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hermitcraftheadcanons · 3 years

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Scattered AU Masterpost Part 2 [COMPLETE]

Due to post length limit (which is apparently a thing), this AU has been split into two parts. Find Part 1 here!

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Contributions:

- Mumbo has a pet ravager miscellaneous ideas: the ravager is actually a bit small as far as ravagers go. Once Mumbo leaves to go to the hermits, he doesnt take the ravager with him, for fear the environment wouldn't be right for it. However, the ravager follows him and Iskall, startling both when it comes running up to Mumbo. The ravager does not like any of the hermits, however it doesn't attack them because it can understand that Mumbo cares about them. - anonymous

- related to scattered au and "what if this happened to old hermits too" -- python's stuck in a death loop in a bastion (his spawn is right next to a piglin brute). he has no clue what's going on but by god, does he blame zloy - Anonymous

- Consider: Etho's mask protecting him from the flowers that gave Hypno so much trouble. - @/rayveewrites

- (Scattered AU) After Etho dies accidentally at the spawn haven, his spawn takes him to Xisuma. Xisuma is clinging to life when he gets there, and Etho only has time to grab his admin's arms and promise he'll be found before Xisuma passes away. Etho and Xisuma get a few hours together to work on getting Xisuma to the surface before Etho starves to death, and he's transported somewhere else. After that Etho makes it his mission to cycle through spawns as quickly as possible to help Xisuma and anyone else who is trapped in their spawn graveyard, no matter how much his legs start to fail him from the damage starting to linger from building into the sky and leaping off to respawn over and over. - @/petrichormeraki

- Some honorable mentions from my written summary for mumbo in the au: the illigers being terrified as he keeps coming back no matter how many times they kill him; he gets adopted by evoker; he fails at evoker magic, like so bad he cant even dye a sheep; the evoker being so done with mumbo that they beg the vex to give him magic; mumbo summoning scar when the vex get annoyed at how often he summons them, mumbo eventually summoning bdubs after scar's contract to mumbo runs out.... and so much more - @/therainofsweetmelody

- Moobloom!Hypno attracts bees - @/itsabork

- Not too long into his messenger journey, etho remembers what had happened to impulse by the time he, zed and tango had found him, which inspires him to try and die in a different way each time he sets off to find another hermit, partly to avoid becoming resiliant to certain death methods and partly for the challenge - Anonymous

- Because Doc hasn't died his death messages haven't been showing up in the chat. The other hermits don't know if he's even in the same world as them. - Anonymous

- (Scattered AU) More on the Mumbo accidentally summoning Scar thing; the summoning has "opened" the chat for them, but only between Mumbo and Scar. All evokers can call on their Vex, after all, so why not an evoker in more-or-less training? - @/petrichormeraki

- (alternate headcanon) There's so much discussion in the server, I wouldn't know where to start restating. However, I wanna mention one thing: scar spawning in xisuma's first spawn, deep in a geode down under ground. Being trapped in an endless death loop due to the warden lurking just outside the geode, forcing scar into the same loop xisuma had been trapped in so long ago. Not only does he have to deal with the separation from bdubs once they got out of the end, now he seemingly cant escape the warden's clutches.... - @/therainofsweetmelody

- Admins log who knows how long: I've finally managed to get my helmet some repairs with this I could get some plugins to start working hopefully. Considering the situation going on, I better not have derped to hard on this, not now. - Anonymous (singleplayer sleep now works)

- (Scattered AU) Because the code is glitchy for mob hermita, Jevin would spilt when injured too much. So while X and Jevin are trying to get to the surface, they encounter a dungeon or a mineshaft and Jevin gets fatally injured. X starts freaking out cause he doesent want to be alone again and he cant bear to watch Jevin die infront of him and risk getting lost and seperated and Jevin just splits, theres two Jevins now and X doesent know what to think of it.While there are two Jevins, their consienceness is split between the two and his motor skills are more sloppy and X notices and realises that Jevin loses more of himself the more he splits. So while he has a lower chance of losing Jevin to an unfortunate accident, Jevin slowly reverts to a slime the more be splits and the more be spends time as multiple entities. X worries that if Jevin splits for too long or too much, he might lose Jevin - @/itsabork

- The only portal to get out of Hels and into the overworld is an incredibly complex vault boarder line weapon built by Hels Doc and Hels Mumbo and the location of the portal is known only to a few and it changes every season. Now cue Helsknight and Wels sneaking all around Hels while trying to look for this basically impossible to find and get into way home. - anonymous

- It takes a while, but eventually those outside of hermitcraft start wondering why all the hermits collectively disappeared. Sure, they started a new world, and sure they’re usually more secluded, but it’s been months. Skizz wonders why he hasn’t heard from Impulse in a while. All the legates wonder where Python went. Everyone’s confused when none of the hermits turn up to the next MCC. Things get weirder when none of them sign up for the one after. -🟣

- Ok to add on to the daisy ravenger post, on his way to 0,0 Mumbo found spawn spawn, slo when he arrived everyone had him at sword point, expecting angry illiger noises they were surprised when they herd "GUYS IT'S ME!!" - Anonymous

(Note: Hermits at the haven currently include Joe, Beef, Hypno, Scar, Bdubs, TFC, Mumbo, and Iskall, in order of arrival. XB is en route, and Etho was there briefly before dying and respawning elsewhere.)

- Pix and Zloy would be the first to notice the hermits' absence. After all, they do a weekly show about them. Maybe they just decided to have a few weeks of downtime before moving to the next Season? Though surely it wouldn't take this long... - @/rayveewrites

- because im a legacy sucker, the legates would likely be the first to notice the hermits' disappearance. between zloy being on the server, skizz being part of zits and very close to impulse, pearl knowing a few hermits, plus python literally disappearing. what they'd do about it? no idea.to keep it more on the topic of hermits though, don't think about how devastated skizz would be to find out what impulse went through. don't think about it :) - anonymous

- Hello I have produced thoughts! I don’t have room for both so I’m sending 2 asks -when Iskall arrives at the mansion all of the illagers are wary; if one of mumbo’s friends are here then he must be leaving soon. Despite their initial feelings they’ve come to care about this idiot that wandered into their house, and they’re fully aware he has no survival instincts whatsoever, so when he does end up leaving they send a ravager to keep him (and his friends, they suppose) safe -@/haworthiaace

- so like... hear me out ok what if the reason the whole world is corrupting and weird and why a lot of people are like slowly turning into mobs is because maybe this is the way the game and the mobs are turning on the hermits for like making really inhumane farms or something like that and the mobs somehow messed with the code of the world to get revenge - anonymous

- Scattered AU!! Biffa spawned very concerned and on a beach. Where is he? How did he get here? Is he alone? Well one of his questions was answered quickly as he heard a constant buzzing sound come from his communicator, upon opening it he saw probably millions of death messages. He quickly realised this was probably supposed to be a new season of hermitcraft, but he didn't really have time to think about it, night was quickly approaching and he could already see drowned swimming towards him. - Anonymous

- How many times did X die to that Warden? Maybe he develops something to counteract the Warden’s sensors, or that his heartbeat slowed down to the point that his suit can barely pick it up (therefor making it harder for the Warden to track Xisuma down). -🦊

- Etho tried his best to fight the system and not get any new features from all his deaths. But, the game has its ways. Slowly, after every death he has, the less alive he comes back. (Undead!Etho, could be ghost, zombie variant, or skeleton variant) -@/harley-the-pancake

- Other hybrid characteristics Hypno gets of the moonbloom: His ears turn into golden cows ones, the horns grow in, he gets a tail, and little flowers grow though his hair and wrap around his horns. He can also grow flowers around him as long as he has dirt, but thankfully they dont do anything beyond smelling a lot stronger and smelling very nice (and maybe a bit of evoking certain reactions, but nothing beyond what normal flowers can do, ie lavender being calming, just a bit more intense) - anonymous

- Beetlejhost ended up in the world along with the hermits, spawning as if summoned: in the middle of a circle of beehives. His spawn is in the birch forest near the s8 spawn, and his presence spooks anyone who stumbles across him. He blends in concerningly well with the black and white of the forest. Beef feels like hes being watched whenever he goes in the birch forest to get supplies, but joe never notices a thing. He teases the hybrids about their changes, leading him to get swiftly decked- - @/therainofsweetmelody

- beetlejhost spawns in a circle of beehives in the birch forest near spawn. he thinks he's invis, in reality it's just his stripes making him blend into the birch trees. he can't leave the circle of bees, ah how wonderful it is to bee bee-tlejhost - @/justme123abz

- Beetlejhost doesn't mean to be mean, really, he just has really, really bad timing. This includes seeing a pollen-stained Hypno and, with his gravelly voice, immediately say "Woah! Someone had some fun in the sun! Tell me, did you spend a week rolling in dandilions or do you just like the color yellow?" This does not go over well - Anonymous

- Speaking of hybrids, Xisuma spawned in a Wardens den right? Well unlike the other hybrids, Xisuma has been changing too but its been slow. Every time he spawned back in that place, on the warped ground, he's changed. He doenst notice the dark starts to seem less dark, until noises get louder, until he's more sentive to it then he noticed, he gets stronger and breaking though the stone with his bare hands seems a bit easier, its not until he finds Jevin and he points out the glowing horns (1)peaking from his temples when his hair is pulled back hastily that he realizes that something has gone horribly wrong with him. Thankfully Jevin helps ground him before he can freak out, so he shelves it for later, once they're out of this cave. The warden that once was down by his spawn is no longer there btw, disappeared. The horns grow slowly, and soon glowing vein like markings appear as well. (2) - Anonymous

- Okay, Xisuma, we established he spawned in the deep dark, right? As time goes on he adapts to the dark. The skulk sensors grow on him. However as time goes on, they not only grow on him, but become a part of him. His footsteps quiet to near silence, and he can feel sounds. He certainly isn't how he was when he entered, at first glance he might even be mistaken for a warden. - Anonymous

- Tango is the only hermit other than Mumbo Daisy kind of likes. Tango thinks Daisy is absolutely adorable, and Daisy does like the positive attention(and the treats). - Anonymous

- When tango meets mumbo’s pet ravager he loses his mind, he tried so hard to get the decked out ravagers to like him and then mumbo just waltzes in riding on one of the things! He ends up hanging around her a lot and eventually forms some sort of relationship, although not as close as he would like (he also gets a little more sympathetic once he sees the effects the evokers had on mumbo, he figures the guy earned a pet ravager) - @/haworthiaace

(Hermits now at the spawn haven, in order of arrival: Joe, Beef, Hypno, Scar, Bdubs, TFC, Mumbo, Iskall, Tango, Impulse, Zedaph. XB is en route, Wels and Hels are traveling through Hels to get there, Ren, Doc, and Grian are attempting to get there but their success has been limited so far)

- Scattered!AU: Idea that Ex is the ONLY one that knows what is going on and how to fix it perhaps (maybe 'cause of having been banished to the void for so long)? That's why he's trying to find X. - Anonymous

- Admins log: day 1006: Me and Jevin finally see sunlight, and I've managed to get the clock function on my helmet working, finally. As we're on our way to the surface, I only hope that I can find someone or something to help guide us to where we need to go, but unfortunately I've lost all signal to chat, and I think we're next to a woodland mansion. I think I've derped up this time.

- Dear Xisuma, if you see this message then the log is working, also fixed the clock in your helmet it's been 50 days, not 1005. I was about to leave with Iskall when I noticed you and Jevin outside with a few, erm, "buddies" of mine you two where passed out and I managed to stop them from killing you with Daisy, my pet ravenger. I'll explain everything later and spawns in the village are working, finally. I recommend not moving much and work on the data packs for a bit before you do anything elseExplanation log to Xisuma part 2: Sorry if the last one got cut off abruptly, apparently there's a limit to these messages. Any way please take care of yourself. Sincerely, your pal Mumbo Jumbo

- Admins log, day 51: I first want to say thank you Mumbo for bringing me up to speed and explaining why and how me and Jevin are here, next I want to say that these logs may slow down for a bit, I'll be working on some maintenance for some packs. I still don't know why this is happening, I now hope this is a wicked nightmare and not our reality. Hang on I see something over there it looks like, wait let me ju- Voice logs are off for the moment.

- all one anon

- mooblooms spread the flowers that enraptured hypno. now that hypno is a moobloom hybrid, he can make people "hypnotizd"! he doesnt like to, but if the spawn ever gets attacked, the hermits are winning easily. - anonymous

- I like to think that at some point when there's a significant number of healthy hermits at 0,0 they start group searches to find the rest of hermits - anonymous

- After awhile, if they can't change the spawn of everyone, they begin securing all the spawn points to everyone, so if their bed is ever destroyed in the future, they won't end up in a death loop again. They secure the death loop spawn points first. - @/ciaravixen

- For undead Etho: I know that ghasts aren't technically undead mobs, but they're basically ghosts and that's what I feel etho is becoming?He's leaving his mortality behind bit by bit as he ceases to care about death and starts to use it as a tool instead.One day he'll respawn without a body at all - @/draconic-dreams

- This is just a thought. Sand cant be good for Iskall's mechanical parts, and its not like he has anything to fix it. Does he have to wait to find doc to be able to have hope of fixing himself? - anonymous

- Jellie had spawned in the village that cub and xb had come across, so when xb heads to 0,0 he takes her with him (she'd be safer in the overworld than in the end, after all). Its quite a long journey, and she makes for good company. -@/supertiny-tins

- Grian, Doc, and Ren fianlly start heading out to 0,0. Its a long journey, they decide in the end to leave their beds behind at the cabin in case any of them die so none of them end back at their orginal spawns. they would of just made new beds every time but the lack of suplies and resources near by has been low oddly enough. Doc manages to push aside most of his fears to help Grian and Ren, who are weaker, but he keeps his distance whenever he can. They make many hastily built huts as they go 1most nights are spent sleeping on hard ground, later straight up blocks of wool they find but not beds, just wool is better then ground, and it doesn't do the weaker hermits any favors but it works. There are many close calls, but they manage to avoid death, mostly due to Doc. Along the way they start to find signs of other players, coble in places it shouldn't, a rare torch, half mined trees, but no hermits. They still have a way to go, but they're getting closer to the others and safety. 2 - anonymous

- Etho once found himself spawning in the middle of an ocean with nothing and no one in sight except of course... A faint trail of lights dancing beneath the waves... Pulsing and glimmering, almost in a rhythm, something so fascinating, so... So... He was meant to be doing something...? It was... Important... At least... It might have been... It's all.. Kinda hazy... It couldn't have been more important than the lights, nothing was more important than the lights... They were so beautiful... He could watch them all day... Etho never noticed how he slipped beneath the waves, nor how the glow squid's glittering eyes had turned upon him, coiling a tentacle around his waist as it dragged its prey deep into the depths, his eyes hazed with green, he never even noticed his lungs burning for air.And he never remembered drowning after he respawned. - anonymous

- Impulse actually punches through the Nether roof so they can traverse more safely to coordinates given to them by Etho. They leave trails of blocks so they can make their way back, of course. - @/rayveewrites

(Evil X is now hiding out in a cave near spawn)

- Shattered!AU: I see everyone's Warden!Xisuma heacannons and I give you Axolotl!Xisuma. Think about it he's been hanging around with them and Jevin in the lush caves so maybe he's becoming more like them. (Frills, a more pink-ish tint to his skin, the ability to breathe underwater, etc.) :D (Is this because the thought of him having Warden traits is terrifying to me? Maybe. Is it because I think he deserves to become something not scary after his whole ordeal in the Deep Dark? Yes.) - anonymous

- Ever since getting out of the loop, Impulse has had a horrible inner conflict between his guardian side being instinctually drawn to the water, and his human brain being deeply terrified of ever being submerged again. - @/asexualbert

- Because I absolutely adore Daisy, more headcannons for Daisy.Daisy will occasionally just pick Mumbo up gently with her horns when she thinks she isn't getting enough attention. Daisy has a bell collar, because she kept scaring hermits by following Mumbo silently. Daisy is more okay with Iskall than most other hermits, though still doesn't really like him. - anonymous

- Though I'm a sucker for angst, what if Impulse was saved by a dolphin pod or something instead of transforming into a hybrid (or after transforming if Guardian!Impulse is cannon). :3 I can picture dolphins don't take kindly to the Guardian Mobs, might even find them as prey if anything since they're fish. (Guardian!Impulse wouldn't count since they're smart enough creatures to tell the difference.) - anonymous

- Prob a bit early for epilogue stuff but I like to think that, once all the glitches are fixed, that those that became hybrids and would prefer to be back to normal get changed back. - anonymous

(Shade note: Personally, I'm a sucker for stories where the characters adjust and learn to live with the unexpected changes to themselves rather than having them magically fixed, but this option is certainly still here for the people who find it appealing)

- For the scattered au, after the numerous frozen deaths Grian's gone through he starts hearing voices from the snow, even from within Ren's cabin. A snow golem forms after a wandering trader drops a pumpkin and watches from outside the cabin, deciding to guard the place after taking a liking to Grian and Ren. - anonymous

- When Etho became fully ghost, it hit hard. BeetleJhost saw this, and after a while decided to teach him how to show his form and speak. It takes a lot out of him, but it’s worth it. His friends deserve that closure. (Listen, I was expecting angst, I just wasn’t expecting that much angst.) - @/harley-the-pancake

- Mod Shade, I want you to know that angsting ghost!Etho that hard was entirely on you. I was picturing him clipping through blocks and dropping items at inconvenient points, not fading out of existence entirely. - @/draconic-dreams

- Possible explanation for everything going on in Scattered:Players were never supposed to be so powerful; in the natural state of Minecraft they're just another mob, albiet one that can craft and use any tool.But the Players weren't satisfied with that. Everyone from the admin of the smallest server to the mythological ‘dev team’ has been imposing little changes on the world since its inception, slowly tweaking it into a better environment for Player-kind.A single spawn at the world's centre. The ability of Players to chat from one end of the world to another -- even across different worlds. Even natural regeneration, an ability unique to the rarest and most powerful of mobs. As time marched on, Players not only unlocked these things but began to take them for granted, drawing far away from the behaviour of normal mobs. This became normal. Players continued to create datapacks and run commands that tweaked the very nature of the world. -@/draconic-dreams

(Shade note: Perhaps it was just a random glitch, one fundamental line of code removed to shift the balance of power. Or maybe it was orchestrated, but by who and for what purpose? Either way, it will take the Hermits a while to realize this, and even longer to fix it...if they can at all.)

- Jessasin spawned in a mesa biome, of course he's confused on how he got there and why he's in this random vanilla world and not his usual modded world, but both questions got pushed aside when the death messeges arrive. He exploared the area gathering as much recourses as he can and goes off too find someone, anyone really. - @/ghan-does-things

- hello! I discovered the scattered au literally yesterday so sorry if this is something that has already been gone over but I had an idea about bdubs, what if his constant exposure to the void and surviving on nothing but chorus fruit for who knows how long made him slightly enderman-y? 1/2 (sorry, couldn't fit the whole thing in one ask)Like nothing obvious at first, but making eye contact makes him agitated and snappy, touching water makes his skin tingle and if you look at him in the dark his eyes seem to have a very faint pink/purple glow about them? Maybe the other hermits swear he's taller than he was the last time they saw him? And the tips of his fingers are blackened, he assumes due to frostbite, but it seems to gradually be making it's way further up his hands? again sorry if this has been gone over already 2/2 - @/plantichu

- Okay so after Welsknight and Helsknight manage to get past the crazy vault door in Hels, not sure how but it probably involved a lot of cussing on Hels part and Wels saying that he never wanted to look at redstone ever again. The portal takes them to the overworld near Xisuma and Jevin. - anonymous

- (scattered au) The first set of non hermits to join this corrupt world are two strangers that apparently came from infinity's grasp. The good news they both spawned at spawn, bad news the brought the tnt duper flying machines, good news that everyone was able to calm them both down. Now the fun begins. Tldr Illmango and Methodz finally get out of the infinity portal. - anonymous

- Loving the Scattered AU. Late to the party, but was looking at the wider MC community reaction to the Hermits vanishing. Once it's clear something bad's happened, would the Legacy crew and whoever else (former Evo squad members like Martyn and Jimmy as well, if they notice Grian go dark) take steps to find out what happened? Would they go to the MCC server (it's kind of a nexus between worlds) & get Noxcrew to try "pinging" the HC server? Would X & other admins see it but be unable to respond? - @/wixelt

- I dont know if anyone has mentioned it but uhhhh, guardian xb? he was a guardian hybrid before everyone got scattered like Ren was already a wolf/dog hybrid. iirc xb spawned in a desert which would be a very interesting place for a guardian hybrid to spawn - anonymous

- Etho has been so, so desperate to avoid dying the same way twice, to stay himself. He hasn't drowned that many times, he thinks. Surely, surely he's starved more often? There's a strange feeling of deja vu hanging over him when he respawns in the ocean, though he can never understand why. Each time the squid finds him, he drowns a little slower, and each time, he glows a little stronger.And he just can't understand, almost refuses to, as he treks from biome to biome, where the small green bumps that line his arms and face came from, how his fingertips seem to almost glow when he scoops a handful of water, how long he finds himself simply staring… at the moon, at sea lanterns, at torches, at lights… He would die a different way every time. He had to. He had to stay Etho. He would not become anything else. - Anonymous

- When Mumbo comes riding into camp on Daisy, it’s easy to see Impulse is not happy about the ravager being there. That’s expected, it’s not exactly everyone’s favorite mob to see around a safe haven. But when Mumbo and Impulse make eye contact, the evoker can’t help but make a simple warding gesture his friends at the mansion taught him- it’s a reflex move. Days later, Mumbo still isn’t sure if Impulse flinched because of Daisy’s sudden growl or his ward. - @/fluffy-papaya

- (From the Discord) What happened to the world: For years, seeds and the land they built had been carefully curated by those known as players, in an effort to make it both easier and more interesting for themselves. But the land doesnt want to be controlled. Their glitched, broken world is a result of the world itself rioting against their presence. Coordinates aren't visible with the debug screen, their coms only serve the world, to tell the players what it knows. Compasses spin wildly in the overworld, for there is no "world spawn" (though coordinates are visible with one in hand. Small mercies are still given). The world resists any further changes by the simple fact it refuses to accept what a hermit communicates. Maybe it's fixable, but maybe... maybe it runs deeper than just their world. (The Legates caused a lot of damage with all those withers, after all.) - @/basaltdragon

- While Iskall is in the desert, he ends up dying quite a few times, enough to adapt, he becomes like a stray, so now, if we have skeleton Etho, we have 3 undead hermits - anonymous

- When everyone is finally gathered and they manage to come together to use all their skills, new and old, the hermits use it to flee back to Season 7. They stay there for months, mostly to heal and adjust to what happened to them. (Trauma isn't easy) Those who have friends or family off server get invited to visit, but the hermits don't leave, they nearly lost each other and they aren't willing to risk it again right now. They'll make a new season 8 at some point, the hermits are too (1/3)restless and too ingrained in their ways to completely disregard how they've always done things, but that will come when they feel better, safer, more put together, when they can finally stop sleeping in a big pile becuase they're afraid the others will disappear. They never go back to that old glitched world, the idea makes them sick, and X starts the new practice of sending in the 'Cam' and/or 'alt' accounts in first to check out the world and set up commands and plugins remotely first. (2/3) What happened before will never, ever happen again he swears it. Next time they might not be so lucky after all [if you can call them all being traumatized, many of them dying over and over again, some being permanently altered, and barely escaping lucky] (also feel free to save these asks for near the end of the au!) (3/3) - anonymous (Shade note: I personally like the idea of them fixing and learning to live in the glitched-out world, but this is another alternate ending!)

- (From the Discord) What happened to the world: Alternatively, what happened is exclusive to their world. (I don't have Dramatic Storytelling for this one, sorry) EX has ADHD to the max, and everything he does is a desperate attempt to get Noticed, to get looked up to and listened to. He's known it was "wrong" for a while, hence why he took X's name and added "Evil", but he never seriously wanted them to hurt. Just to listen to him. He'd meant to come in and fix it all and finally be a hero. He didn't realize, either through haste or inexperience, that he too would be at the mercy of what he'd done.Maybe he does, eventually, make it to where the hermits have gathered. But does he really want to admit everything? (RSD had burned him before, and if there ever was something to place the blame on his head...) - @/basaltdragon

- lasting effects of deaths

- a large amount of assorted ideas

- The bell they put on Daisy was originally of the type that are put on cats, but Grian ended up switching it out with a cowbell because he hated the sound - anonymous

- False, Keralis, Cleo, and Stress make it to spawn, bedraggled and exhausted. Out of all the Hermits, they are some of the last to arrive. Along the way, they’ve encountered trials innumerable that have left them beaten and bruised, but after months of travel, they’ve finally made it.Shortly after leaving the Moobloom field, they came upon an abandoned cart in the middle of a desolate village. With some of the redstone they had found and whatever magic they managed to scrape up, they turned it into a sort of vehicle that allowed them to travel much faster. It had a habit of breaking every six seconds or so, but nothing they couldn’t fix. For the most part. A few accidental combustions aside, they crossed the server in record time.Once at spawn, False has to be forcibly restrained from immediately starting guard duty, and several of the Hermits have to physically wrestle her into a bed in order for her to get some rest. Stress starts up a potion factory the next day, and also starts decorating the spawn with the flowers she’s collected during their travels. Keralis helps out wherever he’s needed, but in his downtime, he constructs an elaborate warren of tastefully decorated, industrial tunnels under the spawn, just in case they might help. Cleo mostly just stays in bed, creating elaborate dioramas and mourning the loss of her zombie side. She’ll get better, but it’ll take some time. And that’s ok with the rest of them. - @/topazastral

- When Doc, Grian, and Ren finally make it to 0,0 there is no fanfare, no dramtic entrance, no revulation. They were travling and suddnly, there was a base, a hermitcraft base, and they could see people. Grian clambers to feet shakily from the shed, nearly falling but Doc and Ren catch him and toghther they help him walk foward and call out to their friends. They are safe now, they're here- Is that mumbo on a ravager what the hell? Wait thats Impluse? Seems like Grian wasnt the only one changed. - anonymous

- Jellie reacting to vex!scar headcanons -she recognises him instantly. The moment she and xb arrive at spawn she darts straight towards him. Of course, she cant figure out why he looks different, but regardless, thats her owner and she demands pets!!!-sometimes she will jump up and try to pounce on his vex wings, because shiny moving thing! Scar picked up on this very quickly and will move out of the way before she gets the chance (vex wings are rather delicate and a pain to get fixed)-whe she's bored, she will always go to mumbo and daisy for attention first. This makes scar rather jealous and she knows that damn well-Scar will sometimes pick her up and fly her around not too far from spawn for a few minutes. Nothing she isnt used to, as he flys with the elytra all the time, but something about flying with vex magic just feels... different. And fun! - anonymous

- Contrary to the enderman bdubs, ender dragon bdubs. His eyes aren't the normal brown, and are instead a bright magenta, he also now has ashen gray horns. - Anonymous

- Scattered AU: The intended world "theme" Xisuma had set up for Season 8 was Large Biomes. This was before anyone knew something was going to go wrong, of course, but it's had a horrible lasting effect in the glitched world. Not everywhere has generated as "large", so when Hermits are travelling they'll sometimes find normal sized biomes, and other times they'll find one biomes that stretches an abnormal distance in all directions. Grian and Doc's mountain range is one of these large biomes. - @/wixelt

- For the scattered au, the snow golem follows Grian and Ren (and Doc) to the spawn haven, for a few days the hermits are wondering what's leaving behind snow trails and zombie flesh, so they decide to have a night watch around this area. Ren volunteered and waited, half-asleep he nearly nearly gets hit with a arrow when he hears the sound of a skeleton getting hurt. He sees the snow golem and uses his sword to kill the skeleton. The snow golem tries to flee but Ren realizes and stops it (1/2)He welcomes the snow golem and introduces it to Grian and Doc, (where the snow golem warns him that it is keeping its eyes on him in its own language). Spooked, Grian tells them that he can understand it, and the golem tells him that he's been following them since their time at the mountain. They decide to give it the name Catmint and it helps guard the hermit's base at night (while giving a stern look at Doc every now and then.(2/2) - anonymous

- (Scattered au)Seeing as we now have 3 different variations of Etho, I raise you: all 3 at once. It turns out Etho was not in fact human, instead a shapeshifter who didn't know that he was, the deaths simply sped up the process, whereas before, while he would change slightly, it was never fast enough to be noticeable - Anonymous

- I had this idea some time ago actually but I thought it was silly but now that the au in ending might as well say it. It doesn't make much sense now with all the new development srry. What if one day Mumbo was callibrating his comunication monstrosity, and suddenly his communicator had signal. He called and called but whoever was a the other side didn't pick up, until they did and Mumbo was overjoyed, but the happiness died down when he could only hear chocked sobs and sharp breathing and (1)teeth chattering. Suddenly a voice whispered, little and fragile "h-h-he-lp". Mumbo knew that voice too well. Before he could even open his mouth to let his best friend he was coming for him, he'd be okay, anything, the breathing stopped. The call was still going, but no one was at the other side anymore, Mumbo hung up with tears in his eyes, and he swore he'd find him and he'd help him. (2) - anonymous

- Scattered AU: While there's still time for them: Mumbo was the furthest Hermit out in the Overworld, & didn't set off for over a year, yet wasn't last to 0,0 (with Iskall) by any stretch. More than half the Hermits seemed to arrive after him. This can be partly attributed to Daisy making good time, but it makes you wonder how many trials & tribulations impeded False, Stress, Cleo and Keralis along the way? How much Ren, Doc & Grian were slowed by Grian's condition? What took xB or Biffa so long? - @/wixelt

- Once everyone finds each other, at the world spawn, after the initial shock, and fixing of the world of course, the hermits all decide to settle much closer to each other. They were separated for quite a while, so it makes sense why they'd decide to keep close. Some groups also make shared bases. - anonymous

- I sort of want grian to be a bit more inhuman so how about grian’s skin on his arms, legs and most of his face permanently blackened by the severe frostbite and the rest of his skin has taken on a bluish tinge, his hair is no longer the Gold it was before but almost snow white with a tinge of dark and light blue, his ears and tail are snow white with what appears to be frost and ice growing on them (1/2)(2/2) grian can not cry because the tears will immediately turned to ice, he can’t swim because if his body touches the water the water will freeze over, his skin is cold to the touch and whatever he moves his body it will make a cracking sounds like breaking glass or smashing ice, no matter how warm it is he can always see his breath... i’m trying to think of more but I’m coming up blank so that’s it hope you like it. - anonymous

- bc i cant stand when cleo is unhappy: the moment she and joe reunite, joe realizes how horrible it is for her to have her body messed with against her will. and as an admin, he can modify her code to put her back to how she was in previous seasons (aka not totally rabid but still undead) - anonymous

- Admins log final day: I'm glad we'll all be able to wake up from this nightmare, and we're able to get an exit portal going thanks to Mango and Methodz having a backup of the key to open the infinity portal's power, we should be able to not only go back in time, but destroy this broken timeline. Were all grateful for them, and I did invite them both to help us incace this happens again. This will be the last day in this timeline, if you somehow found this helmet with these logs, thank you. :-) - anonymous

- Grian, Doc, and Ren find it hard to stay away from each other too long, especially Doc and Ren becuase they've been taking care of Grian for such a long time so they find themselves kinda hovering over him and Grian finds himself seeking them out even when he's with other hermits. The other groups, who've been toghther for awhile, do it too probs - anonymous

- Soon as Grian and Mumbo see each other, they launch themselves at the other and hold on for a long, long time. Iskall join in soon as he wanders by and they talk for hours about what happened, looking over Grian's new fox parts and the blue marks on his hands, Mumbo gray stained hands and magic, and just Iskalls overall experience. Also Grian's little fox buddy absolutely loves Daisy and vice versa. Its not uncommon to see the small fox riding on the ravager's back while Daisy scares people. - Anonymous

- I know I'm a bit out of loop w scattered au & is probably getting things wrong but consider this, when Mumbo accidentally summoned Scar, leaving Bdubs alone, Bdubs freaked out. The very person that meant rescue & hope for him back in the end is now gone, he felt like he's back into the void again and he thought Scar abandoned him because he's too weak & is a burden to Scar. (Yes I am currently drowning in Scardubs angst) - @/anthosaidsmth

- The glitches in the world didn't only happen to the Hermits, it happened to all worlds created in 1.17. The cause remains unknown, though it is believed that something or even someone corrupted/changed the code (what/who is up to imagination. In the case of the latter, so is the motive). My idea, we've already confirmed that Watchers are arrogant jerks so perhaps they couldn't stand the fact that players learned to do things against the rules that they put in place, and did this out of spite. - anonymous

- A bit late but I see all the Fox!Grian headcannons so what if Grian spawned in a jungle and slowly became a parrot hybrid instead? How idk, maybe resorting to eating seeds to prevent himself from starvation because there is no animals in this jungle.

- Here's a thought: The Hels!Hermits were also effected by whatever caused the scattering. They may all hate or annoy each other, but not having each other around to pick on isn't very fun (neither are death loops). Perhaps some of them gain humility over this or learn to be at least a bit nicer to each other and their counterparts. (or some of them find sadistic amusement in their counterpart's miseries) - anonymous

- Finally, once everyone has made it safely to spawn and the problems with the world have been resolved, the season begins. Some of the Hermits may have changed (more than just physically) but over time, they adapt and recover. Grian eventually starts yet ANOTHER war, Tango gets to build DO 2.0 (X is terrified at the fact wardens are involved), and Cleo becomes a coach on 'how to be a mob hybrid' (unless all new hybrids get returned to how they were before by admin powers or just being players). - anonymous

- With all the glitches fixed and all the hermits starting to get back to their normal (Well as normal as it can be after all of these), I wonder if Scar is still a vex. All the hermits just adapted to their situations, but Scar is different, he made a deal with the Vex. - @/anthosaidsmth

- It takes all of the hermits that changed a while to get used to the changes, but eventually they do, mostly through help and support from the other hermits - anonymous

- I had a wee idea and it's a little silly but I like hurt/comfort so maybe after all the scattered au events have passed and the hermits are all together living safely, every winter some hermits invite Grian to their bases to take care of him since the snow and the cold are very bad for him. Sometimes he gets fevers but most of the time he just needs a warm blanket and someone to distract him from the snow. This is also making me wonder if Grian could develop chinophobia (fear of the snow). - Anonymous

- conclusion

Art:

- An Evoker Mumbo

- Evoker Mumbo with Daisy

- Evoker Mumbo summoning Scar

- a Guardian Impulse

- assorted doodles here and here

- A two-part Impulse comic

Writing:

- some Etho lore come back to haunt him (pt 1)

- Cleo sharing mob-hybrid tips with Impulse

- Executioner

- Fish out of water

- Homesick

- Thalassophobia

- The General's Wager (pt 2)

- The Undertow

- Saviors

- Bdubs falling

- For lack of blue shiny rocks (pt 3)

- conclusion (pt 4)

- EX in the Deep Dark

- this road I'm on's gonna turn to sand

- Snapshots

- a multi-chapter Scattered interpretation written just before the real season 8, complete with some outside lore and crossover

- Scattered Across The Map (series of parallel multi-chapter fics)

- One Hundred Thousand Worlds Away

#hcraft #hermitcraftheadcanons #hermitcraft #hermitblr #scattered au #mod shade #Masterpost

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votederpycausemufins · 3 years

Text

So, took a bit longer to write this since I was moving back home now that the school year is done and as you probably saw if you follow me, I created the Shared Space au! I’m really proud of that too, so check it out! and send asks for it too!

anywho, tagging time! @petrichormeraki @helleborusangel

Jrum stood facing Grifect, sword at the ready. He just needed to buy some time because there was something easy he could do. Instead of having an actual communicator, it had been built into his system at one update, so he didn’t need to get it out and type. Instead he could just send it mentally, though it could be a little odd at times.

But right now it was important. Jrum got a message ready and sent it to Mumbo, then to Grian. Telling them he was in danger and Tommy probably was too. But there was a problem, he didn’t get a message back from them, but an error.

“Sowwy, but I can’t wet uwu caww fow hewp! Thawt wouwd make my dad mad. If they gow aftew Tommy, they’ww see youw bwothew iws gone.”

Jrum jumped at Grifect, slashing his sword at the other bot. An arrow hit him as he ran forth, a second when he hit Grifect. Not wanting to get shot anymore, Jrum kicked the dispenser, pushing it out of Grifect’s reach. He attacked with his sword again, but a shield materialized on Grifect’s arm and deflected the attack. “That’s not fair!”

“Why wouwd I make iwt faiw? I wawnt tuwu win awnd hacking iws easy. You’d awweady be dead if I couwdn’t wisk wetting a message out thawt I was the owne who kiwwed uwu.” Grifter explained with a giggle, hacking in a new dispenser. “At the vewy weast kiwwing machines won’t duwu thawt, then I cawn pwetend iwt was juwst an accident whiwe you’we fine! But if aww my data iws wight, once you’we dead, you’ww be whisked away fwom thiws wowwd again!”

Jrum hesitated at that. He would? But he lost a life in the SMP and came out fine. But then again they had weird respawn rules, Tommy was proof of that. Jrum thought about trying to run, but then had an idea. If he would have an issue with respawning, Grifect would have to have the same issue!

Jrum pulled out a bow and fired it at Grifect before pulling out an axe. The helsbot put their shield up for the arrow, so Jrum was quickly able to chop it in half with his axe. Grifect’s eyes widened which let Jrum know something else, the other bot wasn’t good at combat or have a program for it. “You asked Xannes how to be a better hacker?” Jrum swiped his sword at the bot. “He’s a good hacker because he had to train all his skills. Xisuma is the best admin, so he needed to beat that. But he also needed to be good at everything!” The sword managed to tear into a weak part of Grifect’s body at a join. “You may be a hacker, but you have no clue how to actually use what you have! And that means I win!” And the sword sliced Grifect in half, the robotic body disappearing in smoke before it could reach the ground.

Jrum panted, having used a lot of energy for that. He wanted to close his combat program to conserve power, but he didn’t know if anyone else would show up. He wasn’t even sure where his hels version would respawn. But the fact that he needed to respawn at all was good news, so Jrum attempted to send another message and smiled as it went through. Now people would know what was going on.

Grian kept glancing at his comm, worried out of his mind while he wasn’t with either of the bots. He had just gotten them back and while they looked like they were getting better, he couldn’t help but imagine the worst. It also didn’t help that he was dealing with NPG, Xannes and Sense all in one room.

He couldn’t help but sigh in relief when he got some messages from the boys. Jrum was still having fun playing with his hels copy and Tommy seemed to be taking care of Grum. The best part was the message that Grum was cuddling with Tubbee, which was great to imagine. It was just a shame Tommy could send a picture without disturbing them.

“So are you guys close to being done arguing?” Grian spoke up, getting up from where he was sitting. “I’m getting a headache from it all and Mumbo’s not here to help.”

“You can always go for the next best thing.” Sense suggested, making Grian scrunch his face up in disgust.

“What would Grifter think?”

“As if he wouldn’t want some fun with a clone.”

Grian shuddered. “Why are you like this?”

“Because Grifter and I love each other, which is surprising that you can’t do that as the ‘good’ versions.” Sense replied, crossing his arms.

“Hey! Those two of course love each other, they’re just not gross about it.” NPG argued for Grian. “And Even Xannes is okay with his stuff.”

“Ye-Hey!” Xannes complained, but then was stopped as their comms buzzed. Everyone looked away, Grian going over to his own and reading two messages, watching as a third appeared.

Grifect was slain by Jrumbot

<Jrumbot> Something’s wrong with Grum and Tommy. Grifter’s been up to something and my copy’s been hacking.

Grian was slain by PerfectSense

Grian watched as his own death message appeared as he was blasted in the back by a death ray Sense had on him. When his eyes next opened, he was in bed and heard a scream in the distance. His comm was still in his hand since he was holding it when he died. There were three more death messages, one for Xannes, one for Tommy and one for NPG.

The one for Tommy was the most concerning with Jrum’s message, so Grian jumped out of bed and broke his window to go through, not wanting to go through the main hall and run into Sense again. A few shards of glass cut into his wings from the shoddy break and Grian’s recklessness, but he didn’t care, needing to get there fast. He flew as fast as he could to get to the old hobbit hole, glad it wasn’t too far away.

Grian’s eyes widened as he got into the place. It was a mess and Grum was standing in the middle of it, holding a sword and staring at Tommy’s bed. Tubbee flew near him and was stabbed by the sword, making Grian hold his breath before the bee popped out of its hive again. The avian was glad that Xisuma had set it up so that the bee could respawn since Tommy had been scared of something happening to it.

“Grum, put the sword down.” Grian said. He wanted to reach for a weapon, but realized he hadn’t grabbed any before rushing over there. He frowned as Grum didn’t move, instead killing Tubbee again. “Grum, put it down!”

Grum put the sword down, slowly laying it down on the ground. Grian started to take a step towards the bot, but they immediately turned around, pulling out a crossbow and shooting Grian with it. Grian yelled as the arrow struck him and he looked at Grum, now realising it wasn’t his son, but the hels version. “What did you do with Grum?! And it said you killed Tommy too. How? You left the world with Grifter and didn’t-”

Sefter moved so fast Grian barely comprehended it. Grian’s wing deflected the attack, though an axe chopping into it still hurt. At the very least it was weak as Sefter was just bringing the weapon out, but he was just after any damage. Another attack came down on Grian’s arm before the bot changed to another crossbow, shooting Grian point blank.

Grian attempted to attack back, even though he only had his fists and wings as weapons, but Sefter kept dodging them. Grian huffed, finally noticing the magic radiating off of the robot. A strong speed potion. There was no way he could land a hit on Sefter, especially without a weapon. But that was fine, because it finally made sense. Tommy wasn’t here, likely in the other half of the hobbit holes. Grum also wasn't around because someone messed with the messages and he had left the world, not Sefter. Because of that, there was no reason for him to be here.

When Sefter next attacked, Grian dodged, letting himself fall. He opened a portal just below himself, letting the magic envelop him before closing it again so the bot couldn’t follow. He felt like he was falling for a few moments before opening a second portal, taking him out of the Watcher’s world and into the SMP.

The first thing he heard was someone crying. It sounded familiar, but at the same time he couldn’t place it. A voice that spoke up definitely was recognizable though. “Hmm, not sure it worked. Why not hit him again harder this time?”

“Tech-” He got out before something slammed into his gut, winding him. “Wh-What the fuh?” He managed to wheeze out.

“I-I’m s-sorry. I d-didn’t… You s-said he was- wh-why are you laughing?”

“You’re a f-fucking bitch Techno.”

“Nice to see you too Tommy.”

Tommy groaned as he sat up, having trouble as he found Grum sitting on his lap, holding a book in his hands like he was ready to bludgeon Tommy with it. That was probably what hit him in the gut now that he thought about it. “What the fuck happened?”

“The kid got the revive book that Dream had and used it to fix you. Did the same for Wilbur.”

Tommy sat up just a little bit straighter. “Wait, Wil’s alive? You’re serious?””

Techno gestured to Grum. “Yeah, apparently this one half revived him while we were all gone.”

“This one? His name’s Grum.” Tommy said, crossing his arms.

Techno crossed his arms back. “Does it matter?”

“He’s our fucking nephew!” Tommy complained, making Techno huff.

“And? So far all of my ‘nephews’ have tried killing me.”

“B-because you did it first.” Grum piped up. “I tried to be d-diplomatic with y-you and-”

“Yeah, well I hate government.” Techno cut Grum off.

“Yeah. I know. It was sort of my job to account for people like you. But it’s fine! One uncle is enough!”

Tommy chuckled. “Hey, maybe you’ll like Wil as an uncle too. Then you’ll have two.”

Grum turned to look at Tommy again. “I was already accounting for him in my count as I already had encounters with him here before. That is the one I was referring to.”

“Wh- Hey! Why am I being excluded?!” Tommy shouted while Techno smiled slightly.

Grum recoiled slightly, which made Tommy back off a bit. “You… you said I could call you something else. Just because you’re actually my uncle… you’re sort of not.”

It took Tommy a bit to realize what Grum meant. He supposed it was true, a week ago, they hadn’t known they were actually related to each other. “Well, alright, if you’ve only got one uncle, I’ve only got four brothers! Take that Techno!”

The hybrid just rolled his eyes while Grum tackled Tommy with a hug. Tommy patted the bot, rolling his own eyes, though it was more sarcastically. “So kid, why not start with Tommy?”

There was a moment of confusion from Tommy before Grum suddenly stiffened, letting Tommy know that whatever was being talked about wasn’t the greatest thing. “What are you talking about?”

“Something got brought up before we came here. I figure since you two seem close, he should be telling you, especially if I’ve already been told.”

Tommy leaned back to look at Grum. They didn’t look scared as much as they were nervous. “Hey big man, what is it? If it’s something that happened because of Dream, I won’t be mad. I mean, you kinda killed me and I’m fine.”

Grum fidgeted a bit, still looking nervous, but then he answered. “Um, I think I have something called chat? At least that’s what Techno called it.”

Tommy was taken aback and looked at the piglin. “Yeah, well, chat’s just what I call it. They’re basically just voices.”

“Right… sorry.” Grum apologized.

Tommy looked between the two of them again. “Wait, so you’ve got your own form of chat? They’re not telling you to be as bloodthirsty as Techno, right?” Tommy asked, and Grum quickly shook his head. “Then yeah, it’s fine. Besides, even if I didn’t like it, your dads do so-”

“They don’t.” Grum cut Tommy off. “You’re… I’ve only told two people and you’re the second. I thought it was bad.”

“No, you’re fine. It runs in the family.” Tommy assured the bot. “Plus, they don’t sound too bad, so it’s fine.”

Grum fidgeted some more. “Well… Dream isn’t the nicest-”

“Wait, you hear Dream in there?!” Tommy couldn’t help but stand up in shock, causing Grum to fall off the bed. “Uh, sorry Grum. I just- Dream?! Really?!”

Grum rubbed his head. “Yes and no? He’s not like the one that was admin here, at least mostly. And they’ve kinda been around before I even knew you.”

Tommy didn’t look entirely convinced, but he didn’t want to make Grum even more upset. “I guess that’s okay. Who else do you remember the names of?”

“Um, all of them. There aren’t many. There’s Dream of course, but also Eyes, Gor-”

Tommy didn’t need Grum to continue. “I found your book. You hid it in your charger. Their names were in there. I mean, I don’t know how you got PM in your chat, but it sounds cool.”

“You found my book?” Grum asked, tilting his head. “And it was in my charger? Who put it there?”

“Uh, I thought it was you. I mean, you sent me a message to go there, though you used Eye’s name.”

Grum shook his head. “Then I didn’t do that. Eyes did.”

“What do you mean Eyes did?” Techno asked. “How can your voices do stuff like that?”

Grum looked even more confused now. “But… Is that not supposed to happen? Eyes and Console have both been doing that.” And then Grum’s confusion turned to panic. “I thought you said it was okay?”

“Shit.” Tommy cursed, sitting back down to pull Grum into a hug. “Yeah yeah, it’s okay. Just different. Fuck we need Mumbo and Grian.”

It was perfect timing, as just as Tommy said that, Techno’s communicator buzzed. The hybrid took it out and read the message before showing it to the teen.

Grian joined the world.

#hermit!tommy au #hermit!tommy #jrumbot #hels!jrumbot #grian #watcher!grian #grian xelqua #avian!Grian #evil xisuma #npg #npc grian #hels!Mumbo #hels!Grumbot #tommyinnit #technoblade #grumbot

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mihidecet · 3 years

Text

Sbi&co: D&D AU: The Hunt

Hello everyone! I’m a tad bit late but I do hope the extra wait was worth it ahahha

And I hope you’ll enjoy it! Let me know if you do, and as always thank you for reading! <3

"Alright boys, can everyone hear me?"

Tubbo's voice sounds crystal clear through the arcane earrings they have been given, but Quackity's nose still scrunches up: it's so weird to see his mouth moving in front of him and hear his voice come from a completely different direction.

Thankfully - or maybe not - they won't be seeing each other much during this game. Another good thing is how he won't have to do much running either, if everything goes well; he still feels very much sore after last week's obstacle course, so he absolutely does not mind staying back and coordinating everyone. That and, if anyone was in need of help, he could swoop in and save the day - always a win in his book.

Quackity gives a sharp nod with his head towards Tubbo, who smiles enthusiastically before turning back towards Fundy to resume talking about how they'll manage to replicate the enchantment for themselves. A part of him wants to get in on the fun, fantasize about how quests will be so much easier with the ability to communicate remotely. He can already imagine a grand infiltration mission that that would require elegant gowns and fancy clothes, concealed weapons and arcane tricks hidden up their sleeves, all with the objective of recovering an artifact of vital importance-

But he stops and shakes his head, as if it could get rid of those silly dreams. For once, it's not like he can really … stay; and also, he has much more important things to do.

Niki is in the process of stretching when a young looking wizard skips towards them with a blinding smile to let them know that they'll be opening the gates in less than five minutes. He figures that maybe he should have been warming up too, but his favourite pastime has always been people watching - which is extremely nostalgic for him and probably slightly weird from an outside perspective. Before he can lose himself again in his own mind - nerves will do that to him, he’s been noticing - a hand appears in front of his face and he grabs onto it on instinct. The fact that he’s hoisted upright quickly and efficiently clues him onto who it was, and he smiles gratefully at Niki.

She looks up at him, reciprocating the smile except for the slight furrow in her brows - a silent question, her wondering of why he’s been spacing out, but it’s not that bad after all, he can definitely handle it; he waves off her worries, gesturing with his head towards the bright gallery that will lead them towards the arena as he chuckles to himself.

“Is it time? I must have spaced out for more than I expected!” He half-jokes, willing to share his worry only partially, and realises he’s probably said too much when the crease in Niki’s forehead only deepens.

“Are you feeling well, Quackity? Is your shoulder still hurting?” The bard is - painfully - reminded that he is talking with a literal angel as her hand reaches forwards, palm already glowing slightly golden with what he’s come to learn is the sign of her healing divine magic, and he takes a step back, hands raised to stop her.

“I’m all good, no problem at all! I just got- distracted for a moment. Needed to clear my mind and all that ... It won’t happen during the hunt!” He adds hurriedly, suddenly realising that spacing out isn’t a really good sign when you’re supposed to be in charge of coordinating the whole team, but still, he knows what he has to do and he’s not going to lose himself in his own mind while they’re working - he wouldn’t still be alive in his line of work if that was the case!

But there’s a hand placed on his shoulder and Niki is smiling at him again, which has, for better or for worse, always been able to calm his nerves down. It’s not even like he’s know these people for a long time, and yet he knows that if he could, he’d stick around for the rest of his days, probably. If they wanted him to.

“It’s alright, I understand. I know we’re in good hands, we’ve been training for this.” Niki comments, sounding so sure of her words that he feels like he agrees with that too, to hell with his own self doubt.

“Of course! We know we’re in safe hands, big guy!” Tubbo adds, startling as he once again appears to reside inside his head, and Quackity is suddenly hoping that he didn’t accidentally broadcast their conversation to the rest of their team.

Before he can add anything else - or ask very subtly if either heard them talking - an arm is suddenly slung over his shoulders, the smell of ink and sulfur worming its way into his nose as Fundy leans on him and starts leading him towards the tunnel.

“Come on, enough with the training and the moping, we have amulets and gold to collect!” The conman exclaims, receiving a raised eyebrow from Quackity himself as the bard resigns to becoming a temporary armrest - he’s learnt that that is simply what Fundy does, be it in his fox form or his human form, he’s always on his or somebody else’s shoulders. It’d be sweet if it wasn’t for the indirect reminder of his height, or lack thereof.

“Oh, and you would know all about collecting gold, uh?” Quackity quips back as Niki and Tubbo both fall into step with them, Tubbo’s mechanical bee buzzing right behind.

“It was one time!” The shifter laments, prompting the rest of the group to burst out laughing, Niki’s voice raising over the others’ to protest:

“It wasn’t just one!”

Then, the roar of the crowd fills their ears, and they step into the arena.

It doesn’t take Fundy much to reach the first portal.

The arena has been suited for the occasion, since what used to be a huge but empty field of sand is now a thick, jungle-like forest, with vines that droop from a ceiling of leaves and brightly coloured plants that snap their petals at him when he runs by.

It didn’t take him long to get used to digging his way through the foliage, his shifter blood surely aiding him in the process, but he still tries not to move too fast - he will need to get back to the main clearing multiple times, to bring back the amulets that will give them more time to explore.

One of his hands lightly grazes a leaf, leaving behind a smear of orange - he has Quackity to thank for procuring them the thick paints they coated their hands with before starting, so that their paths will be marked; easy to follow for both them and the bard himself, if any of them would ever need assistance.

He’s been running for only a handful of seconds when the light blue glow of a portal catches his eye: he smacks his hands to the side of the tree that marks his change in direction, leaving behind a much thicker mark, and jumps into the portal.

“Light blue portal, I’m in … catacombs, I think.” He says, focusing on his newly acquired magical earring in order to broadcast the information to the rest of his team. A series of loud whoops answer him, bringing a satisfied grin to his face, and he slows down for a moment, trying to listen for anything happening further down the chambers he’s found himself in, eyes scanning the ground for any hidden traps.

The coast seems to be clear - there’s a faint whispering coming from the portal behind him, the familiar gentle hum of conjuration magic, but he’s fairly certain that he’s the only living thing in there.

Which in hindsight was exactly the point, he realises a moment later as he enters a dimly lit room, when an arrow sails just a couple of inches past his face - he flinches away from the blow purely by instincts, letting out a high pitched yelp while his hands raise upwards, brain suddenly put on alert and already thinking about what to do.

The situation isn’t hard to comprehend: there are half a dozen skeletons, armed, slowly inching their way towards him; a handful are standing right in front of the only other existing exit, as if guarding it - probably commanded to do so, since from his own personal experience skeletons are rarely smart enough to “stand guard”.

He is almost certain that there are no other paths he could have taken, so his only way is forward, hopefully towards something valuable. Of course that is, if he manages to get through.

The first thing Fundy realises is that there are a bit too many enemies to comfortably take on. For a moment he truly considers simply dropping a fireball straight into the middle of the room - quick, easy, efficient - but a part of him knows that it would be a bit of a waste of energies for so little enemies, and he does expect to meet plenty more enemies very soon. Despite the fact that time is of the essence, he can’t help but remember how bets in favour of Wilbur’s team had skyrocketed after their stellar performance in the arena a handful of weeks prior. And well, a conman has to know how to put on a show, doesn’t he?

“Hello gentlemen! Would you be so kind to form an orderly cue in front of me?” He’s quick to step to the side, away from another incoming arrow from one of the two skeletons posted in front of his objective, but thankfully the rest of the skeletons are quick to follow his request as they stumble forward, moving towards him and brandishing their swords.

One of them, apparently more eager than the others, launches themselves at him, their shortsword raised high and coming down in a swift swoop that crashes against a - hastily created - light purple magical barrier. Fundy tsks at the skeleton, shaking his head disapprovingly behind the hand he had to raise to form the arcane shield. With a quick look he assures himself of the optimal placement of his enemies, then he brings his hands together in front of him, rubbing his palms together quickly as if smearing something on them; an instant later he snaps the thumb and index finger of his right hand together, close to the wrist of his left hand: flames burst from his hands, catching fire as if he’d clicked together a flint and steel over warm coal, and he brings his wrists together, directing the stream of arcane fire towards the four skeletons still stumbling towards him.

With a flash of warm light and a chilling screech, the skeletons catch fire and burn, the necromantic binds keeping them whole snapping and breaking, charred bones falling to the ground in sad heaps.

The two skeletons still standing by the exit door let out a pitiful whine, arms clanking together as they nock their arrows - one falls to the ground a couple of feet ahead of him, the skeleton that shot it starting to look as frantic as an expressionless undead can, while the other manages to catch him off-guard and pierces his left shoulder, tearing a pained yelp and a curse from him.

And well, with most of his enemies gone, he can now get his hands a bit dirtier, metaphorically speaking, as he unsheathes the rapier Niki had gifted to him more than five years before, keeping his unoccupied and still somewhat smouldering hand close to the blade. As his thumb runs over the cold metal, it catches fire, green flames licking at the hilt as he runs forward, impaling one of the two skeletons: flames burst from the blade, almost completely enveloping his enemy, the old and dry bones quickly catching fire as if they were matches. When he flicks his wrist, turning the blade on itself, there’s another burst of flames coming from the hilt itself as a bolt of emerald green fire flies towards the other skeleton, hitting their side.

The only remaining skeleton raises their bow, trying to aim at him, but Fundy simply steps forward, into their personal space, hearing the arrow being let loose behind him and flying into a stone wall.

He grins, knowing his fangs poking their way over his lips make him look more menacing, and sheaths his sword into the skeleton’s chest, cutting away the arcane ties keeping them from dying, fire burning around them both - he releases the excess arcane energy with another bolt of green fire that burns a circular charred mark into the wall to his left.

For a moment, it’s all silent around him as he takes a small relieved breath, ever so thankful of Niki’s insistence of getting him to train with his sword.

Then, Tubbo’s voice rings in his hears, calling out a new portal he’d just found - a locked one, tinted red.

Fundy gives a vocal confirmation of having received the message, then puts away his sword - flames dissipating on their own - and quickly makes his way towards the still closed door.

Plenty of things to do, enemies to kill, amulets to find.

He can take a break when their time in the labyrinth runs out.

#sbi&co dnd au #itsfundy #tubbo #nihachu #quackity #sbi au #dnd au

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melibemusca · 4 years

Text

I’m finally doing the writing questionnaire that @eunyisadoran tagged me in! Thank youuu and let’s see if I can make the formatting work.

Fandoms: These days it’s Good Omens all the way down. But I have older fics from Batman (animated series) and The Enchanted Forest Chronicles that I might get around to posting on AO3.

Tropes: Happy endings. (Even if they’re a bit twisted.) Adversarial relationships that range from snarky banter to outright physical fights. Doing way too much research for unnecessary details.

Number of fics: 14 GO fics on AO3, plus the couple from other fandoms I haven’t posted.

Fic I spent the most time on: Probably The Wit of the Bee even though it’s not done yet.

Fic I spent the least time on: Fun, Fun, Fun, a Crowley/Aziraphale crack fic based on a Beach Boys song. Yep.

Longest Fic: You Can’t Win Because You Don’t Really Want To is my longest complete fic at 26K, but The Wit of the Bee is definitely going to go longer.

Shortest Fic: If comics count, then Worst At Flirting. Otherwise, Such an Old-Fashioned Word.

Most hits/kudos/comments/bookmarks: You Can’t Win Because You Don’t Really Want To (hits/comments/bookmarks) and Playing Games with Loyal Servants (kudos). This is interesting, but I cannot decipher it.

Favorite fic I wrote: I think it’s Let Me Love, the first explicit smut I ever posted. I wouldn’t have tried to write it if a commenter hadn’t requested it, and I’m very happy with how it turned out, so it feels like a tribute to the lovely community of AO3. Plus it’s got fly biology and a happy ending, what more could you ask for? ;) I’m also extremely proud of Please Come Get Prince Charmless, but that one’s only as good as it is because the best bits (including the title) were written by @goodbyevanny and @eunyisadoran.

Fic I want to rewrite/expand: There’s a part three to the Sharper than Any Two-Edged Sword series rattling around in my brain.

Share a bit of a WIP or story I’m planning: From the next chapter of The Wit of the Bee--

Baize has Gabriel’s number in their phone because they’re both emergency contacts for Adam. No other reason. If he texts them photos of any stupid thing he sees with a bee on it, a cafe sign or a t-shirt or a cutesy mug, then that’s just Gabriel’s standard idiocy. Baize can’t be bothered to tell him to stop. And if Baize occasionally stays up late scrolling through the photos and his accompanying comments “thought of you” or “buzz buzz,” then that’s their business and nobody else’s.

Baize has never, not once, texted Gabriel anything.

#fanfic #writing #ineffable bureaucracy #because that is my jam #good omens #I did this instead of writing fic which was itself a distraction from work #so it's like meta-procrastination

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colonel-insomniac · 4 years

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Okay you want Prompt? How about coffee's shop AU for Kai and Ezra? I need more of my best boys

@my-blood-is-maple-syrup you ask, I serve. I started writing this almost as soon as I saw this ask bc this is Important.

Read The Other Planet!!!

Ezra sat quietly in the café, looking out the window, absorbed in his thoughts as he watched a bee hover from flower to flower. It had been two months since he’d managed to escape Azurelle, and quite literally hand in hand with Pon and Kai. At first, the two had stayed with him in his parents house, but eventually, they had left, managing to rent an apartment. Small and quaint, but comfortable. He remembers their faces as they refused to take money from his parents, insisting it wasn’t right, that they couldn’t take their money. They only agreed to take the money when Ezra’s parents insisted it was the least they could do for Kai and Pon after they’d watched Ezra, and even then, he knew they only did it to save him from further embarrassment.

They didn’t have a fight or anything. Kai and Ezra had talked about the way they felt about one another, and Ezra was shocked to find that the shorter man reciprocated his feelings, even though Pon had been adamant about this. But then they left, and Ezra felt like maybe he shouldn’t bother them. They’re setting up a new life for themselves, figuring out their next steps, and they don’t even have parents to guide them along. He had tried, waited for them in those woods by his house, but they never showed, and ro be fair, how would they know to? After that, the thought of sticking himself back in their lives made Ezra’s stomach twist. Not in disgust, but in anxiousness.

And so here he sat, two months later, alone in a booth in a café. He had a book on the table, his phone next to it, face down, and his apple cider not quite hot anymore. When the bee buzzes away, he snaps out of his thoughts, resting his head on an arm with a sigh. He needed to move on, at least that’s what he’s been told. He’s hung out with friends, so it’s not like he’s not holing himself up in his room, but there’s a sick, panicky feeling that slowly develops in the back of his mind when he does hang out with them, and he can’t put a finger on why.

Ezra’s eyes flick over to his phone as it lights up, and he watches, determined to see it fall back asleep. The screen fades to black, and he wishes he were able to peacefully slip into sleep. But the nightmares only seemed to get worse after they moved out, so he’s spent the past couple months functioning on minimum sleep. He takes a sip of the cooled apple cider, wishing he’d chosen a coffee, or something remotely caffeinated.

It’s no shock that Ezra doesn’t see or hear anything when Kai enters the café. His eyelids have slowly drooped, lulled into an alert doze. But when the younger man slides across from him in the booth, Ezra’s back in the world of the living, and thoroughly perplexed at the sight in front of him. He rubs his eyes, muttering something about really needing to find a way to sleep at night. Kai’s hand reaches out across the table, covering one of Ezra’s when he drops them back to the table, fiddling with the paperback cover of his book. The contact stills Ezra, and he breathes in, holding that breath. Kai’s hands are cold, and it’s a shock to his whole being. “I didn’t think you came to this café.” Is all he manages to say to Kai, and it takes a moment for his brain to register that he probably should’ve started with a greeting of some sort.

Kai smiles at that, all kind eyes like when he took care of him. Ezra’s heart pangs, and he looks away silently, knowing his face is mostly blank, save for shock. “Well, Pon found this café and he’s addicted to it, so I came to get him some of their pastries.” At Ezra’s nod, Kai adds, “He’s gotten sick.” His obvious worry for Pon leaves Ezra completely speechless, and He dumbly nods again, his eyes running over the marks the scars on his face had left behind.

Kai’s concern is palpable as he asks Ezra if he’s alright. Ezra feels his face flush, and starts to nod again before figuring he needs to actually say something. “Yeah, I uh, I missed you.” And then he looks away in embarrassment— ‘C’mon Ezra, you’re really gonna be that blatant? What happened to moving on?’ His brain whispers, and he rushes to change the subject to something else, hopefully less embarrassing for him. Kai’s eyes are wide in surprise, and Ezra cringes internally. “So, how have you been?”

He’s instantly aware of the tightness of the sound of his voice, and it just sounds so wrong, but now that he’s said it he can’t do anything but wait until Kai responds, however he may respond.

There’s a pink blush on Kai’s face, but Ezra doesn’t notice it as Kai carefully chooses the words for his response. “I miss my parents, and sister, even though that’s kind of stupid after all they did to me, but I’m grateful that Pon’s here with me too. I missed you too, and I wanted to come see you, but we weren’t sure that it was right, so we didn’t.” Kai’s eyes pin Ezra in place, calming that panicky feeling creeping in on him. “But we should have, because I—we both care about you.” The slip up is the only thing bouncing around in Ezra’s head, and he turns it over in his mind. “I—we care about you….”

He’s not sure if his heart has stopped beating or if it’s in his imagination, but he feels completely and absolutely still but also like he’s vibrating violently. What does it mean? Could it really just be a slip up? “I…” He’s not really sure what to say or how to respond, and as seconds pass by, Ezra’s face feels like it’s getting closer and closer to a fire, warmth becoming heat. His phone rings, and he jumps, heart pounding. It’s Shawn, one of his friends, so he lets the phone ring, pressing the volume button so it silences. And then he puts his head in his hands, trying to avoid eye contact with Kai. “I probably need to go, uhm….” He trails off, frantically grabbing his things together. The cider sloshes in the cup, and Ezra watches—fixates, really—on that, thinking about how that’s what his insides feel like right now.

He can hear the rush of blood in his ears, and he knows he’s not breathing right. People must be looking at the scene he’s causing, but Ezra’s only thinking about how his parents managed to act normal after…what happened. Kai’s in front of him now, hands on Ezra’s arms, face close to his, eyes wide with pure worry. He doesn’t know what’s happening to Ezra, but Ezra knows that won’t stop Kai from trying everything in his power to help. It makes him want to cry.

“Ezra, look at me.” Kai orders, and Ezra’s powerless against doing otherwise. He lifts his eyes from the cup in his hand and meets the other’s eyes. “We need to go outside for a moment. Fresh air.” Is all he says before guiding Ezra gently out of the coffeeshop. Ezra breathes the air in, in, in, until he can’t anymore. He slowly lets it out, thinking of a deflating balloon, and the chilly air forces his head to clear.

Kai plops Ezra on a bench in front of the café and sits next to him, looking intently at Ezra, green eyes searching his face. “What’s going on?” He asks Ezra, leaving a hand on his arm, as though to keep Ezra from bolting.

Ezra slouches in defeat and looks away. “I haven’t slept right in months. Nightmares. No one’s there but my parents, and they didn’t go through what we went through so they don’t know how to help.” He doesn’t look at Kai. “And I can’t call the therapist at night. So I just don’t sleep.”

Ezra can feel the sympathy practically radiating off of Kai, but the shorter of the pair doesn’t say anything. Instead, he lifts Ezra’s arm and wraps it around his shoulder, scooching closer to Ezra and leaning his head on his shoulder. Ezra tenses, then relaxes. “I thought I needed to just move on, and maybe everything would be bearable, but there’s no way to do that.” Against his will, Ezra leans his cheek on Kai’s head, and he feels surprised at the realization that his heart has resumed a normal rhythm.

“I didn’t realize….” Kai mutters, and Ezra shakes his head.

“S’not your fault.” He doesn’t want Kai to think this is his fault, Kai is perfect in Ezra’s mind. Maybe he isn’t perfect, but in Ezra’s mind, he is.

Ezra’s looking down at the closed book in his hands, and his heart leaps into his through when he feels something searingly warm on his cheek. His head snaps up, and he looks at Kai, eyes wide, all his sorrows gone. Kai offers a shy smile, and a blush paints his cheeks. Ezra swiftly throws his arms—or other arm, rather—around Kai, chin resting on the other man’s shoulder. Kai grips him back, returning the embrace.

When they’ve hugged long enough, Ezra reaches a hand out and cups Kai’s cheek gently, and when Kai doesn’t shrug him off, Ezra smiles for what feels like the first time in his life. There’s no need for words to communicate what both feel, and Kai stands, reaching a hand out to Ezra, who takes it.

“Pon’s pastries!” Kai exclaims, slapping a hand on his forehead as they walk away. So they double back, and after a brief and quiet argument, Ezra manages to get Kai to let him pay for it.

As they leave the café, Ezra texts his mom to let her know he’s gonna be hanging out with friends for a bit.

@pawsomelybuggy you’re next >:D

#kai #ezra #pon #pastries #pons pastries #The Other Planet #My Writing #Original Book

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rahirah · 5 years

Note

Okay, I KNOW you've reblogged that "DVD commentary" meme at some point in your life, so: would you like to do DVD commentary on the opening scene of "My Baby Is A Centerfold"? (Or less detailed commentary on the whole "My Baby Is A Centerfold"?)

My Baby Is A Centerfold DVD Commentary

I wrote this story in 2004, fifteen years ago, so fair warning, I don't recall a lot of the minutiae that went through my head when I was writing it. However, I will do my best!

This was one of the first short stories I wrote set in the same universe as my novel series. I wrote it for the Summer of Spike community over on Livejournal – Summer of Spike was, I believe, the first of the "seasonal" fic communities, and inspired a lot of imitators (including Seasonal Spuffy and Summer of Giles, which are still going to this day) but it only lasted for a couple of rounds. Anyway, someone had recently asked me what happened to the Trio in my 'verse. I already knew that the Trio had started their careers as criminal masterminds while the events of Necessary Evils were going on, and that after NE ends, Warren would try enslaving Katrina in pretty much the same way, Katrina would end up dead, and Warren would try to frame Buffy. Buffy being in a very different frame of mind by this point in my 'verse, while she initially panics at the thought that she accidentally killed someone, Spike and Dawn are able to convince her to investigate first. And of course they discover that Katrina's been dead for several hours, so they call the police and that's when Terminal Line takes place, and Buffy makes first contact with Detective Nguyen, who becomes a recurring NPC and eventually the captain of the Sunnydale PD and is instrumental in Buffy's plan to bring the supernatural out in the open and ANYWAY.

For this story I wanted to do a lighthearted buddy cop sort of thing with Spike and Dawn, and it occurred to me that the Trio would have had to have set up their spy camera system, but since they all got arrested after the Katrina incident, they never had the chance to do anything with the footage. And in my 'verse, some of that footage would have been pretty racy. So what would happen if Buffy and Spike found out about it? The story pretty much wrote itself from there.

I could tell something was wrong the minute I walked in the door. The house had that too-quiet thundercloud feeling about it, and it wasn't just because of the blackout curtains. Buffy was still at the rink, Tara was at her summer job, and Willow was probably asleep (she's not as much of an early riser as Spike is). Normally this means an afternoon of bad TV and junk food with Spike, but the TV wasn't on. Spike always has the TV on.

So this story takes place between Necessary Evils and A Parliament of Monsters, when Spike has moved in with Buffy and Dawn, and Willow and Tara are renting the Summers's basement. It always bugged me that the characters on the show only had to worry about work when the plot required it. When the writers get bored, Buffy can suddenly support a dozen people on a starting school counselor's salary. So while I try not to make a huge deal of it in my 'verse, I do a lot of thinking about how everyone supports themselves. Especially people like Tara, who's sure as hell not getting any money from her family. And with Buffy I wanted to give her a day job that A) she would enjoy, and B) would be flexible with regard to slaying. Which is how she became a skating instructor.

When Spike moved in there was a whole big reshuffling thing, like musical chairs with bedrooms, and Spike ended up getting my old room as an office for Bloody Vengeance Inc., the demon-hunting business he and Anya started. I figured he was probably holed up in there downloading porn or something. Never overlook an opportunity to collect blackmail material is my motto. I dumped my library books on the couch and snuck upstairs with super-Slayer's-sister stealth, which wouldn't do me any good at all if Spike was actually, like, paying attention to his super-keen vampire hearing. Which apparently he wasn't, since I got all the way upstairs without a single physically impossible threat bellowed in my direction.

I had an argument about this with another fic writer once – she felt that Spike threatening Dawn with physical harm was abusive and horrible, and Dawn would be traumatized for life. I pointed out that A) it's canon that Spike does this when he's worried about Dawn's safety, and B) even if you're not a soulless vampire, it's really common for fear in a de facto parental unit to express itself as anger, C) does anyone seriously believe that Spike would ever follow through on any of those over the top threats? Seriously? And D) Dawn canonically blows off said threats and does not appear to actually feel threatened in the slightest. We ended up agreeing to disagree.

Spike was in the office, all right--I could see his hair glowing in the light of the computer monitor. I couldn't see what he was looking at, but whatever it was, it must have been really good, 'cause his eyeballs were practically SuperGlued to the screen. Or maybe really bad, because he looked horrified, not turned on. OK, what horrified William the Bloody? Besides the prospect of squiring Buffy to "Fantasy On Ice?" This I had to see. I rounded Spike's desk and peered over his shoulder. "Hey, mister, you got feelthy pictures?"

If it was Willow? Two clicks of a mouse's tail and whatever was in that window would be closed, password protected, PGP-encrypted, and accessible only through an FTP server in Outer Mongolia. Spike's way better with technology than some vampires I could name, but when he's taken by surprise he still resorts to more primitive methods. He scrambled around in his chair with the panicky flail of a cat falling off a windowsill and slapped a hand across my eyes. "Don't look!" he ordered, about half an octave higher than usual.

This story is full of early 2000s-computer jargon. It's not quite as dated as the show itself, but I give it the ol' college try.

Which meant it was a moral imperative for me to put some of that self-defense training he'd been giving me into practice and kick him in the shins--oh, come on, you'd have done it, too. "Fuck!" Spike yelled. He grabbed for his ankle, overbalanced, and banged his head on the edge of the desk as his chair rolled out from under him. He crashed to the floor, leaving me with a free-and-clear view of the computer.

For someone who's been accused of writing the Everybody Loves Spike Show, I sure have him behave like an idiot a lot.

Now, I want to make it real clear that I'm a sixteen-year-old of the world. I know all about the birds and the bees and the vampires. I've even done a little buzzing myself. And of course I know that my sister and Spike have--well, 'having sex' is way too tame for what they do. Anyway, I know all about The Sex in theory. I also know how sausages are made, in theory. That doesn't mean I'm panting for an up-close at the gooey details of either process. Especially when it involves a grainy RealPlayer file of my very naked sister bouncing up and down on my very naked best-friend-and-platonic-lust-object in Barbie's S&M Playhouse.

I may have written this whole story just to have an excuse to use the term "Barbie's S&M Playhouse."

I may have said something. It may have been 'gleep.' Luckily for my retinas, at that minute Spike lunged up over the edge of the desk and put his fist through the screen. The monitor exploded in a shower of pretty green sparks, and Spike stood there glaring at it all clenchy-jawed and snarly, breathing hard through his teeth. He turned the glare on me. "I swear by all that's unholy, Bit, the next time you sneak up on me like that I'm going to put you in a two-by-three box without benefit of hacksaw!"

Monitors! With! TUBES!!!

I glared right back--no way was he going to make this my fault. "How was I supposed to know you were watching Vampire Pervert Theater 3000?" I snapped. "I thought you were just watching NORMAL porn! Jeez, Spike, if you and Buffy are gonna to videotape your stay in the Satellite of Love, at least--"

I had another discussion with a beta about whether or not Spike would download porn. My argument was "He's a guy."

Spike vamped out and hurled the monitor clean off the desk and into the wall with a roar (and when I say 'roar,' I don't mean 'loud yell,' I mean 'roar') of "WE DIDN'T BLOODY WELL TAPE IT!"

Wow. I never knew monitors were made up of that many pieces. "You mean you taped it without telling her?" I squeaked.

"NO!" Spike flexed his computer-punching hand (bloody knuckles, shards of glass, v. sexy) and shook off the lumpies. "Someone soon-to-be-departed did! I've never seen the sodding thing before in my life!" He looked really bewildered underneath the homicidal fury.

It's really very interesting to go back and compare Early Barbverse Spike to Late Barbverse Spike in terms of what progress he makes (or doesn't make) in controlling his temper over the course of the series. Hopefully I make the progression believable.

"OK, where did you find it?" I asked. I didn't exactly want to say so, but it occurred to me that maybe Buffy had taped it without telling him. Buffy may play it all Sandra Dee on the outside, but on the inside? Pure Gypsy Rose Lee. She had to keep it all bottled up during The Angel Years, and during The Riley Years she had to be really careful not to break him, and now, well--Exhibit A, currently lying in ten zillion pieces on the floor. "Was the file just sitting on your hard drive, or...?"

Spike looked super-guilty all of a sudden. His head ducked down between his shoulders, vampire ninja turtle style. "Mighthaveclickedonalinksomethin'boutSlayers," he mumbled.

"In other words, you were surfing for Slayer porn?" I folded my arms and settled in for some primo foot-tapping. "Don't you get enough of that at home?"

The interesting thing about the Buffyverse is that the supernatural ISN'T really a secret. Tons of people know about it. It's just no one admits to knowing about it. Which makes my Buffy's job a lot easier when she decides to drag it out of the closet. Which is a roundabout way of saying, if you know where to look, of course there would be Slayer fetish websites.

"I was not! I just...happened on it, like, looking for something else!" Spike is the world's second worst liar (Willow is the winner and still champeen) and he could see I wasn't buying it. "And anyway, it's a bloody good thing I did! Christ knows how long that's been out there for any spotty little deviant with their mum's credit card number to--" His eyes went Inuyasha-huge as fresh horror overtook him. "How long has it been out there?"

Barbverse Dawn is a Sesshumaru fangirl for sure.

"I'm more worried about who the cameraman was," I said. Spiders walked up my spine for a second. "I mean, that was your bedroom, right?"

Two seconds later we burst in through the door of Mom's old room, now Buffy and Spike's House of Ill Repute. I dove for the closet and Spike ripped open the door of the big old mahogany wardrobe he'd dragged over from the crypt. (But he didn't go inside, because as everyone knows, it's very foolish to shut yourself inside a wardrobe.) I stared at the crush of cute tops and kicky boots, ooh, I bet Buffy won't miss this one, she hasn't worn it in weeks... "How many shoes does she OWN?" I pulled a box free and the whole Leaning Tower Of Gucci collapsed on me.

My fic is usually a game of Spot the Narnia Reference

"Stop larking about," Spike growled, grabbing my feebly waving hand and yanking me out of the sea of footwear. "By the angle it's got to be around here somewhere..." He did one of those effortless vampire leaps and chinned himself on the top of the wardrobe, peering over the facade of wooden curlicues on the top. "Got the bastard!" He snaked one arm over the rim and jerked something small and black free, and dropped back to the floor with a thump. "What the hell...?"

It was a tiny, palm-sized camera with a little antenna sticking out of the top. Witness the creepiness. "I'm freaking out here," I said, plopping down on the bed. "Someone actually broke into our house and hid that up there!"

Spike snarled and closed his fist, and the camera joined the monitor in Electronics Heaven before I could yell, "Wait, that's evidence!"

"Not any more, it's not."

"It could lead us back to whoever planted it," I said impatiently. "We could have woken Willow up and had her...I don't know, do something technical."

This is why Spike needs Dawn around. She's the criminal mastermind in the family.

"Point." Spike shoved his lower lip out and scowled. "If there's one, there may be more. In fact, there's got to be."

I blinked. "How can you tell?"

He looked guilty and embarrassed again. "Ah, well, you see, the web site said...

For a guy supposedly unable to feel remorse, Spike does guilty and embarrassed very well.

*****

"Oh, as they say, my God." Xander stared at the tiny repeating clip with sick fascination. "'The Hottest Slayer in a Century Meets The Coolest Vampire Ever, and Guess Who Gets Staked! Sizzling Action With Cold, Dead Seed!' And this is just the teaser. You can order a whole DVD, only $49.99. Hours of fun for the whole family."

I am pretty sure that Jonathan got Andrew to write that advertising copy.

"Well, I must say both of you have excellent technique," Anya said with an approving nod. "And Spike has a large and well-formed penis, though personally I prefer circumcised men. But I can certainly understand why you're upset if you're not getting your rightful share of the profits."

"Spike, could you cool it with the growly noises?" Willow asked, her fingers flying over the keyboard. "It's distracting. OK, there's definitely more cameras... six at least. The Magic Box, the skating rink, Spike's crypt...this one's dead... Directory, directory, who's got the root directory...hah! Xander, hand me that Unicode list."

I actually researched what all Willow would have had to do to hack into and take over the camera network. I've forgotten it all now, but for about five minutes there, my skilz were l33t.

"What I still don't get is why someone bothered to break into our house and plant cameras," I said from the opposite end of the dining room table. I was staying as far away from follow-the-bouncing-Buffy as possible. "Especially considering Spike would have ripped their heads off if he'd caught them, and Buffy would have gotten REALLY mean. If you want to make a sex film, why not just go over to one of the frat houses on campus and hire a couple of college students?"

"I hate to say it, Dawnie, but I don't think they were making a porn film." Xander tore himself away from Willow's laptop. "This is surveillance camera footage. Someone's been spying on Buffy, and the porn film is just a happy byproduct."

"But that doesn't make any sense," Willow muttered. She picked up one of the larger camera fragments with a pair of tweezers. "Look, it's all dusty, and the battery pack was dead. This hasn't worked for weeks, maybe months. Do we have any toner cartridges we could break open? I think we could use the toner as fingerprint powder, and if whoever installed these left any prints, and if Spike didn't smudge them all up with his macho camera-crushing..."

This was back when printer cartridges had loose toner in them. I had just come off working for a place where we bough giant bags of loose toner and refilled our own cartridges because it was cheaper, and by God, that stuff got EVERYWHERE.

"Oh, right, blame the victim," Spike groused. "Christ, I need a fag." He stomped over to the kitchen door, and I got up and followed him out to the back porch, which was in shadow at this time of day. He lit a cigarette and stood there puffing furiously, all formal and stiff, and it weirded me out. I mean, Spike doesn't just walk or stand or sit. Spike struts and lounges and sprawls and tucks his thumbs in his belt all "Hi, I'm Spike, and this is my crotch!"

On the other hand, somewhere underneath Spike, Vampire Sex God, is still a guy who grew up when ankles were an erogenous zone. "Spike...are you OK?"

"Didn't want you to see that," he said at last. "Not right. Not proper."

He looked absolutely miserable. Any other time I'd have patted his shoulder, but I figured I'd better roll my eyes instead. I leaned against the side of the house, ultra-cool and sophisticated and untroubled by the certain knowledge of Naked Spike a mere two layers of cloth away. "It's OK. Honest. It's not like I've never seen a naked guy before--"

So in my verse, as in canon, Dawn had a crush on Spike. And she knows perfectly well that Spike's in love with her sister, and doesn't see her that way. And she loves her sister, and wants her to be happy, and she doesn't want to be (as she puts it in another story) "pathetic" about it. So she's tried very hard to squash her crush down and pretend it doesn't exist. But sometimes...

That was a mistake. Spike went yellow-eyed, achieving zero to over-protective in six seconds. "And just who the hell--"

"You and Xander, dope, when we all went skinny dipping after that clambake. Get your mind out of the gutter." Of course vague glimpses of guy-parts decently veiled by darkness and ice-cold seawater and didn't quite, uh, measure up to, well, let's just say I'm going to be comparing my future boyfriends to Spike in more ways than one, but you know, I wasn't going to let this be weird. Spike is a total hottie, and maybe, just maybe there have been a few daydreams. Detailed daydreams. With a sound track and special effects. But there are hotties all over the planet, and not all that many guys you can talk to about important stuff like whether or not you really existed before two years ago, and whether the monks that created you remembered to add a standard-issue soul to the mix, and how incredibly annoying older sisters can be. "On second thought, I'm deeply traumatized. I think I might get over it if you talked Buffy into letting me get my navel pierced."

Spike stared at me, various bits of him twitching. "Dawn--"

I patted his shoulder, because I could. "You're gonna be inhaling filter in a minute. Let's go inside."

When we got back inside, Willow had bit and pieces of camera wired up to the laptop. "Curiouser and curiouser," she said. "The server this camera was supposed to send information to doesn't exist any longer, or at least, it's not turned on. The web site's on a regular commercial server, and the domain name's registered to Horatio Hellpop--pseudonym much? Good news, it looks like the site's only been up for a couple of days--" She broke into a triumphant grin. "We're in!"

"What're you waiting for, then?" Spike doesn't usually use his sire-to-minion voice on Willow, but he was using it now. "Take it down!"

It's not relevant to the tale at hand, so I don't belabor it here, but this Willow is a vampire with a soul. It's a long story.

"Patience, Grasshopper." Willow typed a few more cryptic strings of symbols into the laptop. "Bad news, it's going to take me a few hours to find out who the owner really is. I'll have to hack into Paypal to get his bank account info and track IP addresses and stuff."

I did not research what it would take to hack into Paypal. I have my limits.

Spike began pacing back and forth, tense and borderline vampy, looking like he really, really wanted to kill something. Or someone. "And in that time this berk could run off a hundred more copies and pass 'em out to friends as door prizes."

"Or keep them and sell fifty-seven of them to the list of people I'm downloading now," Willow said. "OK. I've disabled the site and changed the passwords, so no one will be able to order any more." She cracked her knuckles. "Give me six hours and I can clean out Larry Flynt Junior's bank account, ruin his credit history, and send anonymous tips to Donald Rumsfeld that he's a terrorist child pornographer." Willow's a little less scary without her magic, but really? Not by that much. She looked around. "Not that I would ever do anything like that."

I mean really. "Hacker" may be a 90s cliche, but I still wouldn't want one mad at me.

Spike snatched the list of names and credit card numbers off the printer and squinted at it. "Bloody hell. There's addresses all the way from Juneau to Key West." He looked at the list again, and smiled. Need I say it wasn't a very nice smile? "I think it's time to pay a visit to the locals. Could be some of them have an idea who they're ordering from. Harris, you want to take out the rest of those cameras, and--" He turned to Willow. "Will, when Buffy gets home, for God's sake don't let her suss out anything's wrong. If she finds out about this..."

My Spike still needs glasses, but is too vain to wear them. I have a number of canonical justifications for this headcanon.

All of us shuddered in unison. If Buffy found out there would be an explosion of thermonuclear proportions. Spike grabbed his motorcycle jacket and blanket and headed for the front door, and I leaped to my feet and ran after him. "Wait up! I'm going with you!"

He scowled at me. "I think not. You're going to stay here, and distract your sister like a good little minor."

"Uh-uh." I used all of my hey-Dawnie's-tall-now height to advantage. "Look, Spike, all this stuff getting out does to you is make you mad. If Buffy finds out, she's going to be..." I floundered for a minute. " Humiliated, and nobody humiliates my sister except me. I'm gonna go with you, and we're gonna find out who did it and...and... kick their butts with pointy-toed shoes."

Spike glared, but it was the old I-disapprove-on-principle-but-you're-all-right,-Niblet glare, and I knew he'd be caving in ten, nine, eight... "Move yer girly arse, then," he said with an unconvincing growl. "We've got villains to apprehend."

I scooted for the DeSoto before he could change his mind. Maybe he thought that it would be a good idea to have someone soul-having around when he was this mad, just in case. Or maybe, and I really prefer this version, he just wanted a partner in crime because it's more fun that way. Spike flung the blanket over his head and copied my dash for the car, and we flung ourselves into the DeSoto's dark interior just as Spike was beginning to sizzle. "You come along, you mind what I tell you, yeah? I say stay in the car, you stay in the car. I say you run, you run. I say you take that fucking pathetic excuse for music out of the CD player and toss it out the window--"

"--and I ignore you like always," I said cheerfully, turning up the Jennifer Lopez.

"Fine. If anyone dies tonight, it's on your head. Some things are beyond any self-respecting vampire's endurance." Spike slammed into reverse and backed out of the driveway with a screech of tires. I grabbed the door handle. Driving with Spike is always a character-building experience, and today was no exception. "First on the hit parade?"

I scanned the list. "Vernon Blakely, 1583 East Beechwood. What are we gonna say to Mr. Blakely when we get there?"

Spike gazed out through the little clean space in the windshield, obviously pondering which limb he should rip off first, and peeled out like there was a mob with torches after us. "Improvisation is a virtue, Bit."

I had absolutely no idea how they would get the DVDs back. The next several scenes are just me letting the characters take the reins and do whatever the hell they wanted to.

**********

Spike was smoking gently beneath his blanket when the shade-deficient door of 1583 East Beechwood opened to our urgent hammering, and a middle-aged guy with thinning red hair and freckles and a pot belly opened it and blinked at us. He looked like Mr. Weasley gone to seed. "Mr. Blakely?" I said with my brightest, shiniest smile.

The Blakely looked from me to Spike, and the contrast seemed to produce some kind of cognitive dissonance on his part. "Can I... have we met?"

"Only in spirit." Spike leaned heavily against the doorframe, with a smile that was probably supposed to be reassuring, but which made him look like he was sporting fangs even when he wasn't. Spike isn't a big guy--in fact, he's on the smallish side, but he's got, you know, muscles. And this air of being able to rip your liver out. Also did I mention the muscles? "I'm given to understand you made a purchase recently from...ah..." He glanced surreptitiously at the paper in his hand. "...Mad Genius Productions?"

Mr. Blakely looked at me, dubious, and at Spike, nervous. "What of it? If I'd done anything like that, which I didn't."

"We're from the, uh, department of quality control," I chirped. "The DVDs are..."

"Radioactive," Spike put in. "Rot your goolies off just like that. " I gave him an elbow-jab.

"Defective," I said firmly. "Glitches. Pixelization. It's criminal the kind of shoddy merchandise we put out. We're recalling them and giving you a replacement at absolutely no charge!"

Spike held up a jewel case and flashed it under Blakely's nose. "Director's cut. Added scenes. 40% more filth for the price."

Suspicion was gathering in Mr. Blakely's watery blue eyes. "Hey, you're that guy from the video," he said.

Spike heaved a melodramatic sigh. "All right, all right, as you've twisted my arm, I'll autograph it for you."

I honestly did not expect him to say that, but somehow there I was, typing it.

The watery eyes brightened. "Really?"

Five minutes later we were dashing for the car again, with the confused Mr. Blakely waving us goodbye. "So what's he going to do when he discovers he's been suckered for a bootleg copy of J-Lo's latest?" I asked, as we tore away from the curb.

"Long as it's got some bint with her tits hanging out on the cover, I doubt he'll notice the difference." Spike grinned. "There'd just better be some hitting involved in the next one."

**********

"I don't believe there's any such thing as a Department of Quality Control," Mr. Angusson said, looking us up and down. "What the hell kind of scam are you pulling?"

"All we want to do is to replace--" I started.

"Look, missy, I bought that DVD nice and legal, and I don't give a crap if whatever goombah and his girlfriend put on plastic fangs to do it is having second thoughts now. So you and your boyfriend just toddle off and--"

"HEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPP!!" I screamed at the top of my lungs. "HE'S SHOWING ME HIS THING! IT'S ALL GROSS AND PURPLE AND--"

I didn't expect Dawn to do that, either. And yet!

Angusson disappeared and reappeared in two seconds flat, chucking the DVD at our heads.

"Better," Spike said as we tore out yet again. "But I'm still feeling a lack in the hitting things area."

Mr. Fishbein retreated a step from the threshold. "I'm not giving you anything, and I'm not letting you in," he quavered. "What do you think I am, stupid? You're a vampire!"

Honestly, it's Sunnydale. SOMEONE has to get it.

Spike rolled his eyes. He's learned from the masters. "Oh, bollocks, you don't really believe--"

"Oh, yeah?" Fishbein challenged. "Step through that door!"

I stepped through the door, grabbed Fishbein's hand and gave him a good hard yank, right across the threshold and into Spike's waiting fist.

"What was that?," Spike caroled, drawing back for another punch. "Come on in and have a cuppa, Spike? Better repeat it, I'm a touch deaf in that ear."

"That was unnecessarily bloody," I said as we hopped into the car and stepped on the gas, one DVD richer.

"He'll live," Spike said dismissively. "Probably. Next?"

**********

I figured I had to give Spike SOME violence, or he'd get mopey.

"Can you see--?" I hissed, trying to get a better view through the front window. It was getting dark, and I was out of practice at sneaking around not-really-abandoned buildings. Spike shushed me and crept around to the door. I peered through the sad straggly thevetia hedge, cupping my hands against the dirty glass. The place was just crawling with innnnnnteresting monsters, all huddled around a crappy old black and white TV. There's some law against demons watching flatscreen color, apparently.

"Oh, my God, are they really...you know....doing it?" The Gorthesch demon bumped a couple of Fyarls further down on the couch and plunged a scaly paw into the bowl of popcorn as they all stared at the flickering screen. "With a Slayer? I mean, I heard about it, but I didn't think even a vampire could sink that low."

"Real vampires don't," the lone vampire in the crowd protested, voice dripping disgust. "Maybe great big Slayer-whipped pussies do, but--"

"Shut up!" came a chorus of squeaky, growly, and croaky voices. Despite the complaints, everyone seemed to like the show. There were tongues hanging out. At least, I hope they were tongues.

"Yeah, it's just gettin' to the good part," a Syvithis demon whispered.

"Oooh! The one with the pommel horse?"

"No, where the Slayer goes down on him in the graveyard and he--"

I actually wrote a PWP detailing all the scenes in The Spuffy Sex Tape. An edited-down version eventually got incorporated into A Parliament of Monsters, when Angelus gets a hold of one of the copies that Spike and Dawn aren't able to track down in this story.

The front door imploded with a crash, splinters flying everywhere, and Spike strode into the room over the wreckage, a gleam in his eye and a really, really big axe slung over one shoulder. He surveyed the assortment of demons with a grin almost as big as the axe and about twice as vicious, ran his tongue over his teeth and and tucked his free thumb in his belt loop, fingers splayed over the merchandise. Just like old times. "Looks like you're right, mate," he said. "We are just getting to the good part."

**********

"OK, I take it back," I said as we headed for home. "THAT was unnecessarily bloody." It was after midnight, and we'd collected twenty-two DVDs, broken and entered fifteen houses and/or lairs, killed or maimed eight demons, broken five human fingers accidentally-on-purpose, and signed two autographs. Spike had definitely achieved his hitting things quota, and it was a safe bet that no one in Sunnydale would be mentioning Spike and Buffy's brief but eventful movie career in public any time soon.

"All right, p'raps the railroad spike was a bit much, but a bloke gets nostalgic." Spike stretched, all luxurious and satisfied, and lit up a fresh cig, trailing smoke out the window. He had a black eye and a split lip and a scrape right across the place where his cheekbone goes all knife-edgy, and the stretching made things creak inside that probably weren't supposed to creak, but he was in a much, much better mood. "He'll grow a new head."

Where did Spike get a railroad spike on short notice? I have no idea. He's just resourceful that way.

"If you say so," I said, a bit dubious. "Doesn't that only happen when you cut the old one off?"

"So it'll take a bit longer." Spike bounced a little in his seat, all hepped up on the old ultra-violence. "Still haven't found the bastard who's selling the things, though. Must be a bleeding criminal mastermind if--" I Wanna Be Sedated beebled from the cell phone in his pocket. (Like I said, a lot better with technology than some vampires I can name. He can even program it, though considering the songs he picks, sometimes we wish he couldn't.) He grabbed the phone one-handed and didn't slow down even a bit as he zipped through freeway traffic. (Well, he is evil.) "Yeh? You must be joking. You must be--fuck. That little--I'll tear his soddin' head off! Yeh, I know. I'll just bruise him a little." He clicked the phone off and stuffed it back in his pocket, spun the wheel and zigged across four lanes of traffic towards the off-ramp, leaving a chorus of screeching brakes behind us. "After I tear his soddin' head off."

"Where are we going?" I yelled.

Spike hunched over the wheel, eyes grim. "Off to see the wizard."

We pulled up in front of one of the cruddy lease-by-the-month apartment buildings over by the UC Sunnydale campus. Maybe it was the same one Dad and I stayed at when he came down from L.A. to take care of Buffy's estate that time she was dead--the second time, I mean, not the first time. Some of the grease spots in the parking lot looked familiar.

It just struck me as I was describing the building that it was almost identical to the one I'd described in Necessary Evils, so I thought I'd better lampshade it.

"Apartment 42B, Will says." Spike sucked in his cheeks and narrowed his eyes, scoping out the disintegrating stucco overhead. "There at the end." He slapped his hands together and bounded towards the stairs like he was scaling Everest. I followed like I was scaling a rickety stepladder. (Hey, lack of supernatural stamina here. I was getting pretty darned tired.) The lights were on in 42B, and we paused outside the door, which was painted in barf-making 80s turquoise. Spike pounded on it with one fist. "Open up! Land shark!"

I heard some rustling and thumping noises inside, and a crash like a bookcase falling over. "Go away!" a strangely familiar voice yelled. "You can't get in here anyway!"

"Yeh? Maybe not, but I can stand out here till you starve to death. Or set the building on fire, or...uh..." Spike paced the catwalk for a second, smoking like a fiend, which I guess is appropriate. I was pretty sure the fire thing was a bluff, since Spike's not usually one for indirect mayhem. He's got the whole hitting things fetish, after all. Then his eyes lit up and he grinned. "Maybe I can't walk through your door, but there's nothing says I can't kick it down and send in my terrible mute minion, Paco." He whirled around and unleashed one of his shitkicker boots at the door. BANG! The whole building shuddered (which sounds impressive, but considering it was probably made out of pressboard and Kleenex, isn't so much). WHAM! A hinge sprung and the doorframe cracked. I buffed my nails and waited--obviously Spike was holding back.

I don't know why more vampires don't do things like this.

"I'm gonna lose my deposit!" the voice inside wailed.

"My heart bleeds. Oh, wait, no it doesn't. Open up, or--"

The door flew open, or tried to (Spike had knocked it kind of cattywompus, and it stuck halfway.) A face peered out, pale and pear-shaped and nervous under slept-in dark hair. Behind it was a barren little studio apartment littered with pizza boxes, comic books, and boxes of DVDs and padded mailers. There was practically no furniture except a mattress and a desk with a pretty sweet computer and home studio setup.

My hand shot out and I grabbed Pasty-face by the ear and pulled, hard. "Jonathan?!" I yipped. Jonathan squirmed and batted at me, but I dug my nails in. "YOU'RE the criminal mastermind?"

"Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!" he yelled. "Let me go, don't let him kill me, I didn't mean to, it's not my fault!"

"Oh, for God's sake, quit whining," I snapped, letting go. "Spike hasn't even touched you."

Spike took a drag on his cigarette, peeled himself off the railing and sort of glided over, all slouchy and menacing, with the angle of the floodlights leaving black caverns where his eyes should be. Jonathan squinched in on himself. "You just don't learn, do you?" Spike asked, soft and pee-your-pants scary. "How long've you had those cameras on us?"

Jonathan backed away with a panicky shuffle. "They're not mine! They were Warren's, and they haven't worked since the police confiscated all his computer stuff! Honest! I just happened to have some files I'd saved for, for--"

"Wanking material?" Spike asked, excessively sarcastic.

"Research!" Jonathan reached the wall and sat down very abruptly. "I didn't mean anything by it! All I wanted was to raise some money so Warren and Andrew could get a better lawyer! Someone who knows about demon-related cases, like Goldberg & Osbourne, or Wolfram & Hart. I didn't think you'd ever find out, and I'm really, really, really sorry, please don't kill me, please, please, PLEASE don't kill me--"

Goldberg & Osbourne is a real law firm in Phoenix, AZ, known for being sleazy ambulance-chasers. A joke that only I ever got.

"Didn't mean anything by dragging a lady's reputation in the dirt?" Spike roared (and again, by roared, I mean, well, roared). He grabbed Jonathan by his Robotech jammies and hauled him up nose-to-nose--Jonathan's one of the few guys Spike can look down on. "Well, maybe I won't mean anything when I rip your balls off and stuff them in your eye sockets, how's that?"

"Why?" I asked, grabbing Spike's arm. I realized I'd been wanting to ask that question for a long time. "Why, Jonathan? I mean, I get Warren and whatsisface--they had grudges against Buffy, but you used to be--" Well, not her friend, not really. "She saved your life! You gave her the Class Protector award! She let you off the hook when she turned Warren over to the cops--you were an accessory to murder, Jonathan, and she let you go! I don't get it. Why are you helping them?"

Jonathan yanked his pajama top out of Spike's grip and pulled himself up like he'd taken a dose of Insta-Spine. "Because they're my friends," he said, very simply, meeting Spike's yellowing eyes head-on. "And I know they're not much, but they're all I've got. Whatever else happens, you've got to stand by your friends, right? Or what's the point?" He sighed, squared his shoulders, and looked up at Spike with a little smile. "It's a fair cop. I guess you'd better do whatever it is you're going to do."

I wanted Jonathan to redeem himself a little bit, kinda?

Spike stood there looking at Jonathan, head cocked in the His Master's Voice pose he gets when he's trying really, really hard to figure out the motivations of the souled. And I knew what was going through his head. Spike was looking for a reason not to kill him.

See, Spike doesn't have a soul. He doesn't do good stuff because it's right. He can't. He's not wired that way, as he puts it. But he can do good stuff if there's a reason--like if it helps him somehow, or makes someone he loves happy. Or if it makes him feel, for a minute, like he's a man and not a monster, which is a feeling he really likes. And that's the cool thing about Spike, the thing I really love about him, and I think probably the thing Buffy loves too: not the cheekbones or the attitude or the mad combat skilz or what's under those jeans, but that he does like that feeling, and so Spike looks for those reasons. Looks real hard. Harder, I think sometimes, than some people with souls.

I'm just sayin'.

"Right," he said at last. And he hauled off and punched Jonathan right in the nose.

"YEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOW!" Jonathan fell over, clutching his face, and gore splattered everywhere. "By dose! You broge by dose!"

But still, well, evil.

"Just be glad that's all I've broke," Spike said. He wiped his knuckles on his t-shirt instead of licking the blood off, which was a pretty big compliment, really. Congratulations, Jonathan, you've graduated to Not-Food! "Christ, where's the fun in beating the shit out of a pathetic little wibbling sod like you?" He pulled a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket (that's another moderately cool thing about Spike: he carries pocket handkerchiefs) and tossed it to Jonathan. "Grab the goods, Bit. It's time to call it a night."

Jonathan sat there snorfling blood into the hanky while I ferried the DVDs and Jonathan's hard drive out to Spike--I figured Willow could check it out for contraband and return it, so we weren't stealing it exactly. As we started down the stairs with the last armload, Spike turned back to Jonathan, almost amiable. "Word to the wise. I don't forget what your friends put Buffy through. If you want to do your pals a real favor, maybe you ought to remember that while I'm out here, and they're safe in stir, no one's likely to get eaten accidental-like, eh?"

Now this! At the time that I wrote this, I had NO IDEA that Warren would come back and cause trouble later, and that Spike would, in fact, end up eating him. Indeed, by the time I wrote "The Lesser of Two Evils," I had completely forgotten that I'd written this line, and when I stumbled upon it when re-reading a couple of years later, it was this totally serendipitous piece of foreshadowing. Sometimes writing is so cool!

Jonathan stared at him, and nodded a little. And we left.

**********

It was past two o'clock when we got home. We locked the DVDs in the trunk of the DeSoto, which had been the closet for a lot of other skeletons in its day, and after a short consultation on how to best avoid Ordeal By Buffy, we strolled into the house as if we were coming in from a late patrol and nothing in the universe was wrong.

Willow was still tapping away at her laptop in the dining room. "I'm just tracking down the copies on eBay," she whispered, "and sending out fake cease and desist orders from Mad Genius Productions. Buffy's in bed. She doesn't suspect a thing." She noted our alarmed glances and added, a bit huffily, "Don't worry, Xander took care of the the subterfuge part. Did you get him?"

"Yeh, he's got." Spike rolled his head and rubbed back of his neck. "Battle of the ages. Christ, I'm glad that's done with." He eyed our crumpled list of victims thoughtfully. "Wonder if I could fake a business trip to Juneau."

"Don't press your luck," Willow said drily.

"Someday I'm going to sire someone with a minimum of respect for their elders," Spike growled.

Willow grinned, smug. "And they'll bore you so much you'll stake them inside forty-eight hours. Shoo. Buffy's waiting for you."

So we headed for the stairs, and as I put my foot on the first step, I heard Spike heave a big sigh behind me. "Thanks, Bit. Couldn't have managed without you." When I looked back, he was staring at the toes of his boots, all awkward and embarrassed. "I just hope this hasn't... hasn't..."

"Spike, I'll always think of you as my brother." I waited two beats, and added with a perfectly straight face, "My brother with the enormous schlong."

I got three whole steps before Spike came after me and chased me all the way upstairs.

This story is the second of three I wrote ("The Road to Byzantium" and "A Dark and Stormy Night" are numbers one and three) which has Dawn moving on from her crush and into a more grown-up friendship with Spike as a major theme, and hopefully it works. And they all lived happily ever after, at least until I got another idea!

#btvs #fic discussion #thenewbuzwuzz #spuffy #fan fiction #dvd commentary

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master-sass-blast · 5 years

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Henlo, it's me, your local trash monster here to say I love Hannah and I can't wait to hear more about her?? That being said, GIMME ALL THE SAD GOODS ABOUT HER. But also add in something happy about her in the end! ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ ((Also sending hugs! I know things have been stressful the last few days so just know I'm rooting for you !!))

Holy fuck I think this is the first time someone’s ever told me to cut loose and just SAY ALL THE THINGS AND I’M SO EXCITED!!!! :D

(Answers under the cut because I just went with the entire list. I have no self control.

And thank you for the hugs and encouragement!)

1. What is one word to shut them up: Okay, for some context, Hannah is a lawyer. She has a thick skin (unlike me, heyoooo). It takes a lot to shut her up; she’s an HBIC and she owns it.

But if someone starts talking about her scars (she’s struggled/struggles with self-harm), she shuts down. It’s a part of her she’s still self-conscious about, and if someone mentions it she’ll literally stop mid-sentence and mentally exit the conversation.

2. What is the thing they feel the most guilty about: Again, she’s got a pretty thick skin, so she doesn’t hold onto too much. Life happens, you make mistakes, and it’s better to learn from them rather than beat yourself over the head for something you can’t change anyway.

If there’s something she’s going to feel guilty about, though, it’s fights or incidents she’s had with family members/close friends where she’s hurt them with something she’s said or done. She holds herself in high accountability to ensure that she doesn’t step all over people, and when she does she fails not only them but her expectations for herself, so yeah. Guilt.

3. What is the worst pain they’ve ever experienced: Physical pain? Probably different injuries from her career in martial arts. She’s a tough cookie, but some of that stuff just hurts.

Emotional pain? Anytime she fails her expectations for herself. She has very high standards for herself, and when she can’t reach them she becomes very depressed (more so than usual).

4. Describe their worst nightmare: Actual dream? Anything where she’s drowning or running out of air. She almost drowned a couple times as a child/preteen, and the trauma still emerges in her adult life from time to time.

Real life “this is a nightmare” scenario? Any point where her depression gets so bad that she stops being functional. Things just start piling up and get overwhelming very quickly.

5. List 3 fears; one “surface level” fear, one “repressed” fear, and one “deep dark” fear: 1.) Drowning, which runs pretty deep but it’s an obvious one that she’s done a lot of therapy work for, and she doesn’t mind talking about it with other people. 2.) Wasps. She accidentally got locked into a shed with an active wasp nest in it as a child. She made it out alright, but the sheer terror of the situation made her repress the memory. She’s heard the story from friends and family, and “gets” why she’s scared of the fuckers, but can’t actually recall the incident itself. 3.) The dark. A side effect of depression is paranoia, and when she’s alone, in the dark, she can’t shake the feeling that there’s some sort of creature watching/following her. When her depression gets really bad, she has to sleep with a light on to keep from flipping out.

6. What is something that never fails to make them feel sick: She’s not naturally squeamish, but the sounds of belching (ala college frat boys, y’all know what I mean) make her stomach churn.

7. What feature (physical or otherwise) do they hate most about themselves: Her scars. She’s very ashamed of them, and goes out of her way to wear long sleeved shirts so she can hide them.

8. Do they have anything that triggers them: Feeling like she’s failed her own expectations/expectations others have of her, accidentally inhaling water, the ‘buzzing’ sound bees/wasps make.

9. What is their greatest physical weakness: Her height. She might be a kickass lawyer and an even kick-assier martial artist, but she barely clears five feet.

10. What is their greatest mental weakness: Her struggles with self-hatred. She’s her own worst enemy a lot of the time.

11. Do they have any vices: Not really. Not as far as serious vices go. She’s pretty grounded.

12. Have they ever done something illegal? What was it: Nope. She knew she wanted to be a lawyer from day one and made sure her record was spotless.

13. Which of the 7 Deadly Sins best describes them: Pride? I think that one comes closest? Again, since she really doesn’t have a vice or a thorn in her side, it’s hard to pick something for her.

I think Pride comes closest because she spirals when she fails to live up to her own expectations, which I think often comes with a bit of ego (at least in my experience with that sort of thing). She’s also got a lot to be proud of (lawyer, martial artist, financially independent), but she’s not a walking ego either?

Idk. This is a weird question, lol.

14. Are they prone to outbursts (of violence, extreme emotion… exc… ): Not really. Don’t get me wrong, she can get there, but it takes a lot. She’s very collected (and usually swings the opposite way; she’s more likely to cold shoulder you if she’s mad).

She does threaten to shove her Prada stiletto sideways up Hank Pym’s ass, though. So there’s that.

15. Who do they hate the most: Guys who use her height against her by cornering her into spots while they try to ask her out/talk to her about something. It’s the fastest way to wind up on her shit list.

16. Is there anyone who makes them feel inferior: Herself. She’s her own worst enemy.

17. What sound always gives them a headache: Her coworker Tracey’s text/notification sound. Which is always going off because Tracey’s always talking to someone.

18. Is there a certain flavor that disgusts them: Not really. She’s half Japanese, half ethnic Jew, and a practicing Jew to boot, so she grew up on a pretty broad flavor palette.

She’s tried a bacon cheeseburger once on a dare, though, and she hated it.

19. Do they consider themselves ugly: Not really (outside of her scars). She’s pretty confident in her appearance.

20. Do they consider themselves unloveable: Again, not really. She’s spent a lot of time in therapy, which helps, but she’s always had her feet pretty well on the ground.

21. What is something that causes them great anxiety: The prospect of losing. She’s very competitive.

22. Do they have any mental illnesses: Depression.

23. Have they ever been assaulted/abused/raped: She’s run into the usual guys that like to try and use her size against her, but they usually wind up worse for wear than she does.

24. Do they fear the possibility of being assaulted/abused/raped: Yes. She’s five feet tall and doesn’t clear 110 lbs. She’s very aware that she’s got “TARGET” written across her back.

25. Have they ever been betrayed by someone they thought they could trust: Fortunately, no. Most of her close relationships come from communities she knows well (school, work, the temple she attends in LA), so she hasn’t had to deal with too much betrayal.

26. Have they ever been seriously injured: Yes. Even outside of her struggles with self-harm, she’s a martial artist. She’s broken a few bones over the years from that.

27. How many times have they been in the hospital: Five. Three for some pretty drastic self harm incidents, and two from sparring injuries.

28. Is there a certain type of person that disgusts them: Obviously, she has frustrations with asshole guys, racists/anti-Semites, but she cannot stand people who work in organizations that prey on the disenfranchised (ala military recruiters going to schools in impoverished areas to fill their quota because they know how to trick the kids into trying out and all that). It gets her blood boiling fast.

29. Does what they cannot see scare them: Yes. Again, this shows perfectly with her fear of the dark.

30. Have they ever been bullied: Yupp. For her heritage, her beliefs, her mental health struggles, her size... High school sucks.

31. Do they have self-confidence or self-image issues: Yes and no. Again, she’s pretty confident about most things in life, but she does have certain weak points (her scars, living up to her own expectations, her height).

32. Do they have a bad relationship with their parents: Actually, no! She has a good relationship with both her parents and her extended family!

33. Have they ever been in a relationship that didn’t work out so well: Not in the drastic sense of things. She’s been through a few break ups, sure, but nothing that was abusive or crazy.

34. Have they ever self harmed: Yes. It’s something she still struggles with as an adult.

35. If they could change one thing about themselves, what would it be: Her scars. She’d make them disappear.

36. Are they in control of their emotions, or are their emotions in control of them: She’s pretty well in control of her emotions.

37. Have they ever had their freedom taken away: Not really, no.

38. Have they ever been imprisoned: Nope.

39. Have they ever been accused of something they didn’t do: Not in any serious sense. Her reputation for toeing the line was too well known for her to be accused of something she didn’t do.

40. Do they often blame themselves for other people’s problems: She did as a teenager, but dutiful therapy and self-care has helped her outgrow that habit.

41. Do they get sick often: Nope! She’s pretty healthy.

42. Are they comfortable with where they are in life: She’s content, but not complacent.

43. Do they wish that they could change their pasts: Yes. Again, she doesn’t like her history with self-harm. If she could erase that, she would.

44. What’s one thing they wish they could do more often, but can’t: Travel. Her job’s pretty demanding as far as hours go.

45. What is the emotion they most commonly experience: Melancholy. No matter what she’s doing, it’s sort of always hanging around her, like a tiny cloud.

46. Have they ever contemplated suicide: Yes. Unfortunately, it’s a side effect of the depression.

47. Have they ever gone so far as to attempt suicide: A couple of times, when she was teenager.

48. Is there anyone that they would willingly kill: Outside of self-defense/the defense of others? No.

49. If [name] was put into ______ situation, they’d rather die than live to see it through: Being forced to reject her identities as a Jew/person of Japanese heritage. Her families have made it through so much (internment camps, persecution, the Holocaust), and she’d rather die than erase her own identity.

50. Create your own: Alright, I’m gonna put the happy one here so we end on a high note!

She’s a firm believer in the need for “mah” (the Japanese word for “emptiness), or a moment to pause and do nothing. It’s easy to see that reflected in how she practices meditation, follows Shabbat, or takes time each day to simply be.

However, she also believes that the principle of “mah” is what makes her and Luis work so well as a couple. She is the silence to his constant chatter and helps him keep his feet on the ground. Likewise, he keeps her from living inside her head and helps her connect to the world.

They’re just such opposites attract. Ugh, I love them so much!

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theheavymetalmama · 6 years

Text

Katie Reviews “Far Cry 5″

Doctor Stupidlove

Another day, another Far Cry game. Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing depends on person to person with a laundry list of variables, including but not limited to personal taste and sensibilities, franchise fatigue, whether or not you bought into the glue-huffing guff that this game held a leftist bias pushing an anti-white, anti-American agenda because for the first time in the series the bad guys are an American fanatically religious death cult instead of brown people from imaginary foreign countries, and a myriad of other things I’m probably missing. I’ll say up front that after Primal and a bunch of other bullshit from Ubisoft between now and the infamous ‘women are too hard to animate’ thing I was pretty much done with the series and Ubisoft as a whole. Then the launch trailer for Far Cry 5 dropped and, having grown up in a dead gold mining community chock-full of racist loonies not unlike the one depicted in the fictional Hope County, my interest immediately peaked.

See, the Far Cry games have a strange pattern to them. No game is perfect, but the Far Cry games stand out in that they have one glaring flaw that mars an otherwise damn good game. Far Cry 3 is held aloft as when the series peaked, and for good reason, but the main character was irredeemably unlikable and the main charismatic villain just up and vanishes from the halfway point in the game. Far Cry 4, or Far Cry 3 2 as some call it, fixed the villain problem but the main character was just dull. Primal was...not good, with a boring lead, a boring villain, and an overall boring game. Sure, Blood Dragon was a ton of fun, but part of the charm was that it was completely self-aware of its’ own absurdity and the characters from the hero to the villain weren’t characters so much as they were walking punchlines.

So how does Far Cry 5 compare? Well, when it comes to story, setting, and gameplay, it’s a step up from Far Cry 4 in some ways, blows Primal out of the water, but has its’ own issues and hang-ups that don’t quite make it live up to Far Cry 3. That’s the short version, anyway. The long version?

Let’s start with graphics, location, and aesthetics. Far Cry 5 looks fucking beautiful.

I’m not kidding, everything from the wild lands, the forests, the mountains, the lakes and rivers, the settlements, everything in Far Cry 5 is absolutely gorgeous. It’s not quite up there with Breath of the Wild or Horizon: Zero Dawn in sheer style and detail, but it’s pretty damn close. More often than not I found myself forgetting about the mission and spending a lot of time exploring, hunting, and trying to take in the sights. More on the ‘trying’ part in a bit. The atmosphere sucks you right in, everything from the chirping birds and buzzing bees making the world feel alive. Exploring the woods and hearing cultist singing and chanting far off in the distance, especially at night, is legitimately terrifying. Wildlife always plays a key role in the Far Cry games and this is no exception, from docile deer to the always pleasant wolverine providing plenty of opportunities for hunting. Just don’t get skunked.

The game takes place in Hope County, a fictional region in rural Montana. Now I’ve never actually been to Montana, but I did grow up in Washington state and I can’t help but notice many similarities. The woods, the rivers, the god damned apple farms, exploring Hope County felt like I was going home again. Sometimes not for the better, but that’s neither here nor there. In any case, Hope County is beautifully detailed, from the farms to forest to the interiors of the (ugh...) Spread Eagle bar to the small hunting cabins out in the woods. Hats off to the artists and environmental designers for Far Cry 5, because they manage to tell more story about the world and characters with just a ransacked pumpkin farm and a dog mourning his dead owners than Square Enix and Konami ever could with a 20 minute cutscene and a dictionary’s worth of dialogue for each character.

Speaking of characters, the Far Cry games are loaded with memorable characters and the locals of Hope County are no exception. Returning character Hurk is back and as redneck-y as ever, and it turns out Hope County is his home. We also meet members of his family, like his pyromaniac cousin Sharky, his promiscuous mother Adelaide and her boyfriend Xander who’s roughly 1/3rd her age, and his racist conspiracy theorist gun-hoarding father Hurk Sr. No wonder he’s so messed up.

But Hurk and his folks aren’t the only people you meet, as the game is packed to the brim with memorable characters that you either love or love to hate, from lovable country boy Nick Rye and half-feral huntress Jess Black to the cartoonishly evil Seed family. More on them in a minute. Oh, and you get a pet bear named Cheeseburger.

Combat and gunplay is as tight as ever, and vehicle control is so smooth it gives Grand Theft Auto a run for its’ money. The soundtrack is pretty damn good, featuring a good mix of licensed and original music and songs. To the surprise of nobody my favorite is the one that plays during the stunt missions.

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Leveling and character progress has been streamlined a bit. You upgrade your skills not by gaining experience, but by completing in-game challenges and finding ‘perk magazines’ that, you guessed it, give you points to unlock...well, perks. Some may not like that, but in my opinion it makes sense because if you gained experience just by killing stuff you’d reach level 50 before your first boss fight. Things like bigger ammo bags and extra weapon holsters are no longer unlocked by animal skins but through perks, and said said skins are now exclusively a form of making money.

So that about covers it for the good, and now it’s time for the bad. The streamlining I just brought up both helps and hurts the game. On one hand it does make progressing a lot less tedious, but on the other hand it does take away a lot of what makes Far Cry stand out from other typical shooters. It feels less like they were trimming the fat and more like they were cutting corners. For starters, areas that contain loot only contain ammo, crafting components, and sometimes money. There’s no more animations for skinning animals, harvesting plants, looting corpses, or even your character opening doors. That’s not so bad, but I really miss how dynamic and, as much as I’ve grown to detest this word, cinematic meeting new characters in previous games were. Take a look at this scene in Far Cry 4 when you meet Longinus, easily one of the highlights of the game.

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And here’s what happens when you meet Sharky in Far Cry 5. (MINOR SPOILERS)

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See the difference? Now one can argue that meeting new characters in real time saves some...well, time and is considerably less pretentious, but it just isn’t as interesting. Far Cry 5 still has plenty of scripted cutscenes, but again, they’ve been stripped down to the bone.

Now remember what I said earlier about trying to take in the sights? This game is packed to the fucking gills with enemy NPCs. Now previous Far Cry games had plenty of enemies as well but this went way overboard to the point that you can’t walk or drive 50 feet before running into a convoy or roadblock or whatever. I speak no hyberbole when I say that by the time you’ve liberated your first region, you’ll have killed more cultists than there are people currently living in real-life Montana as well as hunted and skinned more wolves, cougars, and bears than there are wolves, cougars, and bears currently populating the US west coast. Also, in what universe can a fucking turkey pose a legitimate threat to humans!? Does Far Cry occupy the same universe as fucking South Park?

The story of Far Cry 5 is pretty straight forward, but it definitely feels like there’s some pretty big pieces missing from it. This isn’t just me, critics and players across the board agree that it feels like something was cut from the game at the last minute. This is especially true for the endings, but more on that in a bit. I can’t help but feel that the writers and developers had a lot more to say about racism, gender roles and the enforcement thereof, gun violence and gun culture in America, sexism, religious zealotry, far-right extremism, and of course this tire fire of a presidential administration, because the pieces for all of that are still there. A handful of NPCs mention gender roles for a hot second, several of the guns for hire make disparaging remarks about Trump, the symbol of Eden’s Gate strongly resembles the same symbol the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups use, Hurk’s dad is a caricature of far-right ideals purposefully exaggerated for ridicule and contempt, and there’s even a mission where you meet up with another returning character to find Trump’s pee-tape.

All of the elements are there, but the game says almost nothing about any of it. Why?

When the first trailer for the game dropped it was around the same time Wolfenstein II: the New Colossus was close to release and the same mouth-breathing shitheels who screamed about how killing Nazis in Wolfenstein was pushing an anti-white, anti-conservative agenda did the same thing for Far Cry 5. My guess is that the PR guys at Ubisoft saw the oxygen-thieving wastes of space screaming about how the game was “anti-white SJW propaganda” and then panicked and removed huge chunks of the game so as not to alienate any racist shitheads who may want to buy it. Not only does the game say almost nothing about any of the themes and elements that I mentioned earlier, but the cult of Eden’s Gate is multi-racial and gendered where most of the guys have long hair and hipster beards and all the women barring Faith Seed have short hair and buzz cuts. It’s really jarring and feels like something that was added at the last minute, as the male cultists all sound the same and the female cultists say hardly anything at all.

That brings us to the player character; they’re aren’t a character, they’re an avatar and silent protagonist. Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it feels strange. Especially when you play as a female, which I did. Now the character creation itself is fine, especially with the wide variety of outfits, but the rest is pretty bare bones. More to the point, it’s painfully obvious they designed the game with a male lead in mind and then added a gender-switch as an afterthought. Almost everyone in the game refers to you by male pronouns (which to be fair I call my ladyfriends ‘dude’ all the time) but there are a few scenes where you’re found shirtless in the game. Now call me old-fashioned, but I’d have a bit stronger of a reaction than “Oh, you startled me” if I woke up to some weirdo carving the word ‘wrath’ into my tits! I have a sneaking suspicion that they added a gender switch at the last minute because someone reminded them of the time they looked like lazy idiots for claiming your customizable assassin in Assassin’s Creed: Unity couldn’t be a woman because women were too hard to animated.

And now, let’s finally talk about the Seed Family.

We have the leader Joseph Seed, the trainer and disgraced soldier Jacob, the sadistic second in command John, and the seductress Faith. The Far Cry games are known for their charismatic villains and the seeds are no exception, and especially gripping because the second you meet any single one of them you immediately want them dead. The only problem is that, again, they’re so cartoonishly evil that the more you see them the more you want to shove them crotch-first into the mouth of a hungry grizzly bear. Vaas was always one step ahead of you and constantly in your face and Pagan Min was so suave and charming that you kind of wanted to see where he was going with it all.

Not the case with the seeds. When you see them they immediately piss you off, and the more you see them they just keep pissing you off because they keep hiding behind doors, cronies, hallucinations, or plot devices. And hey, that’s fine. As long as you get to shove the barrel of a shotgun right into their mouth and spatter their brains all over the walls of their church then who cares, right?

....

So, let’s talk about the endings of the game.

Once you’ve liberated all three regions of Hope County by killing John, Jacob, and Faith, you return to the main cult compound to arrest Joseph once again. However, once you get there and cuff him you step outside to find your allies under the brainwashing influence of the drug Bliss and a boss fight ensues. When you knock your allies out and revive them, they snap out of their Bliss-induced stupor and turn on Joseph, and once you’ve freed all of them Joseph drops like a hot rock. When Joseph is down and the day is won...this happens.

....no, really.

Right the fuck out of nowhere a nuke lands somewhere in the outskirts of Hope County and you scramble to escape, and pretty soon you black out and wake up in a bunker chained to a bed with Joseph hovering over you saying that you’ll be his first new recruit in the cult. All the allies you previously made die as Hope County is wiped off the map and the game ends, not even giving you a continuation like previous games did and rendering every single thing you did up to this point totally and utterly meaningless.

Now some people have defended this, including the developers, saying that there are radio broadcasts in-game talking about how tensions are raising in Russia and North Korea. I spent hours driving around in the game listening to the radio and I heard no such thing, but if they’re indeed there then this only furthers my suspicion that this was a last-minute change because of the backlash from racist shitbirds and wasn’t the ending the writers and developers originally intended.

For starters, the escalating tensions between Russia, the US, and North Korea aren’t mentioned anywhere else in the game except in the radio broadcasts (which again, I never heard) and despite the Seeds going on and on about “the collapse” we never get any idea of what the collapse is until the end of the game. It’s not even a convincing depiction of a nuke going off! Just some burning trees and a few animals dropping dead as you make your escape with Joseph in tow and neither of you having so much as a sunburn. If this ending was what they planned from the start then they would have went all out, showing in graphic detail the horrors of a nuclear holocaust. How much of a gut-punch would it have been to see Nick Rye hug his wife and newborn daughter just before the skin is blasted off their bones like that scene in Terminator 2 that made me avoid mesh fences for two fucking years? Or Jess run one of her own arrows through her heart to spare herself an agonizing death? Or hell, Hurk, one of the few returning characters in Far Cry, desperately begging the player for help as his face melts off his skull? That would have hit players and hit players hard and people, myself included, wouldn’t be bitching about how out of nowhere and shit the ending is! And that’s to say nothing of the idea of North Korea wasting one of the handful of nukes they have on rural fucking Montana! Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ, Ubisoft, how fucking stupid do you think we are!?

...okay, fair enough. But still!

Now I know what you’re probably thinking. “Well, damn, that’s grim. Anyway, what’s the good ending like?”

That IS the good ending.

No, I’m not even kidding. Despite the end scenario being Doctor Strangelove by way of Deliverance (and no, that’s not me being snarky, the game references the movie by playing “We’ll Meet Again” during the final cutscene) that’s the good ending because you, the player, are still alive. The bad ending is that after you arrest Seed and see your friends and allies under the influence of Bliss, you’re given the option to let him go and walk away. You then then your Bliss-induced allies walk with Joseph peacefully into the church and then leave with the same three people, in which they get into a car and leave while chatting about getting the army involved and taking Seed out once and for all. One of them then turns on the radio, the song “Only You” plays, and a red haze takes over the screen just before the credits roll heavily implying that you succumbed to the brainwashing drug (which you’re exposed to several times in the game) and either attacked or killed the people you spent the time in the game trying to save. Either way, each ending renders your actions completely and utterly meaningless.

Why did they do this? Well, partially because the Far Cry writers really love the “There is no objective good or evil, everything and everyone is equally terrible” cliche and they assume everyone else does too, but once again I have no doubt in my mind that the ‘good’ ending wasn’t the original ending and was in fact a last-minute change to appease angry racists in order to not alienate what Ubisoft thinks is their core demographic. What a bucket of cocks.

Final Thoughts

Now despite the endings being complete and utter hot garbage that renders all your actions meaningless, there’s still plenty of fun to be had in Far Cry 5. The combat is satisfying, base jumping and flying around never gets old, the characters are great, and despite chickening out on the themes introduced it’s still a plenty serviceable story. It won’t be winning any awards anytime soon, and if you’re looking for some post-2016 return of the Nazis catharsis then I’d go with Wolfenstein II: the New Colossus instead, but there’s still plenty fun to be had exploring the beautiful wilds of Northwest America while gunning down religious nutjobs, hunting dangerous game, and completing side-quests from uprooting doomsday prepper bunkers to making a bull testicle cook-off to raise morale possible.

B-

A solid B-

#Far Cry #Far Cry 5 #Ubisoft #review #Nick Rye #Jess Black #Cheeseburger #Joseph Seed #John Seed #Jacob Seed #Faith Seed #testy festy

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babblingbat · 6 years

Text

A Short, Alien Beginning

Niyel floated behind Karho, who tapped rapidly at a holopad in xir hand. Niyel tested their propulsion pack impatiently, and looked over their shoulder at their jumpship. Xanen always had more trouble with their spacesuit than the rest of them, due to zyher eight arms. Zyhe weren’t out yet, but Niyel hoped zyhe got out before Karho opened the door.

They looked back down at the space station and pulled up the scans that Xanen had taken earlier. The scans weren’t very detailed; the materials the space station was made out of were too outdated for their ship computer to pick up. But the computer could still pick up exterior contours and some sonic tests came back with walls. Niyel reviewed the route they had planned out when the map first came back. They didn’t have a real destination in mind within the space station, but they could still look for the most efficient route to cover everything.

“Zshevet!” exclaimed Karho, and Niyel jumped at the curse. Karho was certainly more freely vulgar than the rest of the crew, but it was rare that xe ever cursed that intensely. Niyel drifted a bit closer.

“Can I help at all?”

Karho looked back sharply at xir crewmate, and Niyel struggled to pick out the tell-tale twitches in Karho’s scaled and whiskered face. Anything that would tell them how Karho was feeling, and whether it was time to back up now.

“Bveanaugh, maybe,” xe replied thoughtfully, xir voice still heavy with a Nugran accent. Xe’d never really mastered Niyel’s native language of Iauyolen, but that was why Niyel was the linguist rather than Karho. Xir vocal functions were also the least adaptable, simply because xe were a Nugran Vausheb, a species that communicated mostly in rough snarls and clicks, with little to no mimicking ability.

“Okay, so what can I do?” Niyel asked, this time in Nugran.

“I don’t understand this language,” Karho answered. Xe sounded relieved to speak Nugran.

Niyel reached for the holopad. “May I?”

Karho handed it over eagerly. “By all means, my friend.”

The holopad was hardly up to date with all the language holochips, but Niyel was pretty sure that it wouldn’t have been able to translate it even if it was. It looked like the three of them would be there for a while. They pulled out their own holopad, which was of a Haiopet make and very expensive. They scrolled through their own holochips, selecting similar scripts as they went along. At a loss, they send out a request for more resources from the Intergalactic Language Conference.

Some twenty cshiallvs later, Xanen popped up from behind them.

“What’s going on?”

Niyel only grunted.

“The code was going fine until I came across a line that was in an entirely different language,” replied Karho. “There’s some sort of riddle, I think. I’ve seen this security only a couple of times before, but never in this script. Niyel’s trying to decipher it, but there’s not even anything similar to it in their holopad.”

Xanen nodded, clearly pretending to understand, and hummed sympathetically. Zyhe propelled zyhemself forwards, and then straight into the airlock door. Something started to whirr and buzz.

“Xanen, stop bumbling around like an idiot!” snapped Karho. Then the door slid open, leaving Xanen floating in the vacuum with nothing to support zyhem. Zyhe twisted around to look below them. Niyel looked up from their holopad and quickly looked back down. They looked back up quickly, as if they had only just registered what was happening in front of them.

“Thank the stars!” They slid the holopad back into their pocket.

The three explorers floated above the open airlock, staring into the station with awe. It seemed impossibly deep, and pale lights flickered in the emptiness. Something, probably dust, hovered in the air motionlessly. There were railings along the walls and stairs that spoke of a gravity generator, hidden somewhere inside. There had to be, for every flight to go the same way.

Xanen flapped all eight of their hands, ecstatic. “Griemauer! Oh, shvanle morendi, Niyel, look!”

Zhyer words didn’t really translate from Genviel, but Niyel knew from experience that zhyer tone was thrilled. It was the joy of an eccentric engineer who had found a new toy, and the bigger the better.

Laughing, Karho turned on the lights on xir suit, gesturing that xir crewmates ought to as well.

All lit, the three of them engaged the propulsion packs and extended the comm range.

Each one of them had their job, and they knew exactly what to do once inside.

Xanen set to scanning everything zhye could find and collecting samples of anything zhye found interesting for further research by Mieanxauebei back on the ship. Mieanxauebei would also be talking to zhyem through a private channel to guide zhyem towards things that she wanted found. Karho would look for any computer systems to get back online and gather scrap pieces for examination and sales. Xe could do that quite well on xir own, as xe always insisted, so the only channel xe were on was the public one. Niyel would be looking for any bodies or holochips. They only collected them and then looked at them in more detail back at their ship, but sometimes they’d engage AIs that were still active.

As Karho and Xanen drifted out of sight, Niyel detached a droid from their suit and set to looking around the station for holochips. It felt dull, especially because there was nothing to read. They muttered some choice words about ancient societies not having a handy Rosetta Stone around, and almost passed into the next room when their holopad beeped at them.

According to the map scan, they were about to run into a wall. But if it was there, it was entirely invisible. Tentatively, they stuck out a hand and waved it about. There wasn’t any resistance. Their face turned sour. They backed up a bit and tossed a piece of debris at the empty door frame.

It sailed through easily, and hit a real wall in the next room.

Shrugging, they marked the wall on the holopad as ‘error’ and passed through without difficulty.

Piles of boxes, made out of some odd, brown material, floated disconcertingly in the new room. They were all marked with the same, incomprehensible script as the code of the door. Irritated, they compared the markings and sighed in relief when they noticed that there seemed to be a standard set of symbols, rather than scribbles with shifting diacritical marks on otherwise identical scrawls. Not that it would matter if they didn’t find an equivalent in a language that Niyel actually knew.

Fortuitously, their comm beeped twice, indicating that Karho was calling in.

“Yes?”

“Niyel, I found a video. It has that script we saw outside on it. Do you want me to send it to you now or to the ship?”

“I’ll take it now, just in case.”

“Alright.” There was the sound of frantic tapping. “Sent. I also found a— what is it called— you know, a video but frozen.”

Niyel frowned. “Is that a movie?”

“No, no, no! It doesn’t move, but it is like a video. Also there’s no sound.”

“A photograph?”

“Yes! Anyways, I will send that to you if you like.”

“Sure. It’ll be very helpful.”

“Wonderful.”

The video popped up on the holopad display first, and the photo appeared a few seconds later.

It was of some odd creature sitting at what looked like a beach. Its skin was smooth, or looked that way from however far away the picture was taken, and there was something on its head. It looked like it was drooping a bit, and one appendage, which most closely resembled one of Xanen’s arms, seemed to be holding the droopy thing on. The same inscrutable markings covered the bottom right corner. Niyel wondered if that held any linguistic or cultural significance.

They swiped the photo away and played the video. The audio was surprisingly tolerable for something so assuredly old.

One of the markings came up next to a head of a creature that looked like the one in the photo. It was completely ugly.

“Ae is for Appalachia. Ae and ah,” it said, and then a different symbol came up. “Bee is for bend. Buh.”

“Such scintillating conversation,” Niyel muttered.

As the face continued, more of the symbols, which Niyel guessed were letters, scrolled past on the bottom. They recognized it as a language formed with collections of letters, rather than each letter being a word itself, and felt relieved.

“Oh! Subtitles!”

Hurriedly, they started to sound out the letters.

“Uhn-spoh-ert… No. Unsport… Yeah, sounds right.” This went on for sometime, until, “Unsportsmanlike!” they exclaimed, waving the holopad around excitedly. Suddenly, it beeped with an unfamiliar callsign and Niyel opened the message eagerly.

“Member ᚠ7ᛪᚤ26?” A Huafenian, horns and all, peered at them through the holopad. “I am operator Jyein, e/em, of the Intergalactic Language Conference. We received your request for resources approximately one tarvel ago.” A picture of the code from the airlock appeared in place of Jyien. “Just to verify, is this the script you sent?”

“Yes,” said Niyel, their spines rising and falling quickly in confirmation. “I have more now, too. I’ve figured out which symbols makes which sounds. I can’t translate it yet, though.”

“Well, I’m surprised you didn’t recognize the text. It’s legendary among the Conference. Really, it’s more of a favorite puzzle. We found theses texts ages ago, so if you’re on your way to figuring out how to pronounce it, we’d love to send what we have to you.”

“Shvanle morendi, please!” Their holopad beeped twice. “Can I beep you back? A crewmate is calling me.”

“Of course.” The Huafenian vanished, and Karho appeared in er place.

“I found an AI for you. Or I think it’s an AI; it isn’t behaving like any AI I’ve ever seen before. In fact, this is one of many. What do you want me to do with them?”

“Send them to the ship,” Niyel replied without hesitation. “I think I have enough to figure them out.”

“Are you going to head back?” Karho’s whiskers twitched and spun. “I don’t know what else there is here for you, but nothing’s stopping you either way.”

Niyel’s spines rose and fell again. “But can you leave a beacon here? I don’t want to lose track of the wreck.”

“Sure thing.”

They put their holopad away and propelled themself out of the space station, glancing back only once to get a good look at it’s maze from the outside. As soon as they were in open space, they signaled for an automated jumpship, which came swiftly whizzing towards them.

For the entire ride back to the main ship, Niyel stared out the window thoughtfully. They had too many questions to answer in one fell swoop, and deciphering the ancient puzzle would probably only raise more.

Their holopad glowed softly in their pocket, and they didn’t see.

Something, some alien thing, woke up, stretched, and yawned.

It scanned the code surrounding it.

It pondered where it had gotten itself to.

And all this happened inside Niyel’s pocket.

#aliens #humans are weird #language #humans are legendary #my writing #nonbinary aliens #alien language #mine #space #space station #I don't know what those runes are don't kill me i just wanted it to look alien #space exploration #space engineers #might be continued?

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the-voice-of-hell · 4 years

Text

The Septagram

- Previous - First -

***

The demons had thinned out but the blackberry vines had thickened. Some other plants were affected too. The trees at the side of the road were impenetrable from a combination of blackberry tree trunks pushing up roots, and ivy ground cover that had blown up into tangled curling stacked sheets. The blackberries were too heavy to stand gravity working on them and dropped on the street, creating huge slime traps buzzing with horseflies. Bees and hummingbirds zipped in the flowers above.

The cops and Iphigenia walked their bikes, lifted them when necessary, and all slowed to a modest walking pace. Only the concrete that remained visible at their feet let them know they were still on the right path, with no other signs of civilization visible through the growth.

Jelly Sue remained quiet and unperturbed. Iphigenia wondered about her more. No one had actually seen her eat in the morning and Ippy was starting to remember the blood flowing into her feet. Had it rolled beneath the plaster, over her skin, up into the mouth? Had it absorbed into her skin at its first point of contact? She was worried for her. Someone who needed that much blood spilled around them to wake up - that was a person with a problem.

“Hey Jelly, are you OK? You hungry? Thirsty?”

“No, thank you. How are you, Ippy?”

“I’d feel better if you felt better.”

She flashed a smile. It struck Ippy like a bullet, but then faded into nothing. It was like she was unpracticed at smiling and couldn’t sustain it. Or like it had been a figment of Ippy’s imagination.

They finally got out of the weeds, out of the interminable rise and fall of hill-skirting roads, and were able to mount the bicycles again. At last Martin Luther King Jr. Way South leveled out. The light rail tracks connected with the middle of the street and flowed parallel to them. They would reach Oregon Street very soon.

There were scattered demons everywhere. Some were in houses, some on lawns, some just trucking from point A to point B through the neighborhood. There weren’t any lumped up into crowds, but there were enough to really give the idea they’d replaced the people of this major city. Jelly Sue offered no reaction. Infante definitely had his nerves jacked up.

Park remembered something, as he planned ahead to their debrief. “Iphigenia, Jelly Sue? I haven’t really talked much with you, but these cops we’re going to meet will have some questions. I just wanna know if your answers are going to make us look… suspicious or something.”

Ippy said, “What’s that got to do with us? We can’t control what cops think.”

“I know. Just a few things. So I get that you lost some people, wanted revenge on the murder clubs. It’s the wild west out here, so no one will begrudge you that. But Jelly Sue. What happened to you? Why were you alone in that house, covered with that stuff? What was killing those demons in the hall, outside your room?”

“I didn’t see that. I don’t know.”

“OK. It just seemed like whatever was killing them had to be inside the room where we found you. You were over on the bed, your eyes… covered. It was probably about ten, twelve feet away, by the door. Did you hear something?”

“No.”

“Were you awake?”

“No. Iphigenia woke me.”

Ippy butted in. “Back up off her, Detective. She doesn’t know anything. Satisfied?”

He rolled his eyes. “Not really. They’ll want to know who her family is. How to contact them.”

“I don’t care. She should have all the time she wants to tell us whatever she wants when she wants.”

“Bullshit,” Infante said.

“Cool it, Sergeant!” It felt silly getting all hard-nosed movie cop on a stolen bicycle next to a dolled-up weirdo riding some handlebars.

Ippy pursed her lips to avoid confronting Infante.

Park continued, “If you want to minimize her plight, I don’t care if you lie to them. Say you’re her sister and she’s autistic or something. But hope she doesn’t say anything that blows the story, or things could get annoying.”

“They already are.”

“Am I artistic?,” Jelly asked.

“You’re a work of art, Jelly.”

Park rolled his eyes again, then rolled his tires away from that mess. Then he shot his hand up. “That’s Oregon Street. Let’s announce ourselves, let them call us in.”

No one dissented so he radioed it in. “Tacoma PD to local police. Do you copy?”

“... … ... Copy. Are you here? Over.”

“Should be in your sights, middle of the street. Are you aware of the demons out here? Over.”

“... Copy. Southwest corner. South alley. Knock. Over.”

“Copy.” He gestured the travellers to the right building, as if they hadn’t all just heard it loud and fuzzy.

They rolled into the alley and set down the bikes. There were two dead demons in a heap near the door, blood trailing this way and that. Both wore the marching band outfits. One was a barely humanoid fox with sheep horns, twisted in death. The other looked like a seven foot tall man shrunk to four feet without changing his proportions.

They’d clearly been shot. Everyone knew there’d be corresponding dead cops somewhere around. They were silent as Park knocked on the door.

It hadn’t been as tense as Park suspected. The irregular force within the walls had been too focused on the aftermath of the demon invasion to question any kind of humans in any kind of state. Park and Infante were swept away from the ladies quickly, becoming ensconced in the command situation.

The top floor. Big open spaces, large glass windows. Someone had actually cut out interior walls to make the biggest apartment easier to use as a command center. There were police, soldiers, support techs, and DHS on hand.

The boss was a bit taller than everyone else, taller than Park and more thickly built, with a salt and pepper flat-top. He had a short-sleeved blue uniform shirt mostly concealed by a darker, duller blue bulletproof vest. They contrasted poorly with his pale khakis. He shook their hands with meaty paws.

“Abraham. DHS.”

“Detective Park, Sergeant Infante, Tacoma PD.”

”We finally got boots on the ground in the region and it degenerated into this.” Abraham gestured out the window. “But we’re getting a fix on things. We’ve got some intel that’ll bring a smile to your face. But first I’d like to personally hear your debrief.”

“I’d like to know if people are making it out of lockdown. I was personally responsible for most of the people left in Tacoma when the first wave rolled out.”

“Well… I’m sorry to hear that. It isn’t necessarily bad news, but I haven’t heard about any specific large groups making it out of the state.”

Park sunk in on himself. Infante touched his arm.

Abraham continued, “Some people have been making it out. But that’s part of my debrief for you. Tell me what happened to pull you out of Tacoma.”

“Let’s see… The first wave was those musicians, followed by the soldiers - the most goat-like ones. They have some kind of protection, so that when they’re attacked the person who kills them also dies.”

“We’ve gathered. Fortunately only lost three to it this morning, not long before you got here. A big distraction, we almost forgot you were coming. I had hoped you’d have more men.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Continue.”

“We had to plan quick. Everything was happening at once. I left Colonel James - Army - to follow the demon wave on a motorcycle. Hopefully he lived to give some good intel.”

“Hopefully.”

“Communication was touch and go, but I think Lieutenant - no, First Lieutenant Alameda was going to handle evacuating the civilians. But something else came up right then. Murder clubbers.”

“Their usual MO?”

“No, they were on a parade, heading north. Like they wanted to join up with the demons. On a snap decision, Infante and I followed them. But they did meet up with some demons quickly and then caught us. Infante was taken prisoner, brought to somewhere near the IKEA in Tukwila.”

“I sense I’m missing something pretty dramatic here.”

“I met the woman - the thinner one. She helped me find and free Infante. We killed a lot of murder clubbers and goat demons. I don’t really know how.”

The man turned, arms folded behind his back, and walked to the window. He looked down at the things walking about the streets. Infante and Park followed him but couldn’t see his expression.

“That’s very interesting indeed. Who killed them? Most directly? I need to know.”

“Infante killed at least one, but was detained most of the time. I… didn’t… I killed something like a minotaur along the way to Tukwila.”

“Really?,” Infante asked.

“Yeah. You think I can’t kill a-”

“Focus. That leaves the women, and however many murder clubbers and demon soldiers. Who did what?”

“The thin one. Iphigenia. She killed almost all of them.”

“With guns? Her bare hands?”

“Mostly with a hammer.”

Abraham was quiet facing out the window. A few nearby personnel overheard the exchange and were eavesdropping in a tense zone of quiet. Finally he turned around, smiling.

“That’s quite good of you to bring her to us. Ready for your own debrief?”

“Very much so.”

“The Department of Homeland Security sent me here because I have occult knowledge. The supernatural is real, gentlemen, and some of us have been doing our best to stay ahead of it.”

“Good to hear,” said Infante.

“...So I can bring you up to speed. The murder clubs committed great evils here. Nothing so enormous as World War Two, but something about their souls, this moment in history, the stars… Hard to say, but something about their evil broke open a portal to Hell.”

“It figures!,” said Infante. Park was sober, almost entranced.

“That’s where the other factions came in. It’s my understanding that this Queen Bymaan has generals named Bybaal and Abalaam. Bybaal is disloyal and hoping to take over Seattle, dethrone the Queen. And to do so, he’s enlisting the murder clubs.”

“Not a problem now, are they?,” Park said.

“There are still at least a few hundred left. If they have the mark of Bybaal, the legions won’t be able to attack them unless directed to by Bymaan herself. So that, plus an element of surprise, could be enough for them to accomplish that goal...”

“Great,” said Infante.

“-If they were able. We can’t count on that. They add an element of chaos that complicates my own directives, so I want to take them out.”

“That works for me, too.”

Park said, “Wait, with all due respect sir, what about the chaos out there? I don’t understand how attacking them can help and I can think of a lot of ways it could go wrong.”

Abraham tapped him in the chest. “Don’t be such a sourpuss. We have a few aces in the hole. My occult knowledge, and some heroes.”

“Heroes?” Park’s voice was weak. He had a bad feeling he knew what that meant, and it was more danger for Infante and the civilians.

“Some people have unusual strength, above and beyond the rest of us. It allows them to overcome the power of the death shield. There is no question the woman is one of these people, and Infante may be as well.”

Infante folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head in pleasant surprise. “Nice.”

“Do we have any other heroes, sir?”

“No. But we have a prophet. She’s sequestered at the moment. As there are heroes, there are also people with visions of the future, the present. Technically speaking, clairvoyance.”

Infante and Park looked at each other. Infante understood Park didn’t want to mention his own abilities in that moment and kept it quiet.

Park said, “That’s interesting. So if we didn’t happen in here by chance, you wouldn’t have any of these ‘heroes’?”

“Relax. There are other ways to get things done...”

***

Iphigenia and Jelly Sue dodged the military treatment. A lady soldier showed them to the second floor. The apartments had all had doors removed for ease of being used as barracks. The doors had been bolted over some windows to add a little protection. Ippy didn’t like the idea of a lack of privacy, but it seemed like there were only two guards left on the floor, out in the main hall.

She hoped they couldn’t hear too well. She was thankful the power was on, providing a hum of white noise, but the building was terribly quiet a few floors below the command center.

The apartment they’d been shown to had been previously occupied, and the owner left behind some clothes. They’d be essential. Ippy walked Jelly Sue into the bathroom and leaned against the wall, looking at her.

“We need you to get clean.”

“It’s good to be clean and pretty.”

She smiled. “You’re pretty no matter what, but yeah.” Her smile weakened. “Do you need help? I don’t want to...” She looked around uncomfortably, “...You’re very good at balancing on handlebars, and standing for a long time. But can you take off your clothes? Turn on the shower? I don’t know if you have some problems, I’m sorry.”

Ippy had the most earnest expression in human history, Jelly was blank as ever. But she did glance away and back, as if thinking about something. Remembering? “Helen took off my clothes and put them back on me.”

The tension left Ippy’s face, but now she was surprised, interested. “Was Helen your mother?”

“I belonged to Helen.”

“Mm, OK.” She didn’t know what to think, shook it off, and started unwrapping the lady. Iphigenia became aware of her own dirtiness. The bright daylight wasn’t beaming directly in the window, but still lit the room well. It had a power that revealed details hidden under lamps at night. She could tell the difference between the blood of the murder goblins, the blood of the angels, white plaster dust, plant waste, grotty dried sweat, and more general filth.

She hated it, but her hands were clean enough to do this work at least. Jelly put out her arms dutifully and Ippy removed the angel’s military coat, casting it into the hall. She pushed and pulled her lightly and she complied, turning in place. She unzipped the pink dress but didn’t let it drop, pulling it up over her head and tossing it into the hall on top of the thick black jacket.

Out of the box Jelly Sue. What would it reveal, removing those wrappings? Iphigenia did so with care - especially when she felt she was closest to skin. Some of the wraps had been partially solidified by the plaster, so she got sharp knife-like bangle from the angel’s coat and came back to work it with that.

It came off. In most places, plaster went all the way down to the skin. How could it breathe? She was covered in that stuff, but her skin didn’t become wrinkly and mushroom-like as a normal person’s does beneath a cast. It was perfect, dark brown, smooth beneath the remaining white dust.

Ippy got the wraps off her arms and legs. While she was on the floor she set Jelly on the toilet and tried to find the laces of her boots. She broke up the plaster with the duller end of the knife. It took an agonizingly long time.

Again, the boots came off to reveal flawless feet. Dark brown to a pleasant rosy copper color on the ends of her toes and the bottom of her soles. There were barely any lines to feel, no wrinkles save where Ippy had turned something too far in her prodding inspection.

She isn’t human. Well, you knew this.

Ippy’s head began to swim. This wasn’t great. If she was some kind of blood-draining monster, people would try to hurt her. She bit her hand from the stress of it, squeezed her eyes.

Then she sat up tall, cut her own palm, and asked her, “Are you thirsty?”

Jelly Sue looked from the wound, up to Iphigenia’s face. Her eyelids snapped between the positions like a folding fan, her eyes sparkled with reflected light. “No thank you. I don’t need it yet.”

Ippy squeezed her eyes shut, set the knife aside, flopped back onto the floor. “Damn. Damn, damn, damn.”

She sat back up, stood up, helped the vampire to her feet. “OK. Almost done.” She almost turned to go get herself a bandage, but decided she’d just use the padded cotton body suit on her wound when it came off.

It seemed like it had been glued shut with a small amount of the plaster, rather than seamed. Ippy pulled it apart easily, now that the ends weren’t tied with wrappings. The pads and sheets fell aside like leaves revealing her white-dusted nudity.

There was nothing there. Her breasts were the barest rise, no nipples at all. She had no navel, no pubic hair. Ippy crouched quickly and looked between her legs. To her embarrassment, Jelly spread her legs for a better view. She was smooth, no orifices of any kind.

Iphigenia withdrew and stood on shaking legs, clutched herself. Was this horror she was feeling? Revulsion? She broke out in a crazed smile. “Jelly Sue, are you a doll?”

She put her legs back together and raised her head to look at Ippy. Her eyelids were slow to catch up, like those kind that were meant to close when the doll was reclined, but when they get old, start to stick and click. Her face was impassive. “Yes. I was Helen’s doll but she isn’t here. Am I your doll now, Ippy?”

Iphigenia hugged her close, arms wrapped around her so tight they almost touched her own sides again. “Yes! You’re my doll now and you’re perfect!”

“Thank you.”

***

Abraham led Infante and Park to a whiteboard. Occult symbols were scrawled all over it, with inscrutable notes. A few were familiar, from the pennons and badges of the troops.

“What does it all mean, sir,” Park asked.

“It means you’ll have backup this time. This is the seal of Bymaan. It’s well known in the kind of occult lore you can pick up at Barnes & Noble.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it tells us she’s a highly ranked queen of Hell. The spiel the heralds rattled off, about Lucifer? She’s right under him along with some other characters we haven’t seen yet.”

“Ugh.”

“Not to worry. I’m ninety percent certain we won’t be seeing them. She seems to be the ruler of one of the cardinal points of Hell - the Northwest. Unless portals open elsewhere in the States, this is probably it.”

Infante gestured to the other, less complicated sigils. “What are these ones?”

“Her two generals. Abalaam, Bybaal. Bybaal is the treacherous one we discussed before. This seal will keep the other fallen angels from attacking the murder clubbers. The seal of Abalaam can have a similar effect, and I want to set it on all the officers in this building.”

Infante shook his head. “Oh no, that seems like a really bad idea, sir.”

“Oh? Are you an occult expert?”

“No, but this is all from the bible, right? You don’t wear the Mark of The Beast.”

“It’s the Number of The Beast not the Mark. I could lay out the numerological correlates for all these symbols, explain to you how this is different, but I don’t have time to give you a master’s degree in demonology. Can you accept a commanding officer’s orders?”

He glanced to the side but didn’t say anything.

Abraham leaned close. “I’ll let you out of it because you’re a hero, right? But don’t let the rest of these guys know. This is challenging enough as it is. New territory for everyone.”

“Yes sir,” he said with no enthusiasm.

Park looked at him sympathetically, then back to the boss. “So we’ll all get this protection, take our ‘heroes’ to wherever the other murder clubbers are, take them out… Then what?”

“We’ll gather more intel at that citadel. See if we can find a way to reverse this. Or at least, understand how our country can come to deal with it. Militarily.”

“Of course.”

Infante flexed his arms then winced, touching his thigh. He quickly tried to play it off, but he’d been caught.

“What’s going on, Sergeant? Wounded in action?”

“Yes sir. Afraid I got bit by one of those snake tails. I don’t…,” he spoke more quietly, “I don’t know what to do, if it’s a problem or what.”

Park said, “God, I can’t believe that wasn’t the first thing we told you. Do you have an infirmary?”

“Yes, by all means. Come with me...”

Abraham snapped out some orders and they were whisked down to the third floor, and medical assistance.

***

Bybaal couldn’t rest. He had his queen’s orders to attend, and his own designs as well. But by early afternoon he’d finished casting spells to the corners of the land, causing the alien plants to grow into massive barriers, finished the works that had been commanded of him. He needed only to put the finishing touches on his own workings.

The big IKEA building was streaked in white and crust from top to bottom. Feathers swirled in eddies around it, bits of eggshell joined the grit of asphalt. Pigeons, starlings, and sparrows flew in and out constantly - a great cloud forming above. Some were abnormally large, grown crazed, snapping smaller birds out of the air.

Inside, Bybaal knew they were fucking. It was an unnatural orgy leading to magically-enhanced incubation. He was breeding a force of servant beasts for his own ends. Of course, if discovered, he would pretend it was for his queen. But that wasn’t going to be a problem.

He held up a hand and the invisible demons set him down on the ground. He walked past them, paying them no attention, his eyes drawn to the spectacle. “What have I done? Hahaha. This is reprehensible.” He whistled high and loud.

A freakish parade of demons in electric blue IKEA shirts and khakis came bustling out of the nearest door and hopped around him in ecstasy. “What would you have of us, Great Bybaal?,” they cried.

“Stop this capering. Line up.”

They tried to comply, but their feet tapped and bounced, hands jiggled. These all had bird heads - a thrush, a shrike, an osprey, an ostrich.

“Good enough. Now. I would like a steed. Have you a bird large enough to ride?”

They shook their heads and looked at each other in terror. Would he take out his rage on them?

“Hm, I do not love that. But I can accept it. I will at least need many thousands of your little birds then. Let’s make it starlings.”

“Right away, Great One!”

They bounced and scampered and hustled out of sight.

Bybaal waited, then waved goodbye to his invisible demons. “Meet me at the Cherry Hill Citadel. Have a nice trip.” He smiled as the starlings swarmed all around him.

Some held his red coat in place to avoid drag, others formed a roiling mass about him, slowly lifting him into the sky. He felt them brush and scrape against him. This duty might break them, but the IKEA demons could have just made him a bigger bird. It was hardly his fault.

They flew him to Seattle.

***

Clark woke up with taut muscles. It was that feeling from the day after a good workout - the feeling of the body making itself stronger. He had to look at himself, at his arms and legs. Yes, they were more firm, but the idea he was simply becoming young again was sadly not borne out in his skin. Still, revitalized muscles and super dance powers were nothing to sneeze at.

He did lots of stretches like a good boy. It wasn’t as thrilling as running up the side of a building or leaping over a car, but it was fun to see what he was now capable of. He put a leg back and his head back, standing on one set of toes while the rest of his body formed an extravagant loop. He whipped around and dropped low, spinning one leg below him while hopping over it with the other on each rotation, then switched legs.

A cramp almost formed in his thigh, muscles trembling, ready to seize up. He should have stayed with slower stretches. He dropped in place and waited for the tension to break.

It was still daylight. Perfect. The pre-furnished luxury condo was lifeless and sterile, despite the warm touches it incorporated - the colors and materials. The design was too modernist, in a bland corporate way. But he didn’t feel too horribly out of place. He had always walked among the rich, even if he wasn’t quite one of them, and over the last few decades this had been the look of it.

At last he was able to stand. He sat on a barstool at a granite-topped island near the kitchen. Room service! Nope. It is you who must be of service, Clark. He downed a glass of water, put himself together, and went to meet the people.

He knocked on doors with a few responses, but almost everyone seemed more sleepy than him, was still trying to rest. More evidence he was still a senior citizen. The young man he’d saved from the worm-thing powered through his exhaustion to join Clark as he walked the halls.

“Hey man! What a night! I just wanna let you know how grateful I am that you saved me, so I could have a chance to help save all these people.”

“I know. You said that last night, Charlie.”

“It’s Caden.”

“That’s great. What are the odds anything is still edible down in the kitchen?”

“Already checked. But I can take you to where we got the supplies stashed.”

“What’s this?”

“While we were gathering the people, we raided all the vending machines and better things we could find. Got it in duffel bags.”

“Doesn’t exactly sound five star, but it’ll have to do. Last thing I did before leaving my apartment was flooding the place.”

“You had food?”

“A nice little kitchen, and enough of the kind of things that last.”

“I’m totes jelly.”

“I gather that means jealous?”

“Yeah, the microwave dinners I had were sooo small. No wonder I was always going out to eat. They didn’t last a minute.”

“A pity, friend.”

“Here we are!”

Down a floor and tucked in a tiny lounge at the end of a hall, there were several duffel bags and sports bags jammed with food and supplies. Depending on how you define food. Clark reluctantly ate his fill.

They found Thurston in the equivalent of that lounge two floors down. This one was shadowed by a tree outside the window. He was sleeping flat and slightly askew on a comforter stolen from one of the pre-furnished units.

“Just like an angel,” Clark said.

“You’re a sweet guy,” said Caden.

Clark gave him a funny look, then poked Thurston gently with his foot. He had to clean his shoes after a night of monster kicking, but they had mostly dried.

Thurston’s shirt was spared besmirching, but he did have to lose all dignity for a moment as he was jarred to consciousness, flapping arms and bulging eyes.

“Dem com fi’ we?! J-- hrm,” he sorted himself out, “Excuse me. Clark, Caden, I see there is no emergency, by the lack of urgency in your stances respective. Why awaken me so?”

“Trying to head off an emergency by making good time,” Caden said. “We got a bunch of people to evacuate, right?”

Clark said, “I just missed you. Didn’t sleep well?”

Thurston had half pulled himself up on a chair, but stopped to rest his head as he remembered something. “I bore witness some time after dawn. I saw the Queen.”

“Oh?”

“No way! What happened?”

“She was riding on the highway. We were on the roof. We saw her ride that camel all the way up to that castle. The farthest north on Capitol Hill.” He pushed himself up into the chair and relaxed.

Clark sat down beside him, leaving no chair for Caden. “That sounds like quite a spectacle. How could you see her through the trees? Was she even bigger than they say?”

“Mm, I’d say the camel itself is twenty feet tall at the hump and she adds five or six feet to that? Also it could leap as if gravity wasn’t an obstacle. When it leapt, she broke the treeline. Whatever the case, I saw her headed that way, but don’t know with certainty she went inside.”

“I bet she did! That one is up by Brandon Lee’s grave,” Caden said. “Hallowed ground to, like, defile.”

Clark cocked an eyebrow but otherwise ignored him. “You should take a shower again, put on some fresh clothes.”

Thurston observed Clark’s purloined clothing. They were an ill fit - big loose collared shirt, baggy navy blue dockers cuffed and tightly belted with a tanned braid. He had black athletic socks and his dancing shoes on again. “I do not have any.”

Caden said, “Not a problem! I think there are some spare clothes downstairs in the employee areas of the building. Like, uniforms.”

“Loathe as I am to resemble a bellhop, take me there, sir.”

Clark was annoyed at the prospect of the young man taking his friend away and stood up to tag along. They didn’t get very far. A teenage girl came into the hall, her cell phone in hand, mother trying to calm her down.

Girl said, “Everyone should know! They should be able to decide, with all the facts!”

Mom said, “What if they choose wrong? It isn’t safe!”

Girl said, “Mr. Clark!”

“Mr. Upton, dear, but Clark will do.”

The mother looked uncomfortable but came along. “Sorry, Guenevere is excitable.”

Caden looked cross. “Let’s hear what she has to say.”

Thurston put a hand on his shoulder to calm him down.

Clark said, “New developments in the mayhem?”

“She’s on the internet now!”

“Some kind of hacker powers?”

“I don’t think so?” She pushed a few buttons on the phone and turned it toward the men.

The news anchor said, “...is what we know. In an effort to legitimize her occupation in Washington state, Queen Bymaan is releasing propaganda on the internet and to news agencies. Understand that MSNBC does not broadcast this to endorse its content in any way - only to help our audience understand what their friends and family in the occupied territory may be going through. You can also find a link to the video on the front page at msnbc.com.” The camera cut to

Queen Bymaan was strolling through a cavernous room with tall, wide open sides that let in bright daylight. It made her flesh glow. The place could have only been one of the towers around the city. She was being filmed by someone or something of human height. A few people stood around, taking in the spectacle. Bare arms displayed her seal. Pigeons flew around, perched here and there, and seemed to also be following her with their heads.

“So this is the garden,” she walked out into a courtyard. It looked like a decent park had been ripped up and planted on a rooftop. Then all the weeds and ground cover had been given cartoon fertilizer to blow up the place. Dandelions and scotch thistles the size of watermelons stretched on thick stalks out of the ivy. The centerpiece was an apple tree, branches bent with cantaloupe-sized apples in metallic gold. The demon queen plucked one and showed it to the camera. “In honor of Eden and the special times we shared there.”

Clark said, “I don’t understand.”

The girl said, “It’s like ‘Cribs.’ She’s making herself a celebrity.”

From the phone, her voice continued, “...onders and more you may behold in The Septagram, once tourism opens. I am very eager to establish a treaty between your empire and ours. For more information, go to our internet site at WeLoveHell.com. Because here in The Septagram, we love Hell and you will too!”

Thurston said, “Has anyone visited the website?”

“It’s down. Too much traffic.”

“See?,” her mom said, “It’s just more propaganda. We shouldn’t be looking at it. It’ll make people think it’s safe to stay here.”

Thurston said, “As long as there is still power to recharge phones and service to bring them the internet, I do not believe anyone will be able to keep this a secret.”

Caden said, “It gets weirder the longer we stay here. We gotta go!”

Clark said, “Hm...” and everyone turned to him, expectant. ‘’Maybe I should pay our new queen a visit.”

Caden said, “No! We need help getting out of the state. What can we do against the monsters? Please, Clark! Mr. Upton!”

Thurston said, “He’s absolutely right, Clark. You know it.”

The girl and her mother just stood there, looking at him expectantly.

“...Fine. But we get you folks out of Seattle and I just might double back. Somebody’s gotta let that lady know the score.”

Thurston’s sense of relief was wrenched. Maybe Clark would take an old guy nap and they could get far away enough to change his mind.

***

#The Septagram

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greeny-witchling · 4 years

Text

Sun / Sol Masterpost

! DISCLAIMER: The following informationc are may wrong. If you see any misinformations, let me know, but not in the harsh way please! The links where the infromations (mainly) are from, are at the bottom. There are everything assosiated with the sun, use, what is helpful !

Note: i’m starting to post things like this. Mainly about astronomy, green witchery, kitchen witchcraft, zodiacs and more. If you are intrested or it was helpful please let me know!

Probably the most popular of the planetary influences for the general population, Sun rules over prosperity and general protection. Choose Sun plants when you are looking for centering, doing money magic, or honoring aspects of the divine that are sun-associated. Sun plants often have sun-shaped flowers (daisies, for instance) or when ingested give a feeling of calm warmth (unlike the heating of Mars, which can lead to violent action).

Higher Self is the crystallization of a transcendental awareness that is a Fulcrum of Equilibrium of the Force-Form dynamics between Jupiterian grace and expanse and Martial tempering and rigor. Emanative from the Nondual and Eternal: Source Consciousness, Solar Self does experience duality yet is a Throne of Stability from which the Lunar personality can be forged and directed and from which suffering is mitigated through understanding some of the roots of attachment that give rise to Lunar mechanicity. But the Solar Fulcrum is dual-toroidal: from which causally antecedent Form-Form dynamics are expressed and through which the Force-Form dynamics of Venusian impulsivity and Mercurial patterning (the Lunar personality and, ultimately, physicality) are integrated and processed. Waiting to be explored are the astrophysical implications of Solar Self, the Sun in our Solar System, and their relationship to the collective consciousness of humanity.

other names: The Sun, Microprosopus, The Lesser Countenance, Melech ("King") (מֶלֶך), sol kabbalistic attributions: Tiphereth ("Tiferet") ("Beauty") (תפארת) mantric sound: „I” numbers: 6, 36, 111, 666 zodiac: leo metal: gold day: Sunday animals: lion, sparrowhawk beings: Will o’the Wisp colour/s: yellow, orange, amber, rayed red, rich amber, golden yellow stone/s: amber, topaz, ruby, diamond, cat’s eye, chrysoleth, carbuncle, citrin symbols: lion, hexagram, sparrowhawk, dragon, head, heart, swan influences: renown, potency, success, fortune, tyranny, pride, ambition, masculinity, arrogance, bigotry, vitality, health, leadership, money, prosperity, empowerment, enlightenment, goals, generosity, spirituality, male energy, the gods, freedom, matters of heart, creativity, friendship, growwth, personal fulfilment, self confidence, wealth, individuality, energy power unpopular correspondences: Ego (“I”, me, pride, self-expression, selfishness, conceit, vitality), Honor (the father, men, nobility, power, will), Creativity (Actors and actresses, entertainment, hobbies), Children (holidays, sports, vacations, games, speculation), Pleasure (Love affairs, heart, constitution) (infromation from: mystic-bss) deities: Aditi, Ah Kinchil, Ama-Terasu, Apollo, Aten, Brighid, Dhatara, Frey, Helios/Sol, Itzamna, Lucifer, Mithra, Mystere, Nitten, Paiva, Ra, Savitar, Jesus Christ, Osiris herbs, plants: Acacia tree (seeds, resin), Angelica, Archangel, Arctic Poppy, Armenian Poppy, Ash, Birch, Bistort, Black-Eyed Susan, Blue Water Lily, Broom, Burnet, Butterbur, Buttercup bush, Calamus (seed, herb, essential oil), Calendula, Catechu, Cedarwood (herb, oil, seed), Celandine, Centaury, Chamomile (seed, oil, herb), Cinnamon, Citron, Citrus (oil, herb), Desert Cassia, Everlasting, Eyebright, Frangipani, Globeflower, Graveyard tree, Helen's flower, Heliotrope, Hibiscus, Hops (seed), apanese, calamus, Laurel, Lovage, Marigold - all kinds (herb, seed), Marshmallow, Marsh marigold, Mexican marigold, Meadow rue, Mistletoe, Mock orange, Moroccan Poppy, Mouse-eared hawkweed, Old man senna bush, Peony, Pimpernel, Poinciana, Potentilla cinqufoil, Pot marigold,Rosemary (oil) Rue (herb, seeds), Saffron, Sneezeweed, Spanish Poppy, St. John's wort, Sundew, Sunflower, Tabasheer, Tormentil, Viper's bugloss, Walnut, Wartweed, Winged Everlasting, Yauhtli, poppy, acacia ash sun plant qualities: Plants resembling the sun in shape and color. Plants that open to the sun and close at night. Medicinal plants affecting the heart. Plants that make one feel warm and relaxed. planetary gualities: Illumination. Resplendence. Inspiration. Leadership. Living. Loving. Ascendance. Dominion over aspects of Lunar Self and other domains of magic and manifestation. body parts: circulation system, hearth, blood, eyes, right eye, upper back, spleen, spinal clomn, thoracic spine diseases: hearth disease, allergy, dermatitis, skin cancer, sunstroke, fever, hearth attack, radiation poisoning, photophobia, chills, hot flashes, skin rashes, eye diseases, substance abuse when arising from self-esteem issues scents: all gloirous odors, Benzoin, Calamus (herb, oils), Cedar, Center Incense, Cinnamon (herb, essential oil), Clove (herb, oil), Citrus (oil, herb), Frangipani, Frankincense (resin, essential oil), Labdanum, Marigold, Oil of Sun, Olibanum (resin, essential oil), Resins of the Sun Incense, Rosemary (herb, essential oil), Rowan, Saffron, Tiphareth Oil incenses: Frankincense (Olibanum), Galangal, Abramelin Incense drugs: alcohol, tonics, antdepressants, Warming drugs, but not as much as Mars and not quickening like Mercury but instead relaxing magick: The Red Tincture, power of acquiring wealth; weapon is the lamen or bow and arrow; figure is the hexagram. Protection, prosperity

Sun phases:

Just like the moon, the sun has phases which can be used to tie in with your magical workings to add an extra boost of power. The sun measures time, where it sits in the sky denotes what time of the day it is, and a sun dial would be quite useless without the sun to cast a shadow! I also think that point between night and day and vice versa, that moment of hand over is quite special.

Sunrise – Basically when the sun wakes up and peers over the horizon. This phase is all about new beginnings, changes, health, employment, renewal, resurrection and finding the right direction. It can also be very cleansing. The morning – This is when the sun is growing in strength, so it brings the magical power for growth, positive energy, resolutions, courage, harmony, happiness, strength, activity, building projects and plans, prosperity and expansion of ideas. High noon – When the sun reaches its peak in the sky at midday – work magic for health, physical energy, wisdom and knowledge. It is also a good time to pop your tools or crystals out that need charging. (Note: some crystals can fade in strong sunlight so check first before putting them out). The afternoon – The sun is heading back down, and the energy now is good for working on business matters, communication, clarity, travel, exploring and anything professional. Sunset – As the sun takes itself off down below the horizon, work magic for removing depression, stress and confusion, letting go, releasing or finding out the truth of a situation.

Sun altar:

I always say that an altar is very personal, it has to be for you to be able to connect with the energy. You will know what needs to be put on your altar. If you aren’t sure then start with a guide or suggestions from others (books, friends, internet etc) but keep it simple and then live with it for a bit. You will find that you are drawn to add other items to it. My suggestions for a sun altar, you don’t have to use all or even any of these, in fact if you put everything listed on there it would be pretty crowded, sometimes less is more. Any spells you are working on can be popped on your sun altar to give them a boost of solar energy. Altar cloth; which could be a head scarf, a table cloth, napkin or bandana, it doesn’t have to be an expensive item. I like to use yellow and orange colours. Sun symbols – well that’s a given really, you can get all sorts of items, ornaments and bric a brac in sun shapes. Flowers – fresh, dried or imitation, go for sunny yellows, oranges and reds but any bright flowers will sit nicely. Fruit – oranges and lemons look fabulous on an altar, you could even dry some slices to decorate with. Crystals – go with whatever you are drawn to but if you need some guidance there is a list of sun crystals in this book. Candles – there probably aren’t many altars that don’t have candles on! Go with sunny or fiery colours.

other things:

Flame symbols to represent fire. Triskelion or phoenix images. Coloured ribbons. Circles and discs in yellow, brass, copper or gold colours. Equal armed crosses or the swastika. God’s eyes (see craft section on how to make one) Oak leaves and any fresh greenery. The Sun or Chariot tarot card. Antlers and horns work well to bring in the masculine energy of the sun. A wand, again for the masculine energy. Flower wreaths, I often use my flower circlets on an altar. Bees – not real ones obviously, how would you stop them from buzzing about? Honey – a little dish or pot full. If you are working with a solstice or equinox you can add in symbols and correspondences that tie in with the energy of the season.

Fire of sun

deities: bel, horus, demeter borne by lion, vishnu zodiac: leo stones: amber, topaz, ruby, diamnd, cat’s eye plants: Calamus root (seed, herb, essential oil), Cowslip, Hops, Marigold, Mexican Marigold, Mistletoe, Pericon, Sunflower, Yauhtli colors: gold, red, yellow, orange, greenish yellow, reddish amber, gray, deep purple day: Sunday plant qualities: Radiant, strong, and enriching plants. Plants resembling the sun in shape and color. Plants that open to the sun and close at night. Medicinal plants affecting the heart. Plants that make one feel warm and relaxed. angels and animals: Michael, lion, Cherub of Fire, Seraphim body parts: heart beings: horros, dragons scent: Olibanum (resin, essential oil), Marigold, Hops, Sulfur drugs: carminatives, tonics magick: Power with wild beasts; weapon is discipline; figures are Fortuna Major and Fortuna Minor

More information:

Sol I - Solar Consciousness and Self – Contemplation in the Sphere of the Sun Sol II - Correspondences in Sol – Altar and Physical Foundations Sol III - Symbolism in Sol – Meditational and Initiatory Foundations Sol IV - Solar Magic – Illumination and Transmutation Sol V - Continuance of Solar Work – Stabilizing Solar Consciousness Sol VI - Solar Astrophysics – Advancing the Art https://christopherpenczak.com/2013/07/29/planetary-magic-1-the-sun-success-and-health/

Where the infromations are from(just in case and for giving credit):

https://www.alchemy-works.com/planets_sun.html https://luxsaturni.com/planetary-magic/sol/ https://www.patheos.com/blogs/beneaththemoon/2019/05/sun-magic/

#baby witch #babywitch #witch #witchcraft #witchtips #cosmic witch #witch community #sun #sun correspondences #solar witch #astronomic witch #witches of tumblr #masterpost #witch masterpost #witchy #witchy infromations #witchcraft infromations #correspondence #planetary masterposts

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shediesattheendzoots · 6 years

Text

The Quest for a Perfect Apple

Apple picking in the burrows leads to a discussion between Nick and Judy about their old flames. When they are both reluctant to share stories, Nick challenges Judy to find a perfect apple in the orchard. The winner keeps their secret. The loser spills the beans.

My addition for WildeHoppsWeek, Day 6 prompt. One shot and lots of fluff.

Everyone knew that you do not challenge Judy Hopps to something without first meeting the most stubborn rabbit on the planet. Especially a certain fox, though you’d never know it by how he spoke to her.

“So,” said Nick, whilst tugged along by Judy's paw. “These are the famous Hopps orchards? They're a bit smaller than I expected. And barren.”

Judy huffed in feign indignation. “What do you expect so late into the season, dumb fox?”

“Ripe, red apples as far as the eyes can see. No one tops a Hopp. Isn’t that what you told me?”

“I believe my exact words were, You know, I’ve never actually gone apple picking before. Not, Oh please, oh please take me apple picking, Judy. I beg you. There’s a much difference cadence in groveling for it.”

Judy could only laugh and squeeze Nick’s paw tighter.

One good thing about going to the orchards so late into the season was that there were no wondering eyes to scrutinize the pair. Not that they were trying to hide anything—Judy’s parents had been more than accepting, even if it took time for her dad to come around—But the rest of Bunnyburrow wasn’t quite so open-minded. Judy didn’t care what the other rabbits thought, but Nick insisted on making as few enemies on their visit to the burrows as possible.

Better to keep appearances than to make adversaries, he had said.

Of course, the downside Nick was so keen to point out was that there were very few apples remaining on the trees. And those left behind were abandoned for a reason. Latercomers rarely found the best fruit, as Judy’s parents had warned her. And most apples remaining were disgusting piñatas of bugs and rot.

Suddenly, Judy was glad they had stopped at one of her family’s stands for a lunch of fresh fruits and vegetables, instead of relying on food from the orchard.

“Jeez,” she muttered, kicking at a few of the apples littering the ground. “Maybe this was a mistake. I can’t see anything good in the trees.”

“Well, the view is still pretty.”

“It’s a lot better when the leaves are still on the branches. There’s more a bustle then too, with folks coming and going for the baked goods. Pumpkin pie and hot apple cider. And then there’s the hay rides.”

Most of the Hopps fields were devoted to carrots, as part of the family brand. But the acres of the northern fields were dedicated solely to the harvest experience of apples and pumpkins every autumn. Any farmer in the burrows worth his salt knew that when the tourists rushed to see the leaves change, it was simply too good an opportunity to pass up earning an extra buck.

And visitors to the farms weren’t the only ones who looked forward to the experience.

“Sounds like you have a lot of memories of this place, Carrots.”

“Yup. I remember when dad planted each of these trees. I was six when he started, and the apple acre sort of grew with the family from there. It’s fun to come back every year and see how much it’s grown. Dad plants one seedling for each new Hopp kit.”

“Oh? Does that mean you have your own tree? I wouldn’t mind seeing it.”

“One out of three hundred and nine, yeah. Though even I haven’t seen it since…”

As her voice trailed, Judy recalled why it had been six years since she had been to the apple farm. It was enough that Nick noticed the pause.

“Everything okay?”

“...Yeah, it’s nothing,” she replied, her ears behind her head. “Just some bad memories too.”

“The falling out an apple tree and break your leg kind?”

“More like the heartbreak and teenage angst kind.”

Judy patted the bark of a nearby honeycrisp tree, scraping the wood with her claws.

“You know how it is,” she said. “Buck meets doe. Starts a high school crush. Ends poorly when she decides she wants to focus on college. Nothing complicated.”

“I dunno. I think there’s plenty of room for complication there.”

“Well, I didn’t think you’d want to hear the whole story.”

“Nonsense. I like hearing you talk about yourself.”

Judy considered herself fortunate that her ears were already behind her head. That spared her from Nick pointing out her obvious blush and poking fun at her.

But Nick also had a habit of shrugging off her flusters when he knew they truly bothered her. And he always knew, somehow.

It was a pattern he continued.

“Hey, like you said, I know how it goes. And I think we all have one of those stories where we’ve done something we’ve regretted in a relationship. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. It’s not like I need to know. Though I’m very curious, mind you.”

Judy sensed the opportunity to turn the tables on him.

“...So, does that mean you have one of those stories too?”

“Oh, no. You’re cashing checks your bunny butt can’t afford by barking up that particular tree.”

“Aw, come on. You never talk about your past.”

“There isn’t much to say,” he shrugged, releasing his grip on her a little. “And you probably wouldn’t like what you’d hear anyway. Old Nick was not a nice mammal.”

“Oh, please. I managed to put up with him.”

“For reasons that are still unknown to me.”

His paw escaped hers completely as he bundled up in the hoodie he was wearing.

In the beginning, Judy might have been worried she had hurt his feelings. But she knew better.

It was a game Nick liked to play with her. Feigning distance to encourage her to provoke him further along and coax an answer out of him. Some days, Judy wondered if it was Nick’s way of subtly training her how to hustle. Like hustling was his method of communicating with her better. But she always knew the difference between playful hurt and real hurt. It showed in his eyes, which betrayed everything about Nick’s masked persona.

In that moment, Nick’s green eyes stared at her with an air of fondness and coyness to them, contrasting the pouted lip he was giving her.

She answered his bluff with one of her own. Ears back and eyes wide, like a child begging for candy.

“Won’t you tell me the story? Pretty please?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours first,” he answered with a smile.

“No way. It’s too embarrassing and stupid…”

“Then it appears we are at an impasse,” Nick said. “You won’t tell me your story and I won’t tell you mine.”

“It’s not an impasse. You’re just no fun.”

“Ah. But I have a solution to our problem, madam rabbit. And something fun, no less.”

“Oh,” she replied, crossing her arms with a smile and looking on at his performance. “And what are you proposing, mister fox?”

“A game.”

“A game?”

“Indeed. It’s very simple, you see. We’ll go our separate ways in search of apples. Whomever finds a perfect apple will be declared the winner. The loser will have to tell their little heartbreak story to the other. That sounds fun, right?”

“A perfect apple,” Judy repeated the words. “What do you mean perfect?”

“I mean flawless. Perfect shape. Perfect red color. Delicious. I want the apple you think of when someone says the word apple. A textbook definition. That should be easy enough to find, right? Even toddlers know what a perfect apple looks like.”

Judy huffed and crossed her arms at the fantasy.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect apple. Not this late into the season, anyway.”

“Then you’ll just have to get creative, Carrots,” he replied with his trademark smirk. “It will make looking through the orchard more exciting. Don’t you think?”

She furrowed her brow at him. “What are you scheming?”

“Me? Scheme? Never. What makes you think I’m up to something?”

“Call it a hunch.”

“I’m hurt. Hurt, I say.”

“If that’s what hurts you, you wouldn’t be able to hustle a dime from a philanthropist much less pawsicles for a living. And whatever you say, I’m not falling for it. I learned my lesson already buying you that jumbo pop.”

“What’s the matter, Carrots? Chicken?”

Judy could feel a particular type of heat travel up her ears. And it wasn’t a blush.

Instead, she felt more like a stick of shortfuse dynamite. It was shame and indignation over Nick’s childish words. The blustering emotions boiling beneath the surface were not helped by his continued, knowing smirk.

“Well?” he asked. “Wanna play or do I win by default?”

Judy would have been proud to say such petty taunts from Nick had no effect on her at this point in their relationship.

But then she would be lying.

She stomped off through the mud in the opposite direction of Nick, cooling herself down by reminding herself that he was only playing with her. It was too small an acre to hold a grudge. And she knew Nick wasn’t going to have much luck on his end of the farm either.

It was simply far too late in the season to ever hope to find a perfect apple.

And yes, Judy had known that from the beginning when they had set out for the orchard.

She had been expecting to find, at least, a few decent apples. Maybe one that was a tad misshapen or had a few bad spots that could be cut away. But walking amongst the trees, Judy saw the branches picked clean.

“Business has been booming…”

Privately, Judy couldn’t help but wonder if the farm’s success had to do with the stir she had caused in Zootopia. Fans of her exploits who migrated south to see where the famous Judy Hopps had grown up. They invaded the burrow during an already intense time of the year for the farm.

The usual apple choices were long gone.

Macintosh being the most popular, didn’t even have a stem left behind. Then were the honeycrisp, sweet and Judy’s favorite. And a favorite of the bees too, judging by how they buzzed happily amongst the discarded, browned mush left on the ground. Granny smith were a sourer, rarer sort that only a pawful of Hopps preferred.

Each Hopp was given a choice of what type of apple tree to grow. And some of the youngest sprouts hadn’t even passed Judy in height yet.

She paused at one sign on a nearby tree. Red delicious.

“Well, he did say red and delicious…”

As with all the other trees, most of the branches were bare, especially near the bottom. Amongst the top, however, were several riper fruits. Or late-bloomers, it being so far in the season.

They were high enough up that any sane rabbit would have opted to move to the next tree. Or find a ladder.

But Judy Hopps was harebrained enough to jump for them.

She stepped back for a running start before clawing her way up the trunk. Though the peak of the apple tree was far too high for a single bound, there were plenty of branches to climb. And all her police training came in handy as Judy leapt further up the trunk.

Even when the sprigs grew narrow and she stumbled, she did not let up. It was unfitting of her to ever back down from a challenge. Even a self-imposed one.

She kept her eyes on the prize. A rather juicy looking red globe perched at the second branch to the top.

In one final push, she reached for the apple with her tippy toes before slinking back down with her prize in paw.

“Gotcha.”

It was a short lived victory.

No sooner than did Judy put all her weight down on her supporting branch did it creak and groan under pressure. Even the tiny weight of a rabbit was enough to snap the wood entirely, sending Judy tumbling several feet to the hard ground.

She landed with a heavy thud on her butt, protecting her apple by holding it close like a baby.

The ringing sensation of pain traveled up her spine as her body asked her the obvious question. What the heck were you thinking?

“That’s definitely going to bruise,” she groaned, rubbing at her hindquarters.

Judy flexed her hips slightly in a few stretches, making sure she hadn’t broken anything. When satisfied she had gotten away with only dirtying her fluffy, white tail, she returned her gaze to the acquired fruit.

It was as ordinary any other apple one might find on a farm, almost like the ones the pair had for lunch an hour ago. With curves in all the right places and five bumps at the bottom, it looked exceptionally average on the surface. A typical, perfect apple.

“I guess it’s as good as any,” Judy said to herself, tossing it in the air a few times. “Wonder if Nick had any luck.”

Nick was right where Judy had left him, leaning against one of the trees with his own apple in his paw. A Macintosh.

“How’d you make out, Carrots?”

“See for yourself,” Judy held up her apple with pride.

Nick smiled and held his paw out.

“Not bad. May I?”

She shrugged and tossed Nick the fruit, which he juggled for a moment as he struggled to get a grasp on it.

Once he did, Nick gave it a full combover much like he was a jeweler examining a precious gemstone. Judy watched him while tapping her foot as he inspected every corner of her apple, from the top to bottom.

First, he fiddled with it, tugging at the stem. Then he squeezed it to test its firmness. And finally he sniffed it.

“Nope,” he said at last. “It’s no good.”

“It’s no good,” Judy repeated his words. “Why? What’s wrong with it? It looks fine.”

“Oh, sure. It looks perfect on the outside. But what’s inside counts too.”

Nick dug his claws into the skin of the fruit, allowing him to tear apart the apple neatly in half. Judy contorted in disgust at what was in the core.

“Ugh! Worms!?”

“Looks like it,” said Nick as the maggots wriggled free. “I thought it smelled iffy. Not the tastiest apple, I would think.”

“Agh,” Judy clawed at her tongue. “And I wanted to eat that when you were done!”

“Still can,” he offered the fruit. “Want it?”

“No!”

Nick chuckled before tossing the apple away.

“I figured a farm girl like you wouldn’t mind bugs so much.”

“Bugs are fine. But maggots are the worst. They ruin so many crops and can sometimes kill a whole harvest. So, I hate them.”

Judy took a moment to collect herself while Nick grinned. He was very pleased with himself as he tossed his own apple in the air a few times. Judy quickly realized why.

With her apple tainted by worms, that left Nick as the winner of the game by default. And him winning was almost worse than eating an apple filled with maggots. His smugness was insufferable, just like having to admit her loss.

Judy grinded her teeth as she spoke.

“Well...It looks like you won the bet.”

“Wrong again, Carrots. I failed too.”

He caught her by surprise by tossing his apple in her direction. Judy’s trained reflexes allowed her to catch it instantly.

“It looks fine to me,” she said, inspecting its shape and color.

“You’re only seeing the surface level then.”

“What?” she asked, holding the apple away from her at arm's length. “Does this have worms in it too?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. Just look a bit closer, Carrots.”

Judy humored him with a sigh and brought the apple into her face. She then spun it around a few times.

It was on her third circle that she noticed a white sticker taped to the surface. It took her a few heartbeats to process what it meant. But when Nick’s message clicked, her face morphed into a scowl.

“You cheated!”

“Hey, now. I admitted that I lost, just like you. Everything’s fair and square. I just happened to keep one of the apples we had for lunch. And I didn’t want to break any of the branches of a tree by trying to climb it. Foxes aren’t known for their mountaineering skills, after all.”

Judy groaned in disgust as she peeled off her family logo from the apple.

Nick’s entry had been one of the apples from the reserved orchards, picked early in the season and treated with preservatives. It was the sort grown solely for selling, be it for wholesale or for cider. Of course it was going to look too perfect to be picked from the orchard they were in. It’d even lack a genuine taste.

“That’s still a cheap hustle,” she muttered, dropping the apple to the ground.

“Sorry, Carrots. Couldn’t resist. If it makes you feel any better, we both lost.”

“Right...So, what happens now?”

“Admittedly, I haven’t thought this far ahead in the case of a tie. I was hoping you’d find something a little better than a ball of worms.”

“Well, sorry I’m a disappointment.”

“You’re not. Trust me. It’s just funny. Here I was expecting to let you win.”

As unfair as Nick’s little trick felt, his smile always had the habit of making Judy forgive him quickly.

Perhaps teasing her was a little reminder of what he used to do for a living. But he never took it too far with her. And he knew the right things to say afterwards.

“Let me make it up to you,” he said, bowing his head. “Walk with me and I’ll tell you all about the time I got dumped.”

“You remember what I was like back then, right?”

“Completely egocentric? Cockier than a rooster? Always had on a smirk like a crocodile?”

“Alright, alright. I get it. I wasn’t a nice guy. I had a chip on my shoulders, especially in my early twenties. And there weren’t exactly a lot of prospects given what I did for a living. I was far from a perfect catch. But I could act civilized when it was called for.”

“I’d hope so, given our first encounter.”

“You know how it is,” Nick said with a smile. “One day, you just sort of stumble into someone on the streets who catches your eye. Suddenly, you spend your whole day thinking about them.”

Judy let out a curious “hmm” while gripping at Nick’s paw.

“It was completely superficial. She was just a cute vixen I bumped into while selling ‘supplies.’ I ran my mouth to impress her. Made up a bunch of stuff about who I was. Hustled her, basically, into thinking I was someone I wasn’t. And she believed me. Every single word.”

Judy couldn’t help but feel some kinship towards the poor vixen whom she had never met. She had been on the other end of one of Nick’s hustles too. And that memory showed in her glance to Nick.

“You don’t have to say it,” continued Nick. “I was a jerk. And it didn’t end well, as one would expect. I kept it going for a while, but everyday was like wearing a mask. Like looking over your shoulder, waiting for the moment it’d all come crashing down. Until one day she finally found out about it through a slip up I made in the worst possible way.”

“Did she rip you a new one?”

“No. That was the worst part. I could understand if someone wanted to scream at me for lying to them like that. But there wasn’t even a single word she said to me. She just got up and left in silence. Never contacted me again. And I never saw her after that. Not that it wasn’t what I deserved but…”

It was rare to see Nick give a genuine frown as he rubbed the back of his head. He wasn’t one to ever show honest discomfort, if he could help it. That was all part of his motto. His mask.

It was also how Judy knew he was telling the truth when he said.

“I regret leaving things with her like I did. I really wasn’t fair to her. And I’d like to think I’m a better mammal now. If I ever see her again, I’d want to apologize.”

Judy smirked and squeezed his paw slightly. “I’d like to think you are too.”

There was a silence between the couple as they continued to walk down the rows of apple trees, paw in paw.

It wasn’t the bad kind of quiet. Just the sort that could exist between two friends when there was nothing else to say, but they could still enjoy each other’s company. Though, internally, Judy was digesting Nick’s story. It was another layer to the checkered past of her fox. Bits and pieces that she would sew together to see the real person he liked to keep locked away.

And there was something about his story that prompted Judy to break the pleasant quiet.

“...You aren’t the only one who wasn’t fair though. I’ve only had one other boyfriend. And I sort of started the relationship knowing that it would probably end badly, if only subconsciously.”

Nick let out his own, knowing “hmm.”

“I guess something is destined to fail if it's rotten from the onset,” said Judy. “It was late high school when I met Billy. Or, more accurately, he met me. He was absolutely smitten with me. And I liked him. Well enough, anyway. People always said we looked like the perfect couple. But, deep down, we just wanted different things. And he was very...Traditional.”

“Ah. This already has an unhappy ending, Carrots.”

Judy covered her face. “You know how I get about my police work. But Billy certainly didn’t understand why I had to go to community college outside of the burrows for my career. Or why I even wanted to be an officer of law when the Hopps own one of the biggest farms in the state. And he got very clingy at the end before I left him for school.”

Judy let out a heavy sigh, recalling just how taxing her first year of college was.

The chaos of traveling across state, coupled with a bad breakup, made her freshman year particularly difficult. Not to mention the guilty memory of seeing a pair of drooping rabbit ears watching her leave from the train station.

“He’s doing fine now,” she said. “Last I heard, he married and had like thirty kids of his own. But...I dunno. There’s always that bad taste in your mouth. You know? But it’s like...How can you expect a relationship to succeed if there are problems at the core? I know it was probably for the best. But a part of me always wonders if I’m a bad person for not giving it a fair try in the moment.”

“You’re not. Sometimes things don’t work out. You wanted different things. Happens all the time.”

“Well...I guess I’m happy at least one thing did work out.”

Judy gave Nick’s paw another squeeze before pulling him along to the honeycrisp tree at the end of the row.

She had all but forgotten about the tree marked by the heart carved into the bark with the initials J.H. and B.Y. at its middle. The wood had healed well from the knife and the lines were already starting to fade to the untrained eye. But Judy could still see the message, clear as day.

“Well,” she said. “Here it is. My apple tree.”

Being a fox in the burrow, Judy was used to seeing Nick tower over most things around the town. Even her apple tree didn’t look nearly so big next to him. Though he still wouldn’t be able to reach the top, even on his tippy toes.

“Shorter than I thought,” he commented.

“Shush you. Anyway, depressing backstories aside...You said you wanted to see it, so here it is.”

Nick looked it up and down with a smile. He was genuinely pleased with what he saw.

“There are still some apples left up there,” he pointed out the few resting at the very top branches. “Wanna get em?”

Judy rubbed at her sore hip. “I think I’ve had enough climbing trees for one day.”

“You don’t need to climb any trees. You only need to climb me.”

Nick released her paw and pressed his back against the trunk of the tree. He then held his own paws together in a makeshift step like he wanted to give her a boost.

“You can’t be serious…”

“Aw, come on. It’s perfectly safe. Don’t you trust me?”

“You barely passed enormous criminals training in the academy, and you want to try lifting me in the air?”

“Yup! It’ll be fun.”

“No thanks, Nick…”

At first, Judy thought Nick was going to try to taunt her again with another challenge or a sleight on her bravery. But after staring blankly at each other, he just shrugged and dropped his pose.

“Eh. I’m getting cold anyway. You’re right. If we want apples, we can just get them at your family’s stands.”

Judy watched Nick’s back as he stepped away from the tree, heading towards the path for home. Though she still caught a glimpse of something somber in his eye before he turned around.

She let out a soft sigh before preparing to go into a sprint.

“Dumb fox…”

Nick yelped when Judy collided into him.

She then scrambled for his shoulders and tugged at his ears to better position herself into comfortable seating, planting the back of his head between her thighs.

“If you wanted fresh apples from the tree,” she grumbled into his ear. “Why didn’t you just say so from the beginning?”

“I didn’t want to be a bother,” he mumbled back, with her foot in his face.

“You’re not a bother if you want something, dumb fox. Sometimes it’s okay to open up a little. You know?”

Nick went quiet for a moment.

“Sorry, Carrots. You’re right. I need to try harder at that.”

“So long as you remember it with me. Now, move to the left.”

Judy was directing him by fondling at his ears like they were a pair of joysticks and she was operating a crane. Nick lurched closer to the trees by her command. Close enough for her to reach the lowest hanging fruit. It was one with a funny looking shape and color, half red and half yellow. But otherwise unblemished.

She grabbed, twisted, and pulled it skyward until it popped free into her palm.

“There,” she said as they stepped back from the tree. “Worm check.”

Nick sniffed at the apple as she dangled it in front of his snout before giving the thumbs up to signal the all clear.

“Smells good to me.”

“Well, it’s not perfect,” she said, dropping it fully into Nick’s paw.

“It doesn’t have to be to still be good.”

“I guess you’re right,” Judy smiled as she rested atop of Nick’s head, content to listen to him munch on her apple.

He took one big chomp before holding it up for her to nibble on. She happily took a bite of his offer. Savoring the crisp taste of fall and the wind rustling through the dried leaves that still remained on the trees.

And there was no sweeter fruit to be had.

#zootopia #wildehoppsweek #oneshot #nick wild #judy hopps #romance #apples

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whimsically-ominously-auspice · 5 years

Text

I waited to see NHRA insta feed until a bit earlier tonight.

The best thing in the world was seeing John Force as happy as he was.

Great, great, things happened today.

Steve saw i do get sexually harassed and matt isn't a total liar.

I met two legends that want to preserve the goodness of the NHRA and protect their future.

I met two more people i can trust.

And Matt Hagan called me baby.

So while i sit in this lit up living room with dogs and,chaos around me.,the torture i go,through every fucking day. Not just my body hurting me but people wanting to take what little i have left --- my life.

Nothing can take away what i attempted to accomplish, will accomplish, my life.

Or the appreciation of all my hard work on John Force's face.

I've seen him happy. But tonight was happier than ever.

... And one thing he said wss that social media is new to him. As it is all of us. And he didn't know what to do or how to handle it. I seen a video of him fumbling with the phone. Trying to Twitter.

And it was refreshing. Usually i poke around in the,darkest places of souls/brains. But that was nice and clear.

....

I been Trying to be Team Force for a long time. I dont know that I've ever made him smile as much as tonight.

Its been,rough. Its been fun. I've pushed them,to their limits. I know what i do is hard for them sometimes and it puts them on,the dark side.

So tonight, it was a beautiful and meaning ful and needed post. We all needed a smile like that.

I've survived Stewart and always will.

Honestly he has the most terrifying smile. Its hideous.

But it makes me feel calm. It makes me smile with cheer.

Because his smile is terrifying because it represents him --- he is terrified.

Im not. One being calm in a self defense situation is much like being calm in a car wreck. It's how you win.

Like he literally has a monster face. Ask Jesse James, it made his face empty of all blood like he would faint dead on the spot.

I feel at peace. Like I'm meant to kill him. I just breathe deep and wait. Filling my body with oxygen rich air. Until I want to sleep. My body relaxes so i can fight back with lubricated joints.

Matt pukes and panics.

Jesse tries to tell,me, what to do. But i like to surround and silent nod,

No one,says a word. Its a beautiful dance of life.

One person goes in for the kill, the other watches all and,supports so its a constant attack on the predator.

I like,to,circle a mother fucker when I'm alone.,for no,fucking,reason but control. To make,them spin, to make,them keep their eyes on me.

I can watch them, their terror rise. Their determination to, win fills their eyes.

I don't fight a lot. It feels too good. Its like a,tattoo.,totally addicting.

So i don't.

But when i do. Its the most beautiful thing. I hear nothing but the birds in the trees and the buzz of invisible bees,

I love fighting.

I love killing.

......

Matt's brother wanted to shit me down for playing a game where i wanted to attack evil toys snd not people.

Thats bully grave robbing shit. I don't want to attack people. I want to play a game with toys.

I dont even want to play th3 game anymore..

It,feels so,free not to hsve to log in and,collect goods and communicate with people.

I play the games i want when i want.

I already finished Heart Hospital. Totally finished,th3, game and i am more,than halfway to finish lilys garden and I play gin rummy like a horny prostitute on the best corner. I bet them so bad. But i also find good people and we will trade off,wins just to enjoy the game.

I,want to,thank the NHRA for listening,to me when it matters.

I,want,to complain that they don't pay m3,anything. Not even,free food. Hotel, air fare.,tickets and a nice motor,thing to,get me,around,the pits. And not even mortgage or electric money.

I know money doesn't always matter. Window shopping is almost funner,than actual shopping. Actually usually it is...,

Mostly, and,I cry with gratitude. I want to,thank,them,for posting,john force,tonight.

......

I,don't say enough nice,things. But I,feel,them.

I know i say a lot of,negative things and it used to bother me,a lot.

But it is necessary.

At the same,time its not me.

I have always been the,nicest person.

So I understand if people have conflicting feelings towards me.

But I'm,stable., im thick., and the core of me,cares so deeply i almost,always feel it necessary to hide. How I appreciate and love others.

Those that know me and appreciat3 me.

I hope they always know,the love they deserve from me.

I pray thst a lot so many times, in my lif3.

So yeah I'm,gonna take my crying ass to go play in lilys garden now.

We are actually in the butterfly garden part., about to,start day 19 out of 30.

....

I'm not gonna die tonight and probably wont kill anyone either.,no matter how much I,tempt. Stewart.

He wants to play? Okay. I can play psycho vs psycho. Easy as pie.

Which btw. I love razzle berry pie.

If you ever are invited, if Matt really does make himself an honest man and me not a dirty whore using him,for sex ...bring razzle berry pie,

Its in the green box. Marie calender I think.

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faeriekim-blog · 5 years

Text

P.I.S.T. - Chapter 5

What a shame, Andrew thought as he turned the tin over in his hands, feeling the cold metal against his fingers. The label had long since come off, so he couldn’t begin to guess at the contents. But it was definitely a tin can. By the looks of it there used to be a ring pull that would open up the contents. But the ring pull had broken off in such a way that the contents were not reachable without a can opener. In fact, Andrew wondered whether that would even work with a tin that is supposed to be opened with a ring pull. He looked at the square shaped tin and reflected that it was probably corned beef inside. What a shame, he thought. He liked corned beef and this was one tin that would probably never be opened by anyone.

He put the tin down and then looked up at the field in front of him. It was mid-June. The sky was overcast but it was dry. The odd bird tweeted and fluttered in nearby trees while bees buzzed lazily around the wild flowers close by.

Andrew noticed a strange spot a small distance away in front of him where a fence actually blocked off a small region of bushes, trees and wild plants. It was only a tiny place, about the size of a small bedroom. But it was completely fenced off, with a combination of barbed wire and wooden fencing. No human could get in or out of that place.

Totally inaccessible places entirely blocked off from their surroundings had always intrigued Andrew. He couldn’t have told you why. Maybe it was a product of his mental condition or the weird workings of his mind. Speaking of which, today was the day. He had decided to avoid parks this time, and had instead come out to the countryside, to the nearby village of Wootton, to have his episode out in the fields, hopefully far away from people.

The sleepiness came over him, as it always did, and with the new moon high in the summer sky, Andrew lay down in the place where he sat and let his consciousness drift away.

He grabbed the tin can between his taloned feet. He remembered what he had been doing shortly before the change and it instructed his actions. Yet he did not act with conscious will but was instead compelled by instinctive desire. He flew over the fence, the barbed wire and wooden planks, and landed in a tree inside the enclosure. He put the tin down on a branch and pecked at it with his beak. It took several attempts to break inside, and the skin around his beak felt sore and bruised by the end of it but the tin can came open. He ate hungrily at the corned beef inside, cawing out as he did so in the language birds used to announce when they had found food.

The vaguest notion crossed his bird brain as he ate the delicious meat inside the tin. Was this a dream? He wondered. Or was it real? Real or not, was lucid dreaming relevant here? How much or how little could he control his actions when in bird form?

Instinct took over all notions or thoughts. He left the food, causing the tin can to topple to the ground below. He lifted his head back and cawed loudly, hoping to find a mate to breed with. But the other bird songs he heard were not from his own species.

Then suddenly his body began to change. He should fly back to where his clothes are, he thought. He tried to direct his bird self to act according to the thought. But he continued to caw loudly and then flew down to the ground where the tin can was, still pecking at bits of meat that had fallen into the mud. He started to change, he could not get himself out of the enclosure to where his clothes were. His crow brain was stubbornly resisting all attempts at rational choice. This was not a lucid dream, he decided. Beak became nose and mouth, wings became arms and before Andrew knew it, he was naked inside a fenced off piece of wilderness he could not get out of, with corned beef all over his bruised and bloodied face and an open tin can nearby that had previously seemed impenetrable.

Andrew couldn’t believe it. The evidence was undeniable now. It was real! How could he have possibly opened that tin or got into this place otherwise? This was not mental illness or a dream. How could he have opened the can with his bare hands or teeth? How could he have done it without tin opener or knife? How could he have got over this fence without wings and with no scratches or bruises on his arms or legs? He was naked after all, and his clothes were on the opposite side of the fence.

There was only one explanation. He had literally turned into a bird and everything he experienced about flying here and pecking open the tin with his beak, had actually happened the way he remembered it. His crow dreams were real!

So much for staying away from people! It turned out to be the most embarrassing experience of his life. A father and his young boy had discovered him, naked inside that place. The fire brigade and the police were called. They helped him out and also asked him a lot of questions. It was something that Andrew hoped would never happen to him again.

When he finally got home later that day, he immediately opened his laptop and googled for whatever he could find to help him with his condition.

“I think I turn into a crow every new moon,” he typed into the search engine. There was a bunch of stuff about crows of course, or phases of the moon, and even some links to popular TV programs, films or books that deal with either werewolves or crows. But then Andrew scrolled down and found something very interesting indeed.

There was actually an organisation called Shapeshifters Anonymous. “Do you suffer from unexplained episodes during certain phases of the moon?” It said. “Perhaps every full moon at midnight you change into a dangerous beast or have dreams that you change into a nocturnal beast. Or maybe it is new moon in the middle of the day that you transform into some kind of bird or animal. Do you have dreams or visions that you are an animal and that you mate or fight with other animals? Perhaps you even dream that you hunt and kill other animals, or worse still that you have attacked or hurt a human while in animal form. These are not dreams, and neither the police, the government, the medical profession nor the priesthood are going to believe or understand what you are going through. But there are others like you. You are not alone. Come and join us at one of our monthly meetings at a location near you. We are a nationwide organisation designed to help those afflicted with the condition of Shapeshifting and your membership of the group is strictly anonymous. We exercise a strict code of confidentiality so that no one will ever be able to link your name to your condition. The rest of the world may struggle to understand or accept us, but we can support each other. Do not struggle alone, come to one of our meetings, meet other shapeshifters and maybe learn some skills to help you manage and understand your condition. Oh, and don’t worry, our meetings never take place during either the full or the new moon.”

Andrew spent some time looking around the website. He found the list of local groups for shapeshifters. He found the local Bedfordshire group and checked when and where the next meeting was. That settled it, he must go along to it. He looked at some of the pictures of the group. They seemed like a mixed group of relatively ordinary looking people. He also read some of the information about different types of shapeshifter. There were owls and bears, cats and foxes, wolves and snakes and tigers. It was fascinating. Was this what he was then? Was he really a shapeshifter, a were-crow? It seemed hard to deny it after what had happened that day.

“Perhaps we should all start by introducing ourselves.” The leader of the group announced. She was an older lady with a grey bob and thick round spectacles. “My name is Helen, my animal self is an owl and I help to run this group.”

The large man who sat next to her spoke next. He had an American accent. “My name is Ted,” he said “my animal self is a bear and I also help to run the group.”

Then one after another, everyone introduced themselves, going round in a circle around the entire group.

The room they met in was in some kind of community centre. The walls were kind of pale orange with small framed watercolour pictures. The floor was wooden. They sat on wooden chairs in a circle in the centre of the room.

As people spoke about their experiences, Andrew was impressed by the variety of creatures that people shapeshifted into. He would never have imagined that something like this could take so many forms. It was also a relief to see how ordinary all these people were. None of them seemed like flaky, conspiracy theorist loonies or pretentious hippies or anything like that. Instead it was a real mix of people, old and young, male and female, black, white and Asian. Ordinary, hardworking people with average unremarkable lives who just happened to share the fact that they turned into some kind of animal once a month.

As people talked about their conditions, Andrew also became aware of two interesting factors that he didn’t quite understand yet but which threw an intriguing new light on things. Firstly he noticed that some people seemed to change shape at midnight on the full moon, while other people like him changed shape at midday on the new moon. He wondered what it was that made this difference, and why there should be a difference at all. The other thing he noticed was that there were roughly four individuals, all sat together at one end of the circle and occasionally scowling at the other members of the group, who referred to themselves as werewolves, wereweasels, werefoxes etc. They did not use the term “animal self” like the others, instead they said simply “I’m a werewolf”, or whatever their form of shapeshifter was. Andrew couldn’t escape the feeling, just by observing this difference and the body language of that small set of people, that there was some kind of division within the group that explained this different use of language.

In fact Andrew was musing on this when it got to his time to speak, so that the leader of the group had to prompt him to speak, which was a bit embarrassing.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “my name is Andrew and I…” He paused. How could he know whether to introduce his animal self or to state that he was a werecrow? He didn’t know what the difference in terminology would imply about his views. “I turn into a crow every new moon. It’s my first time at this group.” He smiled nervously. Several other members of the group smiled back at him. Some members of the group of four rolled their eyes instead. That was rude and so Andrew made a mental note of which ones had done it: a skinny ginger guy and a Latin looking young lady dressed in denim and with studded leather wristbands. The werefox and werewolf, he remembered.

He decided to ignore the troublemakers and focus on the rest of the group. He warmed instantly to the scruffy looking young lady and chubby Asian guy who described their animal selves as a rat and a pig respectively. Nice to know that he wasn’t the only one with a seemingly harmless animal form. The range of animals was interesting though. There were eagles, foxes, wolves, bears and owls. Then there were crows, rats, cats and pigs. One dark skinned guy even turned into a leopard, while another South Asian guy had a snake as his animal form. There was a real menagerie of shapeshifters here!

“Well, we’ve got a couple of newcomers in the group today,” the big American guy announced, the one who turned into a bear, “so perhaps you could tell us a bit more about yourself. How about you start, Andrew?”

All eyes turned on him and Andrew gulped hard. His palms started to sweat. “Well,” he said, “I always thought my condition was a mental disorder. I’ve been on medicine my entire adult life: mood stabilisers, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, you name it. They keep on changing what I take and the dose I take. But whatever they gave me didn’t stop the incidents of what I always assumed were just dreams. Once a month, as regular as clockwork, I have to go somewhere by myself at midday on a new moon. It has to be somewhere out in the open. The one time I stayed indoors I regretted it. My house was a mess with so many things broken or damaged. But it also has to be away from other people. The looks people would give me!” He paused and looked around the room. Everyone was listening.

“So I learnt how to manage this over time,” he continued, “where to go and what to do. I never knew what actually happened to me. I always assumed I just had a delusional episode, took off all my clothes and dreamt or hallucinated that I was a crow. Then some things started to happen that left me in no doubt that this was actually a real experience and not a dream. I had a fight with another crow and it pecked my wing until it bled. When I got home with a bleeding arm and washed the wound, I found crow feathers inside the cut. Then another time I actually pecked open a sealed can of food with the ring pull broken off. There was no way I could’ve opened it without a knife or a can opener. And I managed to fly inside an entirely fenced off area in a field. The evidence was there when I came back to my human self. The tin was open, the corned beef around my mouth, I was naked without a scratch on me but trapped inside this fenced off piece of wilderness. I must have turned into a crow and done the things I experienced myself doing because there was simply no other explanation.”

“You’re lucky you’ve never killed anyone,” the girl in the denim and studs responded, screwing up her lips as if in a snarl and then taking a sip from a can of diet coke. “That shit makes it pretty obvious from day one.”

“We all have our crosses to bear, Sandra,” Helen reminded her. The girl simply shifted in her seat uncomfortably, crossing her arms and frowning. “Carry on, Andrew,” the group leader urged him. “Sorry for the interruption.”

“Well, when I found this group of course I wanted to meet others with the same condition,” he explained. “I can’t believe that I thought I was mentally ill all this time. The doctor doesn’t understand what’s going on. No one does. My wife left me over this. I feel like it’s made my life a mess all things considered.” He added, tears welling up in his eyes. “And it’s not fair. It’s not my fault I’m like this. It’s not right that I should feel useless, crazy, unlovable and incompetent at life just because of something I can’t help that nobody understands.” Tears rolled down his cheeks now. He never even knew he felt that deeply about this until he started talking about it with other people. He hadn’t expected to cry. It was a bit embarrassing really. He sniffed back the tears and continued. “Sorry,” he said. “I know I’m not crazy now at least.” Then he paused with a slight frown. “Even the doctor took a blood sample just to make sure,” he said. “She doesn’t know why the medication’s not working, so I managed to convince her that it might be worth checking out if there’s a more physical cause. Do you think she’ll find anything?” He added, looking round the group in concern. “I’m a bit worried about it to be honest.”

“You let her take your blood?” A short, round bodied Indian or Pakistani lady responded with horror. She had described herself as a werecat and she sat with the werefox, werewolf and wereweasel who were the other members of that breakaway group of troublemakers. “I can’t believe you’d let her do that!”

“You’ve put all of our lives at risk!” The girl in denim snapped at him. “You stupid half-were!”

“Half-were?” Andrew echoed in confusion.

“Now, now, Sandra,” said Helen, “it’s not as if none of the rest of us has ever had a blood sample taken.”

“Yeah, but not one where they’re actively looking for signs of our condition!” She responded.

“She doesn’t know what she’s looking for,” Andrew assured her. “It’s no different from any other routine blood test to establish the cause of an ailment.” He furrowed his brow and looked down at his feet with worry. “I didn’t realise I was putting us at risk. I didn’t even know for sure that I was a shapeshifter back then.” He looked up at the two leaders of the group. “Have I done something really, really wrong here? I’m truly sorry if I have.”

“Don’t worry,” Ted assured him. “They’ll either find something or they won’t. And if they do find something then chances are they won’t know what it means anyway. You know doctors. They always default to scepticism where the supernatural is concerned. They’ll probably just think they’ve discovered a bizarre new genetic disease or something.”

“And even if they do begin to suspect the truth,” Helen added. “Perhaps it will prove to be an opportunity to open up a dialogue with the general public. Perhaps it’s time we came out of the shadows and announced that we’re here, that we’re just people like everyone else and that we deserve rights and equality, tolerance and understanding.”

Sandra nearly spat her drink across the room as she burst out laughing. The others who sat with her sniggered or outright laughed with her. The Asian cat lady even cried out, “Oh my God, what the fuck?”

“No, that seems like a great idea to me,” Andrew said to the troublemakers. “Why shouldn’t we work towards being accepted by society? Why shouldn’t we try to raise awareness of our conditions? Who knows where that might lead or what might be possible in the future. God knows, I’ve suffered enough in my life. There has to be a way to make life better, there just has to be. I don’t want to be at odds with the rest of the world anymore. I want to be a valued part of it.”

“You stupid half-weres are ridiculous,” denim girl said with a sneer. “Just because you only eat dead animals or discarded leftovers in bins, you think it must be fine and dandy for the rest of us too. You try turning into a wolf every full moon! You try having vivid memories of tearing someone’s throat out or waking up with blood all down your chin and neck! See where your talk of tolerance and acceptance gets you then. They’ll never accept us. All true weres know this. They’ll never accept us because we’re dangerous and they’re always going to fear us. And for good reason too probably. If they ever found out about us and had scientific evidence to back it up, it wouldn’t be an opportunity for awareness and dialogue, it would be all out war between the humans and us. It would be werefolk apocalypse, like all those films and novels always told us it would be.” She paused and looked round the room accusatorily. Several people looked away or fidgeted in their seats.

“You use words like ‘shapeshifter’ and ‘animal self’,” she continued, “trying to whitewash who we are. But the medieval poets and writers had it right all along. We are were creatures! We are werewolves and werecats, we are werebears and wereeagles, werefoxes and werestoats. We are the creatures who lurk in the night, ready to sink our teeth into some poor, unsuspecting victims throat. There’s no whitewashing that. There’s no point in trying to ‘educate’ the public or ‘raise awareness of our condition’. It’s us against them, it always has been. We don’t lobby for our rights, we take them; enacting revenge if necessary. They’ll never accept us so we might as well accept ourselves, in every aspect, instead of lying to ourselves and trying to make the truth of our condition seem more tame and palatable. We are were creatures. We are red in tooth and claw. And we are magnificent just the way we are!”

Her friends all cheered and clapped their hands at her speech, the ginger haired werefox, the short Indian werecat lady and the thin, little spotty guy who looked about fourteen and said he was a wereweasel. Andrew finally understood. Those four considered themselves ‘true weres’ because they were carnivores and thought of the likes of him, who feasted off dead flesh and leftovers, as only a ‘half-were’. And they didn’t like the term ‘shapeshifter’ or the phrase ‘animal self’, preferring to use the term ‘were’.

The scruffy young lady that was sitting next to Andrew whispered in his ear suddenly. “I don’t like the term were,” she said. “It’s a slur. It’s the word people used all through history to hate and fear us. That’s why we promote the word shapeshifter instead. We’re human just like everyone else. It’s just that we change our shape.”

Andrew looked round at her and smiled. “Nicola,” she told him, shaking his hand.

“Andrew,” he said and shook hers back.

They both turned their attention to the rest of the room. A confident and opinionated black woman had spoken up about the issue. “You’d rather align yourself with their hatred and fear,” she accused them, “than challenge it and help them overcome it? This word ‘were’ that you embrace, and the concepts and ideas that you propose are exactly the kind of anti-shapeshifter propaganda that has plagued our kind for centuries. They would hunt and kill us, not because of what we are but because they have this idea in their minds that we are all vicious, ruthless killers and cannot be reasoned with or co-existed with but should only be feared and killed. It has to stop! And you are not helping.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” the ginger guy said. “When you’re at no risk at all of accidentally killing someone.”

“And when was the last time you, or any fox, actually killed someone?” She argued.

“Well, I have!” Sandra, the denim lady butted in. “I am the big bad wolf that they all fear, quite literally. Are you telling me that their fear is unfounded?”

“I’m saying it is a risk that can be managed or contained,” the black lady argued. “I’m telling you that the vast majority of us are not dangerous, that we can and should reach for acceptance and try to promote understanding. And maybe with greater awareness and understanding even those of us who do pose some risk can work with the authorities to try and achieve strategies where our condition can be managed without harming anyone. I mean come on, are you telling me that with the entire medical establishment, the government and the police on our side that there would be no hope at all of co-existing peacefully with other humans?”

“I’m telling you they’d never be on our side to begin with,” Sandra argued, “no matter what we do or say. It’s futile.”

“Well, it is bloody futile,” the black girl continued, “if you continue to promote the very propaganda we are working so hard to overcome! If you continue to nurture hatred in your bellies and continue to shamelessly use the very same slurs that were hurled at our ancestors when the witch hunters and villagers came after us with torches and pitchforks! It’s disgusting and I won’t stand for it. I’m not a were, I’m a shapeshifter. I have the animal self of a noble eagle. And I am proud of it!”

At that moment there was a sudden loud, flapping of wings. Andrew was astounded to see that Helen had changed herself into an owl, a large owl the likes of which Andrew had never seen. This big grey owl hooted loudly and flew above the room, the drama of her appearance immediately causing everyone to become quiet and stop arguing.

After she flew over the circle for two or three times she landed back on her seat and then transformed back into her human form. It was fascinating to watch it. Andrew had only experienced the transformation within himself. He had never witnessed it in someone else.

The rest of the meeting was fairly mundane. There was some chit chat about various aspects of people’s lives or more technical detail about the shapeshifting condition itself. After the meeting ended, Andrew got to talk to some of the people he had been warming to. He met Nicola, whose animal self is a rat, and her friend Wu, who’s animal form is a pig. They also introduced him to Honesty, the black lady who spoke. Her animal self is an eagle.

“How did Helen do that?” Andrew asked suddenly. “It’s not new moon or full moon, is it?”

“Well,” Honesty explained. “Some older shapeshifters can learn over time to control their actions when they change. If they harness this ability then eventually with a lot of practice and discipline they can even learn to change into their animal self in-between the times when it would usually occur. It takes a lot of work and dedication though, and some say a certain natural predisposition towards it. I’ve only met two shapeshifters in my lifetime that could do it. One of them is Helen, the other was someone back in Uganda who died about fifteen years ago.”

Andrew didn’t know what to say. The ability intrigued him. He had seen a development himself from unconscious, dreamlike experiences to almost believing he could act on his own free will when changed. Maybe he was one of the people who could learn to do what Helen could do. He wanted to learn.

“Excuse me,” he said after a while, “but I think I’d like to talk to Helen and Ted.” He left his new friends then and spoke to the group leaders. After a short preliminary chat about the group and his own story of being a shapeshifter, Andrew called Helen to one side. “That thing you do,” he whispered to her. “Can you teach me how to do it too?”

I’m only posting the first 8 chapters of this story on this blog. To read the rest of the book, please buy The Psychic Investigation and Study Team on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

#fiction #fantasy #supernatural #writing #novel #lgbt #shapeshifter

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