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#the scavenger's daughter

mayasaura · 1 year

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Kiriona Gaia/Her Divine Highness AU where Gideon escapes from the Ninth to join the Cohort, and gets claimed by John only a year or two before canon.

The lyctor trials happen approximately on schedule, but this time it's a combo event! Who Wants To Be A Lyctor, and The Bachelor Nine Houses: a chance to win the hand of Her Divine Highness Kiriona Gaia, only daughter of the Emperor Undying!

There are two main reasons for The Bachelor competition, one Gideon knows about and the other she doesn't:

One: She's a plant to manipulate the lyctor trials. John's a bit more invested this time around, after the whole baby plot reveal left him bereft and short-handed. He wants Gideon to get to know all of the candidates and report back to him.

Two: John thought it would be funny and is trying (and badly failing) to wingman for his socially awkward daughter.

Gideon is John's plant in the lyctor competition, but the marriage contest is a setup for Gideon. Here you go, kid, your very own fantasy romcom scenario, now will you finally make a move on that girl you're physically incapable of shutting up about?

#John thought it was sweet when Ianthe hit on Harrow and clearly Made Assumptions and wanted them to be happy together #so I'm dead sure that any social time spent with Gideon the Ninth era Gideon would convince him she was smitten with the Reverend Daughter #and pulling pigtails about it #he's setting her up a playdate!#if it goes well we can talk about marriage! your life is so short kiddo!#he uses a scavenger hunt as a job interview so why not a game show competition as an omiai #the locked tomb #gideon nav #kiriona gaia #ntn spoilers #griddlehark #emperor john gaius #hdh au #tlt au #her divine highness au #tlt royal ball au

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devilsskettle · 1 year

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there’s also just Something About female characters who are jealous of the men around them for getting to behave in certain ways that they just can’t. like you can just act like that? you don’t have to maintain a carefully curated and constructed image of yourself to present to the world so people don’t treat you like shit? i’m not gonna universalize but i do believe most women feel this way at least at some point in their lives, i feel it all of the time and it drives me fucking insane

#that’s the thing with kie from outer banks for me like. she just wants to be allowed to act like the guys and just like. fuck around i guess #like just to hang out and to do whatever she wants and like to be herself and still be accepted #like she is tone deaf when it comes to like. complaining about her supportive family and better-than-stable financial situation lol #but she feels so trapped! and so alienated! and she can’t escape this role she keeps getting trapped in!#as a Daughter! or a Love Interest!#and like a big part of that is actually kind of just Bad Writing lol but i will take what i want from this story lol #i am going through the scraps i am scavenging it for working parts i am creating meaning where the writers forgot to etc #anyway aaaaaaaaa

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oddrock · 10 months

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Part of King’s Scavengers is her figuring out she’s Fray-romantic and not just bisexual, so take this messy sketchy animation!

[longer version]

#I love her dearly #she is my child #my fire flinging daughter #animation #roughs #digital #realms #kings scavengers #art #my art #ocs #jg arts #oc art #oc animation #king #Cenn

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monmuses · 2 years

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What kind of touch do you possess?

lingering touch

you are home. you are the feeling of lasting peacefulness. it resonates in your bones and stabilizes your surroundings. you like routine and the familiarity of things. it brings you satisfaction to have a grounded life. you want to build something you're proud of and share the benefits with your loved ones. you are the glue of your friends and family and essential to the functioning of the group. others admire your responsibility and how they can rely on you for anything. you are amazing.

creative touch

you are a gem. you pride yourself on creating and sometimes you feel it defining your personality. sometimes you can be a bit scattered and messy, but it just helps your brain think that way. you have your own aesthetic and you know its incredibly cool. you are most in your element when you are doing what you love. sometimes the process is SO frustrating but the proudness of a finished product is what keeps you going. you often compare yourself to others and are the harshest critic of your own work. you are immensely talented and you are inspire others. keep doing what you are doing, love.

#✨{homeless scavenger; (braelynn)#// *gotta do the father daughter combo #✨{𝔭𝔞𝔭𝔢𝔯 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔭𝔢𝔫𝔠𝔦𝔩; (𝔥𝔢𝔞𝔡𝔠𝔞𝔫𝔬𝔫)#✨{𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔪𝔲𝔰𝔢; (𝔪𝔲𝔰𝔢 𝔪𝔢𝔪𝔢)#✨{𝔣𝔞𝔟𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔬𝔴𝔫’𝔰 𝔰𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣; (𝔟𝔦𝔤𝔟𝔶 𝔴𝔬𝔩𝔣)

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3d10fire-damage · 8 months

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the thing about harrowhark nonagesimus is that on the surface, she's this aloof maybe kinda creepy maybe kind of a bitch bone nun. but then she's also like a really good necromancer, and she does such crazy badass shit with bones, literally forming harpoons out of her own bones and spearing ghosts of planets with them, and she has these iconic lines like 'death first to vultures and scavengers' and she was so focused about the Canaan House puzzle that she mapped every goddamn door in the whole place in like a day and a half and worked herself to exhaustion learning theorems, she's just an intense, sharply thinking sort of person. not to mention she's so closed off you almost wonder if she even has feelings. but then you read a bit deeper and you realize that harrowhark nonagesimus is also a sad miserable kitten on a stoop in the pouring rain. she's a neurotic mess that is borderline incapable of admitting or acknowledging her true emotions (emphasis on borderline) and would sooner fling herself into the sun than admit any vulnerability. she's the daughter of genocide. she fucking hates herself. no one has more problems than her. she is pitiful. and THEN she's also a fucking weirdo on top of all that. she can't stand food with any significant flavor. tea biscuits are beyond her. she fell in love with a frozen dead body and would marry it if she could. she's afraid of hot water. she thinks bones are the sexiest thing there is. harrowhark nonagesimus is simultaneously so cool, so sick, and so strange, and it's enough for anyone to look at her and be like, what the fuck is going on here? and that is why she gets bitches.

#the locked tomb #harrowhark nonagesimus #harrow the ninth #gideon the ninth #harrow nonagesimus #tlt #i touched on this in my tags on another post but it got me thinking #i love her so much #character of all time

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cherubify · 2 months

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PUPPY LOVE / LEON KENNEDY

3827 words

cw: puppy hybrid f!reader, masturbation, dirty talk, virginity, fingering, mentions of other characters and lore / minors dni

Leon didn't know what to do when he found you that night. He had returned from the gym when he found a little thing sitting at the steps outside his apartment complex. You were a little mutt, curled up into a trembling ball. Your fluffy tail coiled around your shaggy, dirty fur as your big puppy eyes stared up at him.

It would've been cruel to leave you to the elements, he lamented. And how cruel of a human would he be to say no when you began wagging your tail when you met his eyes?

"It's almost like you want me to take you home," he squats down at the base of the stairs. He held out his fingers and you sniffed him cautiously. When you had your fill, you lapped at the pads of his fingers with a soft yip. He stroked your droopy ears halfheartedly.

Just one night, he decided. He'd take you in, give you a shower, a meal and find your owners at first light tomorrow. If he failed to locate them, surely the local shelter would take you in, right?

So he scooped you up and brought you into his little apartment. It wasn't anything fancy, small for two but cosy enough for a single guy. He set you on the floor and you sniffed the tiles curiously. You wrinkled your nose and shook your head.

"C'mon," Leon gestured for you to follow, and you obediently padded after him into the bathroom. He placed you in the bathtub and ran a warm bath for you. It was a little scary so you tried to climb out a few times. But his firm grip prevented you from running, so you gave up and let him do as he wished.

When he finished, he rubbed you dry with a fluffy towel and a blowdryer. It was way scarier than the bath, but you dared not to escape when he furrowed his brows and stared at you pointedly. You whimpered as the stranger rubbed his hands all over your fluffy body.

Despite his rugged touch and scary frowns, he was a kind man. He even prepared a bowl of shredded meat for you. Up until now, you had been scavenging for scraps in the alleys.

"Slow down," he ordered. He squatted beside you and ran his fingers through your fur. "You're gonna throw up if you force it all down."

He was right, you did barf out your insides later. But a soft whine and well practiced sad puppy eyes did the trick to placate him.

You paced on top of a nest of towels. Leon had prepared it for you beside his bed. When you were satisfied, you curled into a ball and laid your head on your paws.

The brunette plopped onto his bed. Shirtless, he was enveloped by the soft glow of moonlight. Leon gazed tiredly at the puppy across him. He didn't expect this much work for a tiny mutt like you.

"It's just for tonight, so don't get too comfortable here. You hear me?" he warned as he fell back onto his mattress.

You yipped once. He closed his eyes, ready to let sleep take him.

On the brink of consciousness, he heard the sheets rustle. With one eye open, he saw you clamber up the bed clumsily, tiny paws gripping the sheets. You crawled over and settled beside him. You rested your head sweetly, droopy ears pressed against your head. Almost as if you were asking to sleep next to him.

Too tired to react, he closed his eyes. Then day came and he began his search.

…

Somehow, an entire month passed and there were still no signs of your owners. He even painstakingly left posters in the neighbourhood with a printed photo of you and his house number. However, nobody contacted him. Other than that one grandma that attempted to hook him up with her daughter. But he digressed.

His plan to drop you off at a shelter also backfired. When he walked into the building, the lady at the desk recoiled the moment she laid eyes on you. You even bore your teeth at her, which you never did. According to her, the 'mongrel' in his hands had caused a hell load of trouble during its stay. A fire broke out in the shelter a while back, and you had escaped during the chaos.

When he enquired if anyone else would be willing to take you in, you began to put up a fight and caused quite the scene in the shelter. So he begrudgingly left with you and bite marks punctured in his sweater. He reprimanded you about it later at home.

"You're such a pain," he lamented as he scooped pellets into your bowl. It was no gourmet meal, but it was delicious enough to elicit a delighted yip.

You learnt that this man was called Leon Scott Kennedy. He was a government agent, whatever that meant. He was smart, handsome and a huge tease. He would slap your sides playfully to disturb you, even though he knew you would jump around unhappily after. Despite his mischievous behaviour and quips, he treated you kindly and patiently. You liked that about him. He was much kinder than the people you encountered on the streets.

But sometimes, you could feel a deep sadness emanating from him. At times, he would wake up in cold sweat. He never spoke about it– but he would stand at the balcony, staring at the night sky with a distant look in his tired, blue eyes. You hated feeling helpless, you yearned to comfort him. But all you could do was sit by him patiently, hoping your feelings could reach him.

As you lost yourself to your thoughts, the agent sat at the dining table, a can of beer in his hand. He rested his chin on his palm, swirling his drink mindlessly. Usually he would spend his evenings at the gym and occasionally in a bar. But now with you by his side, he made the conscious effort to return home earlier.

He watched from the corner of his eyes. You were hunched over your food bowl, gobbling your dinner. For such a small thing, you sure had a voracious appetite. You always ate like you were still a starved pup.

"Slow down," he chuckled. He leaned forward, fingers extended to you. You eagerly approached, wagging tail and all. He petted you with a smirk, "The food's not going anywhere, y'know?"

You lapped at his fingers playfully. Then you resumed wolfing down your pellets. The brunette wiped the slobber off his fingers on his sweatpants.

At this rate, you were his full fledged pet dog. A liability, but a cute one. Not so cute when you tried to bite him when he pissed you off. Which rarely happened, but still. He rubbed his temples together, wrinkles deeply etched in his forehead.

But there was no way he could keep you in the long run, especially when there was no guarantee if he would always make it back home.

"What am I gonna do with you?" he sighed.

The stress radiating from your owner perked you up. You peered up from your bowl for the second time.

You tilted your head. A moment of silence passed and your jaw twitched, "Do... do?"

His blue eyes snapped to you and you wagged your tail curiously. His fingers slipped and his beer splashed onto the table.

"I have bad news for you. And good news too," a man's voice filled the house. Leon left the house phone on speaker and you paced around nervously.

"Let's hear it, Chris. Bad news first," he said.

"We've tracked the origin of your dog. Turns out Umbrella's been busier than we thought," Chris lowered his voice. "She was a test subject, along with other mutts, likely her litter. It was a similar project to Project Cerberus, but they produced inferior results. They were dumped in the Arklay Mountains. It’s likely they were torn to shreds by the pack there."

Leon glanced at you warily; your eyes dropped as he maintained eye contact, "So she's dangerous?”

To think that a B.O.W had been sleeping next to him for the past month. How careless he had been.

Chris hummed, "Not exactly. The T-virus in her is dead. Here’s the good news: the guys from the labs said she carries antibodies for the strain she was infected with. The higher-ups are eager to extract her blood for studies."

"Okay, but how does that explain her aboty to talk?" Leon plopped down on the couch. You padded over and sat at his feet. "Did the virus mutate and turn her into some- some hybrid creature?"

"Beats me. But that's all I know. If I find out more, I’ll let you know," the man said before ending the call. The line beeped and Leon turned off speaker mode.

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. You peered at him with your innocent puppy eyes. You had not spoken much since that night. But there was a newfound intelligence apparent in your eyes. picked you up and set you onto his lap.

"So you were abandoned by those bastards. Never would have guessed. Small world," he commented.

"Small... world," you mimicked. You placed your paws onto his chest and lapped at his face. His stubble was rough against your tongue, but you licked him anyway. A ghost of a smile settled on his face as he petted you. His face lit up suddenly.

“Oh! You’ve been nameless this whole time. I think it’s time I give you one. What do you think of… (name)?"

You shook your head, ears swaying side to side. He raised his brows, "Then, how about... Ada?"

You growled and barked, legs scrambling against him. He held you back and chuckled, "Just kidding. How about... (y/n)?"

He stroked your fur. You leaned against him and indulged in the warmth in his pets.

"I'm guessing you like it. It has a nice ring to it, don't you think?" He smiled, and you thumped your tail on his lap.

After that call, US-STRATCOM tasked Leon with babysitting you. The job was quite simple: ensure the special collar you wore stayed on at all times. It would track any fluctuations in your physical and mental state. An application on a tracking device would notify him of any changes too. Lastly, he would report to the research team on any developmental changes, such as improved speech, et cetera. From time to time, you would visit for blood samples too.

Thus, Leon was withheld from special operations temporarily.

…

Almost three months have passed since he found you, and about a month since he was tasked with your care. When he found you, you were mostly skin and bones. Now you had enough chub for him to pinch and tease. Much to your displeasure, eliciting distressed whines and playful bites from you. You had grown on him in such a short period of time. And him, to you.

Whenever he left and returned for work, you would sit at the door and bark greetings with a swishing tail. When he plopped down onto the couch, you would sprawl yourself on his thighs, nestling comfortably like he was your bed.

Leon was amused. He had never gotten a thigh pillow before but this dog somehow beat him to it. Unbelievable.

There were nights– or days– where he would return after meeting women. And those days were the least pleasant for you. You would growl brokenly with little fangs displayed, tail pinned between your legs.

To placate you, Leon would sacrifice his clothes and let you cover his face with dog slobber. You would spend the rest of the day marking him with your scent, burying yourself in every nook and cranny of his body. Only when you were appeased would you return to your sweet, easygoing self.

"You're such a needy pup," he exhaled sleepily. You were still busy rubbing your little body against his side even in the middle of the night. He placed a heavy hand atop your head. "Sleep."

You whined and relented, resting your head on his side. Big innocent eyes blinked at him as he stroked your head.

It should be annoying– the way you clung to him like super glue. But somehow he couldn't really be mad. Who could be with such a good girl? He stroked your ears fondly, he found it cute that you were this clingy with him, your owner.

But besides that, there’s been something kind of strange happening lately. Sometimes, Leon would find his bed sheets dampened with a strange liquid. It was sweet, with hints of arousal he was familiar with that women carried. But he never brought women home. And his sweet pup was not getting her cheeks clapped either. So where did this strange liquid originate from?

Whenever he asked you, you would run off to occupy yourself with toys. So he figured maybe you've been having wet dreams. If dogs could have them.

It was later than usual when your owner returned. When he called for you, silence greeted him back. Strange, you were usually at his beck and call. He searched his bag for his tracker and checked the tiny green screen. A red dot flashed incessantly on the screen, signaling a change in your physical or neurological state. He lowered his bags and whipped out his pistol. Had the T-virus returned and taken over you?

He scanned the halls carefully before arriving at the entrance of his bedroom. He listened intently. Soft, unsteady sounds leaked into the hallway. It sounded like whimpers. Had (y/n) finally transformed into a monster?

His hand rested on the doorknob. Then he turned it and slowly entered the room. He was attacked by the heavy scent of pheromones. It clung heavily in the air, and he shielded his nose with his arm as he scanned his surroundings. His gun leveled on his bed, where you lay.

Your legs hung in the air, back arched as your hand pressed against your soft, glistening mound. The moonlight filtering through the balcony curtains cast a silver glow onto the stranger. Your fingers drove into your insides greedily in a steady yet clumsy pace. The hand clamped over your mouth did little to mask your whimpers and sighs. He lowered his gun slowly.

"Leon..." Your sweet voice filled the air. You panted softly, toes curling as you chanted his name. That's when he noticed your tail, the same shade of fur as his puppy hybrid. And the special collar and the floppy ears atop your head were telltale signs. It seemed like you had transformed– albeit into something else. He pocketed his gun and stood at the doorway. You were too deep in your haze to notice him, despite the heavy gaze from your sole audience.

You were inexperienced– it was apparent in your sloppy movements. His sweet pup didn't know how to make herself feel good, huh? Maybe he could help with that– wait, what would you think if you knew these sick thoughts?

He licked his lips. It should disgust him. You were his lovely pet. So why was he getting excited instead?

A long winded sigh snapped him out of his daze. Toes clenched, you unfurled and clenched them rhythmically as you sped up. A cry escaped you as your stomach fluttered. You couldn’t cum, you’ve been trying for hours.

With a heavy sigh, you lowered your legs and started to sit up when your eyes met his. You stopped in your tracks and he lifted a brow.

"I think you forgot to ask if I enjoyed the show," he teased. Your blood ran cold. How long had your owner been watching you...?

"T-This isn't what you think it is," you stuttered, grabbing the sheets to hide your body. You squeezed your shoulders together fearfully, appearing smaller.

"Looked like you were enjoying yourself."

Leon sat beside you, his weight on the mattress dipped you towards him. He set his gun and tracker onto the bedside table. You turned away from him, ears pinned to your head.

"I don't know what you're t-talking about."

"Playing dumb? C'mon, you were begging for me." He chuckled darkly, and you hid your face in the sheets in your hands. You tried to leave, but he grabbed you and pulled you onto his lap.

"How 'bout your owner shows you how to feel real good?"

. . .

Your legs trembled as he spread them further with his. Sitting on his lap, he had an arm wrapped tightly around your waist, holding you securely against him. The hard-on pressing against your back sent shivers down your spine. He teased your slick slit as he dragged his thumb up and down, up and down in a slow motion.

"How much?" He demanded, his voice low and dark. You let out a whimper when he pressed against your clit, sending a jolt down your core. "How far have you gone?"

"Leon," you begged softly, "Please stop. You're scaring me."

"Don't you think it's too late to stop?" His chest rumbled with laughter, and you clenched embarrassingly. "Besides, who was the one moaning my name like a little whore? C'mon, tell me."

You shook your head, but you gasped when he spanked your pussy. The bundle of nerves twitched as you trembled. You leaned forward slightly, panting as you clutched his arm weakly. Instinctively, you tried to close your legs but he forced them open again.

"If you try that one more time I'm gonna punish you," he whispered into your ear. He snaked his warm tongue along the shell of your ear and you let out a muted moan. As he teased your ear, a digit gingerly slid into your weeping cunt.

"N-No... Leon- o-oh..." you tried to struggle but your eyes rolled back from the simple ministration. You sighed sweetly as you leaned into him. A smirk settled on his face. He knew you were bullshitting. Thank god for your honest pussy.

"Stop trying to put up a fight," the brunette muttered as he stroked your walls experimentally. You bit your lip and clung to his forearm. "Just feel it."

Leon kissed the back of your head as he slid another digit in. He was knuckles deep within you when you relaxed against him. Your chest heaved with soft pants as you gazed down at where you were connected. Such a good girl, you stopped putting up a fight when you finally got what you wanted. He was sure to reward you for your good behaviour.

He began to move, eliciting whispery moans and whines from your soft lips. The sound of your wetness and his thrusting filled the room. Any shred of embarrassment had dissipated with each loving stroke of his fingers. Your brain was turning into mushy matter. You could barely hold a coherent thought. It felt so different from when you did it, and so, so much better. If only you had gotten his help from the start, then you could've felt this good all along.

You clutched him weakly, body trembling as you panted harder with each thrust. The funny feeling in your belly was growing, pulsating like a burning star. You pushed against him, eyes glassy. "Owner- Leon-'' you babbled, "Stop stop stop-"

He kissed the top of your head tenderly, "I'm here. Just be a good girl and feel it all."

He coaxed you through your orgasm as you shook and trembled like a leaf in the wind. When you finally finished, he withdrew his fingers from you with a soft squelch. You laid limply in him, thighs twitching as stars twinkled in your blurry vision.

His slick fingers rested against your plush lips. You willingly open up and lap at his digits.The taste of your arousal was sweet but slightly bitter, a strange combination, you sleepily wondered as you swirled your tongue around his appendages.

With a soft pop, you freed his fingers and collapsed against his chest entirely. You tried to match your breathing with his, and he stroked your hair and side lovingly. A few moments passed when he finally spoke up.

"Since when did you start transforming? If that's the right word." His voice was soft, like he genuinely wanted to know.

You peered up at him meekly. Your volume fell with each word, "For a few weeks. I didn't know how to tell you. Was scared that you'd abandon me. And you won't be my owner anymore."

"You don’t have to worry about that." He frowned. He placed a fleeting kiss on your lips, "I’m not gonna abandon you. Not now, or ever."

You clung to him, placing your head over his heart. It drummed in the confines of his chest, like an unwilling prisoner. You curled up against him as he looped an arm around your smaller form.

"So those fluids were from you all along?"

You nestled into him. You hummed in agreement, and he looked up at the ceiling.

“Don’t be mad.”

“I’m not,” he laughed. “You could’ve told me sooner. Then I could’ve helped.”

"... I was jealous," you mumbled to him.

"Huh? Did you say something?"

You pouted and buried your face in his chest. Your tail thumped heavily on the bed and he raised a brow questioningly.

. . .

"Where did you get that?" He peered up from his newspaper. The agent sat on the couch, staring at the girl across from him.

You wore an oversized tee that looked like it would fall off your shoulder at any second. It hung above your knees. And when you twirled, he caught sight of your polka dotted panties. He slowly set down his newspaper.

You twirled for him again. "I look super cute, don't I? I found it in your closet."

"Knew it. It looks good," he gestured for you to come, and you hopped towards him. You took a seat on his lap, your legs placed over his. He stroked your hair gently and kissed your nose. "Though I think you'd be even cuter without it."

"Huh? Wait-" you tried to escape but he caught your wrists. He pulled your shirt over your head and swiftly repositioned you so that you laid on the couch whilst he knelt between your legs.

The brunette hooked your legs over his broad shoulders, maintaining eye contact as he pried your thighs open. He pressed a kiss against your inner thigh and he hooked your underwear with his fingers. As he pressed more kisses to your thighs, he he slowly pulled down your panties. Your breath hitched in your throat.

"How do you want it today?" He muttered against your skin.

"Anything if it makes owner happy," you blushed as you curled your toes expectantly.

He grinned.

"Good pup.”

all content written by @puppyina ! do not repost, edit or plagiarise. requests are open for any past written characters.

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mr-walkingrainbow · 8 months

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CALLING ALL MONSTER HIGH FANS. I JUST MET GARRETT. AND I WAS ABLE TO SCAVENGE SO MUCH LORE AND CONFIRMED HEADCANONS TO YOU. THIS IS ALL SAID BY GARRET OR CONFIRMED. I HAVE SPOKEN TO GOD AND HE HAS SPOKEN BACK

#1. Robecca and Venus were implied and ARE dating!!! He said it was like. Just like other monsters they had tried putting hints and characteristics into monsters that we could see and relate too. (He also said it outright down here. Lol I got all the proof guys!)

2. They never actually came up with Jane Boolittles Origins. And yes Dr. Morou and Dr. Boolittle raised her. But it was always a thing to them they'd say ‘oh well get back to this’. And then they never did. When asked; he genuinely doesn’t remember what they had planned for her.

3. a REALLY big mystery solved and lore dump guys. This one’s juicy. I KNOW HOW SPECTRA DIED. I KNOW HOW SHE DIED. AND WHAT THE TRAUMATIC STORY WAS FOR HER. I ACTUALLY FUCKING KNOW! Y’all ready? Drumroll…. It was, a, CAR CRASH! Yes you heard me. THE VONDERGEIST FAMILY ALL DIED IN A CAR CRASH. I think he said he she just came with her family off skirts and they got into an accident. I’ll reblog this with the video of him saying it!

4. Toralei lives in a monster high housing/boarding building when she is not attending school. This place is used for kids who do not have a place to go too, or if their home is too far to return to easily. I think there was an error somewhere where she mentioned parents? I mentioned that to him and he was very confused/didn’t remember. Reconfirmed that if she wasn’t in the monster high housing area. She would have been in either Jail or The streets.

5. Robecca was not rebuilt for 100 years due to Misogyny. Also because it had to go into the lines of her ‘mysteriously’ disappearing for her to have her comeback. I asked about how it was low key such a dark story, and he mentioned that since technically Monster high was the ‘horror’ genre. He was able to get away with things like that.

6. the Vampire Heart mystery! So remember how in Friday night frights we all see Ghoulia place a Robot Heart into Robeccas chest. Something that is very clearly not the Vampires heart? But then suddenly in Frights camera action it’s there? Well, technically that’s an official Error by the crew. He actually said he noticed it, and told management and stuff like ‘won’t people notice it?’ And they were all like ‘nah it will be fine no one will notice’. But then we all clearly did lol. He also said that because if this, he came up with the idea that the Vampires heart was ENCASED in the Robot heart we saw in Friday night frights. Ergo, explaining how Robecca had two hearts in one body! (It’s also confirmed Hexiciah placed the Vampires heart into her while he was building her. Which would explain why she didn’t remember it was their).

#7. Gooliope Jellingtons Origins. I asked what her origins were. And basically, she DOES NOT have any parents. She was CREATED IN A LAB. Which apparently didn’t treat her right. So she ESCAPED the lab and ran away to the circus! (Or blobbed away?) because he also confirmed, she was the blob. Or based off the blob. She wasn’t actually like. The daughter of the blob. She WAS the blob itself.

#8. Kiyomi Haunterly is Gay! I know this is was already somewhat canon and said before. But I asked and he confirmed it that she was in fact, Gay. And he tried to show it in her diary.

#9. We’re reaching some only implied/supported things. Not fully confirmed or intended. But Kala Mer’ri has BPD. I asked about if she has anything like BPD cause I relate and saw that a lot in her. He replied that he did try to make attributes for each Character specifically so we could related to them like that. And that it was to also make sure every character wasn’t a carbon copy of another. Basically. He didn’t like. Outright say ‘yes. She has bpd’. But he also didn’t disprove it. And he reacted positively to the idea and supported it.

#10. Robecca Steam has ADHD. It’s basically the same as above. Although he did like the note that I (someone with adhd) specifically had the same traits with Robecca, even more specifically, that we both are ALWAYS late. And can never keep track of time to save our unlife.

11. Dedyet DeNile Origins. He actually completely forgot about Cleo’s Mother eventually being reunited. I had asked how she had ended up in that same weird time loop Tomb thag Hexiciah was stuck in. (Which they were eventually freed by Robecca in her SDCC diary). He said he completely forgot about that. And genuinely didn’t remember anything about it. I basically re-explained the whole thing and he was very interested. Unfortunately. Not to much origins to go on.

11. here’s a canon one! What happened to Aamanita Nightshade after she left the DeNiles in the tomb. It was kinda funny, but he basically was like ‘Amanita went up and was just like ‘Peace!’’ And then never came back.’ She goofed around a bit, buuut it wasn’t entirely like her fault? She quickly went back to sleep after breaching the surface. So yeah. She was not awake for long. She quickly went back into flower mode until she woke up again at the Gloom and Bloom party.

12. He’s working on another one of his Monster prints! He sells them on his online shop here

He’s currently working on Toralei!!!!! He said he was working on her on the way over. And that he was trying to go in Order of the G1 doll releases. He mentioned he had only done Skelita out of Order because she was like ‘that one’ who was INSANELY popular with fans when she came out. Especially in Mexico. It’s also why she was the only Funko pop made who was not part of the main ghouls.

13. Random. But he actually didn’t create each backstory individually by himself. In the beginning he did A LOT. Like Frankie was the first backstory he ever created. And it got more help and divided as more and more characters were introduced.

14. he has read every single diary for every monster. Cool little fact cause DAMN theirs a whole bunch of them.

15. everything in the Ghoulfriends book series is CANON in the monster verse.

And that is ALL FOLKS! I had held those questions in for about 7-8 years. So it was everything to me to have them answered and confirmed! I really tried to ask everything that was a huge mystery to us monster folks. And I hope you guys are excited to see all these new CANON facts!!!

I’m sorry if this is not everything. Just like Robecca. I forget stuff pretty easily. I’m wracking my brain for every little detail. Unfortunately my father didn’t record as much as I would have liked. But he did get some perfect key moments! And I’ll make sure to reblog with those moments as proof of confirmation!

I love y’all! Make sure this goes viral so every monster high fan gets to hear the news!

Signing out, I’m Tumblr Spectra Vondergeist, and I report the news.

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thatsonemorbidcorvid · 4 months

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ON AN AUGUST night in 2003, a young woman who went by the name Paulina sank into the sofa of her modest, rented apartment, opened up her laptop, and began talking about sex with a man she’d recently met in a Yahoo chat group. His name was Stephen Bolen. His first communications had been terse, but he soon warmed to Paulina. It didn’t take long for both of them to begin to open up.

Paulina had told Bolen she lived in the Atlanta area, that she had a three-year-old daughter, that her daughter’s father was no longer in the picture. Soon, she was sharing more intimate details: what it was like growing up a skinny white girl in a rough neighborhood outside of D.C.; how her dad, a Marine, had died by suicide two weeks before she was born; how her mom had been emotionally and physically abusive, and had never really shown her love. How she’d had a sexual relationship with her stepfather.

Paulina would put her daughter to bed and then she and Bolen would chat throughout the night, over Yahoo and sometimes on the phone. The back-and-forth could feel like dating, but with an added element of danger and risk: Both Paulina and Bolen knew they were tiptoeing up to a line to see if they trusted each other enough to cross it. It could take a while to figure that out.

Eventually, Bolen asked Paulina to send pictures of her daughter, and she agreed to do so, though the ones she’d shared were chaste — the little girl clothed and her face turned away from the camera or obscured behind an untamable halo of blond curls. After seeing the pictures, Bolen asked to meet. While a lot of the men Paulina had encountered in chatrooms like “Sex With Younger” just wanted to trade images and videos of children, to expand their illicit collections, Bolen was a “traveler,” someone looking to act upon his obsessions.

On Sept. 17, just as they’d arranged, Paulina sat on a bench outside Perimeter Mall with a stroller parked in front of her, scanning the parking lot nervously. Part of her hoped Bolen wouldn’t show. When he did, she could see he was handsome, a preppy guy in a pink polo shirt and khakis. “Paulina?” he asked eagerly. She nodded. As he smiled and pulled back the blanket draped across the stroller, he found himself surrounded, handcuffs slipped around his wrists.

“Paulina” watched his face fall, his confusion giving way to distress as FBI agents took him into custody. It was her first undercover arrest. It would be the first of many.

[long read]

IF ONE WANTED to hide in plain sight, one could do no better than the tidy, suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of St. Louis, where FBI Special Agent Nikki Badolato now resides. The well-tended, two-story homes are so pleasantly indistinct that I could hardly tell you what hers looks like, even if it were safe for me to do so, which it is not. Suffice to say that Midwestern comfort and conformity unspool around every gently winding curve. Here Badolato has raised her two children, a daughter who is now in college and a son who is a junior at a local high school. When planning a neighborhood scavenger hunt or tending the community garden, Badolato does not often mention her many years as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force, a joint effort between the feds and local law enforcement that targets some of the country’s most heinous crimes. Open a cabinet in her kitchen, however, and a government-issued Glock 42 can be found stowed away between the vitamins and mixing bowls.

On a sunny morning this past October, Badolato sat at her dining room table, scrapbooks and albums spread out before her on the dark wood. There was the acceptance letter she’d received from the bureau the spring of her senior year of high school, after a representative had shown up to administer a test in the typewriting room. “I chose to wear a red dress and red heels,” she says of her first day as an FBI mail clerk, two weeks after her 18th birthday. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I guess maybe I was trying to go in bold?” She pauses at a picture of herself on the gun range at Quantico almost 10 years later, her shoulders squared and her caramel hair pulled back into a ponytail as she fires off rounds. By then, she’d married a man she met just after high school, had a little girl, completed college at night, and been accepted into agent training in the heady days after 9/11. She’d seen her first dead body only a few weeks into the job, after the pursuit of a bank robber ended with a shootout in a Walmart. When Badolato got to the scene, the body was still warm, and the perp’s head was resting on a bag of cookies. “It was surreal,” she says. “How many times have you been in a Walmart and walked down Aisle 4, not really expecting there to be a dead person with his head lying on a bag of Chips Ahoy?”

Badolato wasn’t deterred. She felt like the bureau saved her, plucked her out of a shitty home life, and gave her prospects and purpose. As a new agent, she was intent on proving herself worthy. “My training agent told me, ‘You know, Nikki, it’s a marathon, not a sprint,’ ” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s ridiculous. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.’ ” She turned a few pages to show a picture of the 391 kilos of cocaine and 140 pounds of meth she’d recovered on a single raid during a stint with a cartel squad, then pointed out another in which she poses with a five-year-old child she’d rescued, the little girl’s hair cut short because the kidnapper had wanted her to look like a boy. But the keepsake she really wants to find is the card that Bolen’s wife had pressed into her hand at his sentencing, the one with the picture of their children — a blond girl of about three years and a tiny baby — and the words “These are the faces of the children you protect each day.” Bolen’s wife had been the only one she’d ever encountered who had lobbied for her husband to receive the maximum sentence. Some wives accused the FBI of planting evidence inside computers. Most seemed intent on clinging to their delusions. (Attempts to reach Bolen for comment were unsuccessful.)

“Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It is happening all the time.”

Which, Badolato has come to understand, is the way it goes with child trafficking and sexual abuse. She had invited me into her home — had agreed to speak on the record about her decades-long career working undercover — because when it comes to the crimes she’s spent her career fighting, she has had enough of the delusions people are under. She’s had enough of the way movies like Sound of Freedom both glamorize and trivialize the work she and her colleagues do, enough of the idea that swashbuckling white men burst through doors and rescue trafficked children with a Bible in one hand and a firearm in the other, enough of conspiracy theories about Hollywood and Washington that detract from the real root causes of why children are trafficked and abused. “Human trafficking is not the movie Pretty Woman — the girl doesn’t get the guy — and it’s not the movie Taken, where people are kidnapped in a foreign country and sold on the black market, or shipped in a container across the world,” one of the detectives who worked on Badolato’s task force tells me. “I’m not saying that doesn’t ever happen, but it’s not what we’re seeing.”

What they are seeing is a lot more insidious and a lot more homegrown. A report released in 2018 by the State Department ranked the U.S. as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. While the Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into this country every year, this number pales in comparison to the number of American minors who are trafficked within it: A 2009 Department of Health and Human Services review of human trafficking into and within the United States found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that between 244,000 and 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked specifically in the sex industry. Heartbreakingly, many of these children are victimized not by strangers who’ve abducted them from mall parking lots but rather by people they know and trust: Studies have found that as much as 44 percent of victims are trafficked by family members, most often parents (and not infrequently parents who were trafficked themselves). Between 2011 and 2020, there was an 84 percent increase in the number of people prosecuted for a federal human-trafficking offense. Of the defendants charged in 2020, 92 percent were male, 63 percent were white, 66 percent had no prior convictions, and 95 percent were U.S. citizens.

Badolato started her career as an FBI agent in some of the earliest days that children could be bought, sold, and traded online. As the internet-porn industry mushroomed, its most lucrative branch turned out to be that of child sexual-abuse materials (the term “child pornography” is no longer used by those in the field, as it implies consent). And as demand for these images increased, so did the abuse that led to their creation.

In 2003, just a few months after Badolato graduated from Quantico, a Crimes Against Children squad was formed in the Atlanta office where she’d been stationed. By then, the FBI was starting to get a handle on the extent of the problem — if not exactly what to do about it. At a weeklong training in Baltimore, Badolato was given a tour of the darkest underbelly of fetish chat groups and then instructed to figure out how to infiltrate. “Everyone was a little nervous,” she explains of the directive. “It was a process, a direction that was new.” Agents were told that they would need to come up with a “persona” and a “story,” and that they would likely have to provide images of children to “prove” they had a minor on offer. They were also told that they could use images of their own children, if they were comfortable doing so (the FBI no longer endorses this policy).

Badolato’s unit with a kidnapping victim after her recovery in 2011. A Health and Human Services review found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that as many as 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked in the sex industry.

Badolato developed “Paulina” based on her understanding that any persona would need to share most of her own backstory and traits. “That’s the only way you can really do undercover work,” Badolato says. “People can tell the sincerity in what you’re saying, so there has to be a level of genuineness, but then you just add this criminal element to it.” Most of the things Badolato had told Bolen were true: where she was from, her family background, the monstrousness of her mother, a woman who she says would pass out cigarettes and beers to Badolato’s 13-year-old friends in a state of manic permissiveness one minute and fly into a violent rage about a piece of lint on the floor the next. (Badolato’s mother declined to comment for this article, but a childhood friend corroborated Badolato’s account.) It was true that growing up in an unstable home with a string of stepdads, she had never really felt loved, true that she had divorced her first husband, true that she was raising their three-year-old daughter on her own. The only thing that wasn’t true was her tale of being molested, her initiation into the “lifestyle” — to use the chatroom parlance — that Paulina said she now wanted for her daughter. As Badolato had familiarized herself with the language and behaviors of the chatrooms, she’d honed that added criminal element, imagining what psychological conditions might believably lead a parent to traffic their own child and how those conditions could be grafted onto her real life story. She already had a history of abuse; it was not hard to extrapolate to a fictional stepfather who had seemed to provide a gentle counterpoint, showing her love and making her feel special when no one else had, even if others couldn’t understand. From there, it was easy to convince the chatroom participants that she shared their belief — or justification — that most people had it all wrong and that “child love” was natural, and could even be beneficial for the child.

Badolato estimates that she has arrested more than a thousand people; not one of those arrests has failed to end in a conviction. She didn’t know until she was in the thick of it that most agents refuse this sort of work, that most can’t even pretend to forge a relationship with someone looking to victimize a child. But she could. “Paulina,” she points out, is not a name she chose at random; it’s similar to her own mother’s name. Badolato says she had grown up learning to compartmentalize for the sake of her own emotional survival. She’d perfected the art of engaging with someone whose actions she couldn’t stand. Doing this work had felt like a way of taking her trauma and putting it to good use, of leveraging her past as a safeguard against her daughter’s and other children’s futures.

Of course there were moments that were hard to take — when suspects mentioned which brands of lubrication were best or whether or not a parent might hold a child down. There were times when she knew that even talking about these things was a turn-on for these men, times when the conversations made her nauseous, times when she’d lie awake all night or play back a recording and think, “Holy shit, I listened to this? I said these words?” But she kept faith in the mission. She reminded herself that the pictures she sent of her daughter — the beautiful, little girl sleeping in the next room — did not represent a real child on offer. “I was thinking, ‘If I send this obscure picture of my daughter and he acts on it, then he’s never going to harm my daughter or anybody else’s,’ ” Badolato says now. “I was presenting a fake girl to save a real one.”

KYLE PARKS SEEMED to think he could get away with anything. He seemed to think, for instance, that he could get away with running a brothel, a 1-900 sex line, and a housecleaning company out of the same Columbus, Ohio, office park and under the same oxy-moronic name, XXXREC and Hygiene Services. He seemed to think he could invite one young woman and five teenagers (four of whom he had only just met) on a road trip to Florida, but instead deposit them in two rooms of a Red Roof Inn in St. Charles, Missouri. When they piled out of the minivan — high on the drugs he’d given them — saw snow falling and asked to be taken home, he thought he could make a little money off them first. All it took was a few ads in Backpage — the Craigslist of sex advertisements — and men began showing up.

Even after things started going south for him, Parks couldn’t fathom that he wouldn’t prevail. When someone alerted law enforcement as to what was going on, Parks (who, according to legal documents, had been out getting food when the police showed up) burst into the precinct the next morning looking to bail his “friend” out. When questioned about the 88 condoms found in the back of his van, he said they had been prescribed to him by a doctor. After being taken into custody, he protested that he was being set up. Most people would have cut their losses and pleaded guilty, but not Parks. He thought he could take his case to court and win.

And it wasn’t impossible to imagine that he might. Badolato knew that even the tightest cases could go sideways when put before 12 people who would inevitably enter the courtroom with a cinematic sense of what sex trafficking was supposed to be. In fact, it wasn’t just the jury that Badolato knew she would need to convince; it was also often the victims themselves, young people who had internalized the exact same misconceptions about trafficking that the jury had — along with any number of other judgments society had thrown their way — and who were loath to submit themselves to a courtroom full of more judgment.

Of all of Parks’ underage victims, the hardest to pin down had been a 17-year-old we’ll call Sierra. Once she returned to Columbus, Sierra seemed to basically disappear. Calls to her mother’s number went unanswered. When one of the other victims managed to track her down in December 2016, a month before the case was to go to trial, Sierra agreed to meet Badolato on a blighted Columbus block with a string of dilapidated homes, climbing into the bureau’s Chevy Malibu with matted hair, dirty clothes, and a wary expression.

By this time, Badolato had remarried, had a second child, relocated to St. Louis, and taken over as head of the Child Exploitation Joint Task Force, which had become one of the most productive FBI teams in the country in terms of arrests and convictions. Meanwhile, as the internet streamlined the process of buying or selling any good or service, trafficking had become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises, estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to bring in $150 billion globally and considered by many criminals to be a superior business model: If caught, the sentences were often lighter than those for peddling drugs; and unlike crack or heroin, the same product could be “used” again and again and again.

Badolato taught her team of 20 how to do the online undercover work she’d trailblazed in Atlanta, tracking the movements of child-abuse material through the online underworld and then prosecuting those who distributed and produced it. Her new squad also initiated her in the type of undercover work it had been doing before her arrival: covert sting operations in which a detective would pose as a john, set up a “date,” and then meet said date in a hotel room fitted out with hidden recording devices while, in the next room over, a taskforce team listened in, waiting for the code word that would let them know that enough evidence had been gathered for them to swoop in and shut the op down. This had proved a very effective technique for getting convictions, but Badolato’s arrival coincided with both a growing sentiment that consensual sex work had been over-criminalized and an increasing awareness that what looked like consensual sex work might actually be trafficking, no matter what the “date” professed in that hotel room.

Badolato has a tendency to say aloud the things she notices — about you, about others, about situations — observations that are not at all unkind but are perceptive enough that most people would keep them to themselves. She points out when someone deflects, and she has a sharp eye for defense mechanisms. She once casually mentions my tendency to mirror other people’s vocal and speech patterns. She is not shy about bringing up the emotional and physical abuse she says she experienced as a child, and she is quick to comment when someone is making excuses for someone else’s behavior. It was soon clear to her colleagues that Badolato brought a trauma-informed mentality to the work, a tendency to look beyond what someone was doing and instead try to parse why they were doing it. And she was relentless: While some squads did one or two trafficking sting ops a year, her team was doing four or five a month. In addition to the hotel rooms reserved for the john and the team, they would have a social worker set up in a third room, ready to offer services to the victims. They would have lookouts stationed to see who might be dropping the date off. If that date was found to be underage, the case was automatically classified as trafficking. But even if they weren’t, Badolato’s team was primed to get to the bottom of what was going on, to figure out whether they were being manipulated or coerced, and by whom.

“If I could put my hands on a pimp, that’s what I wanted,” says Jeff Roediger, a St. Louis county detective who was the “john” for many of Badolato’s sting ops and who makes clear that the team was not interested in policing voluntary sex work. “When I had those types of cases, and I knew they were being sincere with me, I wouldn’t book them,” he says. “It was all about talking to the girls. It’s not like in the movies where they come running to you. You know, ‘Thanks, you rescued me!’ It’s not like that. A lot of them try to bullshit you at first — ‘That’s my boyfriend, blah blah blah’— but once I talked to them for a while, they would become more forthcoming.”

Badolato’s unit was one of the first in the country to take on this “progressive and proactive” approach, as she puts it. Soon, St. Louis looked like a sex-trafficking capital — not because it was actually trafficking more victims than other cities but because the task force was so aggressively pursuing those cases, and classifying them as what they were. “I mean, I was working in vice for years,” says Roediger. “Back in the day, it was always ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution’ — until we started to figure it out a little bit, until we started digging a little deeper.”

Once they did, the task force found that roughly a third of the sex-trafficking victims they recovered were under the age of 17 — and they began to see the reach of the problem. Kids were being trafficked out of every hotel in the area, from the seediest roach motel to the fanciest Ritz-Carlton. They were being trafficked every time of day and by every socioeconomic group (“Before you go do brain surgery, you got to bust a nut real quick,” one underage victim told Badolato of her high-end clientele). Some of the victims were girls. Some were boys. Some were LGBTQ kids who’d been kicked out of their homes. Some were straight cis kids from the suburbs. “I tell people that I could probably name two or three [kids] in the school district they live in that have been trafficked,” Roediger says. “And they just can’t comprehend it.”

“If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work.”

There were kids who were about to age out of foster care (a particularly at-risk group, according to those who work in the field), kids who’d run away, kids who were being sold to pay their family’s rent, or to buy their family member’s drugs. There were kids who’d sit in the hotel room, backpack at their feet, dutifully working on their math homework while agents and social workers tried to figure out what to do with them. Was their home life safe enough that they could be returned to it? Would a residential program take them? Of all the imperfect options, which would make them least likely to be trafficked again?

The one common denominator was this: They all had a vulnerability that could be preyed upon. They all lacked a safety net — societal, familial, emotional, or some combination thereof — that might have broken their fall. Mostly, their stories weren’t dramatic; they were typical American tales of neglect, of abuse doled out casually, of a steady stream of letdowns by people and institutions who should have propped them up. Badolato found that she had a knack for getting them to talk about this, for getting them to open up to her. She didn’t look like an FBI agent — at least not what they’d imagined. She spoke softly, but with authority and a slight vocal fry. And she thinks that, at some level, they could probably sense that she’d once been a vulnerable kid too, that with only a few slightly different twists of fate, she could have become a trafficking victim herself — and that she knew it. “My trauma looks different than theirs, but it’s trauma nonetheless,” she says.

“And I think victims can feel that.”

AS THE TASK force learned more about the psychology of victims, they also learned more about the ways in which their vulnerability was being manipulated, and how those ways were evolving. It was known in law-enforcement circles that once a skilled trafficker set his or her sights on a vulnerable young person, they could be groomed in a matter of days: one day for an introduction, a day or two to make the victim feel special and cared for, and then the day when a “friend” comes over and he needs to be “cared for” as well. Sometimes violence was involved at that point; sometimes drug use was involved throughout. But emotional manipulation was the key element, which is why it was so easy for grooming to move online, for groomers to take advantage of the false senses of connection fostered on social media.

Of the victims who are not being trafficked by family members, the majority are being groomed in this way. “I would say that probably 75 percent of the initial grooming is happening online now,” says Cindy Malott, the director of U.S. Safe Programs at Crisis Aid International. “Recruiters used to have to work really, really hard to get access to kids, but now they’re practically sitting in a child’s bedroom. And kids put everything out there — what’s going on in their life, who they’re angry about, parents are going through a divorce, their insecurities about their body, about themselves, what they do, how they spend their time — so it’s like a gift to these predators.”

The ways to manipulate are legion: Get a kid to send a compromising photo, and she’ll do almost anything to keep you from sending it out to all her Facebook friends; find out a gay kid is still closeted, and the threat of outing him gives you incredible power. And predators aren’t just on Instagram and Snapchat; they lurk in the chat functions of Roblox, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto. “They’re everywhere,” says Malott. “People think, ‘Oh, I just got to keep my kids away from those porn sites, those horrible places.’ Well, no, predators are gonna go where the kids are.” And once there, they’re going to zero in on the kids who are most vulnerable.

That’s what got to Badolato. In her online undercover work, she’d plumbed the psychology of pedophiles, but now she wasn’t just dealing with suspects; she was spending time with victims and seeing the same vulnerabilities in them that the traffickers had seen: the instability or poverty, the addiction or mental health issues or abuse that had been normalized in their lives long before the traffickers entered them. Sometimes Badolato couldn’t help but feel that all the conspiracies and misconceptions weren’t just a distraction from the truth of trafficking but rather some sick attempt to let society off the hook for trying to solve the much more intractable problems at trafficking’s root.

“People would rather stick their head in the sand than address the real problem, because then you have to face and talk about the societal issues,” she says. “With a movie like Sound of Freedom, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is in a jungle in South America. This isn’t actually in [my neighborhood].’ You know? It’s easier for people to ignore the problem than deal with the issues on a societal level.”

BY THE TIME Badolato was sitting in that Chevy with Sierra, on that blighted Ohio block, she knew that the rate of revictimization for children who are trafficked was as high as 95 percent, according to FBI reports. She knew that 90 percent of sex-trafficking victims have a history of child sexual abuse, that more than 75 percent had lived in foster or adoptive care. She knew that she could arrest one perpetrator, and another would pop up in his place, that she could send one pimp to prison and the same victims would show up to stings some short time later, run by a different crew. She knew that testifying was a way for Sierra to psychologically push back against what had happened to her, and she was right: After the young woman took the stand on Jan. 10, 2017, Parks was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years; while testifying, Sierra had seemed to transform, to channel and embody a sort of empowerment. But Badolato also knew that once her testimony was over, Sierra would go back to that blighted block. She wondered how long that empowerment would last.

She also wondered about her own trajectory, her own ability to continue doing this work. The youngest trafficking victim she’d ever recovered from a sting op — an 11-year-old who’d been recruited through Facebook — had been returned to her family in a house that had no heat (Badolato had used an FBI slush fund to get it turned back on). One did not become immune to the human misery of such things. They compounded, became harder and harder to compartmentalize. “It’s just a combination of all of those years — and it’s all awful,” she says. “But there are particular moments that, for one reason or another, you can’t get out of your head. I just don’t think it’s in human nature to be exposed to that for so long and it not start changing who you are.”

One night, at a restaurant near where Badolato lives, I ask her whether she thinks children are being sex-trafficked right then, in that very moment, in just the mile or two radius around us. She’s quiet for a long time, her gaze fixed downward at her glass of wine. By the time she looks up, her whole body is trembling. “It’s happening right now,” she says quietly. “Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are three or four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It’s not only when we think about it. It is happening all the time. And if I’m just sitting here, present, having dinner, not thinking about it, that means I’m ignoring a problem that I know is real.” Tears stream down her face.

“Many images have never left my mind,” she says. “It’s really hard to have worked your entire life in law enforcement with a lot of child crime victims and be at the end of your career looking at the situation where you realize you can only do so much to make a difference.” Badolato wipes back the tears with the palm of her hand and shudders her head, as if she can shake the thoughts away. “Damn,” she says. “Fuck. I shouldn’t be the one crying. I’m not the victim of this.” The veteran agent steels herself and repeats, “I am not the victim.”

THE HOUSE WHERE Korina Ellison says she was first sex-trafficked no longer exists. It once stood on an unassuming lot in a residential suburb of Portland, Oregon, that stumbles down to the banks of the Willamette River. Now, Ellison can’t quite bring the house’s features to mind. She was so young back then, maybe four or five. There is so much she’s repressed, or only pieced together after the fact. As a child, she wouldn’t have known what she now believes to be true: that her grandmother scored her drugs by offering up her youngest daughter, Ellison’s mom. Or that, once her mom was hooked on the meth cooked by the man who’d lived in that house, she’d known just what to do to get more. But Ellison does remember being inside the house, unclothed. She does remember how the man would touch her.

Her life unspooled from there. Her father died of a heroin overdose when she was six. Her mom lost custody for good. She bounced around foster care, then various residential institutions, then whatever shelter she could find. In the story she tells of how she was sex-trafficked again in her teenage years, there’s no moment of drama, no kidnapping, no clear coercion. There was just a random, rainy afternoon when she had no place to go and was alone in the street and a car pulled up. The man inside took her home with him, fed her, introduced her to his girlfriend. They took her shopping. They let her stay. When men showed up at the home to have sex with the woman, Ellison was invited to watch, but she wasn’t expected to participate — not at first, anyway. According to a statement Ellison later made to law enforcement, she just “realized that people aren’t going to take care of [me] for free.” Soon, the woman was posting Ellison’s services on Backpage — $150 for half an hour, $200 for a full one — and the trio were traveling the Midwest. For a long time, it didn’t even occur to Ellison, then 16, to leave. “Where would I have gone?” she asks. “I’d been missing for over a year. Nobody was looking for me.” When the man told her to call him “Daddy,” she complied.

That was more than a decade ago, near the beginning of Badolato’s tenure as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force. But by 2021, leaving it had seemed a necessary form of self-preservation. One of her last cases had gone well legally: The perp, a retired police officer from California who had produced child sex-abuse materials of three sisters in Manila, had pleaded guilty to such charges when he learned that Badolato had brought the girls to the states to testify against him. But the experience had been emotionally devastating for Badolato, who had wanted the sisters, then 16, 13, and 11, to have memories of the U.S that consisted of more than reliving their trauma in a courtroom. She took them shopping and to the zoo, invited them to her home to have dinner with her own family, saw them slowly start to open up and laugh and behave like the children they were. Then she’d had to put them on a flight back to Manila, back to the aunt who had allowed the man to abuse them and who Badolato had been unable to extradite. Fortunately, she says, their estranged father ended up intervening and taking custody of the girls, but that feeling of futility in the fight lingered.

“I stayed for a little bit longer after that trial, but it really was when I should have been able to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘Nikki, you’re done,’ ” Badolato had told me in St. Louis. “It became clear that I had been doing it too long.” She’d spend the last couple of years working national security, a position without the immediacy of child-exploitation work, but also without the heartache. “If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work. I just don’t,” she says.

And yet, here Badolato was in Portland, leading Ellison, now 30, up to her hotel room, telling her about all the announcements she’d heard in the Atlanta airport instructing travelers to be on the lookout for sex trafficking. “It’s like white noise in the background,” she says as Ellison settles into the sofa. “It’s a false sense of doing something to help.”

“Here’s the thing: Nobody knows what to look for,” Ellison agrees.

“And what about the victims who are in that airport, who are walking around and listening?” Badolato asks.

“I wouldn’t have even heard that announcement,” Ellison replies. “Because I didn’t feel like a victim. It goes a lot, lot, lot deeper than anybody realizes.”

That’s what she and Badolato both understand. That’s why they started talking eight months ago. Of all the teenage victims Badolato’s task force recovered, Ellison is one of the few who she knows has permanently extricated herself from being prostituted, though it took years for her to get to that point, years for her to see that what happened to her was not her fault but rather a fault in the system, a fault in many systems over the course of generations. Neither she nor Badolato can fix that.

Yet they can’t help feeling like there’s something they can fix — or at least try to. Under the umbrella of an organization she’s founded called Innocent Warriors, Badolato created a program for schools, instructing educators on the signs that might indicate a student is being trafficked and teaching kids how to avoid getting groomed online, which, she believes, is not about stranger danger but rather an awareness of subtle manipulation. Ellison has been working with trafficked youth through nonprofits like Children of the Night, the residential program where Badolato’s team sent her when she was 17. Together, they’ve been talking about having Ellison help train undercovers who are learning to do trafficking sting ops. They’ve also discussed starting a mentorship program in which children who are still being sex-trafficked are paired with young adults like Ellison who once were, providing a way for victims to begin to envision a different future for themselves and a path toward it even while being prostituted. Such a program may be retroactive rather than proactive, but it would capitalize on Badolato’s and Ellison’s experience and expertise — and it could help in the healing of mentors and mentees alike.

Badolato had traveled to Portland for the two to talk face-to-face about how the program might work. “You have to understand how they’ve been traumatized because sometimes, to a child, relating doesn’t sound like you’re relating. It sounds like you’re pointing out all the bad things in them,” says Ellison from the driver’s seat of her Nissan Pathfinder as she drives Badolato around to show her certain landmarks of her past after she’d left Children of the Night: the bridge she’d slept under for over a year after a boyfriend had gotten her hooked on heroin, the blocks downtown where she’d bounced between a children’s shelter and the needle exchange. It had taken a prison sentence for her to finally break her addiction and commit to a different kind of life, though that evolution had had less to do with not having access to drugs than with seeing her own mother cycle in and out of the same facility — like looking into her own future and witnessing how bleak it would be. Maybe, she thought, she could provide the inverse of that for kids in Innocent Warriors. Maybe she could reverse engineer her own escape.

“I just want to make it very clear that if you were a victim, you are a victim, and just to not have any shame in that,” she tells Badolato as they drive through Portland’s misty streets.

“What I anticipate and hope is that then we get survivors that are like, ‘They get it,’ ” Badolato replies. “And that it opens up doors to help, for people to recognize that there are people who get what’s really going on.”

“It took a really long time for me,” Ellison says of coming to terms with her own victimhood.

“It’s like reworking your thought process about some of those things,” Badolato agrees. “And that’s hard, and it happens slowly over time, and it looks different for everybody.”

Ellison grips the wheel tightly. “The truth does matter. It does. The truth is the fucking truth. And it’s been empowering to be able to talk about it because that’s another way that I’ve realized, like, ‘Man, I was a victim,’ is re-going over all of this. Because when it happens so many times, you do blame yourself. It’s a lot easier to just continue to live in a lie than believe that you were lied to.”

Still, Ellison and Badolato agree that the impressionability that makes children vulnerable is also what makes them open to guidance and mentorship if a relationship of trust can be established. “What do you think a parent does? They groom you. I’d been waiting to be guided and groomed,” Ellison says.

It’s been instructive to see that potential from another perspective, as a mother doing the guiding. As the afternoon wears on, Ellison stops to pick up her then-15-month-old son, who was being watched by a social-worker friend. She buckles the little boy into his car seat, ruffles his hair, and passes him a bottle. He grins widely and begins removing his shoes and socks, throwing them gleefully onto the floor of the car and then kicking his tiny feet in time with the music as Ellison glances back at him and smiles. “Kids are so perfect,” she says.

The last stop of the day is the large plot of land where the drug dealer’s house once stood. Now, it’s been turned into a playground, with brightly-colored jungle gyms, a covered picnic area, and a large lawn, where a couple leisurely walks their dog. Ellison and Badolato climb down from the car and stand at the park’s edge, as Ellison’s son toddles around the grass, oblivious to what had transpired in that very spot. There is some form of poetic justice in the land being earmarked for children’s enjoyment, but neither woman voices it. Mostly, they’re quiet. Night is falling, the air growing cooler, and the gray sky fading into dusk.

“You would never think a park could hide what it used to be,” Ellison says at last. And yet it did. Driving off with Badolato at her side and her son babbling happily in the back seat, Ellison glances in the rear-view mirror, but only for a moment. Badolato keeps her eyes fixed only on the road ahead.

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rapunzelbro · 4 months

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I've been reading your fabulous Lucifer and tall reader. I found a tiktok for a Lucifer scenario. I thought it was perfect just hiding little duckies all over the castle and hotel for Lucifer to find and to also piss Alastor off. 🙂

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8vdXanP/

The Great Duck Hunt of The Century! Ft. Lucifer & Alastor!

This title is so so so fucking specific. Remember my hiatus? Yeah I don’t remember either. I feel like I like writing for Lucifer and Angel more ngl and silly prompts like these give me inspiration. Idk why anywho enjoy~ Angel , Reader, Lucifer, Alastor Husk

Masterlist Taglist

Throughout your relationship with Lucifer you always found new ways to spice it up in the bed room

If you thought sex well, that too

But you meant something else, and that was The Great Duck Hunt of The Century!

What is it you may ask?

Well let’s just say Lucifer made a bunch of mini ducks out of pure boredom one day with you. So you snagged them all when you two were done with them

And spent the next 7 hours placing 500 in the castle and 500 in the Hazbin Hotel

Why? Because why the fuck not

Lucifer was excited and was happily looking around but when you got a text from Angel you knew you were fucked, screwed, in trouble

“Girl what tf did you do”

“Whatever do you mean?”

Why is Smiles yelling about finding ducks all over the hotel”

“Husk is literally finding them in the liquor bottles and choked on one of them and not the good kinda choke if you know what I mean” “🍆💦”

“I made a scavenger hunt for Lucifer that’s all 🫢”

“You didn’t hide any in my room did you”

“Hell no you’re my friend”

“Aw thank you sweetie💗 might wanna avoid the hotel for a while he is pissed I’ll keep rehiding them though. Ttyl babe~”

“Thanks for the warning”

Yeah uh let’s just say, after Lucifer did find a majority of them. Him being short Didn’t give him an advantage and you mentioned to him there’s a ton left so out comes Lucifer in bird mode

Dude is flying throughout his castle knocking so much shit over in the process to find these ducks and he is so fucking happy? Dude is so glad you did this.

It went on for hours

When you finish counting what he found you announce he found 500/1000

“HOLY SHIT THERES MORE??”

He didn’t know how you had so much dedication but he did and was ready to go to the hotel to find the rest

You texting Angel

“How many did he find?”

“I wanna say 100? This radio demons is ripping this hotel apart for them, Charlie thinks her dad did it but I let her in on it and told Vag. They think it’s funny as fuck. Well Charlie not as much but Vag is dying over here”

“omg did I tell you there’s bets being placed on this shit on if he burns the building down or not? Get your ass over here “

Lucifer makes a portal for you two because stepping into the hotel

Holy

Shit

It was a mess?? There were spots you didn’t even put any that were destroyed

“What the actual fuck?”

Everyone is just at the bar watching shit go down as Alastor is ripping the hotel apart for the ducks.

Lucifer is no where to be seen. This man’s instantly looking for the ducks and fixing up the building as he goes for his daughters sake

Alastor noticing you just appeared and him going up to you with his demon form practically almost fully out from his pissed this man is

“I’m hoping it wasn’t you who did this, or I’m afraid ł’ⱠⱠ ₱ɆⱤ₴Ø₦₳ⱠⱠɎ Ⱨ₳VɆ ₮Ø Ɽł₱ ɎØɄ Ⱡł₥฿ ฿Ɏ Ⱡł₥฿ Ʉ₦₮łⱠ ɎØɄ ��Ɇ₥ØVɆ ɆVɆⱤɎ ₴ł₦₲ⱠɆ Ø₦Ɇ Ø₣ ₮ⱧɆ₴Ɇ ₣Ʉ₵₭ł₦₲ ĐɄ₵₭₴”

His voice getting so fucking loud and static holy shit it was scary but you just back away as quickly as possible before Lucifer comes out with a fuck ton of the mini ducks before running infront of you.

Lucifer and Alastor stare at each other before Lucifer almost fucking launches at his ass for yelling at you

You instantly having to hold him back

“Listen you find these fuckers easily right? Help me find them and I won’t have to kill your little girlfriend”

“Haha fuck you. I’d love to see you try. I’m looking on my own terms “

Yeah he highkey didn’t want to take that chance regardless but he wasn’t lying when he said he was looking on his terms. Him bringing the ducks back to you as he found them

You counting them but Angel distracting you so much you had to double count everything like four times.

When he found them all the hotel surprisingly didn’t burn down, which caused almost everyone to give Husk money

“Hah.. old cats still got it”

Yeah Husk knew it wouldn’t be that dramatic considering if it had any involvement with you, or Lucifer, Lucifer could’ve easily fixed the building before it got to the point of that

He is fucking good

Alastor making the ducks dissolve in thin air once you counted them all and confirmed they were all found and Lucifer mourning the loss of his ducks while you and Charlie awkwardly comfort him.

Alastor instantly going back to his room with the worlds most irritating smile

“Please when you have this.. duck hunting again..you have it NOT HERE”

“Well that went better than I thought..”

And that was the end of the Great Duck Hunt of the century

It was the most fun Lucifer ever had.

And to see Alastor in that state was the icing on the cake.

He loved you so much and was 100% going to make himself a trophy since he found them all

It’s just the little things you do or even in this case the big things that make him appreciate you even more

Especially if it involves pissing off Alastor my god you got hella bonus points for that shit

Lucifer Taglist: @vendetta-ari @brithedemonspawn @katshyperfixations @aphestina @satansmanager @irethepotato @storydays @saturnhas82moons @zamadness

#hazbin hotel x reader #alastor hazbin hotel #hazbin alastor #hazbin hotel husk #husk hazbin hotel #hazbin angel dust #hazbin charlie #hazbin hotel #hazbin art #hazbin lucifer #hazbin hotel alastor #hazbin spoilers #hazbin hotel vox x reader #hazbin hotel lucifer #hazbin x reader #hazbin husk #hazbin hotel valentino x reader #Hazbin hotel Lucifer x reader

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virginprune · 3 months

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im always surprised how many people think venetia is the younger sibling. i feel like we get so caught up in those scenes defined as shocking and grotesque by media and pop culture at large that we skim over the quiet, lurking horrors of saltburn. poor, poor venetia, who was born first but will never be first, not to the boys, not to her parents, not to oliver, not to anyone. mommy's emotionally battered and neglected firstborn daughter. felix was born when venetia was still a baby, not even two years old, the perfect golden boy, son and heir, sun and air. and he's getting it all, the title, the estate, everything ("I will look after this house just as felix would have"). do you think they ever talked about it? which catton was getting saltburn? i dont. venetia, the butt of every joke. desperate, embarrassing, lighting her body up like a neon sign on an empty highway. if felix is the sun, venetia is the moon, shrouded in darkness when he's not near. venetia, destroying and remaking herself in her mother's eyes. always hungry, a scavenger of love, picking over felix's scraps, sucking up the detritus at the bottom of a dark, lonely ocean.

#saltburn #venetia catton #i've never been mentally ill in my life #venetia rose catton you will always be famous to me

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ms-hells-bells · 11 months

Text

the story of the four colombian children that survived over a month in the jungle after surviving a plane crash is incredible. their mother initially survived the crash, but was fatally injured, and as she was dying, she told them to leave her so that they may live. the eldest child, a 13 year old girl, is who kept the younger siblings alive, having both knowledge of edible jungle plants, as well as scavenging the wreckage, knowing how to take care of an infant (yes, the youngest was an 11-12 month old baby), and also had a hobby of playing 'survival games' with her 9 year old sister, where they would built make-shift shelters outside for fun. they were finally rescued several days ago, in large part because the search helicopters continuously played a recording of their grandmother, telling them to stay where they are in their native language.

so, three generations of women and girls, grandmother, mother, and daughter, all contributed to the group's survival. they are malnourished and dehydrated, but apart from that, fine physically. they will be out of hospital in little over a week (excluding perhaps the baby).

#the ages were something like 13 9 5 and 1

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ivnxrori · 2 months

Text

When Sun and Moon meet - S1

Zuko x Fem!WaterBender!Reader Enemies to Lovers

As one of the Princesses of the Northern Water tribe, you were blessed with a gift by the moon. However you were permitted to be allowed to use the gift at all costs. From many hidden waterbending usages, the aftermath of the avatar visiting the Northern Tribe had led to your beginning journey, hiding yourself as a water bender as a princess from the Northern water tribe

Warnings: None

Masterlist

҉ * ‧͙ ⋆ ⁺ ༓ ☾ Prologue

“We announce the birth of a healthy girl…Princess Y/N!” Chief Arnook announced as the crowd cheered for their new princes alongside Yue. What the crowd didn't know was the difficulties of even keeping her a healthy princess. Once the baby was born, she couldn't stop wailing and crying. It was like every bone of her body was in pain. All the medical help didn't do anything, they didnt know why the Chief’s daughter was in so much pain. Yagoda suggests going to the Spirit Oasis, it's their only chance. Chief Arnook sweats as well as his wife, as if they're bound to be unlucky for every life they give. The royal parents of this princess used the same technique as they did with their previous daughter. Dipping her in the Spirit Oasis while praying for her life to the moon spirit, the color of the girl's hair turned from brown to a graceful white. Silent cheers and cries as they held their newest child close to them, happy the moon spirit gave another one of their daughters a second chance.

“Stop touching the edge of your coat” My mother instructed as she pulled my hand from the cuffs. I whined but one stern look from my mother stopped me. I huffed as I stood up straight leaning more so to my sister, Yue who took my hand graciously. In books and stories becoming a princess sounds like a dream. You have money, attention and you could do whatever you want. Everything is accurate except the last one, I couldn't do everything I wanted. I had to be restrained to the guards and my parents eye, even Yue doesnt get this treatment as much as I do. However I forgot to mention how I even got into strict confinement in the first place. “What are you doing?” My father grabbed my hand making the water orb splash at both of our feet. “She's a water bender…” My mom whispered as my dad's eyes widened. “Y/N…” He spoke softly as he held both of my shoulders in a kindly manner. “Do not water bend, it's not allowed for people like you”. I furrowed my eyebrows as I looked at him confused. He sighed as he took my hand. “Y/N, where we live only men are allowed to use waterbending, that's their job…to protect” My father shows me to the boys training their bending. “Especially people like you and your sister, you're both very important to this nation”. I didn't listen, it's not like I didn't understand what he was saying, I just didnt understand why it had to be like this. I zoned off as I saw the male benders. Envying that they can use their gift while I couldn't use mine. I snapped out of my zoned out space with a little pinch given by my sister. I flinched lightly as she slightly giggled earning a hush from our mother. I don't understand us needing to come to these royalty meetings, neither Yue and I are close to 16. Well she is closer to 16 by what? 6 years? That's still a whole 6 years till 16! I'm only younger than Yue by a year, however people treat me like a polar bear dog, cooing at me constantly for doing the littlest task while Yue gets treated so much more maturely. Some might say I have it easier but honestly I just feel dumb. Once the meeting ended we respectfully bowed and got up following our father. I held back my yawn as I saw the now night sky, looking how beautiful the moon is. ҉ ☾ I woke up in the middle of the night, groaning as I looked at the moon. I brush through my tangled hair with my hand while walking outside near the river. Is anyone there? I internally thought as I scavenged the area to see if there were any witnesses. I double checked and took a deep breath. Opening my eyes I hold the water orb, feeling the calming air around me. “You're going to get caught if you keep doing that”. I yelped and dropped my water orb. I turn around immediately with widened eyes meeting Yue. “Oh Yue” I sigh in relief as she glared at me. “You could've gotten caught by the guards and gotten in more trouble then you already have”. I sigh in understanding but also in annoyance. This isn't the first time I have snuck out to try out waterbending. Some days I have been caught but some days I haven't. “I'm going back to bed” I sigh with my head down “Are you?” “Yes, I am” Yue giggled as she patted me on the back. “I believe you can use it one day Y/N, I really you” She whispered sweetly as I nodded. “Thank you”

Next ->

a/n: This is my first fic im starting and im getting brainrott from avatar :) im still learning how to write so if there is any suggestions please share. Im like half asleep while writing this authors note so I know it wont make any sense when I wake up lmao Also feel free to tell me if you want to be added in the taglist!

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