#there are three main activities that usually really fuck up my hands

[cookinguptales]

wah I wanna write but my fingers are just slightly out of joint and I keep making typos

#just me #I mean also it hurts but the inability to type prooperly is getting me more #I'm just complaining lmao #currently in The Bad Part of the month #there are three main activities that usually really fuck up my hands #1. tying shoes #2. opening jars #3. writing with pencil/pen #so I try to avoid those things as much as possible #usually typing is fine but brooo the bones are wiggly this month #I'm so frustrated lmao #cw: #disability #chronic illness

[gasolinerainbowpuddles]

On The Verge of a Usual Mistake ║ ⓞⓝⓔ๏ⓞⓕⓕⓢ

On the Verge of a Usual Mistake | main masterlist | PAIRING(s): ex!Lucien x actress!reader x ex!Dieter

| RATING: explicit material | 18+ | WORD COUNT:  2.3k | CONTENT: this is truly just porn with minimal plot (I'm so proud of myself lol), Dieter and Lucien are messy exes, threesome activities, Twister but with genitalia, Daddy and Papi kinks

| SYNOPSIS: You've been avoiding your exes Dieter Bravo and Lucien Flores all night at this event, but you're forced to come to terms with how things ended in both relationships when they seek to right their wrongs.

“My publicist is gonna kill me!” you hiss into the dampened light of the small room Lucien unceremoniously ushered you into.

“Baby, come on. The tabloids loved us together, remember?” he coos.

“The two of you can’t just be pulling this shit! Not when I’m trying to talk to Wayne from A24 about—”

“The fuck’re you two doing in here?” Dieter whispers loudly as he closes and locks the door behind him. “You seriously going back to him after turning me down?”

“Dee, this is not the time,” you snap. “And I’m not doing a fucking thing with this asshole. He practically herded me in here.” You’re grateful neither of them are aware of the pooling slick between your legs you’ve been dutifully ignoring all night with them both chasing you around and begging for a moment alone.

“Well, three makes a party then,” Dieter decides.

“We’re not interested in that sort of partying,” Lucien cuts in.

“Oh, cut the sober lifestyle bullshit. I’m not the one you’re gonna fool with those bogus rehab claims,” Dieter scoffs.

“Well I guess if anybody knows about stints in rehab, it’s you,” Lucien snipes back.

“Okay, I’m leaving,” you huff. You push past Lucien who grabs for you, but it’s ultimately Dieter’s gentle but firm hold that keeps you from exiting. “Dee, let go of me. The two of you can have at each other all you want. Besides, you don’t need me here when neither one of you is gonna listen to me anyway.”

“Don’t be like that,” Lucien pleads. “I’ve been trying to get you to talk to me all night.”

“Yeah, exactly,” you laugh without a hint of amusement. “You want me to listen to you. Never the other way around. It’s the same with both of you. Always has been. Neither of you know how to put anybody else first. Why do you think I ended things? You’re just two peas in a fucking pod.”

“You really feel that way?” Dieter’s hold on you has slackened to a weak grip. Your head whirls back around to look him in the eye. He looks hurt. Dammit. “You think I don’t want to put you first?”

“I never knew that,” Lucien admits quietly. He edges in closer until you’re practically sandwiched between your exes.

“It’s not like I didn’t tell you,” you grumble, aggrieved at their past mistakes and kicking yourself for not just bolting out the door before they mess with your head like they always do.

Some quiet exchange happens between Dieter and Lucien, and you recognize the silent conversation just as it appears to end. Lucien’s hand creeps along your lower back while Dieter’s hands crawl back up your sides and arms.

“You’re right, baby. I never did things how I should’ve when it came to you. I blew it. Messed up the best thing I ever had. S’why I’ve been on your heels all night just trying to get a word with you,” Lucien says softly into your hair. You shiver at his warm breath fanning across your skin.

“I miss you so much,” Dieter confesses in a hush. “Let me show you how much I miss you. Please.”

“Let us both show you,” Lucien adds. “Let us show you we can listen. Let us show you we can put you first.”

You’re going to give yourself a stern talking to in the mirror tomorrow morning, but right now all the reasons why this is a terrible idea are like wisps of smoke catching to the wind. When Dieter nuzzles against the crook of your neck and Lucien is already down on the ground and underneath your dress, your resolve shatters into a million pieces. “Okay. Yeah, I–oh fuck, Lucien–”

The fat wet line of his tongue between your folds jolts you forward into Dieter who busies himself with lifting and tucking your dress aside so he doesn’t miss the show. He’s already got the top of your dress shoved down so he can suckle on your tightening nipples. “Dee,” you gasp.

“I got you,” he groans, nipping and teasing your nubs. “God you look so good. Missed this so fucking much. Missed these tits so fucking much.” He gropes them in appreciation, and his eyes go wide in that wondrous sort of way that they always seemed to whenever the two of you fucked. Every time was like he’d never seen a woman before, not with the way he’d shower you with compliments and superlatives.

Your legs are already shaky with Lucien working between them, and you don’t even bother feeling ashamed at the orgasm that’s already building. It’s been a long time since you’d been with an attentive partner, and nothing quite compared to the likes of Dieter or Lucien. They’d ruined other sexual partners for you forever, but you wouldn’t be caught dead telling them as much. Their egos were inflated enough as it was. Besides, they’d just hear that and not the other side of the coin which was how they were stingy, selfish companions when it came to the emotional aspect of a relationship.

“You want to be Mommy tonight? Or do you want me to be Daddy?” Dieter asks a little breathlessly.

Throwing all dignity out the window, you reply, “I want Daddy tonight.”

He almost sounds pained as his eyes clamp shut at your answer. “Fuck yeah, I can do that. I can be Daddy. You need your Daddy?”

You nod so loose and frantic it feels like your head isn’t attached to your neck. Lucien never stops but inches forward until he’s looking up at you from between the cradle of your thighs. “Tell Papi what you want,” he husks.

“I-I want you to make me come, Papi,” you whine with a roll of your hips. 

He suctions onto your clit, and you’re gone. Dieter seems absolutely giddy to watch another man make you come, but something about it is comforting and endearing. You hate how familiar and heady this all feels, knowing full well that come tomorrow morning it’ll be another fading memory to lump in with all the others. You push away the painful acknowledgement before it ruins your orgasm entirely.

Dieter’s fingers slip inside you with no resistance, and you both moan in unison at the way you part for him. Lucien’s wet mouth and chin leave a sloppy trail across your neck where he lays even sloppier kisses. “Can I take this off?” he asks. You nod, and he unzips and unfastens your dress before tossing it onto a nearby table. “I fuckin knew you wouldn’t be wearing panties,” he says low and needy into your ear.

The rhythmic plunge of Dieter’s fingers has you hurtling towards another climax. “Been a while since somebody gave you what you needed, baby?”

You bite your lip and dip your head. You hate how easily they could both read you. It made you feel laid bare, and not in the fun sort of way.

“Let Papi and Daddy make you feel good, okay? Don’t think about anything except letting us make you feel good,” Lucien whispers against your temple from behind. You feel the hard curve of his clothed cock pressing against your ass. You push back against it and stifle a grin when he moans. The grin slips away the moment Lucien’s fingers slide down your body to rub your clit in time with Dieter’s fingering. You aren’t sure whose hand comes to cover your mouth while you come, but you’re glad somebody has enough sense right now to think about other partygoers overhearing.

“You were always so pretty when you fell apart,” Dieter reminisces with a goofy, tender smile. He slips his fingers from you and licks them clean. “Better than I remembered.”

The sound of Lucien’s belt and zipper draw your attention backward. “You gonna let me fuck you wide open, baby? Think you can take all of me? It’s been a long time.”

“I can take it,” you breathe, arching your back for him to enter you from behind.

“Good girl for Papi,” he praises. He jerks himself a few times with a slip of spit and lines his cock up to your entrance. “Always such a good girl for your Papi, aren’t you?”

“Y-Yes, Papi. I’ll be good,” you choke out.

He inches inside you with an agonizing, languid pace. Your breath catches when he finally bottoms out. He’s so much bigger than you remember, but you still want more. Dieter captures your mouth in a heated kiss just as Lucien starts thrusting, and your high pitched cries of pleasure are caught between his lips. “Daddy,” you whine as you latch onto his shoulders for support. Lucien’s pace picks up quickly, and for a few minutes the small room is only filled with panting and the squelching sounds of him splitting you open.

“You’re taking his cock so good, baby,” Dieter says against your teeth. “You like taking raw cock, don’t you? You always begged Daddy to fuck you raw.”

“Fuck! Yes, I like it when Papi and Daddy fuck me raw,” you cry. “I want Daddy to fuck me raw, too.”

“Yeah?” he goads with a smile. “You want Daddy’s cock after Papi fills you up?”

Lucien grunts and whimpers as he struggles to keep his pace with all the back and forth filth.

“N-No, Daddy. Want you and Papi to fuck me raw together,” you beg. “Please, Daddy. Please Papi?”

Dieter rushes to free his cock and wet it with spit as Lucien starts chanting yes yes yes. He stills for Dieter to push against his own length and fight for the tight space of your cunt. They work together to hoist you higher until Dieter is notched at your entrance and finally pushing inside. The stretch burns and makes you feel present in your own body in such an overwhelming way for the first time in a long time. The first few thrusts are experimental and slow, but it doesn’t matter. You’re already crying and coming and losing yourself in the intoxicating sting of both their cocks wedged inside the fist of your cunt.

“Christ,” Dieter hisses. “Fuck, this is gonna make me come too fast.”

“Tell us what you want,” Lucien urges, sounding close to the edge himself.

Your pussy throbs and clenches around them both as you try to make your brain and mouth cooperate. “I want you to come in me, Papi,” you whine. “Want you and Daddy to fuck me and make me come again. Make me come and then fuck me ‘til you come inside me.”

“Anything for my girl – Papi’s good girl,” he assents.

“Daddy’ll give you whatever you want, baby,” Dieter adds in a hoarse sounding wheeze. “Gonna milk my cock in this tight little pussy. Gonna give you whatever you want.”

Despite never really caring much for one another, Dieter and Lucien seem to sync up with the common goal of giving you another mind numbing orgasm. The feel of their thick cocks crowding your insides, sliding against each other so that each push and pull is a constant punch of a cockhead against your cervix. “Fuck I’m gonna come again,” you blurt out as your climax surges and swells without warning.

You’re sandwiched between two sweaty and breathy men who now seek their own release. Dieter comes first with a pitiful little stuttering whine. His mouth rounds out in a messy kiss as he pulses inside you. Lucien is just behind him with a gravelly moan as he fucks you nonstop. There’s so much of them spilling inside you and being pushed out, and the warmth of it makes you feel sated and soothed.

You’re a boneless bag of flesh when they both catch their breath and ease you off the spear of their cocks. You sigh at the feeling of them drooling out of your pussy. With their concentrated, streamlined focus, your dress is put back on and properly closed back up. Lucien turns you to face him for the first time since you tried to leave earlier. “Can I kiss you?”

You want to laugh at his request given the fact that he’s currently leaking out of you alongside the efforts of your other ex, but you know why he’s asking. He knows certain types of intimacy are something that mean more to you and have to be earned back in trust. “Yeah, Lucien. You can kiss me.”

His body nudges yours against Dieter’s, hands coming up to cradle your face as he tenderly presses his lips to yours. It’s slow and soft and damn near perfect, especially considering Dieter is dotting the curve of your neck with his own kisses. You aren’t sure how long you and Lucien are lost in each other, but it’s blowing your mind to see Dieter be patient for once. Maybe they both really meant it when they said they wanted to do better by you.

You pull back with red, puffy lips and heavy eyes. Lucien looks down at you with a soft smile. “I miss you.”

Your eyes flutter shut at the unspoken words laced within: I love you.

“I miss you every day,” Dieter agrees quietly.

“Look, I–I miss you both, too, but I can’t promise anything,” you warn them. “You both really hurt me before. But, tonight was… nice. It felt nice.” You wonder why it never occurred to you to do this before. The two best lovers you ever had, at the same time. It was a no brainer, really. Probably all that pesky broken heart stuff clouding your mind that kept you from realizing what a good time it could be.

“You don’t have to make promises anymore. That’s not your job anymore.”

“No, baby. We’re the one who need to make promises so we can show you that we can keep them,” Dieter adds.

It might be the dumbest mistake of your life, but you can’t fight it anymore. You can’t fight how good it feels to be with them both. Despite all the pain and heartache they’ve caused you over the years, they both always felt like home in a way. “I think I might be willing to let you try.”

Okay the Lucien Flores brainrot got to me. As far as exes go in the celebrity world, you could do a lot worse than Lucien and Dieter. Also, reader clearly has a type haha.

#lucien flores x reader #dieter bravo x reader #lucien flores x you #dieter bravo x you #lucien flores smut #dieter bravo smut #pedro pascal characters #the bubble #the uninvited

[v3nusxsky]

Insecurities 18+

*Authors note~ inspired by a TikTok audio and my own thoughts about myself, it's important to remember that everyone is different and that's a good thing. You're exactly how you need to be*

Trigger warnings~ insecure depressive thoughts daddy Nat g!p Nat usual mission things smuttt is all I got here

Prompt~ Team go on a mission, r would get like kicked in the chest or something just to make her boobs hurt and she'd say on the ride home "man my boobs hurt so much after that mission" where Nat hits back with "what boobs?" So r like laughs sarcastic and goes "ahaha fuck you"

It was really a simple mission, a simple sneak in and retrieve some of the updated super solider serum and get the heck out of there. You all knew it would be heavily guarded, that's why you, Natasha, Wanda and Yelena were sent in this one. You sat next to your girlfriend and in front of Wands while Lena opted to be the pilot of the Quinjet. In between some basic things about the mission and general chat you all arrived at the secure location.

Wanda and Yelena immediately taking control of the soldiers while you and Natasha snuck through and into the narrow halls. Dating a Russian Assassin definitely has its perks, her ability to get into rooms undetected was something you admired, although you could've used magic and drawn attention to yourself you definitely couldn't pick a lock or hack into the Hydra systems like she could. Your main job was to cover her back, make sure no one would be able to stop her. You even noticed her backing up information onto a hard drive. Smart.

A quick glance back at the redhead resulted in her quipping back "stop looking at my ass Y/n." But you didn't get a chance to reply to her as a guard delivered a hard kick to your sternum. A surprise yelp of pain alerted Nat and you both fought the guards off before taking the drive and information you'd secured and left. Yelena held the doors open for all three of you to jump in before she sped off in the Quinjet.

You slumped on the seat, a hand holding your chest as you breathed slowly in and out. Wanda noticing your pained thoughts, decided to check in on you. "Are you okay mini me?" Natasha seemed curious to what you'd say, after all she knew how much you hated admitting an injury. "I'm fine wands, just man my boobs hurt so much after that mission" you chuckled slightly. Wanda seemed to nod in understanding where as Natasha hit back with, "what boobs?" Yelena burst out laughing at your lovers reply, neither realising that had upset you. "Hahahaha fuck you" you replied sarcastically before taking yourself off to the far back corner. There you curled yourself up in a ball and attempted to sleep the flight away. The only problem was Wanda could see your thoughts were active but out of respect for you she choose not to interfere.

Arriving at the compound, you were the first one off the Quinjet and making your way to your shared room with Natasha. You knew you'd be alone, after all she always went straight to the training room to blow off some steam. You however, prefer to shower the mission away, the mindset of a clean body would be a clean slate. But instead of it calming you and clearing your mind you felt this overwhelming cloud of negativity. You were strong enough to beat them just enough to allow you to complete shower and wrap a towel around yourself.

Nat then joined you in the room to grab shower supplies and go to shower, once again leaving you well and truly alone. That's when you surrendered your mind to the thoughts. Standing in front of your full length body mirror. Instantly all you could see is the imperfections of your body. Which seemed to outweigh any positive thoughts by a ton. Your boobs felt too flat, your skin the wrong shade, your hair to straw like, your arms too thin and your thighs too thick. Hell, even your eyes seem to dull and cloudy like for you. You didn't even realise tears were flowing freely as silent sobs wracked your frame. What a sorry state for you to be in. It's not one you'd normally allow yourself to get to but Tasha had really hurt you, let alone Yelena agreeing.

Natasha didn't mean to hurt you, to her you are the most beautiful woman in the world, so perfect and pure and most definitely too good for her. A statue made by the goddess of lust herself is how Nat sees you. If only you could see yourself in the same light, but right now, all you could think and feel was disgust at yourself and your body. And if you were left just long enough you were sure it would've gotten deeper, but if there's one thing Natasha was famous for it would be routines. She always took the same amount of time and normally you'd be with it enough to notice, but not today.

"детка" she called out to you, effectively breaking the haze. Your head snapped towards the offending red head, tears trailing down your cheeks as you sat there naked being taunted by your reflection. "дорогая what is going on, who do I need to kill?" She murmured moving closer to you only for you to flinch away from her and grab your towel, "nothing Nattie, m'Kay" you sniffled. "No no детка, you're crying naked, that's not okay."

"I'm just so ugly! My thighs are too big, my arms are too small and even you don't think my boobs are even too small!" You sobbed curling into yourself. "ебать!, детка, no. No, I love your body детка I really do. моя любовь you're absolutely perfect in every way. I spoke without thinking and for that I'm so sorry. I never wanted to hurt you моя любовь." She murmured over and over until you let her hold you. From their you just cried it out in her arms.

"детка, let me show you how beautiful you truly our my love" she whispered kissing the crown of your head as you nodded silently. "Lay back моя любовь" she commanded and you did so instantly, yet trying to hold your towel to your body. "None of that красивый дорогая, you are absolutely stunning" she whispered before kissing the tear tacks stained on your cheeks. From there her lips trailed over your facial features and down the column of your neck. Words of praised murmured against the soft skin there.

Only when you seemed to be feeling better did she allow her lips to travel south, all down the length of your body, every inch of skin kissed and caressed softly. Only when her lips had finished their work did she ask you to flip over. Your shoulders were so tense she couldn't help but spend the amount of time it would take for you to relax enough there. Once again she whispered words of praise to you.

"Daddy" you whimpered, the raw intimate emotions overflowing now, leaving you bare in every sense of the word. "Тсс, моя милая девочка, папочка позаботится о тебе, котенок" her thick Russian accent doing wonders for you. After all she knew how much it made you feel good when she complements you in her native tongue. "мой милый котенок" she murmured before bringing her slender fingers to play with your pretty little clit. Her actions teasing but doing enough to bring you to the path of pleasure. "No daddy, more please want you, show me you mean it" you whined.

Showing you was exactly what she did, her hard cock slipped into your folds as her mouth trailed from your lips to your breasts. There she marked each and every inch of the soft skin, it was clear she wouldn't stop till she'd showered each breast with the same amount of attention as the other. Her thrusts slow and meaningful as she attempted to poor all her love and adoration for you into her actions. "мой, все мое" she murmured against your skin as she brought a hand in between your bodies to play with your sensitive clit.

"Gonna cum for me котенок?" She purred as her thrusts began to hit your G-spot over and over again, "yes yes daddy! Yes, please please make me" you mewled for her. "Go on, cum love" she whispered sucking harshly on the sensitive skin of your right breast. "Oh my god! Fuck" you squealed as your orgasm flooded her dick causing Nat to bite back a grown and pull from your fluttering hole to spurt cum all over your chest. Her thigh helping you ride your high while she stroked herself down from her own high. "You look beautiful babe, all painted white for daddy. A good girl for me."  From there she cleaned you up and you both got settled down in the bed where Nat spent the rest of the night loving on you and making you feel like the most beautiful girl in the world.

Word count~ 1544

#anon answered #v3nusxsky answers #fanfic #anon requested #natasha romanov #natasha romanoff #natasha marvel #natasha mcu #nat x reader #natasha x reader #natahsa romanoff #natasha x you #nat #natasha x y/n

[colsonlin]

“Cape Cod”: a good old-fashioned short story (a 45-minute read)

“Cape Cod” is an analysis of our society’s tendency to produce narcissism, sociopathy, and casual dehumanization. It felt so good to get all of this off my chest! —Nina

A lot of how we talk about middle school in America is something I take issue with—like, for instance, that it’s somehow not the most formative experience of our lives. (It is.) A lot of people say “college,” but I had already cycled into an idea of who I was going to be as an adult by then—an A student, a talker, a birdwatcher, a take-no-prisoners observer of human social life. I studied sociology at the University of Maryland. At my retail job now—I work at a Nordstrom in Connecticut—I interact with a dying breed: old rich white women who still buy their cashmeres at the mall. At my old retail job in Farmington I was a cashier. At Nordstrom I’m more of a saleswoman—I don’t hand my customers their purchases after I’m done folding their clothes into the bag, I walk around the counter to deliver their parcels to them personally. I work six nights a week until the mall closes at 11 and on Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays I drive to my second job at a call center in Southington. I earn enough money to pay for my Hyundai and an apartment above the laundromat, have coffee on the weekends, keep up with my student loans, and map out what the next step will be.

College feels like a million years ago.

Middle school still feels like yesterday.

“Brenda” (not her real name), my supervisor at my old department store in Farmington, was the portrait of managerial incompetence. She was fat and unmarried and all of the associates who weren’t actively helping a customer used to crowd into the stock room whenever she came out of her office, usually to berate one of us for misplacing a store key. We all know a Brenda from middle school. Everything you say is wrong, and everything she says can’t be improved upon. Three of us quit within the first ten months of Brenda’s arrival, and at least one of us later wrote an anonymous email to the district manager about her obvious drinking problem.

My old department store—I don’t want to get into any trouble here so let’s just call them “Not-Quite Sephora”—was in a strip mall. I never knew who to feel more sorry for during the day, myself or the customers who came in. I once explained to my boyfriend that we were kind of like Wal-Mart’s “more youthful older sister”—a high school varsity cheerleader perhaps, but still stuck in the past all the same.

There were ten of us on the first floor—the second floor, “Men’s,” might as well have been a different planet entirely. Brenda acted like she was better than all of us, because she has a master’s degree in “Global Business Administration,” whatever the fuck that was. Brenda didn’t seem to understand that all her master’s degree did was make her look both underqualified and overqualified for her job at the same time. (Her main role, from what I could tell, was assigning holiday bonuses and amplifying customer complaints.)

Not-Quite Sephora has a dying business model, but we were kept artificially alive by a steady stream of suburban glum as the principal anchor of a once-iconic strip mall. The first floor was perpetually understaffed—our Google reviews under Brenda’s mismanagement decayed from 4.2 to 2.8 stars (and this coming from a woman who tends to take “American public opinion” with a grain of salt). The turnover rate among everyone except me, Ashley, and Gabby seemed to be such that a new Chris, Brian, or Andy was being fired every three months. Good riddance, I always thought.

Men don’t understand how to take orders from a woman, and the ones who say they do are liars from the black lagoon.

I understand Brenda.

I really do.

Brenda’s most direct feature was that you couldn’t get a direct answer out of her, ever—it was either caustic sarcasm or happy-peppy self-deprecation. Everything she said was either designed to suppress or to charm. She was intelligent, which was the problem—quick-witted even—she prized competence, prided herself on being everything everywhere all at once (with self-pity), once complained to me in the break room that she was an ex-spelling-bee champion. Appearance-wise, what once made me jolt awake at night was that she tries, she actually tries. Not doing anything to set Brenda off had become something of an obsession of mine by her third month there. I applied to other jobs, but only in non-retail.

Trying to go non-retail—my life in a nutshell.

Brenda took over at a precarious time. Inflation was rising. Covid was either over or about to be over, but either way, brick-and-mortar seemed to be one of its death tolls. Brenda had mousy blond hair, wore black trousers to work, and used to tramp around the store carrying an inventory clipboard whenever she was upset about something. I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to take fashion-merchandising so seriously. Her first day at Not-Quite Sephora, Brenda compared our fitting rooms favorably to the fitting rooms at her old Kohl’s in Florida, now shuttered (“So coming back up here was kind of like coming home for me, y’know?”). Brenda grew up in a trailer park in New Jersey and you can tell.

You can guess what her politics are.

I think what appealed to me most about the Cape Cod trip, if I were to be honest, was the right to tell Brenda that I’d have to take a few days off in mid-September because my boyfriend had invited me on a trip to “the Cape.”

Here was a woman in her late forties or early fifties who had located the profundity of her self-esteem in “competence”—and yet it never finally occurred to her that the only way to be “competent” in your everyday life is to command the trust of those around you. Trust is earned, Brenda, and it’s lost with unreliability. I could never really trust that woman not to not trap me inside a rule without being able to explain to me the reasons—not to not be imperious and self-certain and in self-protection mode at all times—and not to not explode all of her emotional wreckage on me, drenching me in the black mist of her self-absorption. Brenda was always right. Brenda is never to be questioned. (Brenda’s real name is “Karen,” which is why I didn’t want to say it at the time.)

It felt so good to able to tell Brenda that—all of her anxieties about the back-to-school rush aside—I’m going to have to take three days off in mid-September because my boyfriend has invited me on a trip with his three friends to the Cape. (I met my boyfriend a year ago on Opal.) It pained me to be so petty—no, not the reference to Cape Cod, which was just a kiss on the lips, but the reference to having a boyfriend, which was my primary poison. I wore more eyeliner to work, not less, the longer the weeks went by trying to circumnavigate Brenda’s imperialism. I enjoyed looking like a magazine cover while supplicating to her at the makeup counter.

We worked at a department store.

(“—so that’s my life, okay?”)

I could see it already. I love how Brenda, with her master’s degree in Global Business Studies or whatever the fuck she majored in, has to flinch every time who I really was blinked in front of her. I bet you flinched every time you saw me shrug into your office, Brenda, no matter what you called me into your office for, because I know about the Us Weeklies you stole from the front stands—I told Accounting about them!—I know how responsive you are to young women with movie-star looks who had won the genetic lottery. I smile at you, Brenda, precisely because I know how my angelic dimples make you feel. It makes you feel like you want to protect me.

It makes you feel you need to defend your true queen.

Beauty was my one and only power over Brenda, but I can assure you I only used it sparingly (all it took was sparingly with a woman so obsessed with appearances). We don’t talk about being pretty enough, which is another way of saying we don’t talk about seeing only the appearances enough. Seeing only the appearances was how I, prior to this weekend, once saw Cape Cod. What do you know about Cape Cod anyway? What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you mentally google it? I want to leave you now with an image of seagulls.

I matched with my boyfriend last September on Opal.

Now I know what you might be thinking—this whole story basically amounts to one long humblebrag about how I have an account on Opal, lol. No. First of all, I deleted that account six months ago. My boyfriend and I both did, on the same day—that was how we agreed to be serious.

Opal’s cornered the market on young attractive people who like to paraglide to remote destinations—the one and only trick it has up its sleeves is “exclusivity,” which in America is a royal flush. I’ll tell you real quick how I landed an account on Opal. A hedge-fund apparatchik I had gone on two dates with wrote me a recommendation letter after I told him I didn’t think it was going to work out between us, but did he still want to be friends? (And what do friends do?) It was his fault. He was the one who’d bragged to me about having an account on Opal in the first place. He even helped me pick out my profile pictures.

I left the Alma Mater field blank.

Opal’s about what you’d expect—videos of narcissist after narcissist who summer in Thailand. I swiped past all of the alpha males, which took days. Men who were earnest or men who were silly were the only men I could take seriously.

My boyfriend’s in that five percent of men just below the top ten percent that most women don’t know to circle the ocean for. You know the type. He’d be unstoppable if just one or two more things had gone right for him, but as it were, the wrong job, the wrong company, the wrong alma mater, had kept a handsome face trapped beneath a monthly gym membership. You’ll recognize these five-percenters from their personality—pure souls who’d lucked out facially, two sevens on the slot machine, but whose unambiguous victory had been stunted by some existential lemon. Some of them have eating disorders. Some google “male plastic surgery” in the dead of night. In my boyfriend’s case, he’s pansexual. Open-minded women have rejected him, which gives him a chip on his shoulder, and now he thinks he understands what it’s like being a minority. My boyfriend’s the type to care a lot about social issues. I’m not sure he even knows we’re interracial.

His parents have a house in Cape Cod.

His dad’s a federal judge and his mom’s an immigration attorney. Until we met and he started showing me pictures on his phone of his childhood vacation home, I had never really thought a lot about Cape Cod. I only knew it as the brand of a potato chip one step up the class ladder from Lay’s, and as a cultural metonym for white-sand beaches, old stone lighthouses, and the Kennedys. Brenda grew up in a trailer park in New Jersey, but I’m sure she must have learned at her master’s program what Cape Cod was.

Cape Cod was where she wanted to be.

And as it so happens, Brenda?

Cape Cod is me.

I wanted so desperately to tell her but I couldn’t.

I wanted so badly to inform Brenda that I had more important things to worry about than making sure the lipsticks were alphabetized, or that the powders were arranged in alternating shades of rouge and beige: namely, that a splitting image of one of the stars you read about in Us Weekly had a life to live, and she was going to enjoy the fruits of her beauty—fruits that Brenda could only live vicariously through (I tallied six missing issues of Us Weekly over the course of a year; no other magazine had gone unaccounted for during the same period except for a single issue of Better Homes & Gardens, which I found one night crumpled on top of Brenda’s desk).

The way Brenda’s eyes lit up whenever she talked about Mackenzie Davis—I just needed Brenda to recognize my own beauty in the same way! It flipped around, you see, like a head trip—sometimes Brenda bowed to her true queen, and sometimes she said mean things to me. I wasn’t thought of as “intelligent” by Brenda, and I could never tell if it was because of my race or my beauty—the two possibilities flickered around in my head like a dueling candlelight until one night I decided, “It’s both,” and just let it die.

Resentment was brewing between me and Brenda.

Ever since I realized I would have to lie to her about my Cape Cod trip, because September would be the back-to-school rush, and there was no way Brenda was okaying me those vacation days. At Not-Quite Sephora, Brenda’s first rule was: “Just be honest. I want to know everything.”

But do you, Brenda?

Do you want to know how I plan to get out of work during the back-to-school rush, because I’ll be with my boyfriend and his three Yale Law classmates traipsing across Cape Cod? Do you really want to read about a beautiful woman’s life in Us Weekly? (Just steal my diary.) I’ll call in sick. I’ll lie and cough right to your face over the phone, Brenda, and I’m telling you it’s corona. I don’t have to be honest with you about anything because you rule by fear, not trust, and in a world of fear without trust anything goes.

Fear without trust is the animal kingdom.

And Not-Quite Sephora is the animal world.

The night before my last day at Not-Quite Sephora, Brenda humiliated Ashley in the stock room. (Ashley had made the mistake of asking her for paid time off for a wedding in December.) I didn’t overhear it, but I heard about it, which was enough. I have always had a way with words, and I gave Brenda some direct evidence of it by way of a resignation letter I wrote to the district manager—only it wasn’t really a resignation letter, it was more like a record of how Karen McHiggins was a terrible supervisor, sent to Corporate and cc-ed to the entire floor. (What mattered wasn’t that I had cc-ed the entire floor, but that the next morning, every single person on the floor congratulated me.) The group chat I’m in with Ashley and Gabby pops off more than ever now ever since I quit, only I didn’t mean to quit.

I only wanted to take a truthful temperature.

Brenda showed all of her cards when I showed up to my shift the next day. “Nina? My office. Now.”

I made eye contact with Ashley, who was already in her uniform, and we both smiled.

She kind of gave me an eye hug.

I wore nude lipstick that day.

The email I had sent Corporate was subject-lined “Management’s Mismanagement,” and it listed six bullet points about Brenda’s bad behavior (one involved throwing a purse at a mannequin; the last five were instances of emotional abuse). It ended with a paragraph about Brenda’s encounter with Ashley in the stock room (Brenda had called Ashley “unlikable,” “self-absorbed,” “a fucking dipshit”).

I laid out the case like the lawyer I couldn’t afford to be (I had other interests, hobbies, and pursuits in middle school, like not killing myself). Brenda was probably shocked I could write. She was probably shocked I could read, but I wield words as weapons—that’s the only thing you ever have to know about me. (In third grade, I won the spelling bee too.)

How did I dress for work the day after I wrote “Management’s Mismanagement” (and really I should say the morning after, because I sent the email at 4 a.m. and had to wake up three hours to let an exterminator in)?

I looked like a star.

I had even spent the last six months of my life casually coaxing Brenda toward the mixed-race celebrities I wanted her to subliminally see me as. Cape Cod would smile. I’d fit in well there, because in my late forties or early fifties I’d have the sort of personality that everybody at Beach Road would know to be impressed by—I could lift my life up to heights that the bourgeois rabble couldn’t even see. Not a single one of my applications to a white-collar job had ended in a palatable offer. Not-Quite Sephora, founded in Vermont, has a labor-friendly CEO. My benefits were good—I even had vision and dental. “One way or another, I’m bringing up my Cape Cod trip,” was the last clear thought I had before knocking on Brenda’s door.

“Come in,” a harsh voice gruffed.

I opened the door.

“Close that please,” was the first thing I heard Brenda say before she and I even made eye contact.

I closed the door dutifully.

Karen McHiggins was standing next to her desk in red pants and a black blazer. She had tied her hair into pigtails that day for some reason, although her hair was so short that they ended up looking more like ringlets, and her eyes behind her glasses were blue and pixel-like. Brenda made a quick gesture at the floor with her hands, almost like she was trying to say “Enough!”, and then said: “What is going on, Nina—what is going on, because I do not understand you.”

Her voice was hoarse.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her red pants—but your blazer is black?—so I just said, “I—” while panning my gaze to her desk, waiting for her to continue.

Brenda’s desk was a mess.

Just like her thought processes.

“If you have ever had a problem with me, you could have come to me directly. What have I always told you, Nina—” Brenda was now screaming.

Brenda thinks screaming has an effect on me.

She’s right—loud noises do have an effect on me. Elevated decibels have an effect on every animal that evolves through nature. How much do I hate Brenda right now? My eyes are staring into hers—but I don’t see a human.

I see an animal.

The power of volume is that it throbs the ear—and ears desire music. Ears desire harmony. Wild animals make me forget poetry as I bolt into the jungle—how much do I hate the woman screaming into my ears right now? Well, there’s a simple formula for that, and all of us are making it, even if we don’t know that we’re making it. We take how much anxiety we experience from being around a person, and then we multiply it by a factor.

My factor is 1 when that person is equal to me.

My factor is a fraction of 1 when that person is homeless.

My factor is greater than 1 when that person is greater than me.

And for Brenda my factor was 42,137—that’s 1 for every dollar that the winds of Brenda’s turbulence lorded over me, granting me vision and dental.

The ensuing number is a hatred.

How much anxiety was Brenda creating in me? Well, for starters—how much did I distrust Brenda? (And how much did I secretly want Brenda to like me?) All the eyeliner I wore to work every day—it wasn’t for mall patrol, it wasn’t for Ashley, and Lord knows it wasn’t for Gabby.

It was for me.

But maybe a little bit of it was for Brenda.

And how much taller does Brenda tower over me right now?

And how much taller does Brenda tower over me right now? Well, let’s see—I submitted 42 job applications, all non-retail. Interviewed at 11. Final-rounded at 7. Received an offer at two—both in New York, which I couldn’t afford. A young white boy at a social media marketing firm told me during the interview that I was “obviously brilliant” before offering me an internship. By July, Brenda towered over me like a god. I fell asleep at night fantasizing about her supervillain origin story. Brenda complained so much about Americans who weren’t vaccinated that I once asked her if she was a childhood polio survivor. “Where in the world did you get that idea?” Brenda laughed, and I laughed too. “Oh, I was just curious.”“How many times have I told you, Nina…”

My expenses have been going up, thanks to my new boyfriend. (As a matter of fact, I am the type of girl to go Dutch!) Taking over Brenda’s position would mean a four-percent raise. To my surprise, Brenda took off her glasses, put them on top of a crinkled magazine on her desk, and started crying. Like, actually crying.

Two actual teardrops leaked out of her eyes.

Self-pity makes me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable when the powerless do it, because now I have to do something, and it makes me uncomfortable when the powerful do it, because now I have to eat them. When somebody more powerful than me expresses self-pity, I can’t help it: I want to guillotine them. I want to take away their right to exist, but I want to watch them suffer first. If I were God, I’d invent Hell just for Brenda. It satisfied me that Brenda would most likely die without children or a partner. I want all capitalists in the First World to die without children or a partner, but to have afterlives that go on forever.

It still doesn’t seem enough though.

Brenda’s office has a desk, no windows, and a door that leads to the loading dock. A poster on the wall behind her desk, and I was just noticing this about her office now for the first time, was of a lighthouse in Cape Cod. “—the back-to-school rush—” Brenda was saying, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

The ceiling light was fluorescent, and the walls were built of the same beige bricks that made up my elementary school. I once applied to a master’s program in sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

I got in, too.

I hate it here in America—doesn’t anybody else? Is this really that much better than the Soviet Union?

Sympathy for Brenda?

Brenda who lorded over my vision and dental like a bureaucratic algorithm—my boss Brenda?

I did good work.

I was Brenda’s star employee! (I left that part out because I’m not the bragging type.) The only work I couldn’t charge for was the work I didn’t want to do—navigating around the runes and mysteries of Brenda’s uncharted sensitivities like Leif Erikson. The truth was, I hated Brenda for not being able to see me as a beautiful woman just because I wasn’t a beautiful white woman like the pin-up girls she’d gone to school with in New Jersey. Brenda bleeds white guilt, but she rarely ever let me massage any of it toward my favor, except superficially (and you can guess by now how I feel about superficiality). Brenda’s insincerity dehumanized her to me. We humanize each other first as leaps of faith, and then through trust—and nothing about Brenda’s way of existing suggested she could be trusted by me. Not her white guilt. Not her New Jersey liberalism.

Not even her tears.

In fact the longer Brenda cried, the more intensely I wanted to punish her—the phrase “white bitch tears” comes to mind. I wondered if Brenda sincerely didn’t understand that if I could push a button to keep her trapped inside a hole for the rest of her life, I would, and her tears only made me want to push harder. Still, it gave me a start to see—this woman who could take away my ability to not go into debt like checking “Buy Now” on Amazon—reduced before me into a person now trying to trick me into believing she has a soul.

Don’t the workers of the world understand?

Powerful people don’t have souls.

Brenda having a soul would have meant taking my ideas about the BOPUS orders seriously, and not dismissing them out of hand because how could any good ideas come from Nina, the pretty one, if Brenda’s even not-racist enough to see me as pretty (BOPUS is industry slang for “buy online, pick up in store,” and it’s basically brought Not-Quite Sephora to its knees—that and Brenda’s mismanagement). I could divide my hatred of Brenda by a factor to account for the fact that she was fat and unmarried—but whose fault was that, Krispy Kreme? Do you think I actually like exercising?

Are you ready for some real talk now?

I can tell you about the runner’s high until I’m blue in the face, but I’m not built inside like a runner—I’m built inside like a girl who understands that nothing tastes as good as being pretty feels. I don’t know how American society decayed to this point—my Ph.D. dissertation in sociology at Johns Hopkins would have been about the link between an artificial society and the importance placed on appearances, but I couldn’t afford to go, I had actual work to do in middle school (like not killing myself) so I never bothered thinking very long and hard about anything. “Quitting would mean losing my gym membership,” I suddenly remembered.

A new recognition suddenly dawned over me—no gym membership would mean no Cape Cod. It takes a couple hundred months and a couple thousands steps to get there, but trust me, I’ve worked out the odds.

(I make my brain work for me.)

I looked at the lighthouse poster behind Brenda’s desk and said: “Brenda, it’s just—how you treated Ashley last night in the stock room…”

“You weren’t even there!” was what a clear-headed Brenda would’ve said, but Brenda the Tender said nothing.

“I heard about it from Gabby,” I continued. “You know, we’ve talked about this so many times.”

“I know, I know,” Brenda whispered.

“You don’t know how to create a functional work environment sometimes. Groups are held together by trust, not fear.”

I wasn’t quitting.

I was saving everyone at Not-Quite Sephora from Brenda’s bad temper. Brenda’s boss Charles would understand—he’d say, Nina made some good points in this email, but it sounds like you guys have everything worked out, so get back to work—and everyone would move on.

Only Brenda would now be moving into the light.

She would see how her anxieties about Not-Quite Sephora’s declining sales figures were spilling into her paranoias about job security (“And what will I do with all of my competence now that I can’t find a job because I’m old, fat, and ugly?”) and have been spilling into us as sarcasm and curt dismissals ever since her second day on the job. (Her first day was lovely—I was obsessed with Brenda! I even nicknamed her “cool Mom” to Gabby and Ashley.)

How Brenda appeared to me that first day was how Cape Cod once appeared to me too, before this weekend—white-sand beaches, old stone lighthouses, the Kennedys.

Cape Cod had told me a story—and so had Brenda when she first took over Kristi’s post at Not-Quite Sephora (Kristi got pregnant and never came back). Cape Cod’s story was Yale Law, benevolence, intellectualism. Brenda’s story was that she was loud and earthy and understood how to make an entrance—if she’d been honest, she would’ve just said: “I can use my power to make you feel however I want you to feel about yourself. I’m an emotional abuser.”

But the story I heard, because I’m a gullible sweetheart, was “Fun Mom.”

I laughed along amiably to “stressed-out Mom,” bopped along bewilderedly to “not everything is functional upstairs Mom,” and—how do I put this?

I didn’t like the mother who had a master’s degree.

Self-protection was Brenda’s middle name, and nothing I said using the tools of reason or logic could penetrate the fortress of Brenda’s first impressions—that’s the definition of “closed-minded,” by the way (Brenda has a lot to say about closed-minded people—that’s the crazy part).

How we look is the first story we tell each other about who we are. It’s our audiovisual accompaniment to the words that make up the second half of our story—the “spoken half”—and everyone understands that this isn’t fair, everyone understands and then does nothing. Brenda isn’t the only person who learned how to survive in America by going to an American middle school. She’s only lost her temper at me a couple of times, but I’ve been tracking all of them.

I’ve been watching you like a falcon, Brenda.

I’ve been watching you like a true A student.

True A students are out of favor in America for a reason. We’re only mortal, but we’re a little bit supermortal too. Because what I really didn’t like about Brenda was her insincerity—“When have I ever said no to you, Nina?” Brenda was now drying her eyes with a tissue and screaming.

It was a change in the air—a subtle bit of misdirection that she probably thought I was too stupid to catch (I’m not).

I was the powerful one now.

And Brenda McHiggins was now “the victim.”

“You threatened to fire me right after Easter for being late on a BOPUS order,” I treaded carefully.

“Nina, ninety-nine percent of our Google ratings come down to the BOPUS orders—”

“Which is why I said you needed a better system for assigning roles for when people aren’t .”

“Which is why I said you needed a better system for assigning roles for when people aren’t here.”

“But I never threatened to fire you.”

“You told me you’d have my name forwarded to Charles!"

“Exactly!”

“Which is the same as getting fired!”

“That isn’t true, Nina—I would have protected you.”

This statement was so stupid that it almost broke my brain. “Wha—protected me: do you not understand how Charles operates?” Brenda turned her back to me, waved her hand in the air, and said: “I’m not going to go into this with you again” as she looked for her glasses.

“It’s right there,” I said. “On top of Better Homes & Gardens.”

“Oh,” Brenda said without acknowledging me.

Brenda put on her glasses and then sat down into the chair, which made a sound like it was about to snap in half.

This was how she always liked to berate us—from her chair. I had seen that painting of the lighthouse behind Brenda’s desk so many times—it just never occurred to me that it was Cape Cod. Sometimes, I’d overhear Brenda berating Gabby on my way to the restroom and I’d think, “Well, she isn’t wrong—Gabby is kind of stupid—but that’s still not the way you talk to her. You have to incentivize her to trust you first.” (Gabby was the one who first changed Brenda’s nickname from “Fun Mom” to that cunt with a stick up her ass.) Ashley and I burst out laughing. (What else is there to do inside a dying country?)

“Everyone here is so short-tempered with each other because you set the tone. I’ve been too afraid to ask you for three days off in September to go on a trip with my boyfriend for our one-year anniversary because I knew you weren’t going to say yes, so I was just going to take them off as sick days—and that’s not a functional work environment if people are constantly doing things like that all the time, because what you really need to do is go to Charles and ask for more staff.”

“This September—oh, Nina, you got to be kidding me!”

It was the first honest thing I ever heard Brenda say.

I thought about my naïve dream from earlier—how I thought I was going to turn Brenda around.

How I thought I was going to save the store. “The problem is we’re under_staffed_” was what I should’ve said—I get that now, I do, and I don’t know why I couldn’t wear it in my mouth even as it was trying to form in my subconscious. Because other forms were rising in me now too, forms like: “Brenda is a world-class manipulator. She butters you up just to brine you.” (I couldn’t even trust her tears, and if you can’t trust someone’s tears, you can’t trust them to ever find help.) I don’t know how I’d fare if it were just me and Brenda on a deserted island—I could see her killing a cougar for us with her own bare hands, but I could also see her killing me. “I never said that, I just told you I’d have to forward your name to Charles”—Brenda the liar. Brenda who could probably play dead about as well as she could play stupid—any falcon worth its weight in bird could see through it.

“I’ve been having issues with my boyfriend,” I suddenly blurted out.

Where had I learned this from?

Middle school.

“The anniversary trip means a lot to him, and I can’t even say yes or say no—it just hangs there over us, because he knows about the back-to-school rush. And he’s not even someone I—even feel fully comfortable with in some ways. But I’m also scared to lose him, I’m scared every time I come into work on Tuesday because I don’t know how you’re going to change my hours. Everything we do revolves around my not having enough time—I’d have issues building a perfect relationship with him if we had the rest of our lives to ourselves on a deserted island, but every weekend until closing? He works a normal job! He’s tired all the time too, but he makes time to see me and I can’t—I can’t come to you about anything.”

I didn’t cry.

But I did smile in my head:

“Wanna play victim, bitch?”

I could see Cape Cod now—I could see its lighthouse drawing my boyfriend and I closer and closer, I could see us dancing now to The Strokes at midnight like we were back in middle school because I didn’t want this to be the rest of my life, I don’t want retail, I don’t want resumes and cover letters and I don’t want to meet any more Brendas—what I want is for the Brendas of the world to collapse at my feet, but all I can see are the Brendas of the world closing in on me until death and so I need a release, I need to go back to middle school (I was popular in middle school, I can admit that now, I had bee-stung lips, and a bee-stinger too)—I need The Strokes (haven’t you ever made out with a boy in a hot tub while stroking your nails across his abs, parting the hair where his lower back begins?)—“Is this it? … Is this it?”—(my boyfriend and I swimming in the stars of our liberation, and I’ll give him all the vision and dental that he likes)—prey: always just a one-click order away (and we’ll eat lobster, because lobsters hold harms forever)—I the warm body and he the warm arms, holding me in his lanky-panky forever (and if Connor ever got a gym membership I would die—I don’t need a perfect 10, I can settle for an 8.9)—my captors: do they know? Do they understanding I’m not living my one true life? Wearing Ray-Bans while gazing out at the Atlantic from a yacht, because Comfort is my one true God—I’m ready, Mr. DeMille, for my one true closeup to begin. How am I still in Brenda’s office? I’m twenty-seven years old—how am I twenty-seven years old and still smoldering in Brenda’s office? In middle school I listened to The Strokes while everyone else listened to pop hip-hop—another Universe has been calling to me all my life. And all it would take was just a few more thousand steps to get there.

I’ve been running every day since I was thirteen. I don’t even eat my desserts correctly—I just spit and chew.

Ashley and Gabby remind me of who I was back in middle school. I had power over everyone back then except Abercrombie Couture (not her real name). Abercrombie was the class favorite—it’s hard to explain, but among the very-outgoing girls, Abercrombie was Frivolity Personified. And when only the people who needed to see it could see it, Abercrombie was the cruelest human you’ve ever met—she’d ignore you so subtly you’d drive yourself crazy for days asking the other girls if she was mad at you. Back then I had already begun telling myself I was too cool to care—but I still have nightmares about Abercrombie sometimes, about the way she’d say hi to everybody else at the party except me. “I just can’t deal with your emotional up and downs anymore, Brenda! Like I’m sorry—I’ve defended you to Ashley and Gabby so many times! I’m sick of having these conversations with them.”

Abercrombie, I later realized during college, must have been unsettled by how candidly I could talk about her behind her back. That was my little power over her, and I’d like to think I wielded it gracefully. (Abercrombie was dethroned by a lurid sex scandal involving a used condom in eighth grade, and I’d like to believe I led our class to a more open and inclusive place after her dismissal.)

“Three days—where you trying to go, Wuhan?”

“No. The Cod.”

“The what?”

“The Cod.”

“Where’s that?”

“In Massachusetts.”

“You mean Cape Cod?”

That was how quickly I realized I had fumbled the ball—that was the speed at which I realized I had fumbled the fuck-you—the one thing I needed to do correctly and I had fumbled the ball trying to cross the finish line. “It’s the Cape, not the Cod sweetie,” Brenda was already huffing to me by the time I realized my mistake, with a smile on her face. She’ll deny it to this day, and in absolute candor I can’t really say it was a “physical” smile—I don’t remember what it looked like, I don’t remember if Brenda actually huffed or if she even moved her mouth all that much at all, it was more in the eyes, but that bitch smiled.

I grew up in Nevada.

My boyfriend graduated from Yale Law and with him I can see a way out of my life—and I really don’t understand why that’s such a terrible thing to say. And I’m about to lose him—it’s in between the lines, but I can just feel it, I have him wrapped around my little finger because that’s the only way I’d ever have any man who loomed so tall over me, with him it’d be Cape Cod until the end of my days and nobody would ever laugh at me for calling it the Cod again—I’ll just rename it.

My hatred of Brenda in that moment was rivaled only by my childhood hatred of Abercrombie Couture.

But I knew I had to proceed gingerly.

I began to feel like Leif Erikson again—what other uncharted sensitivities do you have, Brenda?

Do white people really have white guilt?

Verbalizing the subconscious is like navigating by stars—Pequod knows where it’s trying to go, it just needs the conscious mind to plot out the steps to get there first—only I couldn’t verbalize any of this, all I could do was feel the mind for throbs like the twitches of a rat’s tail inside the forest below—and I was throbbing for a release, I was throbbing all my middle-school embarrassments, I was throbbing Cape Cod. A woman who understood nothing but appearances stood in front of me, utterly preoccupied with her own self-preservation—neither wise, open-minded, nor beautiful—but who could mean the difference between me and my income, between me and my livelihood, between me and my boyfriend breaking up (which would mean the difference between me and Cape Cod)—and I couldn’t even get anyone on the second floor to take her magazine theft seriously. How do I even begin to tabulate all her subtle knife-wounds to the psyche?

My favorite song by The Strokes?

“Hard to Explain.”

“You can correct the way I say things all you’d like, but it doesn’t change the fact that I live in fear of you—okay? I go home every night and cry. You bully Ashley and Gabby every day but I’m not Ashley or Gabby—okay? You have not created an emotionally safe environment in the workplace and it’s affecting my life—okay? I’m sorry you take yourself so seriously, and I’m sure it has nothing to do with your fear that all the girls who thought you’d never amount to anything in middle school might be right, but if you have to terrorize other people just to feel better about yourself, that’s not how I roll—okay? That’s not me. The way you talk to Ashley, Gabby, Mike, Chris—it’s un-ac-cep-ta-ble, Brenda.”

And this is where my ship was trying to go:

“I don’t think you belong in your position. So that’s what I told Charles.”

I’d set fire to Cape Cod if I could.

I’d set fire to my boyfriend’s lake house, I’d set fire to Brenda’s Us Weeklies, and I’d certainly set fire to the poster of the lighthouse with seagulls behind Brenda’s desk.

“I don’t work here anymore. Not until you apologize to Ashley,” I added quickly.

My speech was now outpacing my life decisions.

“And I’m not going to be manipulated by you anymore, okay? Because you know how hard I work, you know how much I give to this store every day but Wannabe-Nordstrom isn’t my life, okay? I am not living the life I want to live every single day—so that’s my life, okay?”

Were ordinary people in the Soviet Union this unhappy? Has anyone ever bothered to ask them?

The only thing I ever knew how to do around Brenda was say whatever I needed to say to make her feel comfortable.

Like seagulls exploding out of a cove, that was the only thing Brenda ever seemed to value: her personal comfort. I don’t remember how Brenda looked in that moment. She kept darting her eyes between Better Homes & Gardens and the floor, and her glasses were foggy. I gazed at Brenda with a falcon’s stare and said:

“Think of last night as my last straw.”

It’d be worth it, you know.

It’d be worth it to suspend my gym membership for a few months to see Brenda have to swallow the fruits of her own disorder. I hadn’t coaxed Brenda into reacting the way she did to Ashley’s request—I had only coaxed Ashley into talking to her, and that was a sincere act of friendship: “You have to stand up for yourself with people like that, Ashley.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Brenda and you are like best friends.”

“We are not.”

“You have her wrapped around your little finger, Nina.”

“No I don’t,” I said, and then I hit Ashley’s face with a big fat pillow until feathers fell out, which of course never happened because Ashley and I don’t have open and honest conversations about anything. All Ashley said was “You’re probably right,” and I could sense in Ashley’s eyes that she was perceptive enough to understand I was probably wrong—but even I couldn’t pick that up, at least not consciously, so in a way, Ashley doomed herself by failing to correct me.

I was Brenda’s star employee and everybody knew it.

I’ve been an A student all my life.

I’m the picture of good anger management.

Management hates it when you quit. That’s the one thing you can still lord over them, even during a recession (and July 2022 in America was anything but)—replacing an employee costs time, and time is money. Every store manager knows that—even Brenda (her management woes don’t source back to her inability to optimize).

And then Brenda said something so stupid that for a second I almost thought she was parodying Gabby.

“I thought you and I could speak openly to each other.”

Brenda.

Girl.

Just because you tell me about the medications you take for your back problems doesn’t mean we’re friends.

Was this really happening right now?

“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” I told Brenda. “I did speak openly in the email.”

Was Brenda really buying into Ashley’s delusion that management and workers can be just friends?

Or was she just calculating that I—because I’m pretty—was stupid enough to buy into it too?

“Actually, no—the way you engage with others doesn’t seem intended to provide a pathway for sincere and open conversations. You have a ‘No Assholes’ policy that seems intended to make other people suppress their true feelings around you at all times, because anybody who contradicts you is automatically an asshole.”

I didn’t say that.

I just said: “It can be intimidating to speak to you sometimes.”

Even when you try to laugh with me about your muscle relaxants, I laugh back, but what I really want to say is “Brenda, a certain percentage of the population is going to have back problems, and you have given me no particular reason to care about yours.” I think again now about if Brenda and I were stuck on a deserted island. I’d probably have to save her life from the elements from time to time, and that’d build trust between us. “What we’d need to do is charter a plane somewhere, and have the plane crash. That’s the only way to resuscitate this relationship.”

“How many times have I told you, Nina, you can come to me about anything…” and before I could even respond, Brenda began comparing our dynamics to a mother-daughter relationship and I was one second away from saying, “Bitch, that’s your problem,” but I caught myself and said calmly:

“Brenda, that’s the problem.”

Brenda looked at me earnestly.

“Just, that right there—the word you used. I don’t think you really understand other people’s boundaries? I tell you obligatory anecdotes from my personal life because you specifically ask to hear them, not because I want to volunteer them—again, that’s how afraid I am of you, Brenda, because I don’t even feel like I have the right to tell you that my dating history is, actually, now that I think about it, none of your business. And then you lecture me about how I talk to my boyfriend? Again, because you asked to hear the details, and you actually make it so that now I’m thinking about my boyfriend at work instead of focusing on my job, which you then get mad at me for? I don’t think you really understand, Brenda, how your friendliness comes off when it’s mixed with so much—neediness, I don’t know, this need to control everything all the time—to make everything perfect.”

The first time I ever met Brenda, we got along so well that after our shift we went to a Red Lobster on the other side of the strip mall, where she bought me three milkshakes. I told her about growing up with my mom in a trailer park in Nevada and she told me about growing up with her mom in a trailer park in New Jersey—we laughed a lot that night. I don’t even remember what we laughed about, but we were both talkers, Brenda and I, we were both tellers, and we were both showers. I could tell after my first milkshake that Brenda must have floated in the margins of the sub-popular crowd in middle school, and she all but confirmed it on the second (she just had one of those I’ve seen it all energies).

“So how does it feel being back in the Northeast?”

“Honestly?” Brenda said, grabbing a French fry. “I’m ready.”

You couldn’t hear the ocean from where we were sitting, but you could hear a highway.

I understand Brenda.

I really do.

Sometimes at night, while I fantasized about quitting a company whose Corporate was famous for giving their employees vision and dental (and anyway, what else would I do besides marketing or retail? In what other way might I be called upon to serve the good people of America?), I’d climax with an image of Brenda sitting alone at home on a Thursday night (that was Brenda’s day off), crocheting to Fleetwood Mac, with a cat rubbing up against her ankle. The only mystery was how many paintings of beaches dotted her apartment.

I know Brenda doesn’t talk to her mother anymore (“Neither do I!” was probably one of our first laughs), and I’d fantasize about how much she probably secretly admired me—because I was pretty—because I could always talk my way into classes and parties she could only stare through the curtains of (I once helped Brenda create an account on Plenty of Fish), and now it was too late for her because she was already in her late forties or early fifties—and I?

I was bound for Cape Cod.

“What are the locals there like,” all summer long I used to wonder. I work at a Nordstrom now.

And I no longer wonder.

“Oh, sweetie—it’s called the Cape, not the Cod.”

Wasn’t that how she had said it?

Even in her most helpless moment, she was still so condescending—she was still just so frivolously condescending—I mean think about the stakes here, girl, you’re about to lose your star employee right before the back-to-school rush—was the poison dart worth it?

Was the poison tip worth it, Brenda?

“I don’t think it’s healthy for me to work here anymore,” I suddenly blurted out. “You’re not a good influence on me.”

“What can I say to make you stay just through September?”

It was so quick and direct that it snapped me instantly out of my sympathy spell.

Brenda.

There’s the Brenda I knew—Brenda, you’re back!

And you’re still holding onto threads in the air.

This store will dissipate, Brenda. Your job will dissipate, and then you’ll have to go right back out there again and sell your competence at another round on the roulette wheel. (Just don’t end up at another store that sells beauty supplies, Brenda—I don’t think you quite understand what they’re really telling the world.) “I don’t think there’s anything you can say, Brenda. I know how hard the last few months have been for you, and I thought very long and hard about doing this to you. But I have to prioritize my own mental health.”

“You know Charles is only giving me a year.”

Brenda said this with a vulnerability I had never heard from her before.

Her voice was like a child’s.

Guilt—it’s impossible to summon it for a person you’ve already dehumanized. Cockroaches die every day.

My subconscious was churning again—I would have a child with my boyfriend someday, and I would protect her from people like you, Karen McHiggins. “Brenda, you have the mental age of a child,” was what I really wanted to say to her. “When I fuck up at work, who do you think I go to? Nobody—do you understand that, Brenda, because adults take responsibility for their shit.”

But I would have to sugarcoat it, because someone with the mental age of an Abercrombie would be unable to understand that the powerful can’t be friends with the powerless, no matter how hard they tried—and someone with the mental age of an Abercrombie would also need everything sugarcoated for them.

“Brenda, I don’t know how to break this to you but there isn’t going to be any back-to-school rush! It’s not 2019 anymore—Covid killed retail. We don’t know whether we want to be bargain basement or high-end and the middle class is dead, everyone wants either a bargain or an experience! What did they teach you in that master’s program?”

Only I couldn’t say that either, because Brenda would somehow spin it into me losing my cool, which is the one thing I never do—I’ve been one thing and one thing only all my life, and that’s an A student.

“You’ve given your life to a dinosaur, Brenda—move on. Department stores are dead—this isn’t the ’80s anymore. Your image of America—it’s a façade, and I can prove it. It’s that picture of the lighthouse you keep behind your desk that you pilfered from returned merchandise, and I can prove that too. We’re like explorers in an uncharted land. Things are going to fall apart for us in ways we have no templates for, just like they did for all of the generations before us—only they weren’t as trapped inside the façade of returned merchandise as we are! Settled mores are changing. This century could still look like anything—it’s all up for grabs, and more and more people are just beginning to wake up to this new dawn. Maybe what you really need to do is start a YouTube channel. You have the voice for it, you have the charisma, and you have the storytelling abilities—we could all profit from hearing from your perspective, only nobody will because you’re not young, thin, or beautiful, but hey—it’s worth a shot! You’ll have a better chance there at the lighthouse than you do in retail.”

Only I didn’t say any of this either, because I knew Brenda couldn’t hear a word I was saying. Brenda was dead between the eyes—her soul died in middle school, and she’s been dragging the corpses of would-be lives ever since.

“You’re not a particularly smart or competent person, Brenda, and what’s happening right now speaks for itself. You didn’t just get unlucky, Brenda.”

Brenda once whistled to me when she saw me change into a sundress as I was leaving my afternoon shift—“Whose heart are you breaking tonight, Nina?”

“None of your business!” was what I wanted to tell her, but I wanted to let Brenda live vicariously through me—it was the only gentleness I could ever offer her.

“You know Charles is only giving me the year,” Brenda had said, and she was staring into the void now. I could feel her back pain. She had given her whole entire life to Not-Quite-Sephora, six days a week, and on most nights on my way to the restroom I could hear “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac playing from a small Bluetooth speaker. I looked at Brenda and said: “I have no idea what you want from me. It’s not my job to make you look any better than you are at your job. And I don’t know what your agreement with Charlie has to do with anything—in fact, I had lunch with him the other day.”

Brenda lifted her eyes.

“What?” she said stupidly.

“Oh, I’m sorry—I was trying to get a vacation approved. No, Brenda. I needed to talk to him about a few things.”

“What things?”

And then, before I could offer an answer, “What are you trying to say, Nina? Just spit it out!”

“You have a problem, okay? I’ve seen the way you’ve unraveled in the last few months—Gabby and Ashley are afraid of you, Chris is about to quit, literally nobody can handle your emotional volatility anymore. Everybody’s so short-tempered with each other all the time and coming to me for help, and it’s not my job to help them—that’s your job! You’ve created a situation where nobody can even talk to you. We just smile at you out of fear. You don’t command anybody’s respect—you know that, right? So we basically have to operate without a supervisor—you understand that, don’t you?”

It feels good to eat.

I no longer have a gym membership anymore. Instead, I jog every Tuesday and Friday at the public park.

“So yeah—so I guess I just thought it was about time Charlie heard all of this. He’s actually very reasonable if you talk to him in a reasonable way. He said he’d look into opening one or two more positions for us to cover the weekends. But you probably won’t be there to oversee it.”

Not-Quite Sephora was founded as a regional competitor to J.C. Penney in 1991. It never expanded beyond the Northeast, Minnesota, and California, and it’s about to die—it’s only a matter of time. Unless if maybe Corporate in Burlington saw the light and hired someone like me and actually listened to her ideas for turning all of their stores into “experiences,” which is what I’ve been trying to tell Brenda every time she questioned one of my lipstick arrangements. A lot of what I miss about middle school is the taste-test of freedoms I enjoy every day now as an adult: you build a friendship with the highest person who’ll take you in.

That’s how you climb a hierarchy.

Brenda looked at me like a wounded animal.

There really isn’t ambiguity, is there, about which one of us would survive if it were just you and me on a deserted island. A new recognition was forming inside of Brenda, and I didn’t want to be there to watch it settle in—you can’t treat people like you treated Ashley the other night in the stock room, this isn’t the ’80s anymore. Of course, Brenda was too obtuse to work out that I was only bluffing. The truth was, I had talked to Charlie briefly on the second floor, but he just told me to “put it all in an email,” and I knew he was never going to speak to Brenda long enough to ever contradict anything I had just said—Charlie’s not exactly the open type. Besides, Charlie did agree to look into hiring more part-timers, the way Charlie ever agrees to anything—by pretending it was his idea all along. “It’s the unreliability of when customers come in, that’s the problem,” Charlie had explained to me. (“Yes, that’s true. Unreliability is always the problem,” I told Charlie.)

You can’t rely on other people’s testimony when you ask them about Abercrombie Couture.

You have to come to me.

I’ve seen sides of Abercrombie that nobody else has.

“So what’s the dating scene like out here?” Brenda had asked me that first night at Red Lobster, while popping a French fry. I remember trying not to look at Brenda like she was serious. “It’s just men!” I remember laughing to Brenda in front of two tall glasses of milkshake. “It’s just a bunch of men—that’s the only way I know how to put it!”

And then Brenda in her black blazer and black pants laughed too.

Like we were girlfriends.

“I would’ve given you those vacation days, Nina,” Brenda finally said in a whisper. “If I had just understood that you knew what you were doing when you took them—what you were doing to the store—I would’ve given them to you.”

A new sincerity is trying to grow in the air all around us—I can hear its infant-screams, can’t you? (Couldn’t Brenda?) “Oh my God, Brenda. This is about so much more than whether or not I can go on one trip to Cape Cod.”

“That is all this is about to you, Nina, and don’t you pretend otherwise—”

“No, it isn’t.”

“—because you have a fancy boyfriend now.”

“Leave Connor out of this.”

I don’t really know where my life’s going to go after Cape Cod. Colson’s mental health—it causes collateral damage to people (Colson was one of Connor’s three friends that had stayed with us at the lake house). I don’t really think he understands that his actions have consequences on other people. He thinks I’m one of the popular kids who terrorized him in middle school, but the truth is—I’m just a little bit higher or lower on the pecking order than he is. All of us are—all of us down here. I can’t really bring myself to fully hate him for what he did, but then I remember what his life is and I do—I hate him by several orders of magnitude more than I ever hated Brenda. And what Colson and Brenda both have in common, of course, is their dripping self-pity: they’re both absolutely lacquered in it (what is it about competitive social environments that produces so much self-pity anyway, dripping like honey?). I didn’t have too much compassion for Colson when he asked me to feed some of his honey back to him with my fingers. “Money,” I wanted to tell him.

“How much money you have is an easy way to tabulate what your self-pity is worth to me.”

But to be honest, I couldn’t even lift a finger to care.

Cape Cod was only four days ago, but it’s already just another memory now—that’s how all of our weekends are bound to end. Several hundred more of these and then it’s lights out. Connor and I listened to the first season of Serial on the way up, and as we walked through Martha’s Vineyard later that afternoon, we saw fifty migrants from South America file onto a bus bound for a military installation.

There were cameras and cake everywhere.

We’re all participants in this gladiatorial contest to see who ends up in Cape Cod as the sun sets over our lives.

Colson recently wrote a book called A Stick of Dynamite in the American Elite.

I wish him luck.

I have plans for him, you know.

No matter what his next chess move is—I have a plan to stop him. I left Brenda alone in her office that day. I never learned where she went after she was dismissed from Not-Quite Sephora, all I remember is Ashley and Gabby coming over to hug me as I grabbed my purse from the break room, and they both quit two days later. It was because there’s something in my soul that doesn’t like to see other people are in pain—even people without souls like Brenda (Colson doesn’t count because he’s not really a human in my eyes, he’s more like a bad anecdote you shake off)—that I found myself hugging Brenda right before I said goodbye, holding her as she kept saying to me that I’d been like a daughter to her: “Brenda—Brenda, listen to me. My boyfriend has an ex-boyfriend whose stepmom also has a drinking problem, okay? Brenda—are you listening to me? They live in Westport…”

Cape Cod will die.

It’s only a matter of time before it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. I sail America’s values like Leif Erikson now—other people have built their homes and comforts here, but I don’t mind. I wonder sometimes what Abercrombie Couture anesthetizes her listlessness to these days—HBO? Unsubtle affairs with younger men? “How long before mundane dehumanization bears fruit?” I smile to myself every day at Nordstrom, as I walk around the counter to deliver my customer’s parcels to them personally.

I see Abercrombie sometimes in the eyes of the women I help at Nordstrom. They’re all moms, and if that’s the final meaning of our lives—then yes, I agree.

Let’s all be moms.

You don’t know the Hell I’ll reign over America’s guilty class in the twenty-first century, but you will soon: I will mother the destruction of America’s guilded gilts into existence. I broke up with Connor this morning. Something about his reaction to Colson’s breakdown in Cape Cod just didn’t sit well with me—he couldn’t see through Colson’s insincerity, and that makes me think he might not have what it takes in this life to go where I’m trying to go. At my new job at the mall, I nibble on old memories like a woman who hasn’t eaten now in years. The last person I ate was my narcissistic mother in Nevada—she ruined my childhood—she was the Leif Erikson of my formative years—but then again?

So was my middle school.

College feels like a million years ago. My sorority sisters are all married with kids now. Mothers will do anything to protect their young.

#MeToo.

2022

[aroaceleovaldez]

okay outside of the retcons and continuity errors in TSATS, I think the main part that bugs me is how much the book seems to infantilize Nico, particularly relating to his relationship with Will. Especially because the book seems to remember and then forget again that Nico is autistic only when it’s convenient to infantilize him further.

Nico is randomly nerfed and basically helpless at literally everything the entire book. There is not a single fight EVER in the book that he actually fights without someone else very directly doing the work for him or actively helping him (usually LITERALLY holding his hand), save for that singular time where he sneak-attack kills the monster that just regenerated, but honestly that doesn’t really count as a fight. Or the aeternae, but they literally weren’t attacking him.

He’s in the underworld! He’s been dating Will for a year! How is he completely incapable of the simplest tasks? He tries to help Will - in the infirmary (is helpless at it), patch up his wounds (Will’s condition only worsens), put batteries in a sun lamp (he drops the batteries) - every time he manages to fuck up like he’s never done a single task in his life before. He runs away from every fight or someone else does the work for him because he’s randomly incapable of it for some random excuse. He completely loses several notable powers of his (only ever using one of his powers the entire book, and the only other reference to his powers is his shadow-travel which we don’t actually see) and acts like he’s physically incapable of them even though they logically should be the best answer for a particular situation (geokinesis! dream powers! influencing fear/nightmares! one-tap kill dissolve-you-to-bones! rip souls out of living people!) Yet Will randomly can do everything he can’t - generates two completely new powers to fight Nyx with (alongside bringing back an old power that got forgotten)! Plus a third (growing flowers/plants) that doesn’t even have anything done with it! Can pick the fruit from Persephone’s garden when Nico can’t (LITERALLY IN NICO’S OWN HOME)! Nico panicking? Soothes him without even trying. Will saves Nico in fights like five different times when he’s supposed to be the one with zero combat experience and explicitly isn’t a fighter (and doesn’t even have a weapon) and Nico’s the one who lived on his own as a rogue for three years! They’re in the Underworld, Nico’s home, and Will - WHILE ON DEATH’S DOORSTEP. LITERALLY. - is more powerful than him! For no reason! Nico is a Big 3 kid! He’s SUPPOSED to be extremely op! We don’t even see Nico speak to any true ghosts the entire book and they even acknowledge that he’s Ghost King!

And then on top of it all, the narrative keeps treating Nico as not knowing what’s best for himself and making Will always correct. Or making it so Will is the only one who is able to comfort Nico ever. And have Nico constantly refer to Will with almost exclusively babyish pet-names - “Night-light,” “Care bear” (when logically Nico shouldn’t even know anything about Care Bear lore?), even “sun therapy lamp” isn’t great. The constant “My little ball of darkness” also isn’t great? Like, if you establish that Nico’s extremely short, then it’s not as bad cause then it’s a height joke, but since the book never establishes that it just reads as more infantilizing.

I get they were trying to hype up Will for this book and let him have some action scenes so it wasn’t just Nico dragging him through the Underworld for 50 chapters while he does nothing but be emotional support. And Nico’s powers usually means he very often acts as an almost literal dues ex machina in a lot of plots. But you can still work with that without nerfing Nico so much, or completely infantilizing him! Just because Nico has trauma doesn’t mean he can’t be capable on his own, and that doesn’t have to negate him having people he leans on for support! These things can coexist!

#tsats #the sun and the star #tsats spoilers #the sun and the star spoilers #pjo #riordanverse #nico di angelo #long post // #bi-weekly complaining time! okay now time to go doodle something silly

[the-grand-gemini]

Big obsessed with all of the BG3 villains. The themes of the cycle of abuse/trauma in all of the main cast makes me feral over how the villains unfortunately do not/did not get the opportunity to be "saved" by Tav (if doing a good playthrough) and by experiencing the heros journey.

I could talk about Ketheric and Orin, but after reading @bearhugsandshrugs fic it got me deep diving into Gortash's character. It's amazing and everyone should read it especially if you're weak for Tav/Gortash like I am 👀💦

Trigger warning for abuse mentions below the cut.

Let me start with stating this is NOT an Enver Gortash apologist post, he's evil and he's done terrible things. This is just me yelling into the void about character foils.

Childhood abuse:

In game we really only get to know his history through background information that we can scrape together if you search through the city and the House of Hope.

We don't get any details on what exactly Enver went through as a child. We can assume neglect/possible violence from his parents given his mother's words and the fact they sold him. We get to know that he was beaten when living in the House of Hope, but not what other possible horrors he could have experienced there (not including just the trauma of witnessing the other debtors and Hope), what age he was, or for how long (if anyone knows more timeline wise I'd love to know) he lived there before he escaped. We don't know how he escaped either, if he had help or did so on his own.

I'm no child psychologist, but abuse has lasting effects as we can see through all of the main party. Victims of abuse tend to have difficulty moving past certain emotional stages in their life. Aka a person abused in their childhood may have issues maturing emotionally without therapy, etc (again I'm not a psychologist). There is a strong possibility that "Child" Enver is still probably holding the reins emotionally while adult Enver isn't even aware of how his past affects every action and reaction he has at all times.

I can't imagine how living with Raphael during ones formative years being healthy in anyway, but we can definitely see some of the learned behaviours he's picked up from the Cambion. A focus on possing/presentation, a suave persona, torturing/using people for his own gain, a general lack of empathy, deal making, similar attire with devil motifs...

Unhealthy coping mechanisms:

Speaking of attire, Enver's coat not allowing Fear to be cast on him speaks volumes to me. Imagine the absolute horror of moving from one situation of abuse to another much worse one in the hells as a child/teen and probably being in a state of fear/anxiety at all times. Enver wearing a coat that doesn't allow him to feel fear gives me three main thoughts:

1. He is doing everything in his power to avoid that specific emotion and therefore prevents himself from thinking about that period of his life. Meaning he is not confronting his trauma the same way the main party is forced to throughout the game.

2. Narratively does the coat prevent him from feeling any fear at all? Or do we just go with the game mechanic that ensures he cannot be made afraid by the fear spell? If it prevents him from feeling fear at all (which I think is narratively more interesting and you can take this headcanon out of my cold dead hands) how does this effect his every day decisions? Fear prevents risky decisions all the time, it's one of the emotions that actively keeps people alive. Psychopaths usually don't experience fear the same way an average person would. Given his many horrific actions (the Iron Throne being a key example) I wonder how much his forceful removal of fear has done to his perception of rational thought. If you aren't afraid of consequences what's to stop you from doing anything at all? Selling a loyal body guard to the hells, torturing an entire faction of people in order to manufacturer your own personal army, stealing from an immensely powerful devil aka mother fucking MEPHISTOPHELES??? He presents himself as calm and collected in conversation. He appears as if he's the most rational of all three villains when he's really just as awful when we look into what he's actually been up to vs seeing Orin and Ketheric kill people on screen.

3. Where did he get the coat? Did he make it himself or was it a boon from Bane? A promise to a devout worshiper that he would never be made to feel afraid or beneath anyone again?

Another abuser - Bane:

Speaking of Bane... Another user (please tag if anyone can find the original post!) mentioned a line Astarion says where he states that he prayed to all the gods, but none answered. OP wondered if Enver, trapped in the hells and desperate for salvation, called out the same way... only for Bane to be the only god to answer. I'd die to know specifically when he was introduced to Bane and made to be his chosen.

We know Bane is considered an evil god and we even find that if we kill Enver and then use speak with dead that Bane is torturing him in the afterlife for failing him.

Given this abusive relationship is Enver a foil for Gale, a man groomed from a young age by a goddess and left with the consequences when his actions did not meet her expectations?

Is he like Shadowheart, someone who was given no alternative and made to believe they willingly chose their god only to learn they were deceived and never had any other options?

Like Wyll he's cast out by his father (or in his case both parents).

Like Lae'zel he's worshipping a deity with false promises, how can he believe he'll rule the entire world like a god himself when Bane the god of TYRANNY would see no other at the top but himself (Was he secretly planning to use the crown like Gale to usurp Bane or just pandering to us)?

We know he and Karlach are absolutely foils for each other given that he is her abuser and like himself Karlach was forged by her times in the hells only to survive on her own merits.

Those are my thoughts! Would love to know anyone else's on the walking red flag that is Lord Enver Gortash.

If Enver lost his memories like the Dark Urge would he be given a chance to redeem himself through his actions? Could he with his knowledge of infernal engines fix Karlach's heart

Would Enver have ever become Lord Gortash if not for Bane...?

Anyways if anyone wants to yell at me about Enver, Orin, or Ketheric please feel free to do so! I love characters who fell through the cracks because they had no one there to help them only to crawl out themselves and burn the world.

#enver gortash #lord gortash #bg3 gortash #bg3 #bg3 spoilers #bg3 thoughts #headcanons #character study #the cycle of abuse #trauma #child abuse #trigger warning #fear #ketheric thorm #orin the red #character exploration #narrative foils

[lonepower]

@curlyparmesan replied to your post “hi! guess who's alive! this is just the page from...”:

You made that?? It's so good!! I know nothing about Hollow Knight but it looks so pretty.

​BWEH THANK U 😭-

but also oh man okay now i have to yell because this game. it's like. ok. so the game is about this little bug

(absolute creature. unauthorized fucking thing.) known variably as "the knight", the "little ghost", "pale thing", "small friend"- the point is they don't really have a name, or an identity, or any memories, or any personality, or anything. (spoiler alert: they have all of these.)

the game starts with you entering "Hallownest," a deteriorating subterranean kingdom of bugs that has been slowly rotting for an unknown amount of time as a mysterious infection consumes it from within. the king is missing; the queen has barricaded herself into her home out of an unspecified grief; all but a handful of citizens are dead; and nobody wants to sleep, because if you do the infection will come to take over your dreams and drive you mad. and dying doesn't free you from this because it just fills you with goo and puppets your corpse around! fun.

so your job as this little creature is to find out what's causing the dreaming sickness and put a stop to it.

there is a way you are supposed to put a stop to it. this is the easiest, worst, and most horrifying ending.

describing the story any further would delve into spoilers that are absolutely more fun to discover (and going lore-hunting is at least half the fun of the game - make sure to explore everywhere), but like. these little 16 pixels will RIP your HEART from your BODY. they will cause AGONIES. you'll be on the floor crying about bugs and you WILL like it.

as far as gameplay goes, it's a 2D sidescroller/metroidvania style, which put me off it for a long time because i haaaaaaaaaate metroidvanias. i actually started it, got past the first boss (which is a testament to how good it is in and of itself, because usually i get to the first enemy and am just like "nah"), went "oh right I hate metroidvanias," and gave up. and then about three days later i was like, "...but I want to know what happens next." as it turns out, it's actually highly moddable, so I stuck god mode on and played through the entire thing three times in about a month. I've actually weaned myself off of it for a couple of encounters, which is even more impressive! Troupe Master Grimm also headlines my very very very short list of "bosses I not only tolerate, but actively enjoy" (alongside essej from control + tom and hel from ghostrunner. that's the entire list.) combat is... still hard, but can be rewarding - it's mostly timing-based and there's a parry mechanic whose window is so fucking microscopic but actually managing it is really satisfying.

(also, like-

-i can't even go into details because it's BIIIG spoilers but like. the way two of the characters parry. like their stances and stuff. i'm screaming and wailing and tearing out my hair over the Implications of that-)

and the MUSIC too. the THEMES and MOTIFS. the way certain characters' leitmotifs creep into different areas or into other characters' themes... POETIC CINEMA. i could, have, and will continue to listen to the main theme, dirtmouth bgm, and city of tears bgm on repeat for hours. (also bonus favorite boss theme. the fact that this man is not a Tumblr Sexyman(tm) continues to boggle me-)

another thing I really like is that you're not the only adventurer in the world. there's not really a companion mechanic (though there are some upgrades that will give you little minions, and you can kill a clown and he'll give you his son as a reward), but there's a couple of other characters you can encounter periodically across the game who are on their own quests, which depending on your actions you can help bring to fruition or not. it just feels like the kind of thing you don't see very often? but this kingdom is known in-universe to draw adventurers, and there... actually are other adventurers. idk. it's neat.

anyway. play hollow knight. it will hurt you but you won't regret it.

#curlyparmesan #replies #hollow knight #THIS GAME. THIS GAME MAN- #it literally broke six uninterrupted years of art block. i hadn't so much as doodled in half of a decade and this little bug came along-

[lansplaining]

*rocks up to the fandom meme mad late with drip coffee i made in my own home even though its like 10pm*

sometimes i see posts that express some intense general feeling about my dude, lan wangji. intense like or dislike, extreme affection or disdain, you know, the usual. and – with the exception of people who are super blatant side character fans who are expressing the opinion they adopted from their fav side character – i don’t really believe any of these strong emotion claims (ppl who are actively roleplaying jiang cheng or lan jingyi i believe you i promise pls).

(beginning hyperbolic generalizations in 3,2,1-) as a group fandom just does not ponder lan wangji enough for me to believe many of them actually care the way the suggest they do, and when they do he doesn’t stay the topic of conversation for long. sure, they might start a post about his traumas and woes about his parents and his beloved but strict grumpy uncle but that post will swiftly slide to xichen and the way he approaches relationships and then it turns into 3zun and that turns into Mess lol. maybe they’ll start with how he was raised but don’t be fooled! that is actually just the opportunity to complain about the evil lan sect and all its controlling rules in a trench coat. if you find a post about his relationship with his brother then what you’ve actually found is a post about the tension between the nie bros, the trauma amongst the siblings jin, or Whatever Is Happening In Lotus Pier and the Twin Jades of Lan are actually just there as a comparison point in paragraph three of the essay. more often than any of this, if you think a post is about lan zhan, blink, and it will be wangxian before you hit the author’s note/tags.

secondly, if the fic isn’t a lwj-centric fic then lwj tends to be 1) an objective window into the story, a reliable narrator you can trust to give you the plot with no opinions, thoughts, or feelings about what’s happening 2) a Voice of Judgement an author can use to berate a character they’re mad at with the idea that hanguang-jun can get away with that with minimal fall out and is Convincingly Convicting enough to change the character’s behavior 3) a plot-hole filler – you don’t have to explain why something is true is lwj says it bc he never lies and he probably knows more than you. it’s the maple leaf in the Xuanwu cave over and over 4) a treat for wwx. you don’t have to like lwj or let him speak, just have him in the background for wwx to kiss and beg money from occasionally.

i have to say I’m not /bothered/ by this. i have enough lwj brainrot for all of us I don’t need other people’s thoughts and headcanons i have my own and a corner of fandom that supports me in these things. i know a lot of it is bc mxtx made him all ~mysterious. i just think its funny when people speak so strongly on the guy as if they think of him ever for real at all.

this is fascinating. obviously I spend my times in the JGY/xiyao corners of the fandom, but I am probably one of the people you are talking about in some ways!! i fucking love lan wangji, i experience extreme Feelings about him regularly and he's the reason i fell in love with CQL and ended up on this downward spiral into madness

but if i tried to make a post about him it would be like, 'u know when CQL wangji says 'are there rules already written for everything in the world?' and it permanently altered my brain chemistry? (hand gestures)'. my position on lan wangji is no thoughts, only internal yelling.

however, i think all the patterns you're noticing are so right, especially when it comes to fic. when it comes to meta i sort of get it-- wangji doesn't feel like he NEEDS explanations, he's the main love interest! other characters need their arcs and interests and personalities excavated, whereas his is surely just right out there. but it isn't!

#ask answered

[rhinozilla]

🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹

(I'm not sorry lmao)

NOW YOU LISTEN HERE. I do not even have the ambition to count these flowers, let alone count out the sentences on this WIP to match. So I'm just gonna post the entire WIP, you monster XD

--

The night was young, and Hob was not. Not in years at least. Most days his body was perfectly happy to still be the spry young man that he’d been when he received the gift of immortality. Then there were evenings like this…He had just finished grading his students’ final projects for the semester, and the crash had hit him rapidly.

He hadn’t INTENDED to fall asleep watching some Netflix show about ancient earthquakes on the couch with a bowl of popcorn at 7pm in the middle of the week…but here they were.

So when his phone—having slipped from the arm rest of the couch to be wedged between his shoulder and the cushion—began to vibrate with an incoming call, he came awake thinking that an earthquake was happening right below his very head.

With a jolt, Hob startled and swatted at the cushion, inadvertently smacking the phone to the floor. It hit with a clatter, and he winced at the sound, rolling onto his side and reaching for the phone on the floor.

“Fuck,” he moaned as he did so.

He slumped back into the couch with the phone in hand as the caller ID came up as a colleague from the literature department of the university. He frowned and checked the time. It was half past eight at night. Too late for a routine call. He sat up on the couch and answered the phone.

“Hello, Stephen?”

“Robbie, hey, so sorry for the oddly late call.” He sounded shaky.

Stephen always got a little twitchy this close to the end of the semester, but this wasn’t twitchy. He sounded genuinely unnerved. Something had happened.

“What’s wrong?” Hob asked, deciding to cut to the quick of it and try to avoid Stephen’s usual rambling around the main subject.

“Um…Christ, where to start—”

“At the beginning usually works best,” Hob said, standing up and already moving to put his shoes on. “Where are you? You need help?”

“Um…N-no, not me…I’m at the lecture hall now and…The medics have already arrived—”

“Medics?” Hob grabbed his jacket, keys, and wallet, doing a cursory glance around the flat before opening his front door. “On campus? Who’re the medics for, Stephen?”

“That…That Ric Madoc bloke…He just…Christ, you’ve got to see it to believe it.”

“I’m on my way now, mate. Be there in a jiffy.”

A jiffy turned out to be a cool ten minutes, plus another three when Stephen accidentally told him the wrong lecture hall. Not that it really mattered at that point; Hob could just follow the nervous crowd and staff trying to disperse them.

He spotted Stephen, the head of the literature program at the school, talking to a police officer and a campus security officer. Stephen was a squat man in his fifties, bald on top and thinning the rest of the way around, looking every bit the dusty old librarian in his knitted sweater vest and pressed pants.

Hob hung back, making eye contact with Stephen so he’d know he was there, and then he left his colleague to wrap up…whatever statement he was giving to the officers. Instead, Hob meandered around the dissipating crowd, catching snippets of students’ and staff conversations but actively trying not to engage them as he got close enough to peer into the open doors of the cleared out lecture hall where whatever had happened…had happened.

“…had this crazy look in his eyes…”

“…just one after another after another, like some kind of psychotic episode…”

“…looked like drugs to me. Just a really bad trip. You know how those famous writers party…”

“…heard they found him in the stairwell babbling nonsense…”

“Robbie!” Stephen was hustling toward him soon enough, and Hob turned to look at him, spreading his hands in confusion.

“Bloody Hell, Stephen, what happened?”

Stephen wiped a handkerchief across his sweaty face, huffing a bit, and he gestured for Hob to follow him…away from listening ears.

“He was answering student questions,” Stephen explained once they were safely down the hall. “No odd behavior or strangeness at all for the entire lecture…and then he just…started talking absolute nonsense. All manner of…of half-formed ideas for stories.”

Hob frowned, perplexed as to why that was garnering such a response from everyone present. “Inspiration strikes at weird times, Stephen, you know that.”

Stephen eyed him, shaking his head. “No, this wasn’t that. It was like he was hallucinating it or…sputtering out the words like some kind of compulsion that he couldn’t stop. I was sitting in; I saw the whole thing. He was lucid as you and me, but he was scared by what was happening to him. I’ve never seen such a thing. Made what hair I have left stand on end!”

Hob held out a hand. “All right, all right, but that still doesn’t explain all the police and students—He’s gone to hospital by now, surely? So what’s everyone still doing hanging about?”

Stephen drew a deep, measured breath. “Rumors are already spreading. This way.”

He shuffled farther down the hall, and Hob followed him toward the stairwell.

“Two students found him in here,” Stephen explained, popping open the stairwell door.

Another police officer was standing on the landing inside, taking pictures of the walls.

“Said he was just collapsed on the stairs,” Stephen went on.

Hob followed him, still not sure why he was being shown this…as if it was some kind of…crime…scene. His thoughts trailed off as he looked up. The formerly plain painted walls were marred with words…written in the unhinged font of someone desperate to put ink to their thoughts. But the ink was red…and the ink wasn’t ink.

“Fucking Hell,” Hob breathed, stepping past Stephen and stare at the horrors scribed onto the walls.

“It’s blood,” Stephen said. “His own blood. Poor sod tore open his fingers and did all this…If I believed in it, I’d say he was possessed by something.”

“You said two students found him?” Hob asked, eyes tracing the jagged words without really reading them. “Did he say anything to them?”

Stephen sighed. “He…One of the last things he said that sounded coherent was…The student said he told her that he had someone locked in his apartment. To go let them out and tell them it was over or…something like that. Absolute nonsense.”

Hob continued to frown, staring at the scribblings on the wall.

He’d tried his hand at writing a handful of decades ago. It always ended up degenerating more into journaling, no matter how fantastical or otherworldly he tried to make the stories. He’d already filled enough journals to pack a small library. Written word was still one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and he’d fight anyone on that point.

Still, the way Dream’s face had lit up when he saw the shelves and shelves of journals in Hob’s flat…He hadn’t seemed to mind Hob’s disorganized, rambling writing technique.

He wondered what the old Prince of Stories would think about this madness.

[arcaeda]

toa anniversary munday!

Celebrating TOA and the people who contribute to make our group what it is.

Repost, don't reblog. Only fill in what you feel comfortable sharing!

Happy anniversary, TOA! Here's to many more years spent together.

Name: leon!

Pronouns: he/him mainly but they/them? also sick

Birthday (no year): aug 30th whats up my fellow virgos

Where are you from? What is your time zone?: i'm from good old virginia but ive lived in a few different state. i currently live in illinois (insert peace sign hand emoji here) i'm also central time! midwesterners make some noise

Roleplay experience: my first experience rping was when i was like 12 or so. i started off doing cringe ass rp in deviantart group chats (if anyone remembers those). i didn't start doing (cringey attempts) @ legit para rp until i was 15 or 16 where i used deviantart and tumblr interchangeably. i experimented with panfandom rp for a bit and then a little while after that i found toa!

Got any pets?: my two chihuahuas who are brothers bae and skippy! i post them in gen media sometimes (bae is the white one and skippy is the one that looks like a frito)

Favorite time of year: autumun girlies rise up

Some interests and things you like: video games and animanga, mostly. i like (mostly j)rpgs, visual novels/otome games and rogue-lites. i used to bingewatch 30 episode animes in one day when i was younger LMAO. nowadays i mostly just stick to reading manga with my favorite genres being shoujo & josei. i don't stick to the new anime seasons anymore so these are some oldies, but my favorite anime of the past would probably be kaitou saint tail and nana. the newest anime i've probably enjoyed and actually remember is akatsuki no yona.

Some funfacts & trivia about you: im gonna be real with you all im terrible @ sharing fun facts about myself. uhhhh idk i guess i've swallowed whole pennies and dimes before as a child. i also ate a whole tube of toothpaste on christmas day and puked it up later..... i ate a lot of weird shit as a kid apparently

What non-Fire Emblem games do you play?: uhhh most of my main interest in vidja games is fire emblem, but actively rn i play like mobage and rhythm games on the side. other big interest games for me would probably be the botw series (not neccesarily zelda overall but), persona 5, ffxiv a LOT in the past, hades…. i cannot think of anything else off the top of my head LOL

Favorite Pokemon type & Pokemon: blaziken you are my favorite little guy. my favorite type is probably electric or ice though.

How did you get into Fire Emblem?: i saw fire emblem awakening at gamestop and remembering marth from smash bros decided to buy it

What Fire Emblem games have you played?: there are some i've only read the script for, but for actual games that i've played : geneaology, shadows of valentia, blazing blade, some of sacred stones, path of radiance and some of radiant dawn, awakening, conquest, three houses and engage!

First Fire Emblem game: awakening

Favorite Fire Emblem game: geneaology will stick with me in my heart until i die, but like i also really did enjoy engage. she's climbing up there boys

Any Fire Emblem crushes? 😳: SIGURD FIRE EMBLEM I AM BEGGING YOU I WILL BE YOUR DOG BARK BARK WOOF WOOF

If you’ve played the following games, who was your first S support? Who would you S support nowadays?

Awakening: chrom bc i didnt realize how s supports worked (though i did already like him when we married). my first marriage by choice was with lon'qu. i usually play f!robin, but if i do m!robin i marry cherche teehee

Three Houses: claude my beloved

Engage: alfred. hrk

Favorite Fire Emblem class: i fucking love mage knights so much. so glad engage brought them back

If you were a Fire Emblem character, what would be your class?: villager LMAOOOO but nah for real i think i would probably be a cleric, not by choice but because it would be the only thing i excel @ in universe. (my ass weak as hell)

If you were a Three Houses character, what would be your affiliation?: golden deer rePRESENT WOOOOOO

If you were an Engage character, which Emblem would you Engage with?: sigurd for completely totally normal reasons. marth if you forced me to choose someone else

How did you find TOA?: on twitter! and i am so glad i decided to apply hehe

Current TOA muses: veyle and caeda!

Who was your first TOA muse?: sigurd! i wrote him here for around two years i think, but i also had prior experience writing him before toa teehee

Do you think you have a type of character you gravitate towards?: i definitely think i gravitate towards the parental figure therapist type.

What do you believe you enjoy writing the most?: i love writing idiots who mean well the most i think (looks at sigurd and my very old tormod muse)

Favorite TOA-related memory: everyone swapping and trading letters of their mun name in the discord server. also anything 0 days since our last food discourse related

How do you pronounce TOA? 🤔: toe-uh! since the day i was born

Got any delusions that didn’t see the light of day that you’d like to share? 😉: (barking and growling at you) i am thinking of bringing back timerra after i recover from top surg tho.

#{ ooc. } #{ yayyy dash gamess!!!!!!!!!! }

[chaotic-enby-selfships]

Chaotic La squadra Headcanons because I can

So, I know im not as active on here as I used to be but that's just cause I kinda just. have moments where I forget this site exists hfvgkjsdfgvjksdfgkvsd. Anyways I know I dont really post about JoJo that much but take these chaotic LS headcanons because LS is the main reason I love golden wind so much.

Prosciutto is a fucking plant dad. His room has shelves that are just full of old-ass books and plants. He even has names for them.

Melone, Illuso, Risotto and Formaggio all have an Onlyfans. Formaggio has it ironically while Risotto just has it for the money. If the gang has a flight to somewhere, Prosciutto will be the one to wake everyone up at 5AM even if they have to leave at 1PM. this has resulted in Formaggio and Ghiaccio beating his ass. Illuso says shit like "Yass queen", "Slay", and "material gworl" unironically. he also uses "babe" and "sweetie" as platonic nicknames. also he dresses in drag. His drag queen name is Refa Lection yk how I said Pros is a plant dad? well Formaggio is absolutely a cat dad and yes this HAS resulted in fights since Formaggios cats often knock over Prosciutto's plants. P: "IF YOU DON'T GET THOSE BASTARDS UNDER CONTROL I WILL!!" F: "YOU WON'T LAY A *HAND* ON MY SWEET BABIES!!!! AND HOW DARE YOU CALL THEM BASTARDS!!" Three days grace, Fall out Boy and MCR can almost always be heard from Risottos room. even in the dead of night. Everyone either just puts up with it, listens along, or drowns it out with their own music. Out of all of them, Risotto has the highest spice tolerance. Ghiacco always insists that he can handle the spicy food that Riz eats. He cannot. Both Formaggio and Melone like to metaphorically fuck with everyone in la squadra whenever they're bored, with the exception of Risotto because 1, he doesn't give a shit, and 2, Melone is too intimidated by him. His favorite member to piss off is Ghiaccio. Make no mistake though, they fuck with each other all the time too. They are NOT partners in crime. Formaggio will often dare Ghia to do stupid shit and then film it. He has a whole chest filled with tapes of Ghiaccio failing or suffering during his dares. Melone is a HUGE fucking astrology and tarot card bitch. He legit knows everyone's birth chart by heart and is always offering readings. He also cleanses with incense and Ghiaccio finds it insufferable. Melone also just somehow knows everyones secrets no matter what and no one knows how. The rest of the members all sorta fear him to a certain extent because of this. Yes Melone has used his uncanny ability to his advantage.

Pesci likes to paint his nails. it's usually really messy whenever he does it though, so he'll sometimes get Prosciutto to do it for him. He doesn't really do anything fancy with them; usually just paints them a bright green like his hair or blue to represent the ocean. :) He also watches shit like troom troom and 5 minute crafts and genuinely believes practically every word that they say. He has tried more than once to recreate some craft he saw on one of those channels, and gets really sad when it doesn't work. Pros usually has to console him out of it. Ghiaccio "secretly" listens to BTS and knows all the words to the songs. Formaggio once caught him singing Fake Love at the top of his lungs. Yes Forms has this recorded. The reason Ghia attempts to keep his love for the band a secret (even though everyone knows about it) is cause he thinks that people will make fun of him for listening to it, which Formaggio does do, but mainly just because of Ghia being so insistent on denying it. He really couldn't care less. Both Riz and Melone each have a secret stash of Monster energy in their rooms and both have accidentally stayed up all night more than once. Risotto because he is overworked as shit (poor boi) and Melone because he gets sucked into internet rabbit holes. Between the two of them Risotto is WAY worse though. This man has stayed up for DAYS on end. His record is two weeks without sleep. Sometimes other members of la squadra will deadass find risotto passed the fuck out at his desk. Whenever this happens, it's just a mutual agreement to leave him there (unless it's super important) and Prosciutto will take charge until he wakes up.

#la squadra #la squadra headcanons #proscuitto jojo #melone #prosciutto #risotto nero #formaggio #pesci #illuso #ghiaccio #jojo part 5 #jjba golden wind #jjba headcanons

[fictional-character-whore]

CHAPTER 1 

SUMMARY - Lydia Lupis had lived a terrible 14 years of life. She went to a school full of drug dealing thieves and gangs, lived in a shitty neighbourhood, had parents that didn't even give a shit about her to come home and a brother that treated her like absolute trash. The only half decent thing in her life was a stupid camp - Camp Rim of the World. Her brother Conrad gad a job there but instead of actually doing it, he just snogged any girl he could find, leaving Lydia to do his job for him. Lydia was never that much of a social person and usually spent most of her time at the camp either working or in her own cabin reading. Lydia expected these school holidays to be the same as every other, but what she didn't know was that these holidays were going to change her life. Aliens were taking over planet earth and after following three kids into the woods and meeting a strange boy, the fate of the world somehow rest in their hands. With her new found friends will they be able to save the world before humanity becomes extinct and will a curtain strange boy steal Lydia's heart or smash it into a million pieces?

WARNINGS - i wrote this story years ago so i can’t remember exactly what’s in this but let me know if i miss anything! swearing, mentions of abuse, mentions of parental neglect, mild violence and threatenings, use of weapons, blood?, mega freaking cringe read at your own risk lol

"Wake up Bitch! The campers are arriving!"

My eyes snapped open to the sound of my brother's booming voice and his fist bashing against the door of my cabin.

I sighed and got out of bed to opened the door, almost getting hit in the head by my brother's fist.

"Fuck man, could you at least give me another twenty minutes of sleep? I couldn't sleep last night with all the noise coming from your gay party last night," I said with a scowl on my sleepy face.

"Tough luck shit head, the campers are about to start showing up in about half an hour so if I were you I would get my shit done before they get here and trash the place," he said while walking away.

"Whatever..." I closed the door and went back to bed.

My brother Conrad and I have been living at the camping grounds of Camp Rim of the World for the past few days, helping set up the camp for the holidays. He worked here as one of the camp instructors and since I didn't really have anywhere else to go when he was at work I just with him.

The first few times staying here were fun but after a while it got pretty boring, but it was always fun watching the newbies get scared doing some of the activities.

I got along with most of the workers and the kids my age but I never got too close to anyone because after having the kind of childhood I've had, I learnt that you can never trusted anyone but yourself. So I kind of isolated myself from the group of kids and did my own thing or helped out around the camp.

But sometimes coming here was a relief because being at school and home wasn't always great. The school I go to is full of fucking assholes that sell drugs, drink and do a tone of other fuckin' fucked up shit. Everyone had some kind of weapon on them because you never knew when someone was going to attack you and you never had anything precious on you in case someone stole it.

Throughout my high school years, I learned that the school was split into three main gangs and if you weren't apart of one, you got beat up, stolen from and sometimes killed. Being in a gang was really the only way to have protection and some kind of security and safety at school. When you're in a gang you look after one another, you stick together and back each other up if someone's in trouble. You were basically family in a weird and violent way.

But the higher rank in a gang you were, the more power and protection you had. When a new school year started and the grade twelves left and the grade sevens came, a new leader was picked, that is if the leader had left. When the new kids arrived they had to do trials if they wanted to be apart of a gang and if they made the trials they had to prove their loyalty by completing a task given to them by the gang leader. It was very rare for a grade seven or eight kid to get a high rank really quickly or easily because most of the time they still have to prove their loyalty because with their young and experienced minds they can easily change their minds and leave their gang for another.

I was a grade eighter but I was trusted by my gang and had a high rank by the time I reached the middle of grade seven. I had power and skills that my gang use to their advantage and after some training I became their assassin.

Home wasn't much better either.

We lived in a shitty neighbourhood full of shitty people and shit. Mum and Dad were barely ever home and I had to basically live by myself with Conrad.

My brother was a selfish piece of shit that didn't give two fucks about me so it was technically just me living, surviving defending for myself.

I had learnt how to shoot a gun at the age of seven, how to fight with knives, how to pickpocket anyone that walked past me, how to sell drugs for money but obviously not take them and how to defend myself and hide when necessary. I had learnt how to survive and it's probably not your ideal idea of a great childhood but it was life and I just had to get though it until I could leave.

The sound of tires on the dirt road and the screech of brakes made me open my eyes and groan.

I got up and went to my wardrobe to get dressed. Unlike most girls I didn't like the shit that they wear. I mean who wants to wear something that covers half their ass and a quarter of their tits? Honestly, you might as well go fucking naked.

But sometimes I liked to mix things up a bit, especially if I'm feeling convergent or sexy.

I grabbed my tight black strapped top and placed favourite red flannel shirt over my shoulders, leaving it unbuttoned, then some not too short black jean shorts. I tied my black bandanna around my head which kept my short shoulder length dirty blonde hair out of my face. I tied my spiked choker around my neck and my chain bracelets to my wrists, I put my sunnies on and slipped my black converse onto my feet, walking out of my cabin and out into the sunlight.

As I closed the door and walked down the pathway towards the dining hall, I could hear more cars pulling up and the sounds of kids talking, screaming and running around.

I've never really liked people, even before most of my crappy childhood. They just never really seemed very nice, real or important. From what I've seen, most kids my age (which is 14) are not really the friendly type. They bully and pick on other kids and they're all selfish, self-centred and fake. But I was fine without them, I didn't need anyone. Never have and never will.

As I reached the dining hall I saw a familiar black man hanging out the window waving to me. I smiled and walked over to the window he was at.

"Hey there Polar Bear! Did you finally decide to come out of your cave and join society?" Logan the camp leader asked me.

"No I came to restock on food for my next hibernation," I smirked at him.

Logan was an idiot, a funny and nice idiot but still an idiot.

"Haha well you better stock up quick because by the time half the campers get here there's probably going be nothing left."

"What a shame, I'll just have to go hunting then if that's the case."

"Woah there polar bear! No need to get violent, we can learn to share can't we?"

"You'll just have to wait and find out."

"I don't think I want to find out." He said closing the window laughing.

I chuckled and entered the dining hall.

I went into the kitchen and buttered some bread to eat. As I exited the kitchen I saw a bunch of campers lining up at the registration tables to get there cabin numbers and hand in their phones and stuff.

I saw a guy standing in front Lucy, one of the camp workers that was currently collecting kid's phones. He looked like some rich kid who's never gone outside before. He had two chain necklaces around his neck and a gold loop earring in his right ear. But the thing that weirded me out the most was his clothes. It looked like he was wearing fucking silk pyjamas, I mean who the fuck in their right mind wears pyjamas to a camp? This kid has obviously never been to camp before, let alone outside a city. But I've seen him around before in some previous camps and I've tried my hardest to avoid him and others like that and so far have been successful, but lets not get my hopes up that it'll be that same this camp.

I saw that the pj kid and Lucy were having a conversation that had suddenly turned dark and Lucy looked like she was ready to slap him in the face.

This guy was obviously a pain in the ass.

I walked out of the dining hall and over to the zip-line where I was posted to work today or more like my brother was posted to work. I didn't technically have a job at the camp but since my brother didn't really do anything but snog girls, I kind of just showed up and did it for him.

When I got to the zip line area there was a big group of kids hanging around the tower of the zip line talking about how awesome and fun it looked so I assumed that they were all newbies. I grinned and told them to buggar off until the zip line opened. Once they were gone I started to set it all up.

About twenty minutes later Logan showed up with the pj kid that I saw in the dining hall trailing behind him talking up a storm.

Great now this kid was a one of those kids that hung out with the adults because they thought they were too cool to hang out with the other 'lame' kids.

When Logan saw me he smiled and started walking a little faster.

"Hey there Polar Bear! Did you decide to skip hibernation this winter?" He asked me.

"I've considered enjoying this winter without sleeping throughout the whole time. And besides, someone's gotta do Conrad's job for him," I said.

"Well you should tell him to get his head out of his ass and do his job instead of his sister doing it for him," he joked back.

"Isn't that your job though?" I said with a grin.

"Yeah I guess but you're his sister and you know how scared I am of his big man titties and that gorgeous blonde mullet of his," He said while making a fake scared expression on his face.

I chuckled and shoved him towards the ladder that led up to the zip line, "get up there you dork."

"Alright, alright. Dariush, are you coming?" Logan asked from the first few steps of the ladder.

I turned back around and saw the kid staring at me, mouth open and what looked to be a bit of drool hanging from the corner of his lips. I cringed in disgust, "you're gonna have a broken nose and ribs in the next few minutes if you don't fuck off right now buddy."

He suddenly stood up straight and wiped the drool from his face, he put a confident smirk on his face as he walked over to me like he hadn't heard a single word that came out of my mouth. , "hello gorgeous," he said as he reached for my hand but before he could I grabbed his shoulder and brought my knee up straight into his chest, feeling the soft material of his clothes while also feeling his ribs snap like a twigs.

His grabbed at his chest but before he could do anything else I grabbed his hair yanked his face upwards and punched him square in the face sending him flying backwards towards the ground. He fell to the ground and curled in on himself, grabbing at his ribs in pain while making weird squeaking noises like a mouse.

Logan started laughing like a maniac as he climbed down the ladder and went to see if his friend was alright.

"I warned you kid but you didn't listen, you didn't fuck off, and little things like that are gonna get you hurt just like it did now. So next time I encourage you to just fuck off when told to."

With that I crossed my arms and went over to the line of kids waiting for a zip line ride. After watching what happen to the pj kid they were all a little scared of me and kept their respectful distance away. I didn't mind though, it was nice to know that I had some power over them.

We were an hour in and had about thirty three kids go on the zip line. The next kid that was going on had red hair and a tone of freckles. He was small and looked scared, and not just scared of me.

After I got him suited up and ready to climb the tower he began to shake a bit and I could see the fear in his eyes. I had heard of this kid from eaves dropping on the others kids, apparently he was a bloody nerd and never left his room, but from the scars on his arms; which look to be burns, I could tell that he had gone though something traumatic and the fact that the other kids were talking about him like they were made me feel kind of bad for him.

I put my hand on the kids shoulder, making him jump a bit and look up at me. I gave him a small smile, "you don't have to do this, you know that right? It's perfectly fine if you don't."

But he just looked back at the tower and shook his head no.

"Alright, suit yourself," I said pushing him towards the ladder for his turn.

I watched as he climbed up. Slowly and unsteadily. Logan was at the top with Dariush calling out encouraging words to him who I now assumed was called Alex. When he got to the top Logan helped him up and they were out of sight.

I looked over to the next kid in line and told him to get ready for his turn.

A few seconds later Alex was climbing back down the ladder, shaking even more and breathing like he had just run a marathon. He most likely just had a panic attack.

As he reached the bottom I unhooked him from the rope and was about to check if he was alright but he ran off.

Some of the kids started to whisper and talk about how he was a pussy for not going down the zip line. I frowned at this and walked over to them, "just because he didn't do the zip line doesn't mean that he's a pussy. For all we know you could be the next person to climb back down that ladder, how would you feel then if everyone started calling you a pussy for it, huh?" I was met with silence and heads tilted towards the ground in shame, "Yeah, that's what I thought."

I walked back to the kid at the front of the line, hooked him up and he started climbing.

The rest of the day was filled with kids running around screaming, playing and being annoying little shits. I spent most of my time and the zip line but when it reached about four o'clock, we started to pack up and head over to the dining hall.

I grabbed myself a ham sandwich and a glass of orange juice and headed over to a deserted table in the back corner.

While I was eating I could feel the eyes of a group of boys around me. They were staring and whispering to their friends and when I looked at them they just smirked and wolf whistled at me.  After a few minutes of this I got pissed and walked over to their table to confront them. As I walked over there I observed the boys to see what I was dealing with. A group of about seven guys that looked to all be the age of thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. They were all quite ugly I thought, they probably thought that they were the coolest kids here and thought they could intimidate me because the way they all got excited and crazy at the fact that I was walking over to them was a definite give away.

This is good though, the more they underestimated me, the better.

"Hey boys," I said leaning on the edge of their table, "mind explaining to me why you pervs can't keep your eyes where they should be and not at my tits?" I asked them with an innocent look.

"Woah there baby doll! No need to acuse is of something we would most certainly not do," a boy at the end said making some of his friends giggle.

"Yeah, but those tits do look pretty good though," another kid quickly cut in making the group burst out laughing.

I stood there with my arms crossed and my eyebrows raised, waiting for them to finish.

"You idiots done?" They all stopped and waited for me to continue, "good. Now let's get to the point. I don't need you fucking pervs staring at me like horny creeps while I'm trying to eat so if you don't mind keeping your eyes and thoughts to yourselves then I see no reason for anyone to get hurt. Ok?"

"'No reason for anyone to get hurt' what the fuck are you talking about bitch?" A third guy said.

"If you stop perving on me then you won't have to find out," I said and turned away to leave but one of the guys closest to me had he guts to slap my ass. The boys started laughing but stopped when they saw what I was doing.

In a flash, I had grabbed the ass slapper and put him into a head lock while pulling my knife from my sleeve and had it pressed to his throat. I was angry now and I wasn't going to take any more of their shit.

"Holy fuck! Calm the down you crazy bitch! We were only playing with you." One of them said.

"Yeah? You were only playing with me were you? Well guess what, I'm not playing with you. Where I'm from if you 'play' with someone you can almost get yourself killed, so let me make myself clear. I don't play games and if you boys desire that it would be fun to mess around with the 'crazy emo chick,' yes I have heard what everyone calls me, then you better watch your backs because you might just get your throats slit and I'm sure none of you want than, do you?" I said this in the most calm but menacing voice as possible, making sure that they knew who they were dealing with.

They all nodded their heads in agreement.

"Good," I let go of the boy and put my knife back in my sleeve as I walked back to my table.

I sculled the rest of my drink, grabbed my sandwich and headed back to my cabin, finishing my sandwich on the way.

As I walked along the dirt path towards the cabins, I walked past the camp fire site. There were kids gathered all around them, huddled together to try and get warm in the cool afternoon almost night. I saw Logan and Carl sitting by one fire talking and joking like best friends usually do. But as I watched them I suddenly felt a great longing and sadness inside me.

I was familiar with the feeling. It was loneliness. I had felt it many times while at the camp, I would go around minding my own business when this feeling would suddenly appear. And every time I felt it, it grew and grew and it was digging deeper into my chest trying to get to my heart and once it did it would squeeze and squeeze until it just stopped, and that would be when I finally broke. But that wasn't going to happen any time soon, it couldn't. I just had to suck it up and push it back down into the pit of my stomach where it slowly grew stronger.

I had always wanted a friend and a family, a real family that actually cared about me and real friends that I could trust and feel completely open with. I've always wanted someone that I could tell all my secrets to, that I could share my troubles to and know that they would support and comfort me as I cried on their shoulder. I've never had someone that I felt completely free with before but I've always wanted it, and even though I've grown to trust no one but myself, I've still had hope that I would find someone, maybe a friend or someone I could call family or maybe a soulmate, I don't know. But I've always had that little bit of hope that I would find them, I just had to be patient.

But I've never been good with emotions or feelings and if it came to actually have to feel something other than hate, fear or annoyance towards someone that I would be completely lost and doomed. So I pushed the feeling down and kept walking.

I walked towards the bridge that lead to the cabins but I saw two kids standing there. One was the ranga Alex from the zip line and an Asian girl that I didn't know. They were both standing on opposite ends of the bridge, not talking or anything but just leaning against the railing, looking out over the water and enjoying being in each other's company.

They looked perfect together. They had the perfect setting, the perfect timing, basically the perfect everything. It was so beautiful and as I stopped and watched their little moment that stupid feeling resurfaced into my chest again. Digging deeper and getting closer to the one thing besides my brain that was keeping my walls up.

This was ridiculous, I didn't need anyone and I most certainly didn't want a moment as perfect as this in my life, no way on earth! The thing that I needed was to survive long enough to get away from my horrible past and start my life over again. So as I pushed that feeling back down again, I quietly walked across the bridge, doing my best not to draw their attention and ruin their special moment.

Once I reached the other side I ran straight to my cabin. I got changed into my pyjamas and went straight into my bed and curled up into a ball. I shut my eyes tight and hoped that sleep would catch me before my feelings and thoughts could.

>*< >*< >*< Time Skip >*< >*< >*<

I had woken up at four that morning, my eyes were red, puffy and sore from crying myself to sleep after trying to drown out my feelings. I knew I had no chance at going back to sleep so I binged watched Stranger Things on my iPad until morning. It's morning now and Logan is currently at my door trying to convince me to work today instead of 'hibernating.'

"Come on Lydia! It'll be fun! You love canoeing, and if you don't go than you'll get fat fro-"

He stumbled backwards as I slammed the door open, "No-one. Calls. Me. Fat." I growled in his face.

"O-okay! Tha-at's fine! I will be sure to remember that!" he said while trying not to look scared but failing miserably.

"I'll go canoeing but only for the morning. Once we come back from the first few groups I'm done for the rest of the day and you won't bother me for the whole afternoon. Do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal.."

"Good. Give me five minutes to get dressed and I'll be ready to go."

"Okay," he walked off and I shut the door.

I was posted to work at the canoeing site with Logan, Carl and a few others today but after crying myself to sleep last night because of fucking loneliness, I didn't really want to do anything today except watch Netflix in bed. But I knew that if I did that then I would just feel even more lonely and pathetic. That and Logan wouldn't leave me alone until I at least get out of my cabin. So I made the deal of doing half a day instead.

I grabbed my ACDC shirt and black side up leather pants (like Klaus's from the Umbrella Academy - I love his style by the way) and put on my black leather jacket that had a gang logo on the back of a zombie bear head with the words "Grizzly Ghouls." I tied my black choker with a crystal charm around my neck and my black finger-less leather gloves. I tied my red and black bandanna onto my head, slid on my sunnies, popped some chewing gum into my mouth and walked out the door, slipping my red converse on along the way.

As I reached the vans that were driving us to the canoeing area at the river, I saw that both vans were almost full of kids and Logan and Carl sat in the drivers seats waiting for everyone to get in so they could leave. I went to the van at the front and gabbed the door handle to the front passengers seat when it suddenly burst open and hit me right in the head. I stumbled backwards a bit and I touched my head to make sure that nothing was broken or too badly injured. When I pulled my hand away from my face I saw blood on my fingertips, I touched my nose again and felt the blood dripping out of it.

Anger boiled inside of me and as I looked up and saw who had hit me, my anger turned to rage. It was Dariush.

"What the fuck you stupid wanker!" I said beginning to walked towards the trembling kid as he backed up against the van.

"I-I-I'm s-sorry! I didn't m-mean to! I s-swear!"

I grabbed he front of his shirt and roughly shoved him against the van door, "you're sorry are you? Well sorry ain't gonna cut it you little bitch! You hit me in the head with a fucking door you stupid cunt!"

"I'm sorry," he said as he began to cry.

"I should bash you for that you stupid piece of shit but you know what I'm gonna do?" I pulled out a dagger from the inside of my jacket and pointed it at his neck. He was sobbing now and it was so pathetic I almost wanted to just beat him with my fists.

But before I could take it any further Carl stepped in and pushed me away from Dariush, "Lydia! Put that thing away now you crazy bitch! Just because he accidentally hit you with the door as he was getting out doesn't mean you have to threaten to cut his guts out!"

"Fuck off Carl, this is none of your business," I snapped.

"Well it is if you're being a moody little brat and threatening campers lives with a knife in your jacket," he said to me, "Now put that thing away and get in the car."

"Whatever," I turned away from Carl and glared at a terrified Dariush, "This isn't over dickhead," and he ran away to the other van.

I looked back up to Carl who was staring at me in disbelief, "don't look at me like that or I'll do worse to you than I was going to do with him."

He just rolled his eyes as if my threat meant nothing, and got back into the van. When I got into the van it was completely silent and I could basically feel every kids eyes in the back seats glaring lasers into the back of my head. I growled in annoyance and told Carl to start driving.

The drive was short, silent and awkward. The kids were probably scared that if they moved or spoke that I would lash out at them like I did with Dariush, but honestly the kid deserved what he had coming to him. The little prick had the nerve to call me gorgeous and try and kiss my hand after I had specifically told him what would happen if he didn't just fuck off, now he just so happened to slam a car door right into my face. I would have beaten the shit out of him and cut him until he looked like an animal that got stuck in a razor and barbed wire fence if Carl hadn't stopped me. But boy was I going to hurt him when he made another wrong move against me.

As I hopped out of the car I saw that Dariush was hanging around Logan, not leaving his side or taking his fear filled eyes off me. I grinned a wide evil grin and walked with the rest of the group towards the edge of the riverbank where Ameline stood; she ran the canoeing area and activities.

"Uhh Sorry guys, some kid shit the canoe while shootin' the rapids," she announced to everyone as they all 'awed' in disappointment, I just rolled my eyes.

Logan, Carl, Ameline and Dariush got into conversation, I turned around to go back to the van but I saw Alex and the Asian girl walk off into the bush (sorry guys im Australian). I sighed knowing that I would have to go after them, but then I saw that Dariush walked in the same direction a few seconds after them and I sighed even louder.

As I trudged through the bush I could suddenly hear screaming and shouting. It sounded like Alex and as I got closer I could make out that he was screaming and begging for someone to stop. Panic and fear ran through my veins and I began to run.

Shit he could be getting fucking raped or bashed or something! Fuck if I get there and he's dead and I get seen with the body than I'm going to get blamed, and I could not afford to get thrown back in Juvie. I had shit to do back at school and home and if I'm not there when school starts then all hell would brake loose, literally. But right now my main priority was to get to Alex before something bad happened.

I reached a small clearing were it sounded like Alex was located. I frantically scanned the area for any sign of Alex or the Asian girl and as my eyes looked to the edge of the mountain to my right, my panic lessened at what I saw. Dariush was holding Alex at the edge, standing on top of the rocks. Dariush was apparently trying to help Alex conquer his fear of heights and Alex was trying his hardest to get away from him. From what I could see Dariush was doing a pretty shit job of helping Alex because it just looked like he was getting even more scared.

I was just about to run and help Alex but someone appeared out of nowhere and beat me to it.

"Let him go!"

CHAPTER 1 - CHAPTER 2 - CHAPTER 3 - CHAPTER 4 - CHAPTER 5 - CHAPTER 6

#rim of the world #gabriel #alessio scalzotto #gabriel x reader #oc reader #cringe #angst #fluff smut #x reader #reader insert #original character #reader #fanfiction #mega cringe fanfic #idk why im reposting this on my tumblr but i am indeed regretting it #its for the content lol

[kobblefort]

Blackfaint: Origins 2

I feel that this entire song is emblematic of rat world, but the "conversation" part at 2:49 is most important for our purposes of understanding it. This is how I imagine all of the rats speak to each other and the kind of things that they speak to each other about. "Well not really because I fucking had to buy beer" "That's fucked up man" is the kind of thing they are all saying to each other with that exact cadence. I think the lyric "Raise your hand if the system has missed you, man" also applies to rat world because the system has quite literally missed us - we can't create military squads or appoint administrators because the warlord needs to at least appoint a caravan leader for us to get the Nobles & Administrators screen back and I don't think she gives a fuck - it's still Vakeek Malignreasons last I checked and yeah she's a little busy seeking that artifact and doing other dubious necromancer activities. But it's okay, we're just treating this like a challenge run. Rat world is kind of like how I live because there is no structure to my life and I have never held a single job for more than three months in a row. And I try not to drink alcohol anymore but sometimes I still do and I just immediately start scrolling through my contacts looking for people to flirt with, harangue about Media we both like, or ramble at about some story I'll never actually write (usually all 3 at once) I only have an apartment by literally an act of god extending divine mercy directly to me and it's a fucking mess where I eat the $1 for an 8-pack hot dogs from Aldi cut in half to make them lie flat on sandwich bread with just diced onions and seasoned salt. "You take what you get in rat world" is one of the things we say in rat world, besides "Fuck it!!" lol, thats the main thing we say in rat world but yeah there are other things we say in rat world basically.

There's only two and a half more Z-levels we have to grate up before the aquifer drain is complete and we never have to think about it again. Considering there's 11 levels from the aquifer to the drain that means out of the 176 grates we needed to make there are only 40 left.

This farmers' guildhall I'm making just to have it out of the way when it inevitably becomes necessary kind of looks like a buttplug. Oops almost out of food and drinks again :\ rat worlddddd

A problem is quickly becoming apparent: rats get upset over not wearing shoes, but rats can't actually make shoes. I'm not sure we will ever actually get a caravan from The Nightmare of Tunneling, much less any other merchants, and without being able to actually assign any squadrons, sending them out on missions to retrieve them from any poor settlement that catches my eye won't be possible either. Keeping seed stocks up is another problem, and since I'm running the mod that fully forbids the eating of plump helmets, we can't rely on the plentiful stock of those from the caverns. It's sort of just a race away from the bottom right now, constantly scurrying out to grab handfuls of boar tails and cave wheat and cook them up just to watch them scarfed down. I am, however, deeply enjoying the fucked up layout of this fortress so far. Maybe when we get 50 rats they will be able to elect a mayor and thus start having administrators? It's entirely possible we see the end of this fort without ever being able to use some absolutely critical features of the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress. But nobody said rat world would be easy.

As a matter of fact it has just been confirmed that rat world is easy. The dwarves have come to wreak vengeance upon us!! And it's like what did we even do!? Sure we're part of a civilization known for havoc and pillaging and violence but none of us did anything! I literally went and checked! The only one who did anything is Ikeek Hatredeel.

And she never even killed a dwarf, just a kobble! Come on! Whatever you're mad about it probably wasn't us!!

The best we can do right now is breaking down the stairway and setting up hatch covers to bar shut just above the bedroom level, which is above the main floor. The dwarves don't seen to even notice the entrance to our little hamlet, at least, which is good. It's just as well, what business do we have up on the surface? All the plants are dead and what little we left in the wagon was just a few sheets and crutches. (I am notoriously bad at remembering to break down my wagon because I hate "all-purpose" stockpiles and only designate piles as they're needed, but I don't want my kobbles/dorfs/rats to leave stuff on the ground, so I usually just leave it there for like... a year at least.)

They just keep dancing around a dead tree. There's really no reason we can't wait them out, but then again, if a forgotten beast comes wandering in through the caverns, we'll be kind of fucked. But that's rat world dude. The thing about rat world is sometimes you're just helplessly scurrying around looking for plants to cook into the saddest little biscuits ever while some dwarfs come trying to maim you for no fucking reason. They've got a lot of silver weaponry, which makes sense because we are monsters, and the one with the steel crossbow could cause some real problems.

Giant monkeys appear, which is almost always cause for celebration, but ESPECIALLY now. They're not doing so great against the dwarves though.

We got some tablesss

Me too

The only way any food gets put on the table in rat world is by everyone scampering out to the caves every few minutes to grab more of whatever they can find growing wild on the floor, which has to be arranged manually. Then I manually have to go over to the kitchen and put "prepare easy meal" on repeat until it runs out, which is usually 30 seconds and 5~15 food units after I press it. If you'll permit me to be honest right now rat world is just really not feeling that sustainable. I'm not going to say like oh I give up and just let the dorfs come kill us all or whatever but you know sometimes rat world just actually sucks.

Speaking of shit that just sucks, I feel like the rodent men should be chill with us, but well...

They're not. Luckily, we're fucking fast in rat world, and as long as we keep the numbers right, stronger than them too. We can't just bar off the cavern since then we'd starve, so the only real option is just... every rat for themself.

But the truth is that rats together are strong. Do you not understand this, rodent people??

oh wait, this might be bad... Yeah we got nothing on steel weapons actually.

It'ikik ghoulscar, who was described as someone who was "made deeply uncomfortable by differences in culture or appearance," does not survive a stab to the brain. What should I not say he was racist?? Ohh his body's still warm you can't say he's racist!!! Well he was a racist is the thing. I don't think he'd even object to be called that. I don't know though because most people who'll admit they're racist are a lot less racist than people who vehemently refuse the idea that they could ever be racist. A guy who says "yeah i'm racist" is probably going to catch himself letting media/institutional/just stupid shit he thought when he was a kid bias cloud his judgment, but a guy who says "You're Calling Me RACIST??? That's Like Calling Me The N Word!!" has completely internalized whatever "FBI Crime Stats" are on HTTP colon slash slash BootSuckerNews.Cuck without even knowing what the words "materialist political theory" mean when you string them all together like that. Like I'm just going to say it I trust a guy who listens to Cum Town to actually not be evil when it counts a lot more than a guy who thought Million Dollar Extreme World Peace was a good show. Oh and for the fucking record I actually was a huge fucking MDE fan when they were new, I'm talking about the 00s when I was a teenager and they beat Tim & Eric to market with the "insane editing" game and did it way better. Shit like Malbone Trucking and Extreme BassFX were and are genuinely still funny, I don't care man, but the TED talk was basically the end of an era, all the shit that came afterward where Sam Hyde just records himself yelling into a mirror is absolutely fucking insufferable, and the fact that when they finally got their shot at TV after that they just made a fucking crappy sketch comedy show where all the jokes are edgy teenager trying to get in trouble bullshit instead of utilizing any of their previously many strengths is the biggest fucking let-down in the world, Sam Hyde let his ego blow up like a fucking car bomb and was helped along to do so by post-Stormfront invasion 4channers, 90% of whom just thought he was crazy and that it was funny to see a crazy guy yell into a mirror and record it with a cell phone, I will never not be so disappointed that it gives me a fucking ulcer about what could have been, sometimes I go back and watch College Cunts and it's almost hard to enjoy because it's like wow this is where it ended - this glimmer right here is the last diamond before they started just shitting. Oh god, what we lost. What did we lose again? Oh shit, yeah, the game. We're down to 18 rats.

Kikeek Menacebreeds takes one down. Nice, good shit.

The last remaining rodent person earned the name Nightsea from the fracas, and just starts camping one last area. He seems to stop being hostile and just lets everyone pass him as they run around the caverns freely. Maybe he'll make a good bulwark against the first forgotten beast we have to deal with, I don't know. For now he's just an annoyance. Youve got to take the Ws you can get in rat world that's one thing for sure. As an anarchist it annoys me that the game requires a strict military hierarchy in order for citizens to start arming themselves and training but I guess we can start putting down some traps. But first, you know, five rats need to get buried real quick before they start haunting this bitch. Also, a while ago a "Glassmaker" went into a strange mood and has just been standing in the door of their bedroom - Been there dude!! I have no idea what to do about that, I'm not bothering with glass here, they refuse to claim any kind of workshop so I guess I'll have to just let them do their thing and eventually weather whatever kind of tantrum they're going to have.

In the worst moods now are Eeteek Terrorslip, K'keek Attackdemons, and Vatekeek Learnedmaligns. Eeteek in particular has just really been upset over not owning any shoes. Embarrassed about it, angry about it, sad about it. Like I'm sorry. I would love to do something about it. But, well, I can't!! Maybe - and this is a big fucking maybe - we'll be able to make leather out of the rodent people and then maybe we'll be able to make shoes or at least boots out of their leather, but I'm not optimistic about it!!!

Oh that was fast. See Eeteek there's a guy you could learn from, she doesn't mind having no shoes. She doesn't mind having no clothes at all!! She's just fully embraced the mania in this bitch!!

Burial time, lol. Oh and despite the advent of some giant ibexes, a giant tick, and other random terrifying creatures, all 10 dwarves up on the surface are completely unbothered. Siege is going great for them. Ass holes

The "natural mist generator" is really not good enough to offset all the miserable violence, ratfolk don't particularly care for natural beauty anyway.

Kikiteek Jackalgranite suddenly has 11 fucking children, all of whom are good to go and get straight to work the second they're born. Dude what the fuck is even going on in rat world.

After setting up some cage traps around the cavern entrance (sorry, I know they're OP, but I need them for this fort lol) everyone cleans up the blood on the main floor and starts partying. Uhh except R'eekeek. R'eekeek dies.

It's still not really feasible to actually open the doors back up yet, but the tavern has been officially "opened to the public." I'd also like to start building a library but I don't know if this is the fort for it. Ratfolk library seems like a great way to get some necromancers on deck and well, necromancers are always a rare treat.

I'd really like the dorfs to fucking leave already too. There's actually some live prickle berries and red spinach on the east part of the map, but of course these Ass Hole's are just camping out here keeping us from prosperity. I cannot imagine that any rat still enjoys cave tubers but that's all we got.

After ages they finally fucking leave and we can go scoop up the goodies. Spinach and prickleberries baby!!! Sounds awful actually but when all you've eaten for like 9 months is the same thing it must taste awesome.

If it's not one thing it's always just another.

Our carpenter is caught out during the attack, but she's fucking fast. Every time she sees one of the rodent people she just dips the fuck out of there across the entire map, then goes back to just wandering around. We barred her in there, but we'll eventually have to do something... There's twelve rodent people running free, three in cages, and Srekitdret running around randomly like he's our fucking mascot or something.

She actually manages to do some serious damage, but she has other things on her mind, and would just really prefer not to fight I guess. The fact that there's a thing called "Holy Ape of The Faith of Tribes" sounds really interesting to me, I'll have to learn more about that. If we survive. Or actually if we die it'll be a good excuse to hop back into legends mode. So either one is fine by me!!!!! Fuck it!!!! Lol I hit the 30 image limit I'll probably update again tomorrow

#dwarf fortress #ratfort

[asseater3k]

Master Chief Madness day 1

(may not actually include master chief)

these are going to be different than MGM for formatting reasons and cause I'm more familiar with halo from a game play and unfortunately a lore stand point specifically reach. while I've spent time with most of these games I've only ever beaten or played to campaign of two of them they were mostly games I'd play at a friend's place. Reach is our starting point though so lets break it down by mission

1: Noble Actual/winter contingency

reach occupies an interesting spot as both a prequel and a finale of sorts being the final game by the original developer bungie as such an opening mission presents some challenges. The key of this mission is it's pacing while it starts quiet and grounded going to inspect a relay outpost that's been damaged, that damage believed to be cause by human rebels, but the game knows you wont be surprised by covenant and doesn't really try to make it a twist instead using tension brought on by the player knowing that funny aliens will show up and builds quietly to a fun set piece where you encounter your first enemies after a quiet trek. This then gently escalates into larger battles and tougher opposition. Pacing and escalation are some of reach's key strengths narratively and they are on display at a small scale here in the first mission. Another strength is its efficient character work reach is not a long campaign and you don't spend an equal amount of time with all the members of noble team, your super solider squad of eventual besties, but the game uses the time you do spend with them to communicate their character to you very well. These are especially deep or complex characters but they are endearing and most importantly feel complete. The way the start of as not to fond of noble 6 but warm up to you as the game goes on. They rely a lot on traditional solider show arch types and sort of play with them a bit Kat the techy member of noble team and its second in command but instead being a dweeb ass she has this very headstrong confidence to her that I really enjoy, Jorge is heavy weapons guy and the only spartan II on your team ( spartans are halos super solider fellows, spartan II’s are probably what you’re thinking about when you picture halo man theyre more hand crafted than mass produced using cool unethical methods to boot they’re also fucking huge, guys like master chief are spartan II’s the noble team is mostly spartan III’s which are less super soldiers and more ex soldiers they aren’t like 8 feet tall and not as busted and are usually sourced from adult soldiers instead of kidnapping children and replacing them with colones that die in three ish years) hes also a big old softy not necessarily unusual for the archetype but interesting in universe as most spartan II’s as a result of being super duper brainwashed are not very dialed in emotionally so Jorge’s sentimentality stands out, Carter the squads leader is mostly just soldier man but has a fun gentleness to him, Jun is the sniper but is interesting in that he doesn’t seem to take much seriously not in a goofy way but an irreverent way, Emile is just a walking Xbox live live avatar hes the least deep as his whole deal is just the 2011 gamer ideal of cool guy.

2: Oni sword base

the second mission consists of defending an office of naval intelligence (ONI) base from a covenant assault this is a very fun and varied mission starting with you and Kat fighting through a tight firefight on the facility’s doorstep before moving on to a fun vehicle section outisde. Halos vehicle controls are strange on pc the slower Turing speed on console gives the camera based Turning a smooth and natural feel that isn’t necessarily present on PC it could be my mouse sensitivity or the fact that I’m coming of playing forza but it tends to feel goofy. After activating defenses and a communication station you and Kat head back to the main facility which is under siege from a covenant corvette you have to make your way to the roof through the inside of the base while dealing with covenant forces when you reach the top you have to blow up a bunch of banshees with rockets and the corvette gets orbitally struck . This mission is quite possibly halo at its mechanical best a well paced run through different systems and environments like all great halo moments it allows for a beautiful flow in the gameplay an open fire fight melts into a great vehicle section and point defense segments which then loops back into the same firefight area that itself transistion into some classic corridor shooting action finished of with a nice action set piece at the end at the end of the mission Jorge congratulates her and then you meet with ONI scientist Dr. Katherine Halsey who’s is pretty important. See ONI and Halsey are actually responsible for the the Spartan program Halsey being the director and master mind with ONI the overseer and providing resources such as the cloned replacement kids for the recently kidnapped super soldiers to be. Halsey is also, an asshole, shitting on noble team through out the meeting with a brief pause to say hello to Jorge who as a sparten II she has more of a connection with although she gives out about his customizations to his armor pretty quickly after though. Halsey mentions that one of the dead scientist from the first mission had found a “latchkey” discovery something that could turn the tide of the human covenant war. This mission is also notable for being the final time in the game you end the mission on a full feel good W.

3. Nightfall

Not much to say about this mission a standard sniper based nighttime trek with jun hes fun but other than that the mission is kind of uninteresting to me and is probably my least favorite mission in the game its not bad or anything its just kind of walking in a straight line towards combat encounters the set up is that you’re running a recon op for Kat to figure out the strength of the covenant forces which your more or less do finding a whole bunch of the lil fockers and plant a bomb on a little radar jammer. It’s mostly a set up for the next mission which is very and we’ll talk about tomorrow

See Ya! Thanks for reading

#master chief madness

[wangthephonk]

Starting a new thing called SFW Sundays! ^^

the deal is that i find make sfw fanart of a character who primarily appears in nsfw contexts.

Why I'm Doing This

erotic artworks often don't afford their characters the same depth as those of non-erotic works (and of course, authors of these works don't necessarily have to if that isn't their goal). still, i have a fascination with moments of character depth embedded within a lewd work— when an author injects humanity into a character that could have just been a fully-objectified titty monster— or, better yet, works which purposefully intertwine day-to-day character depth with erotic situations. because damn it! I'm a person who's trying to integrate my repressed lewd interests into my already-complex sense of self, so I enjoy works which embody that ideal!

Who is Featured This Week?

(Source material CW: monsterfucking, sexual violence)

Vise from indie "erotic action RPG" Ruins Seeker 「 ルインズシーカー」! The game is created by Nupuryu (ぬぷ竜) who you can find on twitter (cursed site) @ nupuryu. Note that the creator's twitter is R18 o7

Ruins Seeker begins when our fantasy adventurer MC, Quem, sets foot into Heaven's Ladder, a sky-high vertical rougelite dungeon. She's the first person to enter in 500 years!... and she immediately gets cursed! D: Vise (supporting character) is an advisor/guide— mysteriously knowledgeable about the dungeon— who lends Quem a hand in climbing Heaven's Ladder and breaking the curse. these two are so gay!! <3 like the whole time i played i felt like they should really date (absent extenuating circumstances) ^^ Vise is at every checkpoint waiting for her girlcrush and gives her potions and they're so cute when they banter !! >w< Vise's flat, distantly wise, and caged demeanor contrasts excellently with Quem's expressive energy and worldly strength! °^°

Also did i mention Vise lives rent-free in my head? i've tried painting her on three earlier occasions in my art journey >w<

<- 2020, 2021, 2022 ->

Game Content

The world of Ruins Seeker is refreshingly fleshed out! With a charming hub town— which feels large and lived-in. There are also meaningful side quests involving the residents ^^ The main plot can be surprisingly sappy, which is right up my alley :^)

The gameplay is awesome!! It's absolutely unbelievable that this was made in RPG Maker. Instead of turn-based combat, this game has real-time birds-eye action where you juggle a melee weapon and ranged weapon (the plug-in list that makes this happen is... impressive!) There's so many different weapons too! I remember loving the 20-ton hammer and bone needles (maybe the names are wrong it's been a few years).

Erotic Content (cw: discussions of monster fetishes and fictional sexual violence)

not gonna lie i wasn't a big fan of the erotic aspect. like, i don't hate that it exists, but i can't help but feel a gap between the erotic content vs general story and gameplay. the curse that Quem gets struck with is an arousal curse that makes the monsters of the dungeon want to fuck her. these erotic scenes are triggered by game over (losing all health in the dungeon) and they're animated live 2D! they're also unique according to the type of monster that defeats Quem, and there are a LOT of MONSTERS. im impressed but not ecstatic about how many of these animations are in this game. truly, a lot of time and effort went into making this!

the lewd content doesn't feel well-integrated though. i do not recall many points when Quem actively struggles with a desire to fuck monsters. like, either you lose and the curse is triggered, or it gets flicked ON/OFF during a discrete cutscene to remind you it's there, or it's gameplay as usual and Quem is just her typical, go-getter adventurer self. if you don't lose, you can almost completely forget the lewd content is even there! which may be a plus, but i feel like there were missed opportunities for internal character conflict (which is why i like moody Vise more than brash Quem, sorry Quem! i still like you!!)

Final Words

so yeah! i like this game and i like Vise <3 though i obviously can't recommend it to everyone because the objectionable content is— in a few places (main story cutscenes)— an unremovable part of the game. i skipped a large portion of the optional lewd content (game over scenes and i think a side quest?) cuz i wasn't interested in exploring it back when i played the first time. tho if i were to replay, i might check it out.

Ruins Seeker was originally published in Japanese on DLsite and is available in English on Steam.

#art #my art #SFW Sundays #Ruins Seeker #Vise

[peachdelta]

did anything inspire the emmetropia au?

i kept seeing people draw emmet beating the fuck out of volo and while they were VERY funny the sephiroth-obsessed part of my brain was like “hmm but many of these make volo look like a pathetic wet cat…which he is, but also i like him as a competent antagonist as well” so i made the first comic. then it blew up and i got more and more ideas

my writing is heavily inspired both by my own humour, trying to keep in line with the traditional levity of pokemon’s tone to a certain point— but eventually my major writing inspirations come into play here. specifically, the works of kitty horrorshow and the book house of leaves. i’m gonna talk a lot about the third page in part 5 which i talked about on my twitter but its easier to save things here

i’m gonna preface this by saying emmet =/= the main character of house of leaves. he is not supposed to parallel johnny truant in any sense whatsoever, due to johnny being highly flawed in ways that are absolutely fascinating to examine and analyze but (in my opinion) extremely morally reprehensible, so i don’t want people to think that i’m trying to directly compare the two. rather, i’m just using a similar literary concept that’s used in the book, and getting some inspiration not from johnny’s character himself, but from the process of johnny’s deterioration

if you haven’t read house of leaves (it’s very good but it’s highly nsfw and i don’t recommend going into it blind if you suffer from delusions / paranoia / psychosis, please be careful) i won’t say anything about the plot specifically, BUT it’s important to note that it has three separate narrators. there’s an initial story, which is written as some kind of analysis of a movie that doesn’t exist. the story is interspersed with comments from the second narrator (johnny), as he reads the story and gives commentary and translations, stuff like that. the third narrator is very infrequent but will occasionally leave notes specifically commentating on johnny’s notes, not usually on the story itself. not important to understand my thought process here

basically, johnny occasionally talks about himself or what he did that day, but sometimes as the narrative progresses he visibly starts to deteriorate and break down mentally, as he loses his identity and mind and ego to fear and paranoia because of this story that he’s been reading and commentating on.

these initially short off-handed comments that he leaves in the footnotes will suddenly start extending so long and be so heavy with text that a single SENTENCE can take up two entire pages, a dizzying and overwhelming beast of a paragraph that’s genuinely horrifying to even find when you flip the page, much less read it specifically— there seems to be some kind of point to it, he has a thought, yeah, but it’s a literal stream of consciousness. he can’t filter himself even though he’s actively typing it out, it’s just COMING OUT OF HIM and he can’t control the rate that it’s expelled out of him.

and then, what i find FASCINATING: if the previous page is empty enough of text, you can literally see it coming when johnny is about to dump that stream of consciousness on the next page. the paper is thin enough that you can’t read the words, but you can see the vague shapes of a huge block of text, and it’s genuinely chilling when you notice it. it feels like there’s a monster creeping around the corner, right in your required path, and you know it’s there, and it knows you know, but you have to keep going down that path because you have to know what happens next!

it’s an absolutely genius way to utilize PAPER THICKNESS of all things if that was intentional, and i really wanted to try something similar. i can’t do the same ineffable shape through paper, but on twitter you can vaguely see that “oh, that’s a huge hunk of just text” in the preview before you click, and on tumblr you’d expect there to be an image when you scroll, but the further you scroll the more it dawns on you that it’s just text. it’s just a huge paragraph. it’s just his thoughts, unfiltered and breaking down. i don’t know if i was able to capture anything remotely similar to that thing in house of leaves, but i hope i at least captured something vaguely similar

ok thanks :) house of leaves and kitty horrorshow are big inspos for me for horror writing. i came up with the comic idea bc i like sephiroth so i liked volo in a very similar way so i wanted to make content for what i like

#delta.txt #emmetropia au #also i added weird levels of emphasis bc it ended up being very long #and i know it’s easier to read it like this if you have adhd #with all the emphasis n stuff