away.”

“Kane, if you leave now I’ll go back to the tavern and spend my coin. You’re not a dragon, you’re human and dragons eat humans for breakfast. They don’t care if you carry a weapon or not. They attack.” Leroy pointed out.

“Don’t worry friend, I used my last skill point to level up on the skill Animal-friend and, may I remind you, that I was raised by a dragon.”

Leroy sighed heavily. “Animal-friend means you don’t scare rabbits or chickens easily, but I highly doubt that a dragon will not attack you due to that skill.”

“I was raised by a dragon.” I pointed out again to make my point. The delicate creature would not attack one of their own children.

“You were not raised by a fucking dragon. You had human parents as I did.”

“Never met my parents, have no memory of them. I was raised by a dragon. If you would read all the documents we find along our adventures and not skip them, you would know that there was an unnamed young boy in Themar Land, who was saved by magicians from a fierce dragon… and turns out in other letters that this boy was raised by the dragon. They took the boy against his will and slaughtered the pure creature for nothing.”

“And how are you sure it was you? Was your name written down?” Leroy wanted to know, looking at the dragon, afraid we might catch his attention with our banter.

“I can’t be sure, but as you’ve might noticed, I have a pretty big scar on my shoulder and … that’s proof.” I said, opening my mouth to say more before closing it again. Damn, I needed better arguments to prove my point of being dragon-raised to convince him. Did being pretty sure about it count as proof?

“Okay” Leroy rolled his eyes, clearly avoiding the topic now and trying to find a solution. He eyed the dragon more than once, unsure if we’d drawn his attention already but I was sure we hadn’t crossed the checkpoint yet and that’s why the ice-spitting dragon hadn’t moved yet.

Leroy looked at me, raised eyebrows, sword in hand. “So, what are we gonna do? We can stand here and hide, but then we won’t find the treasure and you know I want the treasure. I need to find it and I can’t do this without you.”

“I know, that’s why I’m gonna go and talk to him. Dragons are a million years old, he has to know something about the hidden treasure of Themar Land.”

“This still does not solve our problem, even if he wouldn’t turn you into an ice statue, you can’t talk Dragon.”

“Duh, I leveled my language skills too.”

Leroy’s lips pressed into a white slash. “Yeah, for human language and that upgrade means that it’s easier for you to get information from humans, not freakin’ dragons.”

I shrugged. My shoulders lowered and I crossed my arms. Maybe he had a point but we needed to make a decision quick.

“Guys!” The voice from the Gamemaker blurted into my ears through the tiny intercom. “Make a decision or you’re out of the game!”

This whole situation Leroy and I were stuck in didn’t seem to look good on TV. The ratings weren’t rising like the producers wanted to. They needed more action. That was getting them great ratings, it was the reason I started to watch it and applied to be part of too. Action, slaying dragon, fighting aliens or battleships -whatever the setting, it always involved fighting.

Leroy and I nodded. We didn’t want to be cut.

“Like it or not, I’ll try talking to him, when I die you have to go and find the treasure without me. You chose the skill Death-From-Above and Lightfoot, that-”

“Landing safely when jumping from higher grounds won’t help me when this thing attacks.” Leroy snapped.

Maybe he was right, the dragon was huge but asking him for directions seemed to be a good way to get ahead of the competition. I was sure no one else was so smart about it.

I was going to do this. Although Leroy had taken some of my confidence away, I kept the battle-ax with me just in case things went south. I didn’t want to die so early in the game.

The grass was crunching lightly under my boots when I moved forward. I was amazed, that even though I knew this was just Virtual-Reality-TV, I was nervous. My heart rate was going up, my hands were sweating and the closer I moved the bigger the dragon got. When crossing the checkpoint the dragon started to move. He spread his wings, sending icy wind towards me. The air was shifting and I saw my breath coming out of my mouth. My hands started shaking, it was suddenly so cold and I had trouble standing straight.

When the dragon spotted me, he growled. The ground was trembling. I lost my balance.

“I’m Kane. Son of the dragons.” I yelled. The dragon looked at me. A smile crept up my piercing cool face, before the dragon opened his mouth. He spilled ice, not words. The icicles flew through the air, cut into my skin and split painfully through my heart.

My sight faded, everything went black.

#writing prompt #short story

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

The Greatest Year in Horror Film History Part III: 1979

New Post has been published on https://nofspodcast.com/greatest-year-horror-film-history-part-iii-1979/

The Greatest Year in Horror Film History Part III: 1979

Imagine you are in a restaurant. You sit in a dark corner booth and check out the menu. The faint smell of cigarettes smoked long ago fills your nostrils and Thelonious Monk tickles your eardrums. Now, this isn’t some posh bistro in Paris or somewhere “Midwest fancy” (like an Arby’s) it’s just a no-name corner spot in a no-name town. At this restaurant, you order yourself the classic three-course meal of an appetizer, entree and dessert. You have done this hundreds of times in your life, but this time is different. This meal just so happens to start off with THE BEST chicken wings you’ve ever eaten. That’s followed up by THE BEST cheeseburger you’ve ever had, and you end the meal with THE BEST piece of apple pie you’ve ever tasted. Using basic logic, that would make this the greatest restaurant you’ve ever been to, right? So what does this have to do with the greatest year in horror film history?

Now imagine that this restaurant represents 1979, the number one year in horror film history. We can call it the greatest because it features three best-of-all-time films in their sub-genre, all packed within one magical year. Within its 365 days, this year gave us the best vampire, zombie and science-fiction horror films that have ever been made. Some may try to debate these claims, but luckily for us, we have the math to back us up.

Over the past few weeks, we have examined the #2 (1986) and #3 (2017) best years in horror film history. This week, as a final gift from me in 2017, we will be looking at the films that make 1979 the greatest year in horror film history. For those of you unfamiliar with our process, here’s a quick refresher:

OUR METHODOLOGY OR: HOW WE LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE EXCEL

We took a look at all of the horror films from 1970 to 2017. (The early 1970’s were a starting point for us because A) We needed one and B) The frequency of quality and iconic horror films really picked up during this time).

To determine a “score” for each year, we took a look at 5 different rating sources-

Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer Score

RT Critic’s Average Rating

RT Audience Score

RT Audience Average Rating

IMDB Viewer Ratings

– These ratings were averaged to find the “Fiend Score” for each film. We then combined the Fiend Score of the top three horror films from each year to give that year a total. I admit, the selection of the top three films was sometimes difficult. It was necessary to take other factors into account, such as the size of release, box office total and iconic status to determine which films were included in the top three. These three films were totaled and given an official number which we are calling its “NOFS Score”. These NOFS Scores ranged anywhere from 142 (Ouch) to 255.

So, without further ado, The Greatest Year in Horror Film History is:

Part III- 1979

NOFS Score- 255

The 1970’s were a tumultuous time in the United States and abroad. This was especially true at the end of the decade, where marginalized groups struggled to find their place in society and were denied basic rights from the newly galvanized conservative movement. This directly led to an influx of horror cinema across the country, packing small-town theaters with those wishing to escape. The 1970’s produced some of the finest horror films ever made, like The Exorcist (1973), Halloween (1978) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Everything culminated in 1979, however, and we were given the greatest year in horror film history.

The horror films of 1979 are an amalgamation of the societal fears and attitudes toward authority the population felt all through the decade. Although horror has been an effective mirror for society throughout history, this is especially true for 1979. Here are the films with the top three Fiend Scores from that year:

  #3- Nosferatu the Vampyre

Written and Directed By: Werner Herzog Starring: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz

Fiend Score- 82

Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre is the best adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that has ever been made. Officially, it’s an adaptation-of-an-adaptation, but either way it far surpasses any other attempt at the story. Nosferatu (1922), directed by F.W. Murnau is gorgeous and iconic, but Herzog’s direction, cast and setting puts his version above the original. It is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful horror films ever produced.

Bruno Ganz, a man that has somehow found a way to look like Javier Bardem but talk like Tommy Wiseau, plays Jonathan Harker, a man sent to Count Dracula to sell a house. He and his beloved Lucy, played with an angelic ethereality by Isabelle Adjani, are thrust into harm’s way as the Count makes his way to town to set up shop. They are fine representations of their characters but are ultimately overshadowed by the performance of Kinski as Dracula.

He is not an attractive man who just happens to enjoy dark castles and dope capes. You cannot walk past him on the street and mistake him for yet another aristocratic gentleman. He is an animal, an apex predator than needs to hunt. Kinski plays the character with a hunger and a pent-up power that is unrivaled in the Dracula filmography. Herzog lights his sets so perfectly that even his bright-white complexion can be hidden from you if he so chooses. It is shown in several scenes that Dracula is capable of forcing you to do as he wishes. Harker is twice attacked and is unable to fully resist or remember it in the morning. Kinski’s vampire doesn’t resort to glamour or hypnosis, however, as he chooses to take what he wants and stare directly into your eyes as he takes it. The scenes where he enters the bedchambers of both Harker and Lucy are so chilling because of the hunger in Kinski’s eyes. It bores into the screen and creates an uneasiness in the viewer, almost as if he has triggered our prehistoric fight-or-flight response.

Nosferatu the Vampyre is required viewing for fans of vampires or horror in general. The film begins with actual mummified corpses from Mexico and only gets darker from there. Herzog fills every frame with a physical weight, forcing the audience to gasp to keep from asphyxiating. The scenery surrounding Harker as he journeys to Dracula’s castle, in any other film, would be gorgeous. In Herzog’s hands, however, every crag and rock looks like it is trying to keep Jonathan from finding the way. The wet trail would rather make it’s hiker slip and die than reach their destination. For to reach the castle they seek is a fate far, far worse than death.

#2- Dawn of the Dead

Written and Directed By: George A. Romero Starring: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reininger

Fiend Score- 84

I remember the first time that I ever saw this film. I was way too young to be watching it, but when you’re in grade school and home alone sick with the flu, you watch whatever VHS tapes are at your disposal. Feeling OK (maybe I was just playing hookie? I can’t remember, but I wouldn’t put it past me), I made myself some lunch and popped in Dawn of the Dead. Many of the film’s central themes went way over my head, but the gore definitely did not. I distinctly remember feeling physically sick after watching the movie. So, I may have been faking my illness at first, but I was most definitely ill afterwards.

The film seems almost tame by today’s standards, but in 1979 it was a gore-fest unlike anything else in theaters. George A. Romero took what shocked audiences in his classic Night of the Living Dead (1968) and turned those scenes up to 11 and shot them in living color. Tom Savini, now regarded as one of the finest effects artists in horror film history, was still a young Vietnam War Veteran when tabbed for this film. His practical gore effects have gone down in history as some of the finest ever filmed, even with the crazy-bright fake blood that he hated so much.

The blood and guts made the film stood out for 8-year-old me, but its central theme of commercialism and the dehumanization of its survivors are what make the film so special today. Everyone knows that setting the film in a shopping mall was no accident, and Romero wanted to make a statement about how the need to buy material things turns us into inhuman beings. That message still works today, only you can now replace the shopping mall with the endless shelves of online shopping experiences. We stare at our screens and drool over (BRAINS!) digital images of things we absolutely must have or else we will surely perish. I like nice things, so I don’t really care what Romero has to say about my shopping habits, but the hedonism and greed that the survivors show is what interests me.

The ending of the film is almost inconsequential. It is the behaviors shown by the survivors of the worldwide epidemic that is what makes this film so powerful. The actions of the initial survivors and the stupid desperation of the motorcycle gang shaped what zombie films and television eventually became. At a certain point, it’s no longer about the reanimated dead, but how we interact with one another as survivors that makes zombie cinema so interesting. Without Dawn of the Dead, the zombie genre would have died out long ago and the horror genre as a whole would not be the same.

  #1- Alien

Directed By: Ridley Scott Written By: Dan O’Bannon Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt

Fiend Score- 89

Priority one: Insure return of organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable.

So reads Special Order 937 from the fine folks at Weyland-Yutani. These fourteen words are the central driving force for an entire franchise that has now reached an incredible 8 films. It is also indicative of a sentiment many people felt in 1979. The government and corporations cannot be trusted and will do anything to further their reign and expand their power.

The film itself is a perfect horror movie. Some have called it a slasher film in space, likening the Xenomorph to everyone’s favorite terrestrial killing machine, Michael Myers. They have even compared the Nostromo to a haunted house. While this is completely valid, I have recently run across a point of view that paints the film in an entirely different light. You see, Alien isn’t a slasher, its a possession film.

The haunted house is not the freighter Nostromo, but instead the planet LV-426 where the crew encounters the abandoned alien spacecraft. They are sent to the ship because of a mysterious beacon, luring them in even though some may see it as a warning. The crew investigates the ship, then something attaches itself to Kane (Hurt). The others rush him back to the mother ship, which only allows it to spread and evolve, putting everyone else on the crew at risk. The Nostromo represents a host body, and the Xenomoph a possessing entity. Once invited in by the foreign agent Ash (here an android, but in other films shown as a demon or Satan himself), the entity systematically destroys everything that made the host unique and independent. As the final battle between Ripley and the beast showed us, the only way to survive a possession film is through exorcism.

Whatever lens you choose to view the film through, Alien remains one of the finest horror films ever made. It is tied with Silence of the Lambs (1991) as the film with the highest Fiend Score we calculated, and it launched the careers of Scott and Weaver. Although the on-board “computer” looks a little silly by today’s standards, the rest of the film holds up and is just as terrifying today as it was in 1979. Scott’s ability to film in tight, dark spaces is unparalleled, and the creature design by H.R. Giger is still regarded as the finest in horror film history. The bio-mechanical quality of the Xenomorph makes it difficult, especially when the ship’s lights begin to strobe, to distinguish what is ship and what is alien. This forces the audience to stay on edge and to constantly search behind the characters and down the dark hallways for the creature. It is a masterclass in film-making and suspense-building, and it led the way in making 1979 the greatest year in horror movie history.

Honorable Mentions:

We’ve determined that 2017, 1986 and 1979 were the top three years in horror film history, but what was the top decade? According to our calculations, the 1970’s carry the highest average NOFS Score at 224. Even though the current decade started poorly, 2016 (224) and 2017 (234) may be a sign of what’s to come in the next few years and it may push the 2010’s over the top.

Even though it is considered an all-time classic (for some reason), 1979’s The Amityville Horror didn’t quite crack the top-3 for the year. It finished with a lowly Fiend Score of 50.

1979 also gave us David Cronenberg’s The Brood (Fiend Score– 71), Phantasm (Fiend Score– 69) and When a Stranger Calls (Fiend Score– 52). Not all of these are are earth-shatteringly good films, but all have become iconic movies that are must-watches for horror fans.

Although it was only a made-for-TV miniseries, Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot also premiered in 1979. I mention this exclusively for the bedroom window scene. I still have nightmares about that one.

Dis-Honorable Mentions:

Whenever you are crunching the numbers, looking to find the “Best Of” anything, you inevitably discover the “Worst Of”. Here are the worst years in horror film history-

Although 2015 gave us The Babadook (and we say thankya), the year as a whole came in as the #3 worst year of all time with an NOFS Score of only 152. The other films from that year were poorly received, including Annabelle (Fiend Score– 44) and Ouija (Fiend Score– 31).

The number two worst year in horror film history was 1989, which finished with an NOFS Score of 149. The top-three films for that year ended up being Pet Sematary (Fiend Score– 58), Puppet Master (Fiend Score– 48) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Fiend Score– 48).

Last and definitely least, the worst year in horror film history was 1995! Demon Knight (Fiend Score– 55), Species (Fiend Score– 45) and Village of the Damned (Fiend Score– 41) were the top three films of the year, totaling an NOFS Score of only 142.

Join the Discussion:

So, there you have it! 1979 is officially the greatest year in horror film history. What do you think about our findings? Head over to our Official Facebook Group and let us know! Where would you rank these years? What do you think makes the 1970’s the best decade for horror? Do you think the 1980’s should be above it? Put on your thinkin’ caps and tell us your opinions!

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