#like reader is an eldritch horror who is human shaped

[doctorrabbit]

Do people actually imagine themselves when they read chatacter x reader fanfiction? Do they actually substitute Y/N with their real names, and any vague physical description (like “your h/c colored hair”) with their details of appearance?

I've always imagined Reader as this human shaped faceless person with gray skin, like artists usually draw anon x character arts. And I never could imagine myself as the reader. Maybe because default reader is a thin white girl with longish hair and big boobs.

But even when I read fanfiction with specified physical characteristics (like fat!reader, tall!reader, etc.), I still can't really get into it. Probably because reader's default personality is more boring and banal than cheese flavored chips. She is just snarky enough to not seem like a complete pushover (even though she is, in fact, a pushover), just nice enough to seem kind, just reactive enough to not be a wordless decoration and always, always submissive in the end, both sexually and socially.

And I’ve always thought that people did this too, because creating a “universal” character who is the ultimate self-insert for every single reader is impossible. Every person is unique, not only in appearance, but in personality, tastes, reactions, etc., and fully submerging yourself in the story is also impossible because sooner or later you’ll notice the differencies.

#x reader #lol imagine naming your oc something like yuun reader #hilarious #like reader is an eldritch horror who is human shaped #but you are unable to remember any detail of their appearance #body type race gender #hair eyes voice #even their clothes #and any footage files become corrupted #any photos are blurry

[earthry]

Papas and Reader!Familiars (Familiar AU Headcanons)

Alrighty here's my little AU idea where familiars are necessary to the Emeritus bloodline because they soak up any excess demonic energy from their bonded ones; preventing madness and corruption that can happen if there's too much in the papa's body. It's a mutual symbiotic relationship between a familiar and a papa. The Emeritus bloodline naturally generates demonic energy; this tends to boil over during rituals or other specific occasions. Too much demonic energy is harmful to its host. Familiars don't generate their own demonic energy but they need it to survive outside the pit; they're similar to ghouls but have an animal form-- when weakened they cannot take human form. When each Emeritus brother becomes a papa, a familiar is summoned for them to bond to. Familiars all have a demonic form if they have enough energy stored in them that looks vaguely like an eldritch horror. This is so they can protect their papas <3

tw: sfw, brief mentions of violence and injuries/blood, lots of fluff, this is the cute fluffy animal edition. might make another headcanon post with the reader as other animals depending on the reception of this one.

Primo

When Primo first summoned you, you were just a cute little ball of fur with huge eyes. The cutest fruit bat to ever fruit bat— that’s you! You may be half blind but you knew he was going to be yours the first time you saw him. With joy, you fly to his shoulder and then smack right into it, to which he lets out a panicked cry and manages to catch you before you hit the ground. You click happily at him. Your bonded protected you! This was very good news!

His gardening actually begins with you, wanting to grow fresh fruit and veggies for you to snack on. Lazy mornings and afternoons napping on his shoulder or in his pocket while he tends to his plants and trees. He talks with you sometimes, and you give him little clicks and chirps in response.

You spend an equal amount of time in your bat form as your human form— sometimes you garden with Primo. It’s a pastime that becomes special for the two of you, time spent together growing life and watching the flowers bloom.

Unfortunately you can’t attend his rituals because the noise hurts your sensitive ears too much— which you’re very sad about because you want to hear your papa sing. He makes this up to you by singing to you sleep most nights. Your favorite sleeping position is snuggled right on top of his head, sometimes laying straight over his forehead. He thinks it’s a bit much but if it makes you happy then who is he to complain?

Secondo

Was not sure what to do with you when you were first summoned for him. You are the most unlikely familiar for this man-- you are a bunny rabbit. You are so petite, so small. You fit in his hands and have soft little ears and a cute button nose that twitches when you're annoyed. You are also in bad shape when he receives you, injured and bleeding and barely holding on. If it wasn’t for the bond that formed between the two of you, you may not have survived.

Once he bonds to you, you heal a little faster but you're still very weak during your first few months on the surface. You were very distrusting of Secondo at first, biting and gnawing on his hands and fingers each time he got close-- but he persisted, bringing you all sorts of fresh delicious veggies to snack on, wrestling with you to change your bandages and make sure you're healing correctly. Eventually you warm up to him and now you're both practically inseparable.

You wear a silky beautiful green ribbon around your neck that claims you as Secondo's; everyone knows not to touch you for fear of Papa's wrath. He has pockets with soft lining sewn into all his papal robes so he can carry you around safely in his pocket.

You stomp angrily when you're upset and Secondo finds it way too cute to actually feel threatened. You often sleep on his chest over his heart or tucked into the crook of his neck. You love nothing more than his scritches behind your ears and when he gently rubs your little bunny tummy.

You're distrustful of other humans but you get along well enough with the ghouls. You're only in your human form around Secondo or ghouls. Secondo is fiercely protective of you. You may not be human but that doesn't mean you're particularly powerful or strong either (at least not to Secondo’s knowledge). You're totally fine with that because it means you get spoiled rotten by your papa. To him, you’re just a soft squishy little dude! You can’t fend for yourself you’re baby!

It’s only when your Papa is in danger, passed out and demonic energy in him rises dangerously that you rest your little head against his chest to soak up all that energy— and once you do, you don’t let anyone near Secondo. I imagine that at your most powerful you increase to the size of a large wolf and you’re like this scary demonic rabbit with extra eyes and sharp teeth and claws and people just fear you. You curl up around your bonded and snap your jaws and snarl at anyone who tries to approach. After that they call you a demon rabbit but Secondo doesn’t believe them. Like come on, a demon rabbit? You? You’re just a little guy, you couldn’t hurt a fly if you wanted to.

Terzo

You are a little bit of a brat and you love causing trouble— which honestly makes a little sense since you are a raccoon. You’re very poofy with a clever nose and fluffy tail. The first time you are summoned you promptly chomp down hard on Terzo’s ankle as a show of affection.

Unlike the other papa’s familiars, you prefer your human form when you’re in public which makes it easier to accompany your papa anywhere he goes. You’re not exactly pocket-sized, though you’re sure if you were it’d be a whole different story.

You love baths, love nothing more than soaking in bubbles and scrubbing yourself nice and clean. Terzo spares no expenses when it comes to you, so you have endless choices of essential oils, bath bombs, salts, and fancy soaps. Anything you want, you have it. He gives you a Etsy account with his card registered to it so that you can pick out whatever you want to pamper yourself with.

Your favorite place to sleep in your animal form is under Terzo’s shirt or robe when he’s wearing it, where it’s warm and you can rub your cheek against his squishy belly. Sometimes you burrow to the other side, poking your nose out of the collar and squeezing your head out, with Terzo’s chin resting on top of you between your ears.

You are in the middle of a long prank war with his ghouls and you are currently winning. Just last week you dyed Dewdrop’s hair hot pink and he’s been PISSED. Anyone else would have been dead meat but you’re lucky enough that he likes you. Aether is begging you not get him involved but you’re being crafty and trying to drag him into it somehow.

Terzo’s bed is your burrow, your cozy little nest. You steal all sorts of shiny bits and bobs from all over the abby and they wind up here, tucked and hidden away under blankets and pillows and each time Terzo goes to bed he has to do a check to make sure you didn’t take anything that would get you in trouble and to make sure he doesn’t sleep on anything dangerous.

Your favorite nights with Terzo are curled around his shoulders in raccoon form and chittering at him as he cooks for the two of you in his kitchen. Every so often when he’s not looking you’ll stick your little paws into whatever sauce or dough or sneak a piece or two of dinner-in-process and each time he catches you, you give him the biggest, widest ‘i’m so innocent you can’t be mad at me, look at me I’m just a baby’ look and he can’t help but kiss your little nose after he scolds you. Or even better when he catches you with a morsel or pasta noodle in your paws and you make eye contact while slowly bringing it up to your mouth while he goes: ‘tesoro— no. Don’t you dare. Don’t. Do not eat that. Put that down this instant or I swear—“ and then you shove it into your mouth and continue to stare at him while chewing slowly. Yeah you’re a menace but he loves you dearly.

Copia

You are a little itty bitty rat and Copia loves you and coddles you and spoils you so much. You were literally the perfect summon for Copia and the ministry took that as a sign of luck and prosperity for Copia's run as Papa.

He has a special little pillow for you to nap on by his bed but it doesn’t get used often. If he’s also sleeping, you prefer to nestle on top of him or in his arms. If he’s not there, you often go to snuggle with his other rats. The first time this happened Copia had a panic attack because he couldn’t find you and you were buried under his other rats in their cage so he didn’t see you until you woke up from his panicked Copia noises.

Much like Secondo's familiar, you prefer your animal form. You find it easier to stay by Copia's side plus he thinks you're so cute like this! He coos and aws at you whenever you do something extremely cute (which is almost everything) and you eat that shit up! Love? Affection? Yeah, rat form is best form in your opinion.

You have a close relationship with Copia’s ghouls, often sitting in to hear them practice or snuggling with them during their cuddle piles. They’re always very careful not to squish you— though there’s been a few scares.

You get round and pudgy from all the snacks Copia gives you, not that you’re complaining because now ‘you’re even cuter’ according to Copia. But he also worries about your health so he does actually cut down your snacks a little to your disappointment. You do a lot of angry squeaking and scrabbling and gnawing at his hands for it, to which he only chuckles a little, “Ah ah, come now little one, let’s not be too upset, si? I want to make sure you’re healthy, that way you can live a very long and happy life alongside your papa.” And okay, you guess if he puts it like that you can bear it for a little while. You still pout and sulk about not getting extra snackies like usual and he gives you kissies and extra cuddles to make up for it.

You love when he holds you in the palms of his hands, your tail curled around one of his fingers as your little paws hug another. Your eyes become happy crescents and you make contented squeaks as he scratches behind your ears.

#the band ghost #copia #terzo #secondo #ghoul #ghost band #ghost bc #primo #dew #papa emeritus iv #papa emeritus iii x female reader #papa emeritus i #papa emeritus ii #papa emeritus iii #papa emeritus i x reader #papa emeritus x reader #papa emeritus ii x reader #papa emeritus iii x reader #papa emeritus iv x reader #papa emeritus #cardinal copia x reader #cardinal copia #dewdrop ghoul #aether ghoul #headcanons

[clanwarrior-tumbly]

Well here is an ask of mine that I wanted to send but never had the chance to but could you do ilper egos (dark,actor,Yan,Jim and space) with reader who is a eldritch God/creature who is in disguise?

Dark

He knew the moment he met you and is like “hey I’m something of an eldritch creature myself..care to see?”

Both of you compare forms and yours lowkey nearly drives him mad since you’re leagues ahead of him when it comes to power.

As much as he hates finding someone more powerful than him, you two get along quite well.

He introduces you to the other egos, and it fascinates you how they’re all either human, half-human, robot, demons, and more.

Quite the array of characters. 

Actor

He’s dealt with the House Entities, which are most likely eldritch horrors in some way, shape, or form. 

So he’s completely unaffected by you.

Still, you prefer to keep up a human disguise out of consideration of humans who didn’t encounter your kind before. 

But you can show him glimpses of your true self if he insists (and he will whine about it so you have no choice).

He just stares and smirks like “that’s cute, so when are you taking me out to dinner?”

Yandere

Honestly you can reveal yourself as the most fucked-up cosmic creature who can easily evaporate/traumatize those unfortunate enough to gaze upon you..

And Yan would still call you adorable, absolutely worshipping you (as both a god and his senpai).

“Senpai you look beautiful no matter what form you take <3″

“..even if my true self were to shatter your mind?”

“Hehe, you’re so silly, senpai~” He giggles, giving you a kiss before skipping away.

You get flustered every time without fail.

Jim

“An interdimensional being of unimaginable horror?!! What do you know about all that is unknowable, O’great one???”

You’ve never met this man before in your life..how did he see through your disguise so easily??

You try to play dumb and just walk away, as to not unveil yourself in public.

Jim is insistent on following you like a lost puppy and getting answers no matter the cost.

Humans are very strange...they’ll risk it all just to have word with you. You never understood why these “reporters” did what they did.

Space

During one of his solo wormhole trips, Mark meets you in a reality where you became an eldritch alien/god thanks to the wormhole’s prolonged effects.

And is instantly disintegrated when he stares at your true form for a millisecond too long.

You’re like “really? Of course he’d be stupid enough to gawk at me..”

After rewinding time and restoring him, you approach him in your space suit, fully concealing your incomprehensible features.

“C-Captain? Nice uh..place you got.”

“Thanks. I haven’t heard that name in a millennia..it’s actually [insert long and complex name] now.”

“...oh, okay! Can I still call you Captain, tho?”

Yep. This was definitely your himbo of a head engineer, alright.

#clanask #iplier egos x reader #darkiplier x reader #actor mark x reader #actor x reader #yandereplier x reader #markiplier jim x reader #jim x reader #reporter jim x reader #space mark x reader #eldritch abomination #monster reader #headcanons

[hell-drabbles]

Possibly Eldritch!reader has the effect of Uncally Vally, I don't think their container is flesh if it is not created by God, possibly it is made of another material, maybe clay or maybe plastic, but also to create the illusion of human skin, She may be made of porcelain, but her appearance is still strange, perhaps in the way she walks somewhat rigidly, or could it be the strange shape of her shadow? No, not that, perhaps in the shape of her voice it seems to distort for a few seconds, no. It's definitely not that, but the real question is why is his skin so hard and cold?

Sorry for the late replies, getting them out of the way now.

Have you ever seen the way they bleed? I cut off their hand by accident one time, 'cause I forgot that humans are so delicate, and it was... weird? I don't know how to explain it. I know I cut off their hand! I had it right on my desk, but the blood was moving?

I don't know. All I know is that I got a big migraine for the rest of the day and I couldn't make it to the bar party. But it was weird! Took a while for the blood to come out. Kinda looked like sand? Dirt? Then it got all liquid-y like it probably should. And then it just started moving? I don't know.

...what? A prank? No! I'm not pranking you! I did! I did cut off their hand!

Wait, what? They fought with our king? And survived? With all their human body part intact?

Okay, now you have to be the one pranking me. I cut off their hand with paper! I saw it!

...wait what do you mean they're not human?! And they pranked me?! A full week migraine as a prank is just too much, you know...

Anyways, I like to think that while those with greater power have an inkling that the eldritch reader is, well, eldritch, but can't really do anything about it beyond just being generally cautious. Because they can feel Solomon in the eldritch, in that body that's overflowing with Solomon's own magic.

Lot of the other devils tend to think they're just another human, if a very weird human but who are they to judge? Oh? Solomon came out of them? Ah! Must be a very magical human then!

You know, classic horror protag logic. They'll catch up to the program eventually. After the Eldritch Reader is done with their "pranks."

They really like to test the limits of these devils, because, in the end, they know a way to avoid the potential consequences or divert said consequences onto someone else.

What they love most of all is testing the emotional relationships between devils. They're not... the best, that's for sure. Like messing with people's bonds to see if they come out stronger or entirely broken. And if they're broken beyond repair, they just consume the memories made and it's back to how the relationship once was. Nobody remembers, not even the people around them.

These kinds of situations have always been their favorite food.

#admin #eldritch inheritor au

[pickypicknoname]

[Yan. Warriors] - Concept: iron lung au, slow build horror with an unreliable narrator

TW: Yandere Themes, Weird Alien/Eldritch Abomination Biology - BODY HORROR, Clasutrophobic Themes, Past/Refrenced Death, and Allusions to death, MC/Reader is morally grey since convict.

THIS IS A WIP - VERY UNFINISHED

In the Earth’s deep sea, nobody can hear you scream or cry for help if something went awry. However, in your opinion, you would’ve probably had a better chance of survival or at least, having the higher probability of your corpse being found by someone.

(A decent chance of being laid to rest, something that you definitely don’t deserve after what you’ve done. )

The Earth’s bodies of water were already places of wonder. The vast ocean was a place that was barely known for all the years that humankind had lived in it, and the seas that gave so much weren’t much better.

In the end, humanity never got the chance to learn about their homes. The “Quiet Rapture” that made every habitable planet in the known universe vanish along with the people, plants and animals on them, never to be seen again.

The “Silent Rapture” occurred and all the stars disappeared too.

People went crazy for the depletion of leftover resources, committing atrocities for a single chance of surviving whatever this “apocalypse” was—yourself included.

It was, after all, how you landed yourself in this mess.

(It was either you or them, and you chose yourself over the rest of humanity. You didn’t want to, but you can’t die. You won’t die. Not like this.)

No trials were held after you committed the act. Instead, you had been led to an outside shuttle within a cramped ship. One that resembled the looks of a submarine.

A mission for humanity. A punishment for the greater good. A chance, they said - the same survivors who weren’t much better than you.

A chance for redemption and hope.

So, In you went and- now here you are.

Inside the ship The “Blue Bird” or “Fi”, as you begin to affectionately call her. It was cramped, dark, and suffocating inside the small ship, navigating in an ocean that was apparently made out of a liquid that was identical to blood. Deep red with a scent of iron and copper.

The planet’s name was something you couldn’t care enough to remember, but you couldn’t help but wish you had paid attention to the name or at least searched about the remaining planets before you committed a crime.

It was a simple mission: take pictures and write your findings in a journal. If the mission’ successful you’ll earn your freedom, if not you simply rot in some cage.

All it was was simply taking pictures and scribbling into your journal before ensuring you didn’t crash into anything. You pretty much had it in the bag, but you remained solemn, after all, it was an odd punishment that was probably leading to a horrific ending, or you weren’t even going to earn your freedom after said mission.

You pretty much committed a major crime that would’ve landed you in jail instantly had the world hadn't gone to shit.

Something was bound to go wrong.

And wrong it did.

The wailing of a radio that you hadn’t even noticed, the bursting of pipes within the ship, the dimming light of already flickering bulbs, the sudden fires of the ship, and the sharp thumps that echoed after you hit a wall after the ship began to slowly drift without any navigation.

However, all of the bad things that plagued Fi were not part of the major problem. Not even close.

It took a while before you noticed it with all the haywire mess within Fi, but eventually you finally noticed the odd occurrences around you.

The flickers of the pictures, the slow odd parts that showed within each photograph.

A shape that got somewhat clear inthe grainy photos that you took.

Something had been following you for a very, very long time.

Then it started to show itself, no longer following or caring to hide itself.

A sharp snarl echoed through the walls of the ship. shrill groans and blood-curdling screams ranged throughout the vast ocean. you forced yourself to stay calm as thuds and bangs hit the walls. How the sound of something scrathing and abnging at the ship grew louder and louder. How your heartbeat slammed inside your head, no longer even able to think with the rush of fear and adrenaline forcing you to write and take photos.

You took pictures. So many pictures, not to document it, but to scare it.

It’s a foolish idea since if you had a sliver of truth in your idea, then it probably meant that it was the pictures that alerted it and annoyed it in the first place, but you couldn’t think clearly. Not when said being was attempting to claw its way into the ship.

In the end, it didn't matter.

A sharp thud was all that heard before the burst of water and a piercing wail rang deep as the wall’s were ripped apart as you could only stare in horror.

Sharp, red claws pulled it apart and in came the horroric being that had been following you the entire time.

It’s large with a long, slender, almost serpentine body. Long curling claws dig into the metal walls of Fi. As it slithers forward you can see the vaguely monster horror come clearer with the flickering lights

The being is beautiful in a horrific way.

Its face held a resemblance to human beings, but it was rather obvious that it wasn't a human, not at all.

A gill like pulses, besides its throat, hair like appendages fell over its face that show deep glowing eyes staring back at you. A lantern hangs from the tip of its head, almost akin to the long gone anglerfish. There’s a row of sharp teeth that budge against its maw as it opens its mouth. Long translucent fins and scales scattered across its body. The body looks attached to the end of a fish.

A humanoid top connected to the lower bottom part that looks like a fish tail.

A mermaid, you can’t help think with a hubbling sense of hysteria, a fucking space mermaid.

You couldn’t even let out a scream before it sprang forward. It’s a sharp row of teeth being the very last thing you saw before the blood ocean swallowed you whole like the abyss had swallowed the planets and a large part of life whole.

#cw yandere #tw: yandere #tw yandere #my writing #concepts #yandere lu #rosie writes #fic concepts

[here4theheartbreak]

My Tentacle Romance (ksj)

AO3 Link Here!

Relationship: hamster hybrid!Seokjin x Eldritch Horror!Reader

Genre: smut, pwp | Rating: Explicit | Word Count: ~7.2k

Summary: You didn’t mean to scare him. You didn’t to fall in love with him, either.

Tags: agender reader, gender neutral reader, tentacle monster, first kiss, meet weird, and they were roommates, getting together, tentacles, tentacle monster, tentacle dick, come inflation, come swallowing, excessive cum, gagging, choking, dirty talk, oviposition, multiple penetration, multiple orgasms, switch!Jin, switch!reader, mild bondage (but with tentacles)

A/N: This fic was written for @aroseforyoongi​ both filling a request from my 2k followers event (”you need to stop pulling my tail”) and for Eva’s birthday! Happy birthday, ilysm!! 

A/N 2: The banner for this fic was made by the awesome @i-live-so-i-love​ - thank you so much!!!

The first time Seokjin saw you, he was terrified. Reasonably, you assumed; most people would have that reaction if a humanoid tentacle monster oozed from underneath their bed the first week in their new home. He didn’t need to throw that stupid book at you though. Books really hurt when the spine struck a sensitive tentacle tip. He also didn’t need to scream the way he did. Your ears ached for an hour after. You didn’t know a human male could make that sound. Well… Humanoid. 

He had looked human, at first glance. And then you saw his ears. They were large and round and most definitely not human. And his face – with a streak of light tan fur over his nose and a smattering of whiskers on his cheeks – You’d found yourself rooming with a hybrid of some sort. Which was okay, hybrids scared just as easily as humans, in your experience. But you were curious what kind of hybrid he was. Not that he would tell you, what with all the book throwing and screeching he was doing.

A few weeks later, you attempted to meet your reluctant roommate once more. You snuck out from under the bed once more and peeked over the bed, watching the handsome humanoid. He was lying on his bed, reading. At least it looked like he was attempting to read. He was squinting and turning the book this way and that. You spotted his glasses a few feet away and slid a tentacle out, snagging them and bringing them to the bed. You dropped them next to him, and he startled again, head whipping around.

“Don’t scream,” you said, plugging your ears in preparation. He put his glasses on and drew in a gasp of breath, mouth open to scream. “I said don’t,” you pleaded, one tentacle whipping out to cover his mouth. He promptly bit it. You screamed, that time. Who the hell thought biting a slimy black tentacle was a good plan? 

You yanked the tentacle back, holding it in your hand as it throbbed. “Why would you bite me, you fucking lunatic?!”

He spluttered, scrambling back into the far corner of his bed. “What are you?!”

“You don’t go around biting people, Jesus Christ, are you an animal?” You snapped, crawling the rest of the way out from under the bed. 

He squeaked, covering his mouth with both hands. You could see his chest rising and falling rapidly, and hear his heart racing. 

“Dude. Calm down. You’re gonna have a heart attack.” You glanced down at yourself, chuckling a little. “Just calm down,” you repeated. You shuddered a little; this was never an entirely pleasant experience. Bit by bit, you withdrew the multitude of tentacles from various parts of your body back into your skin. Your magic allowed you to appear in somewhat human clothing, simple pants and a shirt, though your left arm remained rather… Tentacle-y no matter how hard you tried to change it. “Is this better?”

His breathing seemed to slow a little. “W—What are you?” He asked again, letting his hands drop from his mouth. 

“I’m ___. I’m the Eldritch God that lives under your bed.” You grimaced, looking around. “What is that horrendous sound?” You asked. You spotted a radio on the dresser nearby, blasting some male voice screeching and snarling about dancing to the tune of someone’s death, loving, or something—A tentacle shot from your back and slapped the pause button on the noise. When the room was silent, you turned back to Jin and stuck your right hand out for him to shake, holding the tentacle arm your back. 

“Eldritch God?” He repeated. “Also, that was a good song.”

“Yep. I’ve lived in this area for hundreds of years. Scaring humans or… Hybrids. Just generally enjoying life. I’m a low-level god. Pretty young, so I just kinda have to find stuff to do until the end of the world. Scaring people is fun. Never had one bite me though… I won’t comment on the… musical taste.”

When he didn’t move, you blinked at him. “Don’t your kind shake hands? What’s your name? What are you?”

“Th—I— Jin. S—Seokjin,” he finally spluttered. “Kim Seokjin.”

You dropped your hand, realizing he wasn’t going to shake it. “Okay, Kim Seokjin. What are you? Those ears – Are you a mouse?”

“Hamster,” Jin murmured. His ear twitched and he pawed at it. 

He seemed to be relaxing a little. You approached slowly, raising your human shaped hand in surrender when he pressed himself against the wall. 

“Look, I live here, I’m not leaving,” you said simply. “This is my apartment!”

“I’ve lived here since this place was built. I think it’s technically my apartment,” you clarified. “Just because I don’t hand the humans money doesn’t mean I don’t live here.” You pouted a little as you spoke, wrapping your arms over your chest. “I don’t want you to leave. Humans need a place to sleep too. I just… Want to work something out.”

“Sure, leave.” Jin snapped, his whiskers twitching madly. “You smell like water and… Storms.”

“It’s the Eldritch in me, sorry.” You smiled a little sheepishly. “I’m not leaving. Normally I’d get my kicks scaring the shit out of the humans in this place, but I’ve never had one that had the gall to bite me. So I wanna work something out with you.”

“I’m a rodent hybrid. You scare us, we get nippy. Especially when we can’t see.” Jin crossed his arms over his own chest, mouth thinning into an annoyed line. 

“How blind are you?”

“Pretty blind.”

“I can’t see in the sunshine,” you said. 

“It hurts my eyes. They don’t dilate so well.” Jin touched his glasses. “It’s why the curtains are always shut.”

“I appreciate it, honestly. I can be in the sun, but it doesn’t feel good to bump into everything. Plus with tentacles… A little more of a hazard.”

“Those were tentacles…” Jin’s face contorted into an awful grimace. He slapped his hand over his mouth. “Oh God – I bit that thing. Was that like biting your dick? In the pornos—”

You truly couldn’t help it. You really tried, but you had never seen a human look so horrified. You doubled over in laughter, holding your stomach as you did. 

When you were able to right yourself, Jin was still staring at you, the horrified expression now blending with a shocked one. 

“Sorry, sorry,” you said between gasps of breath. “No, no you didn’t bite any of my genital tentacles; it’s more like an arm. They look similar though so I get the confusion.”

Jin’s eyes bulged comically. “Y—You have more than one? Are you…” He hesitated, seemingly searching for the right way to phrase it. “Boy?”

“I’m an Eldritch horror.”

“Right, but… Genital tentacles. Plural? You don’t…” He motioned to your crotch area. 

You chuckled. “I existed before the concept of gender and sex was even a flicker in the DNA sequence of the somewhat sentient slimes that would someday become your species. I’m a god, Seokjin.”

“But you look human,” Jin mumbled. You noticed his cheeks and ears had begun to take on a reddish hue. It was kind of cute. 

“Sure I do. I like this shape. But it’s not my true form.”

“What is?”

“Your eyes would burn from your skull and your brain would melt into sludge if you saw my true shape even in your peripherals. Why are you so pink?”

Jin blinked. “What?”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to a human, or a hybrid,” you explained. “I seem to have forgotten their ways a bit. And most of the time the color they change around me is a paler hue. Or purple, occasionally, when one has choked on something and been unable to breathe…”

Jin swallowed audibly. “Ch—Choke on something?” 

He touched his mouth, his cheeks brightening more. You could hear his heart thudding rapidly. That was a familiar scent… You moved forward a little, surprised that he didn’t shy away, and sniffed. Oh. Oh. You smirked.

“Hm…”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing.” You backed up, letting him relax a little. “Well, I’m going back to my space. Perhaps next time I come out, you won’t screech at me.” You sank down and Jin scrambled up.

“Wait!” He reached out, touching your shoulder before you slid under the bed. His hands were firm. And big. You felt your own body begin to warm up. 

“Yes?”

“What is your space? Do you just… Live under my bed?”

“In a way. I live in the depths of the shadows under your bed that allow my form to transcend the plane of this existence and rest in an area of my own design.”

Jin blinked owlishly at you. “Uh…”

“Portal. To another dimension. Under bed.” You spoke in simpler terms, assuming his humanoid mind was unable to compute. He nodded slowly, ears twitching.

“So when you’re in there… Can you… See up here? What I am doing?”

“If I choose.”

“Well, don’t choose.” 

You blinked, scowling a little at the firmness of his tone. What did he mean by that? Was he intending to tell someone about you? That would be a problem. Most humanoids and humans you scared were too terrified to have a conversation about what you were. People would think they were nuts. But this one… Seemed different. He smelled different, that was for sure. Almost like he was interested in you. 

“Well, I’m going to go now. I’ll see you again.”

“Knock on the wall before you come up next time. It’s scary when you just appear like that.”

“Right. Bad eyes.” You smiled at him. “I’ll knock.” 

You sank back down on the floor sliding fluidly under the bed, oozing into the shadows. You heard the bed creak before you fully disappeared and peeked out, a simple black mass with red eyes. You met Jin’s wide gaze and smiled… Not that he knew it was a smile … Before disappearing into the shadows.

You tried to rest. You really did. Floating along in a sea of nothingness, the distant screams of a billion galaxies colliding, dying, and reforming all at once. It was normally a lullaby to you. But tonight, your mind wandered. Not to the murder and bloodshed of a million cruel lesser Gods, or the agonizing scream of terror as someone is riddled with nightmares from your very presence… But rather… Of Jin. Seokjin. The hamster boy Jin. His ears looked so soft, you wished you could pet them. And his big, dark eyes… That soft smattering of fur. The balls it took to bite you.

Heaving a sigh, you unwound yourself from your tentacles and drifted back up to the space where your world connected with his. You slipped out from the shadows, peeking out from under the bed. It was dark in his room – he must be sleeping. You could smell him above you, that musky fur scent, the bitter scent of human-  sweat, the rich scent of sex. A pang shot through you. Sex. Was he mating with someone? 

As if on command, the bed creaked, and Jin whimpered softly. You could smell no one else, only him. In the silence, you could hear a slick squelching noise, and a soft, electronic babble from a device on the bed. Curiosity piqued, you slid further out, peeking up over the edge of the bed. Jin was stretched out on top of the covers, naked. You could see a smattering of the same creamy light fur on his chest and belly. His fist was sliding rapidly up and down his hard cock, glistening with lube and precome. His head was turned, earphones over his round, twitching ears. You peeked a little further, spotting the laptop on his bedside stand. The video on it was some sort of cartoon. A male figure was being suspended in the air by a multitude of tentacles, his ass being spread open as one drove into him in an obscene manner. His mouth was filled as well, tears streaming down his face. 

You couldn’t deny that the video was quite attractive. You glanced back at Jin and smirked. So that smell earlier was arousal. You were right. Hm. Well the feeling was mutual… Why should he have to do this alone?

Slow and careful, not wanting to terrify your skittish roommate, you slid one tentacle up over the bed. Moving slowly, you reached the laptop and poked the pause button. Jin’s hand hesitated and he scowled, eyes widening when he spotted the tentacle on the keyboard. He looked down at the foot of the bed. You grinned and waved another tentacle at him.

“What the fuck?!” Jin howled, yanking his blanket over his lap and jerking the headphones from his head. The fabric was raised ever so slightly where his erection was, doing nothing to really hide it from you. 

“Sorry,” you apologized, “you were masturbating to tentacles…” Jin reached out and snapped the laptop shut, nearly pinching the tip of your tentacle in the process. 

“So what? It’s my room!”

“It’s a room we share,” you corrected, moving out from the bed and coming around. “I was worried you were going to tell someone about me with how determined you were that I didn’t come back through… And I couldn’t stop thinking about you in other ways, so I was going to come back to talk and… I stumbled onto this.”

Jin remained silent, his lips pinched in annoyance. You smirked and moved closer to the bed, noting that he didn’t cringe away this time. 

“So that scent from earlier was arousal.”

“What scent?”

“Oh, I smell you very well. When I talked about choking humans… I smelled what seemed like human arousal. But I figured I was just imagining it. Why would a pretty humanoid like you be aroused by me?” You reached out with a tentacle, brushing the smooth skin of Jin’s chin. His eyes fluttered shut.

“I’m interested in you too, you know. I’ve never had a human so brave face me down. I admire that.” You hesitated and looked at his lap, the blanket still lifted. “Shall I help with that?”

“Wh—” Jin’s eyes snapped open. “What? No, please, I’m so ashamed,” he lamented, setting a pillow over the spot.

“Why are you ashamed? You are decently endowed for a humanoid of your height and weight ratio. The phallus seemed healthy and firm, and I sense no chemical influences so it can be safely assumed that you can get and maintain an erection capable of breeding, with no help.”

Jin’s cheeks reddened more and more as you spoke. 

“Please!” He cried, waving his hands in front of him. “Stop talking about it like that.”

“Oh.” You frowned a little. “I suppose that wouldn’t be arousing for you… If you were wanting me to speak in a way that aroused you… I suppose I should rather say that your cock is beautiful… It looks so hard and I’d love to make you come…”

You heard Jin’s heartrate pick up and couldn’t help but smirk. “Would you like that, Jin? For me to make you come?”

Jin swallowed hard and nodded, meeting your dark eyes. 

A tentacle shot out, knocking the pillow out of the way. It yanked the blanket down, revealing Jin’s cock, still mostly hard despite the conversation. 

You moved down to the foot of the bed, relaxing and allowing more tentacles to emerge. Jin’s eyes grew wide as you did, darting from side to side as he seemed to try to process.

“You enjoy this,” you said. It was a question you already knew the answer to.

“Yes.”

God, that felt good to hear. You slid a group of tentacles up over Jin’s chest, feeling the smooth skin and delicate hairs. Your touch left goosebumps in its wake, and Jin shuddered softly. 

You used another set of tentacles to push open his thick, muscular thighs. You made a soft noise of surprise. At the base of his spine, visible when he spread his legs, was a tiny tuft of fur, and a fuzzy tail. Only about two inches, thin and blunted, it was potentially the most adorable thing you had seen on a humanoid being in all your time living with them.

More tentacles to lift Jin’s hips off the bed. 

“Oh my—Your tail,” you commented helplessly. You reached out with your human-ish hand and grabbed it, petting the soft fur above it. Jin’s entire body went tense, and you watched his cock twitch. You cocked a brow. “Oh…” 

Curious, you tugged the tail, ever so lightly, and Jin grunted. You pulled again, with the same response. A third time, and he moaned softly. 

“Please—Stop pulling my tail,” he pleaded.

“Why? Does it hurt?” 

“N—No.”

You smirked. “So then, it’s good…” You tugged once more and Jin’s back arched off the tentacles suspending it. 

“Please—” He whined.

“Would you like my help, Seokjin? I could make you feel quite good.”

Jin huffed, swallowing hard. “Th—This is so strange.”

“Mhm. I’ve never, if I may be blunt, seen such a willing person.” You let one thin tentacle circle around the tight rim of Jin’s hole, leaving a trail of slick fluid behind. “I’d love to see just how much you want.”

“Everything,” Jin confessed, his body relaxing against your tentacles.

“What was that?”

“I want everything…” Jin opened his eyes, blinking a few times before focusing on you. “If you want it, I—” He nodded. He let his thighs fall open further, smirking. “I want it.”

Excitement coursed through your body. He was so willing, so aroused. It was the most intriguing and exciting thing you’d done in a millennia. 

You pushed the leaking, swollen tip of the tentacle into Jin’s tight heat, barely able to resist moaning. His rim clamped down around your tentacle like a vise, coaxing a little of your warm slick to squirt from the tip. You were gonna wreck this pretty rodent.

You drove the tentacle deeper into him, smirking when you reached a resistance. Jin whimpered, biting his bottom lip. 

“Deep—“ he whined.

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Yes—” Jin groaned. You pushed your second tentacle in; this one a little thinner and slicker. Jin shouted, his back arching. The movement tightened the skin of his stomach. You gasped, spotting the barely there swell. You worked the thinner tentacle up to where the first was and relaxed, letting it balloon and expand. The swell in his belly grew, and you groaned, reaching forward and touching it. You could feel yourself in his body. 

Jin tried to lay back on the bed, hiding the beautiful swell. You reached out with two of your tentacles, catching him and arching his back once more.

“I like this,” you growled.

Jin sobbed brokenly, and you worried for a moment you’d hurt him. But his cock was hard and leaking, and his face was twisted up in a grin.

“___— Please...” 

“I’ll take care of you,” you promised him. You wrapped a tentacle around his neck, letting your suckers rub over the smooth skin there. So easily torn. Jin’s cock twitched on his belly and he moaned. You began to squeeze his throat, ever so gently. You relaxed your grip and prodded his plush, swollen lips with the flattened tip of another tentacle. the movement left behind a glossy, oil slick sheen. 

“No biting this one, Jin,” you warned. He huffed and rolled his eyes, opening his mouth. You slid the tentacle in, sighing as Jin eagerly lapped at it sucking softly. You stroked the smooth flesh of his tongue with your tip before sliding deeper. You bumped his uvula, smirking when he coughed. 

“Open wide.”

Jin did his best to obey, and you pushed in, nudging past his tonsils and down his throat. His eyes bulged and he swallowed, squeezing your tentacle delightfully. Cool air whistled past it as he struggled to breathe.

“You liked being choked, didn’t you?” You cooed, squeezing his throat once more.

Jin’s cock throbbed on his stomach and began to shoot come onto his belly. His eyes rolled back and he gagged hard, moan muffled. His ass clenched rhythmically around your tentacles, milking fluid from them.

You couldn’t help but laugh even as you moaned from the stimulation. Two suckered tentacles slid up, rubbing through the hot come on his belly and up to tease his hard nipples. Jin sobbed what sounded like your name, but you couldn’t be sure. You allowed the rest of your tentacles to surround Jin, touching and rubbing and leaving little streaks of oily slick on his smooth, clean skin. The one that started this all, wrapped firmly around his dainty tail, yanked once more. 

You’d been saving the best for last. A tentacle no thicker than his pinkie wound up his leg. You could feel his muscles quivering from the overstimulation, his breath whistling around your tentacle firmly lodged down his throat, his eyes already rolling back. Up, through the mat of curly dark pubic hair, around his still hard shaft, stroking and squeezing. It was so warm and smooth. Your mouth watered. You’d have to taste it one of these days. And finally his tip. 

The tentacle released and touched the tip of his cock. Jin’s eyes widened, still somewhat unfocused. Slow and steady, you let the tip your tentacle open, sliding down, down, swallowing Jin’s cock.

You moaned, quivering as you were filled with his thick girth. It had been a century since you let something penetrate you in this way. His cock was perfect, solid and warm and hit every single spot inside your channel just right.

Jin reached out with the hand not being held by a tentacle and grabbed his cock, rubbing his fingers lightly over the smooth outside of your tentacle. He began to stroke, up and down, firmly, jerking off with your body.

You moaned brokenly, head falling back. Your tentacles caught you as you sagged, legs spread. A pressure built deep in your guts as he used your channel to jerk off, sucking the tentacle in his mouth and clenching his ass around the ones inside him. He knew exactly how to drive you wild. This wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair— He was just a human—

You screamed his name as you came around his cock, squirting thick and wet. Jin moaned, gagging hard when the tentacle in his throat swelled a bit.

He continued to jerk off with your tentacle, his eyes losing their focus once more. He was going to come again, you could feel it. The wet squelch of your released as he used your hole filled the room. It was music to your ears. 

A tentacle whipped forward and grabbed his wrist, yanking it off his cock and pinning it to the bed. You wrapped another tentacle around his cock, squeezing yourself against him as you began to jerk it. 

“You’re gonna come in me, Jin,” you cooed. 

He tried to nod.

“I’m going to come in you.” His eyes rolled back, a full body shudder making you moan as well. Enough foreplay.

The tentacles holding Jin’s arms and legs went taut, pulling his arms above his head and forcing his legs open wide. You jammed a third, slender tentacle up his gaping asshole for good measure, shuddering at the impossible tightness of it. 

At once, every tentacle buried inside your new humanoid plaything began to thrust, the room filled with the obscene glugging noises of his throat and the wet squelch of his ass as you added more natural lubricant. You were still pumping his cock with your other tentacle, squeezing that and his throat playfully.

Jin came first again - not that you were surprised. You moaned as he spilled ropes of come into your channel, swelling it a bit. You continued to milk him with the slender tentacle and the one wrapped around it. Another tentacle slipped up to play with his balls, urging every drop of come out of them and into you. You moaned softly at that, smiling down at him. Time to return the favor. 

You began to fuck his throat hard and fast, mouth hanging open in pleasure as he choked on you. Jin’s eyes screwed shut and you growled. “Look at me, pretty.”

He struggled to do so, drool and your own slick bubbling up around the tentacle in his throat. His throat was painfully tight. 

“You wanted me to choke you. Is this how you wanted it, Jin?” You purred. 

Jin nodded, gagging and coughing hard. His eyes rolled back in his head, cock dribbling once more into the slick channel of your tentacle.

“That’s it… Give it all to me, baby. I’ll give you what you want too. Swallow it.”

Your body tensed, a knot of pleasure squeezing tight and drawing all of your nerves to a near painful edge. The tentacle began to spurt down Jin’s throat. He coughed hard, some of the dark fluid escaping around his mouth and nose. A tentacle caught the back of his head, holding it as you pumped your release down his throat. 

You threw your head back, moaning loudly. At the same time, you continued to fuck his ass, your secondary climax nearing. 

Some of your smaller tentacles that you’d been using to tease his tail and skin began to spurt as well, streaking thick, hot ropes of dark, oily release over his heaving chest and tearstained face. And over his tense stomach, now swelling with amount of fluid you were pumping down his throat.

Your second climax ripped a scream from your throat, surprising you. The tentacles buried in Jin’s ass began to spurt, shudders wracking your body as you filled his with release.

A pressure grew in the base of your groin and you whimpered. With fuzzy eyes, you watched the base of the tentacle swell just a little larger than a chicken egg, before moving down the length of the tentacle. And another… Another… Seven total eggs made their way down your length. The first caught on Jin’s clenched rim, making him sob wet and broken around your tentacle.

“Shh… Let me in,” you whispered. 

Jin seemed to try to relax. You shuddered and strained, helping work the thick egg into Jin’s body. It slipped past the rim and down the inserted part of your tentacle. You moaned and shuddered when it released. Time to repeat. Again, and again, you worked the eggs into Jin, tiny aftershocks of orgasm washing over you each time your tentacle ejected one. 

Jin’s stomach was swollen with come and eggs, and his body was lax, eyes half closed and glassy with exhaustion. 

You pulled out slowly, smirking a little at the little rivers of come that followed both from his ruined ass and his mouth. Carefully, you laid him back onto the bed, still cocooning him with your tentacles as you crawled onto the bed and kissed his sweaty cheek.

“Still with me?”

“Mhm…” Jin touched his stomach. “Eggs?” He croaked, as if speaking through a mouth full of caramel.

“Yes. They will dissolve harmlessly within you in a few hours, don’t be alarmed. I should have warned you.”

“No, not at all… It’s good. I liked it… I feel so full…”

“You look absolutely ruined.”

Jin blinked tiredly at you, looking mildly concerned. You smirked and kissed his come stained lips. “It’s a beautiful look. We should get you cleaned up, shouldn’t we?” You sat up, your tentacles slinking back into your body. Jin reached out, grabbing one and holding onto it. 

“Do you like being this way better?”

“I have no preference, but it’s more comfortable with some of them out,” you admitted. “I’m not used to using these.” You held up your human-ish hands. 

“Leave them out then. I like them.”

“They don’t frighten you?”

Jin’s ear twitched. “No. Not now.” 

A smile crossed your face before you could stop it. “I’ve never really let a human look at me so long.” 

Jin ran his hand up your tentacle, his soft skin tickling and warming you. “I’m so different from you. Why did this happen?”

You hesitated at his question, unsure how to answer. Jin smiled when you did. 

“I’m not saying I’m mad or… I dislike it. But the problem is… I’m human. At least human adjacent. And the way I feel emotions… It’s strong but I don’t know how your kind does. I just…” Jin frowned at a spot in the corner, clearly deep in thought. “I guess I just want to know what this is going to be before I let myself get too attached.”

You chuckled a little. “This is absurd.”

“What is?” Jin’s face drooped.

“We’re having this deep conversation... While you’re lying on the bed naked and messy. Come on, let me clean you up. We’ll continue when we’re both a bit more put together.” 

You scooped him up with your tentacles, laughing a little at his surprised shout. With minimal effort, you carried him out of the room and down the hall to where you knew the bathroom was located. Jin laughed, wiggling in the firm grip of your tentacles as you did.

“Aren’t I heavy?”

“Not really. Rather light, actually. Do you obtain ample caloric sustenance to maintain humanoid organ function?”

“Do… Do I what?”

“Eat. Enough food,” you supplied. You turned on the water of the bath with another tentacle, turning to face Jin, who was still firmly wrapped in your grip.

“Yes, I eat enough,” Jin huffed. “I’m a good weight.”

“You are certainly well built,” you agreed, letting your eyes roam Jin’s body. Even covered in the oil slick iridescence of your come… He really truly was stunning. Broad shoulders, firm chest, thigh, muscular thighs… Even with the tiny swell in his stomach where your eggs were slowly disintegrating… He likely drew the attention of anyone on the street. 

“___...” Jin drifted off. “You’re staring.”

“I’m admiring,” you argued. “Do you have a human partner?”

“No. I’m single.”

“Why?”

Jin blinked, seeming surprised at the question. “I—I don’t know. I guess… Nobody’s ever really struck my fancy.”

“Why not?” You turned, reaching a tentacle out to test the water. Deeming it warm enough, you shifted, settling Jin into it. 

“I have no idea. I guess I just know what I’m looking for.”

“And what’s that?”

“Join me?” Jin asked, shifting to sit in the tub and make space. 

You let your tentacles disappear back into your body save for a dozen smaller ones, and stripped out of the clothing you’d donned. You crawled into the tub, sighing a little as the warm water lapped over your skin. 

“I want someone who is there for me,” Jin continued after a moment. Someone who knows what I need both physically and emotionally, and someone who is willing to let me provide for them too. A give and take.”

“Do you desire offspring?” You reached out and snagged a washcloth, wetting it and adding soap. You began to wash Jin’s skin clean. 

“Someday, maybe. Not now. I am young, I wanna use that youth.” Jin shifted, sighing. “I like you, ___.” 

“I know you do. And for some bizarre reason… I rather like you too.” You sighed a little, frowning at the confession. It was the truth. That much you knew. But why did it feel so scary?

“Bizarre? Have you never liked a human before? Or a… Hybrid?”

“No.” You continued to wash his shoulders and back. “I tend to just scare the pants off them and call it good.”

Jin laughed a little. “Well you got my pants off in some way, it just wasn’t by scaring me.”

“Oh, I scared you,” you argued, laughing as well. “You threw a book at my head.”

“A giant tentacle monster appeared in my room, of course I threw something at you.”

“You also bit me.”

“I’m starting to think you liked it.”

You paused, brows raising. “I guess… I sort of did.”

Jin’s smile faded a little, the laughter dying. “I asked you a question in the room, ___.”

“You did.”

“And you didn’t answer.” 

“Because I didn’t know how to. I still don’t.”

“Do you have feelings? Like… Happiness or sadness or affection?”

You nodded. You sank down a little more in the tub, and Jin reached out, gently sliding his hands over your legs and tentacles where he could reach. “I do. I’m sure it’s slightly different but the result is the same. I do find you interesting, both physically and otherwise. I want to get to know you more, and spend time with you. Being on this plane of existence is… Different. I don’t normally do it, but I feel content to be in this form, because it means a chance to learn more about you. I’d watched you for a while before but… Face to face.”

“I understand.” Jin took the cloth and washed his face and ears. “So, you do like me then.”

You nodded once.

“And I like you,” Jin continued. He set the cloth in the water, using the tip of one finger to gently slide it back and forth. 

“It would seem that way. For some strange reason.”

Jin smiled softly. He scooped up the cloth and ran it gently over one of your tentacles. The slightly rough texture sent shivers through your body, and you couldn’t stop the smile that formed. 

“That feels nice.”

Jin shifted, the sound of the water sloshing in the small tub the only answer he gave you for the moment. The tub was truly too small for the both of you, but he was able to make it work, shifting over to settle closer. He used the cloth to wash over the exposed tentacles and the humanoid form of your body, meeting your gaze every few seconds. His ears were perked forward, nose and whiskers twitching. 

You reached out with a free tentacle, stroking his back and running down to his ass. You touched his tail. The fur was soft and silky where it seemed to blend into his skin, and his tail was covered in the same soft down. It wiggled a little under the water and Jin made a small noise between a squeak and a sigh. 

“Just don’t pull it,” he whispered.

“We know what that does. Is it difficult?” You asked. You let go of his tail in favor of stroking along his smooth back.

“Is what difficult?”

“You’re a hybrid. I know your kind is not common still. I’ve never seen one of your species specifically.”

“It can be. I’m a pretty timid animal by nature. So I used to get bullied. But I enjoy being different. In the long run. It’s what makes me who I am and I wouldn’t change that.”

“That’s admirable. You are a beautiful specimen.” When Jin frowned, you paused. 

“Being. I don’t mean specimen as an insult.”

“I know,” Jin sighed, sitting back. He pulled his knees up to his chest. The air in the bathroom seemed to thicken a little, and you frowned. Though human emotions weren’t your forte, you could still sense enough of the shift in Jin to get it. 

“I’ve upset you.”

“You haven’t. Not on purpose.” Jin rose and grabbed a towel, beginning to dry himself off. His stomach was back to normal, and it felt like all sense of afterglow had worn off. You followed suit, rising and opening the tub drain. As you stepped out of the tub, you allowed your powers to work, drying your body and re-clothing it instantly. As you did, Jin turned around, about to offer you a towel. His face drooped when he saw you clothed. 

“Oh.” He pulled it back and looked at it for a moment before dropping it into the hamper and heading back toward the bedroom. You followed from a safe distance, unsure how to help the humanoid you’d found yourself so attached to.

When you reached the bedroom, you hesitated at the foot of the bed while Jin stripped the mattress, messy from your activities. 

“Jin…”

He glanced at you, but said nothing. Instead he tossed the sheet into a hamper and went the closet, digging around to get a clean one. He hesitated, rubbing at the back of his ear. 

“Jin.” You repeated yourself more firmly. He turned, his whiskers twitching. 

“You’re not human.”

“No, of course I’m not.”

“Even with the… The tentacles. It’s easy to forget. You look humanoid.”

You nodded. 

“But then you do something like… Like what you did in the bathroom or you call me a specimen like I’m so different and I just—I like you, ___. But can you like me? Do you want to get to know me and maybe be… Something more?”

“Of course I do, Jin,” you answered. And the reality of it was – you were being honest. You stepped forward, reaching out with your tentacles to pull him closer. When he was near enough, you wrapped your arms around him, nuzzling his neck. “I want to know you. You’re the first human I’ve ever wanted to be around like this. I know we’re different… I’m sorry I’ve upset you. I don’t mean to.”

“I’m not upset, ___. I just know things are… Difficult.”

“They don’t need to be.” 

You stepped back and shifted a little, the tentacles sliding into your body. You changed your clothing with a simple thought into something a little baggier, pulling your left arm more out of view in the fabric. “I can look human. I can be anything you need to make you comfortable.”

Jin pouted a little, his plush bottom lip sliding out. “But this isn’t you. I don’t want you to change. I like you.” He pushed the sleeve up and grabbed your tentacled arm. “I like all of you. If you meet my friends, of course… This works, but… When it’s me. I just want you to be yourself. As much as you can be.”

“I don’t frighten you? Make you feel different?”

“You do.” Jin shrugged. “But that can be okay.” He sighed softly and reached up, stroking your cheek. The motion was unfamiliar to you, but not unwelcomed. You could feel the calluses on the pads of his thumbs from use, hear his pulse throbbing softly against his wrist, feel the brush of his fingers against the baby hairs on your current form’s face. It was soothing. Your eyes fluttered shut and you smiled a little. 

“Do that again…” You whispered when Jin pulled his hand away. He repeated the motion, and then on the other side, cupping your face in his hands. 

“___.”

You opened your eyes, surprised to see him so close to you, his dark gaze trained on yours. “Have you ever been kissed?”

“No.”

“Never? Wh—”

“It’s never really come up,” you admitted. 

“Well… I’m going to kiss you, okay?”

“O—Okay.” 

Jin closed the gap between your faces, tilting his head a little as his eyes closed. His lips pressed against yours, soft and silky. You could feel his breath tickling your cheek, and you giggled a little. 

Jin pulled back, a smile of confusion brightening his face. “What are you laughing at?”

“Humans do this a lot?” You asked. “I’m sorry, it feels funny,” you laughed a little.

Jin laughed too, nodding. “They do. It’s an affection thing… But now that I think about it, you are right, it’s kinda weird.”

“It’s cute,” you said, reaching up and touching his cheek. “I don’t hate it. I’ll do it if you like it. But know I might laugh every time you do.” 

Jin nodded, kissing you again quickly. “It’s okay. You have a delightful laugh. I want to hear it more…” He sighed softly, seeming to search your face for something unknown.

You remained quiet, letting him look. Being honest, it gave you a chance to really look at him. Humans – even humanoid hybrids like Seokjin… Were so simple. Their genetic makeup was easily replicated, reproduced, altered. You could reach out with your true self and shatter his genome sequence. You could change him completely – turn him into a hideous monster, or a beautiful human, devoid of any rodent features. You could kill him, or make him live a thousand years longer. Simple creatures. Yet there was one thing that even you – with all your age and knowledge… Couldn’t master. 

Their minds. 

Sure, you could scare or arouse one, you could tweak simple emotions, but not for long. They always compensated. And each one compensated differently. Some coped, some panicked, some lost their minds. The answer to the human equation had long eluded you. Not that you’d bothered to care much before now. Before this humanoid being had blazed into your existence. And now… You found yourself caring, but not to overpower or control humans. But to make the one that was offering himself to you… Happy. The feeling was foreign. You didn’t want to scare or change or fiddle with this one. You just wanted to be with him.

Cautiously, you reached your hand up, letting your fingers brush over his whiskers, then up, over his large ears, covered in soft, fur. They twitched, as did Jin’s nose, and you smiled. 

“Do you eat?” Jin asked suddenly.

“Eat?”

“Yeah, like food. Burgers or rice or a steak…”

“I am capable of it, yes. I can almost perfectly mimic a humanoid existence in this form.”

“Wanna get a midnight snack?”

“Shouldn’t you sleep? Humanoids need an ample number of hours of sleep per night in order to maintain proper f—”

“You’re worth a night of no sleep,” Jin cut you off. 

“I—I am?”

Jin grinned broadly. “Of course you are. I want to learn more about you. I want to spend more time with you. Do you have to… Go back? To your… Space, I guess?”

“Not with any pressing need. It simply exists because I’ve created it.”

“I want to know more about it. More about what you can create.” Jin took your hand, and your tentacle. “Everything.”

“There is far too much to tell.”

“Then we’ll just have to spend more time together. Is that alright?”

“It is.” You felt the smile spreading across your face before you could stop it. 

What a human response. Could spending time around this human make you more of one? The thought would have been horrifying to you a month ago. Now… Looking at Jin’s bright gaze, and broad smile… Maybe a little humanity was exactly what you needed. 

One tentacle drifted out and over to the radio on Jin’s dresser, poking the play button. The same male voice from your meeting earlier in the day filled the air, though it was an entirely different song now.

“You’ll never make me leave, I wear this on my sleeve…”

Jin’s eyes darted to the radio before landing back on your face. “I thought this was horrible noise?” He asked, a grin causing his cheeks to fill out adorably. 

“Give me a better cause to lead…”

“I can learn to like it. I want to. For you.” You closed the space between your faces this time, kissing Jin’s soft mouth gently. 

“Give me a reason to believe…”

#thebtswritersclub #seokjin x reader #jin x reader #reader insert #seokjin smut #bts x reader #mywriting #kim seokjin #seokjin

[boop-le-snoot]

PARTY FAVOURS I A VENOMOUS INTERLUDE

Did y'all know symbrock is canon? Well, now you do. Reader's favourite deadbeat surrogate uncle is in town and he brought a... Friend. No warnings, just a boatload of crack and fluff, as usual. Reader being mouthy. Takes place a little bit into the future - around after chapter 32: spoiler alert is useless because we already know a tonybrucestrange/reader quartet is the endgame. 💖💝✨

"What," I had to pause for a second for my brain to catch up with my eyes. "The fuck?!"

It was truly a miracle I could say anything out loud, at all. Words weren't valid enough to describe my shock and confusion. The scene unfolding in front of me resembled and unholy cross between a B-rated horror movies about demonic possession and some deep-sea Eldritch monstrosity.

The eight-feet tall black, oozing dude in front of me? Yes, you, with the teeth. Ctulhu called, he wants his tentacles back.

The creature honest to god rippled, like some nightmare-fuel goth Jell-O, rapidly shrinking in size within seconds. As more of the black tar-like substance receded, a much more human form started to appear under it. Worn jeans, leather jacket, ungroomed beard and the look of a biker gang member coming off a serious bender.

"Uh, Princess?"

"Eddie. Fucking. Brock. Uncle Idiot." I punctuated each word with an increasing widening of my eyes. The world was fucking nuts. Two and two did not compute - Eddie might have looked threatening to some people - like white suburban Karens - even without the... Gooey squid-on-steroids thing he had going on. The man was built like a fucking brick shithouse, but I knew him way too well. Eddie couldn't be that badass to save a life.

"You two know each other?" Tony shrieked indignantly, a coarseness in his voice that indicated only one thing: my boo was well into his third drink. Hell, I didn't blame him - that gaping toothy maw was fucking gnarly.

Hands on my hips, I caught myself slipping into a mute rage, storming over to the 200lbs worth of pure dumbass and knocking him right in the face. "You! Didn't tell! ME!" A black tendril wrapped around my wrist, carefully but firmly securing it and preventing me from causing my non-related uncle any more physical damage. Although I must admit, my knuckles probably were more affected than his jaw. "You! Are! A MUTANT!!! HOW COULD YOU?! How could you NOT tell ME?"

I trusted the man with my soul and most embarrassing drinking stories. Hell, I called Eddie in a stoned haze the very same night I lost my v-card. I just thought we were bros, you know? I saw his whole fucking life implode more than once and personally flew to California to ice his injuries and his hurt ego countless times. I was done dirty in the worst way.

"I'm not-" Eddie's sigh was long-suffering. "I, uh, I have a parasite..." He sounded meek, in the same way he used to describe his drunkenly misconduct when I made our family driver bail out his ass outta jail in the morning.

"TAKE THAT BACK!" A deep gravelly voice thundered, seemingly coming out of his chest?

"Okay, okay," Eddie smiled. It was strangely soft and un-eddie-like. The only person he smiled like that was... used to be Anne. "This is Venom. They're an alien and we're, uh, a thing. It's a recent development." The tentacle unwrapped itself from me as I took an involuntary step back.

Even barring the fact that Eddie was dating an alien, this was way too fucking weird for 3 o'clock on a Sunday. I always knew the reporter was, for the lack of a better word, a little weird but he really took it to new heights. With Thor and Loki looking... Like that, I could see a human dating some sort of a hot alien. But with Ctulhu looking the way he did just minutes ago? Did Eddie seriously let all of those teeth in close proximity of his dick?

I had a "ERROR 404, common sense not found" hanging over me for the longest time. The others were quiet behind me, too, even Tony - one of my boyfriends, the most likely to cause utter chaos, was hanging back and expecting me to do something.

"Venom," I clarified, just to fill the silence with some noise while my brain processors re-synced.

"WE ARE VENOM." The tentacle that was sleek and black now had two completely white eyes and a smaller-scale version of the toothy grin that had drooled all over the common room carpet. Their voice had an interesting effect: it was so deep, the air around them vibrated slightly when they spoke.

I tilted my head examining the appendage. It was considerably less terrifying when it wasn't five times my size. "What are you?" And most importantly, are you a threat to my favourite non-related family member? I left that statement unspoken although it was obvious I was ready to fight it? Them? If need be.

"A SYMBIOTE," They replied, swaying the head-tentacle slowly. "WE LOVE EDDIE AND KEEP HIM ALIVE AND HEALTHY." So, they understood the actual question.

"Which is fucked up because Klyntar usually behave in the opposite way." Hearing Thor swear was, perhaps, even more unsettling than finding out about the symbiote-alien-boyfriend thing my uncle had going on. The thunderer himself was nursing a jug of golden liquid. The good Asgardian stuff, he must've been really fucking bamboozled.

"Okay. So anybody wanna fill me on the details before I beat up my favourite idiot?" I sighed, pointedly looking at Tony.

"I thought I was your favourite idiot!" He immediately retorted, hurt, but nonetheless opened his arms to give me a grounding embrace. We may have sucked face for a few seconds, because why the hell not, Tony was an amazing kisser and his tongue down my throat was very calming.

"Hold up, what the fuck?" Now it was Eddie's turn to act all offended. "Aren't you a little too young for him?"

"You and your most likely carnivorous goth space pudding can fuck right off if you're not going to be supportive of my very inappropriate, very polyamorous relationship with three incredibly hot boomers," I shot back, slipping into some resemblance of normalcy. Me and Eddie go way, way back and shitting on each other's bad life decisions was the founding stone of our bromance. Hell, he was the guy who showed me the wonders of sarcasm at an early age! Wonderbaum!

"There's three of them?" Eddie's voice pitched and he gaped, palming his face.

"SHE HAS A POINT, EDDIE. WE EAT PEOPLE. BEING UNSUPPORTIVE WOULD MAKE US LOOK LIKE AN ASSHOLE." Eddie's buddy stated, sounding almost fed up. So, they were sentient enough to recognize how much of a pain in the ass Eddie could be. I could work with that, disregarding the cannibalism comment, of course. What the fuck was up with that?

"Yes, Eddie, I also periodically bump uglies and trade disgustingly sweet text messages with the Hulk and a badass wizard," I rolled my eyes at the reporter's following gasp and angry muttering. "Venom, I like you."

"WE RETURN THE SENTIMENT. YOUR CHOICE IN MATES IS VERY WISE, CONSIDERING YOU ARE A WEAK MORSEL. THEY CAN PROTECT YOU."

"Shut up, Squid. I'll still kick your motherfucking ass if you hurt Eddie."

The emo space goo laughed, a terse scratching noise, showing way, way too many teeth for me to feel comfortable but I allowed myself to be placed on the couch between Tony and Eddie nonetheless. The initial shock of seeing a talking octopod with fangs passed quickly - I've seen Stephen's "trophies" he brought from his otherworldly journeys and Lovecraftian horrors were, honestly, pretty low on the gross/creepy scale.

"Both of you, explain. For the love of fuck," Tony sighed, emotionally exhausted and drained of his usual bravado.

"Eddie was my dad's friend until he moved to Cali, I've know him for fifteen years, give or take. He taught me how to ride a bike and bake the best pot brownies," I shrugged. There wasn't much to say. "I visited him whenever I could but you know, with school and then you guys, there wasn't that much time to iron out the details." I have Eddie a death glare, pointing to Venom's floaty head with my eyes.

Eddie nodded. "What she said..." And then launched an elaborate tale about some company called Life Foundation, some evil dude named Drake and his own alien pudding named Carnage, who was one ugly motherfucker judging by Eddie's and Venom's combined "ew" face, their aching need for human brains to survive and other, more trivial things, like mental breakdowns in a lobster tank and getting dumped by a fiancé and eating their way through a HYDRA base after being captured and tortured. What a wild fucking ride.

"Sounds like you had a rough year," Everybody's dumbfounded silence was ended by Tony who took a slow swig of his whiskey before speaking.

"Yeah, no shit," Eddie muttered, twisting his black coated fingers in elaborate but frankly pretty shapes. His alien wrapped around his neck like a tube scarf and additional tentacles appeared between Eddie's hands, gently prying them open and enveloping them in a sort of a hug? It was hard to compute, the black mass appeared to be totally amorphous.

"How's your anxiety?" I asked, damn well knowing Eddie's mind tended to run like Tony's: zero to sixty in point five with no clear destination. Having an alien inside of him must've really thrown Eddie for a loop.

"It's, uh, better. Venom helps," The reporter admitted, still staring at his hands but the crease between his brows had disappeared and the expression he wore was kind of fond.

"Good. You know, Venom," I thoughtfully addressed the definitely sentient creature. "Eddie is a bigger dumbass than me, which is saying something. You ought to keep a really close eye on him. If not for me, he'd probably be dead from alcohol poisoning, like, years ago."

"WE ARE AWARE. WE CAN ACCESS EDDIE'S MEMORIES." A head manifested itself on a thicker tentacle, floating over to look me in the face but maintaining a respectful distance and staying out of my personal space bubble. "AND WE ARE THANKFUL. EDDIE IS THE PERFECT HOST. WE LOVE EDDIE."

I felt the corner of my mouth tilt upwards at the alien's proclamation. It was child-like in its blunt honesty but carried a certain weight with it. It told me whoever tries to separate those two in any way would get eaten faster than they could say "SIKE!". And honestly? I would help Venom hide the evidence.

"I literally had you for thirty minutes but I would kill everybody and then myself if you two got hurt. This is too soft, I can't." I snorted, extending a curious hand towards Venom. They looked so shiny. I had to touch them.

And they let me. Venom butted their head into my palm and let me gently run my fingers over their slightly cool, slippery flesh. It felt like putting my hands on a surprisingly sturdy yet bouncy piece of flubber. I purposely avoided the small maw and the endless rows of sharp teeth but managed to accidentally brush against something rough and scratchy - as it turned out, the Symbiote had a very long, very dexterous tongue. And didn't that give me a bunch of interesting mental images.

"Oh my God, NO!" Wanda moaned from somewhere, the voice mortified and disgusted.

"Why are you touching the people-eating alien?" Bruce yelped, entering the room with several people in tow. The scientist looked worried, a little bit green around the edges. The tablet in his hands beeped periodically, signifying the ongoing sciencing bender he was in process of.

"WE WOULD NOT EAT THIS HUMAN. WE ARE FOND OF THE MORSEL." Venom defended, well, venomously. Eddie wisely choose to stay silent, trading a knowing look with Tony.

Stephen Strange sighed, briefly closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose with a jagged movement. "One day, Princess, one day you will stop collecting people that are obviously bad for your health and your future. That, or space in the tower will simply run out." With a deeper, calmer sigh, the sorcerer landed in front of me on the floor, sitting cross-legged and subtly begging for a head scratch. Which meant just placing his always neatly trimmed curls under my free hand. His jealousy was about as subtle as a foot in the face.

"I'll just ask Tony to build more floors, duh," I rolled my eyes with force at the obvious solution, giving into Steph's demands, beginning to card through his hair. It was calming both of us, really.

Bruce came over to give me a kiss and my other boyfriends didn't even grumble about the scientist placing himself in my lap, crawling over both Tony and Stephen to get comfortable.

Our dynamic was unconventional and more than a little weird, but it worked for us and the rest of the team most certainly didn't complain about the vast decrease in conflict that came with the territory. Come to think of it, all of us were more tactile than just a group of friends sharing a house and I was very much on board with that. None of us except select few (looking at you, mister doctor) were hugged enough as children and we were making up for it in spades right fucking now.

"Girl has a type," Wanda remarked, like the messy little shit she was. I stuck out my tongue in retaliation.

The Avengers' brain trust began talking about Venom's slightly inconvenient diet that directly resulted in multiple felonies for one Edward Brock, and as much as I tried to follow the flow and make my own, however feeble, contributions to the scientific side of the conversation, the new life form was much more interesting. I asked Venom several questions and they deemed them acceptable enough to answer - which evolved on both of us absolutely geeking out over the differences in our physiology. The space pudding didn't hold back one bit, insulting the inferior human biology with gleeful gusto.

"They need a chemical called phenethylamine," Bruce sighed, having deduced it through discussion since Venom and Eddie both protested aggressively against any kind of invasive testing. "I can synthesize it. No more head-chomping, no more murder."

It made perfect sense. Except it didn't. "Brucie-bear, you're a brilliant fucking scientist but a shit psychologist." I interrupted whatever came next. "Venom is a person, like me and you and, yes, even Hulk. Tell me this: if you found a way to get rid of Hulk, would you stop sciencing in the gamma radiation field?" I looked my boyfriend straight in the eyes, hoping for a spark of common sense. "Do you see my point? You science, Tony engineers, Steve draws and Clint bakes. Venom hunts. It's who they are, you can't give them a pill to make it go away."

The weight of my word landed in the room like lead, heavy. The only source of sound was the TV, playing the news quietly in the background for the longest time. Those few minutes felt like hours until Thor expectantly turned towards Eddie/Venom.

"IT IS SO. WE ARE AFRAID WE CANNOT INFLUENCE OUR INSTINCT TO HUNT PREY. KLYNTAR ARE APEX PREDATORS." The little black goop sounded almost apologetic. It was hard to hear undertones with their voice being so deep and grating. "BUT WE CAN TRY." Okay, I could totally hear the hope. Finding out the Eldritch horror could make puppy eyes was... Terrifying, to be honest, because they fucking worked.

"Got any better ideas?" Tony asked me sarcastically.

"I do, actually." I leveled a look with Natasha. She understood. "HYDRA goons. The aliens that, for some reason, keep invading New York every month or so. Stephen's adventures in Hell. Do I need to continue?"

"Wait, hold on," Steve raised his palms. "We don't kill HYDRA, we deposit them in SHIELD custody."

I snorted at the naïve Captain. "And what do you think happens to them there? Did you honestly think they just let torturing, murdering, world-domination planning psychos back on the streets?"

Steve frowned in confusion. "They go to prison?"

Natasha choose that moment to step up. "It's not uncommon for them to possess certain enhancements to be deemed too dangerous to be released back into society. Some of them are low-tier mutants and inhumans. Trust me, Steve, the lethal injection is a much more humane treatment than solitary life imprisonment in a ultra-high security prison." Romanoff stated with a trace of compassion. "And some mutants, we can't contain for prolonged periods of time." She added quietly, looking away.

Rogers was staring blankly into the wall, mulling over the information in his head. His intensive thought process was plainly visible on his face. I heard about some kind of fiasco with HYDRA agents suicide-bombing a city in Europe few years ago and Steve was there, along with Wanda and Sam.

"Venom is a whole person, and even if they look like they could be the main character in Call of Ctulhu video game, we can't just disregard them like they are some kind of badly behaving pet. They're my honorary uncle's boyf-sorry-significant other, for fuck's sake," I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation. "Y'all should know I don't fuck with people who give shit to one of my own. Don't disappoint me like that." I finished, feeling more tired than I had in months. I didn't regret giving into the found family dynamic, however I didn't exactly sign up for hard choices like them vs my long lost uncle, y'know?

Great, now I had a headache and three very concerned boyfriends glaring at me for unknown reasons. The urge to pace always manifested strongly within me as the emotional atmosphere rose in the room. With Bruce dangling off my lap, I couldn't do even that and I felt the restlessness blossom into irritation more and more with each passing second of my existence.

Eddie remained silent, looking down. Venom had mostly receded into the reporter's body, save for a few tentacles tightly wrapped around Eddie's palm.

"Alright," Steve suddenly said. "We can work with that."

"Princess, you look like you're either going to cry or yell any second," Bruce said softly, squeezing my shoulder and pulling me closer.

I immediately hid my face in his chest, taking several deep, shaky breaths. "Eddie is family. Y'all are family. It's terrifying to have to choose between the two." I said, after a brief moment of hesitation.

The reporter made some sort of a choked gasp, quickly masking it with a cough - I knew him way too well to miss the way he was fighting back tears of his own. Bruce understood, he really did understand me - hopped off my lap and let me hug Eddie properly, my happy-sad tears soaking through the collar of his tee.

"You're, uh, welcome to stay. I'll have a guest room prepared." Tony cleared his throat, passing his half-finished glass to Stephen who swallowed the liquid in one gulp. My boyfriends were so fucking emotionally illiterate. Disaster humans.

Huh, I really did have a type.

Later that night, I made the mistake of barging into Eddie's room with a bottle of really fancy whiskey I liberated from Tony's overstocked liquor cabinet. Visiting my uncle and boozing and smoking on the balcony, for old times sake, was my plan and...

I failed the mission successfully.

I didn't bother knocking. As soon as I saw a pair of bare feet, my eyes traveled further up on the couch on their own volition. There were so many tentacles, a writhing, oozing silky black mass and Eddie was making sounds, unmistakable noises-

"UNSEE. UNSEE. OH MY GOD, UNSEE, UNSEE." I stumbled back into the common room shivering.

"What happened, is everything okay?" Bucky stood up as soon as he saw me enter the doorway with my face scrunched in a grimace of regret. I felt like I've gone through the five stages of grief in the shortest time possible for a human being.

Somwhere, I heard Wanda's sudden moan full of pain and misery. "Please, stop THINKING about it!"

"Brain bleach, oh my God," I cringed. "Where's the Clorox?! I have decided I don't need my eyeballs-"

"Oooh," Tony's proverbial lightbulb lit up. The engineer sounded like he was about five seconds away from building a space ship and permanently moving to another planet. "They're together-together..." Tony intercepted me nonetheless, doing the most effective thing to make me stop speaking and thinking bullshit. He kissed me. With lots of tongue.

THE TAG LIST IS NOW OPEN! @another-stark-sub ​ @mostly-marvel-musings  @vozit ​ @littlegasps ​ @pilloclock ​ @shereadsinquiet @downeyreads ​ @hermione-grangers-wife ​ @individualistfem ​ @sleep-i-ness @capbrie @lillsxd @agustdowney @dee-vn @justanotherblonde23 @fanngirl19 @persephonehemingway @softie-socks @schemefrenzy @letsby @cutenessloading @romeo-the-cactus @jelly-fishy-babie @mikariell95

#party favours #bun writes #tony stark x reader #bruce banner x reader #stephen strange x reader #eddie brock #venom #stephen strange x y/n #tony stark x y/n #bruce banner x y/n #tony stark x you #bruce banner x you #stephen strange x you #venom is babey fight me

[blueluneacy]

Familiar Shore

Hey, so this is a commission for the lovey @lliminall! Thank you so much for commissioning me, it means a lot! This is a continuation of Black Ocean, so go check that out if you haven’t! It’s Bruno bucciarati x reader timeeee

Word Count: 2.8k Warnings: kidnapping, suicide, transformations, just general angst and comfort vibes

The ocean no longer had any color. It was like the moment you woke up on this terrible island, most everything lost color, the strange world you now found yourself in feeling small compared to the extent of the Labyrinth you once knew. You tended to sit by the ocean nowadays, watching the fish that swam up to the shores to see the strange being that liked to sit and watch them. When Bruno first dropped you in his little lair, some minor beasts that inhabited the ocean and the island, but it seemed that in the days that Bruno was gone, he quickly straightened them out. This place was strange in the sense that everyone seemed a lot more docile. You supposed that most people would have considered that ocean uncrossable and that the local wildlife wasn’t used to humans like yourself, leaving to strange circumstances, like finding that the many tailed foxes seemed to like your company, or that after giving some of the gray birds some of your dinner, they perched near you and cawed at the beasts that came towards you.

Of course, that’s not to say things were sunshine and roses. For example, Bruno was actually terrible. A few times you had tried to pull together a raft and get back to shore, only from Bruno to simply tear it apart and carry you back to your little island. A paradise, he called it. Yeah, what a paradise. And you had gone to Jurassic measures. You remembered waking up in that cave after doing something terrible, stepping out to find Bruno sobbing over your lifeless body. You actually felt bad enough to sigh, only for Bruno’s new keen ears to pick up on it and lunge back to you, thanking whatever Gods there were looking out for the two of you that they set your spawn to here, that you would be with him, that he wouldn’t lose you. You cursed those same gods.

But for now, Bruno seemed to leave you alone. Whether it was because he understood that you needed space and time to process this, or just because he was busy with who knows what, you weren’t sure. Maybe he needed a steady supply of torture to sustain him. It would make sense, the way beasts seem to just thrive on destroying any human being that they came into contact with. But, there was also another problem, one that plagued you. It had to be a lie, right? Bruno couldn’t have possibly actually… Turned into a beast, right? No, he had to be one beforehand. There’s no way that a human being could turn into a beast, and even so… Why would he? Bruno was kind and caring… Unless he wasn’t. Until he was completely deranged, dragging you under the depths until you passed out. You didn’t like to think about it, didn’t like to think about those eyes. You just closed your eyes, telling yourself in just another minute, you’d walk the fifty feet back to the cave you had now found as your home, finding the stone becoming increasingly more smooth, the terrible thing that was keeping here making it more homey day by day. What started off as a simple cave with furs on the ground now had furniture, actual walls, even a bed. You still preferred to sleep on the floor if it meant it kept Bruno from holding you. It didn’t.

After a few moments and a lot of convincing yourself to get up, solely just to eat and get some rest as you plotted your way out of this mess, you made your way over to the cave only to stop when you heard voices. One of them you recognized, Bruno, but there was someone actually responding to him. You swallowed, unable to help yourself from hiding at the edge of the cave to listen in to what they were saying.

“I just don’t know if I can make it work, is all. I mean, you’ve seen them. They’re horrified of… This.” Bruno spoke out, leaving the other beast just to scoff.

“They’re horrified that you’re no longer human. Something that you can’t change. Do you honestly believe that you can make them separate this idea of who you once were versus who you are now?” The other beast, for what other creature would be able to speak out with such calm in front of Bruno in the state that he was in now, replied, sounding simply skeptical.

“But you don’t understand, it’s not like I’ve changed. I’m still the same person, I just-”

“Happened to have turned into an eldritch horror beyond basic human comprehension now trapped in a liminal space shaped like a labyrinth. Good pitch.” He sounded so curt, leaving Bruno just to huff.

“I don’t know why I even bothered to ask you.”

“Because you knew I would be honest with you. It would be easiest if you just gave up on the human, Buccellati. Humans are odd, fragile, and emotional. You could easily find a nice beast girl to settle down if you really wanted.” He replied, leaving you just to… ponder. You never really thought of beasts actually speaking to each other, much less loving each other.

“You act as though we’re not humans.” Bruno replied sharply, leaving the other beast to sigh.

“You’re not. We’re not. Sure, maybe at one time, but there’s no way back. Who knows, maybe you and Dio can laugh over this one day.”

“He’s on the other side of the Labyrinth. Speaking of which, how are there other Beasts in this territory? I thought it was supposed to be mine.”

“Oh, only stronger beasts deal with things like territory. Pathetic ones like me, we don’t have that luxury. It’s easier to say you’re with the biggest guy in the room than to try and stake out your own claim in the world. Plenty of territories are filled with beasts that simply stick around for protection or just because they feel like it. I’m surprised you don’t have a line out the door with Beasts asking for your blessing to move in, this is prime real estate.”

“They’re too dangerous for my beloved to be around. I’m particular about the things that might feel too comfortable to try and hurt them.”

“If you’re choosey, then you really made a bad choice in letting me stay.”

“You don’t like humans. I figured you didn’t have the spine to break theirs.” You gasped at that, Bruno’s fine tuned ears finally picking up on your listening in to their conversation and standing up.

“Cara, you can come in. It’s rude to listen in.” He called out to you, leaving you to swallow as you stepped out into the low candlelight of the cave, making your way inside. You just stared at the ground, not wanting to respond for fear of… You weren’t really sure. Bruno didn’t tend to get mad at you, but you didn’t know anything about this other beast. When you caught a glimpse of him, you were a bit skeptical. While Bruno tended to hide his more… Er, Inhuman qualities, this other beast had no qualms about being comfortable. You saw how his silvery hair fell over his shoulders, his painted lips barely concealing rows of sharp teeth and neatly done nails actually claws.

“Tesoro, this is Leone Abbacchio. He’ll be staying near the Shore, so you may see him often.” Bruno told you, leaving you just to roll your eyes.

“Oh boy, another terrifying monster I get to live near! I’ll make sure to bake cookies for the house party.” You replied, leaving Bruno’s face just to set into a grimace while Abbacchio just smiled and rolled his eyes.

“I have no interest in humans, and much less one this scrappy.” He replied, standing up. It took a moment for his insult to click, but once it did, you were ready to fucking fight. Would you lose? Probably. But your honor. But, before you could get a word out, Abbacchio just brushed himself off of bits of sand that seemed to stick at his body, and turned to Bruno.

“I’ll let you two have your lovers quarrel in peace.” And with that, Abbacchio quickly was out of there, leaving you alone with Bruno, who just shook his head as he sat down, motioning for you to sit with him. You did not obey.

“Don’t just stand there, tesoro. Perhaps we should talk. I hate the idea that there’s something wrong with our relationship.” Bruno told you, leaving you just to scoff as you crossed your arms.

“It’s fundamentally wrong, because it’s based on a lie. Me being here isn’t because of love! It’s because of… Because you… I’m your prisoner, Bruno!” You didn’t know why tears were welling up in your eyes, why the pain hit your heart as you spoke the truth, but it did. Your dreams of escaping with Bruno to the outside world, outside of this hell, were crushed entirely. Everything was just a wreck, Bruno had lost it, and beyond it all, he still gave you a pang in your heart. Bruno just shook his head, standing up and you released how much taller than you he was. Was he always this much taller than you? Still, it didn’t matter, you didn’t have the chance to step away before Bruno wrapped his arms around you, holding you tight. It was possessive, but his hand came behind your head, pressing your face into his chest. You gasped as you released he still smelled the same as before, of coastal air and cypress.

“I… I don’t care about that, (Y/n). I can’t lose you, not like everyone else. Please, just stay with me. If I lose you, I know… I know I’ll become like the rest of them. Please, I really do love you. Don’t you love me back?” Bruno’s voice was shaking, as if he were about to cry. You had the instinct to try and comfort him, holding yourself back the best you could.

“I… I don’t know anymore. It feels like… I’m haunted by you at this point. This person you once were and the… Thing you are now.” You replied, leaving Bruno just to sigh and let you go.

“I… But I haven’t changed. I haven’t hurt a single human. If anything, I’m safest out here. No one could possibly come out here, it’ll just be you and me. We can make the life you spoke about here, we can get married and have a family-”

“Bruno, no! We can never have that! You know that! Deep down in your heart, you know that just as well as I do, that this will never work! Even before... “ You looked away, hoping to find some sense of reality in a pace that seems to lack it. God, this was terrible. “We were just chasing after affection, weren’t we? Did we really love each other, or were we just so lonely that we didn’t know what to do and threw ourselves at the idea of human contact?” You replied, leaving Bruno to sigh.

“(Y/n), do you remember how you entered into the Labyrinth?”

“I…. What?” That was out of nowhere. You wondered if maybe he was trying to change the subject, but nonetheless, you shrugged and decided to answer.

“I don’t remember. I was walking through the woods one day, and it was like I got lost… Well, lost forever. I don’t really… Know what I did to deserve all of this.” You replied, leaving Bruno to sigh.

“Is there something back in your old life so pressing that you have to return to it? Is the world outside better than something we could build?” Bruno asked. You wanted to argue so bad, but he was right in a way. There really was nothing that you had going for you back at home. You would go back to work, live your boring, mundane life, but…

“You’re holding me hostage here, Bruno.”

“I’m protecting you. (Y/n), there’s no way out of the Labyrinth unless you have someone from the outside to pull you out. There’s no exit. That is the main secret of the Labyrinth.” He told you, his voice serious, and you knew he was telling the truth.

“I-I… T-Then, what were we searching for all that time?! Why were we… What kind of torture is all this?!” You replied, shaking a bit. You didn’t notice the way your hands were starting to fade and distort, but you didn’t care. “What kind of being would create such a terrible place?!”

“I… I don’t know, tesoro. I really don’t know. But… If there’s no one outside looking for you, you have to understand. Travelling back to the main portion of the Labyrinth is…” He didn’t have to say it. It was a death sentence, a world of torture waiting to happen. You just collapsed, feeling yourself collapse into a pile as you sobbed, trying to find some way, some reason for your entire existence here. You wanted to believe this was a lie, you really did, but something about Bruno’s tone.... How did he even learn this? Did that other beast tell him? Maybe it was just a lie that that beasts told, and Abbacchio knew that Bruno would try to be a sap with you. Torture by proxy. But still… Bruno’s hand hit your back, rubbing it gently as he sat down next to you.

“I… I know. Apparently… Every Beast that is in the Labyrinth was once a human being. One that was never saved.” He told you, leaving you just to go silent. You looked at your hands, the twisting of your own flesh and the accenting of claws that you had been telling yourself was just your nails growing jagged from lack of care. You turned to Bruno, lip quivering.

“I’m just haunted by the ghost of the person I thought I loved, and I don’t know if that person truly is you, or if he was killed in the fire.” You whispered, almost hoping that Bruno wouldn’t hear it. He just pulled you closer, wiping away your tears.

“I… I honestly don’t know. I feel like I am the same person, but who knows. I don’t know what has changed about me, and what hasn’t. All I know is… (Y/n), you keep me whole. You keep me… Good. I can’t explain it. I know you loved that person before, but… Could you ever be able to love me too?” He asked, leaving you just to look at the ground.

“I… I think so. I…” Your eyes just welled up with tears again as you grabbed onto Bruno, sobbing. You mourned for him, for yourself, for the hell that dozens were put through.

“What’s going to happen to me, Bru? Am I going to become a monster?” You asked, leaving the man to just pet your hair, hushing you.

“No matter what you become, you’re still going to be mia cara. And I’ll always love you, no matter what. I promise.” He told you. You looked up, letting your hand run along his cheek as you pressed your lips against his for the first time in forever. And he wasn’t warm the way he once was, but the kiss was still real, and his lips were still soft. When he pulled away, Bruno just held you in his arms, the two of you sharing a soft moment as you both tried to process the new reality that had come upon you. This was now the world you lived in, a world of Beasts and humans who would someday become beasts. If there were gods, they were only malevolent.

“I… I really do love you, (Y/n). I want a life with you. Even if it has to be in this hell, I really do mean what I meant. I think we could create a paradise here. A place just for us, forever.” He told you, and in your week state, you just nodded, letting Bruno hold you as you closed your eyes.

“I… I love you too. I’ve always loved you.” You told him, feeling your eyes get heavy as you cuddled up with Bruno. You looked into his eyes again, seeing that blue you had fallen in love with in the beginning, the Fisherman’s son who was determined to get home, with that serious look on his face, but full of hope. His eyes still had hope, though. For some reason, that seemed to comfort you, seemed to make you feel like things… Might be okay. Maybe not now, but someday.

For the last time that night, you dreamed of that idyllic life you once wanted with Bruno, in the old world on the ocean, a family and kids and peace. When you awakened in the arms of the beast, you were finally ready to throw it away.

#bruno bucciarati x reader #bruno bucciarati/reader #writing #My writing #mine #sfw #yandere x reader #yandere/reader #jjba imagines #jjba x reader #jjba/reader #commission #labyrinth au

[hysteriium]

Hello! I love that pennywise/reader nest fic you did, it was so soft and sweet ☺️would you consider doing the same reader/penny but with the reader finding out shes pregnant and pennywise doubling down on the nesting cuteness?

Thank you so much for the kind words! I’m really happy to hear you enjoyed it :,)) I tried my best with this one, though I’m not entirely sure it’s that good fsiduhfiusdhf regardless, I hope you enjoy! 

////

Trembling hands gripped the stick in front of you. The two pink lines glared at you in a malicious taunt. The cool porcelain your backside was firmly planted against was warm compared to the cold sweat which encapsulated your being. Horror couldn’t even begin to describe what you were feeling.

How, exactly, were you going to explain to your lover you were pregnant? A lover who also happened to be an eons old, extraterrestrial who feasted on the fears of mortals?

It was a good question, one you wished you had the answer to.   How was this even possible?

To put it simply, your thoughts were racing, juggling the non-stop stream of questions that threatened to flood and short circuit the entirety of your brain.

You needed air.

Slowly, you peeled yourself off the seat and tended to yourself, eventually exiting the enclosed space. Perhaps your eldritch mate had sensed your distress, because when you opened the bathroom door to exit, his looming form appeared, face partially cut off by the door frame.

While you would have found his sudden manifestation and his ongoing struggle with entrances comedic, today you were not in the mood.

“Fear doesn’t smell pleasant on you” were the first words he said to you.

You stepped closer to him, passing the door frame so you could look at him properly and you felt your mouth grow dry. With your jaw clenched and ticking wildly, you searched for something to say. Thinking was something that had suddenly become difficult.

His face morphed into a frown when it clicked just how uneasy you were.

“Pen, I, uh. I have something I need to tell you,” you felt yourself grow pale, the unpleasant feeling of dizziness took over. How would he react?

He tilted his head lightly and waited for you to continue.

“I’m pregnant.”

The silence, which had only lasted a couple of seconds, was powerfully deafening.  

“I am aware,” he said.

He planted his painted nose into the crevice of your neck, and you could feel the air from his nostrils against the flesh as he sniffed. He pulled back moments later, his head shaking and his bells ringing as he released a hiccuped laugh.

What?

“Curious.”

“C-curious?”

“You are scared,” he stated plainly like pregnancy was the most casual thing in the world.

“Do not be afraid, young one,” an arm snaked around your waist, pulling you into an embrace. His pointer finger, which trailed up your neck, stopped at your chin, forcing you to look up at him.

“For I will keep you safe.”

---

It had been days since you told Pennywise and even though he essentially knew before you had, he had smothered you. It was incredibly sweet, but then there was also a point where things went overboard, and perhaps today had taken the cake.

It was quite a shock when you returned home from work to find a large portion of your things gone. It was mainly from your room, the once cluttered, dare you say lively, area of space was reduced to a void of nothingness - cleared completely. To make matters worse, the dust that had silently accumulated over the past few days, due to your impressive collection of excuses to avoid dusting, had not vanished along with the missing items - the floating pests ever so present.

It didn’t take much to conclude Pennywise had something to do with it.

He was always implicated in something.

Said name spilled from your pursed lips, the call cutting into the silence.

As you blinked, he appeared right in front of you. His floating form defied all laws of gravity, and his face, which was plastered with a mischievous grin, became your salient view. It was as if he was lying on an invisible bed; the image of his tall legs kicking back and forth while his hands lifted his chin, cupping it sweetly, was a sight that made your serious demeanour difficult to maintain.

Playing the innocent act, huh?

You shot him a look, causing his smirk to grow impossibly larger.

“You called?” He giggled.  

He was in a suspiciously good mood…

“Penny...what have you done?”

When you blinked again, he was gone, only to find him next to you, your heights contrasted - comically so.

“What do you mean, little one?” He cheerfully stated, sustaining his clueless sham. He petted the top of your head as the word ‘little’ passed his plump lips, thinking that the oblivious air was enough to suppress bloating curiosity.

The gust of air that travelled from your nose conveyed your frustration with the orange-haired clown, “my things Penny, where’d you put everything?”

It was true that his beating around the bush had started to get on your nerves, but that quickly dissipated when his next words registered. A small, simple sentence that made your heart swell. The fluttering of your stomach was nowhere near a new feeling with him though, without fail, it always reduced you to mush.  

“A place safe enough for the three of us.”

More than touched by his gesture, you moved to speak. He saw you were about to, and thinking you were about to object (which you weren’t, for the record), he interrupted you, speaking up before you could.

“My dear, you carry my offspring. I won’t allow filthy humans to endanger that.”

You laughed.

“But Pen,” you whined, feigning hurt, “I’m a filthy human.”

You tried to lay it on thick, though it hardly worked. 

“My filthy human,” he hissed.

The sound of your joy, which penetrated the room, led to the upturn of his lips.

Then, he lowered himself into a crouch, his long slender fingers placing themselves upon your clothed stomach. They lightly traced the bump, a sweet caress as he moved his ear to your belly, listening for something. You weren’t far into the pregnancy at all, and while there was somewhat of a prominence, and morning sickness which had prompted you to take a pregnancy test days prior, you didn’t expect any movement from the part-alien, part-human hybrid inside you.

So when there was one, you panicked.

Pennywise had begun speaking in an entirely different language, whispering against you. It wasn’t anything you recognised, though it was beautiful, complex and entrancing. It was a language that was antediluvian, a forbidden wonder.

Moments passed as you found yourself lulled by his otherworldly expressions, that was until you felt the distinct, sudden jerk from within; a kick.

A surge of alarm nagged at you from the sensation, something the eldritch being before you picked up on.

“Calm, sweet thing,” he said, outlining comforting shapes against your stomach, “you are progressing well.”  

That fast!?

While everything was new to you, scary, upon exciting, you trusted Pennywise’s judgement. He would never willingly expose you to danger. So, you tried to shove your worry aside.

“Hey Pen?”

A hum, deep and distracted was your only response.

“Did you want to show me what you did with my things?”

The clown suddenly parted from you and leapt to his feet. Then, he bowed, an arm hiding behind his back while his other extended towards you, daring you to take his hand.

Another smile fought its way to the surface, the teeth you dug into your lip an attempt to suppress it.

You laced your fingers with his.

In an instant, you found yourself in an unfamiliar place. There looked to be a large crater in the middle of the room, large, black spikes protruding from the circular formation. It was darker than his usual den in the sewers but you were still able to see.

“What is this place?”

Pennywise glanced down at you, “it’s where I truly reside.”

“Truly? Like your real form?” you paused, looking up into his glowing eyes for confirmation, “can I see?”

He chuckled lightly, his thumb grazing the skin of your hand, “no sweet thing, for it would drive you mad.”

“Oh.” 

“Well then is there a way you won’t drive me insane?”

His brows scrunched in thought but quickly subsided soon after, “perhaps. There is another form close enough for you to comprehend, though that is for another day. Now, come.”

Thanks to the gentle guiding hands of your lover you were led through the shadows of the cavern. As you walked, you were quickly able to spot the area he was taking you to. A homely tinted light slowly lit up as you approached, displaying an extra special indent in the rocky surface of the wall. It was large and spacious, yet oddly cozy looking as the familiar objects filled your view. Your bed, which you didn’t even want to imagine how it got there, was looking particularly appealing.

With what you could only blame as conditioning, you failed to stifle a yawn. This immediately caught your mate’s attention because he stopped, turning around to lift you effortlessly. Your protests were swiftly put an end to by a curt hush, the silence communicating his win. You didn’t need to look up at him to know there was a playful smirk tugging at his lips - your stubbornness was a fire he loved to extinguish when necessary.  

When he reached the opening in the wall, he held you close to his chest, hunching to accommodate his large figure. He placed you on the bed with such delicacy, like a collector with a porcelain doll.

In all honesty, you hadn’t realised how tired you were until your head hit the softness of the pillow. The smooth touch of cotton sheets kissed your skin, and your body sunk into the embrace of the mattress, encouraging you to surrender to sleep.

When the bed dipped next to you, a sudden breeze hit your heavy body. The unexpected draft sent shivers through you, as the blast of air was followed by a material - warm and furry. It was draped across you, then tucked while the tickle of what you believed to be Pennywise’s hair, brushed against your face softly. He was huddled into your side, his head resting near your stomach.

Ever since he had found out you were pregnant, the cryptid had never strayed far from you, especially from your growing belly. He couldn’t go a few minutes without showering it with affection.

Along that train of thought, he was also extra protective. If someone even thought of bothering you, they were never to be seen again.

Ah, the perks of having an alien mate.  

As a way of thanks, you dove one of your lazy hands into his fluffy locks, and like a cat, he leant into your touch, pushing against it. His eyes became half-lidded at the feeling, eventually shutting completely. He cozied into you, wriggling slightly as a hand rested on your stomach. He soon drifted off into slumber.

You promptly followed.

#pennywise x reader #pennywise x you #pennywise the dancing clown #pennywise imagine #pennywise #it chapter 1 #it chapter 2 #kat answers #request #pregnant reader #fluff #x reader #slashers x reader #ask clownxclowns #clown fuckers

[ladystylestores]

Ars’ summer reading guide for our very surreal summer

Enlarge / A lot of literature in this.

Look, we’re admittedly biased around the Ars Orbital HQ. Whether the best of times or worst of times, we routinely find comfort in a good book. COVID-19 has changed so much about our day-to-day lives, including some of our entertainment habits around things like gaming or streaming TV and film. But when it comes to precious reading time in between work and busy personal lives, we’re continually drawn to the stories that grip us—as grim as some of those may be.

This year’s staff summer recommendation/To Be Read list has a few newer releases, plenty of old classics, and a lot of alternate reality/sci-fi. Ars’ book tastes remain nothing if not on-brand, meaning we may never get through one of these without Douglas Adams being mentioned. Here’s everything, Hitchhiker’s Guides and others, we’ve been escaping to.

Enlarge / The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi

Sparth

Series starters

Sci-fi fans who enjoy engaging characters and story driven more by human interaction than technical wharrgarbl will enjoy John Scalzi’s latest trilogy, The Interdependency. The third book just released last week, and it ties things up neatly—a first, for Scalzi. The Interdependency is an old-school galaxy-spanning empire, with a twist—habitable planets are almost impossibly difficult to find, and in an effort to curtail war, the Interdependency was designed so that no system can survive without trade with the others.

This arrangement is fine, until systems begin being inexorably—and permanently—cutting off from access to one another, heralding a collapse of civilization itself. Scalzi lightly channels the kind of wry humor the late, great Douglas Adams was best known for, though never going over-the-top into outright comedy.

If you’re looking for something a little further off the beaten path, I’ve also been enjoying a series called The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells. I’m only a couple of books into the five-book series, but Wells’ description of a confused rogue AI in a cyborg body, with absolutely everything designed, maintained, and forcibly supplied by the lowest bidder, is both charming and engaging. The Murderbot has its own desires, needs, and goals—it’s just not too clear what those are, beyond doing as half-assed a job as possible in order to leave more time for trashy soap-opera consumption. —Jim Salter, Technology Reporter

Hachette

Sci-fi, lots of sci-fi

I read, um, kind of a lot—between 50 and 100 novels a year, most years—and I’m always happy to talk books. In these quarantimes, leaning in and running away seem to be the two big categories in my reading. Sticking to books that were published in the last decade (so leaving out annual comfort re-reads of Lloyd Alexander and Terry Pratchett), I have some thoughts.

If you like motley crews in space: Becky Chambers’s Wayfarer series, starting with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Chambers’s books are optimistic, character-driven science fiction; stories about people and how they feel in a strange and exciting future. Soft and cozy reading.

Just this week I also finished the two books to date in Alex White’s Salvagers series, starting with A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe. Motley crew of talented space pirates, but also with magic and a set of moral codes. Zippy reading, genuine fun.

If you like cities: I cannot recommend N.K. Jemisin’s latest, The City We Became, highly enough, especially if you love cities and double especially if you’ve spent any time in New York. I haven’t lived in New York City since 2008, and I still could smell and feel and hear every single page. Cities have souls, and this is their story.

If you liked Hidden Figures: Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut books, The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky. As a Washington, DC, resident, I didn’t love my home being wiped off the map at the start of the apocalypse, but for all that a story of doom kicks off the tale, it is optimistic, Right Stuff spacefaring fiction at its finest.

And if you really want to lean into the apocalypse: Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers poses a pandemic from an animal-borne virus striking humanity right against the landscape of a US presidential election year. It’s the wrong book to read in our actual 2020 if you’re prone to giving yourself nightmares, but it’s still a very good book. —Kate Cox, Tech Policy Reporter

Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams are among the executive producers of HBO’s Lovecraft Country.

Two greats set in the past

Now is the perfect time to read Lovecraft Country, the 2016 dark fantasy/horror novel by Matt Ruff, since HBO’s adapted series will debut in August. Set in the Jim Crow era of the 1950s, it’s structured almost as a series of short stories, although everything is inter-related and hangs together beautifully as a whole. The first quarter focuses on Atticus, a black Korean war veteran and big H.P. Lovecraft fan, despite the author’s notorious racism. When his estranged father disappears, leaving a cryptic message, Atticus sets out on a road trip from Chicago’s South Side to rural Massachusetts. He’s accompanied by his Uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia.

There are plenty of sly references to the works of Lovecraft for the astute reader, as we encounter a secret cabal called the Order of the Ancient Dawn, a haunted house, a strange pocket universe, time shifting, shape-shifters, an evil mannequin, and a cursed book. What makes the book so ingeniously subversive, however, is that the worst monsters are not eldritch terrors or a Shoggoth in the woods; it’s the stark racism and bigotry our protagonists encounter along the way.

Beyond that, I’ve got one other recommendation: Iain Pears‘ sprawling 1997 novel, An Instance of the Fingerpost. Part historical murder mystery, part philosophical rumination on the unreliability of human memory and personal narratives—aka the “Rashomon effect” after Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film— the novel remains one of my all-time favorite reads that I return to every few years. The title refers to a quote from Francis Bacon, who held that all evidence is fallible, and yet there can be “one instance of a fingerpost that points in one direction only, and allows of no other possibility.”

Pears is a former BBC reporter who garnered early success with his art-history mysteries featuring fictional detective/art historian Jonathan Argyll. Those novels are light and quite fun, but with Fingerpost, Pears attains a whole new level of thematic complexity. It’s almost as if he started out writing a simple tale of a 17th-century Oxford murder, only to be carried away as that world and its denizens came alive for him. It’s been justly compared to Umberto Eco’s 1980 bestselling novel The Name of the Rose, although I prefer Fingerpost.

This was a tumultuous period of enlightenment, when new scientific ideas were flourishing and conflicting with religious institutions, and political intrigue was everywhere. There are four sections, each narrated by a different character, each remembering their version of the 1663 arsenic poisoning of a man named Robert Grove many years later. A servant girl confessed, but the four witnesses—an Italian physician, the son of an alleged Royalist traitor, a cryptographer, and an Oxford archivist—each identified a different culprit, and only one will ultimately reveal the truth about what really happened. Pears masterfully evokes Restoration England, as Charles II regained the throne after Oliver Cromwell‘s short-lived attempt at a republic, and his characters (historical figures and fictional ones) are richly detailed. It’s a long book but so riveting that you’ll be tempted to devour it as fast as possible, and you’ll be pondering the nature of truth entirely by the end. —Jennifer Ouellette, Senior Writer

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[corruption-spreads]

The Catalyst of Horror: H.P. Lovecraft

In February of 1928, the magazine Weird Tales was the first to publish “The Call of Cthulhu,” the now profoundly influential short story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The story is told in three parts through the eyes of Francis Wayland Thurston, an anthropologist from Boston, with much of the story being Thurston reading his grand-uncle’s notes. However, the story did not initially carry the legendary status it has now. When Lovecraft first submitted the story, it was rejected by editor Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales. Likewise, Lovecraft wasn’t exactly a fan of the story either, describing it as “rather middling – not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches.” Lovecraft died in March of 1937, poor and nearly impoverished, with no idea of the weight his name and stories would eventually hold among writers of horror. H.P. Lovecraft has inspired countless stories across various mediums, going so far as to even have a genre named after him, dubbed “Lovecraftian horror.” His themes of cosmicism, misanthropy, and hopelessness act as groundworks for similar themes found in modern horror. More specifically, the themes found in tales told by Stephen King, John Carpenter, and many other works of popular film and literature.

John Carpenter is a critically renown filmmaker and composer in the horror movie milieu, who takes clear inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft’s works. Carpenter himself once said “A master craftsman, Lovecraft brings compelling visions of nightmarish fear, invisible worlds and the demons of the unconscious. If one author truly represents the very best in American literary horror, it is H. P. Lovecraft” (Lovecraft, Dream). Through the way he talks with reverence for Lovecraft, it’s shown that Carpenter’s admiration runs deep; furthermore, many of the philosophies and themes found in Lovecraft’s writing can be found reflected in Carpenter’s own work. Lovecraft is quoted saying that “the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” and Carpenter takes this to heart (Lovecraft, Supernatural). An obvious example of Lovecraftian influence in John Carpenter’s work is in his film The Thing. In The Thing, a group of Americans become entrapped in a research base in the Antarctic. On this base, they discover an otherworldly creature with the ability to almost perfectly mimic humans, including their personality and appearance. Throughout the movie, characters are killed, unable to comprehend and come up with a method of defeating this seemingly unstoppable monster. This causes them to turn on each other, suspecting the others to be the creature. This movie reflects on Lovecraft’s themes of misanthropy and hopelessness. With the characters unable to discern who the creature is mimicking before it’s too late, they begin to resent and doubt each other, isolating themselves mentally from their fellow survivors, making it nearly impossible to work together in order to defeat it. Throughout the movie, the characters are kept on edge, unable to feel safe and relaxed. This is very similar to another one of John Carpenter’s movies, Halloween. Halloween focuses on a babysitter by the name of Laurie Strode, and an escaped inmate from a nearby mental institution. As the movie goes on, the inmate, Michael Meyers, shows many odd characteristics that one wouldn’t expect a human to show. This includes the ability to teleport, as well as a seeming imperviousness to bullets or other harm. The latter ability is magnified at the end of the film, where Michael is shot six times in the chest and falls from a second story balcony. However, it’s revealed that Michael survives this ordeal. This touches on cosmicism, with Michael seeming to be an unstoppable force of nature, rather than an actual human being. When reviewing the original script of Halloween, Carpenter can be seen referring to Michael simply as “the Shape” a total of 95 times, further amplifying this idea that the killer is something larger than life. Through these two movies, it is understandable that H.P. Lovecraft and his themes heavily impacted John Carpenter and his works, which future horror writers may be further inspired by, lengthening the impact that Lovecraft has had on the genre.

Stephen King is another author who is heavily inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s writing and themes. While Carpenter focused more on the misanthropic themes found in Lovecraft’s works, King was more interested in the theme of cosmicism. Cosmicism refers to the philosophy that humans are, in the grand scheme of the universe, rather insignificant, and that there is no divine presence watching over humanity. This theme shows up particularly often in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, with eldritch beings controlling the universe. King has been quoted saying, “Now that time has given us some perspective on his work, I think it is beyond doubt that H.P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale” (qtd. in Wohleber). Many of Stephen King’s works focus heavily on motifs also found in Lovecraft’s work, such as insanity and god-like creatures that the human mind cannot fully comprehend. One of King’s most popular books, It, exemplifies these themes. While on the surface, It just appears to be a story about a child-eating clown, the story goes much deeper than that. It is an eldritch being who has existed before time itself, whose true form cannot be grasped by the main characters, neither as children nor as adults. This is very similar to a creature in the Lovecraft mythos by the name of Azathoth. Azathoth is also known as the blind idiot god and is said to be the reason that the universe exists. According to the mythos, Azathoth is dreaming the entire universe and, if he were ever awoken (as is attempted in various Lovecraft novels), it would cause the universe to end. Azathoth essentially has the power to warp reality, much like It does, which It uses to terrify children in order to make them tastier. It also uses this reality warping power in order to draw the main characters (collectively known as the Losers Club) back to their hometown as adults, eventually causing the demise of many of the characters. However, It was not the only story that King wrote that was directly inspired by Lovecraft. The Mist is a novella centered around a town in Maine. Similar to Lovecraft having a majority of his stories taking place in New England, King has many of his stories taking place in Maine, where he grew up. After a military test goes awry, a threatening mist covers the town of Bridgton, Maine, forcing residents to take shelter as waves of otherworldly creatures threaten their lives. Most of the novella is set in a supermarket where those who were there when the mist arrived soon find themselves trapped. The Mist touches on Lovecraft’s theme of misanthropy. After only a few days in the supermarket where the majority of the story takes place, the small society formed within it quickly turns to anarchy, with suicides occurring, unlikely people getting together to have end-of-the-world sex, and factions forming. It’s implied that humans are the “real monsters” of the story, with one of the characters, Mrs. Carmody, attempting to sacrifice the other town residents in an effort to please the mist. This also falls in line with Lovecraft’s theme of misanthropy and the cruel nature of humans, with authority figures and the government in his stories often turning their backs on the impending doom humanity is facing. Lovecraft may think that when humanity turns its back on itself, it may in fact deserve it.

H.P. Lovecraft’s effects on the genre don’t only reach to famous filmmakers and authors such as John Carpenter and Stephen King, however, with the eeriness of Lovecraft’s work being something that horror writers still discuss and attempt to emulate. In a journal written by Thomas Hull, an associate professor of mathematics, titled H.P. Lovecraft: a Horror in Higher Dimensions, he discusses the impact Lovecraft’s writing has had on the modern world of horror. “…Lovecraft was a master at capturing a certain eerie mood of unknown gulfs which very few horror writers have since come near,” Hull says. “Specifically, Lovecraft was primarily interested in creating an appropriate mood to inspire in the reader a sense of cosmic horror: that the hopes, dreams, and philosophies of humankind are inconsequential to the larger universe” (Hull 10). These philosophies are something that creators of horror attempt to emulate. For instance, take H.R. Giger. Giger was an illustrator and painter, who became very popular for his work in Alien, a science fiction movie from 1979, specifically through his designs of the xenomorph, the main villain in the film. Giger was heavily inspired by Lovecraft, evident by the fact that he would name two collections of his work after the Necronomicon, an item found in various stories. The first of these works, Necronomicon, was given to Ridley Scott, the director of Alien, during pre-production of the movie. After Ridley Scott saw the illustrations, H.R. Giger was hired to make concept art for Alien. Furthermore, Alien was also inspired heavily by Lovecraft, featuring aspects of the Lovecraftian philosophy cosmicism. There are numerous movies with slight Lovecraft influence, such as The Evil Dead series featuring a Necronomicon, Ghostbusters, Re-animator, and The Cabin in the Woods. These films act as proof of Lovecraft’s more subtle influence on the horror genre.

Through these plentiful examples of Lovecraft’s themes reflected in the works of horror innovators, it is shown that Lovecraft had a lasting effect on horror as a genre. To this day, numerous writers use the adjective “Lovecraftian” to describe their stories, from monsters within them to the insignificance of man evidenced through the themes. With influential works such as Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness, readers of horror are terrified of otherworldly beings who don’t care for them, many of whom show up in stories by those Lovecraft inspired.

Works Cited

Carpenter, John, and Debra Hill. “HALLOWEEN.” Shooting draft, 10 Apr. 1978

Hull, Thomas. “H.P. Lovecraft: A Horror in Higher Dimensions.” Math Horizons, vol. 13, no. 3, Feb. 2006, pp. 10-12. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25678597.

Lovecraft, Howard P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by E.F. Bleiler, New York: Dover Publications, 1973.

---. The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death. Ballantine Books, 2003.

Wohleber, Curt. “The Man Who Can Scare Stephen King.” American Heritage, vol. 46, no. 8, Dec. 1995, www.americanheritage.com/content/man-who-can-scare-stephen-king.

#writing #lovecraft #horror #essay

[aion-rsa]

Top New Fantasy Books in March 2021

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New year, new books. After a tumultuous 2020, we’re hoping 2021 treats us a bit better. Either way, we have the following titles to help us take a break from reality when we need the respite. Here are some of the fantasy books we’re planning on checking out this year…

Top New Fantasy Books March 2021

Bridge of Souls by Victoria Schwab

Type: Novel Publisher: Scholastic Press  Release date: March 2

Den of Geek says: The next entry in this well-received series mixes fantasy and horror in a twisty mystery about a ghost-hunter in an atmospheric New Orleans.

Publisher’s summary: Where there are ghosts, Cassidy Blake follows . . .

Unless it’s the other way around?

Cass thinks she might have this ghost-hunting thing down. After all, she and her ghost best friend, Jacob, have survived two haunted cities while traveling for her parents’ TV show.

But nothing can prepare Cass for New Orleans, which wears all of its hauntings on its sleeve. In a city of ghost tours and tombs, raucous music and all kinds of magic, Cass could get lost in all the colorful, grisly local legends. And the city’s biggest surprise is a foe Cass never expected to face: a servant of Death itself.

Buy Bridge of Souls by Victoria Schwab.

A Broken Darkness by Premee Mohamed

Type: Novel Publisher: Solaris Release date: March 30

Den of Geek says: This is another one hard to categorize. It’s a little bit fantasy, a little bit science fiction, and a little bit eldritch. The first book in the series showed off Mohamed’s unique aesthetic and mix of serious stakes and wry humor.

Publisher’s summary: It’s been a year and a half since the Anomaly, when They tried to force their way into the world from the shapeless void.

Nick Prasad is piecing his life together, and has joined the secretive Ssarati Society to help monitor threats to humanity – including his former friend Johnny.

Right on cue, the unveiling of Johnny’s latest experiment sees more portals opened to Them, leaving her protesting her innocence even as the two of them are thrown together to fight the darkness once more…

Buy A Broken Darkness by Premee Mohamed.

The Councillor by E.J. Beaton

Type: Novel Publisher: DAW Release date: March 2 Den of Geek says: This political fantasy follows in the footsteps of The Traitor Baru Cormorant. We’re intrigued by the story of a character tangled in her own ambition, and fantasy where words are more important than swords.

Publisher’s summary: This Machiavellian fantasy follows a scholar’s quest to choose the next ruler of her nation amidst lies, conspiracy, and assassination

When the death of Iron Queen Sarelin Brey fractures the realm of Elira, Lysande Prior, the palace scholar and the queen’s closest friend, is appointed Councillor. Publically, Lysande must choose the next monarch from amongst the city-rulers vying for the throne. Privately, she seeks to discover which ruler murdered the queen, suspecting the use of magic. Resourceful, analytical, and quiet, Lysande appears to embody the motto she was raised with: everything in its place. Yet while she hides her drug addiction from her new associates, she cannot hide her growing interest in power. She becomes locked in a game of strategy with the city-rulers – especially the erudite prince Luca Fontaine, who seems to shift between ally and rival. Further from home, an old enemy is stirring: the magic-wielding White Queen is on the move again, and her alliance with a traitor among the royal milieu poses a danger not just to the peace of the realm, but to the survival of everything that Lysande cares about.  In a world where the low-born keep their heads down, Lysande must learn to fight an enemy who wears many guises… even as she wages her own battle between ambition and restraint.

Buy The Councillor by E.J. Beaton.

Top New Fantasy Books February 2021

Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

Type: Novella Publisher: Tordotcom Release date: Feb. 9 Den of Geek says: De Bodard is a staple around here for lush settings and unique characters. Here she turns her hand to a romance (and maybe love that doesn’t work out after all) compared to Howl’s Moving Castle. Publisher’s Summary:

Fire burns bright and has a long memory….

Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother’s imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a fire that devastated Ephteria’s royal palace.

Thanh’s new role as a diplomat places her once again in the path of her first love, the powerful and magnetic Eldris of Ephteria, who knows exactly what she wants: romance from Thanh and much more from Thanh’s home. Eldris won’t take no for an answer, on either front. But the fire that burned down one palace is tempting Thanh with the possibility of making her own dangerous decisions.

Can Thanh find the freedom to shape her country’s fate―and her own?

Buy Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard.

City of the Uncommon Thief by Lynne Bertrand

Type: Novel Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers Release date: Feb. 9

Den of Geek says: This novel sits at the crossroads of fantasy, horror, and YA. A gothic city provides a pleasantly weird background to a dark adventure about teens who lurk on the rooftops of the city.

Publisher’s Summary:

“Guilders work. Foundlings scrub the bogs. Needles bind. Swords tear. And men leave. There is nothing uncommon in this city. I hope Errol Thebes is dead. We both know he is safer that way.”

In a walled city of a mile-high iron guild towers, many things are common knowledge: No book in any of the city’s libraries reveals its place on a calendar or a map. No living beasts can be found within the city’s walls. And no good comes to the guilder or foundling who trespasses too far from their labors. Even on the tower rooftops, where Errol Thebes and the rest of the city’s teenagers pass a few short years under an open sky, no one truly believes anything uncommon is possible within the city walls. But one guildmaster has broken tradition to protect her child, and now the whole city faces an uncommon threat: a pair of black iron spikes that has the power of both sword and needle on the rib cages of men has gone missing, but the mayhem they cause rises everywhere. If the spikes are not found, no wall will be high enough to protect the city—or the world beyond it.   And Errol Thebes? He’s not dead and he’s certainly not safe.

Buy City of the Uncommon Thief by Lynne Bertrand.

The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck

Type: Novel Publisher: Pantheon Release date: Feb. 16 Den of Geek says: Tidbeck is known for her strange and literary short stories, full of musing and teeth. Her take on portal fantasy is bound to bring something new to the subgenre. Publisher’s summary: From the award-winning author of Amatka and Jagannath—a fantastical tour de force about friendship, interdimensional theater, and a magical place where no one ages, except the young In a world just parallel to ours exists a mystical realm known only as the Gardens. It’s a place where feasts never end, games of croquet have devastating consequences, and teenagers are punished for growing up. For a select group of masters, it’s a decadent paradise where time stands still. But for those who serve them, it’s a slow torture where their lives can be ended in a blink. In a bid to escape before their youth betrays them, Dora and Thistle—best friends and confidants—set out on a remarkable journey through time and space. Traveling between their world and ours, they hunt for the one person who can grant them freedom. Along the way, they encounter a mysterious traveler who trades in favors and never forgets debts, a crossroads at the center of the universe, our own world on the brink of war, and a traveling troupe of actors with the ability to unlock the fabric of reality.   Endlessly inventive, The Memory Theater takes us to a wondrous place where destiny has yet to be written, life is a performance, and magic can erupt at any moment. It is Karin Tidbeck’s most engrossing and irresistible tale yet. Buy The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck.

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Top New Fantasy Books January 2021

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Type: Novel Publisher: Tordotcom Release date: Jan. 12, 2021

Den of Geek says: McGuire’s Wayward Children series is a loosely connected group of novels all playing with fantasy tropes. What does it really mean to be a chosen one in a magical world? In the latest installment she turns her careful wit to centaurs and unicorns.

Publisher’s summary: “Welcome to the Hooflands. We’re happy to have you, even if you being here means something’s coming.”

Regan loves, and is loved, though her school-friend situation has become complicated, of late.

When she suddenly finds herself thrust through a doorway that asks her to “Be Sure” before swallowing her whole, Regan must learn to live in a world filled with centaurs, kelpies, and other magical equines―a world that expects its human visitors to step up and be heroes.

But after embracing her time with the herd, Regan discovers that not all forms of heroism are equal, and not all quests are as they seem…

Buy Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire.

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner

Type: Novel Publisher: Ace Release date: Jan 12, 2021

Den of Geek says: Romance and magic come together in what looks like a fun tale with a wide variety of characters. The roguish setting reminds us of The Lies of Locke Lamora with more women. Publisher’s summary: Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt—again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly peculiar women tasked with protecting their wealthy charge from unknown assassins.   Delly quickly sets her sights on one of her companions, the confident and well-bred Winn Cynallum. The job looks like nothing but romance and easy money until things take a deadly (and undead) turn. With the help of a bird-loving necromancer, a shapeshifting schoolgirl, and an ill-tempered reanimated mouse named Buttons, Delly and Winn are determined to get the best of an adversary who wields a twisted magic and has friends in the highest of places.

Buy The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner.

The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson

Type: Novel Publisher: DAW Release date: Jan. 19 Den of Geek says: A gorgeous and mysterious fantasy world is ready to unfold. The world-building here looks delightfully weird, with sailing ships on fields of greenery.

Publisher’s Summary: On the never-ending, miles-high expanse of prairie grasses known as the Forever Sea, Kindred Greyreach, hearthfire keeper and sailor aboard harvesting vessel The Errant, is just beginning to fit in with the crew of her new ship when she receives devastating news. Her grandmother—The Marchess, legendary captain and hearthfire keeper—has stepped from her vessel and disappeared into the sea.

But the note she leaves Kindred suggests this was not an act of suicide. Something waits in the depths, and the Marchess has set out to find it.

To follow in her grandmother’s footsteps, Kindred must embroil herself in conflicts bigger than she could imagine: a water war simmering below the surface of two cultures; the politics of a mythic pirate city floating beyond the edges of safe seas; battles against beasts of the deep, driven to the brink of madness; and the elusive promise of a world below the waves. 

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Kindred finds that she will sacrifice almost everything—ship, crew, and a life sailing in the sun—to discover the truth of the darkness that waits below the Forever Sea. Buy The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson.

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[winedwords]

Aleister| In The Dark |Black

Title; In The Dark

Pairing; Aleister Black/Reader

Words; 5200

Summary; He ate my heart out.

Warning; NSFW. SMUT. AU AF. Heathens!verse. Sex pollen/venom trope. Magic healing dick trope. Thigh riding, oral sex, public sex. Kinda dubcon. Persephone and Hades spin if you drink some wine and squint. morally flexible aleister. porn with the faintest traces of plot. shit editing and proofreading is shit. ye have been warned.

A/N: Repost from the old blog

I don’t know how I got talked into this.

This wasn’t my scene. There were too many people entirely too close to me. The lights were blindingly bright and the strobing made my eyes hurt. The music was so loud, I could feel the bass rattle in my chest and thrum through my veins. Or maybe that was the several shots of tequila that I felt in my veins? Even if this was an outdoors event, there was little to no airflow and sweat clung to every inch of skin from the heat and exertion of my pitiful attempts at dancing.

My roommate and coworker, Adrienne, had talked me into coming to coming here and wearing as little as I was. This wasn’t me, at all. Whereas I would have been content with a game night and a couple of glasses of wine, like the homebody I am, she wanted the lights and the sounds and the feel of writhing bodies pressed against each other. She wanted the crush of uncontrolled euphoria brushing against and dancing with her magic.

I love her to bits, I really do, but this is what happens when your friends worship Dionysus. They would throw themselves into anything hedonistic and it would feed their magic. That magic would then reach these euphoric pinnacles and Adrienne swore that it was better than any orgasm she’d ever had, so I just had to come with her to this club.

My usual night out attire was not appropriate, oh no.

Adrienne had insisted on the tiniest, strappiest neon blue bikini I had ever seen. I’d balked at her as she pulled it from the shopping bag, the microscopic bits of polyester would barely cover anything and I’d told her as much. She’d just laughed and said that there would be others wearing far less and to stop being such a prude. Her Circle would be there and nothing would happen she said, so why not have a night of fun? Like an idiot, I relented.

Yes, it was a Circle dedicated to hedonism and the worship of Dionysus, but I knew that if they had any say about it, no harm would come to me. Not when they would have to face the unholy wrath of the North American Council.

I guess you could say that I was special, even amongst the magic folk.

See, magic is a finicky thing, temperamental and as unique as a fingerprint. Most magic folk do not fall into strictly black magic or white magic, but rather on a spectrum of grays. We are all born with innate ability, affinities and knacks for certain types of spellcasting. Our magic comes from the blood and each individual had different talents. Some, like Adrienne, are ridiculously skilled at charms and summoning magics. Others, like those in the Order of Osiris, were stewards of the dead, shepherding lost souls to the afterlife and banishing malignant spirits.

Then there was me.

The only White Witch born in nearly four centuries.

White magic was beyond rare. Difficult to wield, incapable of actually causing harm, and the only magic capable of healing wounds and curing illness, those with white magic had been worshipped and revered throughout history as living deities. With white magic, everything had a cost, every action had an equal reaction.

The biggest reaction was the prevalence of black magic. My tutors had said that white magic burns so brightly, that it must always be followed by the impenetrable darkness as its shadow. Black magic was expressly forbidden by mainstream casters, for good reason. Blood magic, sex magic, necromancy, there was no taboo that was considered to be off limits. Black magic could steal free will, snuff out life, summon inconceivable eldritch horrors from parts of the universe best left untouched.

My tutors had warned that white and black magic were inexorably drawn to each other, like two primeval magnets. That they were two halves to the same coin, the light and the dark, yin and yang. Precautions had been taken to never allow myself to be anywhere in proximity of a user of any type of dark magic, lest the inconceivable were to happen.

I felt him long before I ever was able to lay my eyes on him. The brush of his magic against me felt like velvet and tasted like single malt scotch.

I’d been followed before. Since my birth, there was always someone watching from a respectful distance. They were always nondescript people, blending in with their surroundings, if it weren’t for the feel of their eyes trailing me. I’d grown used to them with time, knowing they were there at the back of my mind, but also knowing that they’d never approach.

He was disturbingly handsome and not trying to blend in, in the least. He stuck out like a sore thumb in the sea of writhing humanity, as still as a statue with the slicked back mohawk and the clearly tailored black on black suit. He wasn’t dancing like the others around him, I wasn’t sure he was even breathing. He was just staring. At me.

I was close enough to make out the tattoos on his hands and the crescent moon high on his cheekbone through the crowd and I shivered for reasons I was not ready to examine closely right now.

Illuminati. And an enforcer at that.

Why in the world would they be sending someone who should be doing their wetwork and other unsavory bits of business to keep tabs on me instead of their usual nondescript types? Both the Templars and the Illuminati sent the same types of people to shadow me, always nonthreatening and certainly never got this close to me.

Both groups, the Illuminati and the Templars, were tasked with keeping balance in the world, maintaining order, and cleaning up any… messes to keep the ordinary and non-magic from discovering us. They just happened to go about it from each other.

The Templars were an ancient order, able to trace their beginnings to Babylon, with a strict code of ethics and morality. Everything was for the greater good. Duty, honor, and sacrifice were revered amongst them and it was not unusual for them to sacrifice their lives so that others may live. The ultimate white hats and do-gooders. The handful of Templars I had interacted with had reminded me strongly of the Knights of the Round Table and my mentor had laughed, saying that the Templars made up the entirety of the Knights of the Round and that Arthur was practically a saint to the later generations.

The Illuminati were a whole different breed. Young in comparison to their arch nemeses, the Templars, only about three centuries old, and infinitely more ruthless. They would do anything, no matter the cost, to keep balance. Blackmail, treason, deceit, murder, torture, it was all on the table. They had no such scruples about manipulation or power grabs. It was well known that they were the people on grassy knolls, the shadowed faces in corporate board rooms, and the kingmakers in every political system around the world.

I had been followed and tracked by both factions since I came into my magic. The Council had told me to not be worried, that this was par for the course whenever someone was born with significant magic, especially when it was black or white magic. I was warned that eventually, when the time was right, they would make a play for my allegiances. I had been assured that I should barely notice them with time, that they would eventually become fixtures of my everyday background. The Council was right, they had become my personal shadows, the faces and shapes changing but never enough for me to pay them much mind because I was never approached.

Until this one.

As soon as I had registered who and what he was, he was gone in the blink of an eye. Even if he was gone from my sight, the taste and feel of his magic still lingered.

So much darker than my own, that mysterious suited man’s magic felt like smoke and velvet and tasted as heavy as the darkest of chocolates with the after burn of a finely aged scotch. It seemed to swirl around me teasingly, caressing along my skin like a lover’s hand would. Then it was gone. My own magic crackled along my skin pleasantly at the loss and it reached up and out of its own accord to seek his out again.

I panicked, it felt like my throat was closing up, and I began attempting to push through the crush of  the writhing crowd. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, my magic which I had such a tight control over from a young age, attempting to do something of its own will. The loss of control paired with the tequila and the hum of the euphoria spell that the Dionysus cult had cast was fogging my thoughts and I just needed a moment to breathe and to collect myself.

The bodies of revelers were tightly packed and it was damn near impossible to make any headway to the back of the venue, where there were fewer people. The bass of the music was overwhelming and the strobe lights were dizzying, making progress through the teeming masses of human flesh all that more difficult.

I’d made it a scant few feet when a delicate, but impossibly strong, hand latched onto my wrist. I pulled hard to attempt to get out of the iron like grip, but there was no give. I turned back to confront the person accosting me, but the anger and panic rushed out  of me as soon as I made eye contact with a pair of hypnotic and eerily dark eyes. The woman holding onto my wrist tightly gave a blinding smile and leaned in close.

“Dance with me.”

The will to fight drained from me and I smiled dreamily at her. She was petite, with a delicate heart shaped face and an overly full sensuous mouth. Those eyes had hooked me in and all I wanted was to please her and make this strange woman happy. I moved closer to her, my hips swinging to the rapid fire beat that the DJ was playing over the speakers, and she leaned in to press a teasing kiss to my shoulder.

“God you smell divine.”

Her words tickled and I threw my head back with a giggle, exposing the tender skin of my throat. I didn’t see the way her eerie dark eyes zeroed in on the thumping pulse point in my neck, nor did I see the way her teeth seemed to elongate into sharp points. I was too entranced by this woman, the feeling of being around her seemed to enhance the tequila that was lowering my inhibitions.

“You don’t mind if I taste just a little, hm?”

She didn’t wait for a response, leaning in with fangs bared for my exposed neck. I stood stock still, my head heavy from her hypnotic eyes. I could feel the heat of her breath against my skin and then the pinprick of fangs. I relaxed for the barest of moments into her touch before she paused, a strange gurgling noise at the back of her throat.

Then the fog around my brain cleared, the gravity of what just almost happened weighing heavy. My eyes were wide as she practically exploded into dust, her mouth wide in a silent scream, revealing that handsome suited stranger from before, holding a wickedly sharp wooden stake in his left hand.

He cursed in a language I didn’t understand, his eyes drawn to the small pool of blood at the nape of my neck from where that… creature’s fangs had broken skin. I wouldn’t have even noticed the small scrape if it weren’t for the slight burning irritation that emanated from the area. Dust from the creature clung to the lapels of his dark suit jacket, which was clinging to his broad shoulders in what was becomingly an increasingly interesting way to me.

“Do you like men or women?”

The sound of his voice startled me. Deep, cultured, with just the faintest traces of an accent. My skin was starting to feel almost too tight and the thrum of the bass of the electronic music was vibrating straight to my core. I laughed uncomfortably at his words as soon as they registered through the returning fog that was becoming thicker and thicker in my head.

“What? Get out of here you creep.”

The suited man’s face tightened into a grimace, still deathly serious. His magic flared and surrounded me completely. It was heavy, all encompassing, and so dark that it sung to my own magic in a way I had never known before. It was simultaneously exhilarating and comforting. I couldn’t help the purr that escaped my throat and the answering bright burst of magic. I was so lost in the feel of his energy that I missed the way he shivered and the rapid bobbing of his Adam’s apple.

“You were bitten by a dhampir, woman. They have a rather potent venom that acts as an aphrodisiac in their saliva.”

Well that certainly explained a lot about the way I was feeling. I’d begun to break out in a cold sweat and I could feel slickness that was most decidedly not sweat clinging to my inner thighs. My heart was racing and I could feel the panic bubbling up inside of me. How did I miss the signs of the dhampir? It was clearly trying to influence my behavior and get me alone… I could vaguely remember something about an anti-venom, but the crush of the bodies around me and the fog of the aphrodisiac was clouding my memory and judgment.

“Anti-venoms?”

His smile was wry but unapologetic. His sharp eyes were cataloguing my every reaction, likely calculating how long I had until my senses left me and I was reduced to a babbling, horny mess.

“The blood of the offending dhampir, which is out of the question now, or… a high dosage of the unique cocktail of adrenaline, endorphins, and oxytocin that’s released during orgasm. Now tell me, men or women?”

My mouth was dry and my brain was still whirring to process. My answer was clearly taking too long and he hurriedly pushed his hand through his dark hair with a frustrated sigh.

“The venom works quickly, you only have about five more minutes before the it overtakes your nervous system and begins to liquify your internal organs. Which means someone needs to make you cum in the next five minutes to stave off the effects. Do… Do I have your consent to see you through this?”

I was most certainly not ready for this, to be afflicted with a venom that was going to take away my free will, let alone a man offering to help and asking for my consent before I was turned into a mindless sex machine who’s organs turn to mush. He was dangerously handsome, I could definitely do a lot worse, and the touch of his magic alone pulled me to him. What was I forgetting though? This damn pink fog was beginning to take over my vision and I had somehow inched myself closer to him, so close I was practically plastered against his front, the brush of the soft fabric of his suit making my blood roar.

“I trust you. I don’t know why, but I do. B-but what’s your name?”

He smirked, something dark and hungry crossing over his face, but the venom was pumping too thickly through my body for me to pay too much mind.

“Aleister Black. It’s a pleasure, (Y/N).”

There was no chance to respond, as Aleister had swooped in for a sinfully feverish kiss one hand cupping the back of my head and the other playing with the many straps of the neon bikini at my hip. The cool metal of his lip ring felt like a brand against my lips and a quick nip from his teeth had my lips parting to make way for him to deepen the kiss. My insides clenched at his touch and I was already so, so close. His lips began to trail downwards along my jaw line and he chuckled as I shivered against his lips.

I felt like I was burning up. 

Every nerve was on a razor’s edge, to the point where every touch by a dancing partygoer and every touch of his lips against the bare flesh of my decollete was a pleasurable torture that bordered on pain. I couldn’t say what part of my body’s reaction was due to the guttural, primal attraction that drew me to him and what part was what that…. thing did to me.

It felt like someone put a live wire to my sweat drenched skin when he pushed his thigh between my legs and up against my core. The pressure on my hypersensitive center was delicious, already on the brink of release, and I couldn’t stop my hips, even if I had wanted to, from rutting against his firm, muscled thigh. Mere seconds had passed of my feverish grinding and the fabric of his suit pants were completely soaked by my desire.

My mouth was agape at the combination of friction and pressure in the place where I needed it the most and Aleister seemed to realize it. Both of his hands grasped my hips in a vice like grip and pressed me down hard and faster than I could manage against his thigh. His teeth clamped down on my earlobe and my release jolted through my body like I was struck by lightning.

I writhed in his arms, hips jerking shortly while my eyes rolled into the back of my head. Aleister hummed his approval, raspy foreign words spoken into my ear. My body eventually stopped shuddering, my chest heaving with my inhaled breaths and my heartbeat still fluttering like a hummingbird’s wings. The relief was only momentary however, then the lust was back and just as overwhelming as before.

I mewled in desperation, frantic for something, anything to bring relief to the pressure. The suited man in front of me made sure to double his efforts of dragging my core along his thigh, before gliding a hand underneath the small polyester triangles of my top. The rough pads of his fingers teased, then pinched the pebbled flesh of my nipple, the pleasure-pain sending jolts of pleasure directly to the tight bundle of nerves between my legs. Aleister caught my lips again, his tongue twisting with my own in the most ancient of dances.

The crush of the bodies around us was pressing me tight against him and it just took a sudden shove of a partygoer against me to send me into another orgasm at the rough treatment. Shudders wracked my body longer this time, the release feeling three times as strong as the one before it. It took several deep breaths to finally gain some semblance of control over my motor functions again, the white hot pleasure finally fading.

The pink fog that clouded my brain and my vision seemed to lessen in its density for just the barest of moments, long enough for me to begin to paw at the front of Aleister’s suit pants. He chuckled and swatted my hands away, only to be met with a high pitched whine that somehow came out of my mouth.

“You’re so cute when you pout.”

His affectionate words only served to double my effort in getting his pants off. His much larger hand grabbed both of my wrists and held them tightly, his once amused face now like stone.

“Sorry, beautiful. Not here, and most definitely not right now. I need to get you somewhere safe before others come for you.”

His magic swarmed me, the taste and feel of it overwhelming my already compromised magic. I weakly in his arms and against his magic for a couple of breaths, before I fell unconscious.

An undetermined amount of time later, I found myself splayed lewdly across the back seat of a large SUV, Aleister between my legs lapping at my core with abandon. I had only been conscious mere moments before I was shrieking his name and grasping at his hair. The pressure and pace with which his tongue had been moving lessened considerably as I rode out my pleasure, the shudders of my body slowly lessening.

It was then that I noticed the hastily drawn symbols on my thighs and lower abdomen, the vast majority of which I could not make out.

“What are these?”

My voice was so much breathier than I would have liked and Aleister looked up, the lower half of his face and beard glistening from the fluids of my core. I flushed brightly at the sight, arousal and embarrassment burning through me. His smile was predatory and filled with male satisfaction, the bright white a stark contrast with the darkness of his beard.

“Sex magic. Increases your pleasure while staving off the effects of the venom. I had to do something, you were starting to seize as I brought you to my car.”

The squawk I made would have embarrassed me further if I wasn’t so indignant.

“Sex magic?!  Are you out of your fucking mind? I cannot be party to this!”

I scrambled to get up and he made no movement to stop me, still crouched over my lower body as still as a stone, waiting. I had no idea what he was waiting for, too preoccupied with looking for the skimpy bottoms of the neon bikini, when a muscle cramp unlike any I had ever felt before wracked my lower abdomen. I groaned and attempted to curl in on myself to try to quell the pain.

“You’re going to have to be party to it. The only other choice is to die. Now come to me, this is going to get worse before it gets better.”

The cramp passed for the moment, leaving me exhausted and weak.

“You talk as if you speak from experience.”

He hummed noncommittally, pressing a kiss to the skin of the top of my thigh, his tongue flicking across the gooseflesh that his kiss caused.

“Enough experience to know how long this will last. Your mind is coming back to you, but your body is still prey to the effects of the dhampir venom. It’s going to be a long night.”

I hesitated, just a moment too long, then I choked off a scream as another cramp seized me, this one even more vicious than the last. Aleister’s face was hard, before making short work of his button up dress shirt, the suit jacket in places unknown.

“Do you trust me?”

My eyes were bleary with tears of pain and I could barely make out his face through them. He’d seen me through this far, the only untoward thing he’d done was drawing symbols of profane magic on my body in sharpie, in an attempt to ease the process. There wasn’t even a question.

“Yes.”

I didn’t have the time to read into the flurry of emotion across his face or the way his magic rubbed and purred against me in a decidedly feline way. Aleister had practically lunged upwards  to my lips, his kiss demanding and unrelenting. I groaned and arched upwards into him and into his mouth, returning his kiss with equal ferocity. I was so distracted by the flurry of our tongues, teeth, and the taste of myself that I barely noticed Aleister pushing his pants down his thighs.

It was the heavy press of the blunt head of his cock that made me pull away from his mouth with a gasp.

“Last chance. Say the word and I’ll do my best with my fingers and my mouth.”

His raspy words made me tingle in the most delightful of ways, the need in his voice pulling at the dark and primitive part of my psyche. The heavy pink fog had made its return with a dizzying speed and I frantically shook my head. I was just so… hungry for him.

“If you stop now, I could never forgive you.”

Aleister didn’t respond verbally, surging forward between my slick folds and not stopping until he bottomed out inside of me. My scream was wordless and he didn’t pause for a moment, his hips setting a bruising pace against my own. My hips were stuttering upwards into his, desperately craving every generous inch of him, needing more more more.

I was already on the brink, my magic crackling like lightening around me. It reached up to touch his skin, sizzling against the sweat and he groaned. Aleister began muttering in a language I was wholly unfamiliar with, his magic caressing along my skin so heavily it felt like an actual touch. He shifted ever so slightly and the heavy drag of his length inside of me caught that one spot that made me gasp at the immensity of the pleasure.

“Found it.”

I couldn’t be mad at his smug words, because they were delivered so breathlessly. Every thrust of his hips caught the hidden bundle of nerves inside of me, my hands clutching desperately at him as I mewled and moaned and writhed underneath him.

The orgasm was too big, too intense, and came on entirely too quickly for me to adequately prepare. I tried to say something, to warn Aleister, but his thrusts felt like they were driving the air straight out of my lungs. Then the knot that had been coiling inside of me snapped.

I remembered screaming, a sudden rush of fluid leaving me, and the delighted curses from Aleister’s mouth.

After that everything had faded and blurred into a rush of orgasms, different sex positions, and Aleister, most importantly Aleister. Somehow we had made it to a residential building and made it inside, unseen. My memory was hazy and I didn’t remember collapsing from exhaustion.

I woke in an unfamiliar bed, the silk sheets a sensory overload to my touch sensitive skin. The venom may have been out of my system, but it was still wreaking havoc on me. Religious and occult artwork decorated the walls of an otherwise sparsely furnished room and it took me some time to gather my bearings, the walls seeming to seep magic and the smell of Aleister surrounding me. There was an unfamiliar thrum in my chest and at the back of my mind, I could feel annoyance that wasn’t my own.

It took several moments, but I was able to gingerly make my way out of the bed, every muscle in my body screaming from the overexertion last night and my feminine flesh was almost painfully sore. I shuffled my way out of the bedroom, turning to what must have been the kitchen by the sound of a coffee machine and Aleister’s voice. I felt like I was being pulled by a cord towards him.

He was speaking with someone.

It wasn’t until I got further down the hall and closer to the kitchen, did I realize that he was speaking about me to someone on the phone.

“I understand that this was not what the bosses meant when they said to watch her, but what was I supposed to do?”

He paused, before chuckling.

“I’d like to see what you would have done with a pretty little thing like her begging for you.”

Hurt burned in my chest when he gave a bellow of a laugh. Was this some sort of sick cosmic joke?

“No, no, it was not like that. Dhampir venom. You just don’t get it though Michael. Her magic practically sings to me. That’s… its impossible to describe.”

He stopped speaking for a moment, running his hands through his hair.

“She knows that I used sex magic last night to fight off the venom last night. I just don’t think she realizes that her magic bound us together. It’s for the best though, the bosses will be thrilled that she’s ours now. And it wasn’t even as hard as they were making it out to be.”

Aleister paused at my gasp and took a breath. My magic had bound us last night?

“Dante, I must call you back.”

He hung up the phone, not turning to face me. Even through my shock and hurt, I was still struck by his terrifyingly beautiful appearance and the tattooed skin pulled taught over expanses of muscle. I wasn’t of the mind last night to have explored him as thoroughly as he had explored me.

“Did… did last night mean anything at all?”

Aleister turned towards me, his eyes suspiciously dark and molten, with a small and secretive smile on his face. I blinked and then he was in front of me, body heat seeping through the thin fabric of the t-shirt I wore. He filled my vision, all I could see, smell, and feel was him. Anticipation curled in my stomach and my breath was caught in my lungs.

“You were my mission.”

He hooked a long and tattooed finger underneath my chin and pulled me in for a kiss that was simultaneously chaste and claiming. I could feel my magic begin to crackle in the air as my anxiety began to rise. He could sense that between our neophyte bond, brushing his thumb against my lower lip to give me some comfort. Affection was all I could feel from him, with the barest traces of pity.

“There is nothing I wouldn’t have done to have you.”

I wanted to sob.

“Th-that’s not what I meant, Aleister, you know that.”

He gently pushed an errant strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers caressing slowly down my cheek. His touch was almost reverent and my skin seemed to hum with pleasure in the wake of the path of his digits.

“It’s all that mattered at the time.”

The lump in my throat felt like a boulder, cutting off my airflow. He may have answered my question, but I hated that I still had to ask.

“And now?”

He leaned in, his forehead resting against mine and one thick, tattooed arm snaking around my waist. Aleister’s magic washed over my skin like the heaviest of velvets and instinctively, I relaxed into him. This is what I was warned about, the bonding of magics like ours. We were two halves of the same coin, one light and one dark, forever drawn to each other by forces so much bigger than us.  

“You are mine as I am yours. I would open the gates of Hell and let every demon loose before I let anyone, including my brothers and sisters, touch you.”

Aleister then ducked his head just a little further and caught my lips in a claiming, soul searing kiss. The touch of his lips did not quell my unease for what was inevitably to come. The… circumstances of our joining was sure to start a war.

#aleister black fic #aleister black imagine #aleister black smut #repost from the old blog #dog days of summer challenge fic #heathens verse

[rjdrawsstuff]

Mystery Kids, Bloodborne, children and alien gods, the Nightmare Frontier, Kubo and Stanford Pines as hunters, Bill Cipher’s father, etc.

Lovecraft readers are gonna give me hell for this. But I’m doing it, I’m making dumb headcanons. I’m gonna sound like an idiot, but whatever. I’ll be making mention of Psychonauts, Gravity Falls, Coraline, Paranorman, Kubo, Over the Garden Wall, Bloodborne and stuff they have in common that make them so much more interesting when put together(I’m excluding Invader Zim and Danny Phantom as I write this since I have yet to watch them again). I wanted Kubo to be part of the group and I just want to make it clear why. My idea was that the majority of the Mystery Kids: The Eldritch Truth takes place where Kubo ended up traveling towards shortly after the spiritual departure of his parents. He lived as a lone child warrior, and soon headed off in wonder how his extended family was able to transcend into godhood when they sacrificed their eyes and allowed themselves to go mad, and to see if it was possible to get his parents back in the physical world, and he found himself eventually stuck in the same timeless dimension where Stanford Pines was hurled into for 30 years, never to come out of it and age at all. This was the city of the damned, Yharnam, a place stuck between reality and the mindscape, and a frontier of interdimensional beings. The main story happens after the finale of Gravity Falls, and after Bill Cipher made a comeback and the portal to Yharnam had to be reopened.

This is all so difficult to process and put into words that make sense, I mean even for myself, as the concepts in Bloodborne and Lovecraftian horror are enough to make my head explode, but let me break down some things so that it makes sense that the Mystery Kids belong in the same universe. Hear me out. And I might repeat the same things just for the sake of context so bear with my monotony if it comes to that. And I’m going to be mentioning the names of 2 specific gods here, a lot. Their Lovecraftian names and their counterparts in Bloodborne and in Mystery Kids.

Lovecraft’s work had the outer gods Azathoth and his son Nyarlathotep, among other eldritch abominations. To put it simply, Azathoth was the ruler of the outer gods. He’s mostly just there but his mere presence influenced a lot of chaos. He WAS the cosmos, and the center of everything, and Nyarlathotep just loved fucking with humans and his own father and getting into people’s business for the lolz. He was the only outer god who showed interest in humans. Now just substitute Azathoth with Oedon and Nyarlathotep with Oedon’s implied offspring in Bloodborne, the Moon Presence. And it’s gonna get more fucked up when we substitute the Moon Presence with Bill Cipher. I’m gonna lay out 3 similar situations here, the 3rd one I’m sticking out with for context of MK: The Eldritch Truth. 1.) In Lovecraft’s writing, Azathoth and Nyarlathotep, already explained above. Azathoth not necessarily evil but he was just so unfathomable his mere presence caused madness. Nyarlathotep indeed the evil one, and he loved fucking around with Azathoth. It’s easier to think about them as God and Satan. 2.) In Bloodborne, Oedon and the Moon Presence, in which the Moon Presence makes a pact with Yharnam hunters(notably the paleblood hunter Gehrman) to rid the city of Yharnam of the plague caused by Oedon because apparently Oedon impregnated people with alien babies and caused Yharnam to go bonkers just by being there and the Moon Presence is like “You’re going down, dad. That’s fucked up. You can’t do that.”, even though Oedon is actually mindless and probably doesn’t know what the hell he was doing other than being an unfathomable blob of cosmic energy and caused the Yharnam population to go on a mad frenzy. But the Moon Presence, the earthbound son of Oedon, had good intentions for humanity. 3.) in MK: The Eldritch Truth, Oedon and Bill Cipher, Bill Cipher being another offspring of Oedon but still a nod to Nyarlathotep(because Bill loved making deals just like Nyarlathotep) in which Bill keeps getting involved in human pursuits with the intent to eliminate Oedon and take his place as the one and only bad guy in the entire universe. This is why Bill burned his own dimension along with his parents(as indicated in Journal 3 in Gravity Falls), or so he thought. His father and more of his kin remained alive. Oedon and Bill has had a long running feud for eons that has never stopped until Yharnam and Gravity Falls. Now...for the things I’ve observed...

Eyes, Insight, Madness, Dream realms, Souls, Lanterns, Bells, Voices, Underwater themes, Ancient civilizations, and Portals 1.)In Psychonauts, there was a mineral from a crashed meteorite called the psitanium. Prolonged exposure to it either caused someone to go mad or develop a stronger brain. It gave people exposed to it an immense amount of insight. Psitanium was probably organic and an alien element, as it was literally called the Whispering Rock and spoke in an inhuman tongue and into a person’s mind. People who were able to withstand the effects of it were elevated to superhuman status(the psychics), and they can percieve things normal people can’t and even influence memories. Dream realms were an alternate reality. They were as tangible as the physical world. The psychics in Psychonauts had enough mental prowess to transmigrate between worlds. Whatever was done in the dream world directly influences physical reality. Psycho-Portals were likely forged out of the remains of the Whispering Rock. These are little door-shaped devices that psychics use to traverse through dimensions. With it, they can, at will enter the mindscape and escape out of it. All the psychics of the known world in Psychonauts were probably descendants from the Lake Oblongata settlers who were directly affected by the psitanium 500 years before the events of the game. The psitanium meteorite most likely fell right in the middle of Lake Oblongata. It’s where the camp is as well because it’s easier to train possible psychics there where the main concentration of psitanuim is. It may be a coincidence that it fell into the water but it’s going to be a recurring theme here that dream realms can be found underwater, so I’m going to say it’s not just a coincidence. And note the family of psychics who cursed Razputin’s family to always die by drowning. My guess is that the influence of the psitanium for this other family was so strong that they started believing growning is a way to transcend into a godlike state. They most likely died out themselves by drowning. And this family was evidently close to Raz’s family as there was an obvious falling out between them and Raz’s father, Augustus Aquato. 2.)Kubo’s story had his extended family sacrifice their eyes in exchange for godhood, but in doing so they went mad in the process. Eyes were windows to the soul, and in that sense giving up their souls meant giving up their humanity. Kubo’s grandfather infiltrated one of the boy’s dreams to influence his decisions. That’s literally the same thing the psychics do in Psychonauts. Kubo’s mother literally has the same sensitivity to the universe as her family. But she didn’t give up her eyes, so she didn’t lose her humanity. When her body fell, she had the choice to transcend but she chose to stay earthbound in another vessel and protect her son. The soul is eternal, and with the aid of the lanterns in the Bon festival, they can move to another plane, the dream plane where the gods reside. The mindscape and physical reality can be easily traversed through by people with a heightened enough sensitivity of the known universe, while risking insanity if their minds aren’t strong enough. In MK: The Eldritch Truth, Kubo’s grandfather communed with the same god that turned Yharnam into a hellhole, the god Oedon. By the time the story of Kubo(in the movie) ends, he remained dismayed by the departure of his parents, so he traveled looking for them until he found himself eventually in Yharnam. The ringing of giant bells was significant in the Bon festival, and it’s that idea that leads Kubo to Yharnam. Bell ringing either summons souls from the dream world or puts them back there. That was literally the function of his father, Hanzo’s, helmet, the Helmet Invulnerable. It served as the bell that ushered souls into the spirit world when the Bon festival was held, and it was also weaponized by Hanzo to drive back evil elements, namely Kubo’s grandfather and aunts. Okay now moving on, Kubo finally arrives in Yharnam. By the time he enters it, Stanford Pines was already teleported towards it and trapped inside. I’ll explain why Kubo is the only one who doesn’t age. Stanford Pines was already bound to Bill by the time he was teleported out of Gravity Falls, and thus cannot forge a deal with the Moon Presence against Oedon. Stanford then cannot operate within the dream realms confined in Yharnam, making time for him as real as it was when he was in Gravity Falls. This will stand for 30 years. That’s why when he walked out of the portal he was dressed as a hunter. And he was already halfway through the 30 year lapse of time when Kubo arrived. Kubo, however like the paleblood hunter Gehrman who served under the Moon Presence in Yharnam, would find himself working under both Gehrman and the Moon Presence as another paleblood hunter, able to operate in the nightmare frontier within Yharnam. Paleblood is a title given to those akin with the Moon Presence. The term pale blood may allude to how blood has mercury content in it, specifically the gods’ blood, but I’ll expound on that later. In this timeline, Kubo and Stanford would be working in tandem against Oedon and until Stanford would be teleported back to Gravity Falls. Kubo remains in Yharnam and doesn’t age. Lastly, the eye monster in the Long Lake was likely an eldritch abomination itself. It looked like a shoggoth but I’m not pushing for it. It was able to whisper and read into Kubo’s mind. And it’s a monster that lives in deep water. And I’m willing to bet that monster was a representative of Oedon(though I kinda won’t push for that either). 3.)In Gravity Falls, Fiddleford McGuckett lost his mind after his head was hurled into the portal. Considering that the other side of the portal is Yharnam, and since it was riddled with eldritch abominations, McGuckett’s mind became ruptured with cosmic energy and inhuman knowledge. He wasn’t ready for it. That’s how he babbled gibberish when he was pulled out and eventually slipped into madness(even without the help of the memory eraser gun). In Dreamscaperers, Dipper was completely within the cosmic realm, that’s how he was able to fight Bill back with superpowers, and at that time, he was sort of akin to the gods, but compare it to when Bill made that one deal with Dipper in the episode Sock Opera, he inhabited the boy’s body leaving his soul in a state of limbo in the physical world. Dipper was helpless. It wasn’t a higher state of being. This is the case of the spirits in Paranorman who refuse to leave the physical world. Without a physical body, Bill was also useless in committing physical actions, that’s why he needed a host, and that’s how he was so clumsy when he inhabited Dipper’s body for a short period. Mabel was able to overpower him later on showing his then weakness in a physical state of being, as Dipper was weaker in the mindscape compared to Bill in Dreamscaperers. Physicality at that time was foreign to Bill. In the finale though, when the rift broke and Bill was both in tune with the physical and nightmare world, he was able to unleash hell. He achieved duality, though not the kind that humans posses i.e. being a man/woman. Rather he achieved complete transcendence. He was already an elder god. But elder gods’ functions are to influence the mind and physical surrounding and not actually commit physical actions. So when Bill had both a physical and form and a form shaped by the cosmos, he became unstoppable. Well, almost. Similar to the Psychonauts, the key to another dimension was the Rift. As the wiki states, it’s a byproduct or a leftover of the reactivation of the portal. It’s a tangible key to the nightmare frontier. And just like the psychics in Psychonauts who can traverse between the physical world and the mindscape at will with the help of the Psycho-Portal, Bill Cipher can do the same thing with the use of the Rift. That’s why he wanted to get a hold of it so bad. The Rift was of the cosmos, and only a cosmic being such as Bill can use it correctly. Now let’s look at the episode “Dipper and Mabel vs the Future”. Stanford made Gravity Falls as the final destination of his research because it had the strongest concentration of cosmic energy that he could find. He hit a roadblock in his research and with enough searching, he found a cave  where he accidentally called out Bill Cipher. It wasn’t said what this civilization was, but I’m taking a wild guess here that it’s the same aliens who landed in Gravity Falls millions of years before the events of the story. The aliens who owned the ship that Stanford looted for parts for the portal he constructed. There was a warning in the cave writings not to summon Bill. Considering all that, you can guess what actually wiped out the aliens who were drawn to and decided to settle in Gravity Falls. Bill Cipher himself. These warnings are of the same nature in Bloodborne, the saying “Fear the old blood”, which leads me too... 4.)Bloodborne, the cursed city Yharnam had people who argued over the use of either blood ministration or autoenucleation and the collection of eyes to commune with and become one with the gods, as these practices gained them inhuman insight. It also made people with weak mental constitutions to go insane. First, the blood. There was a school in Yharnam that had scholars who discovered alien blood used by an ancient civilization. It was headed by a man who frowned upon blood ministration because he knew of the side effects of it, and that it caused the complete purge of that old civilization. He conjured up the saying “Fear the old blood.” That’s literally the same warning in Gravity Falls that Stanford ignored when he read “don’t summon Bill Cipher, you idiot”. So, when people disagreed with this man, they split into groups that openly accepted the use of the blood ministration, and it brought demise to Yharnam the same way it killed off the civilization before it. That man who didn’t wan’t to do this leaned instead towards autoenucleation, severing his own eyes so that he can see within the confines of his mind and later on, the cosmos, and it worked, but in the process he became bound to a rocking chair and couldn’t talk. Autoenucleation was the thing Kubo’s grandfather became obsessed with and eventually made the old man a kin of the gods. Not a god, but a kin of the gods. It was heavily implied in Bloodborne that no man can really become a god, but only elevate his kindredness with the gods, and usually with overbearing futility in the end. Yharnam was overrun by the influence caused by the presence of Oedon and it’s stuck in an everpresent state of timelessness and deteriorated humanity. Also note that the gods that are present in Yharnam never operate within the physical world and are only present in the nightmare frontier though their influence caused a total cosmetic deterioration of Yharnam and the insanity that came along with it, like how Bill Cipher can only operate and be in his strongest and the nightmare realm and that the only remnants of his energy in the physical world were the strange happenings in Gravity Falls. The paleblood hunters who are stuck in Yharnam who serve Oedon’s son the Moon Presence can also transmigrate between dream realms and reality through the use of lanterns. Bloodborne also used the idea of lanterns, like in Kubo and the Bon festival, but in this case specifically sentient winter lanterns, as ways to guide souls toward the dream realm. There are many key characters in Bloodborne whose physical bodies have died without their knowing because they stayed in the nightmare frontier for too long. One such individual who was cursed to keep watch over the nightmare frontier forever was the paleblood hunter Gehrman. He serves as the chief hunter for the Moon Presence and is under the care of a sentient winter lantern who embodies someone he loved. Bloodborne also has large themes of an entire body of the cosmos and the dream frontier being found underwater. The blood of Oedon, and an artifact of the cosmos, the Eye of the Blood-Drunk Hunter, functions relatively the same as the Rift in Gravity Falls. The blood was a direct link to the cosmos like the Rift. The Eye was a little different. It grants access to a version of the nightmare frontier that one of the hunters in Yharnam lived in. It’s an artifact of a memory, and in it, a distorted image of Yharnam can be seen underneath an endless body of water, suggesting that Yharnam was indeed stuck in a timeless dimension underneath the dimension of the gods. And it also is revealed inside that memory that one of the reasons that Yharnam was under the scourge of angry gods was because a fishing village some distance away from Yharnam butchered an eldritch god that they found underwater and its corpse was delivered to the same man who committed autoenucleation on his own eyes. Moreso, the culture of bell ringing in Yharnam was a major reason Kubo went there, as he was in pursuit of getting his parents back prior to ending up there. A subcity in Yharnam, Loran, was part of an ancient civilization(the same that was wiped out by blood ministration) that abused the bell ringing ritual to bring back the dead(and mostly to humanity’s demise). 5.)Paranorman - I’m willing to bet that Bill Cipher was the reason Agatha Prenderghast and her descendants can see dead people. Aggie was already an odd and naive child by default, and was likely an easy target for Bill Cipher. Okay now consider Bill Cipher as a nod to the Lovecraftian outer god Nyarlathotep, we already established that. Nyarlathotep roamed the earth a lot disguised as a man dressed in black(remember that), and is responsible for fucking with people like the demon Satan. In the movie The Witch, the witch in said movie made a deal with the devil(who looked like a man dressed in black when he revealed himself) in order for her to commune with him and elevate her being. This may have been the same case with Aggie and how plenty if not all of the Prenderghast descendants are cursed to be in tune with people who have already transcended into another plane of existence. Aggie’s case was special. Notice how other souls that Norman saw were only in a state of limbo similar to Dipper’s soul in the episode Sock Opera. And Aggie’s soul interfered with the energy with Blithe Hollow, and not just because she was mad and the way she died, oh no, but because that was cosmic energy. That’s ridiculous, you may say, but look at the soul of the soldier who was drowned in the beginning of the movie. That’s a pretty fucked up way to die too, so why wasn’t he like Aggie? Right? Norman probably will have this power as well when he transcends into the dreamscape. That old man Uncle Prenderghast probably had it too but he just doesn’t care. I’m going to throw in a wild card here and say Aggie’s father probably died from an illness, and this made her mother undergo severe depression. In her desperation, Aggie met Bill Cipher, disguised as a man, and he gave her a deal. She would be able to talk to her father, but Bill didn’t tell her this would curse her family forever, and cause the inhabitants of Blithe Hollow to go on a frenzy from witchcraft hysteria. Aggie was most likely a nod to one of the most notable victims of the witchcraft craziness in Massachusetts, Ann Glover. Ann Glover was executed before the Salem trials actually happened, but was the only victim of the witchcraft trials that was given a tribute day 300 years after her execution. Aggie probably even handed documents of spectral evidence to the judges when they tried her, much like Ann Glover did, but to no avail. Her madness would take effect when she herself was already in the dream realm, just like Kubo’s grandfather, and it was only amplified by the rage and betrayal she felt when she was ostracized and finally executed without mercy. In any case, Aggie and Norman’s sixth sense came from an alien source. At least that’s my headcanon for this story. Why did Bill do this? Because he’s a fucking asshole, that’s why, just like Nyarlathotep, and just like Satan. 7.)Over the Garden Wall- Everybody knows OTGW had a lot of similarities between Dante’s Inferno and the stages of hell. Someone here already made a concrete writeup about that and their observations were quite tactful and impressive. I am however making this about the rift between our world and the mindscape, the same place where the Beast resides in. Much like Dipper’s out-of-body experience in Gravity Falls, the souls of Wirt and his brother Greg went into a state of limbo when they drowned in a nearby river. And like Dipper and the wandering souls in Paranorman, they had no clue what to do because their minds weren’t in an elevated state in the majority of the story. Wirt, though, later on realized during his confrontation with the Beast that the only way to get him and his brother’s minds and bodies back is that if they take their power back through sheer force of will, in a sense, elevating his state of mind in the process. The will to exist was what the Beast preyed on, and Wirt denied him of it. This is how the dynamics of insight work as well in the other stories, is that people with strong convictions(our heroes) are the ones with superior mental consitutions and can face evil, in this case, meddling godlike beings. It’s not usually the book smart ones, with Stanford and Dipper Pines as exceptions because they’re already book smart by default, but they have heart. A strong will to exist in all these stories was a key element to surviving against the baddest of the bad. Note that Wirt’s travels in the dreamscape happen underwater, and that time was irrelevant in it, much like how in Bloodborne, the cosmos can be found underwater, and that the city of Yharnam remained timeless because of the outer gods. The outer god in the case of OTGW, is the Beast. The woods in his dimension didn’t have the concept of time, either. I’m also willing to bet that the town Wirt lived in was inhabited by Puritans some hundreds of years ago, like Blithe Hollow in Paranorman. It’s evident from how the people in the woods dressed and lived. The character Wirt met in the dreamscape, Quincy Endicott, was already dead for sometime, as evidenced by his gravestone in episode 9. He was a resident there. This town was also likely involved in a plague caused by an outer god that preyed on them. This caused a mass hysteria so bad in the town that the inhabitants of it went mad and either died or merged their existence with the dreamscape as a result. This was how many of the characters in the woods are out of their minds and can’t seem to find any resolve to their problems. They’re ordinary people without a clue and caught in an endless cycle. And just like Bloodborne’s Gherman who does service to the Moon Presence under the care of a winter lantern in a land where time is meaningless, OTGW’s Woodsman does service to the Beast with the task of carrying a soul lantern around in a Puritan settlement where other poor souls like him are lost in their existence as a result of cosmic interference. It’s a pretty big deal how these ideas fall parallel to each other. If you don’t believe me yet, look at the Moon Presence, and the true form of the Beast, and now look at artist interpretations of the Lovecraftian outer god Nyarlathotep. They all look the same. The ringing of bells was also referenced, but once, in the episode “The Ringing of the Bell”. Auntie Whispers kept a malevolent spirit inside Lorna at bay for short periods of time, unlike the crazed out Loran haindmaidens in Yharnam who used bells to bring back spirits of the dead.She used it to drive back evil like Kubo’s father Hanzo did with the Helmet Invulnerable. 8.)Coraline also played with the idea of eyes and dream realms. The Beldam is the ruler of the Other World, a nightmare realm disguised in hedonistic pleasures. She blinds weakened children from reality and cause them to lose themselves to her, this was her racket until she fell to Coraline. The Beldam operated similarly to how the devil worked in The Witch, a temptress. However in Coraline, the Beldam never grants the children any enlightenment after making the deal with them. Instead she consumes them to sustain her existence and entraps them in her world, like the Beast in OTGW. And of course there also had to be a portal to her world, the weird door in the Pink Palace, and it’s different from the other portals mentioned so far in a way that this was under her control the whole time, although her control was only focused around the Pink Palace itself and nowhere else. Also similar to Bloodborne and the story of Kubo, giving up your eyes means giving up your humanity. The Beldam was obsessed with it. She may be an earthbound cosmic entity herself, and just as devious and fixated on messing with people as Bill, the Beast and Nyarlathotep. She may have existed even before the Pink Palace built over the physical place where her dimension was. Also note that the snowglobe where the Beldam trapped Coraline’s parents functioned the same way as the Eye of the Blood Drunk Hunter in Bloodborne. It’s an artifact of a memory of the nightmare realm, and when it shattered in the end, the memories of Coraline’s parents being abducted by the Beldam disappeared with it. And her victims, 100% of the time it’s children. Thinking about all this, why are these monsters so interested in children? This leads me to my next observation.

Eldritch gods and children Bloodborne-the god Oedon was kinda just there all the time not doing much, though his presence influenced so much chaos and disorder. 3 women in Bloodborne were affected by the plague Oedon caused in such a way that they became pregnant with alien babies(yay!). Eldritch beings cannot reproduce.  While omnipotent, they don’t possess the duality and physicality of man. They operate in the dream world, or the mindscape, or the nightmare frontier, or whatever you want to call it. They can’t just have sex and say heyyyyy we have a new alien baby that’s gonna last another eleventy billion years. No, they can’t do that. They’ll find a way to form a surrogate child, and it’s usually through a human woman, a virgin, a whore, doesn’t matter. In Catholicism(please don’t kill me, I’m Catholic, okay?) it’s the birth of Jesus Christ through the virgin Mary. In Star Wars, it’s Anakin Skywalker. All theories for Jesus and Anakin Skywalker and similar cases aside, it all comes with the thought that they’ll bring balance, peace, order, etc. A rebirth that is heralded by them if you will. But Oedon, being the mindless fuck that he is(like the Lovecraftian god Azathoth), wasn’t really doing anything, but it was the Yharnamites’ prerogative due to his influence to administer his blood in themselves that eventually well, some of them had to be impregnated, and most of them just went nuts. Ironic that one of the impregnated women was a whore, which only cemented the helplessness and volatility of humankind as opposed to the gods of the universe. And now these aliens have a bastard child, if nobody comes around to step on the poor thing anyway. It won’t be just an ordinary alien baby, either. It’s the herald of a new, anarchic age. This is why the Moon Presence intends to put an end to it. Ironic that in Bloodborne, you fight the Moon Presence as a final boss, but when you think about it in a more thorough context, this guy who’s supposed to represent Nyarlathotep or Satan was just doing humanity a solid against another interdimensional being who’s supposed to represent Azathoth or God. This further suggests the futility of human-centric thinking.

In Kubo’s story, his grandfather was hellbent on taking the boy’s other eye. He wasn’t interested in blood ministration like the crazed out populous of Yharnam. He focused on the other way, which was autoenucleation. What more did the old man want? He’s already akin to the gods. My guess is that he and his other two daughters achieved enlightenment much later in their lives, and it’s a safe bet that their transcendence fell a little short. So, with Kubo’s humanity out of the way before he even learns to talk, they thought, he’ll be able to achieve a higher state of being than them. It was all about being part of the nightmare realm and his grandson achieving god status. That’s why his grandfather wants that other eye so bad. Infants are always the ones who have the strongest potential to shape the future of the universe when alien gods are involved. And with Kubo at the helm, the old man can rule beside him.

Coraline’s Beldam and OTGW’s the Beast are both inclined towards consuming children. Both are omnipotent only in their own dimension and are reliant on sharing an existence with someone with duality(because they have no concept of it despite their claimed perfection), and someone they can watch over, much like the Moon Presence is to Gehrman in Bloodborne. The Beldam gets her life source from neglected and possibly codependent children she tempts with fantasies and traps them in her nightmare world. My guess is that she doesn’t kill the children outright once their eyes are replaced with buttons. They’ll stay there for a while until they get smart and want to leave. That’s when she eats them and find another source of supply, leaving the eyes/souls of the damned children to be imprisoned there forever, and codependent children are easy to fool and groom. Coraline was wise enough to see it early and that was the cause of the Beldam’s downfall. After all, like Gehrman, it’s more a curse than an honor to be indebted to an outer god. You can’t just get out whenever you want. When you want to get out, you have to eliminate the source of the problem with your own hands. You have to kill a god and claim an existence greater than it. This is what Wirt did in OTGW.

In OTGW, it was likely the Woodsman’s daughter making a deal with the Beast that caused the hysteria in the woods to begin with and forced it in the state that it was in then into an everpresent dimension of damnation like the city of Yharnam in Bloodborne, and all before Wirt’s generation inhabited that town. The Beast saw it fit to be his new home, but in order to sustain it, the Woodsman had to keep a very specific lantern lit, the soul lantern, and it is lit only by edelwood, which was revealed later in the story to be souls of lost children. The Beast, being an outer god, cannot operate past his dimension, and has to wait for children to fall into accidents in order for their souls to wander there. This is where he wears them out and forces them into a state of submission so he could exist. Wirt was strong enough to withstand this. Everybody knows, in the story, before the Beast was confronted by Wirt and annihilated after, the Woodsman’s daughter was revealed to be dead the entire time and it wasn’t her soul that was in the lantern, but the Beast’s. The Woodsman was fooled into servitude thinking there was an end to keeping it lit. But it was Wirt who said this. This is going to be controversial, but bear with me on this one. Wirt MAY have been wrong in the sense that it was the Beast’s soul that was in the lantern. The Beast was an outer god. He had no soul, he consumed them in the form of children’s remains as edelwood trees. Wirt called him out on his bullshit, sure, and it led to the Woodsman coming to his senses and Wirt’s escape with Greg, but you can bet a million bucks that it was the Woodsman’s daughter that was indeed in that same lantern. Refer to the above paragraphs when I stated that in Bloodborne, while Gherman was serving the Moon Presence, a winter lantern representing a person he loved kept watch over him the entire time. You can literally say it’s the same case with the Woodsman, and it’s his daughter’s soul in the lantern keeping him company for the entire duration of his suffering, along with the rest of the other children that were fed to the Beast over time. The lantern also could’ve been getting brighter and brighter for every edelwood that was fed to it, making the Beast stronger and making the Woodsman even more blind to what was really going on, like how the Beldam in Coraline blinds codependent children to her lies and how Bill Cipher twists deals so he can break the Rift and open the nightmare frontier. The lantern was merely a representation of a deal. And killing the fire in it meant freeing the Woodsman’s daughter, himself, and everyone in the woods of the curse. That’s why when the credits roll the woods is finally in a state of peace and everyone is back to normal and regained their sanity. And again if you look at the edelwood trees, the Beast’s true form and artist interpretations of the outer god Nyarlathotep, you’d be surprised how many striking similarities there are with them, design-wise. And what did he look like 99% of the time as a disguise? A man dressed in black. Also, chopping down edelwood meant that the Woodsman was, in a way, killing children without him knowing, which, if we tie it with Bloodborne again, is similar to how Gehrman and the other hunters are tasked to end Oedon’s curse that was going to produce alien babies, but without them knowing as well. It was the Moon Presence who knew of it. Except the Beast is a selfish asshole and the Moon Presence is a bro.

Lastly(and I’ll keep it short for some because I think I explained most of everything already)

Interdimensional influences on the immediate world around them Okay now Bloodborne was so smooth in dealing with this because the premise was that Yharnam was a city festering with what was known as the “Scourge of the Beast”. Even the smartest cookies would think, oh that’s kinda like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, right? Werewolves, Mr. Hyde, Witches, Vampires, etc. But halfway into the story it was actually revealed that this beastly scourge happened because the inhabitants of Yharnam thought it was a good idea to practice autoenucleation and blood ministration using Oedon’s blood and commune with the heavens. Oedon’s blood was hidden in the Yharnam subcities that were buried a long time ago and tomb prospectors and scholars just thought hey this looks neat I’m gonna inject myself with this now and make a religion out of it bye. Bad idea. There was one Yharnamite who was sensitive to Oedon’s speech despite it being incomprehensible to the rest of the world. This was the runesmith Caryll, and when he etched a symbol for Oedon it contained the symbol for the woman’s vagina(the impregnation of Yharnamite women and the alien babies) and the periodic symbol for mercury.  Uh oh, that means Oedon’s blood had mercury in it. Look above in the earlier sections for when I mentioned mercury. Mercury was toxic for, well, anyone. It causes a complete meltdown of the central nervous system. So when the Yharnamites used it in blood ministration, they actually killed their entire civilization, and not only that , their humanity as well, and almost everyone in Yharnam turned into monsters as a permanent result. They were so obsessed with communing with the gods that they got it, and couldn’t handle it, and lost themselves in the process. Some of the stronger-willed residents became akin with the gods, on a much lower level however, just like Kubo’s grandfather, and lived either in the nightmare frontier working for Gehrman and the Moon Presence as paleblood hunters, or still drunk with the pursuit of enlightenment in the physical Yharnam. And when some of them bled, they would bleed out mercury. People became the werewolves, the Mr. Hydes, the witches, the wraiths, etc. all because of humans trifling with things they shouldn’t have. In addition to all this, the term paleblood may also allude to how it’s a designation only given BY the Moon Presence to hunters. And pale blood means white blood, and white blood cells, in biology, are our body’s repair cells. Meaning that the Moon Presence was trying to undo the disease that Oedon’s corrupt blood is spreading, but that may be stretching it another way, too.

Psychonauts- the psitanium. For the longest time a lot of the inhabitants around Lake Oblongata suffered because of this and caused the mass hysteria that would eventually lead to the building of an asylum within it and the generations of free-roaming psychics across the earth. Lake Oblongata and the Whispering Rock campgrounds were a hotspot for cosmic energy and everyone and everything in it were effected. Hell, even the animals developed psychic powers.

Paranorman, assuming that Aggie’s curse was also the cause of an elder god, it directly affected Blithe Hollow for 300 years.

Gravity Falls, where Bill Cipher was, strange monsters roamed about. The closest to an eldritch abomination like Bill Cipher in Gravity Falls was the island monster in the mini episode “The Tooth”. I may be wrong but I think it’s the only other entity there that speaks backwards, a trait owned by Bill and an actual requirement to summon him. It’s a language the nightmare frontier understands. It’s not just me. There’s just too many things in pop culture that says backward talking equals demonic chanting. Hell, it’s in the movie The Exorcist. And so far all I’ve observed was the devil = a cosmic entity who just loves punking everyone including other cosmic entities. And the island monster resided in the center of the lake, and underwater. Again, there’s your underwater theme. In any case, it was mostly Bill Cipher and the leakage of the nightmare realm that were the causes of the strange happenings in Gravity Falls, and it only got worse when the Rift broke. The aliens who settled in Gravity Falls we probably scientists who investigated the place themselves, and got destroyed by Bill Cipher when they knew too much. Stanford only repeated their mistakes. It’s the same with the Yharnamites in Bloodborne repeating the same mistakes as the ancient civilization before it. Oh and you know what other movie that had eldritch gods punking humanity and are actually the sole reason monsters roam the earth? Cabin in the Woods. It’s fucking amazing.

OTGW- the dimension where the Beast entraps people and children also experienced some form of deterioration over time. It probably began in the same state the woods was in before the Beast made the deal with the Woodsman’s daughter(considering a deal was made anyway). It was soon filled with monsters and the people in it became mad. Some even turned into animals. And the children who ended up in that dimension soon gave up existing after feeling lost for too long and became edelwood as food for the Beast.

Coraline-The Pink Palace was placed under a dome of cosmic energy that the Beldam inhabited, much like Oedon was to Yharnam, Bill Cipher was to Gravity Falls, and how The Beast was in OTGW. Strange how their omnipotence is still confined within a closed space, when all that they’re supposed to be are otherwise. But that’s my human brain rationalizing things. Notice how the Pink Palace and the immediate vicinity around it seem so barren. It’s like the place was purposely rid of life so that the children who’ll live in it will become bored and eventually fall prey to the Beldam and her lush temptations. The Beldam was controlling the entire plantation surrounding the Pink Palace. It makes sense that Coraline’s family knew some farming and that they were able to plant things easily after the story, because the Beldam then already died and had no more influence around the Pink Palace.

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That about sums up everything I’ve observed. Fucking hell I’ve been writing and rewriting all these for days, and I’m pretty sure I missed a million other things because I’m just an idiot maybe and I’m actually not that smart. But I hope a lot of it still makes sense especially  as to why it actually works when the characters in these stories are put in situations where they interact. That’s because they live in the same universe. That’s how it is to me and many others.

I hope you enjoyed reading this. I’m so tired now hhhhhhh my mind is going to explode from all the thinking I did

#mystery kids #paranorman #gravity falls #kubo #kubo and the two strings #bloodborne #coraline #otgw #over the garden wall #psychonauts #literature #writing #headcanon #lovecraft #hp lovecraft #theory #theories

[rebelliousredknight]

What does an eldritch monster look like?

((Not sure if you were asking the muses or the mun, but seeing how I know so much more on the subject than they do…

Eldritch monsters can come in many different forms but all of them are pretty horrifying to look at, or if you’re as into horror as I am, some of them are pretty darn cute.

Putting this under a read more because its going to be image heavy and definitely very text heavy too.

Okay so, going into some of the monsters from the C’thulhu Mythos, the ones I’m going to mention should be fairly well-known. A couple may not be but this isn’t a subject I get to talk about much thus why this going to be long!

First off are the Shoggoths! 

Lovecraft described the Shoggoths as a, “formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes; rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile.” So, essentially, they’re large, shape shifting blobs.

That in itself is unsettling enough, but the history makes them all the creepier.

Originally, they were created for underwater construction in the arctic by the Elder Things. They were the first alien species on Earth in Lovecraft’s mythos and while the Elder Things were plenty gross themselves - being man-sized, barrel shaped aliens with tentacles - they weren’t quite up there on the gross scale with their creations.

At some point after being created, the Shoggoths revolted against their creators and this is especially concerning given that they were created to be mindless workers. They developed some sort of sentient intelligence over time, however, and rebelled against the Elder Things. The idea that, aside from being huge, shape shifting, underwater blobs, they were also learning, is definitely a pretty potent sleep repellent.

Next we have the Tsathoggua!

Tsathoggua is described in a few different stories with slightly different appearances. In The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, the idols that depict him are described as, “He was very squat and pot-bellied, his head was more like a monstrous toad than a deity, and his whole body was covered with an imitation of short fur, giving somehow a vague sensation of both the bat and the sloth His sleepy lids were half-lowered over his globular eyes; and the tip of a queer tongue issued from his fat mouth.”

That’s definitely creepy but there’s something about his description in The Seven Geases that’s a special kind of unsettling.

“In that secret cave in the bowels of Voormithadreth… abides from eldermost eons the god Tsathoggua. You shall know Tsathoggua by his great girth and his batlike furriness and the look of a sleepy black toad which he has eternally. He will rise not from his place, even in the ravening of hunger, but will wait in divine slothfulness for the sacrifice.”

No matter who describes Tsathoggua, he is cosmically disgusting.

Next up, Nyarlothotep!

Nyarlathotep is just about everywhere in the Cthulhu Mythos. He first shows up in a self-titled story where he appears as a “tall, swarthy man”, looking similar to Egyptian Pharaohs. His strangely bland appearance leads the readers to believe that he is simply just a wizard of some sort. In fact, in Nyarlathotep, he is just that. 

However, we get a hint that things are not as they seem when he travels as a magician and wherever he goes, the inhabitants of the town begin having terrible nightmares.

After that introduction, we are shown a scene where Nyarlathotep is performing magic tricks for a crowd including the narrator of the story. The narrator openly dismisses the Outer God as nothing more than a phony, just doing slight of hand rather than actual magic as Nyarlathotep claims. In anger at having his abilities challenged, he disperses the group and they leave in three lines. The first disappears around a corner, shortly followed by a moaning sound. The second goes into a subway station, followed by the sound of insane laughter. The third group, which includes the narrator, leaves the city and is shown bizarre, horrifying visions of terrible landscapes. From these visions, the third group realizes that something horrible has come to Earth. 

What makes Nyarlathotep so terrible is the mundane appearance he likes to use when he walks among humans. It forces the people around him to exist near an unspeakable evil without realizing it. Even beyond the story, Nyarlathotep drives home the basic human fear of the unknown. Nyarlathotep represents the fear that comes with never being able to truly know another’s intentions.

Next, Yog-Sothoth!

Few of Lovecraft’s creations have more of a presence throughout the mythos than Yog-Sothoth. Its first mention came in the short novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where Yog-Sothoth is mentioned many times in the incantations used by the protagonist of the story. From there it would appear in other works such as At the Mountains of Madness, where one of its avatars is implied to be the thing beyond the mountains that even the Elder Things fear. In The Dunwich Horror, Yog-Sothoth is said to be the progenitor of the Dunwich Abomination.

Though it has been described many different ways across its appearances, there is an agreement among the various mythos authors that it is a mass of glowing orbs, often shown with tendrils and/or eyes. Though any description of its appearance is likely correct because, according to the The Dunwich Horror, Yog-Sothoth exists outside of any planes of material reality.

Despite existing outside of our physical universe, Yog-Sothoth still has the ability to influence it. In The Dunwich Horror, it is revealed that it can control time and space. In that same story, it also manages to impregnate a woman from outside of the universe.

Yog-Sothoth isn’t the same kind of terrifying as a lot of the other creatures in the Cthulhu Mythos because we never actually see it or come into direct contact with it. The fear of this Outer God comes from its sheer power rather than some insidious implication. Its ability to reach into any time or place, and influence it however it likes means that, at least where Yog-Sothoth is concerned, security is non-existent.

And I promise this is the last one since this is getting long, but here we have Azathoth!

Azathoth, also known as the “Nuclear Chaos” or “Blind Idiot God”, was first mentioned as the title of an unfinished novel turned short story published by Lovecraft in 1938, but written in 1927. It is the Cthulhu Mythos’s creation deity. Differentiating itself from other creation deities, Azathoth is shown to be completely unaware of its actions. It simply ��dreamed” the universe into existence, and will likely “dream” it out of existence eventually.

“The Blind, Idiot God” is often mentioned in passing, kept to the fringes of stories in order to drive home the unknowable and terrible nature of the creator deity, so descriptions of its appearance are few and far between. In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, however, Lovecraft gave one of the most complete looks at Azathoth and its lair:

“Outside the ordered universe is that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.”

The terror surrounding Azathoth stems from something pretty simple: it tears the cosmic safety net out from under us; the net being the truth that the creator god isn’t benevolent, or perhaps even more unsettling, malevolent either, producing the idea that morality can be divine in nature. This is obviously a pretty awful prospect for most religious people. It points to conventional morality being a human creations, and thus, inherently flawed.

What’s worse is that the implications of Azathoth are not limited to the religiously devout. As people who live in a universe created accidentally by this completely unaware creator deity, we can never be certain that it won’t just as accidentally end it, too.

Azathoth’s terror comes from the utter sense of uncertainty it leaves intelligent life with. Since it has no mind, and thus, no purpose behind its actions, we have no solid footing to stand on when dealing with it. Azathoth represents the idea that safety isn’t just lost, but never existed in the first place.

So, we do find that a common theme with eldritch monsters seems to be otherworldly aliens with many eyes, tentacles, or mouths and representing a part of the world we will never fully comprehend or an instinctual fear.

#kaijulover142 #eldritch horrors #eldritch deities #in which mun goes on about one of her favorite subjects

[comicteaparty]

August 21st-August 27th, 2019 Reader Favorites Archive

The archive for the Reader Favorites chat that occurred from August 21st, 2019 to August 27th, 2019.  The chat focused on the following question:

What is a villain-less webcomic you would recommend?  Why do you think the lack of villain works in the comic?

authorloremipsum

http://www.smackjeeves.com/comicprofile.php?id=139455 A comic I can think of off the top of my head with no villain is Dead City on smackjeeves. It's slice of life in a zombie apocalypse so I guess you could call the zombies villains, but for the past months they haven't been an issue really. As for how effective villain-less comics are, it depends on how they're written and what the conflict is. Dead City has survival and exploration of self instead of a big bad, which is effective.

ErinPtah (Leif & Thorn | BICP)

cracks knuckles Okay, let's do this! Ongoing: http://forwardcomic.com/index.php Forward - it's just a depressed human hanging out with a robot. https://www.tamberlanecomic.com/ Tamberlane - human baby gets adopted by a community of furries who can't figure out what her species is. Runs on the mystery, plus intercommunity shenanigans. http://ruuandwaltercomic.com/sample-page/ Ruu and Walter - adorable cinnamon roll and cranky goth drow, stuck on a roadtrip together. Might be a villain revealed down the line, but so far they're mostly dealing with natural hazards + mismatched personalities. http://sssscomic.com/ Stand Still Stay Silent - adventure in a post-apocalyptic landscape. No evil mastermind running things, just lots of plague beasts and other hazards outside the safe zones. https://www.gocomics.com/breaking-cat-news Breaking Cat News - very important news as reported by cats!

Complete: https://www.webtoons.com/en/romance/always-human/list?title_no=557 Always Human - sweet futuristic romance with lovely VR settings. http://drop-out.thecomicseries.com/comics/1 drop out - depressed girlfriends go on a roadtrip. https://ozyandmillie.org/ Ozy and Millie - adorable misadventures with cute fox kids. https://pizzawitchcbsp.tumblr.com/ Pizza Witch - she's a witch who loves pizza! http://teadragonsociety.com/ Tea Dragon Society - adorable fantasy friendship bwith a bunch of pet-size dragons.

ErinPtah (Leif & Thorn | BICP)

Haven't updated in a while, but I live in hope: https://kochab-comic.tumblr.com/ Kochab - a lost skier and a lonely fire spirit, helping each other in the snowy woods (and some lovely ruins). http://forlovecomic.tumblr.com/ for love - partly-sweet, partly-eldritch romance between an angel and a demon. http://ellieonplanetx.com/ Ellie on Planet X - adorable cat-shaped robot explores a weird alien landscape, makes friends with Seussian critters. http://occasionalcomics.com/ Max Overacts - extremely enthusiastic kid with big ambitions about being an actor. https://sundaze.co.vu/#_=_ Sundaze - romance in a sleepy seaside town with a woman who is definitely a mermaid.

AntiBunny

Drop Out http://drop-out.webcomic.ws/ has no villain. Just two characters dealing with depression, and taking a road trip. WARNING: Features occasional nudity, and themes of mental illness, and suicide.

RebelVampire

Gonna go with two. First one, Radio Silence. http://www.radiosilencecomic.com/ It has antagonists for sure, but they aren't really villains. They're just like average people that would actually exist to make your life suck, and that probably is what makes them scarier to be honest. Nothing like that touch of reality. Second, Princess Pups. You could argue the cats are villains, but they aren't serious villains. They're the comedic back drop kind. Otherwise, this comic is just about happy puppy adventures of happiness. That you should read cause no sadness. https://tapas.io/series/Princess-Pups

NeilKapit

Here I Lie Awake, by melaredblu . No bad guys per se, just insomnia, hallucination, and abstract horror. http://hereilieawake.webcomic.ws/

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