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#WHY!!!! does tumblr EAT!!! my entire !!!!!! formatting!!!
3liza · 1 year
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frembly remonger that you can increase the potency of Adderall by taking it on an alkaline stomach environment. in other words, not acidic. so with some tums or maalox or a pinch of baking soda in water. if you're stretching your Adderall due to shortages this is a good way to make it last. i am not a doctor this is not medical advice do this at your own risk.
FAQ below the readmore so I can edit this post if necessary without errors being reblogged.
FAQ:
1. Q. How much Tums/baking soda should I take with my Adderall?
A: It's not an exact science and it probably won't poison you but one or two Tums/chewable antacid tablets or a 1/4 teaspoon (medium pinch) of baking soda in a glass of water should be fine.
2. Q: How much stronger will the Adderall be if I take it with an alkaline?
A: There's no way to predict this or measure it, but maybe start with half your normal dose and see how it goes. You aren't going to overdose. The worst thing that would happen if you took your normal dose with baking soda is you will feel a little jittery. Unless you have a heart condition in which case you shouldn't be taking Adderall at all.
3. Q: Does this work with other drugs like Ritalin?
A: It's complicated. Sometimes, but you have to look up each and every individual drug and check. All drugs have different routes they take through the body and different pH levels cause different things to happen. Mushrooms for example are potentiated with acids, especially ascorbic acid*. This post is only about Adderall. The bioavailability of Adderall is increased with an alkaline stomach environment. If you have verified information about other drugs and how to stretch them please make your own post.
If you have questions about other drugs please google them (or Startpage or DuckDuckGo or Bing) in this format: "[drug name] potentiate [alkaline/acid/tums/baking soda] [erowid/bluelight/reddit]", look at at least 20 different posts on the subject, synthesize that information and make a judgment call about how reliable the info is. In general, people who have actual research papers backing up their posts/opinions on the drug forums are better informed and more trustworthy.
4. Q: I did what you said and there was a problem/I got too high/my tummy hurts.
A: This is a risk of taking drug advice from the internet, which you should not do, especially from someone who is not a doctor (me) and is not giving you medical advice, but sometimes your stomach hurts when you have too LITTLE stomach acid and you should have a slightly acidic food to balance it out. If Adderall is still in your stomach, eating something acidic will derail the rest of the dose and either partially or entirely deactivate it. If you have already absorbed the Adderall and it's in your blood then your stomach pH won't make a difference. This is why you should start with a low Adderall dose if you are experimenting with stretching it out.
5. Q: I did what you said I made my Adderall so so strong and got so high and now I'm a drug addict. It's your fault. You harmed me with your "knowledge".
A: Adderall can cause euphoria especially in high doses because it is a dopaminergic. If you lack enrichment in your enclosure you can get attached to the adderall feelings. By reading my posts or following me on Tumblr dot com you agree you are a responsible person that bears in mind at all times the potential for addiction or injury when taking pharmaceuticals of any kind.
* Look up "Lemon Tek" and try to find the actual research paper, not just drug forum posts. Despite the silly name it is scientific and does work. I will edit this post with a link when I find it.
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theogonies · 1 year
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too tired to properly format this but here are my haikyuu social media headcanons. if you even care.
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you might think that hinata is a tiktok guy but no. he doesn't sit still long enough to scroll. (he does have a tiktok but most of his videos are just himself trying on filters. he knows the draft function exists but doesn't care enough to use it.) snapchat is more his speed, quick and easy way to keep up with his friends. also youtube. is volleyball youtube a thing? idk but i think he's an ipad baby who watches videos while he eats
nishinoya on the other hand? nishinoya is on tiktok. nishinoya is a tiktok fiend. he films dance trends with tanaka now and then (i'll let you guess which of them is more committed) but mostly he's a funnyguy. only the most elaborate of bits. gets bored of socials easily and goes long bursts of time without posting anything, but people like his energy enough that he keeps a pretty consistent audience anyway.
oikawa has an instagram technically but he only posts once every few months at most (cba) and his entire grid is videos of himself jojo posing. they're all super grainy and kageyama is tagged in a few (he has yet to acknowledge this in any way btw). tons of followers in spite of all this.
tsukishima is the king of twitter. don't think i need to explain this one.
yamaguchi has a youtube channel. too busy to post often but every now and then he'll roll out some insanely thoughtful and heartfelt video essays on movies and games n stuff he likes. pretty good editing skills too. tsukishima is his biggest hype man behind the scenes, helps edit his scripts and stuff.
kenma tells people he doesn't use social media but in truth he's an active tumblr girlie. not one of those normal twitter refugee joke-posters either. ao3 reader self-confessed fujoshi. five million different sideblogs and an impeccably organized tagging system. kuroo is the only irl allowed to follow him (kuroo does not care). in lots of discord servers too but only actually chats in a few
kageyama is a redditor. he likes that it doesn't clog his feed with stuff he's not interested in. mostly a lurker on sports subs but he's got a decent amount of karma because he can't let things lie when he sees a stupid question/comment, he's got to leave a terse reply and reddit eats that shit up. somehow ended up as a moderator for a big gaming sub, didn't ask for it and doesn't know why but he takes his job very seriously.
bokuto spends 85% of his screentime on pinterest
okthatsallthanksbye
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Note
<SPOILERS FOR APOTHEOSIS EPISODE 2>
THEY START IN A TAVERN LMAOOO
Rumi is on the stage oh it's greattt!!!!
Rumi- "You! Do you know how to play the viola?" POINTS A FUCKING PETER
DONT PEER PRESSURE THIS WET RAG OF A MAN INTO PLAYING AN INSTRUMENT ON STAGE
RUMI STOP BULLYING HIM XD
"I'm sorry I don't know why he did this" Stop apologising.
Nevermind maybe do apologise that was awful
Don't sing hot cross buns over his narration
Rumi STOP dragging this poor boy around!
Oh yeah I get what you mean, he is sobbing over a surface level compliment
"I'm sorry noone has ever asked me that" YOUR NAME????"
I have visions of you" that does not have the implications you think it does (retrospect, that was probably intentional)
I can't imagine the players are anything except entirely baffled by Peter
I love Peter he's such A dork
I love Rumi he's so cool
"I was more like a meat puppet in sort of a play of destruction" boyyyy
Rumi is bestieeee he's great
"We just joined hands" SIR
"I have litterally never done anything"
"This is the best day ever" You sopping wet tissue paper boy
I THINK RUMI IS GETTING LIKE FOLLOWERS TO GET POWER TO HELP PEOPLE THATS SO COOL!!!!!
PETER YOU ELDRICH DIVINE HORROR
ANGELIC LIZARD OMG <<<3333
"I run into a tree" Charlie stop physically abusing your characters they deserve better
"Goddamit you're a murderer"
"Stand behind me"
"No stand behind me"
"No stand behind me"
"No I'll protect you"
"I would like to sense anything holy"Just both of Them
Peter Sqloint, the most holy man
Oh shit PvP
TASHAS HIDEOUS LAUGHTER TO MAKE HIM LAUGH LMAO
"You can't just magically make me laugh" He litterally can though
Peter for being Peer Pressured
"Rumi this guy kinda sucks :<"
"I steal his viola and play hot cross buns"
I am suffering /pos
Hes so genuine
All of the other JRWI characters take note, THIS IS how you do a speech
Peter: 🧍
As the nothing moves across the nothing XD
LIZARD 💜💜💜💜
Peter be like: not me, actually my super cool all powerful OC
"You look super aggressive sometimes please don't kill me, I'll die, I'll just die
Summons sword epically and musically
SUNNYYYY AAAAAAAAJSHSHSHD 💜
Exandroth my beloathed
"Peter is GONE" well bring him back maybe?Archangel sounds are the worst
"Don't lecture me on morals"
"THERES A WOLF ON MY LEGGGG >M<"
"YES PETER YOUR BLOOD IS NOW SPIDERS""
Your [blah blah blah] will be your end/downfall/undoing"
Okay so it's not just me right? Rumi is incredibly Gay
Woughhhhh
Lizard Log
(These are gonna take a while because Tumblr eats the formatting from my notes app, also if there are random words that cut off a sentence and don't make sense, autocorrect is a bitch)
RAGHHHHH RUMII AND PETERRRR I LOVE TJEMMMM THEY WERE SO <3333 FROM THEE STARTTT
i can’t wait to watch peters development because you can already see how he’s getting stronger + more confident in himself even by episode 6 aughuguguh. going from crying when rumi asks him his name to bashfully accepting compliments who cheered (me)
rumi is SO gay. i aspire to be like him he’s so fucking gender. but also a suave motherfucker i hate them so much. i want to shake them like a maraca and hear them go shkshkshkshk
RRRGGHH JUST THE. THE EBERYTHING AND THE WAY THANATOS GOT IJTRODUCED TO THE PARTY I LOVE TJEM SOO MUCHH AUGGH
rumis so fucking graceful even in combat it makes me angry. who let this asshole be so perfect
if peter doesn’t get his lizard log by the end of apotheosis then it’s all for nothing istg
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piosplayhouse · 2 years
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hii! i saw ur mdzs physique post and i just wanted to add that doing a specific sport or activity will not necessarily give you the body type that is usually associated with it. this is because, for example, basketball players are chosen for the sport because they are naturally tall, not because basketball makes you tall. football players have bodies naturally predisposed to being big and strong so they go into football. you see a lot of lean muscular people in swimming because that is the body type naturally associated with swimming. that isn’t to say that their bodies will be unaffected by swimming, football, etc, but that it cannot overwrite their natural body type or skeletal system, and those effects will show up differently on each persons body.
swimmers actually have bodies all across the board, and there are people who look like they’d sink like a rock and people who look like twigs; both can be amazing in the water. of course there are people who have the stereotypical build, but they likely had it beforehand, or had the genetics that would allow their bodies to look like that. not to mention, if someone is capable of having a swimmers body, it could take an incredibly long and intense time to get there. 12-20 hours a week of straight swimming, which despite being close to water, i doubt the jiang have time to do. supplemental exercises could speed up this process, but because it’s different form of exercise they wouldn’t necessarily end up with the same body type. it also heavily depends on what kind of swimming they’re doing, how often they do it, what swimming exercises, at what level, not to mention what they’re eating, how much or often they’re eating, how the individual person responds to certain foods, metabolism, and things like stress, sleep, hormones, etc etc.
upbringing does have an effect as well, wwx, depending on how long or how badly he was malnourished during his time on the streets would likely have effects from that, stunted growth, weakened immune system, delayed bone development, bad teeth, neurodevelopmental disorders, etc etc. these can be reversed if it only lasted a short time but his later periods of malnutrition makes things murkier. he’s probably not going to be tall and broad unless jfm found him really really fast, or if a golden core formation magically fixes everything, but it probably doesn’t. lsz could suffer from these issues as well.
TLDR; the jiang could have people in it that have swimmers builds, and the nie could have bulk, and the lan’s could look like acrobats, but it all really depends on the individual’s genetics, skeleton, and diet, and not entirely on the activity that they’re doing, and though that would effect their body, the cultivators would not have a specific body type distributed uniformly across the sect. and wwx suffered through periods of malnutrition that could show up on his body, leaving tall broad wwx a pipe dream. probably. there’s room for interpretation there. in mxy’s body…. idk because we know very little about him but he’s probably suffering from malnutrition as well.
sorry for such a long message i just saw that post and had a lot to say lmao. this is probably adding too much realism into an ancient fantasy setting but why else be on tumblr if not to over analyze lmao. i hope ur doing alright, have a nice day!
Publishing this as is in case anyone is interested!
As for my thoughts, absolutely no offense intended but I can't really read this because the talk of food and nutrition is sort of triggering to me (I have an ED). I really do appreciate your long post and meta thoughts and of course you didn't know but just putting this out there for future reference for people to see: I'd appreciate if people don't send me asks about any content regarding struggles with food and nutrition or malnourishment or things like that; I hope this is coming off ok! I'm definitely not mad and I'm sure this is a great analysis!
Hope you have a good day too!
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rainbowsky · 3 years
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Did DLS Out DD During a DDU Recording and Make Him Cry?
This has been making the rounds on Twitter and YouTube and even Tumblr, for a while now. Fancam footage of DLS making a boyfriend joke and then leaning in to a supposedly upset DD and trying to smooth things over.
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This whole thing is based on fancam footage taken during the recording of the DDU 20190825 episode. In this episode dating was being discussed using four beautiful young women, DD and QF along with two handsome young guests as a backdrop.
The subtitles of the fan cam present a scenario where DLS supposedly refers to DD as ‘not needing a girlfriend because he already has a boyfriend’ and then leaning into a supposedly emotional DD and apologizing, trying to calm him down; saying viewers won’t understand what was said.
Let’s take a look at the video:
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youtube
The full fan cam footage that this out of context clip was taken from can be found here.
If you watch the episode and the complete fan cam footage, you’ll see that this happened during the segment where they were being asked to comment on various dating scenarios. An announcer would present each scenario in a multiple choice format, asking the women to choose between four options based on the type of guy they’d most like to date. For example:
How would you like the boy you like to invite you for a meal on the weekend?
A] Save your weekend for me. Do not say no.
B] You had breakfast at 7:50 this morning and lunch at 12:30. It’s already 7pm now. You have to eat meals on time. Why don’t I take you out for dinner?
C] I tried to explain my thoughts when I look at you, but I failed. So do you have time for dinner with me this weekend? Let’s talk about it.
D] Get out. Dinner.
My opinion
We should always, always be suspicious of anything that is presented without context. 99.9% of the time, when someone removes context they are doing so to mislead audiences. This clip is a perfect example of that. The video creator appears to have removed important context in order to make the clip better fit the narrative they’re trying to sell.
In this segment of the episode, the hosts and guests were seen commenting on the options as they were being read out. The comments DLS is making appear to be in response to something the announcer has said. I don’t think the comments have anything whatsoever do to with DD.
I also don’t think DD looks even remotely upset. Certainly not near tears. Some fans seem over-eager to claim DD is crying. We’ve all seen DD cry, but it’s exceptionally rare and only happens in very personal situations. This doesn’t qualify. It wouldn’t qualify even if everything the video creator claimed was true. DD would be more likely to get angry than cry in such a situation. He isn’t doing either of these things.
Whoever made this video simply doesn’t ‘get’ DD’s personality at all. The people who buy this are similarly unfamiliar with him.
I invite everyone to use your own eyes and your own judgment. Ignore what’s being claimed, ignore the framing you’ve been given of the scenario by me or the video creator, and instead just watch the clip. Does that look like a man on the verge of tears to you?
Second and third opinions
I asked the indispensable @potteresque-ire and @knivescharade what they thought of the clip. I didn’t tell them anything about my opinion, but simply sent the clip and asked their thoughts - are the subtitles correct, what do you think of the lip reading, etc.
@knivescharade
wow, for this person to put this analysis in i would say that lip reading is a very difficult skill. and to try and lip read someone like DLS, who speaks like a bullet train and doesn't really enunciate SUPER well (unlike Han-ge, for example) ... i would say the interpretation is only very vaguely possible at best.
i know both the cand int fandom have a major something for how WYB keeps swallowing around XZ, but honestly. WYB tends to get throat issues. i think swallowing has become one of his habits at this point. so... in conclusion... there are already lots of major, amazing, and irrefutable candies in the fandom already, let's not bother with such iffy ones :D
he is indeed saying that "this man has a boyfriend", but i cant quite remember which part of the show that was in. i watched that episode, it was something to do with love and having 4 guys paired with 4 girls or something like that, and listening to 'types of guys responses to etc etc' so DLS wasnt saying that WYB has a boyfriend - he was saying that 'this man', the one whose voice was playing in the audio, has a boyfriend.
That tracks with my interpretation of what was happening.
@potteresque-ire
Unless people have learned the dialect, Mandarin speakers cannot understand Cantonese, and vice versa. This is why I don't support or wash auditory candies, especially if it involves someone from Northern China (such as DLS, who is a Beijing native). Their local accents make their Mandarin even more difficult to understand.
This dialect restriction is actually not specific to a me, or other Hong Kongers. Someone whose family is entirely from Northern China would be equally prone to making mistakes if they're asked to lip read southern Chinese.
Lip reading also removes tonal consideration, which makes everything that much more uncertain. Have you heard of the Mr Shi Eats the Lion story? This is why, even if I hear some similarities, I'd hesitate to say X has to be saying ABC. Context is important.
Cantonese speakers are especially picky about tone. Mandarin have 4. We have 6 or 9, depending on who you ask. So... I may be more picky than I should be that way too. And I don't want to spoil anyone's fun 😊
The translation was correct in the sense that it was faithful to the Chinese words in the clip I saw, which replicated what DLS said accurately. But the video itself was from a fancam. Where that fancam happened (and got cut off) was at Q3 at the Q & A segment, starting ~9:34 of the official YouTube clip.
DLS said what he said half way through the voiceover of Option A (very precisely, right after the words "I'm the only one"). Technically speaking, therefore, he wasn't talking about DD.
However, it was also a little strange why DLS said what he said. If you watch that segment, all options have a certain personality attached to them. C was very talkative / pretentious. D was connected to DD because it was blunt and direct. A was the so called "overbearing CEO" personality... which is common in het romance dramas but isn't one that has been connected to the gay stereotype. And so, DLS's timing of saying that ... is curious.
Dd did look a little ... I wouldn't say upset, but tense after DLS said that. Maybe it's because that comment kinda came out of nowhere (because of its curious timing), and so it would be read as hinting at something. But that comment is harmless, wording wise.
Alternate theory
I’ve seen some talk from fans about a different theory for why DLS said what he said. Fans say the announcer for option A was Bian Jiang, the actor who did the voice of LWJ in The Untamed. They say that DLS was making a joke about LWJ not needing a boyfriend because he already has one. That actually makes a lot of sense to me as well, and if that’s really Bian Jiang, then I’d say that’s the most likely explanation for this entire thing.
Conclusion
It’s my firm opinion that DLS was not talking about DD having a boyfriend, nor was DD ‘near tears’ in this clip. Whatever DLS said to DD after that, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been ‘words of comfort to placate an upset DD’.
The Bian Jiang theory fits best, but we don’t need to know why DLS said what he said to be able to conclude he wasn’t talking about DD.
Cute DD candy from this episode
If anyone wants a better candy from this episode, look no further than when he emerges from “door #2″, chosen by one of the women as someone she’d like to date based on the food he’d picked out, and immediately launches into “I want to take a man back to my place and hide him.” A LWJ reference (which DLS and Wang Han clarify with him because they appear baffled by what he just said), but still a tactful, perfect rejection of this woman he’s being paired with. 😅
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mythiccheroacademia · 4 years
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A/N: Thank you hottie❤️ Tumblr was fucking with the format, so I had to repost.  Anyways, I looovveee this request. I’ve been waiting to be in the right mood to write this. Like, jealous muscular himbos completely head over heels for their s/o? Sign me up.
Sorry for the wait. I hope you enjoy this, sugar plum
All characters are 18+
Warnings: smut below the line!
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Katsuki Bakugo:
SFW
bakugo doesnt get jealous
he usually felt secure in your relationship
yeah he got annoyed when kaminari would jokingly flirt with you
and yes, it made him angry when the dekusquad would literally stare at you with puppy dog eyes
and it pissed him off when kirishima suddenly became the funniest guy in the room when you were around
but he wasn’t jealous
how could he be? he’s bakugo katsuki
you agreed to go out with him. the strongest. the best. you couldn't get any better than him
right?
lmao no
the bigger the ego, the more fragile it was
bakugo doesnt handle jealousy well
there’s a small part of him that knows he can be an asshole
he’s not the most...affectionate person
but damn it, if he doesnt try his hardest for you
you notice that he gets quieter but his actions become a lot more aggressive
he’s glaring at anyone that smiles at you
it’s honestly scarier than his threats
forces you to hold hands
is suddenly into PDA??? when he kissed you in front of your friends you literally made a face
you didn't know what was up with him, but you were really confused when you told him to chill and he visibility wilted
once he came around to telling you that he wouldn't hold it against you if you wanted to leave him, you were quick to reassure him
give him a couple kisses and rub his ego just a tad, and he’ll be back to normal
acts like he didn't just look like he was about to cry two seconds ago
NSFW
there are two things that happen when bakugo gets jealous
at first, he’s very rough and handsy
he likes to talk big and say things like
“imma fuck you up when we get home”
“you like when daddy does that, sweetheart?”
“kiss it right there, baby”
“youre mine. tell me your mine”
he’s doing everything he can to get you screaming and thrashing
he’ll go down on you for hours, leave you trembling, only to tell you that was a warm-up
there’s this dark look in his eyes when he’s pounding into you, gripping the headboard so he can angle himself in the best position possible
it’s like he’s trying to prove himself by wrecking you
in the midst of your fucking, just when you feel like youre about to pass out, bakugo’s head falls on your shoulder
he’s still thrusting into you, but it gets slower and deeper
needier
now it’s not just fucking
looks into your eyes with the most adoring gaze and kisses the breath of out you
he can’t speak, too deep into your lovemaking to express how much he loves you
how he’s so scared of losing you
but you don’t need his words to understand
lock your legs around his hips and tell him how you’ll always be his and he will let out a moan that makes your toes curl
when you reach your high, it’s a vulnerable moment
lots of soft kisses and hugging
wont admit to the tears that sting his eyes but is willing to express his adornment for you through his embrace and aftercare
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Todoroki Shouto:
SFW
todoroki doesnt have a lot of experience with jealousy
he knows what anger is
he’s felt insecurity
and he knows what it feels like to long for something or someone
but envy was a foreign concept to him
that was until he got into his first romantic relationship with you
don't get him wrong, he trusted you with everything
you gave him no reason to question your loyalty
and it never occurred to him that you would leave him for someone else because of how strong your love was for one another
however, his insecurities always got the best of him
he had a lot of baggage
he knew that
and when someone would approach you, someone that looked free-spirited and independent, he’d wonder if he was holding you back
even then, he can’t help but think that no one is worth the ground you walked on
not even himself sometimes
he never brings it up
but you notice that he started touching his scar a lot more
todoroki would try to act more extroverted thinking it would be better if he was livelier
youre deep talks about family matter diminished little by little
he tried to fill your comfortable silence with awkward conversation
you were so confused why your bf was acting so different
it took a couple attempts to get him to spill his thoughts
once he did, he’s stark quiet, looking away, fearing that you’d be so disappointed in him
but you just take his face in your hands and tell him
“you’re my whole world shouto. why would i ever give that up?”
he holds you in his arms for a long time after that
NSFW
behind his jealousy of onlooking eyes is a deep steed of low self-esteem
and you can feel it when you get intimate
he’s always looking to please you, but now he’s desperate, trying so hard to think of what will make you feel good
it makes you sad bc he already knows the answer to those questions
but he overthinks it
he’s noticeably shier
his touches are hesitant as he second-guesses himself
is continuously asking if you’re okay or if he’s doing it right
at one point, you have to take charge and push him down on the bed
“let me show you how much i want you. just you”
licks his lips as you kiss down his body
one of those guys that believes sucking his dick is a chore 💀
“you don't have to do that” face ass
so when you suck the soul out of him, he’s SPRUNG
would write a song about it if he could LMAO
quickly says he loves you before kissing you like the world depends on it as you ride him
twirl your hips in the way he likes and he’ll hiss out curses
run your hands through his hair and kiss his scar and he’ll give you such pretty moans
please tell him how beautiful he is and how much you love him
my mans will nut on the spot
after the first round, he regains his confidence and flips you on your hands and knees
before you even know what’s going on, he’s pounding into you, gripping your hips like a lifeline
now that he’s reminded that he’s your man, he spends the night realigning your spine
bc who could do it better?
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Togata Mirio:
SFW
mirio is one of the most confident people ever
not only is he secure in himself, but he’s secure in your relationship
he knows he bagged a baddie
ofc people would be all over you
he couldn't blame them! i mean, look at you!
when people approached you, he usually let you handle it
if they were persistent, he would just put an arm around your waist
“you’ve got good taste, but they’re taken! sorry!”
it’s so wholesome that the other person can’t even find it within themselves to be upset
there was only one time he recalled getting genuinely jealous
it was during the time you two weren't exclusively dating
just going on dates to see how things went
at the same time, he overheard from your friend that your ex was trying to get back with you
when he heard that, he started sweating
it wasn't jealousy, but more like fear
he was determined not to lose you
not when things were going so well
mirio literally goes above and beyond on your dates
mans deadass learns how to cook all your favorite foods to bring to you
youre crying bc the seasoning was just *chef’s kiss*
brings you flowers at random times of the day
sends you pictures of things that remind him of you
you’re just soaking up all the attention
he’s always been an extra person so you didn't think much of it
it wasn't until you two were cuddling and watching a movie in his apartment that he confesses to you
“i know that i’m competing against history between you and your ex, but i want you to know that my feelings for you are strong, y/n. and i’ll do everything to prove to you that i can be the man of your dreams”
you stare at him before bringing him in for a kiss
“there’s a reason my ex is my ex”
“but--”
“just ask me to be yours already, mirio”
he didnt have to be told twice
NSFW
it was actually that same night that cuddling turned into something a little nastier
honestly, from then on, if you cuddled for more than 20min, there was a 99% chance yall end up fucking lmao
but that night, when he was kissing your neck and grinding his dick against you, he noticed your phone light up on the nightstand
you were too caught up in his fingers between your legs but he saw the text from your ex
it read: “i know this might be out of the blue, but would you wanna catch up over dinner sometime?”
now, mirio wasn't one to be spiteful
but he couldn't help but get a little heated
knowing your ex was trying to get back with you was way different than seeing it
a tiny switch goes off in his head and now he’s ready to make it known that you and him are together
you’re in heaven as mirio’s lips suck and nip at your neck and body
his head game is immaculate
turns you on your stomach so he can massage your back and ass before sliding into you
mirio holds your neck and gives you sloppy kisses as his hips swim into you
your phone lights up again and you can barely think straight when he gets rougher
starts pounding into you like he’s tryna put a baby in you whether it’s possible or not 💀
youre grabbing for anything you can hold as he starts whispering sweet nothings about how he’s gonna take care of you
whew...what a man yall 🥴
the entire time he’s wearing a shit-eating grin
bc he knows he won
might have accidentally sent your ex a voice recording of you moaning his name
oops
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darling-i-read-it · 3 years
Note
Salutations! I was wondering if you could write a multiple character headcanon for Will Graham, Alana(because ✨women✨), Hannibal, & Atticus Finch(because that Atticus fic was something I didn't know I needed until now😳) where the reader kinda surprises them with breakfast in bed. Hope you have a good day & thank you💛
Yes!! All of these people slap. Very excited to be writing these kind of format requests again. I hope you enjoy love! 
I wrote it and the saved the draft and tumblr didn’t save it so fuck you tumblr
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- the kindest man in the world who has to much going on and literally cannot make himself food to save the world
- that was what made you make him breakfast
- you knew that if you didn’t make him any food he wouldn’t eat anything till you forced him (mostly out of sheer forgetting to eat) 
- so you made something very simple, eggs, toast, sausage and some orange juice
- he slowly got up and saw you walking into the room with the plate and he honestly thought you had just made yourself breakfast
- he was so utterly surprised when you handed it to him with a gentle smile
- ‘for me?’ he asks groggily
- ‘duh’
- you explain a little bit why you did it but honestly it was nothing 
- this boy borderline cries
- you made that for him? for HIM? 
- thinks its the best food he has ever eaten in his entire life because it has the thought behind it and also you’re the only person who ever cooks in the house and your food is always good even when it isn’t
- blows his mind that you made it for him still
- tells hannibal about it in a session
- also tells alana about it and she thinks its the sweetest thing to but is really just happy Will seems so happy about something 
- you do it every once in a while as a nice surprise when you can and he just is amazed that you think about him, no matter how many times you tell him that all you think about it is him sometimes
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- you know going into it that Hannibal is probably going to critique your cooking skills
- you are prepared though
- plus he’s naturally a very polite man, especially when it comes down to you
- so you whipped up a simple breakfast, nothing overly fancy
- you thought about adding some spice people but decided against it
- you came in at an ungodly hour (you had to get up hella early because how early he gets up naturally) and placed it on the night stand
- he sits up and looks over at it with a raised eyebrow and kind smile
- ‘is this for me?’
- ‘no it’s for my other husband yes Hannibal it’s for you’
- he is very pleased and touched as well
- you had never cooked for him before and even if the breakfast was simple, he thought that it was the kindest thing someone could do for him
- Hannibals love language is food
- he shares with you and makes you come back to bed to sit with him
- you probably rant about how hard/easy you thought it had been to make it and he listens happily
- he adores you so much
- after that he tried to get you in the kitchen more often with him, if nothing else to try and watch to learn
- you are very flattered because you know he doesn’t do that with just anyone
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- Alana can cook
- she just chooses not to
- it’s kinda the situation where she knows she should have more than a cup of coffee for breakfast but simply does not
- she has the time too
- she’s a bad psychiatrist to herself
- you are ready for her to get her shit together but you just do it for her
- so one morning you get up early and get her coffee from her favorite place and donuts
- you don’t even bother trying to make anything cause she’ll wake up
- she’s a light sleeper
- you figure the donuts and coffee are good enough anyway
- and you were very right
- she is sooo happy to see it
- she sits up and you’re just standing there
- ‘this is here for when you want it’
- and she just sits there with a line, serene, half asleep look and messy bedhead, in absolute love with you
- ‘you’re the best’ she says after a second and grabs her coffee
- jack is confused on why the heck she is so happy at work that day
- he reminisces on those days with Bella and is over all very glad Alana found someone to make her happy
- she deserved it
- you and Alana try and cook dinner that night together too and it end in take out and lots of food on your clothes but it’s overall worth it
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- poor tired old man
- needs someone to make him breakfast every once in a while
- you had the idea spontaneously and decided to inlist the help of scout and Jem who are up to early as well
- and you make a decent breakfast together and bring it in for Atticus
- he’s so HAPPY
- literally hugs the kids so hard and gives you such a loving sweet appreciative look
- 10/10 would pay to see that face again
- even if the breakfast is meh he loves it so much and let’s the kids sit on the bed with you and him to chat
- he rarely gets those family moments cause he’s so busy and really savors in them when he can
- adores you so so much because of it
- absolutely tells people at work about it
- even clients although he isn’t really planning on it when he does it
- is just very happy to have everyone at home waiting for him
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shift-shaping · 3 years
Note
Top 5 birds
this is an extremely difficult question i hope you know this
First, let's define what a bird is. This probably seems like a pretty easy question, but ask any paleontologist and you'll get like four different answers. From the same person.
Because phylogenetically, it's extremely difficult to say, definitely, what makes a bird a bird. For a drunk, slightly-outdated explanation of why paleontologists don't know what birds are, check out the following video:
youtube
It's not my video to be clear, I just really like it for all the confusion it illustrates. One of my favorite ways to piss off my colleagues is to call Triceratops a bird, which nobody likes to hear because it's stupid as fuck, but if feathers make something a bird then, well...
ANYWAY. For the sake of this ask, I'm going to use Avialae as my cutoff for Bird because it sounds pretty and (probably) includes Archaeopteryx but not Dromaeosaurus. Unfortunately this does not include Microraptor, which is very sad because Microraptor is a good little friend. This does, however, probably include the Scansoriopterygids, the real-life wyverns that I wrote a post about here.
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Above left: Archaeopteryx, from Nat Geo Kids. Above right: Dromaeosaurus, from Gabriel N.U.
So here are my birds below the cut:
5. Secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius)
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First off, nice genus name, though I think she's a gemini. This is a gorgeous bird of prey from Subsaharan Africa that looks kind of like a vulture in flight but a bitch on the ground. They kick snakes to death because of course they do. They are the only member of their family, Sagittariidae, which is within Accipitriformes and therefore places them closer to hawks and eagles rather than falcons.
4. Hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin)
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SKUNK BIRD SKUNK BIRD THESE GUYS ARE FART MONSTERS. They are the only living members of their entire order! Their babies still have claws on their wings! Hoatzin are herbivorous birds from the Amazon that like leaves and fruit and have a weird digestive system convergent on mammalian ruminants. Food ferments in their strange gut which gives them a bad stink and a bad taste. Despite being fairly large, poor fliers, they smell and taste so bad that people don't eat them. In addition, their preferred habitat (swampy marshlands rather than true rainforest) is disappearing slower than the rainforest proper, so these stinky idiots are IUCN Least Concern.
3. Turkey vulture (Cathartes aura)
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If you live in the United States and see a fairly large black bird circling above you and trying its damnedest not to flap its wings, it's probably a turkey vulture. They are lazy and have few natural predators. These guys sometimes get a bad rap because their cousins, the black vultures, are not terribly well-behaved and will sometimes attack newborn cattle. Turkey vultures do not kill. They are too lazy. I love them because they refuse to expend effort, even on flying, and that's an entire mood. They're also pretty chill. I met one named Lurch at ZooMontana who was a bro that had been raised as a pet and thought he was a human. Other vultures perplexed him.
2. Confuciusornis
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Above is a stunning specimen of Confuciusornis sanctus currently residing at the Natural History Museum of Vienna. It's actually a really common creature in the Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation in Northern China. It's small, about the size of a pigeon, and those double tail feathers are not present in every specimen --possibly indicating sexual dimorphism. There's debate over how good these little dudes were at flying, but the most recent evidence I could find suggests they could perform powered flight in short bursts.
There is a persistent myth that paleontologists cannot know what color an extinct animal was. We actually can discern color for particularly well-preserved specimens, though this is an emerging concept with lots of ongoing research. The presence of fossilized melanosomes (organelles visible under a microscope that carry color information for soft tissue) possibly indicates they were a rusty brown color, but other researchers think they may have been closer to gold and white.
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Above left from DK Find Out
1. Black-billed magpie (Pica hudsonia)
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I love these horrible bastards!!!!!! They're so trashy and loud!!!! They are easily one of my favorite animals ever, full stop. They are notorious for eating songbird eggs and chicks, but they actually don't do that terribly often. They prefer ~your garbage~ or, truthfully, nuts and seeds and lots and lots of bugs. Like crows and ravens, magpies (which are also Corvids) follow wolves and other predators to scavenge from their kills. Also like crows and ravens, magpies are highly intelligent. They were the first non-mammal to pass the mirror test, indicating that magpies can very likely recognize themselves in a mirror. Magpies hold funerals (or post-mortems...) for their dead and can be taught human speech.
They are stunningly beautiful animals, but Western culture refuses to understand them and chooses prejudice and ignorance over curiosity and compassion. Let me be clear: if you hate magpies (or really any animal; they're just doing their thing) I do not like you. That sounds harsh, but it is unfathomable to me that a person would actually hate an animal for living its life. They are not gentle, they are not sweet (usually, tw animal death in video: a baby magpie is rescued after its possible siblings were found shot), but they are vibrantly beautiful survivalists that have found a way to thrive among creatures that villainize them. You don't have to love or even like them, but every animal deserves respect. Magpies just deserve a little more. ;)
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I can do Eir's favorite birds in another post with more detail, but Tumblr is trying to keep me from spreading the good news by enforcing an image limit so for now, a list of Eir's favorite birbs:
5. Red-tailed hawk. They're fairly large survivalists that live fucking everywhere in the US. She would definitely relate to their hardiness and determination. Also, they're the ones that make the hawk noise (at 0:31).
4. Little blue penguin. I maintain that if Thedas is in the Southern Hemisphere, it should have penguins. Eirwen is not always one to freak out over cute things, but her cold hard heart would absolutely melt for a little blue penguin.
3. These fucking things. Just because they're hilarious.
2. Pigeons. In some life or another, she is a crazy pigeon lady. There's a fun AU! She would love having so many small, chubby, cooing friends to feed and care for. I could see her devoting her retirement to a flock of stupid round bird children because that's just who she is.
1. Carrion crow. Because of course.
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comfy-whumpee · 4 years
Text
Whumping Safely 101
Many people in this community have mental health problems, face various types of discrimination, and have complicated relationships with some parts or types of whump. In particular, I aim this at people who care about the experience of survivors and others with triggers – partially because I am an abuse survivor who often flirts with triggering content as part of my love of whump.
Keeping your blog safe is difficult, takes effort, and is never a perfect process. But as the community grows and grows, it’s really important that we hold ourselves to a high standard. I would argue that this is a responsibility of all content creators, but especially those of us in the messy playground of whump.
I’ve got three sections in here: content warnings, writing with care, and community interaction. I’ve tried to make it navigable. It’s about 1.8k words. Shorter than a lot of drabbles! I welcome good-faith criticism on this topic and further questions on my own views.
Content Warnings
The biggest responsibility, in my opinion, is empowering your reader to make their own decision on whether they want to expose themselves to your writing. This also happens to be by far the easiest way to help people whump safely.
What to warn
This is a big and ever-changing topic. Some things you should warn for as a rule of thumb are anything NSFW, pet whump and box boy whump, drugs and alcohol, medical and hospital content, graphic gore, intimate partner violence, and animal harm. It can be tricky to draw the line of what counts – what needs a warning? If you’re in doubt, just warn it anyway. It doesn’t hurt.
If someone requests a trigger be warned for, even if it’s something that feels obscure or tame, show compassion and agree to the request. This is someone who cares enough about being able to read your writing that they wrote in! They want to be able to read it and enjoy it. You’re being complimented.
Otherwise, look at what other blogs tag for. You’ll see some variation in styles and levels of detail, but it’s a good way to gauge what people think is warn-worthy, when we’re often writing stuff that would already be R-rated in mainstream media.
Read Mores
The easiest way to make sure people don’t see your triggering content is to use a cut. Tumblr is not a very functional website and likes to delete cuts, but a cursory check of your posted content will usually tell you whether it’s worked. With asks, cuts are very spotty, so don’t be afraid to post an ask response separately with a screengrab of the original question. People often then respond to the ask itself with a link to the post, especially if it’s a whole drabble. Tumblr is weird and bad so just do your best.
Content notices
I.e., a quick summary before the drabble, usually in bold, to state what will be coming. I like to distinguish between using content notes (CN) and trigger warnings (TW) to indicate severity. Others might use the old phrase ‘dead dove do not eat’ to indicate this is a heavy piece, and often you will see qualifiers like ‘intense’, ‘mild’, ‘mention’, ‘referenced’ (i.e. it is discussed but not actively happening), and ‘implied’ (as the opposite of ‘explicit’). I’ve also seen a couple of people use ‘vibes’, which is a really nice way of demonstrating that it’s there, but not the focus. A quick paragraph like this, or just a line, lets people make a quick risk assessment on their reading.
This is also important if you’re sending in asks or requests to people. If you want to ask about something triggering, send an inquiry first about whether the blog is okay to hear it.
Tagging
Tagging is a chore, but it’s your primary way of warning people about your content. The main benefit of tagging is that you can be as detailed as you want, because can be tagging for content in general, not just triggers.
In a best case scenario, you’d tag the kind of whump you’re doing, tag triggers, tag characters, and even your ‘verses, because tagging is your index for your blog. If you tag reliably, you help your future self and your readers find stuff, and you also make your blog really dang safe. People who have unusual triggers can blacklist tags, and will pick up on your content tags to help them.
Don’t just tag your own writing. Tag your reblogs, tag your prompts, tag your asks. Yes, edit your asks to add the tags. Tag your images and gifs. Tag your images as images and your gifs as gifs.
If you aren’t up for detailed tagging for whatever reason, just tag for triggering content, and add stuff to that list if you’re asked to. My usual technique is to make a mental note of tags while I’m formatting and editing before posting.
Be aware that your first five tags will be used in search results. If you’re using tags that are associated with kink too, such as ‘shibari’, you might want to rethink your tag order if you don’t want interaction from those blogs. Also think about what tags might come up in non-whump contexts, such as ‘collar’ or ‘PTSD’. Some tactics for getting around this I’ve seen are adding ‘whump’ after the content or writing the tags in past tense (i.e., ‘collared’).
It is also a good idea to watch out for when you might be reblogging something whumpy that is intended as kink / porn / fetish, especially in images. Tagging these as spicy / nsfw / kink is a sensible move.
Writing with Care
Okay, now for the harder stuff.
I mean here to lay out some guidelines for how to write in a way that helps your reader build good faith. This is a much more nuanced topic, and it’s different for everyone. There will always be differing opinions on what should and shouldn’t be written about, what a good depiction of a sensitive topic is, and how to discuss that topic. I tried to strip this back into absolute basics that I hope we can all agree on.
Maybe your whump involves abuse. Maybe it’s gaslighting. Maybe it’s severe mental health problems, or addiction, or slavery, or you write about or analogise real-world issues. Whump deals with the dark stuff, and that’s a big part of its appeal. But don’t ever forget you’re writing the dark stuff.
(Try to) Know what you’re doing
Some of us play fast and loose with plots, medical accuracy, worldbuilding, and other things that get in the way of the pain we crave. This is all well and good, but when we start using whump that speaks true to people’s lived experiences, we shouldn’t be careless with it. I’m particularly talking about things that get represented poorly in mainstream media, such as abusive relationships, issues around marginalisation, mental illness and disability.
Be critical of media that you’ve consumed. Think about how its depicted things that you want to depict in turn. Look for opinions on fictional representations of those issues. Be aware that you might be more ignorant of things than you realise.
Look at how others are writing these issues, particularly if they’re writing from a perspective different to yours. If you haven’t personally experienced what you’re writing about, e.g., if you don’t have PTSD and you want to depict a character who does, seek out stuff written from or with experience. Listen to the experts.
If you’re looking for stuff about representation specifically, I recommend this collection of posts about ‘Braving Diversity’ cultivated by Writing With Colour, who are in themselves a fantastic resource for this topic, and have recommendations for other blogs that deal with intersecting issues.
Listen to others
Missteps are inevitable. Nobody is perfect. If constructive criticism is offered, that’s also a compliment to your writing. Someone read your work and thought about it, and thought you’d care about improving it. They’re offering themselves as a resource for helping you see your work in a new light.
Criticism is hard and sometimes hurtful, but even if we don’t think it’s accurate, there’s often a grain of truth in it. If someone tells you that your writing is harmful, think about why they’ve said that, not whether or not they’re correct. This is an opinion! Opinions are subjective! But what drove someone to send that in?
You don’t have to respond to all your criticism and definitely don’t respond straight away. Being respectful to those who are trying to help you means taking the time to consider it properly. Sometimes, they don’t need a response. Others, you might want to learn more about what they think before deciding. You might have already discussed the topic, in which case, you might just want to reblog your previous posts.
If it’s sent in bad faith or is outright hateful, you’re well within your rights to just delete it and move on. You might get the same criticism over and over again, and that’s exhausting, and you don’t have to retrace your steps for everyone.
But if it’s new, even if it puts your hackles up, you can always stop and wonder why someone felt that strongly about your work.
Take a step back
One of my better-known characters is a pet whumper who conditioned his victim to adore and depend on him. It’s not always easy to represent how deeply messed up that is within the text – though I think that’s part of the challenge – but in meta-commentary, I am always describing him as a creeptastic bastard lacking compassion and self-reflection. I hope to always give the reader the confidence that I know just how wrong it is.
This is a really simple thing you can do just to give readers good faith in you. Show that you know what you’re writing is dark and messed up. Show your understanding for the issues you’re handling and that they’re complicated. It might seem self-evident, but when you’re writing the really dark stuff, or unhealthy relationships, or institutionalised whump, you can inadvertently create the impression that you just think it’s fun. The fact that it’s fiction does not automatically absolve you. Show that you care about doing it right.
Community Interaction
I’m going to keep this one short and sweet because I will almost entirely be preaching to the choir here.
Be polite to others. Imagine saying what you’re saying to their face.
Don’t send anon hate. Just don’t. If you can send criticism off anon, do so.
Nobody is obligated to interact with you.
Nobody is obligated to monitor their own reader base.
If someone says do not interact, do not interact.
If someone says do not interact, why they’ve said that is none of your business.
You don’t need to spread the word about someone’s bad politics.
Ask yourself if your input is needed, or if what you’ve said has already been said.
You don’t have to take a side.
Take care of yourself. Take breaks. Remind yourself that whump is a small part of the world.
That’s all from me, folks. Stay safe.
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honey-sunsets · 3 years
Text
Sensory Overload (Good Version) — Sanders Sides One Shot
Pairings: platonic LAMP
Trigger warnings: first-person sensory overload, screaming, cooking and mentions of food
Word Count: 1300
AN: I had to copy and paste this from my Wattpad on mobile, so apologies for the crappy formatting.
~
Virgil's P.O.V.
It's a pretty nice afternoon in the Mind Palace. Patton works on cooking dinner in the kitchen, Logan reads a book on the other side of the couch, Roman scribbles down ideas at the table, and I'm sitting on the couch scrolling through Tumblr. I'm not sure where Janus and Remus are, but it certainly can't be nearby, considering it's quiet in here. The only sound is the gentle scribble of Roman's elegant ink pen on his paper, as well as the occasional soft clink or thud as Patton works away in the kitchen, still being mostly quiet. The air is filled with a thick silence that presses a comfortable weight down on me.
Tap.
Roman's fingers drum against the table, sending a shudder down my spine. My ears sting as the silence is penetrated by the sound.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
He continues drumming his fingers, seemingly with growing force each time. With every tap, I can feel my muscles contracting and tightening. I try to focus my attention on the words on my phone's screen, but my senses are concentrated entirely on that tapping. My brain fogs over and floods with the urge to scream at him to stop. An overwhelming tightness sinks into my chest and arms as the pain in my ears intensifies. My breathing gradually picks up speed and force.
I sit my phone down and grip my hair, squeezing my eyes shut. It's just a sound, Virgil, calm down. He'll stop in a second.
And he does stop. I let out a sigh of relief, only to be jolted again by an agonizingly loud clank! My hands reach up to cover my ears against my will.
"Sorry, sorry!" Patton calls from the kitchen. Why is he yelling so loud?! The sound of him picking whatever he dropped up off the floor sounds like a giant church bell ringing, and I'm inside the bell.
"Virgil?" I hear. I snap my head to the side, eyes wide, and see Logan looking at me with concern. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," I grumble, forcefully dropping my hands and picking my phone back up.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm fine, Logan."
Logan silences as I lean back, trying to regain composure. Things settle down, although there's a tenseness now in the air. The silence that was previously here returns, but its weight is no longer comfortable, now oppressive. My breathing remains heavy, my heart continues to pound, and my muscles are all still tensed. The seconds tick by agonizingly slow. At the table, Roman flicks his pen back and forth. It isn't hitting anything, it isn't making a sound, but the sight of it is intensely painful. It's unsettling in the way it is to see a ghost right in front of you. I try to cover it from my sight without looking too suspicious, but I'm certain from his glance my way that Logan notices.
Despite the overwhelming knowledge that Roman's pen is swinging just out of sight, I think I can handle this. The tapping is gone, we're quiet again, I can't see the pen. This is fine. This is—
The stove clicks on in the kitchen. Click click click click click, whoosh. The gas stove fire lights up and a pan slams down above it. This is fine. This is fine. It's just a fire. In fact, the soft, low sound of the flames is calming. There you go, focus on the fire. There's no pen, there's no tapping, just tiny flames. Happy little fires.
A higher, sharper noise suddenly appears as whatever Patton's cooking is tossed into the heated pan and begins sizzling loudly. I can feel it the moment I lose control of my body. My hands swing back up to my ears and my torso folds over, curling me into the fetal position. A guttural scream rips its way out of my throat, the only thing loud enough to drown out the sizzling.
Hands descend upon me, smashing against my skin like rocks. My arms tear away from my ears and start swinging, my legs carry me somewhere. My eyes are closed and watering, so I don't have a clue where I'm going. I feel something against my back as I lower to the floor, presumably a wall.
"Virgil!" someone shouts.
"STOP!" I scream. Oh, I'm screaming words now. That's not good. "STOP, STOP, STOP, PLEASE, MAKE IT STOP!"
"What?! Make what stop?!"
"THE PAN! THE PAN! MAKE IT STOP!"
"Logan, go turn the stove off!"
"Stop!" I cry again, quieter but more desperate this time. My head pounds and my throat tightens. The water that was welling up in my eyes starts pouring out as I curl further into myself.
"Virgil, please—"
"STOP, stop, please, please just shut up, please! Be quiet, be quiet, please..." I mumble the same phrases over and over for God knows how long. As my words blur together and quiet down, I feel a hand carefully touch my shoulder. It's slow this time, so I don't flinch away. The hand sneaks across my back until there's an arm wrapped around me, and eventually I find myself tucked securely against someone's chest.
When I finally manage to open my eyes again, I can see a blue shirt against my face. I shift my head slightly, becoming dizzy even with the small movement. My breathing picks up as I suddenly become aware of the hollow feeling in my chest and the numb stinging in my hands and feet.
"Hey, kiddo," Patton whispers softly, his voice low and calm. I attempt a reply, but all that comes out is a short groan. "That was pretty rough. I'm sorry about the pan, I'll find something else to cook for dinner, okay?" Slowly, I get my head to move up and down enough to convey my reply.
After another minute or so goes by as my head pounds harder and harder. I clear my throat and swallow, hoping that when I speak, it will be audible. Yet again, only a mumble escapes my frozen lips. 
"What is it?" Patton asks.
I lift my arm, wincing with the effort it takes to move, and tap my lips.
"He wants water," Logan states. I sigh gratefully.
"Here," Roman says, summoning and handing me a small glass of water.
I hum a thank you as I cautiously guide the glass to my mouth with both hands, taking what feels like hours to get down a single sip. After a few more minutes, the pounding in my head subsides and sensation returns to my hands and feet. Now able to make larger movements, I wriggle my way out of Patton's arms and back up, getting some room to breathe.
"Feeling better, kiddo?" Patton questions with a sympathetic smile.
"Little," I mumble.
Roman lets out a sigh. "You had me worried half to death, Panic At The Everywhere."
"Sorry."
"It's fine, I'm just glad you're okay."
"Yes," Logan adds. "I'm pleased to see you recover as well."
"Hmm, thanks."
"How do you guys feel about pizza for dinner?" Patton asks cheerfully, though still keeping his voice down.
"Lovely choice!"
"I trust you understand how unhealthy that decision would be without me having to remind you, but I will indulge this once."
I shrug. I probably won't be able to eat, but tomorrow I might like leftovers.
"Great! Now, Virgil, let's get you back on the couch and find you some blankets."
Patton, Roman, and Logan help me up from the floor and guide me to the couch. They give me more water and a thick blanket to curl up beneath, and about thirty minutes later, they give me a thin slice of pizza to eat. For the rest of the night, we relax quietly and peacefully.
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arotechno · 4 years
Text
The Heartless: Chapter 1
Next
Read on Inkitt
(A/N: HOOOO boy here we go, after five years of staring down the barrel of this thing it’s finally done! Important question: does it matter to y’all if I don’t post the text of the chapter directly below the cut in the future and just link to Inkitt? I ask because formatting for tumblr was beyond annoying and I’m not looking forward to doing it for like 20 more chapters. But if it’s necessary for accessibility reasons, I’m willing to do it.)
Chapter I: in which the story begins
When the winter first melted into spring, Basil and I crept to the edge of the woods behind our houses to pick wildflowers in the meadow. It was still too early for raspberries; in the summer, we’d fill our baskets and our stomachs with them until our mouths were stained red with juices. Our mothers would bake pies in the afternoon and we’d eat them in the evening, cleaning every last scrap from our supper plates with the promise of a sweet dessert. Now, the earth was still cool beneath our bare feet, our toes wiggling in the soft dirt. Once we’d filled our fists with flowers, we settled in the tall grass and began weaving together goldenrod, daisies, and violets into flower crowns and daisy chains.
Basil presented his work and beamed at me, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun with the back of his hand. “Take it, I want you to wear it,” he urged, thrusting the flower crown into my lap.
“But you worked so hard on it,” I replied.
He shrugged and brushed the dirt from his tanned knees. “I want you to have it,” he insisted, reaching forward and taking the crown from my lap to place it gently on my head.
I stared down at my own work in my hands; it was not nearly as beautiful as the one Basil had made. Some of the stems had split, and many of the flowers had lost some of their leaves and petals. I didn’t have the same steady hands that he did.
“In that case, I want you to have mine, too,” I decided, pressing the crown onto Basil’s head as a couple more leaves fluttered to the ground.
Basil grinned a mile wide, practically radiating sunshine with every inch of his being. “Now we match,” he beamed.
A peaceful silence fell over the meadow. Behind us, the trees rustled in the woods. Insects hovered in the grass, hopping from flower to flower; Basil jumped when a bee buzzed past his face to land in the flowering raspberry bushes that bordered the tree line.
“We’ll be friends forever, right, Basil?” I asked after a while, sheepishly adjusting my flower crown.
"Of course we will,” he responded. “Even when we’re old!”
 “How old? Like, eighteen? That’s super old!”
Basil laughed. “Yeah! Eighteen and then even older!”
I smiled hopefully. “And we can still make flower crowns like this?”
“Ace, when we’re eighteen, I’ll still make you all the flower crowns you want,” Basil decreed with a grin. “That’s a promise.”
* * *
The warmth of the sun and Basil’s innocent smile faded as I woke up to last night’s rain dripping down on me from the cracks in the ceiling above. Bertrand stood over me, jostling me awake with one hand while the other held a vial of another one of his concoctions. I assumed I had fallen asleep after supper, because the dishes remained untouched by the washbasin and twilight was just pouring in through the window.
“Drink up,” Bertrand commanded in that voice of his that just begged to be disobeyed, holding the potion in front of me expectantly as if to remind me of the curse that filled the vacant space within me. He stared at me with piercing eyes over the top of his dull gray beard, swishing the vial back and forth for emphasis.
I grabbed it from his wrinkly hand and sloshed the red liquid around in disgust before shutting my eyes and downing it in one gulp, just to appease him. Even so, I could not resist the urge to lay a hand against my chest, but still I felt nothing. Shaking my head, I rose from my cot and pushed past Bertrand, grabbing my bow and arrow off the hook by the door and slinging it over my shoulder.
“Where are you going?” Bertrand called after me.
“Out,” I answered, already halfway out the rickety wooden door.
“It’s past nightfall, Ace, it’s dangerous out there!”
But I was already gone, walking away from the old house as the door slammed shut behind me with a satisfying thud.
Over the seven years I’d spent under Bertrand’s leaky roof, I had slowly become disillusioned with the idea of ever finding a potion strong enough to light a fire in my ribcage. Bertrand had tested a lot of his spells on me throughout my life, but the love potion had always proven to be the least effective.
But I suppose that is to be expected when you do not have a heart.
The Village of the Heartless was smaller than the town where I grew up. A single dirt road ran from the village gates to the top of the hill, through the neighborhood before coming to a stop at the edge of the woods that surrounded the kingdom of Amistadia. We were a close-knit community, learning to provide and look out for each other through thick and thin, through every harsh winter and plentiful spring.
Bertrand’s house stood at the edge of the village, where the hill dropped off toward the gates below. At the base of the hill stood a large, sturdy oak tree where I perched some nights with my bow and arrow on the lookout for trouble.
Nights in the Village of the Heartless were always dark, as we could never afford enough oil to keep all of the town’s lamps lit, but they weren’t always quiet. Kids from neighboring towns sometimes wandered the area at night, brandishing knives in their grimy hands, looking to stir up trouble. Tonight was no exception; as I neared the village limits, I caught a glimpse of a pair of boys making their way down the road, and a thrill shot up my spine. I climbed swiftly up the oak tree and perched in the shadow of its lush, leafy branches, fingers itching for my bow.
The pair dragged a child behind them by the arm, yanking her across the dirt with them as they cackled and cheered triumphantly at their prized catch. The girl held tightly to a canvas sack, trying fruitlessly to pull away from her captors.
“Get away, get away!” she shrieked, dodging a blow as she fell to the ground, clutching the bag to her torso desperately.
“What’s the matter, little runt?” one of the assailants sneered. “You’re not afraid of a couple of kids, are you?”
“I just wanted something to eat!” the girl cried out as a likely filthy knife narrowly missed her cheek.
If I had been in my right mind, I would have simply shot the pair of boys in the shoulder, snatched up the child, and run away, but Basil’s face kept flashing in my mind; an anger was boiling in my gut that demanded confrontation.
“Hey, ugly!” I shouted, pulling back an arrow and pointing it in their direction.
The kid with the knife froze, eyes darting up to my place on the tree branch. I was yards away, but I could see the glint of light from the last of the setting sun on the knife as his fist tightened around it. His partner, as well as the child still laying on the ground with the sack clutched to her chest, stared wide-eyed as he
“Who’re you talking to?” he grumbled.
“Doesn’t matter,” I quipped, hopping down from my perch and tightening my grip on the arrow. “Just let the kid go.”
“Why should I?” he retorted, nonetheless taking a step back when he saw the arrow aimed directly at his head. “Y-You’re not really going to shoot that.”
“How do you know?”
The other kid called out, “Hey, let’s just get out of here.” He was ignored.
Pointing to the little girl, Knife Boy puffed out his chest and continued, “There’s no way you’re really worried about her. You Heartless are all the same; you don’t feel a damned thing. No way you’d go out of your way to save her.”
I allowed myself a bitter, self-indulgent smirk, too brief to be seen in the thick darkness. “If that’s what you believe, that I am entirely emotionless, then wouldn’t it also stand to reason that I would feel no remorse about ending your sorry life right here and now?” I drew my bowstring further; the wood audibly creaked. “If that’s the case, then it would seem you had better start running.”
Knife Boy froze, taking a few steps back before he and his friend took off running in the direction they came. “Cursed bastards!” he yelled over his shoulder as he hopped the gate and disappeared. Once they were out of sight, I let my arms drop to my side and slung my bow back over my shoulder. I felt my brow furrow in frustration; life in the village had become so mundane that I was almost hoping for a fight. I quickly stifled that selfish thought, pushing it to the far recesses of my mind; the girl, who had stayed completely still on the ground throughout the whole ordeal, now scrambled to her feet, still clutching the bag in her white-knuckled hands. Now, no longer squinting through the dark, I recognized her immediately.
“That was awesome! How did you know what to say?” she beamed, slinging the canvas sack over her shoulder and wiping the dirt from a pair of ratty pants that fell three inches from her ankles.
"Petra, you’re the one who I keep hearing has been stealing food from the neighboring villages?” I asked her, and her expression soured immediately at having been caught.
“Yeah, that was me,” Petra admitted under her breath. Then, scrambling to justify herself, she added, “But I only do it because there’s not enough food in the village and I gotta eat something!”
I nodded, mulling it over. “Sure, now I suppose I can’t blame you for that, but stealing is wrong. You’re plenty old enough to know that.”
“Of course, I know that, but I needed food!”
“Fine, I get it, I get it,” I sighed. “Just don’t make this a habit, got it? I promised Annie I would keep you out of trouble.”
Petra pouted. “Fine,” she mumbled. I started back up the hill, with Petra trotting silently alongside me.
At thirteen years old, Petra had been living in the Village of the Heartless since she was a baby—which was still longer than I’d been in town—left outside the home of one of the village women, Annie, in the middle of the night. I’d met her several years ago, and she quickly became enthralled with my stories of life outside the village. Annie was dead several months now, leaving Petra to fend mostly for herself, though the community kept a watchful eye over her (Not watchful enough, I thought ruefully).
“You didn’t tell me how you knew what to say to that kid,” she urged, struggling to keep up with my strides.
“I used to spend time around those kinds of people a lot when I was a kid,” I explained, deciding to humor her. “I’ve learned how to turn their own words against them by now.”
I did not tell her that had I learned how to do so sooner, things may have turned out a lot differently.
 * * *
I eventually sent Petra home with a warning that I’d be watching to make sure she didn’t get into any more trouble. When I crossed the threshold back into Bertrand’s musty old house, the palm of his hand came down hard across my face, leaving a sharp stinging sensation behind on my skin.
“What on earth was that for?” I yelped. Bertrand grabbed me by the wrist and dropped me into one of the rickety dining chairs in the center of the room, bearded face practically sparking with rage.
“You must not keep doing that!” he scolded.
“Doing what?” I asked innocently.
“Getting into confrontations with… hooligans! What else?”
“I did what I had to—”
“Don’t think I wasn’t watching, Ace! I could see the entire ordeal from the window!”
 “Well maybe if you’d actually done something to help instead of just watching—”
“Unlike you, Ace, I value my life and am not going to get myself killed just to feel like the hero!”
I couldn’t help but bristle at his comment. Something in my soul shattered, and I sprung to my feet, the wooden chair tipping backward onto the stone floor behind me with a loud clatter that would have rang through the eaves had I not immediately erupted into theatrics.
“What do you mean you value your life? All you do is sit around making futile potion after potion and you still think it’ll work next time!” I clenched my fists at my sides, willing the confrontational energy in my veins to burn out before it swallowed me whole. “So maybe I need to tell off some asshole every once in a while to finally feel like I’m doing something meaningful. So you can keep pouring bile down my throat all you want, but I can assure you it’ll never make me happy!”
Bertrand’s face fell, and I knew deep down that I had hurt him, but I could not bring myself to feel guilty. He had it coming, I thought, stalking across the room to my cot by the window. I sat down on the thin mattress, kicked off my boots, and pulled my knees up to my chest.
“Ace—” Bertrand, having followed me, reached out a hand as if to lay it on my shoulder, but I flinched away from the touch and he retracted the appendage as if he had been burned.
“Don’t touch me,” I muttered, directing my gaze out the window at the dark, lonely night creeping across the landscape. “Just leave me alone.”
With a sigh, Bertrand retreated from my bedside, retiring to his back potion room to conjure his demons away, and I sat back against the wall, longing for home and the warm voices of my parents.
That night, I dreamt of Knife Boy, and his words reminded me of Carita, the girl who kissed me under an oak tree when we were younger and told me I was weird for flinching
Next chapter releases 7/25!
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cavalierious-whim · 3 years
Text
Pawfully Yours (FE3H)
FE3H | Sylvix | General | Complete
Sylvain finds a cat and falls in love.
  ###
A/N: I’m finally reposting some older stuff from my last tumblr blog. Read here on AO3 for better formatting! 
###
Sylvain has always been a dog person. There’s nothing quite like cuddling with a soft and warm ball of fluff or the heavy weight that sinks into the mattress on top of the blanket as you sleep, or inevitably getting drool in your mouth when you pull them close, crying into their fur as you vent your frustrations about your shitty life into the scruff of their neck.
Sylvain has no idea what that’s like. Not one bit.
When he moved to the city, he had to leave Daisy behind. Ingrid on the surface had made it seem that she was more than aggravated to have the Golden Retriever unloaded onto her. Sylvain knows better. Ingrid’s always had a soft spot for Daisy. She’d let the girl sleep in her bed on the occasional platonic sleepover. Dorothea didn’t even have that pleasure half of the time and she was the girlfriend.
It’s led to a rather quiet life and Sylvain is still adjusting to an empty apartment in the not-so-great-but-you-might-not-get-murdered side of town.
Three months into his new home is when he notices the cat. It’s a small thing with sleek black fur. It looks too healthy to be a stray, but judging on how the creature responds to those getting close, Sylvain doesn’t think that it has an owner either. It seems too proud to slum it as a pet, walking along the dingy alleyway that Sylvain cuts through as a shortcut to work, tail swishing and held high. Proud, even.
But then again, maybe that’s just a cat thing. Sylvain doesn’t know, he’s never really given a cat much thought. He doesn’t know why he decides to pity it.
One day, Sylvain brings a can of tuna and popping the top off, he sets it down on the ground. The cat watches him carefully from ten feet away, sitting on his haunches haughtily. Warily. Carefully composed.
“For you,” says Sylvain, not sure why he even bothers to speak to it. It’s a cat. Cats don’t understand humans. Even Daisy had never understood him, tongue lolling out of her mouth as she responded to just the sound of his voice, and not the content of his words.
Still, the cat seems unimpressed, large amber eyes half-lidded as it looks from the can of fish to Sylvain. And if Sylvain doesn’t know any better, that’s what he would think a frown looks like when spread across a feline face.
Sylvain frowns right back. “Well then,” he says. “I see that I’ve wasted my time. Never again.”
He’s wrong through. Sylvain cuts through the alley every single day, a soiled apron slung over his shoulder and a takeaway cup of coffee in his hand. And sometimes, he brings the dumb little cat an old and stale pastry from the shop, because there’s no harm if they’re just going to toss the old food, right?
Sylvain doesn’t stick around to see if the cat actually eats them or enjoys it, or if it just bats the food away with a hiss. He kinda wants to pet the thing though, because it’s fur looks soft and  Sylvain’s feeling lonelier and lonelier as the weeks pass by.
Eventually, he has the crazy idea of maybe adopting the pitiful thing. It’s like any other day that he’s posted up an offering. He breaks an old cheese pastry into several pieces and tosses them onto the ground. And this time, he waits, crouched down, elbows resting on his knees.
The cat comes closer, but it seems pissed off, body stiff and tail twitching angrily. Amber eyes narrowed in suspicion. He sniffs at the pastry and then snags a small bite. Then it spits out the food, clearly not a fan.
Sylvain swallows thickly. “So like, if you want a roof over your head or something, I can bring you home.”
The cat pauses like it understands him. It’d been pawing at the pastry, playing with it when it stops, head snapping up as it looks to Sylvain. Then the cat’s mouth opens, fangs long and sharp, and it says with surprising clarity, “Fuck off.”
#
Sylvain had imagined it, that was the only explanation. It makes more sense than a cat had opened his mouth and spoke to me. Anything makes more sense than that, so Sylvain chalks it up to too many shifts at the cafe, too many hours of schoolwork, and maybe a smidge of not eating enough.
He keeps cutting through the alleyway because it’s the fastest way to work. Sylvain’s a perpetual oversleeper, the kind that sets five alarms and sleeps through all of them, only to roll out of bed with five minutes to spare.
And he can spare that five minutes if he takes the back way, no matter how dark and creepy it seems at three in the morning and on the way to his early shift.
The cat’s made himself scarce. Sylvain now knows that it’s male because of the shockingly handsome voice it carries. More proof that he’d absolutely made the entire thing up in his lonely misery.
Sylvain doesn’t expect to feel sad about the disappearance of the cat, but it’d sunk in deeper than expected. Even if the cat had seemed eternally annoyed-- as far as a cat could seem at least-- he’d been cute, and Sylvain liked bringing it treats. There’s not a lot left that makes him feel good about himself.
That morning, Sylvain pauses because he’s got a moment. The alley is dark and there’s no sign of the cat. Sylvain sighs softly and says, “I’m sorry if I offended you or something. I just thought that maybe a home would be better than an old alley.”
It seems silly to talk to a cat, but he feels a little bit better and he continues to work with a little bit more pep in his step. And later that night he leaves a pastry behind, just in case.
The cat slinks out from under the dumpster once Sylvain’s out of sight. In his wake is a tuna roll, a fluffy pastry filled with tangy fish salad. The cat likes this one, not that he’d ever admit it.
#
Sylvain rarely works the night shift, mostly because he’d rather wake up at the butt crack of dawn and get his day over with. But sometimes it’s inevitable. Sometimes a coworker just needs a shift covered and Sylvain’s a nice enough guy to agree.
And he doesn’t want to risk getting fired, even if he doesn’t think Byleth is a vindictive manager.
It’s probably a bad idea to cut through the alley at ten at night, but Sylvain’s tired and weary, and he just wants to get home. Not to mention he’s got a container of day-old tuna salad in his hand that he needs to leave the cat, otherwise it’ll just wind up rotting away in his fridge.
He opens the container and places it on the asphalt near the dumpster, waiting for just a moment as he crouches down. Just in case the cat decides to show his face. He doesn’t. Sylvain frowns and with a sigh, pulls himself back up.
There’s a shuffling behind him and he turns to look, only to be slammed against the dumpster, head cracking against the hard metal. Sylvain’s vision swims as he tries to push against his attacker, but then he stops dead. There’s a knife held close to his neck. Sylvain can feel the soft scrape of it as he swallows.
“Wallet,” the man behind him says, a hand gripped tightly around Sylvain’s arm that’s wrenched behind him. He’s stockier in his build, pinning Sylvain against the dumpster easily.
“Hey look man--” The knife digs deeper into his skin, cutting just barely. Sylvain’s not dumb enough to push the situation further. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “Back pocket. My phone’s there too, opposite side.” A pause. “You know, just in case you want that as well.”
He can’t help the cheeky reply, but his assailant doesn’t seem to hear him as he rifles through his pockets. The man pulls the wallet from Sylvain’s pocket, flipping through it.
And then there’s a shout as the man is wrestled to the ground by someone else that Sylvain can’t see. There’s a scuffle, some odd yowling, and then the distinct sound of a punch, bones crunching sickly under the hit.
Sylvain stands stock still, still pressed against the dumpster, not moving. Just in case.
“Useless, aren’t you?” Sylvain freezes at the voice, taking in the acerbic tone. “It’s bad enough that you waltz through here every morning, but you should know better than to do it at this time of night.”
Sylvain turns but he doesn’t find the cat, he finds a man standing there instead, finely boned face tugged into a snarl. He shakes out his hand, knuckles already bruising from the solid hit that he’d gotten in. Sylvain blinks. He’s handsome in a feline sort of way, hard edges to his jaw and circles cut deeply underneath his eyes. His black hair is tied into a ponytail high on the crown of his head.
The man toes at the assailant who’s out cold on the ground. “I’d get out of here,” he says. Then he looks to Sylvain again, unimpressed. He stalks over to the container of tuna salad and toes at that too, lips pulled into a grimace of disgust. “Really, now. If you won’t eat it, what makes you think that I will?”
“Um--”
The man blinks slowly, catlike, and with subtle grace. “Do I need to explain it to you?”
“No,” says Sylvain quickly. “No, I just--” A pause as he rubs at his head. “The cat?”
“It’s not the cat ,” says the man with a snarl. “It’s Felix.”
“Felix,” Sylvain repeats.
“I won’t repeat myself.”
“Thanks,” Sylvain blurts. “For, you know.” He gestures to the man on the ground.
“It’s a one-time thing. I don’t reward stupidity,” says Felix as he picks up the container and tosses it into the dumpster. Then he looks to Sylvain again, shoving his hands into the pockets of his navy blue hoodie. “I like the baked ones with the fish and cheese. They aren’t so bad a day past.”
Felix doesn’t meet Sylvain’s face, instead, stalking off without another word.
Sylvain smiles.
#
Sylvain leaves a pastry that he pilfers from the bin after every shift. It’s not always Felix’s favorite, but he doesn’t complain. Either way, they disappear into his belly, leaving Felix to lick his paws clean after a tasty meal.
He doesn’t turn into a man again, but he does walk Sylvain through the alley. And then sometimes further. If Felix follows him to the coffee shop, he knows that he’ll get a small lid of cream.
It’s a strange routine that concerns an even stranger man. What is Felix, Sylvain wonders? A cat? A man? Both? Neither? He’s real and solid as the day though, and Sylvain knows that he hadn’t hallucinated anything that’d happened.
When winter comes, Sylvain worries. It’s cold and crisp outside, not preferable for a street cat. He wonders if Felix has somewhere warm to sleep, which is why he eventually asks.
“Surely you can’t stay out here all season,” says Sylvain one night, as he watches Felix pull apart half a savory ham and cheese tart. He’s not sure if cats should eat one of those, but maybe with Felix, it’s different. The cat never complains.
Felix pauses mid-bite to look at Sylvain. Then he drops the tart, hisses lightly, and runs off. Sylvain blinks. An answer is an answer at least, and Sylvain stops asking.
#
One day, it snows. Gautier is a cold and dismal place in the winter, but the snow comes later that year than anyone expects. Sylvain’s wrapped head-to-toe in a heavy jacket, a scarf, and thermals.
Felix follows him to the coffee shop that morning and against Sylvain’s better judgment, he opens the door to the storage shed out behind the shop. “It’s not much,” says Sylvain, “but it’s not in the snow.”
Felix gives him a long look before bolting inside.
Later that day, Felix strolls into the shop as a man, walks up to the counter, and slaps five gold coins onto the counter. Sylvain stares at them and then back to Felix, who immediately bristles.
“I didn’t fucking steal them,” says Felix. “I have a job.”
That’s news to Sylvain and he can’t quite picture it. This is only the second time they’ve met face-to-face, but he has a distinct feeling that Felix isn’t a people person.
Felix points to the fish and cheese pastry in the case. “It’s my favorite.” There’s an awkward pause as he closes his eyes in a near wince and continues with, “Look, I need to talk with you about something, alright?”
Sylvain rings him up, throws in a free cup of coffee, and fifteen minutes later they’re settled into the soft armchairs near the back of the cafe. It’s cold and bitter out, so they’re alone.
“You once offered a home,” says Felix, his hands wrapped around a warm ceramic mug. Sylvain’s coworker Annette paints them and they never get used. Felix huddles closer to it though like he’s trying to leech the warmth from it. “Does that offer still stand?”
Sylvain’s mouth parts in surprise and Felix turns bright red, looking anywhere but his face. “Look, it doesn’t mean anything,” says Felix. “But it’s getting cold out and it’s hard to find somewhere to bed down for the night where I won’t freeze to death.”
“So, my apartment,” says Sylvain.
“I’d be a cat,” says Felix. “I’d stay out of your way. It’d be like I’m not even there.”
Sylvain frowns. “I offered because I wanted a pet.”
Felix bristles. “I’m not a--”
“I know,” says Sylvain quietly. “I wouldn’t ask you to be since you’re… well, you know.” But Sylvain doesn’t know, so he gestures to Felix vaguely. He’s still trying to figure Felix out.
Felix sighs. “It’s only for the winter,” he says. “You won’t see me like this much. It’s not easy to… well, it’s not preferable.” He leaves it at that, which piques Sylvain’s curiosity.
“You can have the entire couch to yourself,” says Sylvain, half in jest.
Felix finishes his coffee quietly and then stands. “I’ll think about it.”
And he must, because when Sylvain leaves his shift in the late afternoon, Felix follows him all the way home.
#
Felix is never a man, he’s always a cat. Sylvain thinks that he prefers being a feline, though he’s not sure why. When he comes home from work, Felix is often curled up next to the warm glow of the fireplace. He leaves it lit because Felix can handle whatever might happen if something bad does.
As winter passes, Felix moves closer. He’s less annoyed. He sits on the couch next to Sylvain, his tail twitching softly against Sylvain’s thigh. Sylvain talks to him about any and everything, and he knows that it’s probably annoying, but Felix hasn’t yet told him to stop. So he doesn’t.
Sylvain gifts him a collar on Yuletide as a joke. Felix stubbornly wears it, because he’s testy about the weirdest of things.
When the New Year comes, he’s a man again. They’re nestled into the couch, Felix having shoved his feet across Sylvain’s lap with a cursory glance. Sylvain immediately pulled them closer, kneading at his arches.
Neither of them thinks more of it. Or maybe they both think of everything about it. Felix is impossible to read, but Sylvain thinks that he’s starting to recognize his moods. Even the most ornery of cats can’t turn down softly placed affection.
Sylvain wonders if it’s weird to fall in love with a cat. It’s a momentary thought because then he remembers that Felix isn’t just a cat and that there’s probably weirder things out there than Sylvain’s love, or the cat that’s also a man.
They watch New Year’s festivities on the television.
“I hate the noise,” says Felix when the fireworks start. “Too loud.”
“It’s not so bad in the city,” says Sylvain, hands still wrapped around Felix’s cold feet.
“It’s the worst day of the year,” says Felix. “Everyone’s drunk beyond reason and they roam the streets doing shitty things. Like kicking cats.”
There’s a lot to unpack there and Sylvain looks at him. “I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s an earnest apology.
Felix huffs, lips curling into a sneer. But then it’s gone as he relaxes into the couch. “No, it’s--” A pause, the air pregnant between them. “I’m not out there tonight, so it’s okay.”
It’s not, because Felix isn’t the only street cat to ghost the streets of the city. Still. “You’re welcome,” says Sylvain, squeezing his feet lightly. Felix kicks at him just because he can.
#
Winter ends sooner than Sylvain likes, but Felix doesn’t leave. He seems intent on staying and neither of them says anything, even if he’s a man more than a cat nowadays. Felix disappears during the day for his proclaimed job. He even cooks dinner sometimes and those are the kind of nights that Sylvain likes to cherish because Felix gets weirdly soft.
There’s a weird morning as Sylvain’s about to shuffle out the front door and Felix stops him.
“Is there something wrong?” asks Sylvain.
Felix doesn’t immediately answer and when he does, he says, “Have a good day.”
Sylvain assumes the worst because it’s an old habit that he can’t quite break. “Oh shit, you’re leaving aren’t you? Felix, you should know by now that you’re welcome to stay--”
Felix grabs Sylvain by the lapels of his jacket and pulls him forward, pressing a kiss against his lips. It’s short. It’s a little bit sweet. Felix seems to have no idea what he’s doing. Sylvain loves it, hand reaching out to grasp at Felix’s elbow.
When Sylvain pulls back, he asks, “What was that for?”
Felix’s hackles raise, immediately on the defensive. “Whatever, it was--”
“It’s not a complaint,” says Sylvain simply. “I liked it. It also sends some confusing signals.”
“What could be confusing about a kiss?” asks Felix.
“You don’t seem the type to do that,” says Sylvain.
“I’m not.” Felix pulls away, brushing at Sylvain’s shoulder to distract himself.
Suddenly, Sylvain gets it. Felix isn’t good with feelings and he’s not sure if it’s because he’s really a cat-- or maybe it’s not that at all. Sylvain still hasn’t figured out the details of all that nonsense, nor has he asked Felix outright. But Felix seems the kind of person who’s a doer, not a thinker, so he did the only thing that he thought would send a clear message.
Or maybe Sylvain’s overthinking something that’s really quite simple in the end.
“I love you too,” says Sylvain quietly.
Felix’s hand pauses and Sylvain watches him swallow. “Fool,” says Felix, but it’s more affectionate than angry, his voice cracking sweetly as he tries to find his words.
Sylvain smiles, pulling him back for another kiss. It’s longer this time, but just as awkward. Felix sinks into it, fingers curling tightly into Sylvain’s jacket as they hover in the doorway. When they part again, Felix says, “What an absolute fool.”
“The most foolish,” says Sylvain.
There’s a beat as Felix stares back at him like he’s looking, really looking at Sylvain. Felix sees him. And for once, Sylvain doesn’t mind. He’s never liked people seeing him for who he is, but Felix is different. He’s wormed his way into his heart and Sylvain doesn’t want to let go.
“But I wonder,” asks Sylvain, “what’s that say about you?”
Felix could have reacted a hundred different ways. What he does is pull Sylvain closer again, pressing their foreheads together. “Obviously I’m an even bigger idiot.”
Sylvain laughs, before swooping in once more.
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ayamari-no-goshi · 3 years
Text
Verboten 8 | (T)
ff.net | AO3
Fandom: Danny Phantom (DP)
Summary:   AU. When Danny was five years old, he went missing for 2 weeks. In the years that follow, his family tried to make sense of what happened, only for the truth to be discovered years later.
Warnings: rated T for violence, mentions of death, language. Be prepared for some very weird things
Chapter warning: some gets physically sick, discussions of death
Parings: Danny/Sam
Notes: originally uploaded to Ff.net. Cross-posted to AO3 and tumblr. This fic is very heavily inspired by folklore surrounding mysterious wilderness disappearances
Chapter 8
"Hey, is it just me, or is the floor moving?" Danny questioned as he stared at the moving stone.
"No, it's not just you," Sam confirmed as she glanced at her friend. Although he was sitting rod straight as he watched, his coloration was still flickering, and there now seemed to be a green tinge to his cheeks.
"Don't you think we should run?" Tucker's question nearly made Sam snort. With Danny getting worse, there was no way he'd be able to escape with them.
Before anyone had a change to respond, the stone completely lifted and shifted to the side, exposing a hole. Seconds later, a furry head popped out. They watched in silent horror as it flicked one of its ears as if hear them and turned to face them.
The face that greeted them was terrifying. If Sam had to describe it, the appearance was like an angry polar bear who happened to have icy horns. Maybe calling it a yeti would be more accurate, but she could argue with herself about the semantics once she was out of this mess.
They just stared at the thing in the floor until it smiled at them. Whatever spell its sudden appearance held over them was broken, and they yelled in terror. There where several seconds of confusion as the three of them tried to escape. Tucker was halfway to the door while Sam tried to help Danny, who had fallen off the table, when the thing spoke.
"Children, please do not be alarmed," it gently requested as it raised itself up from the floor. Its entire body was covered in that same white fur, save for its one arm, which appeared to be made from ice. In an almost bemused afterthought, Sam noted it wore a blue clothing article which may have been a kilt. "We don't have much time before Plasmius returns."
When they didn't respond of move, the creature continued to speak as it tried to look as non-threatening as possible. "I am call Frostbite, the leader of the Far Frozen. I am lucky to have found out about you when I did. Plasmius has killed many humans in his experiments. If you allow me, I will help you return to your home."
"Why should we trust you? How do we know you won't take us somewhere and eat us?" Tucker demanded as he inched closer to Danny and Sam.
It laughed heartily at Tucker's question. "Myself as well as my clan do not eat people. We have made it the goal of our afterlives to try to assist as many wayward humans as we possibly can." Frostbite's smile faded. "However, I acknowledge your concern. This is the first time we have met, and if Plasmius has been your first encounter with the those of us from this realm, then you most likely do not think highly of us." It, possibly he, glanced at Danny as his coloration cycled again. "You are ill, and if you do not leave this place soon, you may not be able to return to the land of the living."
There was a tense moment as Sam and the boys stared at Frostbite. It… no, he… seemed genuine. Although his face was frightening, his eyes were sincere and almost seemed to plead with them.
"Alright," Danny eventually stated as he slowly stood, "but, you have to swear you won't hurt them!"
"I swear it on my honor, young one."
"Psst, Danny, what are you doing?" Tucker angrily whispered as he tugged on Danny's sleeve. "Are you trying to get us killed?"
"Call me crazy, but I think it's much less risky to go with him then it is to stay here and wait for Plasmius," Danny responded as he tested his footing. "He's a lot more honest than Plasmius, that's for sure."
"You noticed it too?" Sam was impressed he picked up on it. Although, Danny was often clueless when it came to certain social cues, particularly flirting, he did have an amazing talent for picking up on whether someone was being honest.
Tucker looked at both of them for a disbelieving moment before he shook his head. "Alright. I'll follow your lead on this, but if we get eaten, I'm blaming you."
"Young one, do you require assistance?" Frostbite asked as he eyed Danny, who appeared to be somewhat lightheaded as he tried to walk.
"It's Danny, and no, I can handle it."
A frown crossed Frostbite's face for a moment before he scurried forward and scooped Danny into his arms. "I understand your desire to escape on your own, but you are not well, and time is of the essence." Frostbite then instructed Sam and Tucker to enter the hole in the floor first. Once they were safely inside which was revealed to be a tunnel, he handed Danny to them. He then entered the tunnel and carefully replaced the floor's stone.
There was little light in the tunnel save for the slight glow Frostbite and occasionally Danny produced. As if sensing their concern, Frostbite held up his hand (or was it more of a paw?) and created a soft blue light. "This way, children," he instructed as he began to walk. "I am sorry I cannot produce a better light source, but if I generate much more energy, Plasmius may discover our location."
"I was wondering why we were doing things so old school," Tucker whispered.
As Sam rolled her eyes at him. If it wasn't for the fact she and Tucker were both supporting Danny as they walked, she probably would have smacked him for being rude. But, his statement did bring up an interesting point. "So, you could have gotten us out in an easier way, but Plasmius would have caught us?"
"Correct. Most sentient ghosts can easily phase through walls, unless the object is something native to this world or is coated in something that disrupts our powers or repels us. Plasmius' palace is unusual as much of it is created from materials taken from the human realm, but his reputation and the barrier he uses is able to keep most ghosts away. He is very unkind to trespassers." Frostbite glanced back at them. "I know young Danny's name, but I have yet to learn yours."
As weird as it sounded, Sam was embarrassed by that lapse in courtesy. She quickly introduced herself, and Tucker followed suit.
"Sam and Tucker! Such fitting names!" The strange ghost seemed pleased, but after a moment, he stopped walking, so he could turn and look at them. "Please alert me immediately if you notice you are not feeling well or notice something strange about yourself." After they promised, Frostbite nodded and continued forward. "This world can do strange things to those who unintentionally enter it, and there are many ways the changes can occur."
"Can… can I ask a question?" Once Frostbite agreed, Danny continued, "I'm sorry if this is a bit rude, but were you human?"
"That I was." The ghost didn't appear bothered by the question. "While many of my human memories have faded over time, I do remember that I was once an explorer. As for how I came this this realm, I am uncertain, but I do know that by the time I once again found a way back to the world of the living, I appeared much how you see me now. Many of my clan seem were also explorers or those who spent a great deal of time in the woods or mountains. We are not sure why we have taken this form, but we use it to our advantage. We often patrol areas where portal formation is common and try to scare humans away from them. However, more recently we have been finding more and more humans who seem to be looking for us." He seemed absolutely puzzled by the concept.
Sam shared a look with her friends. Did that mean that he and his clan were what people considered Bigfoot? Maybe she was reading too much into it, but that's what it seemed like.
"So, does that happen to everyone who dies? Cuz I don't know if I can handle the fact I might not keep these good looks when I die," Tucker whined.
The soft blue light flickered as Frostbite chuckled. "I don't believe you have to worry. While it is possible, you are unlikely to become a ghost if you expire outside of this realm. However, I am no expert regarding the mysteries of life and death."
"But what happens if you die here?" It was Sam's turn to ask a question.
"It seems to vary. Some die, but their souls do not remain here. For others, their body and soul mingle and change, creating a ghost."
"That almost sounds like a zombie," Sam mumbled to herself.
Frostbite chuckled again. "I understand why you would think as such. However, zombies can only exist in your world. They are corpses reanimated, often through magic, but lack a soul. For us, our earthly bodies are somehow a catalyst for the new form our soul takes, but even though I have seen it happen, I do not understand the process."
His explanation somewhat made sense, Sam mused. It also lined up with what Plasmius mentioned about how his experiments didn't always work. Although, it posed a more troubling question. What exactly would happen to Danny? If he really did die and become a ghost, did that mean there would be no body for his family to bury? It was a troubling thought that wouldn't go away no matter how much Sam tried to think of something else.
However, something Sam also noted was that Danny was avoiding asking questions regarding what was happening to him. Other than when his hands flickered in and out of visibility in the lab, he hadn't brought up the subject. It was possible he was focusing on escaping. However, with the new knowledge Frostbite had given them, he was probably in some sort of denial. She wasn't certain if she'd be able to be as calm if she was the one affected.
What seemed like an hour later, although her sense of time could have been altered due to the darkness, they finally reached the end of the tunnel. It wasn't a moment too soon as Danny had fainted when they had first caught sight of the exit. Once outside, she and Tucker carefully sat Danny down, so they could take a quick break. Once she was certain Danny was settled, she took the chance to look around.
In front of them was a think yet somewhat dead looking forest, like what they first found themselves in when they fled from the first ghost. Behind her was the tunnel which had been cut into what appeared to be a rock outcropping. If it wasn't for the strange coloration, it could have looked like something found in the forests back home.
She started when Frostbite gave a quick whistle. Moments later, four more ghosts who had similar appearances to Frostbite appeared from within the forest. They had to be part of the clan the ghost had mentioned while they were escaping. The group exchanged a few words before Frostbite beckoned to the humans behind him.
"Children, do not be alarmed. These are members of my clan, and they will be assisting us in your escape. However, we need to stop at our realm first as we have an object that will help us locate when and where a portal will open. I would also like to assess Danny's health." The ghost frowned at the form of the unconscious teenager. "You have probably guessed this realm has a grip on him, but he is resisting the change more intensely than I have ever seen."
"That means he'll be able to come home with us, right?" Tucker's question was full of a wary hope.
"I am… uncertain. We may have to seek the wisdom of an older entity to know for sure."
The world wouldn't stop spinning when Danny finally came to. After rolling over and relieving the contents of his stomach, he finally was able to think clearly enough to take stock of his surroundings. He was in what appeared to be some type of medical room. Although the walls appeared to be made of ice, there was a light and almost friendly atmosphere about the place.
A sound caught his attention, and he turned just in time to see white creature duck out of the room. Puzzled at the reaction, it wasn't until it returned to the room with Frostbite that he realized it was simply retrieving the other ghost.
"You've wakened, young one!" Frostbite seemed exuberant as he examined him. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I got spun around in one of those centrifuges at space camp way too many times," Danny replied as he rubbed his head. Although the dizziness had subsided, he still felt somewhat ill. "Where are Sam and Tucker?"
"They are resting in another room. They've been eagerly waiting for news of your awakening."
Danny sighed in relief at the news. "Will I be able to see them?"
"Absolutely, but first I would like to discuss something with you," Frostbite sat down at a chair near the bed Danny was using. Somewhat unnerved by how serious Frostbite seemed to be, he carefully sat up and gestured for him to continue. "Your circumstance is nothing like what any of us have ever seen before."
"My circumstance?" That didn't sound good. Did it have to do with something Plasmius did to him?
"Yes. Before I explain, I need to ask if you've eaten anything while you were here?"
Danny shook his head. "Unless Plasmius fed me something when I was unconscious, then no. Wait," he paused for a moment as he tried to remember what Plasmius had told him, "maybe? Plasmius said something about taking care of me when I got lost when I was six."
"How odd, but as you must have returned home afterwards, it might have something to do with the unexpected results. Did Plasmius explain what he wanted from you?"
"He wanted me as his heir? I think?" Before he or Frostbite could say anything else, Danny felt something clench in his navel. Immediately afterwards, what seemed to be a flash of light momentarily blinded him. Terrified, he yelped and tried to move away. "What-what just happened?"
"This is what I have need to discuss with you." The ghost then rose and picked Danny off the bed before carefully setting him down in front of a mirror at the far end of the room.
It was the first time since he had come to this world that he had a chance to take stock of himself. However, the image looking back at him wasn't what he was expecting. His eyes weren't his usual blue but were instead an unnatural green. His skin had tanned, but the color somehow seemed unhealthy. His hair was now a silvery white instead of his black, and if he wasn't imaging it, he was admitting a slight glow. "What's wrong with me?" he asked in a horrified whisper.
Before he could get his answer, he felt the clench in his navel again. When the light subsided, he was greeted with the reflection of how he originally looked. Uncertain if his mind was playing tricks on him, he checked his hands and what he could of his bangs. Everything appeared normal.
"Usually," Frostbite started, which caused Danny to pause his examination and look at the ghost," when this world claims someone, they can no longer return to their human form. If they do, they often end up dead. You are somehow able to keep your human form, yet you produce a ghost form. In all my years, I have never seen such a thing."
"What exactly does that mean? What am I?"
"Unfortunately, I do no know. From what our tests showed, you have both a functioning human heart and a ghostly core, which is our equivalent of a heart. You've been switching back and forth between forms for some time."
======================================
Notes:
1) So… the Bigfoot mention. This is something that I've heard before. There are 2 major lines of thought regarding the famous cryptid. 1) Bigfoot is a flesh and blood creature, and 2) Bigfoot is an interdimensional, extraterrestrial, or spiritual entity (I seriously had a professor who believed Bigfoot could travel through dimensions. He even wrote papers about it). For this story, I'm going with the concept that people are catching brief glimpses of Frostbite and his people as they patrol areas known for spontaneous portal openings.
Interdimensional aspects are popping up more and more when it comes to paranormal topics, and they're a major theory when it comes to unexplained disappearances and weird creatures. Personally, I find the concept intriguing, but it's not something that can currently be proven. Though… there are a lot of rumors about how CERN is trying to do that. I know that group is just supposed to be studying particles and quantum physics, but there are sooooo many weird rumors about CERN.
2) For this story, I'm borrowing the type of idea where a ghost can't be created unless its former vessel (body) is used as a medium. You see things like this for Revenants, Strigoi Mort (Romanian ghost/zombie/vampire thing), and Gjenganger (Scandinavian ghost/zombie thing similar to a Dragur), and others. For those stories, the only way to get rid of them is to damage/destroy the body in specific ways which vary from region to region.
3) human centrifuges are real things. They are used by to help test the effects of G-forces on people, and astronauts receive training to handle said forces in them. They do, at least used to have, a version of it at space camp.
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wrathandgreed · 3 years
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I can’t get my drawings to go how I want, so I figure I’ll *write* out my MCTober stuff, with the help of piccrew :) And as I’m behind, I’ll start at Day 1 anyway. I haven’t written in forever (and I’ve never written for the brothers), and I don’t know how to format stuff on Tumblr Mobile. So, bear with me.
Day 1: MC Presentation
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This is Rae. She is
[[MORE]]
- pretty pale, despite having grown up in California. She’s one of those people who just burns in the sun, so she tends to cover up and wear lots of sunscreen.
- Is around 23, but looks younger. The fact that her entire style is “rebellion” makes people think she’s in her late teens.
- Also has a sweet face. The kind of face that makes her seem trustworthy despite the attire. The face that draws in people needing directions, kids who’ve lost their parents, and tourists who need pictures taken. The fact that she will, without complaint or question, give directions, help locate parents, and cheerfully take pictures only reinforces that.
- She has color-shifting hair, although that reddish color in the picrew is *close* to her natural shade. Just plumped up a few saturation points. At other points she’s gone to black with pink streaks or green tips. Once, when a friend was learning how to do hair, she had one of those super expensive full-on rainbow undercuts, but everyone agreed it was a bitch to maintain and wasn’t worth it.
- When not in RAD uniform, she tends to dress in a kind of rock-casual. Ripped jeans and band-tees are her favorite things, along with belt chains and as many necklaces as she can get away with before they start tangling. It makes sense when you consider she sang with a metal band in her first few years of college. They still play occasionally, but most of them are too focused on their studies to do the hardcore networking it takes to “make it” in music.
- She tends to do heavy eye makeup, but very little on the rest of her face. No nail polish, since she’s constantly chipping or chewing it off.
- Her headphones are as much a constant for her as they are for Levi.
- Personality-wise, she presents as friendly....almost pathologically friendly. If Luke is a chihuahua, she’s a Labrador. She’s game to try anything, has endless energy, and is willing to tag along on the most mundane errands. It seems to take a lot to offend, upset, or frighten her. Deliberately hurting her usually does it.
- Then she’s silent. Whether it’s because she’s protecting herself or giving you the silent treatment is anyone’s guess.
I imagine it goes something like this.....
Lucifer hadn’t been in favor of the exchange program. Far too many things could go wrong. However, it was what Diavolo wanted, so Lucifer would ensure it went well. In order to support Diavolo’s initiative, Lucifer had done everything he could think of to prepare for the new arrival. He had planned on how to deal with errant lower demons attempting to either eat their flesh or steal their soul. He had planned for magical accidents in their classes. He had even planned for the off-chance that their new arrival might be too terrified to leave the House for a few weeks.
He thought he had prepared for everything.
What he hadn’t prepared for was a human who not only wasn’t terrified, but was actively enjoying herself.
A female shriek pulled him from his room and he was halfway to the common room before he realized it had been a shriek of laughter, not distress. Since he was close to the room anyway, he decided to investigate. He had left the girl and Mammon watching TV, so it wasn’t a surprise that things went wrong. The two of them together somehow managed to make more trouble than Mammon did on his own. At least trouble with Rae rarely involved Mammon stealing, so it was trouble that was easier to deal with.
Rae’s loud laughter sounded again as he stepped into the room, just in time to see her evade Mammon and climb to the top of the back of the couch. In her raised hand, high over her head, she held her D.D.D. On the inside of her wrist was the gleam of his pact mark.
“Erase it!” Mammon called as he got back to his feet. There was laughter in his voice, almost enough to make Lucifer smile. His younger brother often talked about how much fun he was having, but really seemed to have little of it.
“Or what?” Rae sputtered over her giggles. “You can’t hurt me. You can’t - “
Suddenly Mammon wasn’t where he’d been. In a move too quick for the human to follow, he had snagged her off the top of the couch and leaned her backwards over it, her head towards the cushions. She still held the phone out of reach, and she was still laughing - mostly because Mammon was tickling her. She wriggled as hard as she could, but no human wriggling could match demon strength. Her shirt bunched up towards her breasts and one of her necklaces smacked her in the face. As she flailed, she caught sight of the older brother.
“Lucifer!” She called. “Catch!” The D.D.D flew through the air towards him.
At the sound of his older brother’s name, Mammon immediately let go of Rae. She fell back onto the couch cushions, cackling, but Mammon was red. “Stupid human,” he muttered. “If I get in trouble, it’s your fault.”
“Why should you be in trouble, Mammon?” Lucifer asked smoothly. “Anything I should know?”
“N-no! I haven’t done nothin’. Haven’t had TIME to do anything, what with the pet-sitting you’re makin’ me do.”
Rae rolled her eyes as Mammon gestured at her. She was still trailing giggles, calming down from the frantic tickles. “He’s just mad.”
“Am not!”
She started sidling closer to Lucifer - and her phone. “He got a little sad - “
“Did not!”
“ - at the movie we were watching.”
“They were separated forever!” Mammon’s flush grew worse and he couldn’t help a sniffle. “All because of some dumb vow made before they even met! It ain’t fair!”
“So I took a photo. Y’know, to commemorate the moment.” She’d made her way to Lucifer and held her hand out for her phone. He placed it in her hand and she smiled. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I apparently promised Levi I’d watch something with him tonight. I don’t remember making that promise, but he’s insistent I did.”
“Hey! Why’re you spending so much time with Levi? I’m your first guy!”
“Yeah, and he’s my second.” She pulled up the hem of her tshirt enough to show another pact mark, shimmering and peeking up from the waistband of her jeans. “And my second guy wants to watch something called I was a Teenage Vampire Who..... uh, Something Something Something Before the World Ends.”
Grumbling, Mammon moved towards the room’s exit too. “Well, if I can’t talk ya out of it, I can at least make sure ya aren’t bored. The Great Mammon will sacrifice his night to keep ya entertained.”
“Are you sure Levi will let you in? Do you know today’s code?”
“WHAT FRIGGING CODE?”
Lucifer pinched the bridge of his nose as the two walked off, still bickering. Fighting. Play-fighting. Whatever they were doing, Lucifer wanted no part of it.
Why couldn’t the House have gotten a normal human?
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fimflamfilosophy · 4 years
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Characters: Tearing Each Other Together
After the world-sweeping success of my previous article (forty notes on Tumblr, wow!) and being driven out of my house due to mold for the second time in two months, I think the time is right to add another essay to the subject of character design and writing. But what’s left to say after having definitely solved the entire process of character writing the last time?
Well, suppose you can figure out the emotional state of one person. That’s well and good, and oddly harder for people than you might imagine. And I think the reason it’s so hard is because in virtually any show you’re not going to be given a character in a vacuum to learn that process from. They have some story, something they’re trying to overcome, and other characters they’re bouncing off of, and the actual process of conflict is more complicated than knowing who your characters are.
Hate, Love, or Indifference, It’s All A Struggle
So what’s the essence of a story? There’s some motive that’s trying to be achieved. A conflict. And I can’t stress this enough. Conflict. Because it’s one thing if you say your main character is a kid who wants to be the best Poke’mon trainer and completely another to have that be a concrete objective with a satisfying story and conclusion. Wanting to be the “best” isn’t actually conflict. It’s a dream. Being forced to travel the known world to acquire eight gaudy pins that probably cost twenty-five cents each to manufacture? That’s conflict.
And not only do you have to travel the world, you do so with a shrill red-head who explicitly hates you because you trashed her bike, and a sex-starved pervert whose life dream is to make Poke’mon mate with each other for a living. And that’s important. Without Misty and Brock, Ash’s journey is a lot less interesting for a lot of reasons. Misty calls Ash out every time he messes up, and aside from being on a watch list, Brock is a helpful older character who tells Ash, and therefore the audience, what’s what.
But let’s back up, because people understand the benefit of Brock and Misty at a basic level, but when you’re starting off, how do you know who those people should be? Well, every show, from sitcom, to comedy to drama, does its best to balance personalities against each other so there’s always some sort of conflict possible between them.
Now, “conflict” doesn’t mean they’re trying to kill each other. It could mean they’re falling in love with each other. Maybe it means they don’t have much in common but have to work together over long hours in isolation. The idea is simply that there’s something to overcome between these people. Misty thinks Ash is stupid - that’s a conflict which is often leveraged to push Ash forward. Brock, however, has a reactive role in the show, only functioning in conflict when a womanizer who grovels at the feet of ladies Ash is already helping anyway.
It’s odd because if Misty were older she would be set up very well as kind of an “opposites” romantic torture device with Brock. They’re even depicted as professional equals, which would have made their levels of expertise and experience more balanced. Had they been closer in apparent age, a “will they won’t they” romance would have fit adequately, with Brock’s constant hitting on other women serving as a major, hopeless, long-lasting roadblock to a serious relationship between them; it would work especially well because Misty is established to have an inferiority complex to her prettier sisters. It also might help explain why Brock hung around so long. But as it was, Brock’s main contribution to the inner dynamic was to act as a mediator, caretaker, and mentor.
But circling back to Brock’s dream of Poke’mon husbandry. Well, on the meta level that’s why he doesn’t leave. Because it’s not a motive, he’s not taking steps towards it, and it’s not going to happen, it’s just a dream. Until it does happen, anyway, and then they wrote him out of the show - but we’ll dig more into this later.
Balancing Imbalance
The best place to look to see good conflict set ups between characters are popular sitcoms. Consider the show “Frasier”: it ran for eleven seasons and revolved mainly around the personal spats of Frasier, his brother Niles, their dad, and the dad’s caretaker, Daphne. Frasier was arrogant, Niles was insecure, Dad was an earnest roughneck, and Daphne was well-meaning. Frasier and Niles were also elitist pricks at times so they couldn’t even always agree where to eat together, much less with their father who was happier having a burger with ketchup.
Every episode had some central motivator; an ice fishing trip, a joint investment, an awards ceremony - but these things were just catalysts to the main conflict, which was almost always something between characters. We’d seen it time and again, that Frasier and his Dad would come to blows over differences in taste. Niles would try to court Daphne while torn by his commitment to his failing marriage, over and over. But the pithy banter and the way they resolved it would always be new, so people watched this show, episode after episode, for over a decade.
And the simple beauty of it all was that each of the characters had something to do with each other. Whether it be filial obligation, lust, sibling rivalry, friction between introversion and extroversion, or taste in food, they always had some source of conflict to make a show out of. Niles and Frasier were both psychiatrists, but from different schools of thought and different working environments, so they even had chances to butt heads academically and professionally. It was rich with writing opportunities and it’s not any wonder it lasted so long.
Another sitcom, “New Girl”, which was about a group of roommates, had a good dynamic set-up between two characters, Schmidt and Nick. Nick is a messy slob and Schmidt’s a type A neat freak, creating a really obvious source of conflict to work with. But then they had a third character, Winston, who they lampshade as the token black guy. 
Now, the joke that Winston is the “black friend” has pretty much no legs, so in the early seasons you see him acting as kind of a third party mediator, or maybe a wild card, and it winds up being funnier when Winston is unhelpful. So as the seasons went on, Winston gradually lost his damn mind. He becomes a cop and meets a woman so that he’d have some character growth and dynamic, but also develops into a man who would burn a building down as a prank. The writers had no idea what they were doing with him and he gradually flew further and further off the handle.
Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Winston as a character. Aside from being funny in the show, watching the writers gradually unglue him from sanity was its own meta comedy above that. I knew they were doing it on accident, but having such a good time with it that it was just going to keep getting worse. In fact a major component of the finale for the whole show is an insane thing Winston does. They wrap the show on the note, “Winston is crazy”. And it all happened because they didn’t figure out what Winston’s conflict was at the start. He didn’t have a source of conflict with anyone, so the man became a living breathing embodiment of conflict in general.
Your Story Ends With the Conflict
Now, the catch is, in any type of fiction, whether a video game, a roleplaying session, or a sitcom, the story ends when the conflict does, because if the conflict is over there’s nothing more to tell! It used to frustrate me to no end back when “My Little Pony” was popular and the other nerds on the internet used to ask, “How many times must Fluttershy learn not to be shy, or that being shy is okay? When will she overcome all that she is and eliminate the core element that creates conflict for her?”
The answer should always be that the character will learn their damn lesson when the show ends or when they’re written off it. If you are sick of seeing a character and don’t want to see them any more, the best thing to do is close out their issues, because once they have no conflicts, they have no story, and there’s no point in doing a show about them. Asking Fluttershy to stop being shy is asking to say goodbye to her, because she's a cartoon and her job is to entertain kids by being neurotic and yellow.
People think they’re so smart when they say they’d solve all a character’s problems if it were them. In the finale to the first season of Poke’mon, for example, Ash decides to gamble his whole championship run on Charizard, who’s a self-absorbed bitch of a creature that ultimately throws the match and leaves it an open question whether Ash might have won if he’d left the team primadonna sitting on the bench.
Some viewers see that and complain it’s the dumbest possible thing Ash could have done, but it’s probably one of the single most brilliant things the Poke’mon writers did in the grand scheme, because think about where it left us. Ash didn’t achieve his goal of proving he’s “the best”, but it feels like a fluke and if he got another shot, he might make it all the way. This gave the show a gateway to more episodes with Ash still having something to prove and a dumb mistake indicating he still had a lot to learn. Because he didn’t win, his story hadn’t ended.
In some cases shows can end characters just by addressing some dream goal they’ve been expressing since the first season. In the case of Brock, they intentionally removed him from the show by introducing him to some girl who was willing to work with Brock in the animal husbandry business. He’d been traveling all this time, his dream opportunity fell into his lap, and he was gone. What reason would he have to refuse, and why would anyone stop him? And of course, Brock’s dream job was incompatible with the central plot elements of the rest of the show, so that was it!
The Format Informs the Conflict
If you want to write something but you aren’t sure when it’s going to end, you need a concrete, long-term conflict that’s not just going to go away. For example, in “Scooby Doo and the Thirteen Ghosts”, there were thirteen ghosts. By design, that show should have ended after Scooby Doo found all thirteen ghosts. It actually ended earlier than that because it was cancelled, but you get the idea. When you have a finite goal, your run time is going to be finite as well.
At least in theory. In “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” they establish at the beginning of one season that everyone’s magic powers were based on the Tarot. Now, I don’t know the Tarot off hand, but as the show went on I knew that sooner or later they’d run out of Tarot cards, and in my mind I assumed the season would be over when the Tarot ended. But then I got a good chuckle when a guy showed up and his powers were based on a totally different theme, because I knew the writer had realized he’d stumbled into something good and wasn’t ready to end it. He invented a cheap excuse to keep going! And I think if “Scooby Doo and the Thirteen Ghosts” had been successful they’d have managed to unleash a whole lot more than thirteen ghosts because Hannah Barbera was not exactly a studio with a lot of shame.
Character conflicts like those in sitcoms are a great way to have conflict perpetually, because people don’t really change that much and there’s no reason why most of the fundamental friction shouldn’t be there indefinitely. But of course, character-driven conflict is going to be secondary in an event-driven show. “Jojo” actually does have a lot of character conflict, but the plot is primarily about the battles and the journey - if all the fighting ended Jojo’s characters probably couldn’t carry a sitcom, at least not without some serious hard work, a little genius, and a touch of elbow grease.
For event-driven conflict, you’ll want to establish a target - a moving target if you don't know when the story ends, and that can be pretty difficult. Old action shows and comics used to do it by having a rotating cast of villains, so that after one was defeated another would show up tomorrow, and it was assumed these guys regularly broke out of prison, or they escaped in rocket pods, or whatever, and they’d be back later with a new goofy scheme. In these cases you tend to find reactive heroes; they patrol the streets until a lunatic in tights and a garden-themed hat shows up and transforms everyone into people-shaped topiaries somehow.
For active heroes, you need to establish something that requires a lot of structure, like Ash’s journey to win the Poke’mon League. In every country he visits, they all have this asinine rule that you have to go to eight unique locations and kick the ass of someone who disadvantages themselves with an easily-countered mono team that all have the same exact weakness. You can’t be accepted into the League if you haven’t proven you own a water Poke’mon to utterly flatten the fire gym! Let’s be real, this nonsense is probably designed intentionally as a money gate - most people run out of cash before they qualify. Either way, it ends when Ash wins the league, and he lost the league so the show could keep going.
For roleplaying games, the same rules apply. With your players, you’re either going to establish a reactive goal - an adventuring guild hires a bunch of colorful salarymen with silly accents to go to a dungeon as part of their nine to five job - or you need players to set an active goal for themselves and keep the realization of that goal beyond their reach until you’re ready to end the game.
The Active Hero Acts
In my younger years, I learned to roleplay in almost exclusively player-driven games where we were expected to come up with our own goals and pursue them ourselves, but I’ve discovered that is stunningly rare in most roleplaying circles. Your typical D&D player likes to play the salaryman with a funny accent who doesn’t have to worry about the venturous part of adventure. His boss told him to go to the Cave of Everlasting Wonders and Torturous Screams, recover the Sword of Bad Portent, and then hand it over to the department of magic items where they’ll file the paperwork to get it delivered to the patron that wanted the sword for some reason. No need to have your own motives.
But what if you want to play a crime fighter who actually, you know, busts up all the crime? Clearly you can’t just wait for crime to happen passively - you’ve got to go after people. Act instead of being reactive. Purse snatchers are small time and in a more grounded setting the guys you’ll catch by being passive are just grunts being hired out by someone - usually kids in a lot of cases. You have to seek out the bosses.
Making an active character to fit into any setting can be challenging, and I’ve seen quite a few pitfalls. I think one of the funniest motives is always “the guy who wants to go home” due to its obvious failure condition. A lot of stories are about everymen who just want to get out of trouble, but those stories end when they get out of trouble! In many books, movies, shows, or roleplaying games, you’re almost always going to find opportunities to send that guy home, and you’ll have to either conveniently ignore it, switch motives and decide not to go home, or end the whole story with going home. These characters only work where the story is happening to them and it's all out of their control.
I’ve also seen my share of the “quirky genius inventor/scientist”. When someone designs a character mistaking a dream for a motive. They dream of building a better mouse trap, you see. That’s their inner conflict. And while this is a real world conflict, it’s difficult to make it a good story because actual science and invention involves a lengthy quantity of controlled experiments. You breed hundreds of fruit flies, expose them to nicotine, and try to isolate the gene that causes nicotine resistance. It can be fascinating work at its level but sometimes the most exciting part of your day is when you give yourself a steam burn cooking the fly food. The “quirky scientist” in fiction is usually more of a mentor, and if he insists on staying in his lab doing his work then he’s not even a main character - he’s a guy who explains fruit flies to the audience and then is never heard from again. Other times he’s the asshole who invented the story’s whole problem.
I once played in a game with “the quirky scientist who wants to go home”, and man was that a frustrating ride. The game itself was about occult magic and demons, and for most of the game the scientist was experimenting with teleportation magic to go home and was focused on that above the goal of finding and eradicating demons (the game’s premise). And when he finally met a boss demon that could teleport him home to his lab, he went! We wound up retiring a character who, to be honest, was barely even interested in the main subject of the story. Had he been in a film or a show, they’d have cut the character after the first draft because he served no purpose and wasted screen time.
So how do you make sure your character has a working, proactive goal, in a nutshell? Establish a goal that can be achieved by the character within the framework of your story through action by leaving his house (or after burning his house down so he can’t go home), and then make sure the goal is big enough that it will take many broad steps to get there - those steps need to be concrete and visible, not things that would happen off-screen. Most importantly, tie that goal into the main premise of the story, so that reaching the end of the story generally may achieve what the character wants.
If You Aren’t Trying, It’s Not A Trial
Okay, I understand that last bit probably requires more unpacking. But think of it this way. There’s a writing structure referred to as the “Hero’s Journey”. Basically it goes like this: the hero is forced into adventure, he meets friends and goes through trials, he hits his lowest point, he is reborn into a better man, he ends the conflict, story over.
What I’m talking about specifically right now are the trials. The “wacky inventor” is usually presumed to do all his research off screen because most media likes to focus on the results of the invention and the conflict. But if you were to focus on the trials of a scientist, it’d actually be about procuring research grants and potentially materials. You wouldn’t watch a show about a man who checks gene A-235 for nicotine resistance in flies, then goes on to A-236, then A-237.
If I were to write a story about a researcher, here’s one thing I might do: the researcher fails to find what he’s looking for in gene A-235, and when he goes to seek a grant to look at A-236, he finds one of his colleagues has convinced the university that the protagonist’s research is a dead end. Hearing this, the researcher realizes he’s about to lose his lab, so he writes a bit of a lie into his report on A-235. He says it may prevent cancer.
Now, the protagonist is, deep down, a good man. He thinks this will generate some buzz at the university and get him more funding, but he’ll do a follow-up and show the data doesn’t hold up. After that he’ll ask for money for A-236 and everything goes back to normal. But disaster strikes. His article, which was only supposed to show up in an obscure research journal, gets picked up by a major news network and winds up being spread all over. Suddenly he’s “the man who cured cancer”.
And as he’s trying to figure out how to navigate the issue, another researcher comes out and says that under peer review, he was able to replicate the results. He too shows that A-235 cures cancer! Now the hero isn’t sure. He becomes a celebrity and simply lies about his research because he has no real data, but try desperately as he might, in private he just can’t get the results the peer review insisted were there.
He struggles and struggles, coming to blows with his colleague who’s scrutinizing his research notes. Throw in a love interest who’s impressed with what this guy did, and actually I think I’ve just described the plot of some movie I saw a long time ago about faking cold fusion. I think Albert Einstein was a supporting character in it. In my version the twist would be the peer reviewer was also trying to get a grant by lying. Point is, the central conflict of the film certainly isn’t the scientific process, it’s all the crazy crap that happened on the way from point A to point B.
The story is in the trials. If nothing changes, if the character doesn’t have to change their way of life or go through anything special, it’s either not a story or it’s not your typical story. There are plenty of experimental films or well-regarded books that can make a certain banality become interesting. Stories that explain the simple struggles of day to day living for people on hard times. But the trials, the palpable challenges, that’s really the meat of it all. When you think of what your character should be doing throughout the story, he should be going through these efforts, these steps, these trials, all in the name of whatever his broader goal is.
Where You Start Affects Where You End
It also matters quite a lot when and where characters are introduced. A lot of tales follow some basic notes, and one of the more common elements is “crossing the threshold”, which prevents your characters from going back to their life before the adventure. It’s used because it compels the characters forward, as they have no other direction they can go. It can be anything: the character’s home town is destroyed, the character commits a crime, he accepts a contract, his mother dies - so long as it prevents him from going back. It’s especially useful in roleplaying games where you really need everyone to be driving forward.
In one such roleplaying game, I got in a spat with the guy who wanted to run the game because I was trying to make a leader character, but the game master wanted to base his game around a movie he’d seen with a single main character. He’d elected another player to be that main character, and explained to me he’d be starting the game after that character had already crossed the threshold and had begun his journey. This meant that everyone else were supporting cast and could go back to their normal lives at any time, because they were coming willingly from where they were and not really facing any drastic changes to their personal status quo.
I eventually resolved not to play in that game at all, because none of the character dynamics I wanted were going to work. It was supposed to be a “wannabe” superhero game, with the premise that everyone wanted to be heroes, except one player had already started the journey and it turned out another had already reached the end of that arc and was going to play a character that had been a hero going on years before the story began. There was no plan to really reconcile the narrative clashes.
If that game were to work as it was, without me being present, then the person playing the pre-established hero would have needed to take the mentor role. The other players besides the main character would have needed to be comfortable in auxiliary roles, and the group would have to play as though they were part-way into the story. Still learning to be a team but well past the initial stages of a plot, and they’d all need to think up reasons to be in this group individually on their own, because the threshold had already been crossed and they didn’t cross it together.
The friend running the game was actually dismissive of my advice here, arguing that I was overcomplicating everything with a meta analysis of narrative and structure when all we need is a basic drive to play, and I don’t think he realized he’d set himself up with a much more complicated game and less cohesive premise by going about things as he had.
The already established hero couldn’t be the mentor because a mentor character had already been created as an NPC. The auxiliary players weren’t really informed at the outset they’d be auxiliaries - especially not me who’d wanted to play the team leader. The player who’d been designated as the central protagonist didn’t want to lead or be the central protagonist. It could have worked, but it would have taken a lot more planning and many more concessions than a typical game.
In a more recent game, I’ve got another bit of an issue with the start misleading the general goals of the players. It’s a sci-fi game, and first, one player is doing “the quirky inventor scientist”; his current stated dream is vaguely to create transhumanist technology. He also wants to play the leader, so he established himself as the most important man nobody has ever heard of. He has spies in every major institution in the known galaxy and is a genius beyond comparison. He’s currently based in a rusting pirate ship in the middle of the space boonies doing nothing with his life save being the most important man.
Meanwhile, I set up a disgraced military officer with a revenge quest against his own nation. But the pirate crew my character joined turned out to not believe in structure nor leadership and they killed their last commander to have a system of “democracy”. My structure-minded character has tried to take the lead and drive us forward, but he runs into general deconstructive resistance and the “quirky scientist” wants to be the leader, but hasn’t yet expressed self-motivated goals.
It’s not exactly my most harmonious game and there’s quite a lot going wrong here, but here’s how it could have worked: first, establishing that the crew of the pirates respects no leadership places the entire crew in the precarious position of being “chickenshit” at the outset. That kind of incohesiveness is why a band of rogues gets easily defeated; it’s not the behavior of scrappy men of action, but hopeless men of inaction. A corrupted “democracy” collectivises failure while awarding success to whoever actually has the most power in the group structure - it protects the weak leaders from responsibility and disincentivizes good work by allowing those same men to reap rewards while offloading the burdens to those lower on the ladder. In essence, “If things are screwed up, blame the democracy. If things are good, I did it.”
What should have happened was the “quirky scientist” should have been in charge to start with, because otherwise he has no reason to be on board the ship. He’s the most powerful man in the galaxy, after all. If it were because he was financing the pirates to go on raiding and salvage missions relevant to his research, then it would make sense. He’d have a purpose and a position of leadership just as the player wanted. It would also establish the pirates have some command structure and a level of respect for it that allows them to function.
And the power struggle between the disgraced officer and the scientist? Perfectly reasonable character conflict that would drive actual, meaningful roleplaying and story. The scientist may bankroll the operation but the officer is the tactical talent and the two pull in opposite directions, as power-hungry men often do.
However, the opportunity to start with a sensible and meaningful social dynamic has passed, and on top of that the “quirky scientist” keeps his galaxy-wide power a secret, so it’s all kind of messy and “badly written” in the sense that most audiences would be generally rooting for the crew to fail, and they’d find the grand reveal of the scientist’s galactic power to be frustrating and unrewarding because it’s more of a plot hole than anything. So close on so many counts and yet so very far, and the opportunity to pull it together eventually is present but a more challenging and uphill battle than getting it right at the outset.
In The End, Did We Even Learn Anything?
Creating a character is easy, in my opinion. Creating a working story with a group of self-driven characters can be a lot harder. This is especially true of roleplaying games or of cooperation with multiple writers, where you need to be on the same general page with a committee. It can help a lot to establish the exact conflicts at the beginning, but as can be seen with Winston from “New Girl” or the later seasons of “My Little Pony”, what you have can morph beyond your control as things go on.
Sometimes you never had control in the first place. Sometimes you lose control because you conclude the original conflict of your story and struggle to find a new one - the brand is too successful to let go. Maybe an executive comes in and injects an idea that throws the entire balance of everything totally out of whack and now nothing works. Sometimes your friend thinks story structure is overrated. It’s a difficult juggling act.
So at the end of this essay did we even learn anything? It depends a lot on what you’re trying to do and what you wanted to learn. If you’re the more typical Dungeons and Dragons group, you don’t need to think much about this. Just make your characters and passively react to activities handed out by Dungeons, Dungeons & Co - your conflict is event-driven. Are you writing a sitcom? Well, balance a tangled web of conflicting character habits and write the ensuing disaster. Want to make a complex film about a group of highly motivated, proactive people with sophisticated individual goals that ultimately converge while still respecting their rich, conflicting, inner politics, and do all that writing as part of a team? Well, good goddamn luck, but with the right start and enough care you can make it happen.
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