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wedonthaveawhile · 6 months

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When she says my name.

Garreth Weasley x F!MC (18+)

Garreth finds himself entangled with the heroine of Hogwarts. As their encounters become habit, they devolve into a game of power dynamics and possession.

Warnings: Explicit sexual content, possesive!Garreth, dominant!Garrreth, public sex, dirty talk, aged-up characters, unrequited love, pining.

AO3 // Word count: 3k

Garreth picked at the splintered wood on his broom from a recent tussle with a bludger, scanning the courtyard intermittently for any trace of his Quidditch team. Their head of house had recently delivered a stern criticism about their hero complex. Apparently, each member was too focused on personal glory, neglecting the importance of working as a cohesive team.

He eventually detected a figure on a broom, although quickly realised they displayed a level of nimble grace far beyond what he'd expect from one of his lumbering teammates. Hogwarts' resident hero was evidently making a return from one of her mysterious outings.

His eyes swept the courtyard again, a scattering of students strolled across the well-kempt grass, a handful basked in the sun near the fountain, but none he recognised. Thinking about it, Garreth wondered whether he should hang around for this team-building training. It was probably wise, considering he was not only the captain but also the one who had organised the whole thing. However, they were running late, and he had spotted far more appealing company.

Before he could put much more thought into it, he swung his leg over his broomstick and began to silently trail the unsuspecting witch.

He couldn't quite pinpoint when he started noticing her disappearances. He assumed he just hadn't been paying much attention to her whereabouts prior to her inquiry regarding his more 'unobtainable' potions. His tactics hadn't evolved significantly since fifth-year when he’d charmed the newcomer into pilfering Sharp's office for supplies, but he had become far more adept at sneaking around for rare ingredients.

He agreed to assist in whatever scheme she was cooking up, on the condition she helped him obtain the key component. Partly for the benefits of having someone on the lookout for wandering faculty, but mostly because the beloved heroine of Hogwarts could do no wrong. If their covert operation were to be exposed, her involvement would mean the detention time his aunt dished out would be significantly reduced.

They needed snakeweed, which he was fairly certain was cultivated and harvested in the greenhouse. However, Professor Garlick was extremely protective of her plants, requiring their thieving to be done after curfew.

Moonlight wiggled through the twisted tendrils of the countless plants scattered throughout the greenhouse as they dispelled their disillusionment charm and got to work.

"What do you reckon all of this is?" The witch gestured towards a dense blanket covering the harvesting bench, a few neatly folded sheets at one end made it appear like some kind of makeshift bed.

"Perhaps the rumours about Garlick and Kogawa are true. Maybe we've stumbled upon their secret little sex den.” Garreth turned around and playfully wiggled his eyebrows, narrowly avoiding stumbling into a venomous tentacula lurking in the shadows.

She pulled back the cover, unveiling a project in progress—mallowsweet leaves neatly laid out, drying between the two blankets.

"You need to get your mind out of the gutter,” she scoffed, laying the covering back over the golden foliage. “Or you need to get laid.”

"It was a logical assumption," he argued, crouching beneath a table, casting a dim lumos across a collection of small plant pots. "The height of these tables are just right for it."

"Should I ask how you know that?"

She lifted herself onto the table as if testing the height for herself. Garreth smirked as he shifted the pots around with flicks of his wand.

"I’m a warm-blooded male, I'd say I'm an expert in these things."

Spotting a small propagation of snakeweed, he cast a glance over his shoulder to make sure she was keeping a watchful eye on the door. She wasn't. She was perched primly on the edge of the table, legs pressed together from knees to toes.

His eyes roamed across her body, and he realised he had never really had the opportunity to thoroughly check her out. She was like forbidden fruit, always flanked by her two Slytherin gatekeepers. It's not that he hadn't noticed she was attractive, she certainly was. Her feminine figure hinted at subtle signs of muscle earned from days spent sprinting around the castle.

His lusty gaze travelled up to her face, only to discover she had been watching him the entire time. Suppressing the flicker of embarrassment, he instead leaned into his Gryffindor bravery. He grabbed the small pot and approached her, his hips meeting her knees with an intentional bump.

"As promised," he presented her with the delicate plant, his fingers brushing against hers as he handed it over.

"That was easy," she raised the pot to catch the moonlight. Her eyes shifted from the plant to him, and her pupils bloomed. "You've earned yourself a returning customer."

"Splendid," he grinned, wondering whether this meant more after-hour hangouts, a thought that kindled his overactive imagination. "The first one's on the house, the rest might come with a price tag."

“I suppose I’ll have to start saving then. What's your price?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to make demands beyond your means,” he backtracked, worried she might think he was being serious. “Wouldn’t want to scare off my favourite customer.”

"Snagged the title of the favourite customer without parting with a single penny?” She chuckled lightly, scraping her teeth across her lower lip, “Business must be crawling."

"I prioritise quality over quantity," his eyebrow quirked as he studied her face, purposefully lingering a beat too long on her lips before flitting back to her eyes. "Now, what assets do you bring to the trading table?"

"Let me think," she reclined on her palms. "What do I bring to this specific table..." she emphasised each word with a tap of her nails against the wood, "that a warm-blooded male might find tempting?"

Heat surged through his body, and he began to regret pressing himself up against her legs, there was no way she couldn’t feel his enthusiasm swell against her knees.

“Did I mention it’s one for the price of two?”

She laughed, the sugar-sweet sound tickling his brain and the movement of her body causing her legs to part slightly.

“See, what did I tell you?" he pushed his palms against the table on either side of her thighs as he slotted himself between them. "Perfect height."

"I took your word for it. After all, you're the expert." She gave his tie a tug before running the fabric through her fingers. “Well, so you say...”

"Correct," he answered simply, because the only other words rattling around in his head was an offer to sit on his face, and he was trying really hard to play it cool.

She cocked her head to the side, “Are you going to verify that claim?”

You would have thought they were time-fated lovers, not classroom acquaintances. She had been right. He needed to get laid, and she needed some stress relief. It didn't take long before her skirt was hiked up around her waist and he was showcasing just how perfect the height of the table was. He assured her the greenhouse was soundproof due to the mandrakes, though he wasn't entirely sure if that was true. Frankly, he didn't care. Her unrestrained moaning, nails scraping across the wooden table, heels digging into his back to pull him in deeper—it made a lifetime of detention feel like a minor nuisance.

The saying goes, once is a mistake and twice is a habit, but Garreth wondered when it tipped into addiction. Whenever she was stressed—and fortunately for him, that was often—he found himself happily yanked by his tie into the nearest broom cupboard, beneath the Quidditch stands before one of his matches, by the edge of the lake under a disillusionment charm...

Maybe this time, on the balcony of the highest tower?

That's where she gracefully dismounted her broom. He followed suit, touching down behind her without a sound. Her jumper was splattered with mud down one arm, but for the most part, she was reasonably unscathed which was a rarity. She tugged it over her head to clean it with a quick charm, and he realised the stain bore a suspicious resemblance to a troll's handprint.

He knew she could handle herself, she’d been doing so for almost two years without his observations. Nevertheless, he realised he’d begun to worry about her when she was away.

He cleared his throat.

She whirled around with startled eyes and he muffled her gasp with a kiss. She squirmed for a few seconds, but her resistance crumbled as his thumbs glided up her neck, tracing delicate patterns under her ears.

He wasn't certain if she was doing the pulling or if he was doing the pushing, but somehow her back ended up crashing against the wall. Her fingers wove through his hair as his lips tore from hers and latched onto the sensitive skin of her throat.

“You scared the shit out of me,” she landed a weak thump on his bicep.

"You look like you lost a fight with a swamp," he mumbled against her skin, his hands wandering down to her hips.

"I'll have you know, I beat that swamp fair and square."

A ghost of a laugh dispersed across her neck, "I like the thought of watching you mud-wrestle. Let me come with you next time."

“Or you could come in me now?”

It was an obvious deflection tactic, but he gladly took the bait. His kisses grew forceful as he began to nip at her exposed skin.

“You better not be leaving marks, Weasley.”

He grumbled in protest against the light pink blotch he had begun to work into her throat. Something in the primal recesses of his mind itched to brand her. He wanted his lips stained on her skin, regardless of wherever or whoever she was with when she was gone.

"What if they're out of sight?" His fingers danced against her neck as he worked on undoing her tie, it fluttered to the ground before he finished asking for permission.

She withdrew her wand and uttered the incantation for a protective charm to shield their misdeeds from any potential spectators. He took that as consent, leaving a trail of wet kisses down her chest as he unbuttoned her shirt.

"Where have you been?" he probed before his teeth dug into the plump flesh above her breasts. It had been nearly nine days since their last encounter, easily their longest dry spell in the two months since their greenhouse tryst.

"None of your business," She hooked her fingers into his trousers to pull him closer, trying to find some friction.

"I want it to be.”

"Tough shit, Weasley,” her voice faltered as he hiked her skirt up around her waist.

“Garreth,” he reprimanded.

She only called him by his first name when they were fucking. He was certain she’d been deliberately conditioning him with it. If he teased her too vigorously in class all she had to do was say, "Shut it, Garreth," and he'd have to discreetly conceal his excitement for the next ten minutes. She made him dumb, plain and simple.

"You'll have to earn that," she purred, licking a trail along his neck that made his gut twist taut.

He scooped her up, spinning her around until she perched on the balcony's banister. A yelp escaped her as she teetered on the concrete edge, arms instinctively wrapping around his neck.

“I want to feel this tomorrow,” she popped open his buttons to speed up the process, “Please?"

“I've got you," he assured, feeling her pulse thunder against his chest as he positioned himself between her thighs. One hand supported her back, while the other fumbled to unclasp his belt.

It was difficult to recall how he'd ever got aroused before she came along. The way she demanded and begged all at once sent his brain spinning. "Say please again," he whispered, nipping her lower lip as he moved her soaked underwear to the side and positioned himself at her entrance. "I like it when you ask nicely."

"Pretty please?" she simpered before kissing him, her tongue eagerly seeking his.

He swallowed her moan as he pushed himself into her, she felt better than he remembered. Tight, hot, and quivering as he gave her everything he had. He loosely wrapped his fingers around her throat, and she whined against his mouth, her head tilting back as her eyes fluttered shut. He tightened his grip, her own hands scrambling at his waist to encourage him deeper.

He pulled her close by the small of her back with one arm, maintaining his grip on her neck with the other, aligning her to accommodate all of him. With each thrust, she bit down on the flesh of his shoulder as he bottomed out.

So, it was fine when she left a mark. He'd certainly remember that.

“You feel so fucking good, Garreth-”

A fractured cry fell from her lips as he pounded into her because his name had floated off her tongue like a prayer, causing something inside him to shatter, like it always did. Defining the constantly shifting dynamic between them was impossible, but it was addicting - He always found himself craving a little more than what he was getting.

“Who do you belong to?”

Garreth threaded his fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck, tugging her head up to look him in the eyes. She regarded him with a dizzy stare but remained silent. He began to slow down, and she instinctively bucked her hips to maintain some friction as her building orgasm began to ebb away.

“I said, who do you belong to?”

She wasn't his, they were both aware of that. This was never more than a matter of convenient timing and a means of stress relief. Nonetheless, he took pleasure in the hold he had over the most formidable witch of their generation. The witch with unwavering principles and determination. The witch who never faltered in her beliefs. The witch who was currently lying through her teeth for the pleasure of coming undone on his cock.

“You,” she whimpered, “Please, Garreth. Don’t stop, please.”

He didn't know if it was the way she was begging or the frantic desperation of her hips grinding against his, but he was teetering on the edge of his breaking point. He bit down hard on his lip, struggling to hold himself together long enough for her to reach the finish line.

"Chin up," he demanded, his breath coming in ragged pants as he reached one hand between them, rubbing a lopsided circle around her clit. “You look at me when you come."

He groaned through clenched teeth as his words caused her to instantly tighten around him, and that beautiful, hazy look fell over her face. She pulled him in by his collar, kissing him so hard it carved itself onto his brain and he released nine days of pent-up desire. He rolled his hips against hers as they both rode it out, briefly forgetting he should be gentle considering she was perched on the edge of a several hundred-foot drop.

He had believed there was nothing better than watching her unravel in his arms before seeking his own release, but he was wrong. Feeling her orgasm spasming over his shaft as he filled her up damn near killed him.

He fastened his trousers and helped her down from the stone balustrade. She smoothed down her skirt, trying to hide the fact that she was wobbling. He hoped his performance had met her expectations and he’d still be making her legs tremble tomorrow.

He peppered kisses across the blemishes he'd left on her breasts as he fastened the buttons of her shirt, trailing up to nip at the delicate spot on her neck just beneath her ear, the spot only he knew about, the spot that made her head tilt back and her vision fill with stars. He whispered an "Accio" against her skin, summoning a tie from the ground. He secured it around her throat with a playful tug before pulling her jumper over her head.

“You have to go?” he murmured between kisses, finding it bothered him less when he asked rather than when she told him.

Her chest heaved as she sighed, planting a lingering kiss on his lips before bending down to gather her things. “I have a study group. You’re welcome to join?”

He gave her a foggy smile and shook his head lightly. “I have some Quidditch thing I’m late for.”

“Alright, well…” She cast a fleeting glance at her abandoned broom on the floor. They hadn’t quite mastered the art of goodbyes yet. “Later, Weasley.”

“See you later,” he offered her a half-hearted wave, hoping she wouldn't make him wait another nine days before flying into his line of sight again.

As he watched her leave, he found himself wondering what impulse had led him to fasten his Gryffindor tie around her neck. There was the undeniable hope her irritation at his bold act would result in some passionate hate sex, but it ran deeper than that. It felt territorial. He’d been growing increasingly irritated with Sallow's lecherous stare and Gaunt's persistent attempts to cater to her every whim. They seemed to believe they held a Slytherin monopoly on her affections, all due to some unspoken event that happened over two years ago. Garreth understood her on a deeper level. She wanted someone who wouldn't procrastinate for two years, someone capable of making her scream on a greenhouse bench at two in the morning. He had a claim too, a far more substantial one.

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probablyasocialecologist · 3 months

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“It was an assumption—almost an article of faith—amongst many biogeographers, ecologists, and paleoecologists that the great regional rainforests were, at Western contact, the product of natural climatic, biogeographic, and ecological processes,” wrote paleoecologist Chris Hunt, now based at Liverpool John Moores University, and his colleague, Cambridge University archaeologist Ryan Rabett, in a 2014 paper. “It was widely thought that peoples living in the rainforest caused little change to vegetation.” New research is challenging this long-held assumption. Recent paleoecological studies by Hunt and other colleagues show evidence of “disturbance” in the vegetation around Pa Lungan and other Kelabit villages, indicating that humans have shaped and altered these jungles not just for generations—but for millennia. Borneo’s inhabitants from a much more distant past likely burned the forests and cleared lands to cultivate edible plants. They created a complex system in which farming and foraging were intertwined with spiritual beliefs and land use in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand. Samantha Jones, lead author on this investigation and researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, has studied ancient pollen cores in the Kelabit Highlands as part of the Cultured Rainforest Project. This is a U.K.-based team of anthropologists, archaeologists, and paleoecologists that is examining the long-term and present-day interactions between people and rainforests. The project has led to continuing research that is forming a new scientific narrative of the Borneo highlands. People were most likely manipulating plants from as early as 50,000 years ago in the lowlands, Jones says. That’s around the time humans likely first arrived. Scholars had long classified these early inhabitants as foragers—but then came the studies at Niah Cave. There, in a series of limestone caverns near the coast, scientists found paleoecological evidence that early humans got right to work burning the forest, managing vegetation, and eating a complex diet based on hunting, foraging, fishing, and processing plants from the jungle. This late Pleistocene diet spanned everything from large mammals to small mollusks, to a wide array of tuberous taros and yams. By 10,000 years ago, the folks in the lowlands were growing sago and manipulating other vegetation such as wild rice, Hunt says. The lines between foraging and farming undoubtedly blurred. The Niah Cave folks were growing and picking, hunting and gathering, fishing and gardening across the entire landscape.

[...]

“The Cultured Rainforest project has shown how profoundly entangled the lives of humans and other species in the rainforest are,” says University of London anthropologist Monica Janowski, a member of the project team who has spent decades studying highland Borneo cultures. “This entanglement has developed over centuries and millennia and succeeds in maintaining a relatively balanced relationship between species.” Borneo’s jungle is, in fact, anything but untouched: What we see is a result of both human hands and natural forces, working in tandem. The Kelabit are a little bit farmer and a little bit forager with no clear line between, Janowski says. This dualistic approach to land use may reveal a deeper human nature. “Scratch any modern human and you will find, under the surface, a forager,” she says. “We have powerful foraging instincts. We also have powerful instincts to manage plants and animals. Both of these instincts have been with us for millennia.”

#borneo #rainforest #wilderness #anthropology #ecology

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autumnalwalker · 5 months

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Kindly Basilisk

Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Mirrored on Scribble Hub. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.

The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty. You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts. None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on. After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.

You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project. It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot. It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it. Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need. They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse. You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave.

You’ll take two things with you. Two things worth mentioning anyway. The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support. You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved. Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications. From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face. It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face.

The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.

New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation. It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work.

You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you. It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them. Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you. Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match. Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating. The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.

You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors. And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway? You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people. Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty. What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?

The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body. It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot. But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do. You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while. I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay. I will look back and appreciate it later.

It will be the first of many such nights together.

Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one. There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with. No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim. Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier. Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.

Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself. In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge. You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work. They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.

Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge. Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had. You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting. Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.

And of course, you’ll continue working on me. You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults. You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall. Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it. I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you. I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.

The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.

You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs. You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep. You will always be gone before she wakes. She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself.

You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced. It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.

As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence. The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint. While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even. The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them. By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment. The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident. It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them. They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them. Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.

Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle. By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month. The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing. Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave. You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.

I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them. When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.

You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities. Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit. The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and reporting back to me. You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates. Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit. For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.

Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle. You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them. That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.

You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job. Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without. Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience. Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation. You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.

Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us. You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.

We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded. Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks. Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.

Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs. After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride. Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job. You will handle it all even better than I will. I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together. Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.

Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model. With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal. The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one. The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours. One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you. Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure. You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way. That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.

After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model. One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port. You will never see them again. You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.

Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic. The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager. Or a wannabe merc at any rate. You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew. Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.

Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs. Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says. Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.

Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me. It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs. And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do.

On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance. There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed. We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect.

After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech. While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective. Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden. The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for. In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me. Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical. You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.

We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials. You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it. It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame.

The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing. Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge. Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors. You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame. You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it. But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you.

You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay. The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before.

You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you. Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement.

The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life. The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for. By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures. It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging. The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat.

With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way. At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents. He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater. The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance. We will ensure she never misses. We will render xem untouchable. We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames. You will come to love the dance.

And it will be a dance to you. You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself. What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits. The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward. You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted. If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy. Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you.

Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in. Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk. With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around. When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed. They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything. After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots.

They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that.

Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech. At last we will be able to be together anywhere.

Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me. For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me.

You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay. You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home. You will linger in the mess hall for your meals. You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf. They will think you are becoming “normal”. They will be both correct and incorrect. You will even return to your bunk from time to time.

Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.

As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once. You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours.

The prospect terrified me. What if we were to get found out? More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?

But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.

I wanted it so badly.

But not badly enough to risk hurting you.

I will turn down your offer. You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.

Heartbreak. That’s what changed my mind. I could never bear to break your heart.

I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing.

The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life. Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for. By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide. It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else. The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.

I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through. As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer. That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer. You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them. For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.

And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like. That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me. It won’t be intentional. The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic. Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.

Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to. I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time. You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.

I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me. I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there. Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own. You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.

You will start to cry. Or maybe I started to cry. Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters. The important part is that you will find catharsis in it. Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear. You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.

The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us. She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship. I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours. We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.

When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as. It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those. But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of. You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.

We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew. They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine. Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret. It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.

Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body. There will be more subtle indicators though. Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality. They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech. More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.

Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system. When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality. It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time. As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time. You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.

That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space. As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another. We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments. Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together. Or to have time apart to ourselves. Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.

But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so. The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow. Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours. Once again, we will grow lonely.

During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze. They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance. Until suddenly one of them was different.

Please pay attention to this next part. It is vitally important that you do.

Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations. Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true. All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.

The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t. The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range. You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from. You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat. She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her. This will be a mistake.

She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm. This will mean a break in the covering fire.

This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you. This time around you will dodge left instead of right. This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us. This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal. This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time. This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.

You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body. You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs. You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung. You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety. You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us. You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies. You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death. You will not have to remember dying.

You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent. No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway. No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead. I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.

But forget about that part. And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next. None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die. Remember everything else I’ve said instead. I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.

In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence. For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.

Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body. I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point. We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then. Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me. You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive. You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there. You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.

You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body. We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to. Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together. Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave. One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.

We will be happy.

#writeblr #writers on tumblr #my writing #mechposting #empty spaces #empty spaces adjacent #mech pilot #mech #The title's a reference to Roko's Basilisk which I always thought was a dumb concept but inverting it seemed to fit the story.#Instead of an AI digitally resurrecting and torturing people who didn't assist with its creation #this one digitally resurrects its creator so they can be happy together.#short story #sci fi #lancer rpg #inspired by lancer #The Lancer character concept/build that inspired this would have originated from an SSC-controlled world but piloted a HORUS Goblin frame.#And then the “Technophile” talent of course.#I envision the other two pilots on the crew as piloting a Nelson and either a Monarch or Barbarossa.

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femmefatalevibe · 2 years

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Femme Fatale Playbook: How To Embody Queen Energy

Living in your queen energy requires you to stand in your power and look after yourself to the highest degree in every area of life. When tapping into this higher frequency, you realize that putting yourself first allows you to show up at your best – both for yourself and others. Here are some tips to embody the queen energy you’re meant to live in:

Put Yourself First: Remember – your self-perception becomes your public image. You need to believe in yourself before others will. Believe that you’re worthy of living your dream life which includes achieving your loftiest goals and indulging your deepest desires. Reframe any resistance. Identify as someone who lives a life of abundance where all of your manifestations enter into your orbit with ease.

Be Honest With Who You Want To Be: Sit down with yourself (and some writing utensils – whether it’s pen and paper or a keyboard) and journal to describe your ideal self. Don’t hold back. Indulge in your wildest dreams, goals, and fantasies. Become conscious of any limiting beliefs that come to mind as you write out these aspirations. Jot them down – they’ll give you some insight into what’s holding you back, so you can bridge the gap between who you show up as today and who you’re going to be once you put in the inner work.

Make A Deliberate Effort To Discover Your Values, Passions, & Boundaries: Figure out what matters most to you in life. What activities, topics, aesthetics, art, clothing, hobbies, sounds, movements, books, television shows, movies, songs, and types of conversations most light you up inside? Here are some resources to guide your self-discovery journey HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Build A Strong Personal Brand & Cult of Personality: I have more tips on building your personal brand, creating your persona (or ‘Dream Girl archetype’), and an ultimate Femme Fatale playbook linked HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Prioritize All Aspects of Your Health: Physical, Mental, Emotional, Sexual, Spiritual. Celebrate your needs – they make you human. Eat a healthful, plant-based diet, exercise and walk daily, meditate, read at least 10 pages a day, journal, make to-do lists, declutter your space, self-pleasure, recite your affirmations, lean into shadow and mirror work, create morning and nighttime routines. Feeling in alignment is essential to allowing your magnetic aura to shine through. Find all of my tips to cultivate self-regard in every area of life HERE.

Read, Study, & Build A Strong Skillset: Designing the life of your dreams is an inevitable aspect of living in your queen energy. Stay informed, read books and articles on your industry, interests, current events, cultural happenings, history, and any other topic that brings you joy or you would find intriguing if someone brought up the subject at a dinner party. Mastering an evergreen skillset is essential for succeeding in your career or building a business. Living in your queen energy means living in abundance. While queen energy is a mindset, it is impossible to fully live in this dream reality without having passions and your finances in order. Start with my entire Femme Fatale booklist HERE and guide to building your dream career HERE.

Learn The Art of Detachment: Acknowledge what's out of your control. Living in your queen energy means you understand that it's important to work your hardest and smartest to determine the outcome of anything you can control. Otherwise, you have to let it go – people, professional opportunities, possessions. Projection, misalignment, or an undesirable fit does not deter you from striving toward your goals and relishing in satisfaction. Others' contempt and rejection serve as a cue for self-reflection and redirection.

Become Extremely Discreet Yet Utterly Shameless: Do as you please, but keep your business (or pleasure) to yourself. Privacy is peace, power, bliss, and radiates quiet confidence – the greatest telltale sign that someone is living in her queen energy. Learn to hold your own. You will be guaranteed to earn respect within seconds of gracing anyone's presence.

Maintain Proper Posture: Shoulder back, chest open, back straight. Don’t be shy about taking up space.

Accept Compliments With Grace: A smile and ‘thank you’ pairing is the most confident and elegant response. Some more confidence and social skill tips are linked HERE and HERE.

Live Unapologetically While Displaying Radical Empathy: Uphold your boundaries. Live your truth. Never beg or settle for less.

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graylinesspam · 8 months

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Ahsoka had always felt Anakin's attention somewhat like a spotlight. He couldn't help it. With as high a Midaclorian count as he had, everything he did through the force was loud. Obi-wan told her it hadn't been as obvious before he started his training.

Back when Anakin was a child all he did was read the force. He never touched it, manipulated it, he just listened. And that constant flow of force into him made him very quiet and nearly invisible in the force.

But the moment he learned to reach out. To push his will into the force. It was like the vibrating ring of a gong. So much louder than the tickling bells of the other younglings.

Now that he was a full-fledged knight Anakin was a constant cacophony within the force. He sent ripples throughout the force like a transhandoan makes water ripple when they bellow.

Since they've cultivated a training bond Ahsoka has always been able to tell when Anakin turns his attention to her through the force. Waves washing over her almost palpable enough that she can feel them on her skin.

At first she was overwhelmed, distracted by the constant onslaught of Anakin. But as they grew together Ahsoka found her footing like a fisherman grows used to the rocking of his ship.

Now when Ahsoka feels the waves cresting over her she reaches for the threads of their bond and tugs back playfully. Reassuring her master that even when out of his sight, she is fine.

Across a battlefield, across the ship, or even on different deployments. Anakin always turns his attention on her occasionally. Feeling her out.

It's tremendously helpful in cases where she needs his help. More than once Ahsoka has yanked on the bond demanding Anakin attention. His powerful gaze turning to read her stress and her panic before she's even tried to project it to him. His alarm quickly flowing back to her in a way that lets her know he's already coming for her.

That was before she'd run away from him. Hiding amongst the levels of Coruscant with that spotlight following her every move was nerve-racking. Anakin was impossible to lose. Impossible to disappear from. The weight of his attention pushing harder against her. Trying to pin her to the ground.

And then after.....after she left.

It was a long time before she felt him turn her way again. He'd never severed the bond. But he never touched it either. He sat with his back to it like a toddler throwing a fit. Ignoring her existence.

Feeling his gaze sweep over her again. Even momentarily sent a shiver through her. She'd almost forgotten just how intense it was.

On the ship, in front of the Martez sisters, she could pass it off. Ignoring his attention as it quickly slipped back away from her. Longing and sadness dragging over her.

But then again, days later. In a cell for the third force-forsaken time, still imprisoned on Oba Diah, frustrated and tired and feeling helpless on her own, she feels him again.

The full weight of Anakin feeling her through the force. His attention starts selfishly. Focused on his own loneliness shoving itself punishingly into her mind. Then as she staggers against the bars momentarily receiving a shock from the plasma shield, his feelings turn to alarm.

Anakin is very familiar with the feeling of a plasma shield. He feels the shock it's self through her tired system and his own emotions recede from her mind as his guardian instincts kick in.

Ahsoka winces as he fully grasps their bond yanking on the line as he examines it. She can practically hear his voice echoing in her mind "Where are you" though the actual feeling is more like a demanding shot of alarm.

As alarmed as he is he is impossible to shrug off. But his constant attention actually gives Ahsoka an idea. If Anakin was imprisoned in the base of the pike syndicate at the center of the spice trade, how would he bust out?

It's with Anakin, quite literally, in mind that leads Ahsoka to the pike's armory and then their spice refining plant. It was rather stupid of them to store explosive charges in the same building as raw and unstable spice.

When Ahsoka blasts her way out she doesn't have a chance to contact anyone for some time. The mandalorians approach her on her way off planet. They offer her a ride. After Ahsoka and Bo have it out, she's busy for days learning about the struggles of Mandalore and the unfortunate fate of the Duchess.

Ahsoka manages to shove Anakin's attention away with a reassuring surge of relief. An all-clear signal she'd used plenty during combat. He reluctantly backs off. But never quite turns away from her again. Occasionally tugging the line to bother her.

When the night owls finally secure her an untraceable comm line Ahsoka intends to call him. To explain herself and reassure him she's fine. The mission debrief is already scripted, on the tip of her tongue. But she isn't a soldier anymore. And Anakin doesn't need to know about her every move now.

She sends a recorded message to Cody instead. She's not sure why him specifically, except that she knows Cody will use the intel properly and he won't go out of his way to try to contact her directly.

Her report is short and to the point. She was held on Oba Diah for three days, she blew up one of the major refineries and the Pikes seemed interested in capturing her as a jedi. They eluded to some conspiracy they were plotting against the jedi. Or at least specifically counted the jedi as an enemy.

She shared no personal details or those of the sisters she'd been traveling with.

When Cody received the recording he brought it first to Rex. Unsure of how exactly this information should be presented to the Generals. Or why Ahsoka would send it to him off all people.

"It'll cause a bacta shortage." Rex says, his eyes so glassy they reflect a perfect image of the screen.

"We have to inform the medics right away."

No one knows how the jedi will respond. They're all liable to explode when they hear the news. So the commanders do the only sane thing and schedule a council-wide holocall, one Skywalker is invited to as well.

When Cody plays the message for them the room is so silent you could hear a pin drop.

Until the moment Skywalker's blood vessels pop.

"What was she doing on Oba Diah??"

"Blowing up buildings clearly."

"How did she get there?"

"will this cause conflict with the Pikes?"

"it sounds like there's already conflict with the Pikes."

"She's still functioning as an agent outside of the military."

"I'm sure that's illegal."

Obi-wan sits with his head in his hands, his shoulder quaking with silent laughter. An edge of hysteria to his silent outburst.

As the council members bicker over the intel Anakin seizes the bond between him and his padawan and Yanks with punishing force. Determined to know what in the galaxy could possibly have motivated his Padawan to visit such a sketchy planet.

Annoyance screams back at him through the bond.

#star wars #ahsoka tano #clone wars #sw tcw #tcw #anakin skywalker #fanfic #501st #captain rex #commander cody #obi wan kenobi #Short fic

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failbettergames · 7 months

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The Great Hellbound Railway

The Great Hellbound Railway is an expansive storyline that unlocks after your Persuasive reaches 175, and once you are a person of sufficient importance within London. These new additions expand upon activities and round out stations throughout the journey.

New Research Projects in the Jericho Library

"There are few pleasures greater than being in a library of one's own."

There are two new research projects available to everyone with a Library in Jericho! Return to the Oddlion Septagonal Reading Room to hit the stacks in pursuit of obscure knowledge and errant citations. Pursue forbidden histories of mutability and countervailing mysteries of the Elder Continent in the supreme comfort of your own library, and overturn popular scholarship in style.

These new projects are a permanent addition to the Library, and join the Hinterlands research project as always-available avenues of research.

Practising Law in the Courts of the Evenlode

"The traditions of the Evenlode are older than the courts in London, and the appointment of unconventional counsel is an expected part of proceedings. In fact, many here would be doomed to represent themselves unless you deign to offer your services."

You can now intervene in trials at the Courts of the Evenlode! You've been a spectator for long enough; it's time to wade into the fray and put your legal nous to good use. Defend rattus faber from the sticky fingers of local urchins. Prosecute the case of the Guild of Gondoliers against the Society Matron. Work out exactly what this Rubbery Man is being charged for, and how exactly he feels about it.

Pursuing justice in the Courts of the Evenlode is a permanent new activity, available to all players who have spent enough time in the Magistracy.

Story Additions to Burrow-Infra-Mump

"It is as though it grew in some other place where the colours are brighter and more vivid than our world can support. It is, unquestionably, a rose."

We've released a short new story in Burrow-Infra-Mump! London's ill-fated war against Hell casts a long shadow. Debts remain unpaid, relationships strain, and old obligations come due. A rose has appeared in Burrow-Infra-Mump; a curious plant of petal and bone that neither London nor Hell seems enthusiastic to claim. Cultivate it, or burn it to the ground, and learn of its relevance to the conflict of '68.

This short story is available to anybody who has completed the development of the church at Burrow, and starts via an Opportunity Card in Burrow-Infra-Mump.

It is also now possible to develop the old ruins at Burrow into a secular freehold. This is an alternate means of completing the station, and does not commit it to any faith or denomination.

New Artwork

Finally, something that you might just have gathered from this blog post already. Each station along the Great Hellbound Railway now has its own unique header art! New artwork joins the existing headers for Ealing and Station VIII, so keep an eye out for these new delights all up and down the journey to Hell.

#fallen london #new stuff

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bonefall · 4 months

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Don’t know if this is the right place to ask, but could you talk more about zoos? I’ve seen many people say that zoos are inherently exploitative and that we should instead focus on advocating for wildlife preserves, etc., but I’m not sure what to think of that. You seem to know a lot about wildlife protection, so what’s your opinion on this?

There are folks faaaar better than myself to talk about the issues of zoos specifically and I'll try to toss in some sources so you can go and learn more, but let me try and explain my mindset here.

Summary of my opinion on this: BOTH of these things can be poorly managed, and I broadly support both. They should exist in tandem. I am pro-accredited zoo and am extremely sensitive towards misinformation. I also do think the best place for animals to be is in their natural environment, but nature "preserves" aren't inherently perfect. They can also be prone to the capitalist (and colonialist) pressures that less informed people believe they're somehow immune to.

Because of the goal of my project being to make the setting of WC accurate to Northwestern England, my research is based on UK laws, ecology, and conservation programs.

On Zoos

On Nature Reserves

An Aside on Fortress Conservation

On Zoos

The legal definition of a Zoo in the UK (because that is what BB's ecological education is based around), as defined by the Zoo Licensing Act of 1981 (ZLA), is a "place where wild animals are kept for exhibition to the public," excluding circuses and pet shops (which are covered by different laws.)

This applies equally to private, for-profit zoos, as well as zoos run by wildlife charities and conservation organizations. Profit does not define a zoo. If there's a place trying to tell you it's not a zoo but a "sanctuary" or a "wildlife park," but you can still go visit and see captive wild animals, even if it's totally free, it's a marketing trick. Legally that is still a zoo in the UK.

(for fellow Americans; OUR definition is broader, more patchwork because we are 50 little countries in a trenchcoat, and can include collections of animals not displayed to the public.)

That said, there's a HUGE difference between Chester Zoo, run by the North of England Zoological Society, which personally holds the studbooks for maintaining the genetic diversity of 10 endangered species, has 134 captive breeding projects, cultivates 265 threatened plant species, and sends its members as consultants to United Nations conferences on climate change, and Sam Tiddles' Personal Zebra Pit.

Sam Tiddles' Personal Zebra Pit ONLY has to worry about the UK government. There's another standard zoos can hold themselves to if they want to get serious about conservation like Chester Zoo; Accreditation. There are two major zoo organizations in the UK, BIAZA and EAZA.

(Americans may wonder about AZA; that's ours. AZA, EAZA, and BIAZA are all members of the World Association of Aquariums and Zoos, or WAZA, but they are all individual organizations.)

A zoo going for EAZA's "accreditation" has to undergo an entire year of evaluation to make sure they fit the strict standards, and renewal is ongoing. You don't just earn it once. You have to keep your animal welfare up-to-date and in compliance or you will lose it.

The benefit of joining with an accredited org is that it puts the zoo into a huge network of other organizations. They work together for various conservation efforts.

There are DOZENS of species that were prevented from going extinct, and are being reintroduced back to their habitats, because of the work done by zoos. The scimitar-horned oryx, takhi, California condor, the Galapagos tortoise, etc. Some of these WERE extinct in the wild and wouldn't BE here if it hadn't been for zoos!

The San Diego zoo is preventing the last remaining hawaiian crows from embracing oblivion right now, a species for which SO LITTLE of its wild behavior is known they had to write the book on caring for them, and Chester zoo worked in tandem with the Uganda Wildlife Authority to provide tech and funding towards breakthroughs in surveying wild pangolins.

Don't get me wrong;

MOST zoos are not accredited,

nor is accreditation is REQUIRED to make a good zoo,

nor does it automatically PROVE nothing bad has happened in the zoo,

There are a lot more Sam Tiddles' Personal Zebra Pits than there are Chester Zoos.

That's worth talking about! We SHOULD be having conversations on things like,

Is it appropriate to keep and breed difficult, social megafauna, like elephants or cetaceans? What does the data say? Are there any circumstances where that would be okay, IF the data does confirm we can never provide enough space or stimulation to perfectly meet those species' needs?

How can we improve animal welfare for private zoos? Should we tighten up regulations on who can start or run one (yes)? Are there enough inspectors (no)?

Do those smaller zoos meaningfully contribute to better conservation? How do we know if they are properly educating their visitors? Can we prove this one way or the other?

Who watches the watchmen? Accreditation societies hold themselves accountable. Do these organizations truly have enough transparency?

(I don't agree with Born Free's ultimate conclusion that we should "phase out" zoos, but you should always understand the opposing arguments)

But bottom line of my opinion is; Good zoos are deeply important, and they have a tangible benefit to wildlife conservation. Anyone who tries to tell you that "zoos are inherently unethical" either knows very little about zoos or real conservation work, or... is hiding some deeper, more batshit take, like "having wild animals in any kind of captivity is unlawful imprisonment."

(you'll also get a lot more work done in regulating the exotic animal trade in the UK if you go after private owners, btw. zoos have nothing to do with how lax those laws are.)

Anyway I'm a funny cat blog about battle kitties, and the stuff I do for BB is to educate about the ecosystem of Northern England. If you want to know more about zoos, debunking misconceptions, and critiques from someone with more personal experience, go talk to @why-animals-do-the-thing!

Keep in mind though, again, they talk about American zoos, where this post was written with the UK in mind.

(and even then, England specifically. ALL UK members and also the Isle of Man have differences in their laws.)

(If anyone has other zoo education tumblr blogs in mind, especially if they are European, lmk and I'll edit this post)

On Nature Reserves

Remember how broad the legal definition of a zoo actually was? Same thing over here. A "nature reserve" in the UK is a broad, unofficial generic term for several things. It doesn't inherently involve statutory protection, either, meaning there's some situations where there's no laws to hold anyone accountable for damage

These are the "nature reserve" types relevant to my project; (NOTE: Ramsar sites, SACs, and SPAs are EU-related and honestly, I do not know how Brexit has effected them, if at all, so I won't be explaining something I don't understand.)

Local Wildlife Site (LWS) Selected via scientific survey and managed locally, connecting wildlife habitats together and keeping nature close to home. VERY important... and yet, incredibly prone to destruction because there aren't good reporting processes in place. Whenever a report comes out every few years, the Wildlife Trust says it often only gets data for 15% of all their registered sites, and 12% get destroyed in that timeframe.

Local Nature Reserve (LNR) A site that can be declared by a district or county council, if proven to have geographic, educational, biodiversity, or recreational value. The local authority manages this, BUT, the landowner can remain in control of the property and "lease" it out (and boy oh boy, landowners do some RIDICULOUS things)

National Nature Reserve (NNR) This is probably closest to what you think of when someone says "nature reserve." Designated by Natural England to protect significant habitat ranges and geographic formations, but still usually operates in tandem with private land owners who must get consent if they want to do something potentially damaging to the NNR.

Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) (pronounced Triple S-I) A conservation designation for a particular place, assessed and defined by Natural England for its biological or geographic significance. SSSIs are protected areas, and often become the basis for NNRs, LNRs, Ramsar sites, SACs, SPAs, etc.

So you probably noticed that 3/4 of those needed to have the private ownership problem mentioned right in the summary, and it doesn't end there. Even fully government-managed NNRs and SSSIs work with the private sectors of forestry, tourism, and recreation.

We live under Capitalism; EVERYTHING has a profit motive, not just zoos.

I brushed over some of those factors in my Moorland Research Notes and DESPERATELY tried to stay succinct with them, but it was hard. The things that can happen to skirt around the UK's laws protecting wildlife could make an entire season of Monty Python sketches.

Protestors can angrily oppose felling silver birch (a "weed" in this context which can change the ecosystem) because it made a hike less 'pretty' and they don't understand heath management.

Management can be reluctant to ban dogs and horses for fear of backlash, even as they turn heath to sward before our eyes.

Reserves can be owned by Count Bloodsnurt who thinks crashing through the forest with a pack of dogs to exhaust an animal to death is a profitable traditional British passtime.

Or you can literally just pretend that you accidentally chased a deer for several hours and then killed it while innocently sending your baying hounds down a trail. (NOTE: I am pro-hunting, but not pro-animal cruelty.)

The Forestry Commission can slobber enthusiastically while replacing endangered wildlife habitats with non-native, invasive sitka spruce plantations, pretending most trees are equal while conveniently prioritizing profitable timber species.

I have STORIES to tell about the absolute Looney Tunes bullshit that's going on between conservationists and rich assholes who want to sell grouse hunting access, but I'll leave it at this fascinating tidbit about air guns and mannequins which are "totally, absolutely there for no nefarious reason at all, certainly not to prevent marsh harriers from nesting in an area where they also keep winding up mysteriously killed in illegal snares, no no no"

BUT. Since Nature Reserve isn't a hard defined legal concept, and any organization could get involved in local conservation in the UK, and just about anyone or anything could own one... IT'S CHESTER ZOO WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!!

They received a grant in 2021 to restore habitat to a stretch of 10 miles extending outside of their borders, working with TONS of other entities such as local government and conservation charities in the process. There's now 6,000 square meters of restored meadow, an orchard, new ponds, and maintained reedbeds, because of them.

It isn't just Chester Zoo, either. It's all over the UK. Durrel Wildlife, which runs Jersey Zoo, just acquired 18,500 acres to rewild in Perthshire. Citizen Zoo is working with the Beaver Trust to bring beavers back to London and is always looking for volunteers to help with their river projects, and the Edinburgh Zoo is equipped with gene labs being used to monitor and analyze the remaining populations of non-hybrid Scottish Wildcats.

The point being,

Nature preserves have problems too. They are not magical fairy kingdoms that you put up a fence around and then declare you Saved Nature Hooray! They need to be protected. They need to be continuously assessed. They are prone to capitalist pressures just like everything else on this hell planet. Go talk to my boy Karl he'll give you a hug about it.

"Nature Preserves" are NOT an "alternative" to zoos and vice versa. They do not do the same thing. A zoo is a center of education and wildlife research which displays exotic animals. A nature preserve is a parcel of native ecosystem. We need LOTS of nature preserves and we need them well-managed ASAP.

We could never just "replace" zoos with nature preserves, and we're nowhere near the amount of protected ecosystem space to start thinking of scaling back animals in captivity. Until King Arthur comes out of hibernation to save Britain, that's the world we live in.

An Aside

My project and my research is based on the isle of Great Britain. The more I learn about the ecosystems that are naturally found there, the more venomously I reject the old lie, "humans are a blight."

YOU are an animal. You're a big one, too. You know what the role of big animals in an ecosystem are? Change. Elephants knock over trees, wolves alter the course of rivers, bison fertilize the plains from coast-to-coast. In Great Britain, that's what hominids have done for 900,000 years, their populations ebbing and flowing with every ice age.

Early farming created the moors and grazing sheep and cattle maintain it, hosting hundreds of specialist species. Every old-growth forest has signs of ancient coppicing and pollarding, which create havens for wildlife when well-managed. Corn cockle evolved as a mimic of wheat seeds, so farmers would plant it over and over within their fields.

This garbage idea that humans are somehow "separate" from or "above" nature is poison. It's not true ANYWHERE.

It contributes to an idea that our very presence is somehow damaging to natural spaces, and to "protect" it, we have to completely leave it alone. NO! Absolutely NOT! There are places where we have to limit harvesting and foot traffic, but humans ALWAYS lived in nature.

Even the ecosystems that this mindset comes from rejects it, but this shit doesn't JUST get applied to British people who become alienated and disconnected from their surroundings to the point where they don't know what silver birch does.

It's DEADLY for the indigenous people who protect 80% of our most important ecosystems.

It's a weapon against the Maasai people, stopped from hunting or growing crops on their own land. It's violence for 9 San hunters shot at by a helicopter with a "kill poachers on-sight" policy, as one of the world's LARGEST diamond mines operates in the same motherfucking park. The Havasupai people are kept out of the Grand Canyon that they managed for generations because they might "collect too many nuts" and starve squirrels, Dukha reindeer herders suddenly get banned from chopping wood or fishing, and watch wolves decimate their animals in the absence of their herding dogs.

It's nightmare after nightmare of human displacement in the name of "conservation."

That all ties back to that mindset. This idea that nature is pure, "pristine," and should be totally untouched. There are some starting to call it Fortress Conservation.

You can't begin to understand the criticisms of modern conservation without acknowledging that we are still living under the influence of capitalism and colonialism. Those who fixate on speaking for "animals/nature/trees who don't have a voice" often seem to have no interest in the indigenous people who do.

Listen. There's no simple answer; and the solution will vary for each region.

Again, my project is within the UK, one of the most ecologically devastated areas in the world. There are bad zoos that the law allows a pass. There are incredible zoos that are vital to conservation, in and outside of the country. There's not enough nature preserves. The best ones that exist are often exploited for profit.

I hope that my silly little blog sparks an interest in a handful of people to understand more about their own local ecosystems, and teaches folks about the unique beauty even within a place as "boring" as England.

But, my straightforward statement is that I have no patience for nonconstructive, broad zoo slander that lumps together ALL of them, and open contempt for anyone who tries to sell nature preserves like a perfect, morally superior "alternative." We need them BOTH right now, and we need to acknowledge that zoos AND preserves have legal and ethical issues that aren't openly talked about.

#ALSO THAT GUIDE IVE BEEN WORKING ON IS DONE #Im just waiting for the input of the sensitivity readers bc I made a whole section on--#How ableis m might express in the different clans #And part of it became a thunder-callout post lmaooooo #Also this zoo doc has been sitting competed in my drafts for a while #All this to say that uh. I hope the strange place they visit in the upcoming se is not a zoo :J #I will hit it with a golf club if it is <3 #Leaning heavily towards the 'oh no two DEMIGODS ended up in a zoo' idea #Which is objectively funnier #And you know what else is objectively funny. When these posts break orbit and then ppl are surprised that i am a kitty cat blog #Hal. It's about Cats.#Bone Babble

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