#he got them gaseous feet

[onejellyfishplease]

And next we have Blaze Mikey!!!

he will commit violence against you

Donnie, Raph, Leo

#he got them gaseous feet #he very warm to the touch #you can fry an egg on his arm #on his FACE #on his bald head #rottmnt #rottmnt mikey #minecraft

[snorky]

You?

Hey y’all! I apologize for taking forever with this story, I’ve been extremely busy recently. This fic is a lot more “iffy” than some of my works, so I’ll be sure to write something much fluffier next time, I promise. Auston Matthews in this story is basically a personification of someone I know in real life, unfortunately, but I’m pretty sure the real Auston wouldn’t be such an a-hole. The title is based off of the song “You” by Two Feet. I hope you all enjoy this fic, and please remember to take care of yourself!

Pairing: Auston Matthews x F!Reader

Word Count: 1.5k

Warnings: Angst, Friends-with-Benefits situation, A-hole!Auston Matthews, Toxic Relationship

—

—

The rain poured down in Toronto. It always does at this time of year. But on this night especially, the rain just didn’t seem to stop. City lights hung outside, twinkling and glimmering, emphasized by the raindrops that rolled down her living room window.

They hung like the stars that weren’t present in the Toronto night because of light pollution. It replaced the gaseous stars with man-made ones. It was so breath-taking and yet, a horrifying thought to think about.

White noise flowed from the TV, a jumble of mindless words and sounds of whatever was going on in the world at the moment. A reflection of what it seemed to be like in her head. The bright screen illuminated her face, intensifying her tired, worn-out expression.

Sitting on the living room floor against her couch, her mind ran endlessly, wondering so much about how she got here. Here in Toronto, so far away from home. 

‘It was only meant to be for school,’ she told herself. 

Ambitious and unstoppable, she wanted to pursue something so big. So big in fact, that her parents didn’t want her to, but she didn’t listen to them. Never did. 

“You’re a small girl with big dreams, huh?”

His words rang in her ears. A siren’s song that lured her in when she first met him at some cafe on a Saturday morning, their orders getting mixed up. They chatted for a bit, falling into a natural conversation about life in Toronto and how it felt far away from home for the both of them.

“Yeah,” he chuckled, “I grew up in Arizona, so ending up in Toronto was something new.”

She smiled, “Really? That’s neat,”

He hummed, looking up from his coffee and making eye contact with her, “I should take you there sometime.” He winked.

A laugh bubbled up from her throat, pulling a smile from him. She thought about it, visiting Arizona with a charming, handsome man seemed like a fun vacation. Plus, she hadn’t traveled much recently.

“Your laugh is sweet, you know?” His voice was weaved with a genuine tone. “I want to hear it more often, darling.”

Warm red crept up onto her face, blushing at his words. “Auston,” she let out a soft and yet warning tone. She didn’t want to fall for him. Her life was already busy enough with studying and working a job at a flower store downtown. Letting Auston in her life, her world, was a risky decision.

“Sweetheart,” he mirrored her tone, noticing her rigidness. “I mean it, I want to know you more.”

Silence fell between them, the whirring of the coffee machine and the chatter of other customers being the only noise in the air. Her gaze was directed towards her room-temp cup of coffee that she forgot to drink while talking with Auston, and he noticed it.

“We can take it slow, I’ll take you out and we can get to know each other more.” He smiled.

She smiled back and nodded, and they exchanged numbers and kept in contact over the months. More sweet coffee dates, more of him spoiling her with gifts, more of her energy being put into him, and more of their time spent together.

As they spent more time together, she started to fall for him, his cliche charming smile, his fast-paced life as an athlete, glamorous or not, and every detail about him. She grew closer and closer to him, but she kept her guard up.

There was no choice. Something inside of her kept nagging her to do so. She didn’t understand why she felt the need to, but she did, just in case. He knew some bits about her, and he noticed how she seemed quiet, but he never thought more of it. Maybe that’s where he went wrong, the fact that he didn’t think more than once or twice about something. Maybe she should’ve kept her guard up.

She was tired of Auston’s behavior. It was draining her, badly. Enough so, that her friends told her to block him, ignore him, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Auston meant so much to her, or at least she felt like he did. It didn’t matter if he cared about her or not. 

It didn’t matter that she had only known him for the past six months. There was something about him that drew her towards him. A moth towards a burning flame.

Radio silence was an ordinary thing to hear from Auston, however. She wouldn’t hear back from him for days and weeks, and then suddenly, just like that, he was back in her life. A flash of his message on her screen and she was a tangled mess for him. 

She had her own life and she was aware, and yet her mind kept lingering towards Auston when it could, but Auston was just, beyond tempting. 

The way his confidence never seemed to falter. The way his voice flowed smoothly as he spoke. The way he never failed to constantly wear his chain, no matter what. The way his mustache seemed to compliment his boldness. The way his warm, dark eyes lingered on her when she was wearing that one dress that seemed to captivate him.

“You look stunning, sugar.” He sighed as he leaned in to catch her lips with his, rough fingers grazing gently against her chin.

She kissed back, the slight taste of him on her lips, “You look even more handsome, Aus.”

The night sparkled behind them, a cool Toronto breeze brushing past. They stood outside a fancy restaurant downtown, slow jazz music flowing out of the doors. His navy blue suit seemed to fit him in all the right places, emphasizing his arms and broad frame.

He caught her eyes gazing at him and the sides of his lips curled upwards, “Like what you see, darling?”

A loud boom of thunder rumbled outside, snapping her back to reality. The TV was still on, her body sat on the living room carpet against the couch, and the sound of the dishwasher was running in the kitchen.

She sighed, thinking about everything she knew at the moment. Her mind was a raging storm, and she stood amidst all of it. 

Auston was simultaneously both the most heavenly and haunting soul she had ever met. As much as she wanted to ignore his faults and wrongs, she so badly wanted to admire all the good things he had brought into her world.

Her world. It sounded so strange when considering the fact that she had her own life before meeting Auston. But now, he was all she ever wanted. His touch, his gaze, his attention, all of it.

And yet, she felt sick to her stomach thinking about him. Every text he sent made her nauseous. He was a sour taste on her tongue and she savored every bit of it. She spent all of her days and nights trying to spend time with him. So much, that she created her own radio silence with her friends.

“Girl, where have you been?” one of her friends questioned. “You’ve been so quiet recently,”

The sun shined down on the group outside, sitting under the large umbrella centered at the table of the restaurant served brunch. At this time of day, it was either old ladies gossiping religiously on a Sunday noon or families on vacation looking for breakfast.

“I’ve been busy, sorry.” She was busy, but maybe with all the wrong things.

Another one of her friends looked at her quizzically, “You’ve been talking to Auston, haven’t you?” She looked at her, taking a bite of her scrambled eggs. “You look tired, I can tell,” she said quietly.

Taking a sip of her mimosa, she thought about it. Maybe she had been spending too much time with Auston. Maybe it was wearing her down much more than she thought. Maybe she forgot to take care of herself.

“We’re here if you need anything, we mean it,” her friend spoke genuinely.

It made her heart ache to think that her friends had to worry about her like this. Nonetheless, she nodded with a gentle smile as a response, and continued to enjoy her brunch with her friends, indulging in the sweet french toast she had on her plate.

Her friends still worried about her often, texting her and calling to check in with her every now and then. She appreciated the gesture, but she assured them that she was doing okay, but was she really?

Was she really okay if it made her heart ache to think about Auston with someone else? Was she really okay if her stomach churned at the mere thought of him leaving her?

A message popped up on her phone that sat on the round coffee table in her living room. Her heart started beating quicker, wondering who it was that would text her at this hour.

You up? - Auston

#nhl #hockey #nhl hockey #nhl writing #nhl fic #hockey fic #hockey imagine #toronto maple leafs #auston matthews angst #auston matthews x reader #auston matthews #auston matthews fic

[12pt-times-new-roman]

MOON TIME

Most of where they've landed is completely obscured by dust storms, and there's a makeshift encampment built around where the bridge lands. There's plantlife, too -- mostly scrub brush and ivy -- but as they land they're immediately in initiative as they try to hide from anyone who might be in this encampment or coming across the bridge behind them.

There are MOON WOLVES???

There's a bell in the encampment and they ring it to summon moon wolves.

With a darkness spell for cover, FCG uses the staff they got to make a passwall through a cliff.

god the fact that Laudna is the only one who can see through the darkness spell and is actively giving directions to a blind Ashton to get them to the exit, just like Morri's trial--

The gravity on Ruidus is about the same as on Exandria -- it differs slightly, but not enough to impact their movement or anything.

Also, it's a great little detail that there are also reilorans on this side of the bridge that are scared shitless of this conflict just like some of the Vanguard members were on the Exandria side.

Nope, they're not moon wolves, they're moon lizard-panthers with a jaw like that one fucked up drawing of Yoshi, and the reilorans are riding them.

Once again, FCG's abysmal spell save DC is a genuine problem. Like, I get that Sam's bit is that he doesn't know how to build a cleric, but having a spell save of 15 at level 11 is...... riding a line, for sure.

FCG update: "It's not luck, it's faith, so it's okay." Their Changebringer coin gives them a luck point (presumably once per day). They reroll a nat1 stealth check to save the fucking day as the Bells Hells flee into the encampment and hide amongst the Ruby Vanguard members. Interestingly, Sam is playing it like FCG didn't actively use the coin, rather that FCG believes it just spontaneously happened at the will of the Changebringer, which is actually really fucking cool.

Distractions save the day, and they successfully cast gaseous form to escape. As they do, they get some info about Ruidus' atmosphere: though there aren't active storms at the moment, there is a constant wind.

MID-SESSION LEVEL-UP! I'll have a separate post for this :)

With a nat20, Chetney is able to guide them as they traverse across the surface of Ruidus as gaseous clouds. He uses Exandria to determine the direction they're traveling, which means that Ruidus is not only tidally locked to Exandria, but that it is also orbiting at the same speed Exandria is rotating -- it's literally tethered by a rigid line.

They're trying to make for the city that they saw in Ira's scatterscope, but it's a long way off, and they need to rest.

Rather than being the occasional storm or hurricane on a clear surface, Ruidus' atmosphere looks more like an occasional clearing, an occasional eye of the storm, in a sea of hurricanes and dust. (a Hamilton reference? in MY 2024??)

As they fly, they see 13 beasts gliding through the storm: they're buffalo-like, with six legs and high haunches, bolting across the surface of Ruidus and leaving cracked earth in their wake. They have furry hides that curl around over a dozen horns that wreath their face, running at a full sprint toward a dust storm. (Travis provides us with some top-tier Texan insight: buffalo and bison will charge toward a dust storm to get through it faster.) The creatures are bovine, vegetarians (square, flat teeth), and prey animals. There are a handful of younger ones, but full-grown, they're about 10 feet long.

They leave the buffalo alone, though, and find shelter in a nearby mountain range to take a short rest. They find that it's cold here; the storm cause the temperature to drop.

In the cave they're resting in, they find the remnants of an old camp. Chetney uses grim psychometry on it, and finds that it was used by a traveler sheltering from a storm; the traveler's mount bolts, and is swallowed by something in the wastes. They still, hold their breath, but the ground beneath them quates -- they try to find somewhere to escape, upward, to the surface, but there is no escape, and the shadows take the traveler, too.

There's definitely no connection whatsoever between the thing in the crust of Ruidus and the fissures that open throughout the Hellcatch Valley. Nope, none at all

As Imogen rests, she notices that there's an ever-present reddish energy that sits around her and the entire landscape. It's like she can see the magnetic field of a planet, but it's centered on her and Fearne -- centered on the Ruidis-born. It's like that energy never went away, was never expended -- there's an ethereal tether between Imogen and Fearne.

Also, this might be nothing, but Matt refers to Ruidus as a "planet" multiple times here.

It's like all the Ruidis-born are part of a living network -- and Fearne and Imogen both gain an additional character feat: they can "share magic." Imogen can expend her sorcery points to give Fearne spell slots, and Fearne can expend spell slots to give Imogen sorcery points.

This basically confirms that everyone else in the Bells Hells is not Ruidus-born; but it does raise questions about whether Fearne and Imogen can sap spell slots/sorcery points from people like Otohan or Liliana, and vice versa.

Chetney will keep his eyes peeled for "anything Seelie in nature." Again, this definitely has no implications regarding his shadow-touched feat whatsoever.

As they rest, Imogen reaches out to Predathos. It doesn't take long for the feeling to take her, the feeling of dropping out of her own consciousness -- "you feel that overwhelming presence, that vibrates like the most ancient snore. You feel that connection, that welcoming earnest draw, like you've never belonged to anything more in your life, and you feel that tug down. Down. Down. And then you feel it shift as it notices you. You hear in your mind, in your soul, in every atom of your body, you feel it -- welcome home. Join us. Wake us. They're not even words, they're just emotions that your brain can try to comprehend -- the way that it swallows you, shapes you, the steel will you tried to build just breaks you, and you let it all in. When you do, you are pulled deeper into the darkness, and you can see hundreds of little red lights here -- so many of them. One that looks like Fearne, one that looks like your mother -- and they're all moving down. And you feel all of you -- connected and networked, and they're all looking toward you. You hear them once more. Wake us. Do you resist? [Yes.] The series of red threads, bridges between all of these Ruidus-born -- they gather, and are still gathering, for what purpose you don't understand but now you do -- to wake them, wake it -- they get stronger, and you pull back, and in the memory of being a child being lost in these dreams, you scream, and the darkness shatters." Imogen's eyes, her spiderweb scars, glow red like an ember, and Laudna cradles her.

Whatever is sleeping inside Ruidus, it isn't awake yet. There is still time. But Imogen doesn't know if she can fight it again -- and she denies that she herself is the "Chosen One." It's everyone, every single Ruidus-born -- including her, including her mother, including Fearne.

Orym thinks that Imogen is their way in, their way through. He is pressuring Imogen, not to give in to it, but to feign complacency. But Chetney has a different idea, and Laudna agrees: that Imogen might be the key, not to Predathos' salvation but to its undoing.

This entire conversation has the air of someone trying to figure out the end-game while they're 1/3rds through the book.

They remember the Emperium, which very much sounds like a faction of Reilorans who want to preserve Ruidus as it is without the influence of either Predathos or Exandria.

During that vision, Imogen saw that there were maybe two dozen exaltants, the "true, final evolution of what the Ruidus-born was intended to eventually be" -- and dozens of others, like Fearne, who supported that network.

Otohan and Liliana are both exaltant, but we know for a fact that Ludinus Da'leth is not Ruidus-born. We got hat ages ago, when we learned that he was jealous of Ruidus-born -- unless that jealousy was feigned, in which case we need to completely reevaluate Ludinus' intelligence.

To be 100% honest, I'm still pretty sure that Ludinus is a warlock with maxed charisma, not a wizard with maxed intelligence.

Orym recognizes that with Imogen, the things that makes her the Bells Hells greatest risk is also what makes her their greatest asset. They decide to stay on Ruidus to gain more information -- and they learn that the Emperium is the faction of the Reilorans who are aligned with the Ruby Vanguard, so there's another faction of Reilorans who are not a part of that faction, who would be on the Bells Hell's side.

Another storm approaches, so Laudna stuffs Pate into the bag of holding and they all set off toward the city they saw before.

But for the record, they do take the Reiloran juggernaut they took (turned into a possum, put into the bag of holding, and then released and killed) and tear it into pieces.

Ashton, in a very Caduceus moment, also takes the seed from the All Mind's Burn and considers placing it here. Imogen and Ashton concede that they should take the seed and plant it closer to the core of Ruidus; they put it away, and loot the Reiloran instead.

Now that the reiloran is gone -- though FCG specifies that they keep the "limbs and head" -- Pate goes in the bag of holding. They all revert to gaseous forms, and they continue for hours until night begins to set. They find another mountain range in which to rest, but they notice that all the mountain ranges here seem to resemble the spines of ancient creatures. They see herds of beasts, then the flickering lights of a village -- a ranch, with abodes and ranches built into the side of this mountain. It's a unique parallel to Imogen's upbringing, to see similar arrangements of livestock and tenders below them on the fucking moon.

They fly closer, and gather that this is a tiny town -- no more than a thousand people. Everything here is simple -- smoothed rock or dried hutch, a popcorn vibe between the houses and livestock pens. Around 20% of the population is reilorian; the majority of the rest are a shorter, squatter folk, swathed in heavy robes, that the Bells Hells have never seen before, almost like statues moving though air.

There is no Vanguard armor here, but more Emperium -- and they're the minority. They're acting like a religious militant presence, similarly to what Team Issylra encountered in Othanzia.

Still, they come to a town, and attempt to fit in. It's almost like whoever's looking at it substitutes their own familiar with what they're seeing as unfamiliar.

As they decide to search for an inn, it gets darker; the interior of the abodes they're near take on a bluish tint. There is no air of violence here, but people are on watch; from what Chetney can see, there are no open mines or quarries here, but there are clusters of villages without farmland --the only cultivated plantlife he can see is this reddish flora, from which the bison eat, grows.

It's a storage room, just shelves of supplies, training weapons, harnesses. but they all reconvene in the shed as a reiloran sheds light on the chamber where all of them are -- "no, no, wait--" Imogen's persuasion check succeeds. "Oh! Woah. Who are you?" They speak in common, and that's where we end.

#critical role #note watches c3 #critical role spoilers #critical role campaign 3 #critical role c3 #critical role liveblog

[gremlin-bear-boi]

𝐄𝐱𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐬

_______________________________________________________

|→ɢᴜᴀʀᴅɪᴀɴ

the start of the school year begins, new students arrive and freshmans turn into sophomores. the principal of U.A. decides to hire a new staff member to guard the students of the prestigious U.A. High. what happens if it's shota aizawa's old rival?

______________________________________________

masterlist

[this is for male readers and gender neutral readers only. pronouns are (he/they). female readers or female aligned dni]

{gif not mine}

_______________________________________________________

_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_

Quirk: Gas Manipulation

this quirk allows the user to manipulate different types of gases. all of which includes steam, clouds, smoke or air. the only gas elements the user can't control is pure oxygen and nitrogen. trying to manipulate pure gaseous elements can take a lot of the user energy. in exchange for the energy used, the user must maintain a good healthy diet and a well built stature. the user can also create things out of the elemental compounds. eq. attachable and working wings (the elements must be very dense for it to work), puffs of small smoke for transporting small things, etc.

_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_

_______________________________________________________

light shone down on the shiny gates of U.A. High, sat upon it was (Y/n) (L/n). Glowy wings flapped around, loose feathers graciously falling. Swinging his feet childishly, staring down at the examinees determined to pass the awfully unfair trial.

Let's look back to how he got here.

___________________

"Has he confirmed his answer to the offer yet?" A gruff looking man asked. "Not yet, but I am very sure they will accept it," a rat-bear looking creature answered. "After all," he took a sip of his tea before continuing. "He gravely needs this friend of his."

"Are you even sure he's safe? I mean, he has a criminal record of a villain." The principal just shrugged. "I am sure of it, besides you two are familiar to each other." Before the man can ask a knock was heard.

A man entered the room, his long beaten scarf trailing behind him.

"Ah, greetings, (L/n)." The creature greeted.

'(Y/n)? He sounds like someone I know...' The gruff looking man thought.

"When do I start," The man said flatly, his scarf covering his mouth muffling his words lightly. "Classic (L/n), always cutting to the chase..." Nezu chuckled. "Just answer me, you mouse." The latter said, gritting his teeth while glancing at his watch. "Your work starts in a few hours," Nezu poured some tea into a cup, "And for safety reasons," The rat-bear creature gently pushed the cup towards him. "Aizawa will be watching you."

'Aizawa... That name sounds familiar...'

"Who is he?" He asked, unconsciously placing his hand on his scarf. "Oh, Aizawa? He's standing right next to me!" Nezu beamed, irking the well-built man. Yet he looked beside the mouse to find a gruff and homeless looking man.

'Ah, now I know why his name sounds familiar...'

He scanned the man like a piece of fresh meat, eyeing him up and down.

"Huh," the man huffed, before bringing his prosthetic metal arm out, considering that his other hand is bandaged. The man showed a displeased expression. "Nice to meet you again, Rookie."

'He's the guy that shot him down...'

___________________

After a quiet discussion between the two pro heroes, they both faced the vigilante. "I do hope you still remember our rules here at U.A., (Y/n)." The principal said. "You must follow our rules and policies," the creature got down from his chair, "Or else you will have to face the consequences."

"Mhm, I still remember them." The man nodded, still displeased with the fact that he is working with his naturally sworn enemy. "But I'd also like to set my own boundaries," he said, crossing his muscular arms, glaring at the underground pro hero.

"One," he listed off. "Do not talk to me." He stated coldly. "Two, " he narrowed his eyes. "Fuck off my space." (Y/n) walked over to the pro hero until he was a few feet closer to him. "And lastly," he moved his head closer until their faces was inches apart. "Never command me to do something. Especially when it's from you," he jabbed the black-haired man's chest with his finger.

"Those are my rules," he backed off, walking back to his original spot, unaware of the growing rage brewing inside the pro hero.

"And if you cross them, I will back off the deal." He finished, leaving the principal's office. He closed the door with a loud slam.

It was silent for a few moments before the sound of someone sipping echoed through the room. "That was amusing to watch," Nezu grinned, continuing one sipping his tea.

Aizawa groaned before leaving the room too, slamming the door shut.

___________________

(Y/n) watched as the carefree students pile in the school. His resentment towards his sworn enemy, now coworker, grew tenfold. He gripped the bridge of the gate, glaring at the sky.

'Why is life like this,' he mentally sighed.

He can hear the whispers and talking around him, he can hear them gossiping, whispering and asking about who he is. His appearance would spread like a wild fire around the whole school, all students being curious of him whenever he walks through the halls. He can just hear the questions, 'Who is he?', 'Why is he here?', 'He looks so tired, does he even get sleep?' and it would go on and on and on.

As he was about to go overthink again, he heard a shout.

"Hey! You on top of the gates!" A student shouted.

'Huh?' (Y/n) is confused. It's the start of the mock and physical exams. Why is this student still here trying to talk to him?

(Y/n) stared at him, hoping that his cold glare would steer him away and proceed his walk to the exams. "HEY! CAN YOU HEAR ME?! I KNOW YOU CAN!!!" The boy shouted louder, almost making the crows fly away.

Not wanting for him to shout any longer, he jumped down from the tall gates of U.A. High. He created a puff of dense cloud in a shape of an oval shaped disc, and started slowly moving towards him.

"Why are you still here when the exams are starting?" (Y/n) tilted his head, crossing his arms. "Because I wanted to know who you are!" The student beamed. "And because I don't think I've seen a pro hero like you before," the boy whispered, rubbing his neck embarrassingly. Yet the vigilante heard him.

The vigilante took a good look at the student. His hair is messy, like he just fought a bear. He's not that tall, just an average height, which makes (Y/n) taller than him. He has pointy ears and a pair of glasses rests on top of his head, brushing the messy hair off his forehead. His eyes were unusual, having black scleras with blue irises.

"Well," The student tilted his head like a curious kitten, his bright blue eyes peering up at him. The vigilante sighed, "I'm Altostratus. Now tell me, why are you still here waiting?" He said. 'Why he did he just say his alias and not his real name?' You may ask. The answer is simple really, he's a criminal in government's eyes.

"Wow! That's a cool hero name! Are you by some chance an underground hero?" The teen asked, ignoring his question. "Yes." The man flatly stated. "Why are you-" "Wow! That's a cool looking scarf you have there!" "Kid, why the fu-" "Oh my god! You have a prosthetic arm-" The boy went on and on ranting about how cool his prosthetic arm is, annoying the (h/c)-haired man. Abruptly, he picked up the student.

"Wha- Hey! C'mon, you can't seriously just bring me in there! I didn't even apply for U.A. High!" The boy reasoned. "I know your files, Axo Langro. You're parents are Dante Langro and Aleina Langro. Both being side kicks working for the pro hero, Endeavor. You are a student at Soumei Junior High School. You were sent a recommendation letter and accepted it." The man placed him on a puff of smoke creating a thick ice chain. "How-" The boy didn't een get to finish before he was shoved in the recommendation examinees waiting room.

"Good luck, kid!" (Y/n) called out, slamming the door shut.

#gremlin-bear-boi fanfictions #bnha #mha #gn!reader #male reader #aizawa x gn!reader #aizawa x male reader #gn!reader x bnha #gn!reader x mha #gn!reader x shota aizawa #bnha x gn!reader #bnha fanfictions #bnha x male reader #my hero acedamia #boku no hero acedamia

[flowers-of-io]

Destcember #10: Witness Me

TW: blood and gore // Read on Ao3

Savathûn laughed. She laughed so brightly and truly, her voice thundering like the sound of an avalanche approaching, rippling across space like magma rushing out of a volcano. Outside, the world was ending. The Deep had arrived to state its claim--oh, what a boring development, what a dull and wholly expected turn of events, and what a sorry display of ineptitude the Final God of Pain was making of himself, spluttering and wheezing at her feet. She kicked him in the face for good measure. He grasped weakly at her ankle, gargling out curses through a ruined throat, and tried dragging himself after her when she turned to leave, but the lack of two limbs and several vital organs prevented him from getting very far.

A small, exhilarated, and no doubt owed to growing up alongside Xivu part of her almost regretted the lack of an additional challenge. All of this had been so laughably easy so far, she'd truly expected more of them--Nezarec in particular, I mean really, any measure of deeply-buried respect she'd still had for the man vanished along with the majority of the blood in his system. She shook her head dramatically. And now she was free to go and fetch her prize like a fox in a chicken pen, entirely unhindered? Such a disappointment.

The prize was very badly hidden, at that. Savathûn tutted to herself. Ah, these Human habits, she hadn't quite shaken them yet, but some of them she even liked. They were such a curious species, Humanity, with their soft faces malleable like wet clay and the skin over their teeth so pliant and expressive; they got by well enough for how dull and static their eyes were, she had to admit. Overall she'd enjoyed her little sally to this backwater system. It had been a nice change of pace, the lull before a dramatic climax.

The Veil just sat there, out in plain sight at the back of the pyramid. She could've picked it up and walked with it out the front door, and a part of her--the exhilarated one--was tempted to do so, if only to see the expression it would've contorted the Witness' sullen face in. But this would've been foolish, and she had caused enough of a scene here already. She'd made sure Nezarec wouldn't be much use to anyone in the nearest century or two, but she was under no delusion that he'd been done for for good. She needed to do this quickly and cleanly. The rift between dimensions roared open for barely a second, and when it closed, the Veil was already sinking into the gaseous depths of the furthest suitable hideout in this system.

Savathûn descended along with it. It dropped a long way down, long enough for this to feel a little too familiar for her liking, and finally settled at one of the layers, hovering among dark-azure mists. The parasite curled in her gut in contentment. This scheme would feed it sumptuously, and that thought both relieved and irked her--but at least she would have some respite from its constant whining, and in all honesty she was already looking forward to it.

She did not linger for longer than a fleeting glance. If all came together according to the plan, the Veil would stay hidden well enough to buy her the time she needed, and once it was inevitably discovered... well. That was when the true fun would begin.

She knew the Witness currently had its eyes on a wholly different prize, and the fact it had no reason to be paying her any attention at this particular moment was undoubtedly a good thing -- but as she rose through the blue mists and the frantic scream of the Sky grew louder in her ears, the small part of her wanted so badly to make it see her.

#i blacked out and wrote this in the span of like an hour and it is also the middle of the night on a workday so. yeah #hope this is good i guess...? #destcember #destcember2023 #my fics #aunt savathûn #anime eyes #destiny 2 #the darkness #nezarec

[gatzilksis-2]

Today's Holiday: The Intern Pt. 2

July 28: National Interns Day Night

Donnie's (un)lucky day

18+

Donnie sat on the end of the motel bed closer to the door. It smelled like cheap cleaner, cigarette smoke, and dust. The walls were paneled and the floors were covered in old shag carpeting.

A disgusting motel for a disgusting event.

His boss, Michael, stood in front of the mounted mirror. The big man started undoing his belt. When his slacks were unzipped, he began unbuttoning his shirt one at a time. "You look scared."

Of course the intern was scared. Donnie was afraid of how far his boss would push him. He was already starting to regret this. "Do I have to take my clothes off?"

"Are you farting in my face?" Michael asked with a hefty chuckle. He pushed off his shirt and pulled off the undershirt. Donnie couldn't remember seeing a man more buff or more hairy.

Donnie dried his palms on his pantlegs. He slowly lay back on the bed. Michael's belt buckle hit the floor. "Good boy! Seems like you're getting the hang of this. You sure you haven't done this before?"

Donnie was trying not to have a heart attack as Michael flopped onto the bed beside him. "I'm sure. I would never do something like this."

"Yet, here we are. Look!"

Donnie didn't want to. He could already see Michael's big ass in tighty whiteys inches to his right. He closed his eyes and envisioned his personal office, pictured being on some tropical vacation without worrying about missing work.

He turned his head.

"Eyes open, intern!" Michael commanded teasingly.

Donnie opened his eyes, and Michael puffed out his ass. VWRRRRP! BWRRRRRT!

Michael grabbed the back of his head and pushed him in. Donnie already wanted to throw up: the smell had been vicious from the first second. His face was in another man's ass, a place he'd never, ever thought it would be. Donnie groaned.

"Oh, is it bad?" Michael laughed, keeping Donnie's head in place. "Wow, that was only one. This is gonna be a good time."

BLRT-BWRRRRRRR! BWOWRRRRRRR!

Donnie's face shook from the loudness of it. It was warm and brought so much more of the stink with it. Donnie tried not to breathe through his nose, but he could taste it through his mouth. He fought against Michael's strong grip.

"Yeah, that's it," Michael said in a moaning fashion. "Fight it, but I'm stronger than you, little man!"

PRRRMP! VWAAAHT!

Michael's wind felt heavier than normal air. Donnie winced against it, and Michael rubbed his ass on Donnie's face in circles. Finally, the hand left his head.

Donnie rolled over onto his back, urgently gasping for cleaner air. "Fuck! I...I can't..."

"Too late! You already said yes, and we already started." Michael stood and flexed, the veins on his arms bulging. Donnie wanted to punch him in the face, but that wasn't a fight he would ever win.

Michael flopped back down, resting his head on his pillow and his ass in the air. He stretched his legs in Donnie's direction, spreading them far apart. "Lay down and plant that lil' face right there."

Donnie sat up to avoid Michael's right foot. He gave the ass a long stare. Michael looked down over a furry shoulder. "Plant your face or you stay an intern and your desk gets moved to my office."

Donnie's mouth fell open, and he fearfully closed it again. He exhaled out his nose, money on his mind. Slowly, he flipped over and lowered his head towards his boss's ass in underwear.

"There's a good boy." Michael stayed facing the headboard.

Donnie regrettably remembered to keep his eyes open and held his breath. His nose met Michael's crack.

BLRBLRRRRRRRR! BWAAAAP! VRRRRRRR-WRRRRRRRRrrr...

Donnie breathed in, and his stomach lurched. He slid off the end of the bed, got to his feet, and bolted to the bathroom. He went to throw up in the toilet, but the lurching ceased. He inhaled, finding the smell of gaseous death trapped in his nostrils.

Michael leaned in the doorway, the outline of his huge dick at half-mast in those cursed briefs. "You're really gonna puke? Damn, I thought you were more used to it than that. You know I gotta punish you, right?"

Donnie turned away from the toilet and turned the faucet on to splash his face. He came across as calm, but inside he wanted to run. "Punish?"

"You can't just stop whenever you feel like it. That's my job." Michael stood behind him and put both hands on his shoulders, leaning close to his ear. "You gotta be in a Dutch oven all night."

Donnie gaped, freezing as he dried his hands. He didn't want to do it, but he didn't have a choice in the matter. Michael had all the power, and Donnie was going to be breathing his concentrated farts all night.

@gatzilksis-2 to buy my stories or order one of your own!

#eproctophilia #farts #eprocto #fart kink #flatulence #gatzilksis #fart fiction #fart stories #male fart fiction #male fart stories

[novoaa1writes]

demonology

pairing(s): wanda maximoff x f!reader, natasha romanoff & f!reader, yelena belova & f!reader

summary:

A voice you know but shouldn’t says your name, all soft and reverent like it’s something holy, and your stomach curdles as you’re wrenched back into yourself with the force of a battering ram.

Your head spins. Your lungs burn. You can hardly breathe.

She—Wanda—is standing close. Too close. How did she get that close? How did you let her?

She’s got freckles, a faint smattering of them beneath her eyes and across her nose. Did she always have those?

You don’t know where you are. You don’t know what you’re doing.

cross-posted on ao3. 

word count: ~6,900

rating: teen audiences and up

warnings: a good amount of blood and violence. brainwashing, swearing, guns, knives, general head-fuckery, etc. pretty much all the warnings from previous installments apply

notes: LMAO. hello how is everyone doing. life can be brutal but i finally managed to get out the next installment! i realized that while i was writing it, i’ll definitely need another one (at least) to wrap up the final climactic action scenes, and hten probably another one after that to tie up loose ends and the like. i’ll do me best, and a huge thank you to everyone who’s stuck around this far. seriously, that is insane to me, and i know i am not a terribly consistent writer with a posting schedule, so it means a whole freakin’ bunch

anywho!

— —

PREVIOUS PART: THE BEST LAID PLANS...

— —

Plan B goes to hell in a handbasket in both spectacularly poor fashion and record time. 

It’s almost impressive, really. 

One second, things are (relatively) under control:

Two’s crumpled form lies listless at your feet, twitching and shuddering atop age-weathered wood. Not completely down for the count, but effectively neutralized for the time being. A handful of strides out stands a shrewd-looking Hawkeye, a single well-honed arrow nocked and leveled at your chest. 

Drama queen.

Beside him, his… tenderfooted charge. The Maximoff girl. Crimson luminescence flickers betwixt her hands, reflecting off spotless silver bands on willowy fingers; and despite your better instincts, you are loath to look anywhere else. 

A second later sees Iron Man plummeting down through the ceiling overhead with a hair-raising CRASH; and just like that, the spell is broken. Shouts ring out, explosions sound, and the entire ground floor devolves into a truly histrionic spectacle of unmitigated chaos.

While your concentration may be a hair short of compromised, years of training ensures you’re already in motion—stowing away the knife, then launching yourself back into a flawless backwards handspring through shrouds of darkness which fall in on you from every side. You’re aiming for the doorless entryway of the adjoining room, which you sail cleanly back through without error.  

Once inside, you’re quick to dart over to the left and out of sight. Scan your surroundings—no one here. Draw both Steyr TMPs, check them over once more—safeties off, mags attached, suppressors screwed on tight. 

A high-pitched whirr sounds off followed posthaste by an explosion two floors up that rocks the entire foundation of the building—again. If this keeps up, you estimate it’s only a matter of time before the entire infrastructure collapses in on itself in a hail of cement and splintered wood and a volatile mélange of deadly chemical fallout.

You haven’t caught so much as a whiff of rotten eggs (gaseous hydrogen sulfide’s distinguishing characteristic), fortunately, so you’ve got some time to figure out how to neutralize any ignition sources in the meantime. Stark’s laser beams, for one. The repulsors shouldn’t be a problem, from what you understand about his particular take on muon-catalyzed fusion. He’s taken great lengths to ensure they don’t release anywhere near the amount of energy (read: heat) required to fuel the earlier models. You’ve studied the logs yourself. Of course, those aren’t the only tools in his arsenal, but, you figure, they’re the ones you’re most likely to be dealing with here. Perhaps a younger Tony Stark would be brash enough to barge into an unfamiliar place slinging plasma from both palms, but he’s endured far too much to succumb to such senselessness now. 

At least, in theory.

You make a mental note to keep an eye out, and remain poised for intervention as needed.  

Beyond that, any Semtex or functional hand-grenade is out of the question, too. If the average grenade filler burns at somewhere over 2500 ℃ (~4500 ℉), even one could easily send the whole place up in flames. 

Thankfully, gunfire is a little less questionable. The scope of the operation combined with the fact that most every operative’s primary (and secondary) armaments are semi-automatics constitute a glaring pitfall that Black Room technicians would have to have been blind or brainless not to consider: If bullets go off at a temperature around or over 260 ℃ (500 ℉),  then even a single shot could send the whole place up in flames. 

Black Room technicians are not, nor have ever been, so irrationally short-sighted. They would have altered the substance accordingly. 

It makes sense, now, why the armory was suspiciously devoid of explosive weaponry. 

Guns loaded, you inch back over and peer around the door frame. 

Iron Man lies floor-bound amidst a mess of splintered wood and uprooted floorboard, silver-and-red armor (that which is characteristic of the Mark XLVII, if you’re not mistaken) reflecting beams of scattered moonlight from overhead. 

(The particular make and model of Stark’s illustrious armament sparks some measure of intrigue within you. 

Unlike the greater majority of his precious iron ensembles, Stark’s Mark XLVII—an earlier model of the Iron Man suit—includes a built-in feature which allows remote control access. Thus, it’s not at all unlikely to postulate that the suit you see is empty and under the remote control of F.R.I.D.A.Y., his quick-witted AI, while Stark himself is elsewhere.

You tuck that information away for later.)

Atop him, the woman you know as One bashes fist-shaped craters into the polished armor with her bare fists.

She wears a Kevlar vest over a wife-beater-style tank top, combat boots, and army-green pants. A thin sheen of perspiration coats her ridiculously built arms, muscles tensing and bulging obscenely beneath the scattered moonlight with every savage punch. 

Clang! Knuckles hammer against metal. Clang! Clang! Clang!

Yikes. 

A split second later, there comes a series of clicks and whirs, followed by the soles of Iron Man’s armored boots setting themselves alight—full-throttle. Twin flares set the entire entry hall alight in blaze of luminescent brilliance as the XLVII shoots directly out from under One, ejecting her off and down—through the floorboards, into the crawl space lying just below with startling haste and a deafening crash.

The Man of Iron torpedoes upward, then, gunning for the gaping hole in the ceiling that still rains debris and plaster down onto the ground floor—

Just before he can get there, a dark figure jumps straight through, crashing into the airborne suit with an audible clunk!—meeting him halfway. Stark—or the Mark XLVII—lurches violently beneath the sudden addition of weight on his plated shoulders, armored legs flailing, thrusters whining audibly beneath the strain. 

Meanwhile, on the ground floor, Barton’s hard at work—bow angled upward, loosing arrow after arrow through the gaping breach overhead in a flurry of movement, stubborn determination marring his lined features. 

Beside him stands the young clairvoyant, slender hands aloft and clouded in scarlet mist; her lurid red eyes fixed unwaveringly upon the freshly-formed crater in the ground floor foundation from which a truly murderous-looking One is re-emerging. She doesn’t appear to be terribly injured—One, that is—save for a nasty-looking gash just over her hairline that stains her left temple with rivulets of freshly-spilt blood. Then again, much like yourself, her tolerance for pain and bodily affliction is something obscene. Nothing less than a fatal blow will deter her from completing the mission objectives; you know that better than anyone. 

She leaps out from the crawl space and onto the ground floor, landing her full weight with a hollow thud! that makes the floorboards groan. Her determination hasn’t abated at all as she prowls forth, cutting a beeline straight for the Maximoff girl, close-cropped blonde hair soaked through with blood and sweat; if anything, it’s only intensified a thousand fold. You don’t have to see her face to know the expression she’s wearing—beady brown eyes alight with mutiny, jaw clenched tight, thin lips curled into a foul-mannered scowl.

You run the calculations in your head. Skill, agility, brute force… Maximoff—Wanda—can hold her off, at least for the moment. There’ll be no guarantees for an extended conflict, however, and the fact remains that even the mere sight of One drawing near her makes your stomach turn for reasons you’re loath to examine. 

Hell, you’ve half a mind to just shoot her dead and be done with it, consequences be damned. 

You almost do it, too. 

Your split hesitation costs you, though, and instead of pumping One full of lead before the ‘roided-up brute can lay a single hand on the likes of Wanda Maximoff, you’ve got your hands full with an entirely new problem:

It presents subtly, at first—nothing more than a whisper in the darkness at your six o’clock—but, what is that old saying? 

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.” T.S. Eliot. American-born, but an Englishman at heart. 

You whirl around just in time to feel the air shift around your cheek and—

Fuck. 

A bone-jarring punch whips your head violently to one side, cool metal stamping an instant bruise (and possible hairline fracture) into your right cheekbone with borderline inhuman force that rocks you to your core.

It’s a damn miracle you manage to stumble off to one side, shaky on your feet as you grit your teeth and right your balance with a considerable amount of effort. 

Your cheek feels like it’s been through an industrial-strength press (though you suppose it’s some consolation to note that your attacker didn’t batter the same one Madame did), and the reopened bullet wound in your left shoulder—relatively old as it may be—feels like a step drill bit cleaving through your mutilated flesh anew. 

Jesus—fuck—

It’s pure instinct that has you reacting well in time to catch the second blow—a vicious downwards jab with a needle-point blade that would’ve otherwise skewered directly through your uninjured shoulder. 

“Brass knuckles? Really? ” you hiss in strained Russian, shoving your assailant off with no small measure of force and a sharp huff. Christ, but they’re heavy—far heavier than their compact, willowy form would imply. 

They relent without stumbling, which you suppose is something—quick and balanced on their feet as they retreat back an arm’s length… then two. 

You narrow your gaze, peering out through the darkness to see— 

Of course. S-shaped brows, raven-black hair piled up into a neat bun… cerulean-blue eyes that glint like polished gems through the cover of night. 

Madame’s taciturn second-in-command. The one who dutifully stood watch over her at the initial mission briefing, wordlessly cataloguing everything like a silent sentinel. 

She’s a graduate of the program, whether Red Room or Black Room, you do not know. (You think, judging by her age, it’s probably the former). If you hadn’t known it before, it’d be impossible to miss now.

As for what she’s doing here, well. Your guess is as good as anyone’s. Mission parameters constituted seven operatives—no more, no less. Then again, Black Room protocol has never shied away from layering one mission atop another, compartmentalizing the overlap and writing off the difference. 

The part that most unsettles you, though, is not the broad assortment of throwing knives stashed away in her belt, nor the black rucksack slung over both narrow shoulders (that which connotes a decidedly more sinister motive). No, it’s the utter lack of firearms (visible or otherwise) on her figure combined with the fact that you can’t catch the barest glimpse of brass knuckles which you’d thought responsible for clobbering you into next week. 

Erskine’s serum aside, that old adage rings forever true—you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. 

So, why would she?

Not to mention—that hit was hard. You think it a wonder your cheekbone isn’t fractured. 

“You’re weak, Angel,” she growls—the first you’ve heard her speak. Interestingly enough, the quality of her voice is mild, sonorous… almost pleasant; even as the words themselves are nothing short of acerbic. 

“And you’re not supposed to be here,” you retort mildly, to—

Thwack! You duck just in time to miss the black-bladed kunai whizzing through the air in an impossibly high-speed blur, seeking to bury itself directly between your eyes. 

It lodges in the wooden wall a step behind you instead, its handle quivering with the residual force of impact. 

Feisty, you speculate, rising warily back up to your full height. You tuck away one of the Steyrs as you do, freeing up your aching hand to brandish the I.C.E.R. pistol instead. (Christ. You and your non-lethal options today.)

“What is your purpose here? ” you try again, brain working overtime to analyze and approximate her alignment (i.e., how deep her loyalty to the Madame truly runs, and consequently, exactly how big a pain in your ass she’s wont to be). 

“Insurance.”

“I don’t wish for us to fight,” you tell her. It is the truth, and though it burns, you do not shy away from it. “I have no reason to.”

A slow, chilling grin stretches its way across her angular features. When she speaks, sadistic mirth underlies her brisk intonation: “And I cannot let you leave here alive.”

Gamely suppressing a sigh, you shift back into a fighting stance—feet a shoulder’s width apart, knees bent, guns drawn. 

You have one last thought as she’s barreling toward you, and you’re bracing yourself for impact: I should really get started on that early retirement plan. 

— —

So, here’s the thing about serving as second-in-command to the Black Room Madame—you don’t arrive there without first selling your soul. 

You’re a little more preoccupied than usual—thoughts a little scrambled, brain a tad freezer-burned—so it takes you longer than it should to discern what you’re working with here.

Nonetheless, you do... though, not before enduring a blow. Or five.  

Cracked sternum—courtesy of a violent palm strike to the chest which sends you careening back through the drywall. Bone bruising in both ulnas—acquired when you blocked a bone-realigning roundhouse kick with your forearms. Three broken fingers (pinky and ring)—your penance for getting the grand idea to clip her diamond-cut jaw with a well-aimed punch. 

Yeah. It doesn’t take a genius to tell: you’re not going toe-to-toe with just another classmate of Natalia’s.

(Natalia…

The moment the thought surfaces, you do away with it. The sentiment—tempting as it is to re-examine—will only live on so long as you do, and at the current moment, that prospect is looking shaky at best.)  

She—whoever she is—is enhanced, sure. A recipient of some unidentified variant on Erskine’s serum? Unclear.  

The serum—though it bolsters muscle mass accordingly on any given subject—doesn’t make a combatant weigh in at 200 kilos (~440lbs). Hell, even Rogers was only weighing in at just over 135 (~300lbs) post-injection—and the batch that he received had been the most advanced variant known to man. More on that: it doesn’t give you a gleaming-silver exoskeleton of impenetrable steel beneath your skin, and it certainly doesn’t mean you can take a bullet between the brows and only be out of commission for two minutes flat.

Whatever she’s on, it goes far deeper than anything Erskine ever cooked up. 

Granted you can manage to make it out of this alive (a quixotic hypothetical that appears to grow increasingly more improbable by the second), you make a mental note to look into this later on, at length. If you know the mind of an overzealous scientist—and, considering your lab-rat background, you’re quite sure that you do—they didn’t stop (or start) with her. 

For the moment, though, you’ll just have to settle for taking things slow—one steel-gloved hit at a time.

You duck another punch and throw yourself shoulder-first down onto the ground, directly forth into a hurried roll across the groaning hardwood. It buys you about a half a second of time and less than a foot of space, but it’s better than nothing while your mind works overtime to come up with a new strategy for incapacitating your assailant—preferably one that doesn’t involve any more broken bones.

The syringes are out; that much is clear. Their flimsy steel needles won’t stand a chance at puncturing her wrought-iron skin. With knives, you’re met with the same issue. Guns? No, you tried that already. I.C.E.R.? Forget it. 

You’re gonna need a lot more firepower—firepower you don’t currently have on hand—to neutralize her. Though, you know what—or who, rather—just might? 

Stark. 

All this runs through your head in the blink of an eye as you rise to your full height and the lieutenant whirls around to clock you, bringing with her a vicious backwards elbow that makes you duck right back down to avoid getting clobbered.

You catch the knee-strike she throws next with both hands, though the sheer force of it sends your crouched figure sprawling backwards ass-first onto the wooden floors with little grace and an audible thunk! 

A boot races towards your face, then, though you’re quick to fall back and twist away. At the tail end of one full rotation, you level a kick at her ankle that sees her bounding back a full half-step to dodge, allowing you time to scramble up onto your feet and break away. 

Ice slithers its way up your spine as you break out into a full sprint, back turned… exposed. 

(Never let an opponent at your unprotected back, Angel. Never. )

Last you checked, she hadn’t any knives on hand (most of them littered across the floor or sunken into the drywall), but it’s a risk all the same. 

You huff out a noiseless sigh of relief when you manage to barge through into the next room and dive off to the side even as a throwing knife—this one silver rather than black—goes whizzing through the entryway where you once stood about half a second later. 

You come up on your feet and launch forth into an explosive run, gunning for the east central stairwell two rooms over. 

New mission objective: find Iron Man. 

— —

You burst onto the fourth-floor landing—TMP-I.C.E.R. combo drawn and looking for trouble. 

And damn it all, but you get it. 

The moment you hear it—faint crackling sounds from a procession of dated black speaker-horns mounted up in corners of every room, static and sputters to signal the intercom system coming to life—

You know you’re fucked. 

“Она провиденье искуша��а.”

[Ona providen’ye iskushala.]

A cool, brittle voice. Feminine; familiar. 

Madame E.

This can’t be a live feed… can it? No, she’d never risk it. A recording, then?

But whose finger is on the ‘Play’ button?

And those words… 

“Она звала прекрасное мечтою.”

[Ona zvala prekrasnoye mechtoyu.]

Your breath catches in your throat. Saliva turns to smoky ash on your tongue.  

Your tenebrous surroundings fall away, and you fall with them—down, down, down…  You barely feel the impact when your knees hit the floor, guns trembling in rigid fists. 

No… 

“Она вдохновенье презирала.”

[Ona vdokhnoven’ye priyezirala.]

The voice is cool, calm… unrelenting. Every word it utters, every letter feels as though it’s branding itself into your bare flesh. 

And the scariest part? Some indispensable, deep-down part of you—one that seems to swell and stretch by the second, growing like a sentient thing—is responding to it. Coaxed forth by its urging… compelled in a way you know there’s no coming back from.  

“Не верила она любви, свободе.”

[Ni verilla ona lyubvi, cvobodye.]

She had faith in neither love nor freedom… 

You know her. You know the girl of whom they speak. Don’t you?

A sharp ache builds in the back of your skull. You bite your lip hard as if to clear it. 

“На жизнь насмешливо глядела…”

[Na szhizn nasmeshliva glyadyela…]

Looked on life with ridicule… 

“И ничего во всей природе…” 

[I nichevo vo vsey prirodye…]

And in the whole of nature…

You clap your hands over both ears to block out the noise, gritting your teeth hard until your jaw creaks… but it’s too late for that, and you know it. The words are too loud, and they’re screaming in your brain, and you cannot help but soak them up like a blooming sunflower might the afternoon sun on a balmy springtime afternoon. 

The last line of the poem—because it’s a poem, you’re sure, and one you think some ever-nearing piece of you might know—is the final nail in a coffin of your handlers’ design.

“Благословить она не хотела.”

[Blagoslovit’ ona nye khotela.]

She did not wish to praise a single thing. 

White explodes across your spotty vision; a shrill, high-pitched noise shrieks deafeningly in your ears… there is pain, flashes of red, the distant sound of someone screaming—

… And then, there is nothing. 

Nothing but silence. Silence, bloodlust, and a single phrase to shatter what precious little remains holding you back—one you’ve still yet to hear.

“Встань, ангел смерти.”

[Vstan’, angol smyerti.]

Bingo. 

— —

You awaken in a strange, dark place—an older building that creaks and groans, its bowels teeming with shadows. Judging by the interior design—modeled to constitute a later motif of the Byzantine Revival—the structure had been built anywhere from the mid-19th century to the late 1900s. Reasonably meritorious upkeep. Doorless inlets formed by tall, rounded archways. Nicked hardwood floors, their once polished veneers a thing of the faraway past. The scent of lingering gunsmoke, how it tickles your nostrils. A brisk chill in the thin, damp air… 

Focus, you rebuke yourself. 

You’re hunched down, on your knees… staring at the floor. 

There’s a voice in your ear… but you have no comm. 

There’s someone there with you. 

“... hear me?” a deep, masculine-sounding voice cleaves through your clouded awareness like the first stroke of thunder in an oncoming storm. American. “Hey, are you alright?” You recognize it, you think… recognize him. Maybe from on television? “Don’t worry; you’re safe now. We’re here to help.”

It’s coming from closer, now… 

He’s right beside you. 

You can feel the heat of his body crowding yours… huge, well-muscled, quick on his feet. It’s not until you feel his hand on your shoulder, though—Big mistake—that the heavy fog which addles your mind seems to dissipate, and in its wake, a singular motive reigns absolute: 

Fight. 

You twist sharply, jerking back and away from the man’s touch. Simultaneously you’re raising your arm, snaking it over and around his own such that your limbs are twined steadfastly around each other like braided rope—his wrist beneath your armpit and palm pressed against your shoulder blade; your forearm around his bulging tricep and knuckles digging into the iron of his brachialis. The position is awkward (significantly more so for him than for you), forcing his arm to lock in a position that borders on overextension with every bit of added pressure you apply. Of course, he resists. 

Christ, but he’s strong. It’s exhausting to hold him still for even a second or two. 

There, with a split second’s worth of borrowed time, you get your first real glimpse of him—sharp jawline; gritted teeth… a chauvinistic kevlar-padded uniform with the most obnoxious, God-awful design you’ve seen in your entire life: a conspicuous blend of proud American red, white, and blues; a navy blue helmet that fits snugly around his cranium like a bald cap; a perfectly-circular shield the size of a large supper platter secured to his other forearm with a series of worn leather straps. 

Steve Rogers. Codename: Captain America.

Designation: Unfriendly. Threat Assessment: Deadly. 

(‘Stevie’... )

There’s a kind of calm, if distant, recognition in his blue-eyed gaze as you peer up at him, and he looks down at you. He knows you… somehow. You haven’t the time to ponder how that could possibly be. 

A beat passes. He sweeps your feet out from underneath you with a well-placed kick, and the moment is broken. 

You go down, down, down without a fight—your arm disentangling from his, your vision tilting upside-down. A calculated twist of your hips increases your momentum in a pinch, and, when your upper back hits the ground, it’s all too natural to further drive that propulsion feet-first into an improvised backwards roll off one shoulder, a move that’ll earn you about three steps’ length in additional space. In no time at all, you’re back on your feet—half-knelt in a crouched position and peering up at your opponent, twin knives drawn. 

“Stand down, Y/N,” he orders calmly, shield-clad arm resting innocuously at his side. He doesn’t even sound winded. 

“I do not answer to you,” you say flatly. 

It’s nothing but a testament to his arrogance that he would think otherwise—or, at the very least, feign it.

“This isn’t you,” he continues on, his words ripe with priggish well-meaning and maddening self-importance. You disfavor it on principle. 

Overhead, there’s the telltale crackle of static from the intercom, followed by an indisputable command:

“Eliminate the intruders.” 

You aren’t really supposed to have opinions (at all), particularly where it concerns orders coming from higher up the food chain. You’re not sure if it’s a flaw in your conditioning, or some indispensable defect of character, but that particular ordinance never quite seemed to take with you. Regardless, all orders are not created equal. (A matter of personal opinion, granted.) Some are ill-advised and inflammatory. Some are tedious, yet tolerable. Some are nothing short of condemnable.

You’d place this particular instance in the ‘tedious, yet tolerable’ category. If you were the type of person to have friends, Captain America would not be one of them. 

You twirl your knives in either hand and lunge explosively forth, seeking blood with both blades raised—poised to strike. 

You get a shield instead. Impenetrable vibranium strikes your upraised forearms with considerable force and a metallic thud to boot… but you’re expecting it. (Even if the impact makes your battered forearms smart like a bitch.)

Palming the handles of either knife, you manage to grip the shield’s top edge with your fingertips (sans the thumbs); and, using that hold as a grapnel, swing your momentum forward, boots first, to deliver a solid two-footed kick directly into the armor-padded gut of Captain America. 

Pained grunts from overhead constitute your reward—one when the soles of your boots strike his gut, and another when you employ that perch as something of a makeshift springboard; pushing off his firm stomach with both feet, setting an angled course for the ground below. 

You catch yourself there with both hands, the impact flattening both knife handles into either palm such that you’re sure they’ll sport impressive bruises come dawn. As your weight transfers to your hands, straining your bent elbows something ridiculous, you clock Steve Rogers at your 12 o’clock, stumbling backwards and righting himself just within arm’s reach. From there, your momentum takes you the rest of the way, and a forceful shove against groaning hardwood does the rest. In a matter of seconds—which see you neatly executing the tail-end of an improvised back-handspring—you’re up on your feet again in a fighting stance with a solid metre’s worth of space between you and your opponent. 

“This isn’t you,” he grits out, sounding rather winded. 

You shrug, like his claim does not irk you. (It does.) “You talk too much.”

And, without further ado, you launch yourself forth. 

— —

Steve Rogers—honorable and masochistic as he is—fights like a ‘roided-out street boxer. His footwork is just barely on the better side of decent; and, despite bouncing dutifully on the balls of his feet all throughout, he’s somehow the most flat-footed fighter you’ve ever seen. He never moves any more than a step or two in any direction, as though his lower half is encased in concrete and he doesn’t fancy moving any time soon. Any blocking comes few and far between, allowing opportunity for unobstructed attacks at every turn. You get four solid hits to his face—the third of which sees his nose broken and gushing blood—before he adjusts and starts dodging them. 

He’s good with the shield; you’ll give him that. 

There are also the faintest undertones of something more refined—and familiar—beneath his brawler fight pattern. Another influence; a guiding hand, of sorts. It’s got Natalia written all over it. 

He should listen to Natalia more, you think. Spar with her more often. 

The moment the thought registers—

A sharp pain behind your eye, making you falter mid-block.  

You take a bone-jarring right hook to the jaw for that one. The force of it whips your head to the side, makes your teeth clamp down hard on your tongue. Warm, coppery blood fills your mouth as you stagger back on the heels of your feet. 

You catch yourself on the second step, and recover your balance by the third. 

Steve Rogers is looking at you like he’s sorry, like he regrets it. 

You hold his gaze as you gather the blood in your mouth and swallow it down, jaw clenched.

“I don’t want to fight,” he tells you, his words jagged with exertion. His lower lip is split. The gusher of a bloody nose has slowed to a trickle. “You’re just a kid.” 

You note a flicker of movement over his left shoulder as he speaks; barely there, and yet, unmistakable to someone with your training. 

Simultaneously: a shift in the air just behind you, and to the right. 

“Down!” a woman yells in heavily-accented English.

Steve Rogers—ever the soldier—doesn’t question the order. He drops like a stone, hitting the deck just in time to dodge the throwing knife that comes whizzing through the air not half a second later. It comes for you, next, making you to twist slightly to avoid it—

A flash of blonde hair is all the warning you get before a shoulder rams you in the gut, tackling you, flinging you both down the nearby staircase with breathtaking momentum. 

You barely register the thunk! from overhead as the throwing knife buries itself in lath-covered plaster, too busy holding onto the golden-haired assailant with all your might as the pair of you tumble down a half-case of stairs, directly into a lath-and-plaster wall on the intermediary landing with an audible thud!

You settle in a tangle of limbs, heartbeat thundering in your ears, sandwiched between creaky hardwood flooring and your newest opponent. It’s a geometric staircase, the intermediary landing of which constitutes a pivot point for a full 180-degree turn. A classic design. You absorb all of this in the blink of an eye as your attacker—who hasn’t so much as a weapon in their hands—hastens to disentangle themselves and rise to their feet. 

You let them—her. A Widow, like you. 

Designation: Unclear. Threat Assessment: Deadly.

Straw-blonde hair, hazel eyes. Pouty lips. Button nose. 

Your shoulder aches. Your nose does, too. 

Yelena? 

The name comes to you like a knife to the gut, but you’re already in motion: Lunging forth, head down, shoulder first; nailing her with a tackle to the gut that makes all the air leave her lungs in a strangled gasp and sends the pair of you sprawling down the remaining steps in a tangle of limbs. 

You take the first impact to your shoulder—the uninjured one, thankfully—about halfway down the steps. You think it a miracle your combined weights and barreling momentum don’t snap your clavicle. 

The next—and last—one is a joint effort, cushioned by her left hip and your right knee; you on top, her underneath.

It’s something like a miracle when the pair of you spill out onto the second-story landing; tumbling over once, twice, before lurching to a decisive halt at the other end of the floor, pressed up against a rickety wooden balustrade. You’re on your sides, chest to chest; your leg slung around her waist, her face pressed into your armpit. 

You make to disentangle yourself, but she beats you to it: viciously shoving you off with both hands and a muttered curse. 

It’s a concerted effort to keep from retaliating, but you do it; skidding back across the hardwood without a fight, slowing to a stop with just short of an arm’s length of space between you. Your forehead is damp, beaded with cold sweat. Your chest heaves. The Widow—Yelena, you think—is not much better off.

After a moment, she wheezes out, “You’re an idiot.” Her gaze is absolutely murderous, her jaw clenched tightly enough to border on painful. She doesn’t sound at all like she means it. 

You eye her with shrewd interest. 

Kill the intruders. But Yelena is no intruder. 

“I don’t need to kill you, but I will,” you tell her plainly, having caught your breath.  

You want to say more. You can’t. You won’t. 

Why do you want to say more?

“Trigger words are flimsy,” Yelena ventures, forcing herself up into a sitting position. “An inexact science.” Huffing out a sigh, she hauls herself up onto her feet. You do the same. “You broke them before.”

“I have orders.” You don’t know why you’re humoring this. Humoring her. 

“Right now, there’s no time for the chair,” she continues on, like she doesn’t hear. You feel a twinge of… something at her mention of the chair. Discomfort? Dislike? Impossible. You are not permitted such frivolous sentiments. “So, they pull a poem out of their asses. They think—hope—that it will collar you. They’re wrong.”

You quirk a brow. Skeptical. “A poem? ”

Yelena huffs out another sigh. 

You get the feeling you’ve had this conversation before. You get the feeling she’s tired of repeating it. 

“Yours is Pushkin,” she recounts, sounding almost bored. Aleksandr Sergejevich. Born 1799… died 1837. “A verse they call ‘Demon.’” She rolls her eyes at that. “They think themselves quite clever for that one.”

You frown. “Because I’m…”

“An angel, I suppose. Heaven’s soldier.” She pauses, there. “Or assassin, as it were.”

You want to kill her. You want to punch in those prim, porcelain features until you reach bone. Even more than that, you want to listen. 

“Mine was Mandel’shtam,” she grits out slowly, almost unwittingly, her features contorted into a grimace. The gravity of such a confession is not lost on you. She is a fool for sharing it. “‘Sisters.’”

Thorns in your chest. Fluid fills your lungs. Sisters… “You had a sister, once,” you hear yourself say in a coarse, tinny voice—as if from under leagues of ocean water.

She flinches like you’ve struck her. (You haven’t.) “So they tell me.” Loosely-curled fists spasm at her sides like she wants to strike you. (She doesn’t.)

“A Widow.” It’s hardly a question. 

Yelena shrugs, smoothing her features out into something harder, colder… marble. “We have what we have when we have it.”

The words scald you like fire on a salted wound. Bile rises in your throat. Crimson colors your vision, so deep and dark and red, red, red— 

Stop. Breathe. 

Fear serves no purpose. Pain will be compartmentalized. 

“Whose words are those?” you demand in a voice that does not tremble, for you will it not to.

Yelena appraises you for a moment, a contemplative look in her eye. Then, without a word, she turns on her heel and sprints into the darkness. 

— —

Yelena is not running out of cowardice. You may not know terribly much right now (—honestly, you don’t much care to); but you know that. 

She is you, and you are her. The tick in her jaw, the fury in her eyes; the blood that dribbles down your chin. A mirror’s echo, even if wrung and wrought and warped beyond all comparison. You would not know your own face in a crowd, you think. But Yelena’s… you couldn’t miss hers if you tried. Natalia’s, either. 

Tearing after her is second nature. You see… narrow streets. Taxi cabs. A church, carved from volcanic stone. A glimpse of blonde hair amidst the sparse crowd of Independence Plaza. 

You sprint out onto the third-floor landing—a different one, this time—in a house of shadows. Floorboards creak beneath your boots. Voronezh. You halt yourself in place for a spell, listening for—

Bootsteps plodding down stairs. Too loud. 

She wants you to follow her. 

You vault the nearby balustrade, surrender yourself to the short drop that follows. 

You’re not alone when you land. There’s another, Yelena notwithstanding; though, theatric that she is, she’s quick to reassert her presence with a bone-jarring tackle that meets you like a speeding bullet train, shoulder to stomach, the second your boots touch solid ground. All the air shoves out from your lungs in a painful, burning rush as the pair of you go sprawling to the floor—again. 

Relentless. 

You’re no better. 

This time, though, is different. 

This time—

A flare of scarlet—red.

“Get off of her,” comes a heavily-accented voice that is cold and scared and just the wrong kind of familiar—

It happens before you can blink: Yelena is lifted bodily off of you in a nebulous mist of carmine-red, suspended midair for half a breath, then jerked sharply back—launched into the nearest wall. You barely register the thud! her body makes when it collides with the wall, the muffled curse that leaves her lips, the ensuing crash! when she tumbles down onto the floor in a haze of dissipating scarlet. 

All you see are pale hands and silver rings and eyes that burn red, red, red. 

You scramble to your feet in a daze, eyes locked on hers as they fade from florid red to a bluish-green. You wait for them to reignite. They don’t. 

Instead, she comes closer. 

“Don’t,” Yelena’s voice warns her, and for once, you agree. 

It’s as though she does not hear—drawn to you like a moth to an open flame. 

She’ll burn if she touches you. Doesn’t she know that?

When she speaks, it’s quiet. Almost reverent. Just a word—your name.  

She’s within an arm’s length, now. Your fingers twitch at your sides, itching for a gun, a knife, anything. Yelena is… too quiet. Peripherally, you recall a shuffle of clothing behind you, a shift in the air as she righted herself, but now—nothing. 

You should reorient yourself. Any moment now, Yelena will—

Red sparks itself alight in the witch’s eyes.

“Fuck !” Yelena curses bitterly behind you. 

You whip around to see her suspended midair in a mist of nebulous red, again. For a split second, the pair of you lock eyes, and in hers, you see… a curious mix of disappointment and righteous fury. It’s there one moment, and gone another as her body is launched unceremoniously across the landing and through the wooden balustrade—which splinters and gives way with a sickening crunch!—and she goes sprawling off the landing. 

It’s a one-story drop to the bottom. Maybe a little more, if you count the gaping hole in the ground floor. 

Yelena will be fine. Maybe a broken bone or two, but—fine. Alive. You don’t know why you care. 

A voice you know but shouldn’t says your name, all soft and reverent like it’s something holy, and your stomach curdles as you’re wrenched back into yourself with the force of a battering ram. 

Your head spins. Your lungs burn. You can hardly breathe. 

She—Wanda—is standing close. Too close. How did she get that close? How did you let her?

She’s got freckles, a faint smattering of them beneath her eyes and across her nose. Did she always have those?

You don’t know where you are. You don’t know what you’re doing.

But her hand grazes yours, and muscle memory does the rest. 

It’s a blur of motion—you’re a blur of motion—as you spin the pair of you around, draw a knife, bully her backwards. She winces when she hits the wall, when you slam her against it. Your forearm traps her shoulders, your blade is at her throat, and she… does nothing. 

Her breath is warm against the tip of your nose. Steady. 

“I will kill you,” you tell her in a voice that’s perhaps a little louder than strictly necessary. The blade trembles in your tightly-clenched fist. Your chest heaves; you can’t get your breathing under control. “Do you know that? I will kill you!” You’re almost shouting, now, or as close as you ever get to it, for the furor you feel is beyond imagining. It aches, it swells, it burns in your chest like something molten, something alive, something that’ll kill you trying to claw its way out.

A survivor. A cornered dog. You.

“Then do it,” Wanda’s strained voice cleaves swiftly through the noise, and it’s with a start that you realize she’s crying. Her cheeks are wet with it. “I will forgive you,” she whispers, wheezes; meeting your feverish gaze with a watery, desperate one of her own. “Do you understand? I will forgive you.”

Every word is a boulder in your throat, a brand upon your skin; a jagged blade splits your chest. You stumble back clutching your sternum, scrabbling for purchase, clawing to staunch the blood that pours out like water from a freshly-burst dam. You scarcely register the dull clatter of the knife when it falls from your grip, the solidness of the floor that breaks your fall. 

There’s just so much of it. It oozes between your fingers. So wet, and warm, and red, red, red.

Natalia was red. Wanda, too. 

Hair, eyes, jacket. 

Jacket? How strange. 

You hear—a name. You think it might belong to you. 

A foolish thought. 

There’s just so much blood.

It’s not yours. Is it? 

You blink. A face looms over you, cast in darkness. Young, pretty. 

So much blood. So much red. 

Another face joins hers—green eyes, fiery-red hair. 

Natalia.

She does not hesitate: grabs you by the throat. Yanks you up, slams you back down. 

The other one screams. Her eyes flash red, and Natalia is gone—torn away from you in a blur of motion. 

Fuck, that hurt. 

Your skull aches. Blackness clouds your vision. 

Is this what dying feels like?

— —

sources (do not tease me for this i stg. i go down rabbit holes with my little ‘puter sometimes. mind your business about it):

встань, ангел смерти | vstan’, angel smerti | stand, angel of death

mark xlvii | the forty-seventh iron man suit of armor constructed by tony stark. built after the mark xlvi sustained considerable damage in a conflict with captain america at a HYDRA base in siberia (captain america: civil war). appears in spider-man: homecoming. 

staircase construction | exactly what it sounds like. we are moving on now.

russian architecture | overview of russian architecture through the ages.

russian revival architecture | overview of russian revival architecture movement (mid-19th to early 20th century).

more russian architecture | russian architecture and its byzantine origins.

hydrogen sulfide (pdf) | hydrogen sulfide material safety data sheet, which includes information such as auto-ignition temperature and related facts and figures that i know you all care very much about. 

aleksandr sergeyevich pushkin | born 1799, died 1837. russian poet, novelist, dramatist, writer of short stories. largely considered to be the country's greatest poet, and the father of its modern literature.

демон/demon | poem written by pushkin. includes russian text as well as english translation.

osip emilyevich mandelshtam | born 1891, died 1938. major figure in russian poetry, prose, and literary essay composition. 

сёстры/sisters | poem by mandel’shtam. includes russian text as well as english translation.

— —

tagging:

[series]: @herecomesthewriterwitch @madamevirgo @tomy5girls​ @avengerstanforlife​ @steamhead15​

[marvel]: @yelenabelovasgf​

— —

end notes: okay. confession time. i did change pushkin’s wording slightly for the lines of ‘demon’ that i used here, but only inasmuch that pronouns were swapped, and the relevant past-tense verb endings were adjusted also to agree with the pronoun change (’he’ to ‘she’), becuase russian language says that they have to agree. 

also i’m pretty sure i forgot to make an actual taglist, ever, so i’m tagging the people that i tagged on the last post, and if i’ve forgotten anyone, i’m truly sorry!! 

thank you all for sticking with me thus far; it means more to me than i am able to put into words <3

link to masterlist

#stuff i wrote #natasha romanoff & reader #natasha romanoff & f!reader #wanda maximoff x reader #wanda maximoff x f!reader #yelena belova & reader #yelena belova & f!reader #reader-insert #f!reader

[certain-death-awaits]

Ages ago you made a post discussing whether Warren was irresponsible and I had disagreed. You had said you were busy, but you'd respond to my response later, but you never did, which I totally get! Life is crazy, I'm terrible at responding to things myself, so I'm not salty or anything at all! But I am still curious what your thoughts are. Are you up for having that discussion? No pressure whatsoever, to be clear, I realize this is old. I'd be happy to try to find the original post if you'd like

[the 2 year old post in question, for context]

You're right! I had the post in drafts, but by the time I had the time to answer it, I thought it would be too late to post. I'm happy to talk about it now. Keep in mind that I love Warren as a character, at least in the original series (I feel Dragonwatch wasn't true to a lot of original characterisations). For the sake of fairness, I'll only be talking about the original series. Using Dragonwatch to defend my position would be low-hanging fruit.

✧ We hear from Ruth Sorenson about how Warren goes behind Stan's back to give Newel and Doren a TV and batteries for it. They tell Seth he also got them high-quality tennis equipment, which must've been a trade.

"Graphite, light and strong", Newel said. "Warren got us our equipment. Back before he went all Boo Radley on us."

They also try to get Seth to trade for wine, which they sell as something impossible for him to get normally because of his age. Maybe they got used to doing this with Warren when he was young. Either way, is trading with the satyrs for anything (especially gold, given the means they use to get it) responsible?

✧ The reason Warren became albino in the first place was because he was carrying out a covert mission for the Knights of the Dawn. This is why he told nobody where he was going when he ventured into the valley of the four hills. He was supposed to remove and transfer the artifact to a secure location all on his own. Even though it was a secret mission, this is a ridiculous thing to do. Removing the artifact without the knowledge and consent of the caretaker is just theft. It makes sense to tell Stan at the very least; the only reason he retired from the Knights was because caretakers aren't allowed to be Knights. It's irresponsible to go in somewhere even a small modicum as dangerous without telling anyone else where you're going and when you'll return.

✧ During the battle with the guardian of the Sands of Sanctity, Warren gets severely injured. He's already been stabbed in the gut, and is feverish; this is an extremely serious injury. He's lost enough blood, it's surprising he's conscious. (To be fair, I don't think Mull understands how fragile humans are. He seems to think getting gored by antlers is easily survivable.) And then he gets bit by one of the guardian's snakes, and hot acidic sludge is sprayed across his chest and legs. Vanessa says he's dying, and offers him a gaseous potion to extend his life. He refuses this, and uses the spear to attack the guardian, using the rod to fall full speed at it for the last 30 feet. Here's a description of the state he's in by the time Kendra gets to him to save him.

Warren was a wreck, facedown, unconscious, breathing shallowly. Heaving with both hands, Kendra rolled him over, wincing as something inside of him crunched. His mouth was open. Tilting his head up, she tried to ignore the snapping sound his neck made, and dumped the potion into his mouth. His Adam's apple bobbed, and much of the fluid leaked out the sides of his mouth.

Clearly, this was not a wise move; had it not been for the Sands, I believe he would've died. Heroic, certainly. But it left Kendra alone with Vanessa. When Tanu arrives, he says Warren must be nearly gone, or he'd be able to move around freely. It doesn't guarantee the guardian will be killed, only that he will be, and the guardian still has another life that Vanessa would have to deal with.

✧ Warren's decision to confront Stingbulb! Kendra in the middle of the night seemed to me a terrible lapse in judgement. It's true he didn't know she was a stingbulb, but he suspects something of that magnitude. When Seth asks if mind control is likely, he shrugs and says nothing would surprise him. Any way it could've gone might have been disastrous. If it was mind control, there's the suicide tactic. If not that, then she could just make a scene, wake up her parents with screams of "there's a strange man in my house!", and neither Warren nor Seth would be able to give a reasonable explanation. He must've believed she was aligned with the enemy, because if he went in thinking it really was all her, and she sincerely believed in leaking these secrets, they'd have to have a long and involved conversation with her grandparents present. This outcome doesn't necessitate confronting her in the middle of the night.

✧ Peeking at Chalize on the Lost Mesa mission. You already know this one, but I am including it for others who might be reading. From Warren's perspective (not knowing Gavarog's true identity), Gavin warned everyone not to look at the dragon, staking his deal with her on the promise his companions were not to gaze upon her. This was dangerous, and there was no good reason for it.

✧ Warren basically convinces Seth to join the Knights on the Wyrmroost mission in SotDS. Seth fully intended to just sulk about it. Warren certainly didn't coerce him, but he more than encouraged him, and Seth wouldn't have been able to act alone. It should be obvious why this is irresponsible. You can read an excerpt from the book of the part where Warren collaborates with Seth to bring him on the mission here. I've put it in a pastebin, as it's a bit long to include here.

✧ I'm going to double down and say having Raxtus drop Warren so he could attack the harpy was still reckless behaviour. He had all the facts, yes, but none of the facts justify dropping Warren only to dive and catch him again moments later. The initial reason Warren had for wanting to be dropped was so Raxtus could make a speedier escape with Bracken and Kendra. The plunging attack manoeuvre doesn't facilitate that. Its sole purpose would be taking the chance that Warren is able to attack a harpy while falling. The risk is Warren falling to his death, or Raxtus botching the catch- imagine grabbing an arm or a leg and having it dislocate; or the harpy grab Warren and attempt to carry him off.

Now that I'm through with examples of Warren being irresponsible, let's move onto your point on there being a difference in thought process. I don't think there is much of a difference between Warren and Seth when it comes to their decision-making process. Here's an excerpt from right after Seth returns after stealing the unicorn horn.

 "I'm with your grandfather on this," Grandma said. "We love you and we're proud of you. The risks you took worked out this time. But how can we reward such behavior? Because we love you, we must teach you caution, or your boldness will destroy you. "

  "I weighed my options and made smart choices," Seth responded. "I didn't set out to borrow the horn. I only decided to try for the horn after Graulas showed how my skills as a shadow charmer gave me a realistic chance at success. It was me or nobody. What would Patton have done?"

  Warren chuckled. "He would have shaved the centaurs, dipped them in honey, covered them with feathers, and hung them up like a bunch of piñatas. " Kendra, Seth, and Tanu laughed. "I'm just saying. " ...

"Yeah, well, I'll give this stupid horn back to the centaurs before I get left out of the trip to Wyrmroost," Seth threatened. "Good luck taking it from me!"

  "It isn't going to be a vacation," Coulter said.

  "And it isn't about seeing cool dragons," Grandpa growled, clearly losing his temper.

  "Although they will be cool," Warren murmured, earning an elbow from Tanu.

 Tears brimmed in Seth's eyes. His mouth opened as if he wanted to say more; then he turned and stormed out of the room.

  "What are we going to do with that boy?" Grandma sighed.

  "I don't know," Grandpa said. "If he hadn't decided to go after the horn, we'd still be treading water. Maybe he's the only one of us seeing this clearly. "

  Grandma shook her head. "Don't kid yourself. His main interest is still the adventure. Saving the world is a happy side effect. This is all still a game to him. "

  "Patton was the same way," Warren mentioned. "He did a lot of good, partly because he relished the thrill. "

  "I think Seth cares," Kendra spoke up. "It isn't only about the fun anymore. I think he's learning. "

I think this part speaks for itself. And I get the feeling Warren's counting himself among the "like Patton" crowd. Warren and Seth do things for the right reasons, most of the time. I think that their most egregious risks come in situations with seemingly no way out, where their idea presents as an outlandish "so crazy it just might work" option. You bring up the time Seth went into Graulas' cave for the first time in GotSP. He goes in not knowing much at all, which is rash. He doesn't know Graulas will radiate fear, and he doesn't know he's immune to said fear. But he doesn't make this decision out of nowhere. Shadow! Tanu has assured his safety to him. Here's an excerpt from the book, which comes after paragraphs of Seth contemplating whether the risk is wise.

Was sneaking out of the house to follow the shadowy manifestations of Coulter and Tanu into the woods going to be dangerous? Absolutely. The question was whether the risk was justified.

Earlier that afternoon, Tanu had completed his transformation into a shadowman just outside the window. He had waited in the shade on the deck until sundown, when he had ventured off into the woods. A few hours later, with evening deepening, the silent shadows of Tanu and Coulter had returned. Visible only to Seth, they had stood halfway across the yard from the house, allowing Grandpa to address them from the deck. Tanu had indicated that all was well with two thumbs up, and they had gestured for Seth to follow them, inviting Grandpa to come along as well. Through pantomime, Coulter had expressed that he would scout ahead as they traveled in order to prevent encounters with dangerous creatures.

But Grandpa had declined the invitation. He had stated that if Tanu and Coulter could devise a way for him to follow them without Seth, he would consent to accompany them. As he told them this, Seth stood behind him making subtle gestures, stealthily pointing at Grandpa and shaking his head, then pointing at himself, then pointing at them, then winking. None but Seth could see Tanu salute that he had received the message.

The house had been still for some time. If he was going to follow through on the message he had mimed to Tanu and Coulter, the moment had arrived. But he hesitated. Was he actually going to disregard a direct order from Grandpa and entrust his life to the shadowy versions of Tanu and Coulter? If Tanu and Coulter had his best interests in mind, would they be willing to let him sneak away with them against Grandpa's wishes? Hopefully they were certain he would be safe and confident that Grandpa would thank them all later.

What were the possibilities? They might lead him into a trap. He might die or be transformed into a shadow himself. Then again, he might solve the mystery of the plague, restore Tanu and Coulter, and save Fablehaven.

Seth scooted out from under his covers, pulled on his shoes, and started tying the laces. The bottom line was that Grandpa would have been willing to risk his life on the gamble that the shadows of Tanu and Coulter meant to offer meaningful assistance. He would have followed them if he could have done so alone. He simply was not willing to risk Seth's life. To Seth, this proved that the risk was worth taking. If Grandpa loved him too much to let him take a worthwhile risk, then he would bypass Grandpa.

It speak for itself. This is the option that presents itself to him, as the gang seems backed into a corner. They don't know what to do about the plague. Stan seems defeated; he questions if he's fit for his role as caretaker. They contemplate ditching the preserve before the plague claims them as victims, but stand by because they're worried the Sphinx would become caretaker in their absence.

In conclusion, I'd like to go back to the point of my original post. People like to joke about Seth being an idiot, someone who doesn't think things through, while seeing Warren as slightly devil-may-care but ultimately smooth and capable. I'm saying that there's no difference between the two in that respect, but Warren being an attractive adult makes us perceive him as more responsible.

#fablehaven #seth sorenson #warren burgess #original #answered #asks #thekitchenphilosopheress #-- #you know one weird thing about this is how well warren seems to know patton #despite only knowing him for the time travel escapade in GotSP #my headcanon is that they had some secret time travel adventures in between the books

[haunted-machines]

> Memory Files

> playback mem_h0jgDdi3typHB7ohd9wcKn.mp4

> yes                          > no

> preparing mem_h0jgDdi3typHB7ohd9wcKn.mp4

> . . .

> . . .

> . . .

> playing mem_h0jgDdi3typHB7ohd9wcKn.mp4

“Doctor, are you certain this is. . . wise?” Shadow did not often question Dr. Wily’s plans, at least not to his face, but this seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. Though, so did many other plans of his. Perhaps the unease came more from how recent the last disaster was. 

In the center of the laboratory sat a large test tube, typically reserved for maintenance on Robot Masters with less stable attributes. What was strung up within it, however, was far from a Robot Master. Several pieces were assembled on a humanoid frame. Most of the softer metal of the body had been burned away, leaving only the more heavily armored parts, such as the chest and limbs. Miraculously, the helmet had also survived rather well, save a few chunks here and there. That only made it more unnerving to look at, though, missing a proper head underneath. 

“Bah,” the Doctor scoffed, rapping his knuckles on the reinforced glass, “don’t be paranoid. This thing isn’t going anywhere I don’t want it to.”

“It is not the body that concerns me.” Shadow pointedly turned his gaze to the eight smaller tubes connected to it.

Inside them were dark, gaseous swirls of energy that almost seemed to resemble skulls from a certain angle. Of course, rather than being unnerved, the Doctor was delighted by the resemblance to his personal branding. 

“I’m not as stupid as the morons who designed those bastards. The energy is completely sealed in those containers, and more importantly, removable. The Eighth Numbers will only be affected as long as they’re connected. If any of them get too destructive, I’ll just have it removed.” The Doctor had a way of making his methods sound so simple that it made you feel foolish for not thinking of it yourself. 

Still, the mere sight of the energy gave him a guttural sense of foreboding. But once the Doctor had set his mind to something, the only person in the world who could talk him out of it was himself. So Shadow dutifully took the first capsule, ready to prepare it for installation-

As soon as it was in his palm, his entire body seized up. An almost primal fear he could not find a source for whited out his higher functions, and he dropped the capsule a moment later. His systems were ringing with alarms for some sort of intrusion, some sort of imminent danger, but were unable to actually identify any threat. It was either a false alarm, or whatever made its way in had hid itself as soon as it appeared. By the time Shadow had regained enough of his wits to register his surroundings again, he found himself on his knees, one hand steadying himself against the floor, the other tightly grasping his own chest. 

“What the hell did you do!?” He retroactively heard as his processor caught up with the momentary lapse. 

“I. . . I’m sorry, I’m not. . . sure,” the words awkwardly fell out of his mouth as his senses came back to him.

The capsule had rolled a good distance from him, but he could still make out a small crack in the glass. They were intended to withstand battle, such a small drop should not have damaged it at all. Had he done that? The Doctor was standing over him, and he had known his master long enough to be able to tell when there was genuine concern behind the usual annoyance. He swiftly got to his feet and reached for the discarded capsule to placate Dr. Wily, only for the Doctor to swat at him.

“Don’t touch that. It’s only a sample, but I don’t need it causing havoc in any of you dimwits’ systems uninhibited. Go fetch one of the drone units to absorb it, they don’t have the brains or the brawn to be any kind of real threat.” There was a pause as the Doctor waved him off before he added, “I’ll run a general system check on you when you get back.”

“Of course.” Shadow said nothing further as he began fading into the darkness cast by one of the nearby tables.

His own scan had turned up nothing, so he certainly hoped he had simply let go of the capsule before it could infect him, but it was paramount that they were absolutely certain. They had all seen how quickly this energy spread throughout the earth and affected its inhabitants. He would have to be careful not to interact with anyone along the way. They did not need another eldritch apocalypse so soon after the last.

> . . .

> . . .

> . . .

> playback ended

#((been waiting a bit to get this off the ground)) #((I think I’m ready)) #[GHOST IN THE MACHINE] | story arc #(( :) )) #[ONLINE] | ic #[ECHO IN THE MIRROR] | Shadow #[MEMORY FILE] | plot

[pageliveblogscomics]

So as I mentioned in that post a bit ago, that I haven’t discussed the Fantastic Four’s actual abilities is a crime. So the Fantastic Four’s abilities are based on the four classical elements, and I know I heard that somewhere, but I think it really helps establish their abilities as interesting and unique while also not feeling totally random. But what I really love is how their abilities relate to those elements.

Ben is turned into an inhuman monster made of his element, but he could have gained the ability to cover himself with rocks to transform into the Thing at will, like how Johnny does, or have the ability to manipulate and throw around rocks, also like Johnny. Or he could have gained the Thing’s strength and toughness without a transformation, sort of like how Reed got the flexibility of water. Or he could have gained the ability to become immovable at will, getting the ability to take on a trait of the element like Sue. Or he could have gotten the ability to burrow through the ground.

Reed could have become a blob of liquidy slime, a Thing made out of water instead of earth. Or he could have been able to generate and control water like Johnny. Or become invisible I guess, since water is see through. Maybe he’d have more of an imperfect camouflage though.

Sue could have completely vanished, a la the Invisible Man. She could gain the ability to fly, or create a whirlwind around her, or shoot blasts of air. Or solidify air into blocks ;). Or she could have gained the ability to assume a gaseous form which couldn’t be harmed by normal means.

Johnny could have become the human torch full time, unable to use or work on cars anymore, depriving him of his main hobby and ability to live a normal life. Or he could have gained the ability to emit just light with no heat element. Or he could have become faster and stronger.

It would have been so easy to just give them all the same power but with different elements, just being an earth/water/air/fire bender, but instead, these different associations with the elements mean that you can switch around their powers somewhat while also preserving their elements and get a completely different team.

You could have, picking one example of each from up there, the Invisible Woman, who is invisible all the time and has to wear bandages over her face the Human Dynamo (who I swear was a real supercharacter already but I can’t find) with increased speed and strength, the Immovable Wall, who can can plant his feet and become impossible to move, and Mr. Fantastic who can create and manipulate water.

#page liveblogs comics #Fantastic Four #Human Torch

[faunawoodsart]

David and Goliath

LoL Oc Fanfic

Large blackened metal boots crashed through the now dying landscape. A green gas oozed out of the cracks and crevices in his armor. That same green gas made up what would be his eyes. Slowly looking around the lands infront of him. He was back. Those who had forgotten would wish they had not. But before he could fully enact, he had to take care of something… Something was clearly watching him.  

“Are you going to show yourself? Or are you too afraid to show yourself to do so?” 

His deep voice rumbled beneath the helmet. He turned around to the sound of rustling dead grass behind him. The smaller figure stepped out of the grass. Their armor was much newer and clearly had not seen battle. But the sword they held had a much different look to it. It was littered with massive cracks and scratches.This interested the revenant. He slammed his mace to the ground besides him. 

“You have a lot of guts to fight me alone tiny mortal…I like that. If it is a fight you want, I will give you a fight!”

The smaller figure stayed silent. Only bringing their sword out to the side of them, the cracks glowing green. The smaller figure darted twords Mordekaiser. Mordekaiser brought up his mace and swung. Smashing right into the smaller figure, sending them flying but landing on their feet. Sending up a cloud of dirt. Mordekaiser brought his hand up and pulled it twords himself. With that movement, a massive ghost hand cameout from the ground and did the same movement. Pulling the figure twords him. The figure took this as a moment to launch themselves at him. The sword separated. Being held together by a green aura. She plunged the sword into one of the openings of Mordekaiser’s armor. Mordekaiser grabbed the sword and laughed. “Nice try.” 

He pulled it out and threw the sword along with the smaller figure. He then brought up his mace and swung it down. The smaller figure got out of the way quickly. Not getting squashed. The smaller figure’s sword separated. The fragments flew twords Mordekaiser’s neck. Going through it.The fragments came back. Shooting through Mordekasier’s neck once more. Combining back with the sword. Despite what it would do to a normal person. It did nothing to Mordekasier. And in a split second, the smaller figure’s head was knocked clean off. Hitting the ground with a thud. The body falling flat onto the ground.Mordekasier let out a hum.

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to put up a fight.”

As he started to walk away, he could hear the sound of something dragging behind him. A scream rang out from behind him. It was gutteral. It sounded painful.It almost sounded like a balloon loosing air. It made him stop in his tracks. If he had ears, they would be ringing. He turned around to see the smaller figure darting twords him, their head now back on their body. How? He thought he killed them. This intreauged him. The sword clashed with his mace. But Mordekaiser was much bigger. He was able to push the smaller figure off. Throwing them to the ground. Their armor sounded like falling pans when they hit the ground. Mordekaiser brought his mace up once more. Swinging it and knocking the smaller figure’s head off. This time he was sure they were dead. He turned his back and started to walk away again. This time he got slightly further than he did before. Before a gutteral feminine voice screamed out in a language he had spoke once. “WHY DIDN’T YOU SAVE ME. YOU LEFT ME TO DIE!! MONSTER!!” Mordekaiser stopped walking. His mace started to shake. His gaseous eyes began to dart slightly. It started screaming again. But no words were heard. Only the sound of someone screaming as they are being beheaded. He began to shake worse. He turned around quickly to see the small figure picking up their weapon. 

“You think it is funny to torment me you insignificant swine!” 

His mace swings began to get messy and uncoordinated. He missed more than he hit. This made it easier for the smaller figure to hit him and do damage. Sending Mordekaiser back a few inches. Mordekaiser swung again. Hitting the head and it fell a few feet away. He brought his mace up and smashed it. It now looked like a metal dinner plate. His shoulders fell.

 Relieved. 

The sudden sound of metal boots behind him made him tense up. He turned around and was met with orange eyes staring back at him. Her black hair cropped at the neck. His gasous eyes widened…

“No…”

#Lol oc #Leauge of legends oc #Leauge of legends loreley #Lol loreley

[magnumversum]

La Vie De Fête Season 1 Episode 6: Presto

RATED PG-13

There were six shadows, circling around the two of them, Joran and Rasheb Nevim. The alternating red and blue lights from police cars became brighter and brighter as they pulled in closer. Police officers waited outside of the prison, hollering and shouting at each other. The six investors, who Joran and Rasheb just discovered the identities of—except for The Cryptic, who sat in his own little corner of the room—had Joran and Rasheb trapped.

They either had to fight their way through the six investors and break Justin Williams out, or let the police do their job. The police weren’t making the first moves though. Panicked police captains and the town’s sheriff deputy stood outside, clearly not on Joran’s and Rasheb’s side. Ambulances, with their own buzzing yellow lights illuminating the dark visitor’s room, pulled up. Medical workers jumped out, joining the officers.

Rasheb knew that their only shot at breaking Justin and themselves out of the high security prison was to get through the seven investors of the corrupt investment conglomerate: Global Cultivation Worldwide Confidential. There were helicopters in the air, police cars and SWAT vans on the ground, so the only way out was through the nasty, grimy sewage system, which Justin had seen enough of already. With the press of a button, boom. The tiled floor gave way, revealing a small tunnel where grime passed through beneath it.

Rasheb and Joran jumped into the sewers, being tailed by the seven investors. They turned left, then left again, until they were right beneath Justin’s cell, where he himself waited. Genevieve Jones took the opportunity, jumping into the air, unsheathing her katana and striking Joran’s knee. He tripped, hitting his face on the cold pavement.

Rasheb picked him up, threw him over his shoulder, and ran down the nasty tunnel. He was about a mile from the fresh air of the outside world, and he had to keep moving. Gunfire came from the end of the tunnel. Rasheb ducked, pulled out his gun, and popped back up.

He fired away, moved further down the tunnel and hunched down. In his estimates, he guessed that there were about twenty one men: six in the tunnel to his left, and six waiting to the right, at nine at the end of the tunnel. Noises of sirens and panicked visitors hovered above his head. He stumbled into the right corridor.

Instead of the six he expected, all twenty one waited for him there, flaunting their katanas. He pointed at them, closed one eye, and fired. A carefully pointed gun left them all on the floor. The end of the hallway was so close, but so far. Seventeen men waited for him at the tunnel’s end with machine guns.

He ducked behind a corner. For a second, he tried to size up his opponents, but backpedaled. Sirens got louder and louder. The three of them were only burying themselves deeper into the maze.

Before he could think, something pierced his hand, and his mind. A small whisper, quieter than an owl in an asleep forest, guarding, watching. He turned around, pushed Charlie Tinman away. As soon as Joran regained awareness, he got to his feet, startled by the ammo shells quickly flooding the halls.

There were more men waiting at the end, and Justin was starting to look nervous. “We’re trapped. We’ll never make it out.”

“No,” Guy Red said, reaching into his pocket. The quiet voice filling the back of his mind began to reveal itself. “We’re not stuck here with them, they’re stuck here with us.” Time slowed down. All was still; all was silent.

The two moved down the tunnel slowly. The mob waiting for them at the end grew. The two: an ex secret agent, and a vigilante clad in red light, made their way down the tunnel like creeping snakes. The mobsters waiting at the end couldn’t trace the two’s footsteps over their own trampling of the marsh until they attacked.

They crept through the mob, carving holes in the mobsters’ tough leather jackets. Gaseous fumes arose from the brawl. Mobsters trying to run away were quickly dragged back into the fumes. Blood and guts mixed with the marsh below their feet, forming a disgusting stew of innards. When the smoke cleared, there stood Rasheb Nevim, donning a black motorcycle helmet, motorcycle jacket and jeans with smears of red; and Joran, drenched in the murky yellow sewage.

Then, the ceiling above them gave in, trapping them beneath the jail grounds, and keeping them in the sewers a little while longer. Six shadows quietly slipped around the corner, the six investors Joran and Rasheb had been chasing. Until law enforcement officials could get to them, it was Rasheb, Joran, Justin, and the six investors trapped in a tense cat and mouse chase, digging through piles of dead bodies until they could throw hands. There was just an hour of sunlight left, but they didn’t know that.

They were stuck underground, making their way through the clutter of waste and gore. The sewage tunnels weren’t used since the 2000s, when the penitentiary cleared out all of the waste. Instead, it became a dumping ground for inmates, who deposited leftover food and illegal items. Joran even found a packet of heroin, lying next to some cigars and a pack of instant ramen.

Joran, Justin, and Rasheb moved slowly but surely, making out some of the inscriptions inmates etched into the walls during botched prison escapes as they crept down the tunnel. There was only about fifty five minutes of sunlight left, but they didn’t know that. As far as they were aware, the Sun was still out, and it was right in the middle of the afternoon. The sewers were dark and mushy, and didn’t let much of the outside world in, apart from the peepholes in the cement, which let in small tinges of blue.

The three were below a river. The sounds of water running down a hilltop boomed through the sewer tunnels. At the end of the corridor was a bright red sign, indicating the exit. Finally, they felt liberated, as the shallow stream could be seen from the back of the tunnel, and a warm beacon of light, the glistening setting sun, burned down on the face of the sewer exit.

But as the three of them made their way through the marsh, they heard the swift strokes of a katana, until it eventually reached Joran’s neck. “Did you miss me, Joran?”

Joran muttered, stepping back, “Henry Jones. I always knew you’d come back for me, but I didn’t know when. How is the House of Jones after the gala scuffle?”

“Operations were going smoothly until the gala happened. Half of my face got blown off.” Henry Jones reached into his pocket. “Then things started going downhill. My involvement in the gala event made it quickly into mainstream news, and I had to work more behind the scenes.

“The world learned of Presto Industrial’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and we had to go under a new name: Global Cultivation Worldwide Confidential. Me and the sixty five other investors had to be creative in how we orchestrated events, and things weren’t smooth. There was infighting and turbulence, until The Cryptic settled everything.”

“I always had a hunch that you were involved in the attacks,” Joran said, reaching his hand into his jacket. “You worked with Al-Qaeda because like them, you wanted to see our country and its star spangled banner burn.”

“You worked with me, and you worked with Genevieve, Keshin, and Marten.”

“Yes, but I never orchestrated the attacks.” At the same time Henry pulled out a handgun, Joran went for the pistol at his side. “The difference between you and me, Henry, is that I don’t kill innocent people. I only worked for you until I knew about your involvement.”

“There isn’t a difference between you and me. We’re all the same, Joran: convincing ourselves that the person we killed is in the wrong. We all believe that—” He dropped to the ground, with a pool of smoke rising from his chest.

Rasheb stammered, “H—he left us with no choice, Joran. Once I learned about how he helped plan the stuff with the planes and the t—tower… his lack of remorse made me pull the trigger.”

“I understand.” Joran hugged him, as he fell onto Henry Jones’ lifeless corpse, soaked in a puddle of blood and tears. It shook in reaction to Rasheb’s shaky feet. “It’ll all be okay.

“Everything will work out, Rasheb. I promise you, everything will work out. It’s over now.”

“Your Honor, I was brainwashed and turned into a terrible, terrible killer,” Joran said to the CCA magistrate. “But now I am a changed man. I am simply looking to do good, and to make amends with the people I’ve hurt. I’m aware that I’ve destroyed the lives of a lot of people, intentionally and unintentionally, but I will do whatever it takes to set things right. And most importantly I want to take back what they took from me, and I can only do that with the help of this agency.”

“Very well then.” The magistrate banged his gavel. “From here on out, you are pardoned, and are invited to work for the Crime Control Agency once more. The court is dismissed.”

Joran rose from his seat and looked into the gallery. Rasheb sat there under the yellow glare of the sunset, with a sly smile plastered across his face. There was a sense of restoration, finally. Everything felt fixed.

Everything felt correct. It all felt perfect that night. As Joran lay in bed that night, looking at the reflection of the glimmering moon in his mirror, he wondered what tomorrow would bring. He looked at himself, and his unbuttoned vest, and the scars on his shoulders from the past week.

He remembered Nevim, and Dorothy Hoffs, and Armstrong, and Harlow Greene: The Accuser; and The Superpeople: Mariq, and the elf, and the donkey man and the screaming man, and the scientific anomaly, and the bumblebee queen; and all of his friends. And as he lay in his bed, thinking about all of the people he loved, and all of the people who loved him back, he felt a deep presence looming over him he hadn’t felt in a long time: a sense of tranquility, and a sense of self worth.

And as Joran lay in bed to ponder, as he lay in bed to drift into a deep sleep, Rasheb Nevim lay awake in his motorcycle shop, with all of his spare parts cluttered around him, and his motorcycle helmet removed, gazing into the starry night sky, thinking about his conquests, and looking into the future. Donning the helmet, fighting off criminals, dabbling in the way of the forest, and now, he had his home back. Then he looked out into the distance, spotting the blue street lamps of Kasambine, dotted along the landscape, and the red lights scattered along Vishingland's piers.

[mr-smith-stories]

Mr. Smith #13: Psychology Class

It was a beatiful June day, close to the end of the accelerated semester for Mr. Smith’s psychology class. Mr. Smith and his friends waddled across campus on their way to class, because Philip claimed it “looked cooler to walk like ducks.” Mr. Smith wasn’t sure ducks even waddled- he was pretty sure they hopped and ate carrots. But he still followed Philip’s lead.

Today Mr. Smith and his friends had to present their group project for psychology. They had to write an essay on mental health in contemporary society, and make a powerpoint explaining the main points.

Mr. Smith waited outside his class with his friends, early probably for the first time in his life. Three students approached the class. Mr. Smith gasped. “Look!” He shouted to Philip. “It’s the GAY GENIUSES! And that other person! Help! Don’t let them see me!” He cowered behind Philip.

Philip did a double take. “Leo and Ritchie? Oh shit! You hide me!” Philip ran behind Mr. Smith. They spent several moments running behind each other, until finally Alex, Leo and Ritchie reached the classroom.

“What are you idiots doing?!” Asked Ritchie.

Mr. Smith pulled his hat over his eyes. “Help! He’s smarter than me!”

Leo rolled his eyes. “You’re a total moron. Please get out of the way, you’re blocking the door.”

Mr. Smith planted his feet firmly in the ground. “No! I refuse to be condescended to by someone smarter than me!”

The professor approached the door. “Mr. Smith, you’re blocking the entrance,”

“I’m not Mr. Smith, I’m Christopher Columbus.” Mr. Smith said, his hat covering his face.

“Christopher Columbus is dead,” Said Leo.

“I’m not dead, I’m immoral,” Said Mr. Smith.

“I think you mean immortal,” Said Leo.

“I don’t know what that is,” Mr. Smith scratched his head in bewilderment, lowering his hat.

“If you’re Christopher Columbus, why do you look exactly like Mr. Smith?” Asked Alex.

“I got rhinocerous- plasty,” Said Mr. Smith. “To look exactly like Mr. Smith, my best friend.”

“I think you mean rhinoplasty, and that is just a nose job.” Leo said.

“What is a nose?” Asked Mr. Smith.

“Please move out of the way, Mr. Smith,” Said the professor.

“No, not until you admit I’m Christopher Columbus,” Said Mr. Smith, stamping his foot.

“Fine, Christopher Columbus. Please step aside.”

“Ok,” Said Mr. Smith, moving out of the way.

They all entered the classroom, and Mr. Smith and his seven friends all went to the front of the room to begin their presentation. Frankie began, “Our presentation is on the government conspiracy of mental illness and mental health.”

Leo raised his hand.

“Yes, devil spawn?” Mr. Smith asked.

“Mental health is NOT a conspiracy! Mental illness is a legitimate issue in modern day society.” Leo said.

“What does modern mean?” Asked Mr. Smith.

“Mr. Smith, please continue your presentation.”

“Mental illness was invented by the government to press the poor. That way the government can increase social inequality and conquer Jupiter,” Bob explained.

“Don’t you mean ‘oppress’?” Asked Ritchie. Mr. Smith shushed him.

“Jupiter is a gaseous planet. How could it be conquered? It can’t support life,” Alex said.

“They don’t have gasoline on Jupiter, they only use solar powered cars,” Said Philip.

“Jupiter is ruled by my kind, the kitty cat Jupitan race. The government wants to take it over and liberate the cats from their kitty overlords.” Kitty explained.

“Rules are annoy-ing,” Said Susan. “I had to follow rules in high school and when I didn’t, I would get suspended. I messed up the plumbing at my high school on purpose and flooded it, and I got expelled. It was annoy-ing.”

Amy gasped. “So annoy-ing! That happened to me too!”

“You’re seriously unintelligent,” Said Leo.

“Shut up, devil spawn! We did a lot of hard work for this presentation! We read TWO of my father’s wikipedia articles!” Mr. Smith stamped his foot.

“Please continue your presentation,” The professor said.

Simon then suddenly burst into tears. “What’s wrong?” Asked the professor.

“That girl in the front keeps laughing at our presentation. I have to go cry in the bathroom now!” Simon ran out of the room.

“Anyway, mental illnesses must not be real, because a lot of them are big words. The government just wants to confuse us,” Said Mr. Smith. “Now we will explain why some of these so called illnesses are not real.”

Philip clicked a button on his remote and said, “Depression is really hard to spell. I can never remember if it’s one or two s’s. If it’s that confusing, it doesn’t exist.”

Philip clicked another button. “Another one is antisocial personality disorder. This means someone who is shy. I found a WebMD article that had too many words to read them all, so it must not exist.”

Bob added, “The government wants to distract us from its mission to conquer Jupiter. If we all unite to overthrow the government, the kitty cats will be able to live in peace. That is the end of our presentation, because even the wikipedia articles had too many words to read them all- two paragraphs each.”

The professor addressed the group. “You have put no effort into your work. You scored a zero.”

Mr. Smith grabbed the remote from Philip’s hand and threw it across the room. Then he knocked over the projector, and ran over to a student near the window. He picked up the student and yelled, “Out the window you go!” but couldn’t hold his weight and they both collapsed to the floor. “Help!” Mr. Smith yelled. The student climbed off and Mr. Smith tried to get to his feet, but forgot how to get up. He crawled around on the ground for several minutes, then grabbed a desk to hoist himself up, but each time it slipped from his grasp and he fell. “Help! I look so stupid!” He yelled.

Finally, someone helped Mr. Smith to his feet. “I look so stupid! This is YOUR fault!” He pointed at the professor. “And it’s BOTH OF YOUR FAULTS!” He pointed at Leo and Ritchie. “I quit!” Then he ran from the room, but forgot how to open the door and crashed into it several times before Philip opened it. “Goodbye, you stuck up pretentious assholes!” He yelled, and then ran away and changed his major to math.

Fin.

***

#pretending to be christopher columbus so you don’t get in trouble with your professor #and then they play along just to get you to behave #changing your major to math because you realized you’re not the smartest person in existence #because math is so much easier #good luck in calculus mr. smith #you’re gonna need it #silly story #funny story #parodies #relentless mr. smith #mr. smith #mr. smith story #philip and simon #amy and susan #leo and ritchie #adorable gay geniuses #we love a gay genius king #and there’s two of them #gay #fictional gay couple #cute gay couple #fiction #original story #kitty #bob and frankie

[amanofhamm]

Croc and Orca kick back after eating half their bodyweight in food.

Dinner time with Killer Croc and Orca was a sight to behold. Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, depending on who you asked. Almost like an even more voracious version of Discovery Channel. Being two big, hulking, animalistic, metahuman monsters, both creatures possessed unmatched appetites.

So when dinner time rolled along, both Croc and Orca were plowing through their meal like famine was fast approaching. The two didn't so much eat their food as they did inhale it. Fast food meant to satisfy entire families went down their thick gullets so fast, it was like gobbling nuggets to them, by comparison.

Now, Killer Croc had always been a ravenous glutton, being the born and raised metahuman that he was. But for the creature once known as Dr. Grace Balin, this was something she still had to get used to. Her bulky, mutated body had an appetite that wouldn't quit, no matter how much she tried to moderate her meals. After a while, she opted to just concede and give in to her gluttony. And to say she embraced it would be an understatement.

The two tore through their enormous meals. Tons of burgers, extra large pizzas, some various side dishes and a few dozen salads, in Grace's case. Eventually, it all vanished down into their rapidly expanding bellies, until none remained.

Killer Croc groaned contently. His huge, scaly belly bulged out so heavily that it almost looked like Croc had swallowed a really big rock. Thoroughly satisfied with his meal, Killer Croc lazily slumped back against the concrete wall of his underground lair, and let out a huge belch.

"BWUUUUUUURRREEEEEEELLLCH!!!!!"

It rumbled forcefully throughout his makeshift living quarters and left him sighing with relief.

"Grooooaaahhh man, I'm stuffed..." Croc moaned, patting his belly in a deeply satisfied manner and letting out another short but deep burp. Its scaly surface rippled with each pat he gave.

"Urgh, you and me both, Waylon," Orca muttered. She didn't fare much better than Croc did.

The former marine biologist turned mutant monster woman groaned in a deeply overstuffed state when she slumped back next to her bloated, scaly boyfriend. Her blubbery belly was massive. It had rounded out by well over four feet, forcing her to spread her smooth, thick thighs apart just to give that massive beanbag chair of a belly she was rocking some breathing room. It looked noticeably fatter than Croc's bloated gut too, not just in size, but in the thickness of her belly and the way it sank into itself a little bit more. Her whale anatomy meant she had a lot more blubber to go around, despite being so muscular in appearance.

Orca huffed and slowly ran her hands all across her giant, silky belly. "Urrooorgh, I'm so full..." Orca huffed.

Then her blubbery belly gave a thick, gaseous gurgle. Orca grimaced and held a hand over her mouth, but she knew it would do her no good. Not when a surge of pressure bubbled up her throat and forced her maw to gape open with a giant, wall-rattling belch of her own.

"HHAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRROOOOOOOORRRRRRRRUUUUUH-AAAAAAAAAAARRRUUUUUULHP!!!!!!!!!"

The sheer force of Orca's belch was so strong that it blew her hand back and made Orca's fat belly ripple heavily with her intense eructation. It blew out of her so loudly that it echoed all throughout the underground. And it surpassed Croc's own eructation in both volume and especially length, as it blasted past Orca's lips for nearly eight seconds.

At first, Orca would've been deeply embarrassed, blushing profusely and excusing herself to thin air itself. Instead, she groaned and gave her belly a relieved slap which made it jiggle and slosh heavily. It was a decidedly unladylike display.

Croc whistled and gave Orca's belly a few pats of his own. "Damn. Nice one, babe!"

Orca hiccuped from the pats and lazily gave Croc a thumbs up.

The two, deeply bloated monsters sat there, nursing their huge, overstuffed bellies as they churned and gurgled heavily. If Croc had sweat glands, he'd be sweating bullets with how full he was. "Urgh...no wonder Harl keeps callin' me a beached whale..." Croc mumbled groggily and rubbed the middle of his glutted gut in a strained yet satisfied manner.

Orca muffled a thick burp behind her fist and grunted. "Mph, I resemble that remark," Orca muttered sarcastically, stifling another deep burp that rumbled in her cheeks audibly. "Remind me to thank her for the meal though...might be difficult for either of us to place an order like this..."

Croc snorted. "Ya kiddin' me? All ya hafta do is just march into 'Big Belly Burger'n' tell 'em t'whip up a hundred burgers or they're gonna be on the menu instead. Works every time!"

"...I'd rather not devour kid trying to save up for a new, used car, thank you very much," Orca replied.

"Tch, ya don't hafta actually eat 'em, babe. But ya'd be surprised how much ya can get from people if ya threaten t'eat 'em," Croc said, snickering in amusement after. The snickering made his turbulent belly jiggle about, which disrupted some more pressure festering in his gut, which made Croc burp heavily.

Feeling another burp coming on right after that, Croc grunted then slapped his belly hard. He immediately threw his head back, and unleashed another ferociously loud belch.

"HHUUUUUUUUUUOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRHP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

That mighty eructation was so strong that it almost felt like the ground itself would start to quiver beneath them. It wasn't as long as that monster Orca let out earlier, but it actually surpassed it in volume.

When it ended, Killer Croc sighed heavily and went nearly cross-eyed with satisfied relief.

"Hoooooly crap, I needed that..." Croc uttered when suddenly, Orca's own belly let out a thick, gaseous gurgle that made Orca cringe. Croc turned to the source and smirked cheekily. "Sounds like ya got one brewin in there yerself, babe." Croc said and nudged Orca's belly teasingly.

The nudge caused a thick belch to expel from Orca's maw. But when it ended, she just huffed, unsatisfied. "Mph, still more in there," she muttered, thumping her chest firmly a few times and releasing another burp, but not one that brought her any relief.

Croc scooted his heavy rump right besides his blubbery girlfriend and decided to lend her a hand or two.

He placed his meaty palms right against Orca's huge, gelatinous stomach, which caused them to sink somewhat into her blubbery belly fat. Then Croc proceeded to then rub Orca's belly firmly all over.

Orca's eyes glazed over as she moaned in euphoric delight. His claws kneaded into her thick, silky flesh, really sinking into it while he compressed and massaged. She always had a very sensitive stomach, even as a human. But as a hulking whale woman, that sensitivity was dialed up to eleven, especially when her belly was stretched out and full to the brim as it was currently. Every sensation of Croc's scaly fingers kneading into her belly fat was enough to make Orca croon.

He felt the gas circulating in Orca's belly and continued massaging it all over. Croc's rough hands ran across the sides of that globular gut, using his claws to very gently brush against that extra delicate, silky flesh. Orca hummed with delight at the feeling and slumped back, which made her belly push out even further.

Croc rubbed circles over the middle of Orca's gut, using his thumb to knead around her incredibly deep belly button, another very sensitive part of Orca's stomach.

This continued for a while until Croc felt Orca's gut quivering beneath his palms. His own fat, scaly belly squished up against hers while he leaned into her gut, applying a lot of extra weight all at once. Then, he pressed down on Orca's blubber-laden belly firmly. His hands sank into her fat a good amount, and caused an intense gurgle to erupt from Orca's stomach.

This was followed immediately with Orca's pale white eyes going wide and her cheeks puffing out for a moment. Until she threw her head back and let out a colossal, record-shattering belch.

"BAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUURRRRRR-HHHAAAAAAAAUUUUUURRRRRRRRR-BWOOOOOOOAAARRRRRRRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

It was this monstrous, quake-inducing eructation that bellowed from the very depths of Orca's belly. The sheer volume was so great that not only did Croc flinch in its wake, but he was dead certain that people on the surface could probably hear his girlfriend burping so massively. And length was no joke either, well surpassing the ten second mark and beyond as the gas just kept on pouring out of her gaping maw all at once.

By the time it finally rattled to a finish, Orca was left panting breathlessly with her massive belly rising and falling with a thick glorp each time.

Croc sat there, stunned by what he'd just bared witness to.

"...Babe...what would'ja say if I told'ja that kinda turned me on a lil?" Croc asked in a tone that made it hard to tell if he was being cheeky or partially serious.

Whichever one it was, Orca looked back at him with an incredibly "over it" look in her weary eyes.

Then, she shrugged.

"...I would say that I've certainly dated weirder guys, Mister Crocodilian Metahuman..."

#ask #request #anon #killer croc #orca #bloated #stuffed #belly #stomach #gurgles #sloshing #burp #belch #possible burp kink #belly rub #belly play #stuffing #dc comics

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

HASO, “Confrontation.”

You guys have been asking me to writ this one for ages, and I finally got around to it.  hope you all enjoy :)

Sirens blare overhead. Red light pulsed in and out of existence as large white spotlights raked their way over the barren grey/purple ground. In the distance gouts of whie mist squirted up from craters in the moon’s surface filling the dark night sky with a gaseous haze. Off in the distance, chain gangs of aliens and humans alike worked to mine precious metals from the soil using pickaxes and drills under the supervision of strict and brooding alien guards, most of them Drev, some of them human supervised on more than one occasion by a uniformed Tesraki. Overhead, in the distant sky, lights winked on and off from the orbiting Kepler Station, where any visiting ships were docked.

No ships larger than a six person shuttle were allowed onto the surface  of the moon, and none were allowed within a ten mile radius of the A1 Supermax penitentiary fittingly nicknamed New Alcatraz. Where the Turma supermax facility on Noctopolis was known for its brutality, New Alcatraz was known for its security. The moon on which it was set had no other colonies and no other facility. It was an entire moon dedicated to a single prison. All of the employees who worked in the prison lived off-world on the Kepler Station.

No vehicles were housed at the prison itself, and when it was time for the emp;oyees to return to  the station, a vehicle would be dispatched from one of the garages on that ten mile radius to come pick up the employee, but only after the proper biometric readings were taken.

 New Alcatraz had been built after another facility breach that had involved infected starborn, a half mad, Gibb, and a couple of corrupt ex Drev leaders. Most of the prisoners had been moved here after the incident, and great precautions were being taken to see that such an event never happened again.

A single hover car sped over the surface of the moon, and under the darkened sky.

Four individuals sat inside two Drev and two humans, one of them driving.

As they approached the prison grew larger and larger in their vision an intimidating span of concrete, steel, razor wire, and laser webs which rose up into the sky and spread out across the moon like the roots of a great tree. They made it all the way o the docking bay where automated turrets controlled from the Kepler station followed them as they stepped out of the vehicle. The driver stayed where he was, leaving just one human and two Drev to be greeted by uniformed guards dressed in black tactical gear from head to toe.

They nodded to the human, who wore a pristine grey uniform and white belt, captains cap resting atop his head before greeting the drev, one of them inconspicuous despite his nine foot size in comparison to the smaller Drev, whose body seemed to glow with pearlescent light cast off by the beautifully crafted armor which she wore. None of them carried weapons, and so they were ushered over to the side of the docking bay where their biometric readings were taken. Retinal, fingerprint, Dna, weight, and body measurements taken by a massive and expensive machine who could detect the smallest change in a biological signature.

Sunny stepped out onto the cold floor of the prison armor clattering lightly as she did so.

Adam was waiting for her as was Cannon, his massive hulkin shape glowing red like blood in the near darkness.

Adam looked at her with some measure of concern, “Are you sure you want to do this, there is still time to turn back, forget about her.”

Sunny turned to look at him, “Are you implying that I can’t handle her?”

He tilted his head and frowned crossing his arms over his chest, “Sunny I KNOW you can handle her, but I am just letting you know that it is an option. You don’t have to grace her with your presence. By all means she doesn't deserve to see you.” he turned to look at Cannon, “Either of you, after what she did, and now that you are Sainted, she deserves to see you even less. She is not worthy of your presence as a parent or as a proprietor of your religion.’

Sunny tilted her head staring at the man who despite his aggressive posture -- feet spread shoulder width and arms crossed over his chest -- she found mildly adorable, with his lip jutting out definitely. Despite being Admiral of the entire GA and UNSC space fleet, the man didn’t exactly do intimidating well, at least not to her.

Cannon, who had stayed quiet up to this point added quietly, “Adam is right, she doesn't deserve to see us, and she thinks I’m dead after all.”

Sunny lifted her head, “Than you can wait in the lobby, but I am going to finish this, once and for all, closure.”

“If you go I go.” Cannon said stubbornly and Sunny huffed, blowing a large gust of air out from the holes in her neck.

She turned to look at Adam, “I suppose this means you’re coming too.”

“Unless you strictly ask me not to.”

She thought about telling him no, but decided against it. Having him by her side on a day like this was comforting. Despite everything that had happened between them over the last few months, they had recently fallen back into their same rhythm of behavior. Granted it wasn’t far along as it had one been, but the friendship sure hadn’t been lost, and the hope of getting back to where they once were was strong.

“No, you can come.”

He nodded brusquely.

“Then I have your back.”

She glanced over at her brother who nodded tersely in agreement, “Let's get this over with.”

***

General Kazna, or Cosma as she was known by the humans, sat on the floor in the middle of her sell. She did not move, she rarely moved these days. Muscle that had once been hard with battle was not atrophied away leaving her thin and brittle in her age. Even if she had enough room to move it wouldn’t have mattered: her legs: twisted and deformed as they could not bare her weight without great agony.

She was crippled.

In an act of revenge that had cut the tendons of her feet. She was what she had once despised, and here in this prison, they would not let her rest, they would not let her honorably fade into the blackness. They watched her day and night, they had stripped all objects from her rooms in an attempt to keep her from returning to the spirits. She had tried other ways, but her body had proven too strong, or the equipment too weak, so on one or two occasions, they had saved her life just to lock her back in this prison and leave her to rot.

She had tired to forgo water and food wishing to waste away, but te survival instinct of the Drev ran too deep over the long term, and she was unable to finish herself honorably. It was the worst punishment she could have thought of, to be left on the face of the world as a cripple unable to die.

And so she sat there in the darkness of her cell day and night dreaming of great battles she had once fought in, armies she had led, and…. The glory and happiness she had once shared with her dear beloved Lanus, dead more than half a decade now, his body decaying into the moss and stone of a bone riddled battlefield. Oh how she missed him, how she had missed him for two and a half decades as they grew apart, as his demeanor had soured towards her.

She thought it was that, which she regretted most of all.

She rocked back and forth slightly imagining his handsome gold carapace and his strong arms that had held her when they were young, when they were still happy. 

Kazna wished to be with him again, wanted nothing more than to finally give up this body so decrepit and broken.

Despite her misery and self loathing, she was not entirely useless, and with her sharp senses she still detected the soft clattering of four pairs of feet coming up the hallway, two of them drev, one of them human.

She sneered.

She hated humans, even more so than the day she had first met them in battle. It was THEY who had taken her home from her, THEY who had destroyed her life, and THEY who had killed her dear Lanus.

The footsteps walked forward, and she expected them to pass by her sell, but instead, they stopped before her, silent except for the shuffling of metal on metal.

She opened her eyes blinking owlishly in the light.

It was the armor that caught her eye first. She had never seen anything like it over the course of her lifetime, but she would have known it anywhere. Pearlescent, glowing like a fallen star from the heavens, the mark of the saints. For a moment she thought she was witnessing some sort of strange illusion, a spirit taken form from the heavens. The light bent and swirled around the body of the Drev, and it was only as her eyes adjusted and the light faded that she saw the face staring back at her.

A face she knew all too well.

She jolted back away holding herself up by just her hands, “You!” her voice came out as a strangled sort of yelp.

Chalan, Kazna’s daughter, looked back at her from under the helmet of a Saint.

“Kazna.”

Kazna covered her eyes, wiped at her face and looked up again, sure that she was hallucinating, sure it was all a lie, but the armor only seemed to glow all the brighter as she looks.

“I… it can’t be.” She whispered,”You’re not… you.”

“What? Not worthy? The Sentinel of the mountain begs to differ.”

Kazna started 

Chalan stepped forward face just opposite the humming barrier of energy, “I climbed to the top of the mountain and there I met the watcher Naktan, who helped me develop the new doctrine. Even as we speak it is being spread far and wide among the Drev.”

Kazna shook her head, “No.”

“Yes, the old ways are bringing us into the future mother, the true beliefs of our ancestors are being restored…. One of them, I think you might be interested to hear. The doctrine of the spear….which I am told is a doctorne as old as time and perverted by generations past, a doctorinthat says any Drev born with the ability to hold a spear shall be spared the fire.”

Kazna started, “What meaning does this have to me! Why are you here?’

Chalan stared at her impassively, nothing like the stubborn young Drev who had lived her life through impulse. This was the cold stare of a warrior, and Kazna couldn’t deny that.

“As a Saint, i might say that every Drev  deserves to know the truth, to hear about changes in our religion despite their status, but…. Honestly mother, my reasons are a little more pretty than that. You were wrong about me, and your hatred tore our family apart.” There was a shifting behind her and kazna raised her eyes to find…. But n… this couldn’t be right either, it was an apparition! A lie! This couldn't be real.

She struggled to her feet in such horrific pain tat she had to claw her way up the wall to get a better look, “Kanan….m...my son…. You can’t be real.”

The hulking shape stepped out of the shadow to reveal the truth. That iwas, in fact, her son, with his blood red carapace and eyes like his father, “But I am.”

They were both here, both of her children, and one of them sainted. It must have been a delirious dream. None of this could have been real, but deep down she knew it was, she wasn’t that far gone.”

Chalan tilted her head, “You’ve fallen far, mother.”

Kazna hissed, “Leave me to my peace!” She shrieked. She Turned her head in an angry whirlwind and as she did, her eyes fell on the figure standing just behind thm, diminutive in comparison to a Drev, with only two arms,and a very human face. She recognized him instantly, and flew into a violent rage that tossed her pain from her like a cloak. She slammed her hands against the barrier despite the shocks it sent up her arms.

“YOU,YOU MURDERER!”

The human stared at her impulsive but said nothing

She was livid spitting vitriol at the human who had killed her dear Lanus.

“How dare you betray him!” She said whirling on Chalan, “How dare you betray his memory, by befriending this, this THING.”

Chalan sneered at her, “You’re pathetic mother. Father died in fair battle, and I hold no grudge.”

“You disgrace, hiding behind the cowardly worm who killed your father. This maggot riddled spite filled unworthy creature!”

WIth a sudden jolt of movement chalan slammed her hand against the side of the wall causing kazna to stubble back and fall, “You will not speak of him that way!” her eyes glowed gold like fire and she seemed to grow larger with her anger despite her diminutive size. “You pathetic hate filled shadow. This human has showed me nothing but honor and respect, which is far more than you have ever done, and with my blessing he carries the legacy of MY father, who I KNOW would respect him as a warrior should.”

Kazna was so angry she could hardly speak.

“What is he to you.”

Standing across the barrier, both of thm shaking with pent up tension and rage.

With her voice tight like a rubber band, straining as if it were to break, Sunny leaned forward, “You will not speak of MY battle partner in such a manner.”

Kazna froze. The tension between them drew tight until it snapped completely.

She saw red, and white and black all in quick succession. She screamed until her voice broke and slammed her hand against the barrier. Her daughter with her husband’ MURDERER!

Kazna continued to scream until the guards rushed in, and she had to be restrained physically.

As she turned her head, she watched as the group of them were ushered away, but she caught Chalan’s eyes and as she did she watched as her daughter rested an affectionate hand on the man’s shoulder the look on her face one of wicked glee.

And then she screamed some more.

***

“So uh, mind telling me what the hell that was about?”

Adam drew to a halt as Sunny marched down the hallway, forcing them all to a stop Cannon looking almost as confused.

Sunny drew to a stop stiffly, “I’m sorry…. I just, I wanted to watch her hurt.”

“As much as I enjoyed her little tantrum,” Adam began, “I was last under the impression that you and I weren’t a thing anymore, unless there is something I missed and we are again, in which case I’m not complaining but….. It's kind of a hell of a way to find out, and admittedly not one that I particularly appreciate.”

She looked away.

“I’m not a fan of being used like that.”

“I’m sorry.” Shewhispered, “I got carried away…. And I...I guess I wasn’t as ready as I said I was.”

She looked up and with a good natured smile he shrugged, “As an expert in not being as ready as I think I am, I can forgive you.” He rested a hand on his arm, “Maybe you will listen to me next time I suggest it isn’t a good idea. I do have your back after all.”

She lifted her head and nodded, “I know.”

“Besides that…. Did it help Confronting her?”

Sunny paused and stared down at the floor.

“No…. it feels empty.”

Spite had brought her nothing 

And she felt no better.