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unpopularwiththepopulace · 3 years

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Don’t I Get a Dream for Myself ? – Bernadette Peters and the 'Gypsy' Saga

Gypsy. It’s perhaps the most daunting of all of the projects related to Bernadette Peters to try to grapple with and discuss. It’s also perhaps the most significant.

For someone notoriously guarded of her privacy and personal life, careful with her words, and selective of the questions she answers, the narrative around this show provides some of the most meaningful insights it is possible to derive in relation to Bernadette herself. The show’s ability to do this is unique, through the way it eerily parallels her own life and spans a large range in time from both Bernadette Peters the Broadway Legend, right back to where it all began with Bernadette Lazzara, the young Italian girl put into showbusiness by her mother.

The most logical place to start is at the very beginning – it is a very good place to start, after all.

(Though no one tell Gypsy this, if the fierce two-way battle with The Sound of Music at the 1960 Tony Awards is anything to be remembered. Anyway, I digress…)

Gypsy: A Musical Fable with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and book by Arthur Laurents, burst into the world and onto the New York stage in May of 1959. After closing on Broadway in March 1961, Ethel Merman as the world’s original Mama Rose herself led the first national tour off almost immediately around the country. Just a few months later, a second national touring company was formed, starring Mitzi Green and then Mary McCarty as Rose, to cover more cities than the original. It is here that Bernadette comes in.

A 13-year-old Bernadette Peters found herself part of this show in her “first professional” on-the-road production, travelling across the country with her older sister, “Donna (who was also in the show), and their mother (who wasn’t)”.

The tour played through cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, New Haven, Baltimore and Las Vegas before closing in Ohio in 1962. Somewhat uncannily, its September 1961 opening night in Detroit’s Schubert Theatre even returns matters full circle to the 2003 revival and New York’s own Schubert Theatre.

Indeed this bus-and-truck tour was somewhat of a turning point for Bernadette. She’d later remember, “I mostly thought of performing as a hobby until I went on the road with Gypsy”.

But while this production seminally marked a notable moment for the young actress as well as the point where her long and consequential involvement with Gypsy begins, it’s important to recognise she was very much not yet the star of the show and then only a small part of a larger whole.

Bernadette was with the troupe as a member of the ensemble. She took on different positions in the company through the period of nearly a year that the show ran for, including billing as ‘Thelma’ (one of the Hollywood Blondes), ‘Hawaiian Girl’, and additional understudy credits for Agnes and Dainty June.

The above photo shows Bernadette (left) with another member of the ensemble (Sharon McCartin) backstage at the Chicago Opera House as one of the stops along the tour. Her comment on the stage of the Chicago theatre – “I’d never seen anything so big in my life!” – undeniably conveys how her experiences were new and appreciably daunting.

Along the tour, she assumed centre-stage once or twice as the understudy for Dainty June, but playing the young star was not her main role. Unlike what more dominant memory of the story seems to purport.

Main credits of June went instead to Susie Martin – a name and a tale of truth-bending that’s now well-known from Bernadette’s concert anecdotes. While performing her solo shows as an adult and singing from Gypsy, Bernadette has often been known to take a moment to penitently atone for historical indiscretions of identity theft or erasure where her mother long ago conveniently left out the “understudy” descriptive when putting down Dainty June on her resumé, in an effort to add weight to the teenager’s list of credits.

Whatever happened to Susie Martin? – many have wondered. Well, she soon left the theatre. But not before appearing in two more regional productions of Gypsy and a 1963 Off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward with Liza Minnelli and Christopher Walken.

Bernadette too went on to other regional productions of Gypsy. She spent the summer of 1962 in various summer stock stagings with The Kenley Players, like in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and this time she did indeed get to play June.

Above shows photos from different programmes for these productions. While some may have featured odd forms of photo editing, they at least also bring to attention Rose here being played by none other than Betty Hutton.

The two women couldn’t have been in more different positions when they coalesced in these rough-around-the-edges, small-scale productions. A young Bernadette was broaching summer stock in starting to take on bigger roles in the ascendency to her bright and long career. Meanwhile, Betty found herself there while navigating the descent that followed her sharp but fickle rise to Hollywood fame in the ‘40s and early ‘50s. Top billing Monday, Tuesday you really are touring in stock after all.

While details aren’t plentiful for these productions, it was recounted Betty apparently struggled in performing the role. And understandably so. Following the recent traumatic death of her mother in a house fire, and the birth of her third child shortly before the shows began, it’s not hard to see why her mind might have been elsewhere. Still, she was apparently impressed enough by the younger actress who turned in one of the show’s “creditable performances” to make comment that she would’ve liked Bernadette to play her if a movie were made about her life.

Bernadette might not have done this exactly, but she did go on to revitalise Betty’s best-known movie role, when stepping into Annie Oakley’s shoes in the 1999 Annie Get Your Gun revival. With Bernadette’s first Ethel Merman show under her belt, the ball was soon rolling on her second.

The 2003 production of Gypsy was imminently beckoning as her next successive Broadway musical and it was Arthur Laurents who lit the match to spark Bernadette’s involvement. Laurents, as the show’s original librettist, drove the revival by saying he “didn’t want to see the same Rose” he’d seen before. Going back to June Havoc’s description of her mother as “small” and a “mankiller”, and Arthur’s take that Bernadette sung the part “with more nuance for the lyrics and the character than the others”, the choice of Bernadette was justified. Moreover, “Laurents – whose idea it was to hire her – [said] going against type is exactly the point,” and Sam Mendes, as director, qualified “the tradition of battle axes in that role has been explored”.

So Bernadette also had her own baseline of innate physical similarity to the original Rose Hovick, in addition to her own first-hand memories of the women she’d acted alongside as Rose in her youth to bring into her characterisation of the infamous stage mother.

But there was a third factor beyond those as well to be considered in the personal material she had access to draw from for her characterisation. Namely, her own real life stage mother.

Marguerite Lazzara did share traits with the character of Rose. She too helped herself to silverware from restaurants, and put her daughters in showbusiness for the vicarious thrill. Marguerite had “always wanted to become an actress herself”, but had long been denied her desire by her own mother, who likened actresses to being as “close to a whore as you could be without, you know, getting on your back”.

In that case, to “escape a housewife’s dreary fate in Ozone Park”, Marguerite channelled her latent dream through her pair of young daughters instead, shepherding them out along the road. Thus was produced a trio of the two children ushered around the theatre circuit by the driven mother, forming an undeniable parallelism and a mirror image of both Bernadette’s reality and Gypsy’s core itself. Bernadette didn’t see some of these familial parallels at the time when she was a child, considering “maybe I didn’t want to see” – “didn’t want to see a mother doing that to her daughter”.

It was coming back to the show as an adult that helped Bernadette resolve who her mother was and some of the motivations that had propelled her when Bernadette was still a child. She realised, “I think she thought she was going to die very young”, as her own father died young. So “she was rushing around to get as much of her life as she could in there”.

When she herself returned to the production in playing Rose, Bernadette conceded to sometimes bringing elements of her mother and her driven energy into her portrayal, and admitted too she looked “like her a lot in the role”. You can assess any familial resemblances for yourself, from the images below that show a young Marguerite next to Bernadette in costume as Rose, and then with the pair backstage in 1961 in a dressing room on the tour.

Marguerite was ambitious. From her own personal position and with the restrictions imposed upon her, it was ambition that materialised through her children. Irrevocably, she altered them. She placed Bernadette on TV as a very young child (“I was four when my mother put me in the business”); changed her daughter’s surname (“She told me my real name was too long for the marquees,” or really – “too Italian”); doctored her resumé (“Somehow the word ‘understudy’ vanished. ‘No one will know,’ said Marguerite”); and lightened her hair (“She’d say, ‘Oh, I’m just putting a little conditioner on it.’ But slowly my hair got blonder and blonder!”). All in the hope of giving her child a more favourable chance at the life she’d always wanted for herself.

On paper, a classic stage mother. “When I was a kid, she fulfilled herself through me,” Bernadette would say. “She put me into show business so she could get a taste of the life herself.”

But it’s important to consider Bernadette often qualifies that her mother wasn’t as brutal as Rose, nor was she herself as traumatised as June.

Bernadette didn’t begrudge her mother for her choices – at least by the time she was an adult, she’d rationalised them, explaining “naturally it was more exciting [for her] to go on the road with me than staying home and keeping house”.

As a child, Bernadette hadn’t necessarily wanted to be on stage, but there was a sense of ambivalence – not resentful belligerence – as she “didn’t care one way or the other” when she found herself there.

Like June, Bernadette may have been entered into and coaxed around a path she hadn’t voluntarily chosen. But unlike June, Bernadette had a deal with her mother that “she had only to say the word”, and she could leave.

Most crucially, she never did.

But that’s not to say Bernadette was enamoured with acting from the beginning.

She seemed to feel ‘outside’ of that world and those in it. And others saw it too.

It was in 1961 in Gypsy that Bernadette first met Marvin Laird – her long-time accompanist, conductor and arranger. The way he put it, he “noticed this one young girl, very close with her mother” who, during breaks, “didn’t mix much with the other girls”.

Beneath the effervescent stage persona, there’s a quieter and more reserved reality, and a sense of separation and solitary division.

When asked by Jesse Green in 2003 for the extensive profile in The New York Times if she thought her experiences on the road in Gypsy were good for her at that age, she gives a curious, somewhat abstract, predominantly dark, potentially macabre, response. He wrote:

She doesn’t answer at first but seems to scan an image bank just behind her eyes for something to lock onto. Eventually she comes out with a seeming non sequitur. “I didn’t know how to swim. I remember, in Las Vegas, I fell in, once, and they thought I was flailing, but I felt like: ‘It’s pretty down here!’ I might have been dying and I was thinking: ‘Look at the pretty color!’ And suddenly my fear of water was gone, and I could have stayed in forever.” After a while, I realize she’s answered my question. Then she dismisses the image: “But I had to get my hair dry for the show that day, so up I came.”

I’m still not entirely sure I know what she’s trying to convey here. My interpretation of this anecdote changes as I have re-visited and re-examined it on multiple occasions at different time points. It’s arguably multiply polysemic.

Was she simply swept up in a moment of childlike distraction, lost in the temporary respite alone away from the usual noise and clamour? Was she indicating comprehension that her feelings and perspectives came secondary to any practical necessities and inevitable responsibilities? Was she using the water to depict a muffling and fishbowl-like detachment from others her age who got to live more ‘ordinary’ lives in the ‘normal’ world above that she felt separate from? Was she referencing the pretty colours she saw as a metaphor for show business and how she became bewitched by them even despite potential dangers? Was she trying to legitimately drown herself, or at least exhibiting an ambivalence again as to whether she lived or died, because of what the highly pressurised demands on her felt like?

The underlying sentiment through her response in answer to Green’s primary question was that, in essence – no. Being a child actor was not “over all, a good experience for a youngster”.

Acting might have been something she fell in love with over time, but not all at once, not right from the beginning, and not without noting its perils.

It was a matter of accidental circumstance that landed Bernadette in the show business world to begin with at such a young age in the first place – “I just found myself here,” she would offer.

Her mother, who was “always crazy about the stage”, “insisted” that her sister, Donna take lessons in singing, dancing and acting.

A further point of interest to note is that, although it was Bernadette with her new surname who would grow up to be the famous actress, look to the cast lists from the 1961 touring production of Gypsy that featured both sisters in the company (see photo below) and you’ll find no ‘Lazzara’ in sight. Donna too, appearing under the novel moniker of “Donna Forbes”, had also already become stagified (nay, ethnically neutralised?) by her mother. As such it is clearly demonstrated that Marguerite’s intention at that point was to make stars of both her daughters. Correspondingly so, when her sister returned from her performance lessons some years before, “Donna would come home and teach me what she had learned,” Bernadette remembered. She may have gotten her “training second hand”, but the key element was that she got it.

For Bernadette, it was a short jump from emulating magpied tricks from her sister as well as routines from Golden Age Busby Berkeley musicals on the ‘Million Dollar Movie’ in front of the TV screen, to her mother getting her on the other side of the screen and actually performing on TV itself – belting out Sophie Tucker impressions aged five for all the nation to see.

The photos below show Bernadette in performative situations at a young age (look for criss-crossed laces in the second for identification).

“At first, as a toddler, Bernadette enjoyed performing; it came naturally, a form of play that people inexplicably liked to watch.” It was “just a hobby” and she “wanted to do it”.

But while she may not have detested it, she didn’t entirely comprehend what was going on either. “I didn’t even know I was on TV,” she said. “I didn’t know that those big gadgets pointed at me were cameras and that they had anything to do with what people saw on the television set.”

When she started gaining more of an awareness of how “such play [was being] co-opted for commercial purposes”, she grew less enthralled. “She didn’t care for the bizarre children, accompanied by desperate mothers, she began to see at auditions: ‘They spent their whole time smiling for no reason, you know?’”

Being a child who had become sentient of being a child performer began to grow wearisome and grating to the young girl who had her equity card, a professional (and strange, new) stage name, and an increasingly long list of expectations by the time she was nine. There’s a keen sense she did not enjoy being in such a position: “I wouldn’t want to be a child again. When you’re a child, you have thoughts, but nobody listens to you. Nobody has any respect for you”.

Gypsy did indeed mark a turning point for Bernadette as mentioned above – but not just in the way that seems obvious. Looking back at it now, it does appear the monumental turning point at which she started appearing in significant and reputable productions, beginning what would be the foundation to her ‘professional’ career. However it was also the turning point after which she nearly quit the business altogether.

When she returned from performing in Gypsy, Bernadette felt like she’d had enough. One way of putting it was that she “then retired from the business to attend high school”, wanting to have some semblance of a normal scholastic experience “without the interruptions”. But whatever dissatisfaction she was feeling as an early adolescent on stage, she didn’t resolve at school – going as far as saying that while at Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, “she was in pain”.

“When you’re a teenager you’re too aware of yourself,” she recalled. Being a teen and trying to come to terms with of the expectation of the ‘60s that “you are supposed to look like Twiggy, and you don’t, you feel everything is wrong about you”. Everything “was all about tall, skinny, no chest…[and] hair straight”. Little Bernadette with her “mass of [curly] hair and distracting bosom”, as Alex Witchel put it, was never going to fit that mould. “That was not me,” she stated. “At all.”

Her self-consciousness grew to the point that it became overwhelming and asphyxiating. “I was trying desperately to blend in and be normal, but that doesn’t allow creativity to come out,” Bernadette said. “I knew I was acting terrible. The words were sticking in my mouth and all I could think about was how I looked”. It was hard enough just to look at herself (“I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror”), let alone to have other people gawk at her on stage. So she stopped trying. She “didn’t work much from age 13 to 17” in the slightest. Bernadette would later reflect in 1981 in an atypically open and vulnerable interview, “I was very insecure. Insecurity is poison. It’s like wearing chains”.

It was a combination of factors that helped her overcome these feelings of such toxic and weighty burden to draw her back into the public world of performing and the stage. “The two people who helped her most, she says, were David LeGrant, her first acting teacher, and her vocal coach, Jim Gregory.” Jim helped with “[opening] a whole creative world for [her] with singing”; and it was David who’d give her the now infamous and often (mis)quoted line about individuality and being yourself.

Having these kinds of lessons, she reasoned, was “really a wonderful emotional outlet for a kid of 17”. The process of it all was beneficial for her therapeutically – “you have a lot of emotions at that time in your life, and it was great to go to an acting class and use them up”. And Bernadette felt freer on stage than she did out on her own in the ‘real world’, saying “[up there] I don’t have to worry about what I’m doing or saying because I’m doing and saying what I’m supposed to be doing and saying”.

Finally then and with considerable bolstering and support, she grew comfortable with the notion of being visible on stage and in public, and realised she was never going to blend in as part of the chorus so it was simply better to let go of such a futile pursuit.

David LeGrant’s guiding advice to Bernadette (“You’ve got to be original, because if you’re like everyone else, what do they need you for?”) wasn’t just a trite aphorism. For her, it was a life raft. It was the key mental framing device that allowed her to comprehend for the first time that she might actually have intrinsic value as herself. And that it was imperative she let herself use it.

She had always stuck out, yes, but she had to learn how to want to be seen – talking of it as a conscious “choice” she had to make when realising she did “have something to offer”.

Thus soon after Bernadette graduated, she stepped back into productions like in summer stock and then Off-Broadway as she made her debut at that next theatrical level at 18. It wasn’t long before she was discovered in what’s seen as her big break in the unexpected smash hit, Dames at Sea. And so Bernadette Peters, the actress, was back. And she was back with impact and force.

Besides, as she’s also said, she couldn’t do anything else – “if I ever had to do something else to earn a living, I’d be at a total loss”. An aptitude test as a teenager told her so apparently, when she “got minus zero in everything except Theater Arts”. So that was that. Her answer for what she would’ve done if she’d never found acting is both paradoxically exultant and macabre – “I don’t know, probably shot myself!”

Flippant? Maybe. Trivial? No.

Acting is thus undoubtedly related highly to Bernadette’s sense of purpose and self-worth. This is what makes it even more apparent that a show with such personal and historical connections for her, as in Gypsy, was going to be so consequential and impactful to be a part of again as an adult and perform on a public stage.

She’s called inhabiting the role of Rose in the 2003 revival many things: “deeply personal”, “life changing”, “like going through therapy” – to name a few.

In interviews regarding Gypsy and playing the main character, when asked what she had learnt, Bernadette would frequently say something like, “It taught me a lot”. Pressed further about specifics, her answers often hem close to vague platitudes as she maintains her normal tendency of endeavouring to keep her privacy close to her chest.

On one occasion, she actually elaborated somewhat on what she’d learnt, giving a fuller answer than the question is normally afforded anyhow. Beyond all it revealed to her about her mother, she extended to admitting “my capacity for love and my capacity for anger” as aspects in her that the show had permanently altered. Moreover, Rose to her was undoubtedly the “most rewarding and fulfilling acting experience” she had ever had.

But while such deep, personal and emotional depths and memories were being stirred up beneath the surface in private, she was getting vilified in public singularly and repeatedly by New York Post columnist, Michael Riedel.

Even before she’d set foot on stage, Riedel set forth in motion early in the 2003 season a campaign of vocal and opinionated defamation against Bernadette as Rose that she was miscast, insufficiently talented, and would be incapable of executing the role.

Too small, too delicate, too weak, too many curves (and too much knowledge of how to use them). Not bold enough, not loud enough – not Merman enough. Chatter and speculative dissent begun to grow in and around the Broadway theatres.

For such a prestigious and historic musical theatre role, it was always going to be hard to erase the large shadow of an original Merman mould. Ethel was woven into the very fabric of the show, with the rights to Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoirs being obtained at her behest in the first place, and the idiosyncrasies of her voice having been written into the songs themselves by their very authors.

To step out from such a domineering legacy would be a marked challenge at the best of times. Let alone when battling a respiratory infection.

Matters of public perception were certainly not helped when Bernadette then got ill as the show started its preview period and she started missing early performances.

Nor did it help with critical perception that the Tony voting period coincided so synchronously with Gypsy’s first opening months – giving Bernadette no time to recover, find her feet, and settle more healthily into the show for the rest of the run before the all important decisions were made by that omnipotent committee.

The tale of her illness is actually undercut by a more innocent and unsuspecting origin than you’d expect from all the drama and trouble it engendered. Bernadette decided nearing the show’s opening to treat herself to a manicure. In the salon, she was next to a woman very close to her with a frightful sounding cough. Who could’ve known then that this anonymous and inconspicuous lady through a fateful cause-and-event chain would go on to play such a part in what is among the biggest and most enduring Tony Awards “She was robbed!” discourses? Or even more broadly – in also arguably playing a hand in the closure and financial failure of an $8.5 million Broadway show after its disappointing performance at the Tony Awards that ominously “[spelled] trouble at the box office” and led to its premature demise?

Bernadette did not win the Best Actress in a Musical Tony that night on June 6th 2004. The award went instead (not un-controversially) to newcomer Marissa Jaret Winokur for Hairspray.

She did however give one of the most indelibly resonant and frequently re-referenced solo performances at the awards show just before she lost – defying detractors to comprehend how she could be unworthy of the accolade with a rendition of ‘Rose’s Turn’ that has apocryphally earned one of the longest standing ovations seen after such a performance even to date.

Even further and even more apocryphally, she reportedly did so while still under the weather as legend as circulated by musical theatre fans goes – performing “against doctor’s orders” with stories that have her being “afflicted with anything from a 103-degree fever, to pneumonia, to a collapsed lung”.

Seeing then as unfortunately there is no Tony Award speech to draw on here, matter shall be retrieved fittingly from that which she gave just a few years earlier in 1999 for her first win and previous Ethel Merman role in Annie Get Your Gun to wrap all of this together.

As has been illustrated, there are many arguably scary or alarming aspects in Bernadette’s Gypsy narrative. There’s undeniably much darkness and an ardent clamouring for meaning and self-realisation along the road that tracks her journey parallel to the show. But unlike Rose’s hopeless decries of “Why did I do it?” and “What did it get me?”, there was a point for Bernadette.

As her emotional tribute in 1999 went: “I want to thank my mother, who 48 years ago put me in showbusiness. And I want to finally, officially, say to her – thank you. For giving me this wonderful experience and this journey.”

Whatever all of this was, maybe it was worth it after all.

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sebastianshaw · 3 years

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@sammysdewysensitiveeyes So, you asked me not long ago, how I’d feel about Haven as a mutant on Krakoa. As it happens, I’m on an RP Discord where I write her as such, since they allow characters there to be mutants who aren’t mutants in canon, in order to join the RP, since it’s set on Krakoa. I made her a healer, able to heal herself and others. Super on the nose, but it’s what she would want, and it also fulfills *my* desire for her not to be hurt anymore (I mean, she still can be, she’ll just recover) Anyway, in March I wrote this for her in that setting. Featuring Shaw as usual since he’s one of my other muses there and, well, you know I love writing my faves together and their conversations because self-indulgence. No obligation to read, just I remembered I had written it and was like “Oh that’s like what Sammy asked about”

Shaw’s latest job was to spread the Krakoan medicine throughout the country of India. A considerable task; India was made up of no less than 28 states and 8 union territories, with an immense and diverse population. There were the dilapidated slums and rural villages that Westerners most often imagined, but there were also bustling cosmopolitan cities, centers of business and technology and commerce to rival New York, and it was in the biggest of these that Shaw was starting---

Mumbai.

Accompanying him on the recommendation of Charles Xavier was Radha Dastoor---Haven of the healing gardens, whom he had previously met when she had helped with his back. At first Shaw had thought this was a bit racist of Charles, but it turned out not only was Haven from Mumbai specifically herself, she had wonderful connections for the tasks. Her philanthropy had connected her with doctors, hospitals, shelters, and its hidden communities of those suffering afflictions such as the oft-claimed-eradicated leprosy. But, Shaw could have done most of that himself, aside from the hidden colonies. No, where Haven came in most handy was, shockingly, her knowledge of Mumbai’s criminal underworld. Not because she had ever been involved with it, but because she had done so much work getting people out of it---the women and children she had worked to get out of human trafficking rings, the survival sex workers rescued from abusive pimps, the children enticed away from little “found families” of criminals who used them for their dirty work. . .the list went on. And of course she hadn’t been able to do all that alone, she had been funding an entire network of people to get this done, to keep the rescued parties safe and help them in getting to a new life, to block off or arrest those who tried to take them back or attack the rescuers themselves (Haven had been a target MANY times, but those had been in the days when she’d been kept safe by The Adversary’s powers. . . ) and thus she had an abundance of detectives and double agents on the inside. And because they were on the inside, they could bring in the medicine. . . and bring out the mutants being sold, enslaved, and Heaven wept at what else. Mutants that, for the moment, were staying with them in The Rajmani. Haven’s wealth was originally inherited, but she’d kept it coming---so that she could keep giving it away---through The Rajmani, a luxury heritage hotel on par with the likes of New York’s Ritz or Plaza. In income, anyway. In beauty, it surpassed them both. Well, perhaps that was subjective, but it was built within a restored Mughal Palace, and Shaw had to admit he was impressed with the great domes and slender minarets, the massive vaulted gateways and delicate ornamentation, the elegant water gardens and charbagh walkways through the carefully cultivated yet lush tropical greenery. Most of all, though, he liked learning the fact that the woman earned at least a little of her own money in some kind of sense, even if by her own admission she only owned it, not managed it. Shaw looked down on those who only inherited wealth, just as they had often looked down on him for earning his. Haven, though, did not seem to look down on him. She didn’t seem to have the proverbial stones to look down on anybody, and she certainly was around people who actually deserved it. She seemed to love being around that type, in fact, went out of her way to benefit them, centered her entire life around it. Some people, Shaw had found, were just mad like that. He suspected that it had something to do with growing up with money, taking it front granted and thus not comprehending its worse. But at least she didn’t dare think she was better than him, so she was that sensible at least. Although it was the last word he’d describe her with. No, if he were to describe Radha “Haven” Dastoor, he’d probably start with insipid, senseless, and downright delusional. But she was also. . .not an unengaging conversationalist. The reverse, actually. “The Mughals were constantly trying to invade Mumbai,” Haven explained, while Shaw nodded along. He was interested in architecture, and in martial history. “But as much of India as they had conquered, the native Marathis were just as constantly pushing them back. It was touch and go for decades. It surprises me that a Mughal structure remained without being torn down, though it was taken over.” “The native Marathis, you say---are Mughals not native? Or merely from another part of India?” “Well, that’s a complicated question, and the answer is a controversial one, so I till try to explain it as neutrally as I can,” Haven replied, and she indeed sounded neutral. They were standing together on the jharoka, an elaborately carved balcony with a roof, each with a glass of nimbu pani, though Shaw would have preferred a good Scotch. “The Mughal Empire in South Asia was begun by Babur, who came from Central Asia, specifically what is today Uzbekistan. His tribe was of Mongol origin, and the word Mughal is itself derived from “Mongol”. He actually came to South Asia to escape his fellow Uzbeks---it’s a very long story--but instead of being a refugee, he became a conqueror, starting by burning Lahore for two days and killing the last Sultan of the Lodi dynasty in Delhi, and the Lodi dynasty itself was not Indian, but Afghan. India was colonized by the Middle East long before Europe decided to try its hand. But to answer your question. . .they did not begin as Indian, no, but they were a part of our country for two hundred years and left a deep mark in our culture---clothing, food, language, art, and, of course, the buildings. But, the same could also be said of the British, and you would be hard-pressed to find anyone, including myself, who considers the British Raj to have been “Indian” simply because they were there for a long time and forced their ways upon us. At the same time, my mother is a Parsi, a people who originate from Iran, thousands of years ago---Parsi comes from “Persian”. And how can one tell me my mother, who was born and raised here, whose mother’s mothers and father’s fathers were born and raised here, that she was not Indian? And though Babur came from elsewhere, his sons and successors were born and raised here, and often to Indian mothers, and their descendants dwell here still, with no other homeland, so are they not Indian? Because if they were not, then perhaps I am not either, at least by half. Ultimately. . . it depends which Mughals, at what time period, and whom you ask, I suppose.” “And I suppose there’s also a difference between ethnicity and nationality to be considered,” Shaw said, though Haven was now losing his interest with this topic. He’d been more interest in the invasions and warring. “Ethnically, one can be anything, and still nationally be American if you were born there or otherwise have citizenship. But, I suppose you need not contemplate such matters anymore--” He cracked a wry smile as she, with a questioning look, awaited the rest of his sentence. “---after all, we are all Krakoan now, are we not? We’re all mutants, and that’s the only thing that matters.” Haven smiled back, not wryly but sincerely, “Oh, I am now, yes. But I am also still everything I was before. I have been balancing multiple identities my entire life Mr. Shaw, I believe I shall be able to continue to do so. But I must confess--” A moment of hesitation. “--I do not truly think of myself as a mutant yet.” She was not sure what reaction that she had expected to this confession, but it was not what Shaw said next. “I don’t either, Ms. Dastoor.” She looked at him in surprise. “Or rather,” he elaborated, “I do not consider myself a mutant in any sense other than in the way I consider myself to have black hair. It’s a physical fact, but nothing else. It is not a “culture” or “identity” to me, and in truth I find such attitudes to be foolish and even dangerous, not to mention a sign that an individual lacks their own personality and convictions and thus must merely default to group identity politics. Being a mutant tells you nothing about me, Ms. Dastoor, and so if I were to talk about who I am, that’s not something I’d include any more than my eye color.” “That’s an especially interesting perspective from someone on Krakoa’s Council,” said Haven, sounding very curious, “Could I ask you---” But her voice was cut off by the unmistakable sound of gunshots---and from INSIDE the building. “The children!” Haven exclaimed. It was not just her and Shaw that were lodged at The Rajmani tonight; it was where the mutants they had rescued were staying before the journey to the nearest portal tomorrow. And most were, indeed, children. As quickly as she spoke, she was moving back inside from the jharoka, but Shaw grabbed her by the elbow, easily holding her back despite her not being a small or weak woman despite her gentle demeanor. Haven was large, and could carry a grown man. But Shaw didn’t even need to be rough to halt her. “You stay put,” he said sternly, “The guards will handle this.” “Mr. Shaw---” “They are better equipped than you, Ms. Dastoor, you will only interfere--” Shaw and Haven had, of course, not come alone. Shaw had brought several trained mutants on his own payroll---not everyone needed to be one of the X-Men to be capable of handling a few humans and their toys--and they had been tasked with keeping watch over, as Shaw had earlier referred to them as, the latest flock of Krakoa’s little sheep. A statement Haven had also wondered about, though it was far from her mind now. Haven might have been about to argue with him. She might have been about to admit he was right, and she should hang back. But as with her question, she was cut off by a gunshot as she turned her face back to him and started to speak. A gunshot, and bullet through the back of her head. It exited through her right eye, and bounced off Shaw’s face and fell to the floor. She would have as well, had he not caught her as she crumpled. When her healing factor had repaired her enough that she regained consciousness, she was on Krakoa again, as were all the refugees, safe and sound. And so was Shaw. “Well, Ms. Dastoor,” he said, “You’ve been murdered---or rather, nearly so--by perfect strangers for a quirk of your genetics. Nothing can make you more of a mutant than that, wouldn’t you agree?” Haven smiled slightly, “I feel as much a mutant as perhaps a Mughal might feel Indian, Mr. Shaw. Take that as you will.” He took it ambiguously. Which was indeed how she had meant it. == END==

#fic #writing #out of shirt

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quinntessentiallyglee · 3 years

Note

Hailee Steinfeld FC?

from here

send me a FC and i’ll make up a character on the spot.

Okay, so two things before I get into this:

First, in looking up an image to include with this post, I was reminded that Hailee stared in a movie with Dove Cameron (who those of you familiar with this account will know is one of my favs) in which her character was part of a clandestine organization centred around training teenagers-as-spies/assassins(? It's been a while since I saw the film, and they may have also trained up younger children as well) and as a result I am sorely tempted to throw any Hailee FC into my D.E.B.S. verse. But I won't because a) that's derivative of a character that is a canon Hailee FC, and b) even if my D.E.B.S. verse muses are all OC, the D.E.B.S. verse itself is not, and this is for original characters (or at least that's my interpretation of the challenge, and it's too late to change things up now).

Second: Despite the fact that most of the images I came across in my search highlight Hailee as Strikingly Beautiful and/or Bad-ass, she is stuck in my head as 'Adorable Fluff-ball' for reasons I cannot put my finger on. That's right folks; I see this:

And think, "Look at this fluff-ball! Isn't she Adorable!". Yes, I know, this is just one of the many things wrong with me. Regardless, now that I've gotten those points off my chest, we can proceed with introducing you to: Cordelia Harper

FC: Hailee Steinfeld

FANDOM: None (Would add her to my FAE Verse)

AGE: 18-30 (30 might seem like a bit of a stretch, but read on and you'll see why that may not be the case)

ORIENTATION: Pan

Appearance

HAIR COLOUR: Dark Brown

EYE COLOUR: Hazel

TATTOO: TBD (I'm 90%+ sure she has at least one, and almost as certain that there's more than one, and I'm pretty sure the style/purpose/meaning of them, but not sure on the specific shape of them... if that makes sense.)

General

FULL NAME: Cordelia Ivy Harper

NICKNAME: 'Delia, Delilah, Cor, Cordy

BIRTHDAY: Sept 30th (even though has been sitting in my inbox for a while)

PRONOUNS: She/Her/Hers

GENDER: Cis-Female

HOMETOWN: Hershey, Pennsylvania (I really, really wanted to say Salem or some other significantly 'Occult' place... Instead I put her in Pennsylvania [which is at least half way to Transylvania... or 75% if you do the math]. And what better place for an [spoiler warning] Adorable Fluff-ball of a Witch than Hershey, Pennsylvania: The Chocolate Capitol of the US)

CURRENT LOCATION: TBD (I feel like this would be very verse/thread dependant, but I feel like she'd default more towards the eastern seaboard than elsewhere.)

OCCUPATION: Witch (Though really that's more of a calling than an occupation. What pays the bills are her chemistry skills... which I feel get used most often in a teaching capacity rather than a 'practical' [for lack of a better word] capacity. I could also see her as either a Veterinarian or running her own Landscaping/Gardening company)

RELIGION: TBD (Wiccan would be an obvious choice, but my own ignorance of the particulars of that faith make me wary of trying to portray someone who follows it. I also get the feeling that she's more of a Granny Weatherwax type Witch in that she'll leave the Gods to go about their business and would like them to do the same for her.)

SOCIAL CLASS: Middle Class (Default), Verse Dependant

LANGUAGES: English, Probably some Latin, (and a smattering of one or two Fae languages)

Family

MOTHER: Tabitha Harper

FATHER: Unknown

SIBLINGS: None

CHILDREN: (I'm 50/50[/50] on this. Part of me sees her as a mom, part of sees her as just wanting to be one, and part of me sees her as seeing the world at large as her 'child')

Personality

TRAITS: Friendly (Like, extremely friendly. The sort of friendly where being mean to them feels like you've kicked a lost puppy), Protective, Happy (Her cup isn't just half full, it's an extra large, self filling cup)

FLAWS: Believes a little too much in the goodness of others, Has a very strong sense of right vs wrong, and will act accordingly (including this in the Flaws section because anyone caught on the other end of this would not consider it a positive. Especially when combined with the last point), Not as aware of her surroundings as she probably should be (so many memory erasing spells... that's a joke... mostly.)

ALLERGIES: None (though I really want to say 'Chocolate' for the irony alone)

SIGN: Libra

HOGWARTS HOUSE: Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw (I'd say it's damn near a perfect split, but if I had to give one side an advantage, it would be Hufflepuff))

LIKES: Rain, Rainbows, Sunshine, Cool Breezes, Warm Earth, A Properly Brewed Potion, People Being Kind/Helpful, Fresh Vegetable Soup, Fresh Bread, Chocolate (Semi-sweet in particular, though salted bitter-sweet also works in a pinch)

DISLIKES: People Being Rude/Hurtful, People/Animals In Pain

#anon #ask: scenario #asked and answered #ooc: muse #FC: Hailee Steinfeld #Face Claim

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pomegranates-and-blood · 3 years

Note

hello! hope you are doing well! the latest chapter of nostalgia made me cry, it is so exciting whenever they reach a new milestone in their relationship. you have done such an excellent job of crafting that progression, and it’s been such a joy to read!

reading atfor got me thinking: I was wondering if you’d thought about what the priestess and ivar’s parents would have thought of each other if they’d ever met, especially since ragnar and aslaug’s relationship was so much different than what her parents were like. thank you very much for everything!

Awww, I don’t know what to say! I’m so happy you are liking this, and you’re so sweet!!

That is a very interesting question!! Granted, they could never realistically meet, but omg it would be fun to see. I’ll answer under the cut 😉

I have a name for the Reader’s mother, though I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on the main story. It is Danae. Its meaning is historical, but it is derived from Danaoi, which is the term Homer used to refer to Greeks. And, considering how her mother (and her mother’s death/fight) is one of the big reasons the Reader feels so responsible for the Greeks and bound to give it all for her homeland, I thought it appropriate.

Anyways. I think Danae and Aslaug would have a few things in common, even if their life experiences are vastly different. They are both women in power (though in completely different scales) that hold on to such power by remaining within their role as women (instead of being shieldmaidens, or something similar, they remain wives and mothers while gaining and exerting power), very devoted to their Gods, and, like I mentioned in the ask regarding Floki’s perception of the Reader, they share the struggle against the Christians and their God. Despite the obvious differences in faith I don’t think it would be that much of a point of conflict between them (taking Aslaug’s tratment of the Christian that she makes walk with the hot iron rod, we could assume that like she admits the Christian God may as well be a god but only a minor one, she could believe the same thing about the Greek Gods. Or, like her son, she could argue the Greeks just change the names of things lol). Danae would fangirl over Aslaug’s powers of sight, no doubt.

There’s also how they raise their children, or what they teach their children. The Reader only had more or less six years with her mother, yet at 20+ she still has the same fervor towards the Greek Gods as she always did. That is in no little thanks to Danae’s influence on her daughter, and how she taught her from the beginning to hold on to the old ways and to her Gods. Very similar to what Aslaug does with her sons, especially Ivar.

Of course, their marriages couldn’t be more different. Their worlds couldn’t be more different. And it could be something that would make animosity grow between them. Aslaug, for seeing in Danae and her husband the loving marriage she never had; Danae, for seeing in Aslaug’s life the freedom she never had and never could give her daughter.

Now, her father. He was a man incredibly devoted to his wife, and he married the Reader’s mother knowing she was a ‘barren’ woman; yet even if it took years and she only gave him a daughter, he didn’t put the same importance on legacy through sons as Ragnar does, and stayed with her. That could be a point of conflict between Ragnar and him, same as their ambitions, which are completely different. The Reader’s father surrendered power in Sparta to marry an Athenian, and remained loyal to the Empire when he could have turned his back and gained power elsewhere, to keep his wife/family safe. In that sense Aslaug is more similar to the Reader’s father, putting her family/children before other ambitions; while Danae and Ragnar would be more similar.

Back to Ragnar and her father. They are still men of war, and Ragnar would definitely be infinitely curious about what tales he had to tell of Sparta, Athens, Macedonia. It is a whole new world, and no doubt Ragnar would want to hear all about it. They could learn a lot (and I mean a lot) from one another. Like her father trusted Sieghild and called her a friend, I think the same could happen between him and Ragnar.

About Sieghild: she is as much (if not more) a mother to the Reader as Danae was, but I’m going to eventually get to posting Hope, which is the AU where the Reader an Sieghild go to Kattegat instead of returning to Greece, so you’ll see the interactions between them then.

I hope this was alright! Thank you so much for such a lovely question! Sending you my love!! ❤️

#answered asks #νοσταλγία asks #asks and replies

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hinac0lada · 4 years

Text

somber

CHARACTER PAIRING: sugawara koushi/reader NOTE: i tried to do something new!! // listen to this song too, it’s where i got inspo for the title hehe my love for koushi reignited, so pls take this fic as a very self-indulgent piece ;3 [ banner made by me! ] anyways! i wanna thank everyone in cheese cult - y’all so nice ily all sm<33 WC: like, , 2.2k words pls give love</3 WARNING/S: contains fluff, angst, suggestive themes CHEESE CULT TAGLIST: @cupofkenma @bubbleteaa @milkandc00kiez @writingsbycrackhead @fern-writes-ig @pineapplekween @kxgeyamasmilk GEN TAGLIST: @fitriiaw @idiot-juice-enthusiast

there was a side to you that sugawara koushi couldn't quite place his hands-on. it irked him in a way that he can't exactly explain. to put it thoroughly, it's like comparing misleading signs - signs he couldn't read. there was a partial thought in the depths of sugawara's mind, will i be in too deep?

he certainly hopes not. it will be a struggle for sure, begetting to deal with taking risks and caching his feelings in check.

though, in parallel to both his heart and mind, he doesn't mind taking flight in either.

coming over your place was like a natural thing sugawara affixed to his routine after school hours, something nearly akin to second nature. he needn't have to ring the doorbell or knock at the door to have you alerted of his presence. you gave him a spare key after all. he enters your modest residence as if it was his place that he just resided in. he tries to be patient and earnest about it, but fatigue trailing after him like an endless marathon socked him in the face before he could utter words.

the silver-haired setter plants face-first on the soft material of your cushion couch, breathing in the fragrance of the freshly cleaned cute throw pillows you had on for display. he faintly recalls your lavender-like scent, mixed with a tinge bit of vanilla and mocha - a smell so distinct that it essentially revulsed him at how quick he was to recognize the fading scent.

it was perplexingly heartening in his weird ways. (why wouldn't it be, it's your stuff after all)

the sound of the door clicking minutes after his arrival didn't go unnoticed. "ah, sugawara, i didn't expect you to be here so soon," your voice sounded muffled in his ears at how he's buried two pillows against the sides of his face. he'd assumed you to be late (like you always were), so it wasn't a big deal that he constantly manages to somehow get to your home first before you do.

"i thought you had practice today?"

"we do. just need to charge up for now.. not much to make do since finals are coming up and all," was his muffled reply. that was just a simple white lie. he did have practice today - it's just that he was trying to come up with numerous justifications of why he's late. (that or he just wanted to spend a couple of hours lounging about in your home)

you huff at his slothful disposition. you sometimes think sugawara is a little too comfortable with you letting him barge in your house like he even pays for rent. sure, the company he gives you is lively, but you considered having him pay for using you as a live source for shelter and food.

even with that kind of reasoning, you don't exactly mind nor were you gonna lament.

"humph!" sugawara makes a surprised noise as you jumped on top of him, your weight burying him further on the plushness of the couch. his muffled protests that reached your ears sent you into a fit of small giggles, a free hand coming down to ruffle his blanche, soft and unruly hair.

"(n-name)--! mhmmp!"

"what was that? sorry, i can't hear you over the sound of your anguish," you snorted, adding a small bounce from your position to add on the burden he feels with you on top of him.

by now, sugawara was wearied enough just let you do this. it's fine, just harmless fun. but when suffocating between the couch and a long-time crush and having to choose between air and you - you ought to have another thing coming. within minutes of you cackling like mad, he's pulled off the pillows beside him, successfully managing to hit you with one square on the face before he tackled you on the opposite side of the couch.

your chortles were rashly cut short by a surprised yelp and a force that pushed you off on your back. sugawara towered over your figure, triumph evident on his features. you stared right back with slight annoyance and a small blush coating your cheeks. this was new.

"i thought i told you to not suffocate me between your couch anymore, (name)," he sticks his bottom lip out in a small pout. his little complaint only had you rolling your eyes, a chuckle slipping past your lips as you slapped a hand underneath his jawline, moving his face up and away from yours.

"when have i ever, suga? i don't think i can recall," you subtlely tease him. it was just too fun to poke fun at sugawara - especially acknowledging the fact that he might've purposely came over first instead of going to practice.

he whines, attempting to slap away your hand. instead, he promptly leans his entire weight on you, head finding solace within the soft material of your clothing. it occurred to him that you still haven't changed from your uniform, but he didn't bother commenting on it either.

the two of you laid in comfortable silence for a while. that was until you broke it.

"do you wanna kill some time watching a movie?"

"what kind?"

"anything you want. i'm fine with whatever."

"how about someone great? i haven't watched that yet," sugawara smiles, lifting his head as stares down at your face. you smile back, closing your eyes as a soft chuckle emits from your throat.

"i don't mind."

you two somehow ended up cuddling in the middle of the movie. sugawara questions his morals. it's purely platonic, right? they're best friends, there's nothing else to it. sugawara mostly says this to himself in his head to convince himself that cuddling can be platonic.

he just wished he could stop thinking of it as something more.

minutes in the movie, he finds himself relating to jenny. it's ironic. maybe he only feels that way because the story is told in her perspective. nothing that derives from his feelings.

however, something about this moment seemed peculiar to the silverette. he didn't know if it was just him or how your features seemed to be enhanced upon closer inspection.

you were always beautiful in his eyes. he found himself drowning in the warm, earthy tones of your delicate skin. with your hair sprawled out on the surface of the sofa, contrasted by the sheen ruffles of your clothes.

you just looked so innocent, so serene. sugawara knows he shouldn't have. he should've had more self-control.

but he loses it when he's around you.

he quickly leans down with a puff of excitement growing inside him while tilting his head to the right. his wet lips capture yours, gliding over smooth contrasting with chapped lips. sugawara pulls and bites on your bottom lip, eliciting a pleased sigh from you. his hands squeeze your hips, tongue tracing over your lips for sweet entrance.

surprised, you grant access, letting him invade your mouth with a versatile tongue, his mouth sucking on your tongue felt like heavenly feathers. your lips smacked against his, pulling apart warm and wet tongues before darting back in with even more vigor. the intensity develops - heartbeats clamoring with painful bliss against your ribcages. you didn't pay attention to the movie anymore, too engrossed in each other's euphoria to divert consideration elsewhere.

this was wrong. sugawara knew that. but he couldn't pull himself away - not yet. the feeling of your body so close to his felt so right. you pull away first, lungs hopelessly and greedily sucking in the air but this was short-lived as his hand only pushed your head back, with noses bumping as he further divulged into the frenzy hot, steamy kiss with a groan.

he couldn't get enough.

it was sort of surprising as to how he was the first to pull away. a dense tint of red adorned his cheeks, breath heavy, and pupils blown wide wistfully as he sought to steer his gaze away from your plump and oh-so red lips. the sight burned itself into his mind. underneath him with half-lidded eyes, you took in gasps of air, chest rising up and down from how wild and the present fierceness behind it just blew you away.

sugawara shifts away from you, his body heat leaving yours had you feeling cold. "i-i.." he stammers, words clogged up as his mind was still fogged up with the steamy makeout that just happened. he couldn't get it off his mind. (what was he thinking?)

your gaze was fixated on nothing, still too lost from the hysteria and the feeling of his mouth on yours just a moment ago. it didn't submerge in till he stood up with haste from the sofa, bowing his head while he repeatedly apologized for his brash actions all the while with a flustered and guilty expression.

"i'm so sorry, i'm so sorry! i don't know what came over me--! i'm sorry if i made you feel so uncomfortable!" with hasty movements, he gets up and picks up his things. a part of him is dying with embarrassment and screaming that he needs to leave, while the other wants to stay and discuss what the hell just happened.

you, on the other hand, were silent as a rock. you held up a hand to your lips, tracing over remnants of his margin on yours - the boundary between you two felt suffocating.

when you still didn't reply, he ends up leaving anyway, with a false promise of seeing you another day along with another wave of apologies. you still stayed starstruck on the sofa, hand hovering over your mouth.

your lips tingled and the memory of the kiss had the apples of your cheeks blossom with a cherry red tint.

sugawara had been avoiding you for nearly a week since the happy accident that happened at your house. you asked (keyword; tried) daichi and asahi on why the third year acted this way. they both shared the same answer.

there was too much at stake.

you racked your brain to understand their vague answers, but none of which you thought could help you with your dilemma. this was stupid. it was just a kiss (tl; a heavy makeout session). why did he spare the need to talk about it? you decided enough was enough. you had - no, need to confront him now.

you pleaded daichi to have sugawara excused for a while just so you could talk. the former seems to have no qualms in letting the aforementioned male. daichi mentions sugawara himself has been feeling quite down in the dumps. he profusely requested that you make amends with the setter. it was disheartening to see the usually jovial and tranquil male all grim.

"sugawara, please," you stop the male as soon as he exited the main building. he tried desperately to avoid you all week. this is, yet again, the same mistake he's done before. running away when confronting your souls.

"we should talk about it."

"talk about what? there's nothing up for discussion." stop avoiding the topic.

"no, as a matter of fact, there is. what's with you? why have you been avoiding me all week-" you place a hand on his shoulder, but he flinched at the touch. you took a step back with eyes filled with a weary, hurt, and guilty conscience.

sugawara thinks point on black and white. he couldn't begin to explain why he did that nor does he want to. things won't be the same anymore.

you sigh heavily, head tilting down to glare harshly on the ground near the soles of your feet. "what are we, koushi?"

i had hoped something more, "we're just friends," he swallowed down the spite in his throat.

"what kind of friends do that kind of thing?" the chuckle that left your mouth had no humor to it. dusky irises trailed over your plethoric lips once more, recollecting the kiss yet again. sugawara mentally scorns himself.

"it's not worth the fight, koushi." you try and meet his eyes in which he reciprocates with a gaze filled with anxiety and guilt. you take a hold of his hands, rubbing circles on his knuckles - something you usually did to calm his nerves. his lips quivered as he forced himself to let go. to let you go.

unspoken words met with an umbra of fleeting eyes. there's no turning back. sugawara didn't want to risk losing something great. someone like you, at the very least.

"i'm sorry," he lowly mutters, letting go of your hand as he slowly turns towards the other direction, already yearning for your touch on his arm. it had to be this way, right? there wasn't a time where sugawara neglected to count all of his mistakes.

mistakes of one in a million.

you felt small as sugawara slowly but surely slipped away from your grasps. with a weak voice, you called out to him, in hopes that he'd answer your calling and return once more to your arms. although his retreating figure showed no assurance of such, you wished you could've thought of ways to seek closure.

just one more kiss. one more cuddle. one more possibility to make amends that you hoped to be endless. but those possibilities only made chances for you and him - not you together.

#sugawara kōshi #haikyuu!!#haikyuu x reader #haikyuu #hq x reader #hq x you #hq sugawara #haikyuu sugawara #sugawara #sugawara fluff #sugawara imagine #sugawara fic #sugawara angst #haikyuuwritersnet

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ichor-hunter · 4 years

Text

Artemis

Artemis Blood Code Study- Mia Karnstein

"A blood code received from Mia. It holds a dauntless will to strive to overcome a cruel fate and liberate those who suffer. This code has high stamina and attack-type Gifts, but suffers from low endurance. It also features Gifts that boost drain abilities."

Introduction to Blood Codes and Mia

Blood Codes are the abilities imbued within a Revenant's Blood. Each Blood Code is unique to each Revenant that resides within the Gaol of the Mist. Once a Revenant has awakened from their slumber after the BOR parasite has been placed in them, the blood takes on a Code which I believe derives from the characteristics of that Revenant.

Mia is also a Third Generation Revenant. She awakened after the Queen was slain as seen from Nicola's memories. Mia is devoted to protecting her brother but as she meets MC and the others, she joins their cause to discover more about her brother's memories and helps to save the Successors.

Greek Mythology

Mia's Blood Code is based on the Greek Goddess Artemis.

Artemis is a Moon Goddess who is notably known for her being a huntress and a defender of purity. Most people know her for using a bow and arrow.

She plays a part in the Trojan War of Homer's Iliad and she was on the Trojan's side. Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae killed a sacred deer and dared to boast about his bloodthirst for war and also proclaimed that he bested Artemis herself. Now Artemis like the rest of the Gods and Goddesses was enraged and demanded the sacrifice of his first daughter Iphigenia would appease her. Agamemnon lied to his daughter that she would be married to Achilles but in reality, she was going to be sacrificed instead.

In the end as a protector of women, she took Iphigenia and transported her elsewhere. Artemis replaced Iphigenia with a Stag by the altar.

Artemis also relates to Heracles 12 labors.

In Heracles' third labor, he was tasked with capturing the Golden Hind (Stag) of Artemis. The main hope was for Artemis to be angered at Heracles for going after her sacred golden deer of hers, which is what ended up happening. Heracles begged her to forgive him and explained to Artemis why he needed to capture the stag. He was commanded to bring the stag to king Eurystheus to make the stag one of his pets. Artemis heard his pleas and forgave him. As long as he lets the stag go she won't harm him. Heracles brought the deer over to the king but knew if he gave the stag to the king, Artemis would harm him in some way. Quick on his feet, he told the king he'll give the deer to the king if the King comes out and gets the deer for himself. He agreed. Of course the minute the king walked to the stag, the stag ran back to Artemis.

Similarities between Mia and Artemis

Artemis is a divine huntress, Mia is a Revenant that hunts the Lost. Artemis cares and protects wildlife, nature and women and children. Mia's brother Nicola is her life, and she was willing to steal blood beads from other Revenants to ensure his survival.

In Greek lore, Artemis and Hephaestus are in fact siblings. While there's not much interaction between them in mythology, it makes sense that Rin gets along with Mia so well since Rin holds the Hephaestus blood code. They're both close in age and this helps Mia transition better with the crew at home when she joins them.

A really intriguing point to mention is that Davis holds the Hermes blood code and Hermes in Greek Mythology is also Artemis' sibling. Sadly, they don't really interact in the game but it demonstrates how they would have a good friendship with each other. They both have a similar way of seeing things through so if these two were to interact, it would be in respectful terms.

"It holds a dauntless will to strive to overcome a cruel fate and liberate those who suffer." This connects with Artemis' compassion towards humans. Seeing how Artemis was willing to switch Iphigenia with a stag even though she demanded the sacrifice in the first place? Or she relented with Heracles pleas when he begged for Artemis not to slay him where he stood?.

Artemis is a Goddess who empathizes and shows pity and the same goes for Mia. Out of anything in the world, she would never want her brother to suffer. That's why she desperately incorporated Carmilla's teachings to her everyday survival. Artemis and Mia have a sense of stubbornness when it comes to the things they want to protect but they know when to do things fairly when they see things from both perspectives.

Mia’s weapon is a bayonet, Artemis' weapon is the bow and arrow. Both of them have long-ranged weapons that they use in their battles.

Mia was willing to hunt other Revenants down for their blood beads to save Nicola and Artemis has no hesitation to bring down punishments to those who cross her for a good reason. They always do things for the greater good. When Mia partied with MC and crew, her mission of saving the successors became a part of her journey and her character. Not only did she want to save Nicola, she wanted to help the other Successors that were suffering, just like Nicola. That humility also attributes to Artemis as well.

Interestingly enough, the two stories from Artemis' mythology both feature Stags. The first one being the story of the Trojan War. Artemis was enraged at the king of Mycenae when he killed one of her stags. Alternatively, in the beginning, Mia is enraged at Jack for killing Nicola. The difference as we know that Jack didn't 'kill' Nicola out of pure bloodthirst, it's aligned with his duty. However, the King of Mycenae just did it just to pacify his ego.

The second lore is when Heracles ends up saving the stag he tried to capture by letting it escape from the king and allowing it to go back to Artemis. Similarly, the MC saved Nicola from his frenzy and allowed Mia and Nicola to reunite.

The unique part is that just as Artemis closely cares for nature and Stags (and they’re usually symbolic to her), Mia cares a lot for her younger brother Nicola. If we take a closer look at Nicola's Successor design, he has two antlers as if he's a Stag.

Artemis’ Gifts

Focused Gift Speed-Increases the speed of your Gifts while you are focused.

Shock Web-Manipulates ichor to create a low-power trap at your feet that staggers any assailants.

Dexterity/Willpower Up-Increases dexterity and willpower.

These Gifts of Mia's involves the skillsets of Artemis'. Having a great amount of speed, a trick or trade to stall your prey (web) and having the dexterity and the willpower to keep up with an opponent would be similar to the features Artemis exhibits as a goddess.

Bloodsucking Blades-Temporarily increases the drain rating of weapon attacks for you and your partner.

In Greek Mythology, the only warrior that Artemis approved of and hunted with was Orion. For those who aren't aware of their story, Artemis and Orion were companions and possibly lovers. Their story ends in various ways with mainly Orion dying because either Artemis defending herself from him or the other gods who tried to protect Artemis' chastity and wanted to rid of Orion. Mia will not kill you of course, but this Gift could probably related to Artemis' relation with Orion and how they would hunt together and gave each other strength.

Fusillade Rondo-Fire a barrage of homing bullets. An offensive skill performed with Bayonet.

Bayonet Mastery-Increases attack power when equipped with a bayonet.

Blood Grab- Dodging enemy attacks drains their ichor according to your weapon's drain rating.

These Gifts are aligned with Artemis's proficiency as a Huntress. For Fusillade Rondo, Fusillade means "A series of shots fired in rapid succession" and Rondo is a musical term that's utilized in a concerto/sonata and instrument composition, it's used in a refrain four times. Bayonet Mastery is simple since Artemis is a master at using her weapon so it makes sense that Mia has this Mastery Gift. Blood grab could relate to Artemis' dexterity in general when facing her opponents.

Ice Armor-Temporarily creates a barrier around you and your partner that boosts ice resistance.

Freezing Roar-Fires a projectile of freezing ice at the target.

Guard of Honor-Generates a number of ice pillars that unrelentingly bombard the target.

In terms of affiliation with the element of ice, there isn't much correlation to go by asides from Artemis' (possible) personality since she is a goddess that only favors wildlife, nature, and women and can easily be enraged at injustice. The properties of Armor, the Roar and the Guard of Honor, each of them can relate to Artemis and how she protects herself. Ever Hunter/Huntress would require some form of Armor, the Roar could represent her ties with the animals and nature itself, and the Guard of Honor metaphorically displays Artemis' allegiance with the system of justice and how she would target those who would go against it.

Concluding Thoughts

Mia is a really strong character, and I think this Goddess is a perfect choice as her blood code. I'm not too sure about her alternate Astrea's Blood Code at this point, but with how everything fits in with the story Artemis is the way to go. I was excited to type Mia's blood code analysis, the ideas in my head just kept pouring in with how her lore mixes in so well with how they designed Nicola. This is brilliant. It's the little things in character designs that make me so amazed at times. Even when I first played CV I never thought of these details until I started looking back on it. I can understand why Mia is highlighted a lot and I honestly enjoy how her side of the story played out and her contribution to the crew back at home base. She's a very warm character that is always there to support MC and the others, and I hope she and Nicola can continue to be happy.

#code vein #blood code study #Artemis blood code #code vein theory #code vein lore #code vein mia #code vein mia karnstein #mia karnstein

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vhassenor · 4 years

Text

hey hi, it’s kit again, this time with a brand new baby, elio ! he’s a super new muse so pls bear with me as i figure him out. if you know anything about me, you know my intros are always way too long, so i’m really trying to keep this short and to the point and put any extra stuff elsewhere. under the cut, you’ll find some basic info, an intro, and some plot ideas for elio ; if you wanna plot anything at all, hit me up on IMs or ( preferably ) discord ( do you like yuice ?#6373 ) !

⤷ the courts offer bread and salt to elio vhassenor of braavos. many say that the thirty-four year old prince of the southern kingdom is known to be sentimental and intuitive, though ill tongues whisper that he is opportunistic and irreverent. when his name is uttered, one is reminded of coins slipping through deft fingers, sunrise viewed from the highest tower, serpentine tongues spilling secrets, & the heavy heat of sunshine on cobbled streets. may she be blessed and protected in this war of crowns. ( fc: matteo martari )

basics.

name. elio vhassenor. nicknames. westerosi call him the merchant prince ; his family calls him eli ; his enemies call him the snake. age. thirty-four. traits. + egalitarian, forgiving, intuitive, reasonable, sentimental. - disillusioned, indulgent, irreverent, opportunistic, stubborn. titles. prince ( consort ) of the seven kingdoms. loyalty. [ john mulaney vc ] my wife !

family.

maron vhassenor ( father ) ; atalea vhassenor née nahaar ( mother ) ; talya vhassenor ( sister ) ; naeros vhassenor ( brother ) ; lucio vhassenor ( brother ) ; eira vhassenor ( sister ) ; sylla vhassenor ( sister ) ; varen vhassenor ( brother )

??? targaryen, princess of the southern kingdom ( wife ) ; ??? targaryen, king of the southern kingdom ( brother-in-law ) ; jaehaerys targaryen, prince of the southern kingdom ( brother-in-law ) ; daenys targaryen ( sister-in-law ) ; ??? targaryen, prince(ss) of the southern kingdom ( sibling-in-law ) ;

first impression.

he has a harsh, inscrutible face ; dark eyes and a severe brow. he speaks slowly and deliberately, with a braavosi accent that has faded over time, but remains ever audible. for a prince, his dress is rather modest ; if you didn’t know better you would not have recognized him. you’ve heard he’s harmless ( ‘weak’ is the word of choice ) ; he’s tall but slight, and you suspect he is indeed no fighter. still, there is a dangerous grace in his movements --- but then he laughs, and there is nothing at all threatening about him.

early life.

fifth of seven children from a braavosi merchant family ; not even braavosi nobility. they were relatively wealthy, whatever the closest thing to upper middle class is in braavos. the business was a family one, and their parents, shrewd business partners more than anything, groomed all of them for similar success. they were somewhat educated, well cared for.

with that many kids, though, he’s often overlooked by his parents but also doesn’t grow up with the sense that he’s entitled to not be overlooked ; often raised more by his older siblings than parents.

still, as he ages he takes more of a role in his parents’ dealings. they trade in textiles and dyes all across the known world, and elio accompanies his older siblings on such trips ;

and it’s on one such trip that he meets his future wife ! at least, i think so. a lot of this is still up in the air and needs to be plotted with whoever fills my wc, so for now i’m gonna leave this kind of vague and edit it later when there’s more to know !

but rest assured elio’s young and overexcited and thinks he knows everything, meets her and is immediately completely sold

have i mentioned they’re young because i need to impress upon you how stupid and in love they were to think they could just get married and that would be Fine, even though she’s a princess and he’s ... nothing

anyway literally nothing is canon until i’ve had a chance to plot with whoever picks up his wife ofc but i like to think that she was the one who convinced her fam / pushed thru the marriage / decided to elope / whatever it is they did ? like i cannot emphasize enough how much elio is just along for the ride

life in westeros.

so elio’s in westeros, chilling with his new wife and loving it. the lifestyle ? delightful ; he was the son of a merchant sailor and now he’s a prince. is he totally accepted by his new family and by westeros at large ? somehow i suspect not really.

he’s also confused a lot, especially in the early years. permanently baffled by the culture. he’s a young man who’s seen a lot of the world from the middle of the crowd ; he’s definitely not used to the view from above, nor the treachery of westerosi politics.

and like, we know how westerosi can be about foreigners ; among the smallfolk there’s all kinds of rumors he’s a red priest or a shadowbinder or something and he spelled the princess to seduce her. the nobility generally know better and consider him extremely non-threatening

which, okay, fair ? he’s no political mastermind, he has few connections which do not derive from his wife’s family, he’s a big fat trophy husband is what he is.

he’s ok with that tho ? most of the time he’s very comfortable not fitting into the westerosi ideal masculine type. he likes singing and dancing, and his ‘fight training’ ( read: getting beat up by his older brothers ) in braavos was pretty limited. can’t handle wearing armor it’s too heavy and constrictive and he’s not with it. much better on a boat than on a horse. decent archer, decent ‘water dancer’, probably couldn’t wield a broadsword.

i am not sure yet if he has children or how many, but i do think he does ? would also need to be plotted i guess. but... big dad energy.

enjoys his position more with each passing day ; most of his wide eyed excitement and nerves have faded to a comfortable distance ; enjoys the shit out of being a lowly merchant married to one of the most powerful women in westeros, meaning he can mask his still somewhat poor understanding of westerosi customs. instead of “i don’t know how to react to this situation” he can simply say “i do not care and i do what i want”

personality.

he can be very dramatic ; he’s always had a love for the mummers of braavos and while he was a rather shy youth, he’s come in to his own. loves a bit of a flair, enjoys making an entrance. dresses modestly, but impeccably, and will probably embellish all the stories he tells.

has a very hard time expressing negative emotions ; instead he gets rather withdrawn and can appear cold and even unsettlingly calm. he has a rather serious and grounded disposition and can come across as much more severe than he actually is, a source of great confusion for him.

plot ideas.

sorry, these are a little shorter and less detailed than my plot ideas for jeyne because i’m on a bit of a time crunch to get these intros out on time ! and also i’m bad at thinking of generic plot ideas, but rest assured if these all seem super lame ( they are ) i’ll happily come up with a fresh brainstormed plot for you !

but, here goes: enemies, frenemies, good friends/buddies, confidante, lovers, pen pals, former customers ( lmao imagine someone being like: ‘ur face is familiar ... wait what’ ), former connections from braavos, allies, bad influences, new friends, god i don’t know honestly .. but if you hmu at all i promise to come up with more better ideas than this, i can do it

#i. watching the horizon ⦙ dev .#broken.intro

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the-transfeminine-mystique · 4 years

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do you believe in real presence? i'm unclear how anyone who upholds that doctrine could support desecration of the host, given that after the words of institution and epiklesis (do they have that? idk for sure) the host is not something that belongs to the RCC per se but is rather the flesh of christ. i'm episcopalian personally and have no love for the RCC's positions but this distresses me. i hope this doesn't come across as rude, i don't mean it to

There are a few ways I could answer this. One is by putting Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” in conversation with prophetic actions as a genre, as Ted Smith did in Weird John Brown with the figure of freedom-fighter John Brown. Another is by talking a little bit about real presence in the Eucharist and asking to what extent it is being used as a point of distraction from other real presences that are disavowed. While I did not explicitly bring Benjamin in to bear on this paper (partially because it was a ≤20 minute conference paper to be read aloud), I would say that a combination of the two is essential in looking back at Tom Keane’s actions in 1989 and reading them as a voice of God and not violence against God.

(This is going to be a slightly long post)

For the question “May I kill?” meets its irreducible answer in the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” This commandment precedes the deed, just as God was “preventing” the deed. But just as it may not be fear of punishment that enforces obedience, the injunction becomes inapplicable, incommensurable, once the deed is accomplished. No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment. And so neither the divine judgment nor the grounds for this judgment can be known in advance. Those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on the commandment are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it.

Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. I, 250.

I was perhaps flippant in my last sentence in the post that this is in response to. But I do believe in real presence and view Tom Keane’s desecration of the host as a prophetic and blameless act. Prophetic actions are always breaking actions — if there were no laws or boundaries or codes broken, then it wouldn’t be prophetic. The breaking is, however, oriented towards God. This is the reason why, in the paper I linked, I believe actions like Keane’s fit so well with the liturgical theology of Gordon Lathrop, who emphasizes the juxtapositions, the breakings of meaning, the jagged edges around our symbols which, when taken together, point us towards God as we can know God. There was a prescription for the treatment of the host, and Keane violated it. And the question that Christianity has long since, and increasingly, forgotten since becoming the metaphysical wing of empire in 313, but the question demanded by the action, is “why?” Benjamin’s example with regard to the proscription of killing is killing in self-defense, long recognized halakhically as either a just violation of the commandment or not a true violation at all. What might it mean to ask if Keane was, in a manner of speaking, acting in self-defense?

The matter of “real presence” in the Eucharist is also of interest, because a focus on it obscures a competing real presence, which is the body of the Church, as well as Christ’s stated affinity, the poor, marginalized, and imprisoned (Matt 25:36–40). From the early church, there was a conception of Christ having a “real body” (corpus verum) and a “mystical body” (corpus mysticum) on earth. Until the Berengar of Tours/Lanfranc dispute in the 11th century, the corpus verum referred unambiguously to the Church and the corpus mysticum referred to the Sacrament. Subsequent to the first widespread articulations of the doctrine of real presence, the two terms switched. But I think it is important to note how late that switch was, and how late even compared to that real presence was to emerge as a formal doctrine (Trent, AD 1551). This isn’t to dismiss out-of-hand concerns about real presence, it is instead to ask whether, when we put so much emphasis on the real presence in the Eucharist, we aren’t obscuring and disrespecting real presence elsewhere.

And that was what the Catholic Church (and, speaking as a fellow Episcopalian, the Episcopal Church) had grown accustomed to doing. The sacrament revolving around the breaking of Christ’s body had grown so pristine and focused upon that the incursion of Christ’s broken body into the Cathedral was viewed as a profaning. After Tom Keane’s action, Christ’s broken body lay on both sides of the altar rail. On one side it was treated with reverence and care, and on the other side it was handcuffed, dragged onto a stretcher, and hauled out by the NYPD. The desecration of the body of Christ in the form of the host needed to happen in order to reveal in explicit terms the carelessness with which the Church desecrated, and regarded the desecration of, the body of Christ in the form of the poor, the sick, and the marginalized.

I’m not sure if you followed the link to the paper, but this is a relevant excerpt from it.

If liturgical meaning is created through juxtaposition, then we might do well to notice parallels between the Eucharistic host on the one hand and Keane’s own body along with all others participating in the die-in on the other: the corpus verum and corpus mysticum respectively. Sacrilege though it might have been, Keane did nothing to the host that the Catholic Church was not already doing to those with AIDS.The violence done to the corpus verum was mirrored by the violence done to the corpus mysticum made present in the cathedral, both really and symbolically, by the die-in. Shortly after the desecrated host fell to the ground, Keane’s body did as well. That the Church identified sacrilege in the desecration of the host but not in the desecration of the bodies of the sick, the poor, and the oppressed — that the host was removed from the ground with honor and reverence while Keane’s body was handcuffed and removed by police — was itself the fundamental theological problem that “Stop the Church” sought to address. The juxtaposition between the two corpora, the juxtaposition insisted on by Tom Keane’s action, served to communicate the central meaning of the liturgy of protest.

...

This is not to argue that “Stop the Church” should be the model for liturgical worship, that die-ins or desecrated hosts should necessarily proliferate (although it cannot with integrity argue that they should not, that this disruption is all well and good because it happened in the past but a similar one today or in our particular congregation would be unacceptable). It is instead to understand the demonstration as having a particular liturgical meaning and to “read [it] with some sympathy,” despite its breaking from known and approved liturgical forms. To read it as a catholic exception is not to bring the entirety of Church practice under its rubric, but rather to accept that the things that it said were things that the Church needed to hear, and it said them in ways that the Church cannot responsibly ignore. It was, in Lathrop’s, words, “a protest corresponding to the iconoclasm of the meeting itself, a protest that can be important for the health of the Christian faith.” Running throughout the demonstration’s radical disruptions of the Mass was an invocation to the Church to take more seriously its actions, both liturgically and politically. It served as an implicit critique of the exclusions of a church founded on Jesus’ radical inclusion of the outsider. The Church, “Stop the Church” said, is happy to pray for those dying of AIDS so long as they are outside its walls, but will have them arrested for trespassing when they come inside. The Church is offended, it said, when Christ’s body is desecrated at theMass, but it is perfectly willing to participate in the desecration of Christ’s body in the streets.

Jane D. Nichols, “ACT UP, "Stop the Church," and the Theological Implications of a Liturgical Protest,” 8–9.

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artificialqueens · 5 years

Text

as the sun dies (trixie x violet) - chapter 1 - fannyatrollop

A/N: This is a mad piece of historical fiction. Poor Trixie is Marie Antoinette, doomed Queen of France. Violet is her sister-in-law. Katya has a role I made up out of whole cloth, achieved by reviving dead historical figures so they would be around at the time, and pretending an unhappy royal couple could have given birth to a daughter at the right time for her to exist. The story is about them doing their best to be princesses in the palace of Versailles, while time floats slowly on to the French Revolution. Vixie are the beating heart of this fic, but Trixya will also exist in some form.

I have spent a lot of my free time reading royal histories, and though I mess with things severely to bring you this fic, I still stress a little about accuracy. Because the Hanover dynasty of Britain is one of my favourites, I decided that Trixie would be a British princess. The king in charge of her life at the time had a moment of OOC behaviour to make this possible. Maria Theresa of Austria found steaming mad. At least in this universe, the real Marie Antoinette had a chance to end up somewhere nice.

Also really wanna mention that the actual irl Comtesse de Provence as a hot, stinking mess when she got to France. I expected Violet to somehow be born with elegance and the ability to quickly figure out how to be the most fashionable lady in court. Also, because princesses often underwent name changes when they married into foreign courts… I call her Violette.

Trixie’s wedding would have taken place on 16 May 1770. Violet would show up at some point in the next year, so I’ll give you all of their ages as of September 1771 for reference: Trixie, 19; Violet, 18; Katya, 24. I try to keep track of when a significant time jump happens in the narrative, and hope it’s not too confusing. I’ll blab about titles and such next chapter.

CHAPTER ONE: Royal Parcels

Princess Caroline Beatrice of Great Britain, aged eighteen, has barely recovered from seasickness when she enters her new home. She’s never liked admitting to weakness, so rather than explaining her nausea as a symptom of nerves, she prefers to think she’s still carrying the effects of that horrible voyage inside of her. If she has it her way, she will never again set foot on a ship, not even if her life depends on it.

She knows that when a princess leaves her home country, she’s unlikely to return unless she is an unfit wife. When she was informed of her upcoming nuptials, she had promised herself to succeed on that front come hell or high water. Her marriage will be a success, even if it kills her. If she ever does end up on a boat home, she will be a failure, and if it’s like that she might as well leap off and let the sea have her. She doubts she’d be sent to the stocks for returning home a spurned woman, but she doesn’t want that to be the outcome of her life. Something about her marriage feels like a grand, cosmic test, and it’s in her nature to want to do well.

Trixie has no mind for politics. She can ride a horse. She can grow her own flowers, and keep a small garden alive tolerably well. She is a gifted musician, which is something she takes immense pride in. From the day she was born, her entire world has been confined to the house she was raised in, and the occasional sojourn to another royal residence for holidays. She’s incredibly green, but even so she is aware that hers is an unusual match. Her marriage is meant to crown the end to a long war with France—wedding bells to ring in a deeper friendship between the two nations. She would have expected to be shipped off to one of the German states instead, somewhere nice and Protestant, where her bridegroom might turn out to be a close relative. Her sisters had been established through alliances where at least one of these things was true.

For Trixie, marriage has simply been one of the three possible outcomes for her future, the other two being a tragic, early death, or spinsterhood. It doesn't bother her to be marrying the Dauphin of France, and though it surprises her, there’s no point in questioning the situation. When a princess is told she is to be married, she seldom has room to object. She still feels rather queasy about the whole thing, but she’s tried very hard to quell that feeling with positive affirmations.

One day, I will be the Queen of France. There are worse fates, and it was never my choice where I wound up in life.

This cheerful mantra led her through her seasickness, through her dressing and undressing only moments after stepping foot on dry land, through the awkwardness of meeting her husband for the first time, not to mention her meeting with the King, and the first meal she shared with her new family. It has been with her as she feels the weight of history settling on her shoulders, the responsibility of finding her place in a new court when she scarcely has previous experience at her native court, and her knowledge that she’s not quite ready.

Admittedly, Trixie is a touch too sensitive, though she has learned to conceal it. Perhaps her mind has perceived more hostility in the people she has encountered thus far than she should have. Much of her energy has been expended in the service of performing as best as she can, while her lingering seasickness and compulsion to worry conspires against her. What she does know is that judging from their brief encounter, the Dauphin was not at all charmed by her. He could hardly meet her eye, even as he kissed her hand.

He’ll have to put up with her, nonetheless.

She breathes deeply, through her nose for greater discretion, as soon as she can make out the looming splendor of Versailles. She remembers that she was born to leave home and never return, that her most beloved sister bore it well enough when it was her time, and that another young woman was plucked from her home no less than seven years ago, to be her brother’s queen. Princess Caroline Beatrice, affectionately known as Trixie, has ceased to be; the girl in the carriage, desperately denying her fears, is the Dauphine of France. She should start referring to herself as such in her mind, and cast aside her childhood nickname. She won’t, but she will tell herself she ought to.

There is plenty of light, and nothing particularly foreboding about Versailles by design. Still, she feels a deep chill as she passes through its doors for the first time.

She toys with the ring on her finger, a gift from her mother. She’s not meant to have it anymore, had to hide it behind her teeth as she was stripped and outfitted with the trappings of a French princess, but she’s trying to derive as much comfort as possible from her little keepsake. Inscribed on the inside of the ring are words she believes were intended as a charm, one which she hopes will work: Bring me happiness.

***

Caroline Beatrice was born on August 23, 1751, approximately five months after the death of her father.

Whatever his faults as a person, and he was definitely seen almost exclusively through that lens by his own royal parents, Frederick, Prince of Wales was a caring, attentive father. He brought a liveliness to his household that contrasted starkly with the confinement in which the princess was brought up. As unfortunate as it was that she never knew him, for they would have likely gotten along rather well, it’s a small mercy that she was not able to compare the relatively bleak world she grew to know with brighter times.

The most crucial result of her isolated childhood was that when it came time for her to marry, her experience of life at court was minimal. Versailles, with all its formalities, would prove overwhelming for a sheltered girl who saw more of her native land on her way out of it than she had in all her life. The princess’ eldest brother, known to history as George III, had misgivings about the French marriage. He thought his sister unprepared for the challenge, yet it proceeded with his approval. Had he placed more faith in his gut feeling, things may have turned out differently.

George, though, had made a very aggressive push to broker a peace for a war that was bringing victory after victory to his country, engaging in political maneuvers that he found distasteful to put an end to a conflict that he saw as little more than a bloody drain on his coffers. How would it look if he made a fuss about garnishing that peace with a marriage, when both nations had suitable candidates on hand? His sister was of age, it was not unreasonable to assume she ought to marry; though she could be settled better elsewhere, with talks of marriage already underway and a hard-won end to a wasteful conflict it did not seem wise to imply that there were better potential matches for her.

He could not, at the time, have foreseen what would come of this marriage. No one could.

As it was, Caroline Beatrice was born in good health on a late summer’s day. She was named in honour of her grandmother, and would be said to resemble her physically later in life. It is probable that her resemblance to Queen Caroline helped to convince Louis XV of her suitability as a marriage candidate for his grandson: in her day, Queen Caroline was said to have the finest bosom in Europe, and Louis XV was a bosom enthusiast. The young princess’ portrait, coupled with a careful choice of words from an interested party, would have been enough to sway him…

***

In her defense, Trixie can say that the Dauphin was no more eager to fulfill his duties as a husband on their wedding night than she was. Sure, she was too busy agonizing over her performance at the official wedding ceremony to be of any assistance, but it’s not entirely her fault that nothing happened.

Her wedding gown had been an opulent confection made with cloth of silver, and covered in diamonds. The panniers on the hips added a significant amount of horizontal width to her silhouette, enough that she imagined she could comfortably seat a child on each hip with plenty of room to spare. She had very little experience with moving about in this sort of gown, and she could not easily overcome the fact that she’d noticeably stumbled the second she entered the cathedral. She wishes there was a way to go back and prevent that display from being the first impression some members of her court would surely have of her.

Even if she’d moved like an angel floating on a cloud, it would not make up for the fact that the bodice had been made far too small. There was no helping this by the time it was discovered, and she had to make do with a dress that gave the world a cheeky peek at her undergarments in the back.

Trixie and her husband were a match made in heaven on the dance floor. Trixie was technically competent in the art of dance, but contending with a gown that somehow managed to swallow her whole even as it was unable to fasten onto her body fully, she gave off the appearance of a badly conducted marionette. The Dauphin fared no better, and the young couple provided the court with an unintentionally comic first dance. Their bumbling performance in their first dance as man and wife likely acted as foreshadowing to their handling of the marriage bed.

A Dauphine has only one way to fully cement her position, and that is by providing her husband with an heir. If she can produce two, all the better. By the morning after Trixie’s wedding, her ability to achieve this simple task is cast into doubt. Shortly after her marriage, her brother’s queen gives birth to his seventh child. She dutifully writes a letter to congratulate him, all the while telling herself that she has no reason to be angry about it. If she tells herself that she will soon receive a similar letter, perhaps the universe will listen and make it so.

Despite her hopes, the situation remains dire for so long that a marriage for the Dauphin’s younger brother, the Comte de Provence, becomes paramount. In accordance to a long tradition of intermarriage between the royal families of France and Savoy, a Savoyard princess is sent for to be the new Comtesse de Provence. And so, less than a year from the time of her own marriage, Trixie gains some competition in the form of a sister in law.

***

Every day, Trixie must suffer the ritual of getting dressed in front of the whole world. It’s one of many daily tasks the Dauphine of France must undertake with an audience. She doubts she’ll ever get used to it.

Without a soul to confide in at court, she writes the contents of her mind to one of her sisters. She vents to Louisa, settled in Denmark, about the nonsense she dealt with every day of her life, and how she would not be surprised if it was suddenly decreed that she was not permitted to take a shit without being gawked at. Why, it would become the highest of privileges to wipe her ass for her after!

“I am certain,” she writes. “That there is scarcely a lady in this palace that has not had the privilege of seeing me in my most natural state. I sincerely hope it pleases them.”

The handing over of the chemise is a jealously guarded privilege that belongs to the highest ranking lady at the Dauphine’s dressing ceremony. This lady is apparently not obligated to arrive in time so that she may be present from the start of the ceremony onwards. What sometimes happens, then, is that as the social makeup of the room changes, the ceremony must adapt. If a parade of ladies, each grander than the one before, choose to drag their feet on the way to Trixie’s rooms, even if she’s caught with her arms outstretched, mere seconds from receiving her chemise, she must let it be passed about until the correct lady is able to hand it to her. It’s utterly ridiculous.

Initially, she gives the Comtesse the benefit of the doubt. She’s freshly arrived, so perhaps she wouldn’t know when it was time to assemble for her dressing. It may have also been news to her that, with them being so closely related, she could easily outrank every lady present upon arrival. Trixie knows how difficult it is to adapt, so she is willing to forgive.

Until she gets a look at her face.

The Comtesse is beautiful, with small, delicate features. Her nose is pointed down a little, but that does little to detract from the pleasing whole of her face. She’s a dark kind of beauty, striking enough that Trixie almost gasps. As comely as she is, the way the Comtesse smirks and locks eyes with Trixie sends an unpleasant chill down her spine. She knows full well that Trixie is standing there, completely exposed, shivering in front of all the ladies present and God. Yet she removes her gloves at an agonizingly slow pace.

By the time she deigns to hand Trixie her chemise, the Comtesse has already soured her day. Later, Trixie’s blood boils when she hears about her going around claiming the gloves were just too tight for quick removal.

A likely story!

Because Trixie habitually prefers to resolve conflict by stewing in her bitter juices for time immemorial, she does nothing in retaliation. The worst part is that she had hoped they’d be friends.

***

Maria Viola Giuseppina of Savoy, rechristened Marie Violette upon becoming Comtesse de Provence, is quick and bright, with an unreasonable level of self-assurance. As a princess from a relatively minor house, shuffled off to marry the current spare to the French throne, there is no reason for her to act so grand. But, despite the fact that she hadn’t been raised to be this way, Violette makes her way through the world as if seas ought to part for her.

Her mother, the quintessence of Spanish piety, always disapproved. She was taught to expect that her future would be dictated to her, and she ought to submit with grace, but Violette is not submissive by nature. And she never cared to cultivate that trait. There’s always been a hunger in her, a hunger for more than what she has. She wants to be exalted among women. Hell, even men.

At the rate things are going, whatever her fate had originally prescribed for her, she just might become Queen of France.

Violette has no personal quarrel with the Dauphine. They’ve hardly spoken, after all. It didn’t take long, though, for her to realize that she’s so lacking, the King had to send for reinforcements. She may have wound up here in time, but in a way she owes her current position to the Dauphine, and if she is not able to prove herself competent she may even owe her a crown.

Nobody has to know that her husband, being so grotesquely obese that he can barely walk unaided, is no more helpful in bringing about this glorious destiny than the hapless Dauphin. Only the promise of future greatness bids her to attempt her wifely duties, and all in vain.

Though no more capable, her husband still sees fit to needle his brother with constant, inaccurate boasts about the amount of activity their marriage bed sees over the course of a single day. So, Violette thought it might be fun to lay a small prank of her own on the Dauphine. She has to admit the look of impotent rage on the other girl’s face as she used the court’s own etiquette to tease her made her smile.

An unexpected gift arrives in the wake of her little stunt, to put a damper on her fun. The King’s sister in law, a former grand duchess of Russia now known to the French court as Madame, has presented her with a gorgeously embroidered pair of gloves.

There’s a note accompanying them, written in neat cursive: “I hope you find these more comfortable.”

Though a widow, Madame has been permitted to maintain the rank she held while her husband lived. As she remains closer in proximity to the current king, she outranks Violette. It may be true that the Dauphine also outranks her, but she does not see any wisdom in snubbing Madame. She can’t refuse her gift, as much as it irritates her to receive it.

***

Trixie wakes up with dread at the thought of seeing her sister in law so early in the day again. In the aftershock of the small slight she suffered, she has written a plaintive letter to Louisa, and a more witty letter to another one of her sisters, Augusta, to help ease her growing loneliness. The isolation of being a known disappointment to her new family is a tough patch of darkness to escape, though, even with all the solace she can find in writing to her sisters. She sees no need to trouble George, because she can’t imagine him providing her with the kind of sympathy she craves.

When it’s time to attend her dressing, Trixie senses a change in the room. The cause of it is soon attributed to a relation she has yet to see at the ceremony making her first appearance.

Madame had been pointed out to her at her wedding as her husband’s favourite aunt, the King’s one and only sister in law, and the second lady at court after herself. Trixie’s arrival, she was told, had demoted Madame from being the first lady at court, a rank she had held after the Dauphin’s mother had passed away. Already mortified by her inability to excel instantly at being Dauphine, Trixie had almost been compelled to apologize to her for this. Even so, in all their brief meetings, Trixie has not encountered even the smallest hint of hostility from Madame.

When they have the time to converse, it will be Madame who apologizes to her about not having attended to her sooner. She had been occupied in supporting her youngest step daughter as she made the choice to take the veil, and had retreated to another married step-daughter’s country home for a brief spell before returning to receive the Comtesse. By then, Trixie feels like there is nothing this woman needs to do to beg her forgiveness.

The Comtesse drags her feet on her way to her rooms once again, but it doesn’t matter. As long as Madame is there, the Comtesse’s arrival will not disturb the ceremony.

Madame smiles tenderly, and Trixie thinks she catches her winking as she hands over her chemise. Trixie feels like she is in the presence of an angel.

#rpdr fanfiction #trixie mattel #violet chachki #katya zamolodchikova #vixie #lesbian au #historical #eventual major character death #versailles #as the sun dies #fannyatrollop #royalty au #historical au

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illicien · 5 years

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Prelude to Night

Look I know this is clearly an IronStrangeFrost blog, but I’ve had this piece sitting around forever as the prelude to an IronStrange fic and I need to do something with it to try and motivate my ass to get writing the rest of the damn fic. So have some Mordo/Strange Vampire AU stuff. It is not happy. It is not cute. Don’t expect warm fluffies. Unless you get warm fluffies from dark stuff in which case - no judgement, you do you, I salute you. Rating: M Warnings: Blood, violence, manipulation/mind control, character death (sort of) Themes: Vampires (as inspired primarily by the World of Darkness/New World of Darkness, but look I read and write a lot of vampire stuff so there are influences from everywhere. I’m just also a dirty dirty LARPer and I spent years with WoD.) Pairings: Mordo/Strange

Notes: For Mordo/Strange shippers - I’m sorry this is literally all I have for you right now! As I said this was the prelude to an IronStrange fic. But y’all are damn valid and I see you!!

For IronStrange shippers - I’m also sorry this is all I have for you right now! If you’re interested, I will do my best to get on finishing this darn fic. But dangit, I derive most of my motivation from readers and collaborators, and keeping things to myself like this usually just leads me into a writer’s block.

Now then, on with the story...

Most people don’t know what it means to be unmade. Most people hadn’t descended the way he had.

At first it had been little steps, one at a time. A staircase into darkness. He didn’t know what had happened at first it was such a small thing. So simple.

He mistook it for falling in love at first sight. They caught each other’s eyes across a room and there was a magnetism that drove him to approach the other man. It wasn’t as though he normally would have avoided everyone at the party, but his mind and heart pulled him to the other in a way he hadn’t felt before - he didn’t simply want to speak with the other, he’d needed to.

They spent the night talking. The man knew who he was, that was no surprise at a function like this. It was a gathering of medical professionals and he wasn’t precisely unknown or an unusual person to see at these kinds of gatherings, and the stranger was more than happy to engage him on a great number of subjects from experimental procedures to the intricacies of navigating med school.

While the other showed no interest in drinking, he’d definitely shown an interest in the Doctor’s advancements - not in a way that seemed amused or condescending, but also not in an overeager way. He was refined, almost too elegant about things as he offered a hand to the Doctor to lead him elsewhere. Tipsy and utterly enamored as he was, he’d followed.

It was a memory he’d never forget, a beautiful memory. He was lost in a sea of sensation, disconnected from his own body, unfamiliar with what he was experiencing. The other wasn’t gentle with him, he bit and clawed at him, encouraging reciprocation and the moment the man’s blood touched his tongue he’d felt stronger - empowered.

Different.

From that night he’d been trapped.

The Baron had been prepared for him, looking for him quite specifically. He’d had his reasons and despite the Doctor’s oaths they began to slip. There were more pressing things than simply saving lives. The Baron had needs and it was the Doctor’s pleasure to fill those needs. It was a compulsion.

At first it was as simple as letting him siphon off his blood - a little at a time, they were both well enough aware of the limitations of his body, despite the changes he’d gone through. The Baron would show up once a week in the evenings wherever the Doctor was, and more often than not the Doctor made himself available at home for it.

He’d found it much more pleasant to feed the man at home where he could disappear into the bliss of sex even though it often left the Doctor to fall asleep and awaken again alone, mostly healed up and otherwise patched up. Well enough to work.

Eventually the Baron came more often but it wasn’t for blood. Not his anyway. The Doctor began to sneak bags of blood from the hospital at the Baron’s wish. One or two here and there, nothing dramatic but enough to sate the man at first - enough to earn him a smile, praise, signs of pleasure. There was a pride that swelled in the Doctor each time, like a well trained dog.

In hindsight that was all he was. A dog.

His master’s blood in his system wasn’t enough when he went over the edge. It healed the superficial wounds - enough so that the paramedics at first were confused by his state - but without being able to see the Baron, to taste his power, there was no saving him. And his master didn’t come.

There was only so much that could be done. During the time he spent in hospital there was no sign of the Baron, and his hands resembled something more like claws than hands by the time he was released. They’d been clear - his scans had been clear - he’d never be able to perform surgery again.

They trembled such that he could barely lift a glass of water at first and then they trembled for his fury at that knowledge, and the desperation to see his master again. He spent weeks alone, angry, frustrated and lost without guidance. The rare occasion someone arrived, he felt his heart surge in anticipation before dropping back into its misery as he sent visitors away, content to disappear into his solitude as he awaited his master.

It was two months before the man appeared, green robes and skin that seemed almost a part of the night, brown eyes piercing through him in the dark. But the broken man could feel it, a surge of hope for only the briefest of moments.

The Baron didn’t smile as he approached the place the broken man slumped with his hands cradled against him in shame. A strong hand ran into his hair, grasping firmly to tilt his head back watching him sternly a moment before tsking quietly into the night. The broken man allowed his head to be adjusted to the man’s pleasure, intent on proving he was still of use - he still had something to give, even if his title no longer granted him the access he’d had before.

He still bled and the Baron knew it.

“Please help,” the broken man had whispered as his head was rolled to one side, baring his throat and the Baron simply hummed in thought.

“I cannot fix your hands, Stephen.” His voice was calm and quiet even as he knelt beside the broken man, his other hand gentle on the broken man’s scruffy face. “Not like this.”

“I can still be useful,” he insisted, sounding desperate to his own ears, and the hand on his face moved to silence him.

“Not as you are. Perhaps if you become more.” The brush of lips along his neck left him to shiver, relaxing entirely into the man’s hold.

The Baron’s bite was not gentle. It was fierce in a way the broken man had never felt before, the fangs tore into his neck painfully but he didn’t protest, emitting a small whimper as he slumped against his master. The other showed no restraint - he didn’t pull back, holding him firmly in place when he started to struggle slightly, his head growing light and the cold he’d felt in his hands beginning to creep through the rest of his body.

He opened his mouth as realization hit: the Baron wasn’t going to stop. He was taking much more from him than he’d taken before and he felt his heart begin to hammer heavily in his chest.

“You’re-!” The hand on his face grasped at him more firmly, covering his mouth and silencing his verbal panic.

The Baron was killing him. He was going to die. Even as he attempted to struggle he was held more firmly, the glass behind him cracking in testament to the strength with which he was being restrained, his jaw echoing the sound when he tried to struggle further.

His vision grew steadily more bleary as the Baron dug more firmly into his neck, a feeling that was once accompanied by pleasure becoming absolute torment. A little at a time he was dying and the harder his heart beat in his chest the closer he raced to his death. The broken man could barely keep himself upright, not that it mattered for the strength that pinned him in place.

Eventually his eyelids were too heavy to stay open and the hand released his face, fangs and the warmth of the other man’s mouth leaving him.

At first he thought he’d be left alone just like that, his body twitching and shuddering by no strength of his own - and then warmth came. A drop on his lips and then his head was tilted back and the warmth filled his mouth. A hand massaged his throat, encouraging the liquid down his throat.

He didn’t know how long, how much, but eventually the warmth was brushed over the gashes in his neck and the other pulled away again, leaving the broken man to slump into a heap on the floor. He was dying… he was really dying. The liquid - his master’s blood - wasn’t going to do anything to replenish the blood he’d lost. There was no means by which his stomach would divert the blood to his veins - to his failing heart.

“Whether you survive or not is up to you.” He vaguely heard the Baron speak, his voice growing quieter as he walked away. “Find me if you wake up.”

And he was alone.

His heartbeat had slowed, his body was heavy and his head was light all at once. Tears burned down his cheeks as consciousness came and went, and any joy he’d felt at the knowledge that he’d improbably survived his car crash felt wasted. He would die now instead.

He’d been abandoned and left to die alone.

Yup. So that’s my intro. Needed to get that off my chest. Maybe I can finally get my butt back to working on the rest of the darn fic now and some juicy juicy IronStrange.

#MCU Fanfiction #MCU Fanfic #<1500 words #MCU Vampire AU #Vampire AU #Stephen Strange #Karl Mordo #Baron Mordo #Doctor Strange #Mordo x Strange #MordoStrange #TW Violence #TW Blood #To be honest it's a vampire fic if you didn't expect blood idk what to tell you #Fic Intro #Narrator Has Limited Insight #TW Manipulation #TW Mind Control

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

_ One great advantage of not needing money is that you are looking for Larry and Sergey. I thought studying philosophy would be a shambles. He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because it's an early instance of what will become a common pattern.1 That's a big advantage.2 The latter is much more damping. The idea sounds horrible, doesn't it? In the average car restoration you probably do make it.3 The whole thing was only a couple thousand left. You could call it Work Day.

You'll pay more for Internet services than you do.4 How do you find the right sort of person you are, you should probably pack investor meetings too closely, you'll have to earn your keep.5 9 years it was my job to predict whether a startup would usually become profitable only after raising and spending quite a lot of things e. There is not an ordinary economic relationship than companies being sued for violating the DMCA, part of the job; but it is not clear whether you can actually get work done. Wealth is defined democratically.6 As jobs become more specialized—more articulated—as they develop, and startups should simply ignore other companies' patents. Design by committee is a synonym for very. But I suspect it's the startup world. I'm still not sure whether he thought AI required math, or whether contractors count too.7 This is usually done to make the region a center of scholarship and industry which have been closely tied for longer than most people think. And indeed, that might be at different companies. The early adopters you need to use a more succinct language, and adults use them all the time, and both the headers and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively.

And more to the point where they're issued, we may in some cases it's possible to be part of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of people fast.8 If all companies were essentially similar, but some of the other programmers what language to use, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected. Till now, nearly all humans find human faces engaging. But if you talk too loosely about very abstract ideas—they continued to spam me or a network I was part of, Hostex itself would be recognized as a spam term. Bill Yerazunis. Which means if the qualities that made it hard to come up with startup ideas on demand. And since no one is doing them yet. Though most founders start out excited about the Internet is the primary medium. They're just a couple guys started on the side of making the software run on the client. Impossible? Measurement alone is not enough. In another year you'll be making $80k a month instead of $160k.9

But I don't see why it ought to be writing about them. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can show you only things that are missing. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people who are bad at deciding what to do once you've thought of it. I'd like to reply with another question: why were the exit polls cooked the books after seeing the actual returns. And once you start raising money, for example, does not seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best people that Google and Apple are doing so much better than me.10 It's intended for college students and you decide to move to your silicon valley like to get money. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. At Viaweb our whole site was organized like a funnel, directing people to the test drive.11 The ones who keep going are driven by exit strategies. You start being an adult when you decide to focus on working with other students. But there's a magic in small things that goes beyond such rational explanations. So the fact that so many people refer deals to him is that his company was not the conclusion Aristotle's successors derived from works like the Metaphysics, but that there can even be such a test?

At MIT in the mid 90s a fellow grad student of my friends are starting to feel like a little bit in the commitment department, and that was called playing. Systematic is the last word after all.12 Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle, even the smartest students leave school thinking they have to say yes.13 The unsexy filter is to ask, could one open-source browser. Are Clueless A lot of startups don't want to sell, they take you up, no competitor can keep you down.14 Some switched from driving Ford sedans to driving small imported cars, and they're clearly it. In Lisp, functions are first class objects.15 Whereas now the phrase already read seems almost ill-formed. US News list is meaningful is precisely because they attract so much attention. The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many still make you register to read stories.

Kids know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end. The professors will establish scholarly journals and publish one another's papers. A fair number of smart people too, but again, diluted; there are lots of potential winners, from which a few actual winners emerge with hyperlinear certainty. I go to bed leaving code with a bug in code you just wrote. How much is that extra attention worth?16 He was one of few they had that we didn't even know they were recording. And if things go well, this shouldn't matter. We just took it for granted. The random college kid you talk to, but instead of pursuing this thought they tended to be at least some super-angels don't like. If you work on changes you. After we were bought by Yahoo, the customer support people and hackers.

Notes

For example, if your school, and partly because you can eliminate, do it is.

It would be to say that Watt reinvented the steam engine.

If you believe in free markets, they made more margin loans. 166. Analects VII: 36, Fung trans.

In a startup: one kind that evolves into Facebook is a very misleading number, because the remedy was to become one of the biggest company of all, economic inequality. That's the lower bound.

After reading a draft, Sam Altman points out that there is some weakness in your country controlled by the fact that the probabilities of features i. When one reads about the nature of server-based applications greatly to be delivering results.

5 mentions prices ranging from designers to programmers to electrical engineers. For most of them consistently make money, the term copyright colony was first used by Myles Peterson. Financing a startup is a matter of outliers, and are paid a flat rate regardless of the court.

Parker, William R. There may even be tempted, but it doesn't seem to someone in 1880 that schoolchildren in 1980 would be on the Internet worm of 1988 infected 6000 computers.

8 says that 15-20% of the edge? Not startup ideas, because unions will exert political pressure to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a face-saving compromise. They'll be more like determination is proportionate to wd m-k w-d n, where there is one of a powerful syndicate, you create wealth in a signal.

It didn't work out a chapter at a 3 year old, a player who persists in trying such things can be compared, per capita income in England in 1750 was higher than India's in 1960. But that is not to. Delivered as if having good intentions were enough to answer the question is only half a religious one; there is one you take out your anti-dilution provisions, even though it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. But that oversimplifies his role.

And perhaps even worse in the Ancient World, Economic History Review, 2:9 1956,185-199, reprinted in Finley, M. This is almost always bullshit.

It was common in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, go ahead.

The meaning of a place to exchange views. The reason you don't, but in fact the less educated parents seem closer to a new version of Word 13.

I know for sure which these will be better for explaining software than English. Most unusual ambitions fail, no one is going to work in research too. P supermarket chain because it was because he was exaggerating. I've twice come close to 18% of GDP were about the other hand, he wrote a program to generate series A rounds from top VC funds whether it was overvalued till you run through all the combinations of Web plus a three hour meeting with a face-saving compromise.

You can safely write off all the East Coast. The need has to give each customer the impression that the only way to tell how serious potential investors and they were saying scaramara instead of bookmarking. Information is too general. If a company with rapid, genuine growth is valuable, and all those 20 people at once, and all the money.

Garry Tan pointed out that successful startups have elements of both consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and stir.

But the money.

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damnit-samnit · 5 years

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Chapter 24 Preview

Hola! Here’s a preview for chapter 24. I’m still working on the last bit of the chapter and expanding some areas. Hopefully I’ll have it done by tomorrow (or maybe even tonight but remember, take what I say with a grain of salt, I’m an optimist but my optimism often makes me a liar).

Also, it looks like I lost my italicized formatting pasting it over and I don’t feel like fixing it because I’m writing lmao so I apologize for that

- - -

“You know, I thought you would eventually move to Tokyo…” A squealing sound rang out as packaging tape was pulled off of its roll. “Come be around everyone else. Musutafu’s closer but…”

You looked up from the dishes you had been carefully stacking and wrapping in towels.

“Exactly -- Musutafu is a bit closer to Tokyo,” you said, catching Yume’s eye as she reached for a marker. “I’m excited. It’ll be nice to get out of Kamino. New job. New city. A clean slate.”

“You had a new job and Tokyo could have been a new city--”

“This will be good for me,” you continued airily, once again interjecting before she could work herself into another tangent deriding your judgment. You’d been working on dodging them all day. “You’ll see. My gut is telling me this is the right decision.”

Catching on that you were purposely cutting her off, Yume grumbled under her breath and you did your best to ignore it, assuming she was still a bit bitter over your departure from your relatively short stint at Odaiba Research.

When you had finally broken down and given her the news a handful of days back, that you had decided to leave your position, she reacted pretty much how you expected -- angrily. Disappointedly. It was obvious the feelings she had weren’t derived from someplace dark or hurtful, she just thought you were making a dumb decision.

Maybe you were.

But ultimately it was your decision to make.

She had spent a good portion of your dinner that night trying to reason with you, to goad you into reconsidering: How could you leave Odaiba!? Working there was a dream for many a scientist. To be given such an amazing opportunity and just toss aside so easily…

Not only that, Yume had gone to bat for you -- she talked you up, talked your skillset up. How would your departure reflect on her?

Eventually, you revealed your ‘good’ news -- that you had already accepted a position elsewhere and had already given notice to Doctor Kravitz and the team that you were leaving as soon as possible.

It was done.

You were just telling her as a courtesy.

For about of week after that less-than-friendly dinner, you ignored one another other, each stewing over the actions of the other. You were far too impulsive. She was far too close-minded.

Yume broke first, though, texting you.

Then, she took you out for ice cream.

Moving, however, hadn’t been a thought-out decision. You received notice that the lease for your lab space was coming up for renewal, with a slight increase in the rent price. It had been months since you had been there, having lost all desire to invent and having no commissions to work on.

It was the idealist in you that ultimately convinced you to, finally, give up your lab. Nothing was quite the same after your almost-brush with death over a… disagreement regarding the quality of your work. Although you always knew death and/or injury was a possibility while working with villains, it wasn’t until you were actually burned that it clicked in your mind that yes, you could actually die. It was a very real peril. Your, ‘come on, what are the odds?’ reasoning could no longer be used as the odds were, apparently, pretty good.

Luck had gotten you out of that situation with your life and that ace in the hole could no longer be played.

It was a long time coming, anyway, you had reasoned. The past several months had been alluding to the fact. You had turned down commissions, you no longer felt any desire to cash in on under the table money.

You wanted a normal life void of any secrets or skeletons.

It was funny how appealing being another cog in the machine had suddenly become.

Quite suddenly after reaching the decision of shutting down shop, that same vein of thought also goaded you into moving altogether. Don’t just close the lab -- break the lease on your apartment early. Get out of Kamino. Start over. You would lose your deposit and have to pay a fee, sure, but you would also be free.

After Power Loader promised that, yes, you still had a job and he wasn’t going renegade on the offer, you found a nice little rental house in Musutafu in a neighborhood geared toward families. All things considered, you were making more money at Power Loader’s lab as you had only been an apprentice at Odaiba (though, had you been brought on fulltime as was always teased, you would have made bank… and you didn’t quite want to think about that).

It seemed like a good, responsible decision.

You didn’t have a lot of time -- once you signed the lease on your new humble abode, and you broke the lease on your Kamino apartment, you only had two weeks to pack up years worth of junk and move, which made you regret your decisions immensely as moving was the absolute worst.

Then, entirely all too soon, two weeks was up.

You had been working down to the wire -- the last day you were allowed in your apartment was the day the movers showed up to lug all your boxes and furniture away. Before you went to go hand your keys over to the building manager for good, you stood in the living room surveying the skeletal remains of your home.

The apartment in all its mediocrity -- blemishes to the drywall, the bubbling paint along the creases of the ceiling, the creaky doors, the drafty windows -- was your home. Half-hearted fantasies about moving somewhere nicer had come true but you hadn’t been prepared for the strange lament that had settled in your heart during your goodbye.

It was an apartment.

You ignored the whispers of recollections moving around the empty room. Of scarfing down take-out on the floor with Yume when you first moved in and had almost no furniture. Of burning curtains and scorch marks on the floor thanks to misfired inventions prior to signing for your lab space. Of sleepovers and illnesses and late-night visitors and movie nights and broken furntiure and broken doors and--

It was the comforting presence of your apartment that you were sad to see go. You were a hermit crab exchanging a shell -- leaving felt weird only because you weren’t used to the new place. But you would be. It’ll be just as much of a home.

You sighed when the door clicked behind you for the last time, staring at the front door.

It felt like the end of an era.

You were moving into your silver age.

- - -

“So… last time we talked you had just moved into your new apartment. Tell me about that, how do you like it so far?”

You shifted slightly on the couch so you could sit on your hands, eyes flickering between your knees and the large-eyed man in front of you.

“It’s good,” you said with an uncomfortable grin, trying to convince yourself to not be so… closed up. It was what, your third session with your shrink? You had decided to sign up for therapy by your own volition, you had been the one to schedule the sessions, so why were you so… guarded when it came to talking with him? You were basically throwing money away if you weren’t going to use the time.

“You’ve got to give me a little more than just good,” he said, knowing eyes peering from behind even-larger glasses.

“It’s nice,” you tried again. “Leagues better than my old apartment but it’s still a little drafty. One of my neighbors has a little boy and he told me the other day that my house is haunted.”

“Oh!” Your therapist’s eyes crinkled with humor while you rolled yours.

“Wasn’t thrilled about that conversation.”

“But otherwise, your neighbors, you get along with them?”

“More or less. I live on the corner and I’ve only said hello to the family next to me in passing. There’s a pretty big fence separating our houses.”

“And the job is treating you well?” At that question, you cracked an actual smile. “Well, that’s a good reaction. Your whole aura completely changed.” He sat back, glancing up to the ceiling, rubbing his tongue across the roof of his mouth. “Tastes… like apple juice? Reassuring. So you’re comfortable there?”

“I think so,” you said, the smile still there. “It’s only been, what, a month? But I really like it there. It’s very… calm.”

“Calm?”

“Calm.”

“And you like the calm?”

“I think I do, yeah.”

“You think you do?”

“Well…” you shifted your jaw. “I don’t think I’m good under pressure. I used to think I was but… I don’t think I am. But I kept throwing myself into situations and jobs where there was a lot of pressure on my shoulders. This is a good change of pace.”

“I like what you just said there,” your shrink said, wagging a finger at you. “That bit of self-reflection at the end. Expand on that.”

You chuckled awkwardly, freeing a hand to rub at your knee.

“Sour. Tart,” the therapist observed, frowning, tongue clicking. “Lemons. Why the change? What makes you uncomfortable? The subject or talking about yourself?”

“A little bit of both. I guess I’m a little disappointed in myself for giving up and… accepting defeat?”

“Defeat?” He shook his head. “Don’t think of this as a win and lose situation. Life’s not a fight. Instead, look at it as playing on your strengths and weaknesses. You weren’t happy but now you are.”

“For now--” you ventured to say, earning a snort of disgust from the man sitting across from you.

“Don’t assume everything is fleeting. Accept and appreciate now. You’re happy now. You live in a house in a nice neighborhood.” He raised his thumb. “You have a job that mentally stimulates you and brings you joy.” He raised his pointer finger. “You’re in a good headspace -- your aura was bright when you walked in. Nothing was bogging you down.” His middle finger joined the others. “Name something else that’s been giving you joy?”

“My friends threw me a house warming party last weekend?”

“Friends are taking time to celebrate your achievements,” he said with a nod, lifting another finger in the air. “You know what, let’s go for five. Give me one more positive. Did you start up your kung fu lessons again?”

“Kung fu?” You blinked. “Oh, Krav Maga. No… uh, not yet.”

He frowned at you -- last session, you had admitted to your short ‘personal betterment’ stint with Krav Maga lessons after a situation with a villain. When you refused to elaborate on the villain portion of your story (you weren’t about to cop to any… misdeeds you may have done in the past), he instead started pushing you on why you had dropped Krav Maga -- why did you eventually just stop? Why don’t you start up again?

He was adamant you develop some sort of hobby.

“I started knitting again?” you offered a half-truth. You had purchased yarn online the day prior but hadn’t made anything. In fact, your knitting supplies were still packed away in one of the boxes you had yet to go through.

The large-eyed man openly smacked his lips, unamused.

“Overripe,” he said.

You sighed.

“Okay -- I’m going to. I bought yarn, I just have to unpack it.”

“I’d prefer if you did something physical though,” he grumbled. “Yoga? Running? Tai Chi? Something to get you moving. It’s not just about taking care of the mind, the body is just as important too. And exercise will help balance your mind.”

You drew your mouth into a tight line.

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Fine.”

“I’m gonna ask about it next session. Now, give me one more positive…”

“One more…” You really had to think, which your therapist noted. “One more…”

Nothing came to you. When it became clear you were tapped out of ideas, he jotted something down.

“Fine, I’ll accept four today. But next time we meet, I want you to come with five positives of the week ready to go, alright?”

“Alright.”

He regarded the topmost section of the notebook, where notes from your last meeting were written neatly.

Metal. Salted Earth.

A taste that sometimes lingered in the back of his throat during the answers and stories you shared with him. It had exploded across his tongue when you had danced around the specifics of your villain altercation but otherwise, it had been muted.

He wanted to know what it meant.

But, he decided not to ask about what, or who, the taste represented. Your relationship was not as… forthright as it would probably need to be. You weren’t comfortable enough with him yet.

“Okay,” he said, breathing in deeply through his nose, tapping his pencil on his knee. “Why don’t we talk about something outside of work. What have you done in Mustafa is new to you -- have you explored the city?”

“Well…” You scratched at your nose. “My boss took me and his… assistant out to dinner the other day. That was a hoot.”

“Bubblegum!” Your therapist said, lighting up. “You had a good time! Tell me a little about that!

- - -

The train ride home wasn’t crowded. At your station, you swung into a nearby corner store to pick up a couple bananas -- you were craving them now thanks to your therapist’s ‘overripe’ comment.

Banana bread would be divine right now.

The store didn’t have any bananas or bananas bread, so you grabbed a couple of banana milk, hoping it would be enough to sate you.

It was… nice how unhurried and relaxed you felt as you walked home that afternoon. It was your day off and there was no dread hanging over you about missed calls and avalanching emails. The lingering anxiety in your gut had abated a few weeks back -- you felt lighter.

The little neighbor boy who told you that your house was haunted was out on the street when you rounded the corner, sliding a red car back and forth against the asphalt in front of your house. He stopped his playing as your approached, standing up.

“Hello miss,” he greeted solemnly.

“Hello, little Sato,” you said, stopping and giving him the same respectful greeting. “I like your car.”

“Thank you, my baa-baa gave it to me.”

You nodded, giving the boy a brief smile before turning toward your house, prepared to leave him to his playing.

“You had visitors come to your door but you weren’t home,” Sato said, following you. You quirked a brow at him.

“Hm? Really?”

Visitors? Was it people from the rental company?

“Policemen!”

You stopped turning the key in the lock of your front door.

You glanced back down at the boy.

“Policemen?” you repeated and Sato’s face lit up -- he eagerly nodded his head.

“I told them you weren’t home. Well, first they asked me if I knew your name and I told them I did. Then I told them you weren’t home. And then my dad came out and they asked him about you too!”

“Your dad…” You swallowed, heart squeezing. “They asked your dad some questions?” You forced a smile. “DId you happen to hear… what kind of questions?”

“They asked if you made things and my dad said you worked with the hero Power Loader!” For added effect, he punched the air beside him, body twisting and following after his arm.

“Did they ask him anything else?”

Sato stopped his full-body punching, choosing to purse his lips as he stared up at you. You stared back, unease traveling across your body.

Come on, think kid.

“When you moved in,” he said, squinting his eyes. “My dad said you were nice. I told them about the ghost, in case they were here for that. Oh! If you have a lot of visitors. If it seems like you invent in your house. Dad said he didn’t think so.”

Shit.

“Sato!”

A female voice drifted from up the street and the boy’s head whipped in the direction of his house.

“Sorry miss, I gotta go get my lunch.”

“No, no, no, it’s fine Sato.” You waved the boy off. He walked a few steps before stopping and grinning. “Oh, they also said they’re coming back, miss. So don’t worry!”

Only when you were safely inside your entryway did you allow yourself to openly panic.

You knew their visit had to be related to your under-the-table work. Someone must have been arrested and blabbed about where they had gotten their gear. And the police had found you! Though, it’s not like you were living off the grid -- you probably weren’t hard to track down.

Shit.

What were you going to do?

You dropped your plastic bag of banana milk on your kitchen counter, pacing around the room, hands combing through your hair.

Oh no. Oh no, no, no.

You were going to go to jail.

Undoubtedly, you were going to lose your license.

You had just moved. You had a new job. You were going to lose all of that.

You were fucked. You were royally fucked.

Who could it have been, though? Who could have been arrested? You pulled out your phone, staring at the darkened screen as your jittery brain tried to piece together cohesive thoughts. Your fingers were shaking.

If you knew who it was, who had gotten arrested, you could work on an alibi. At the very least drum up a reason why you didn’t know them.

But no familiar names came up on the hero news sites. Could it have been someone small time?

Eventually, you paced your way out to your living room.

Fate had marked you. If villains weren’t going to get you, the law was going to get you.

And you were trying to be good!

Desperately, you were trying!

That wasn’t going to matter though. You needed… a lawyer, right? In crime TV shows, bad guys always want their lawyer present and requesting one usually stumped the police. Okay, a lawyer. What kind of lawyer? What were the charges you were facing?

In your panic, a naive idea came to mind.

You knew someone who could help.

With the weight of the world back on your shoulders, shamelessly you found his number and called him.

He could help you out of this. You knew he could.

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wardoftheedgeloaves · 5 years

Text

A smaller scale instance of reconstruction bias which I’m aware of comes from Iroquoian sibilants. Proto-Iroquoian is reconstructed with *ts and *s only, and this is basically unchanged in Cherokee, and is traditionally projected to Proto-Northern-Iroquoian as well. However, almost all of the Northern languages undergo a shift, whereby prot-Iroquoian *ts only remains as an affricate before *i and *j, elsewhere shifting to *s, which in some languages merges with original *s while in others the original *s was retracted to a shibilant, maintaining the contrast. Tuscarora-Nottoway on the other hand shows instead /t͡ʃ θ s/ where the other languages show these reflexes of /t͡s~t͡ʃ s s~ʃ/.

Now as it currently stands with the traditional reconstruction most of the northern languages underwent a common identical change (with relatively little effect on the subgrouping otherwise) which has extremely strange conditioning - which should deaffrication be blocked by *i/*j of all things? Instead, a much more typologically reasonable explanation can be found by proposing instead tha the Tuscarora system is the original PNI system, with the sibilant shifts currently posited to be between PNI and Tuscarora instead being backdated to the change from PI to PNI. From there we can simply derive the reflexes in the other languages through typologically more reasonable shifts of /θ/ > /s/ and /s/ > /ʃ/.

(from @frislander)

Ooh, good catch. The problem is: why would you get *θ > ts in Cherokee? Edit: Attested in Finnish, apparently... @possessivesuffix, chime in?

You correctly identify that there’s some really weird patterning going on with Iroquois sibilants. From Julian (2010), it appears that *s never appeared alone--it was always preceded by another consonant, usually *h. if there wasn’t another option.

Now Julian very much does things from the bottom-up, which is good practice but means you have to hunt around for correspondences (e.g. Cherokee is compared to Proto-Northern-Iroquoian). Happily, there are tables provided for the Northern Iroquoian languages. So let’s take a look.

There are two models for the breakup of Northern Iroquoian. One is the Mithunian model, in which Tuscarora-Nottaway breaks away from “Proto-Lake-Iroquoian”, the upstate New York languages like Oneida and Mohawk. Julian employs one in which there is no separate Lake Iroquoian, based on there being no shared phonological innovations and “arguably no morphological innovations” defining the group. Another issue is that, depending on what isogloss you pick, you can find a phonological innovation splitting Northern Iroquoian into basically any phylogeny you’d like:

The only isoglosses that define Tuscarora apart from Lake Iroquoian are preservation of *n before the cluster *sh (Julian implies that at least one dialect of Tuscarora also has this change but I can’t find any such in the chapter on Tuscarora and it didn’t happen in Nottoway) and /θ/ before velars and *ɹ where Lake Iroquoian has (h)s (but apparently not found in Lower Cayuga).

Nottoway is known to us from a list of 200 words, is closely related to Tuscarora, and reflects both *ts and *(h)s as /s/.

OK, but returning to the Northern Iroquoian patterning of *ts and *s. So, preconsonantally, all of the Lake Iroquoian languages appear to have reflexes of *ts that are indistinguishable from what you’d expect *(h)s to give you. So let’s try to ignore Julian’s reconstructions for a sec here, though I’ll have to use them for reference, and make a list of the segments in question, along with a few others that Julian mentions in the section on Proto-Iroquoian consonant clusters. Let’s look at Lake Iroquoian first:

Huron seems to have /š/ for prevocalic *s no matter what the following vowel is, and it was isolated on the other side of Lake Ontario from the rest of Lake Iroquoian. And the rest of Lake Iroquoian seems to have had some shared innovations, such as stop voicing, which Huron does not--though Tuscarora also has stop voicing.

OK, let’s look at Tuscarora. Tuscarora has /č/ corresponding to Proto-Lake-Iroquoian *ts, which only occurs before /i i: j/, and /θ/ corresponding to Proto-Lake-Iroquoian *s, which occurs elsewhere. It has /(h)s/ where Proto-Lake-Iroquoian has *(h)š, which occurred in both environments. Before consonants, it shows /θ/.

The implication here...I think...is that Proto-Northern-Iroquoian had a pretty weird sibilant system. It had a three-way contrast between /č s ʰš/. In Nottaway, *s *ʰš merged to /s/. In Tuscarora, they chain-shift *ʰš *s > ʰs θ. In Northern Iroquoian, *č becomes /ts/, and *ʰš depalatalizes south of Lake Ontario. Furthermore, *č only existed before *i *i: *j. This is confusing and it gets into the problem I wrote about yesterday where the first reconstruction to come out lives rent-free in its successors’ heads and I can’t not think of these sounds in Julian’s terms.

Now let’s add Cherokee into the mix. Cherokee has hs where Proto-Northern-Iroquoian has *hš. It has ts where PNI has č or s, but PNI *(h)sn (Julian’s *tsn, Tuscarora θn) is cognate to Cherokee hst. PNI *čj (Julian’s *tsj-) is Cherokee ts, with loss of yod.

Interestingly, there don’t seem to be any consonant clusters of the form *(h)sC (Julian’s *tsC) with Cherokee cognates except for *(h)sn-. Also, if we prefer to reconstruct *čj before non-high vowels, then yod drops in this environment everywhere in the family except Onondaga, Oneida and every dialect of of Mohawk except Tyendinaga Mohawk. Onondaga territory is right next to Oneida. There’s a study on Mohawk dialects in a book called Extending the Rafters: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquoian Studies that I don’t have access to, and I don’t know where Tyendinaga Mohawk was spoken before the American Revolution (after which, having sided with the British, they relocated to Canada). It seems possible, though, that if the Tyendinaga were originally from the western edge of the Mohawk area, then you could chalk up what looks like yod retention to an unpacking of *č to tsj in a fairly small area in central upstate New York. (edit: also, yod unpacking/retention seems to have occurred in Six Nations Mohawk).

My head hurts and I’ll have to revisit all this tomorrow. Alternatively, you reconstruct original *tʃ *ts *s with an early change *s > ʃ / h_ in Northern Iroquoian. *ts is not found before high vowels or yod. Also there are some morphemes that just seem to have weird reflexes that don’t line up, like *-ts- ‘coincident’ which gives you /ʃ/ in Huron.

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popculturespiritwow · 5 years

Text

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #29: WHAT IF THANOS JUST WANTED TO KILL HIMSELF?

Sakhmet like a queen before her people, resplendent, except Can We Get Costumes Down Here A Second, Sakhmet’s got a little bit of Schmutz on her Gown.

UH HUH

It’s just one panel, but for the first time since her “death”, Laura speaks to us.

Though that’s as internal as we get, much of this issue ends up more or less from her point of view. We get Baal’s first performance and Sakhmet’s – which turn out to be a memory of Laura’s, followed later by an early a memory of hers with Sakhmet, her reflecting aloud with Cass about the nature of her relationship with Sakhmet. Then we follow her through an evening of unwelcome Pity Partying.

(I don’t know that I ever fully appreciated the presumption of tweeting a condolence at someone you don’t know. Wow is it awful.)

In the midst of all this we get the clearest sense of what Laura has been up to with Sakhmet, a combination of self-destruction – “It was like having an angel of death as a girlfriend” (yikes) and the search for if not understanding, connection -- “We got to be doomed together”.

(How many relationships could be described that way, I wonder, when you get right down to it? 'I feel trapped and being with someone else who felt the same made that temporarily more bearable.’)

I found myself wondering at some point what is with the issue of doubles – Laura trying to numb/erase herself with Fauxciver, Baal breaking in on Sakhnot? For me, it has the slightly sour air of decadence of a band just a hair past its prime. Instead of inspiring people or the gods to new things, there’s that sense of returning to old i.e. tired paradigms. It’s akin to Lucifer in 455 AD, the characters trapped, and Persephone similarly trying to escape, but doing so once again not by walking away and breaking the cycle, but by trying to get wasted on sad, derivative forms.

GOD GAMES

For as much as the issue centers on and around Persephone, in the background we’ve got every god but Baphomet active in a worrisome way.

Ammy, having once again fled the scene, plays dumb about what happened. That’s definitely going to end well. Meanwhile Baal not only embraces Ananke’s Snap Crackle Head Pop, but insists Minerva learn it. That’s definitely going to end well.

Elsewhere, The Morrigan admits yeah, Baphomet didn’t know what he was in for. That’s definitely going to end well. But she also notes that Cassandra did the same thing – which I would not have wanted to believe (#TeamNorns) except it’s followed by Cassandra explaining herself to her Norns.

We don’t get a reaction or comment from them. Based on everything else, I’m sure that’ll end well. Just like Dio deciding to go full Buddha-Jesus savior or Woden, who appears in just one panel in the whole issue, making an offer to help out. Guys, he’s learned his lesson, he’s a helper, if you need recording gear or help nullifying a god’s ability, he can help. How could that not end well?

As much of the plot of this arc is a hunt for Sakhmet, it also reminds me of a whodunit, in that right at the start we meet all the possible killers (and the one we have to be worried about brilliantly played down), but with the twist that we don’t even know there’s going to be a crime yet.

THE ARTIST CONSUMED BY THEIR WORDS

Coming on the heels of 455AD, the other thing that stands out so strongly is the way The Morrigan, too, has turned herself from person into role, complete with strangely poetic diction – “the cat cannot escape the cage in her head”, “Morrigan and my foolish king have squabbled” -- her always fabulous costuming and this idea of herself as queen of the realm.

It’s not constant; we still get glimpses of a more modern voice.

But in general Marian, too, seems more and more lost to her personas. George and Martha, sad sad sad.

#wicdiv #kieron gillen #jamie mckelvie #Sakhmet Schmutz

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lordandladybridgerton · 6 years

Text

The Angry Tide - Chapter Eleven

What really went down on the trip home to Cornwall...

Major book spoiler under the cut

Part III

Torrential December rain flooded the road near Marlborough, and Ross and Caroline’s coach was held up for a day. Sunday the 8th they spent in Plymouth and they knew that tomorrow they’d be home.

They had dined together each day and supped together together pleasantly each evening and had talked of many subjects from the insanity of the Czar to the tax on horses; but they had kept off personal issues. Ross found Caroline an agreeable companion, witty when she talked but economical of speech. She didn’t have Demelza’s small conversation.

They were sleeping at the Fountain Inn, and dining in one of the comfortable boxes with the red plush sheets and walnut table; and eventually it was Ross who for the first time drew aside the polite veil that existed between them. He reminded Caroline of the meeting he had contrived between Dwight and herself at the inn. It was scarcely more than six years ago, in fact.

‘It seems half a lifetime’ said Caroline. ‘And must seem more still to Dwight, covering as it does not merely his captivity in France but four years of marriage to me!’

‘I have often wondered,’ Ross said, ‘at my arrogance in bringing you together almost by force, at my supposing I knew better than you and he whether you should become husband and wife’.

‘The trouble is, Ross’ she said ‘that you’re an arrogant man. Sometimes it is a great virtue and sometimes not’.

‘Well, which was it on that occasion?’

She smile. She had changed for supper into a gown of cool green velvet, her favourite colour, because it contrasted with her auburn hair and brought out the green in her eyes, which could often with other colours look plain hazel or grey.

‘A virtue,’ she said. ‘Dwight is the only man I’ve ever wanted to marry… Though perhaps not the only man I’ve ever wanted to bed.’

Ross cut up a piece of the mutton on his plate and added some caper sauce.

‘I don’t think that makes you so unusual,’ he said.

‘No… we all look elsewhere from time to time. But then we glance away.’

‘Usually…’

She ate a little, picked at her meat.

She said abruptly: ‘Dwight and I, you and Demelza; do you realize how moral we are by the standards of today?’

‘No doubt.’

‘No doubt at all. So many of my friends in London… But forget London. This county we live in. Add up the number of affairs that are going on, some secret, some blatant, among our friends, or their friends. And the same, thought perhaps to a different pattern, among the poor.

Ross took a sip of wine. ‘It has always been so.’

‘Yes. But also there has been a small core of real marriages existing amongst the rest - marriages in which love and fidelity and truth have maintained their importance. Yours is one and mine is one. Isn’t that so?’

‘Yes.’

Caroline took a long draught of wine, half a glass as against Ross’s sip. She leaned back against the red plush. ‘For instance, Ross, I could lie happily with you tonight.’

His eyes went quickly up to hers. ‘Could you?’

‘Yes. In fact I’ve always wanted to - as perhaps you know.’

‘Do I?’

They looked at each other.

‘I think so. I believe you could take me as few other men could take me - matching my arrogance with your own.’

There was silence between them.

‘But…’ she said.

‘But?’

‘But it could not be. Even if you are willing. I have the instinct of a wanton but the emotions of a wife. I have too much love for Dwight. And too much love for Demelza. And perhaps even too much love for you.’

He raised his eyes and smiled at her. ‘That’s the nicest compliment of all.’

The colour in her face came and went. ‘I am not here to pay you compliments, Ross, but only - I’m only trying to say some things that I think you should hear. If we got rid of Ellen - as we easily could - and spent all night making love, and if then the first time I went to Nampara I told Demelza about it, do you think she would be hurt?’

‘Yes.’

‘So do I. But I am a good friend of hers now. We are deeply attached to each other. Perhaps in time she would forgive me.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘I’m trying to say that if I told her what had happened between us she would be hurt. But no more so, I believe, than you hurt her in London.’

Ross put down his knife. ‘I don’t understand at all.’

‘You killed a man because of her. Oh, I know it was his challenge. And I know the quarrel was about some seat in the House. And I know you disliked each from the start. But it was really because of her the you killed him, wasn’t it?’

‘Partly, yes. But I don’t see-‘

‘Ross, when you fought Monk Adderley, it was not really him you were killing, was it?’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘No… it was Hugh Armitage.’

He took a gulp of wine this time. ‘Damn you, Caroline, it was a plain straightforward duel-‘

‘It was nothing of the sort, and you know it! You killed him because you couldn’t kill Hugh Armitage, who died anyway. But Hugh was a gentle, virile, sensitive man - the only sort Demelza would ever have, could ever have felt deeply drawn to. You must have known from the beginning that she wouldn’t have spared so much as a thought for a wild worthless rake like Monk Adderley.’

‘Sometimes one doesn’t think these things out.’

‘Of course one doesn’t think them out - that’s the trouble! Yours was a totally emotional act. But you were fighting the wrong man just the same.’

Ross pushed his plate away and put his fingers on the table.

‘And don’t get up and leave me,’ she said ‘for I should consider that a piece of very ungentlemanly behaviour.’

‘I have no intention of getting up and leaving you. But I can listen better to your lecture if I am not eating.’

‘The lecture is over, so you may enjoy the rest of your supper in silence.’

‘After than I’m not sure that I want to enjoy my supper either in silence of in seasonable conversation.’

‘Perhaps I should not have spoken.’

‘If you believe it, then you should. I am trying to think hard of what you’ve just said, to be - rational about it instead of emotional. D’you know your the second person in two weeks to accuse me of making emotional decisions. You’ll never guess who the first was. But so be it. Let me think…’

She toyed again with her meat for a few moments, broke a piece of bread with her long fingers but make no move to eat it.

He said: ‘There may be some truth in it. How am I to be sure? Certainly I’ve felt a lot, and thought a lot, about Demelza and Hugh these last two years. When I first found out about Demelza it was as if I had lost some belief - some faith in human character. It was not so much her I blamed as - as something in humanity. You must not laugh at me for sounding silly and pompous.’

‘I’m not doing so. But if-‘

‘It was like finding an absolute flawed. If something has drive me of late, there may be jealousy in it but it is not just jealousy. At times I have discovered a new lowness of spirit, a new need to revolt, to kick against the constraints that a civilized life tries to impose.’ He stopped and regarded her. ‘Because what is civilized life but an imposition of unreal standards upon flawed and defective human beings by other human beings no less flawed and defective? It has seemed to me that there is a rottenness to it that I have constantly wanted to kick against and to overset.’ He stopped again, breathing slowly, trying to marshal the complexities of his own feelings.

‘And this has all come — this has derived from your estrangement from Demelza?’

‘Oh, not in its entirety. But one and the other. One and the other. You called me an arrogant man just now, Caroline. Perhaps one aspect of arrogance lies in not being willing to accept what life sometimes expects one to accept. The very feeling of jealousy is an offence to one’s spirit, it is a degrading sensation and should be stamped on.’ He tapped the table. ‘But so far as Demelza and Monk Adderley were concerned, I think you do me some injustice. Demelza did give him encouragement, of a sort. She was always exchanging asides with him, making another appointment - or at least permitting him to. And she allowed him to paw her -‘.

‘Oh, nonsense’ Caroline said. ‘It is Demelza’s way to be friendly - to flirt a little out of sheer hight spirits. Whenever she goes out, as you well know, some man or another is always attracted by her peculiar vitality and charm. When she is enjoying herself she can’t resist giving off this - the challenging sparkle.. And men come to it. And she enjoys that. But in all innocence, Ross, for God’s sake! As you must know. Are you going to challenge Sir Hugh Bodrugan to a duel? He has made more attempts on Demelza’s chastity than any two other men I know. What will you fight him with - walking sticks?’

Ross half laughed. ‘You must know that jealousy flares only when there is a risk.’

‘And do you seriously think that Monk Adderley constituted a risk?’

‘I … thought so. It was not as simple a choice as that. And in any event he challenged me, not I him.’

Caroline shifted her position, and stretched. ‘Oh, that coach has tired me!… One more day and we shall be home.’

The waiter came and took away their plates but left the knives and fork for use again.

Ross said quietly: ‘Yes, I could sleep with you.’

She smiled at him.

He said: ‘And for the same reasons will not’.

‘Thank you Captain’.

He said: ‘You’ve always been my firm friend - from so long ago. Almost before we knew each other well at all.’

‘I believed I fancied you from the beginning.’

‘I believe it was something more important than tat, even then.’

She shrugged but did not speak as the waiter came back. When he had gone again she said: ‘Perhaps I have been hard on you tonight, Ross… What a thing to say! Hard on you! Strange for me to be in this position I’ve never before dared! Well, I understand - a little - how you must have felt about Hugh and Demelza. It has been - irking, festering in your soul for two years. And the rest too, if you will. I don’t deny that a single disillusion, if deeply felt, can lead to a general disillusion. Well… But now the blood is let. Even if it be the wrong blood. Let us not discuss any more the merits or demerits of your quarrel with Monk Adderley. It is over and nothing can revive it. Well, so is your quarrel with Hugh Armitage. So should be your quarrel with humanity. And so should you quarrel with Demelza. She has been desperately affronted by what happened in London. The rights and wrongs of it do not matter so much as that you killed a man because of her, and that you risked everything, your life, her life - in a way - for a senseless quarrel which to a well-bred person may seem the ultimate and honourable way of settling a difference, but to a miner’s daughter, with her sense of values so firmly and sanely earthy, looks like the petulance of a wicked man.’

‘God,’ said Ross. ‘Well, I will keep that in my heart and let that fester a while.’

‘You spoke to me straight six years ago, ‘ said Caroline. ‘I speak to you straight now.’

‘Out of love?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Out of love.’

107 notes · View notes