F L I C K E R || H//azbin H//otel
lil s//taticm//oth because i'm going insane
kink!v/al because reasons
Val's lower arms come to rest on Vox's thighs. The tech mogul repositions himself along Val's hips which earns him something between a grunt and a growl. The moth's upper arms reach up, one hand curling around a lean shoulder and the other pulling at the lapel of his blazer to yank him back into a kiss.
As Vox leans in, his screen flickers just slightly. It's slight. Barely noticeable if you weren't paying attention. But Val is always paying attention. His tongue glides up the flat, smooth surface, feeling the strange static hum on his tastebuds.
"Mm, trouble, amorcito?" he asks as his tongue snakes back into his mouth.
Vox peeks a red eye open, "Huh?"
Val's smile sharpens. "Nothing."
He pulls Vox closer by the hips, digging his fingers in hard enough to bruise. He feels like starting a fight. It'll make this so much sweeter. Vox is always so much sexier when he's on edge.
Shoving back, he yanks his head away from Vox's mouth and narrows his carmine eyes.
"You're distracted," he accuses.
Vox blinks. He looks surprised, then his expression flattens into annoyance.
"The fuck? No I'm not."
"You are. You think I don't know?"
There's that flicker again. It's a little more pronounced this time. A whisper of static around the edges of his screen, as if someone just gave the side of his box a good whack. Vox is oblivious to it, or at least he's pretending to be. Arousal pools in Val's gut.
"I have plenty of other people I could be fucking, Vox."
"Why do you always fucking do this?" Vox complained, "I was just getting into it."
"Then why are you doing that?"
Another wobble of his screen. It passes in an instant.
"Doing what?!"
Val scrapes a gold plated claw down the edge of his casing. Again, the screen twitches and this time, it comes with a soft, uneven inhale on Vox's part.
"Hhih..."
"You're all...glitchy," Val grins.
Vox wrenches out of the path of his hand and recovers, "Fuck off, no I'm not. Are we doing this or can I get back to work?"
Val leaned back into the chair, smug. "That depends."
"On what?" Vox snapped.
"If you're going to just get it over with and sneeze already."
Vox's hypnotic eye went wide and crazed for a moment, the other tightening in clear aggravation.
"I'm not--"
"Oh, but you are," Val murmured, dropping his voice low, "I know you, baby."
As if enticed by the mere suggestion, Vox's screen flickered again. This time, he acknowledged it with a slight twist of his expression. He blinked hard and shook his head. Val could hear his fans whirring in earnest.
One of his hands went up the sinuous curve of Vox's waist. He felt his ribs expanding in his palm.
"Hiih..hhh..." Vox's screen began to fade with his breath, winking out as he slowly lost control.
"Mmm, I thought so," Val grinned.
Vox's screen went completely black before he whipped to the side with a face full of grey, crackling static and--
"H’AEHHZZSCH'ah!"
"Hey," Val murmured as he watched Vox's expression slowly filter back onto his screen, his pixelated eyes squinting in itchy limbo. Val grabbed the side of his face, turning the Overlord towards him with a forceful tug. "Don't turn away from me."
Vox gasped, planting a hand in Val's chest to try and put some distance between them as his head snapped down with a poorly contained second sneeze.
"hH’NGXtssh!"
"And what have I told you about holding back?"
"For fuuuhcks saake, Val," Vox managed to roll his eyes as his screen glowed erratically.
Val pulled him closer, listening to his fans working overtime, the whine of his internal processors trying to dispel the irritant. There was one heavy inhale, and then another. Vox's chest pressed against his desperately.
"Ghh...hg..."
As much as he wanted to be close, he enjoyed the show far too much to miss the front row seat. Val leaned back once more and watched hungrily as Vox's expression snapped and popped with stray tendrils of wayward electricity.
Finally, he gave in, sneezing freely into Val's lap.
"eH'HTZ҉Z҉S҉H҉IEW!" The power in the building whined as it overloaded and filled every room with blinding light. Somewhere overhead, a lightbulb popped. Third time this fucking month.
Vox groaned in the aftermath. His expression returned to his screen, slightly dazed, undoubtedly annoyed.
"So sneezy," Val praised him his arms pulling the other Overload close once more as he sniffled scratchy, static sounds into his ear.
"Fuck you," Vox muttered in a congested voice. But he melted into Val's touch, rubbing the flat surface of his screen along his shoulder for some relief.
"Are you done?"
"Think so."
"Shame."
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Bearded vulture Desmond?
Considering bearded vulture can be seen in the Arabian Peninsula, putting Desmond in 12th century Levant would be fun. He’s usually just chilling, watching Altaïr doing his missions with the look of someone who is proud of the accomplishments of another person but keeping a respectable distance.
But in the eyes of the people who notice Desmond, they have another word for him…
A stalker.
To be more exact, many of the Assassins believe the vulture stalking Altaïr is some sort of ‘blessing’. A herald of death that has taken a liking to Altaïr.
A show of Altaïr’s skills as an Assassin.
It wasn’t exactly a bad thing and the vulture doesn’t try to do anything other than stare.
Of course, Kadar believes this because Altaïr is so cool, it’s only natural to have some kind of being (perhaps even mythical) looking over him.
Malik thinks the entire thing is stupid and the vulture probably liked following Altaïr because it knows Altaïr would leave bodies it can scavenge.
An Assassin from Egypt tells them about how Ancient Egyptians believe all vultures are female so there are whispers that the vulture may have been the reincarnation of Altaïr’s late mother, looking over her son in her current form.
Abbas capitalized on this and annoys Altaïr, telling him that the vulture is most probably some poor woman who made the mistake of falling in love with Altaïr and losing her life because of his ‘personality’. This is crueler if Desmond starts appearing to him after Adha’s death but the Brotherhood (and Abbas) doesn’t know that.
Altaïr just ignores all of these and even ignores the vulture.
It wasn’t doing anything and it wasn’t getting in the way of his missions so there was no reason to shoo it off.
Desmond, on the other hand, has a problem.
He cannot… for the life of him… understand human language.
No matter what he does, he just can’t.
He tried listening in to their conversations but he just can’t understand anything.
Sometimes, he hears names he remember like Altaïr, Kadar, Malik… Abbas.
But any other words?
Nope.
Then…
Altaïr was stabbed by Al Mualim for failing…
No.
Al Mualim said it was an illusion.
But how…
“You should really rest today. Just because that old geezer used the Apple to show you an illusion doesn’t mean you’re not tired. You still felt the pain of getting stabbed, you idiot, and that takes a lot on someone. But noooo. Not you. Of course, not you, you overachieving bastard.”
And who kept whispering to Altaïr’s ear this entire time!?
(aka: Desmond can’t understand human language when he turned into a vulture and Altaïr starts hearing Desmond’s thoughts after resisting the Apple’s control the first time. Why? Isu bs.)
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I'm sure it's all lore that will be revealed in due time, but could you tell us about some of the side effects of consuming the celestial flesh?
I’m definitely not good at working linearly and slow at story plot reveal right now anyway, so happy to answer lol
Also, I wasn’t sure how to gage how much context this answer needed so sorry in advance for the long answer 😭. And cw for graphic descriptions of disease/body horror stuff.
Tl;dr Eating Yvishnir eventually caused evolutionary entropy that sometimes causes horrors.
It’s said that Yvishnir (the body not in the ocean) was a fallen star from long ago, before humanity and the fall of Tartarus(ocean body). The primordials, (Furies and sea dragons) were the ancient fish and birds that fed on Yvishnir in order to sustain their size and godhood and multiply on Earth as its continued keepers. They grew jealous over humanity’s progress and out of fear they buried Yvishnir so humans wouldn’t find it, and hid themselves away. That’s how part of the creation myth goes anyway. Then Tartarus fell and uncovered Yvishnir once again, drawing the primordials out and changing the sea.
So when I say ‘eating the flesh’, I mostly mean the Crux. At first, when Yvishnir was discovered and exposed to the atmosphere, it produced something called Crux which permeated the corpse and oozed from it as a liquid, thought to be a type of otherworldly bacterium or ichor to help it decompose. It caused a sort of explosion of hyper biodiversity/evolution, starting with plants. Here are some examples, mostly some fungi:
Most Humans didn’t really consider eating the Crux of course.
There were a few eccentrics and cults however that started the ball rolling. They would mostly eat it from fungi that had grown around Yvishnir, as well as cooking with it. This caused versions of human evolution, where they began to evolve into the Myce and other species to repopulate as, genetically merging with fungi in order to survive the new world. They’re under the blanket term ‘Hox Strays’, who make up most of Marrowtide and other known civilization islands to this day. There are different variations of these and their mutations have ‘stabilized’ over many generations but that’s another story.
As for Yvishnir, there was a point where the Crux changed its properties, becoming more crystalline. Entropy took over the longer the body was exposed. Even the very insects that were feeding on it began to quickly horrifically mutate and grow. People would say that demons were being birthed from its rotted juices. The Crux began to bring on less desirable effects. Humans classified it as several new forms of horrific diseases ranging from otherworldly prions to the very DNA itself denaturing and mutating.
✨Some outcomes include but are not limited to;✨
>Victims known to have fits of uncontrollable laughter while bleeding from orifices. Several cysts that had broken out on the skin were found to contain bits of teeth, hair and even eyes, like they were growing them.
>Some victims became more beast-like but at the cost of their minds and insatiable hunger for more of the celestial flesh/Crux.
>Victims first described it as a tingling sensation in their chest and extremities. Their blood began to change its molecular structure to be crystalline as well. Cells became shard-like, until their blood eventually hardened completely. It could be seen poking through skin, like they were full of glass.
>Worse still, in a sort of sped up form of the first outcome, they can become a never ending cycle of constantly evolving body parts, growing biomass like cancerous tumors of body parts forever in bloom, eg. growing several hands from your eye or numerous organs. The body can’t sustain this and it pretty much ends in death.
These modern day effects were mostly observed by The Ladder and they determined that Yvishnir was not to be consumed by organisms any longer. In the modern day it is safely contained in Hearth, which is the name of the quarantined citadel outside of The Fever, serving god knows what purpose aside from genetic experiments they’re rumored to be continuing with the remaining crystalline Crux Root.
The primordials felt that those who continued eating the Crux were forsaken, punished for eating the god. They along with others had migrated far, far away at that point, populating the mountains of Zenith and oceans that no one dared to sail through. The body of Yvishnir faded into legends. Even people living within Fever and the isles surrounding it knew less and less about the body as time went on, more focused on surviving day to day.
Their are cases where people have somehow managed to preserve the liquid form of Crux, said to still be procured and preserved when the body was first uncovered and would thus have the least amount of risk involved.
Some people hunt mermaids for the soul purpose of searching the contents of their stomach, to see if they have remnants of Tartarus in them.
With Tartarus it’s all based on theory because no one is able to get down there to see wtf is going on, they only see the results.
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Retrograde MC as an MTF member? Hiding in plain view of the foundation possibly?
Like with everything-
It begins with an accident.
You take a wrong turn somewhere, drop into another reality, someone drags you away and suddenly you're knee-deep in an operation in the middle of nowhere. There are a lot of instructions given to you and quite frankly you're only working on muscle memory that you know you've never had when the mission starts.
You have no idea what the hell is going on.
It gets worse when the team encounters their supposed target. There's plenty of screaming and things that shouldn't be alive (especially not like that) but truthfully you guys get pretty far in "containing" whatever the target is.
And then you die. Horribly, terribly, painfully.
Then, you wake up with your arm being dragged by someone else. They repeat the same phrases, word for word, and don't comment on your silence, the same as last time. You pay more attention to their words this time and hope maybe what happened before was just deja vu.
It isn't.
The scene repeats, over and over again. Sometimes you're the first to die. Sometimes not. Sometimes you're the last to die instead.
'This isn't going anywhere,' you think grimly as the ground opens up beneath you.
You had hoped that the team would be able to capture the target with just your small movements to not die. It isn't working. You know it's unrealistic to expect changes that don't come from yourself in a time loop but-
Well.
It doesn't matter in the end. You'll go back in time if you die and you're a little hopeless without everyone else on the team which means you'll die if they die too. Everyone has to survive to the end.
It takes a few more tries and a bit more “nudging” from you (and giving way more orders than your rank probably allows) before you make it to the end. Everyone gathers around, some injured but nothing terribly permanent or life threatening. You’re relieved.
But now that the fight was over, you finally got the chance to take a closer look at everyone. The badges on their arms showed a familiar symbol. The SCP Foundation.
'Sh*t,' you think.
You close your eyes. You're absolutely certain you aren't who they think you are but in the same vein, you don't know who you are right now either. A heavy hand lands on your back and you look to the side to see who it is.
"The rookie's pretty good, huh?" The commander laughs heartily and gives you a few pats.
"...Thank you," you answer politely, ducking down your head to hide your gaze.
"No need to be shy," another member chimed in. "We're going to be together for at least a little while longer."
Not a one-time unit then.
"C'mon, don't bother 'em 'bout that so soon. It's been a difficult mission. We gotta go back soon anyways."
It isn't long before everyone's shifting around and packing things up to head back to the site. You don't know which one and asking would only make you seem suspicious so you quietly follow behind the group as they chatter away.
There are a couple of things you learn along the way like how you're new to the Foundation, everyone's names and positions as well as what your own name is. It's the same as before. Later, in a room that is supposedly yours, the first thing you do is head into the washroom.
When you look into the mirror, it is your own face that stares back.
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