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dirtyvulture · 1 year

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Natasha Romanoff x GP!Beefy!Reader

Requested by 🐺 anon: Can I request something that's downright filthy and fluffy?

Gp!beefy!reader x Nat fucking missionary hard but so passionate and loving and Nat accidentally slips out an I love you in the middle. We say it back then it becomes love making. Maybe if you can add some Nat titty fucking for a challenge 🤪 😉 please and thankyou 💕

- 🐺

18+ only, read at your own risk

AN: Challenge accepted, my friend. No pronouns used.

"Fuck, Nat. Oh fuck."

You're ready to split the headboard in half with your hands as you hold onto it for your life, thrusting your hips forward so your cock slides through Natasha's breasts, already shiny with the amounts of pre-cum you're leaking everywhere.

You don't think you've ever been so hard in your life, the veins on your cock pounding and the tip spilling more pre-cum as it taps Natasha's chin with every thrust.

"Open your mouth," you demand, and she tilts her head down and obeys, looking up at you innocently as your cockhead moves past her lips and seals around your tip, sucking just enough for you to almost lose all control that second.

You have no words to describe your euphoria anymore as you pump yourself between Natasha's tits and into her mouth. Natasha doesn't mind that you're so focused on your own pleasure, but the ache in her center is unbearable at being unfilled so she grabs your wrists, moving them from the headboard and directing them to holding her breasts together so she can use her own hand to dive between her legs and play with herself.

You start to lose your rhythm the closer you get to your release and you clench all your muscles to hold back.

"Your tits are so perfect, Nat,” you pant, pushing them together to create an even tighter squeeze around your cock. “And I’m gonna cum all over them.”

Finally, the pressure at the base of your cock is too much to hold back anymore and your load shoots in hot, white spurts, catching Natasha on the chin and chest. The sight of her covered in your cum has your cock standing at attention almost right away, but your thighs are still trembling so you lower your body carefully on top of Natasha’s, flattening her against the bed. You feel her arm working between your bodies and you swat away her hand to replace her fingers with your own, pumping them into her core until her head is pushed back into the pillows and she’s screaming your name.

“I want you inside of me,” Natasha says when she comes down from her high. She wraps her legs around your waist, digging her heels into your back to bring you forward until your hard cock bumps her center. “Please, baby?”

She doesn’t have to ask twice. You line yourself up, and the combined lubrication makes it easy for you to push past her entrance, her warm walls hugging your cock perfectly. Natasha clings to your back, her nails tearing across your muscles as she takes your rough and uneven thrusts.

You grunt into her ear, telling her how good she feels around you, and Natasha has never felt so appreciated before in her life. She almost wants to cry, but buries her face into your neck, holding onto you as tight as she can and never wanting to let go.

“I love you.”

You stop mid-thrust, not sure you heard her correctly or if you’d just imagined it. Natasha looks up at you, either shocked that she said it herself or because you’ve stopped fucking her.

“Did you...” you start.

“I’m...I’m sorry.” Natasha’s face reddens more than her hair. She tries squirming out from under you, but you’re much stronger than her so you pin her down easily.

“Did you mean that?” you ask, looking into her eyes.

Natasha says nothing.

You lean down to kiss her softly and Natasha practically melts beneath you and you roll your hips again, with much more gentleness than you ever have before. It was like a switch had been flipped; this was no longer a senseless fuck session between you two. Natasha said she loved you, something you had never had the courage to say first, but you wanted to show her you did too with every fiber of your being.

Although your cock still throbs, it’s simmered down to a pleasurable, but not overwhelming, burn in your stomach. Natasha grabs onto your butt, squeezing your muscular flesh there and guiding the angle of your hips. You tangle your hands in her hair, directing her head up so you can kiss her in between the gasps and whines that escape her mouth.

“Fuck,” you grunt when her silky walls ripple around your shaft. “I love you too, Nat,” you finally say, and that seems to do it for the both of you. Natasha arches her back as she cums, pressing her chest against yours, and your entire body tightens, your muscles flexing and straining as you empty your load into her.

You pull out and lie next to Natasha, neither of you saying a word. She scoots closer to you, eventually crawling to lay on top of you, and you wrap your strong arms around her and hold her securely as you both drift off to sleep.

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#natasha romanoff #black widow #natasha romanoff smut #natasha romanoff imagine #g!p #natasha romanoff x reader

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prokopetz · 1 year

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The third major revision of the increasingly overwrought tabletop RPG about what if Samus Aran was secretly three to five space gerbils operating a person-sized mech suit is now up.

This is primarily an "expansions and clarifications" type update, with few major structural changes, apart from splitting scenes into multiple types and providing simplified rules for the less critical ones. Those expansions and clarifications are substantial, however, so if you're updating from the previous playtest draft I'd definitely recommend giving the changelog a once-over.

My next steps, in no particular order:

Finish the mech suit upgrades table (there are currently a couple of unfilled slots, and I'd like to bump it up to a full 18 eventually)

Provide some examples of pre-generated space gerbil roles

Discussion of campaign play (including advancement)

Discussion of playing without a GM (possibly including solo play?)

Add a bunch of big stupid random mission tables (needed for both GMless play and hypothetical solo play module)

As always, comments, criticisms, and bizarre rants are welcome. Additionally, this is probably the first major revision of the game where a full end-to-end run is feasible (at least for a one-shot), so if anyone would like to volunteer to run an actual playtest, please drop me a line!

Illustrations by @pencilbrony

Full changelog under the cut:

Space Gerbils Changelog 2023-01-08

Note: all page numbers refer to the PDF version.

Print-and-play token sheet updated with twelve additional papercraft minifigs, courtesy of @pencilbrony

Added a brief inspirational media section (p. 8) and a not-so-brief glossary (pp. 9–14)

Two new full-page illustrations by @pencilbrony (pp. 16, 28)

Added procedures for randomly selecting starting mech suit upgrades and increased number of starting upgrades to 2 (p. 21)

Added two new mech suit upgrades ("Co-pilot Protocols" and "Copy Circuit") (pp. 21–22)

Re-worked "Hyperdrive" upgrade for compatibility with revised critical success rules (below) (p. 22)

Re-worked "Well Maintained" upgrade so that it doesn't require players to keep track of how many times it's been used in each scene; all upgrades are now either "once per scene" or "once per phase" (p. 23)

Added six new proficiencies ("Bodyguard", "Fringe Science", "Machine Empathy", "Motivational Speaker", "Observant" and "Psychic") (pp. 24–26)

Re-worked "Direct Neural Interface" proficiency so that it no longer benefits from cost discounts for pushing yourself (p. 24)

Re-worked "Special Operations" proficiency to be less complicated and (somewhat) less overpowered (p. 26)

Added a note about re-naming proficiencies (p. 27)

Made starting Stress Limit more explicit (p. 27)

Revised phase flowchart to reflect simpified workflow (see below) and made it available as a separate PDF (p. 29)

Re-worked Setup Phase to allow players to choose their initial positions (p. 30)

Clarified that Extravehicular Activity task may not be performed if doing so would result in no space gerbils crewing the mech suit (p. 32)

Revised protocol descriptions (p. 34)

Added rules for multitasking (p. 35)

Clarified handling of Fallout Phase when multiple tests were made in preceding Action Phase (p. 37)

Critical success now occurs on any success where the chosen result shows doubles or better, not just double 6s; critical success and complications may now occur on same test (p. 38)

"Lost" complication re-named "Scrambled", and now disallows Reassigning in following Operations Phase (pp. 39–40)

"Delayed" complication re-named "Time Loss" (pp. 39–40)

Subsection on complications and physical threats removed and replaced with more general discussion of interpreting mixed outcomes (p. 41)

Workflow for End Phase simplified; the End Phase now always follows the Fallout Phase, and its triggers no longer depend on what happened in phases prior to the Fallout Phase (p. 42)

Clarified and expanded End Phase triggers, and included a trigger for all space gerbils Stressing Out at the same time (p. 42)

Added explicit rules for recovering Stress and conditions between scenes (p. 42)

"Hazardous" condition re-named "Unsafe" to avoid potential confusion with scene Hazards (p. 44)

Brief discussion of mission structure added to "Running the Game" (p. 47)

Scenes now divided into two types: engagements and interludes (pp. 49–59)

Re-named Mission Clock to Threat Clock (p. 49)

Expanded discussion of Obstacle traits (p. 52)

Added eight new Obstacle traits ("Barrier", "Cryptic", "Hazardous", "High Risk", "Jinxed", "Small Target", "Stressful" and "Volatile") (pp. 52–54)

"Secure" Obstacle trait re-named "Big Target" (p. 52)

"Consequence" Obstacle trait re-named "Fixed Consequence" (p. 53)

Added rules for scene Hazards (p. 55)

Added discussion of handing the end of an engagement (p. 56)

Simplified rules for handling non-critical scenes and having adventures outside the mech suit (pp. 57–59)

#gaming #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop rpgs #space gerbils #game design

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moodymisty · 1 year

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Do you have anymore Daddy! Boba writings? 😳 I honestly loved it sm and couldn't stop reading it!! <3

Author's Note: that’s the only Boba Fett thing I’ve written as of yet, but I have been working on something for Boba Fett for awhile, so here's a snippet of it. It's been fighting me tooth and nail so I honestly I'm probably going to dump it, but I hope you enjoy this part of it none the less. SFW Boba content on the horizon as well.

Summary: Don't tease Boba Fett.

Relationships: BOBF!Boba Fett/Fem!Reader

Warnings: NSFW, Porn without Plot, age gap if you squint, Daddy kink(the word is only said once but the vibe is there please don't continue if this isn't your thing), SoftDom!Boba, Sub!Reader, Oral sex(female receiving), Boba has a nice big bed in his room and not just a bacta tank

'Go upstairs.'

His words echo in your ear, knowing that as you ascend, he isn't far behind.

The steps are steep, and you almost trip over your own feet trying to quickly make your way up them. Bits of sand dragged in from the desert outside crunch under your feet, the stone of the walls cool against your hand as you brush your palm along it.

When you reach the top and open the large door, you can still clearly see the suns casting large amounts of light through the windows, but it's quickly turning to a more comfortable orange, as the evening begins. If you were to look outside them you could easily see large swaths of Mos Espa, but nowhere near the entire city. The buildings all being bathed in the setting of the suns- shades of yellow fading to orange fading to purple.

There's not much up here of interest apart from the view, as Fett's personal room is sparse. A bacta tank, an actual bed, an armor stand. A few other things here or there, but the expanse of the room feels almost empty- unfilled. Looking towards the door it had closed behind you, and has yet to open since your entrance.

You wonder how much longer he's going to keep you waiting; Fett knows well that your patience does have a limit. Any longer, and you might consider going back down for him and making more trouble for yourself.

But just as you turn around you hear the sound of the door open, and Fett's familiar dark green armor strides through the doorway. He instantly notices you, watching the way you're leaning against the stool of the window.

"You took long enough." He's stepping closer, helmet looking down on you. He hasn't taken it off quite yet, the dark tint of the visor reflecting your own face back at you. The set of his shoulders is firm, and even through the helmet you can tell he's staring you down.

"I'd be careful with that mouth of yours," He says as his hand cups around your jaw, gently tilting your head upward as your lips gently part in a silent invitation.

"It's already gotten you in enough trouble today."

Trouble? For just a tease?

Fett steps even closer, and you can feel the hard metal of his armor against your chest.

"What were you thinking, princess?"

You weren't. That was a part of the problem. You couldn't stop yourself; It had been a split second urge that you couldn't hold in when you had him for a moment alone. He was about to return to the throne room- he had guests waiting and was about to slip his helmet back on. But in that split second, you'd kissed him and whispered something in his ear.

'Don't take too long, daddy.'

The word hung on your lips even after you'd spoken them and made your face burn, as you rarely ever say it- let alone when you're right of mind during the day. But you'd done it to tempt him, aggravate him; Make him think of you when you're not even there. When he's busy trying to be a stalwart Daimyo, but thinking about you uttering words to him that no one right of mind with stronger morals would say.

It had worked, it seems.

You feel one of his hands tug at your clothing, hard enough to feel it almost dig into your skin. Any more and he might've snapped the string seaming it all together.

"Take it off."

His firm, unwavering voice will never not send a shiver down your spine, as you grip the edge of your clothing the moment he lets go.

Bit by bit you slowly peel it all off, underneath the weight of his gaze. His helmet is still on, but it isn't long before he takes it off; After your clothes fall away and your back hits his bed. It almost feels like he's looming, watching you like a predator. He's stripped away enough of his armor that it no longer poses a nuisance, leaving mostly his black flightsuit.

It dips under his weight as he follows you, dark brown eyes watching the way the blankets wrinkle and bunch around your body.

His rough hands grip your thighs and in one fell swoop tug you close to him, before he lowers himself to your level. As he does, he can feel the way your thighs tense as well as your whole body, in anticipation for what he is about to do. You can now feel his breath fan over your still covered pussy, and even that almost ghostly sensation has it throbbing. He looks up at you before pulling that thin piece of fabric off, stretching them as he yanks them off your ankles.

"Was this what you were waiting for?"

His lips brush against the apex of your thighs, the roughness of stubble just ever so barely starting on his jaw scraping against your skin.

"I, I just missed you, I-"

Your hands grip the blankets as his tongue suddenly dives into your cunt, breath getting caught in your throat. Your thighs threaten to close, but he doesn't allow it. He gives you no mercy, brushing over your clit as his hands grip your thighs. He has them tight, enough so that if he isn't careful he might leave marks, holding you in place. Even though it's futile you still can't help the way your hips twitch upward with each sudden jolt of pleasure, but he follows and gives no rest none the less.

One of his hands leaves your thighs to gently press his fingers against your slick entrance, the other moving higher up your thigh to still hold you firm at the hip. As two of his fingers slowly press inside of you he can feel the way you clench around him, as he slowly thrusts them into you to the base.

They work in tandem with his mouth to have you almost seeing white, biting your lip hard as you try not moan so loud it echoes in the expanse of the room. The wet noises of him eating you out already do, the wetness of your own arousal slick against your outer lips and the insides of the very tops of your thighs.

But Fett knows you well, far more than anyone else and possibly even yourself, and he has you cumming on his face in what feels like only moments. His fingers are soaked from you, as well as his lips, which he only brushes off with the back of his hand as your heart pounds in your ear and you still feel the way your lower stomach turns and toils from your orgasm.

He gently but firmly taps the side of your hip.

"Turn over."

You can't help but listen, moving onto your stomach within moments of him asking. You can then feel the weight and heat of his cock hit against the back of your thigh, making your pussy clench. One of his hands grabs your hip, cocking them ever so slightly upward. The angle makes it easier as he presses the head of his cock against you, slowly and steadily pushing into your wet and already slightly abused heat.

Fett always loves the soft noises you make when he starts fucking you; Feeling your body stretch to take him. You always bite your lip, and moans come out as cute little mewls and gasps as you attempt to cut them off.

His hips hit your ass hard, quickly setting a pace that takes the breath from your lungs. He almost feels like too much; Like he's everywhere around you all at once. You have to put a hand forward against the headboard to keep from being pushed forward, the other trying to grip whatever you can to keep yourself grounded.

"B-boba," His name softly leaves your lips, feeling the heat of his breath on your skin. But moments after you grit your teeth as his cock hits deep inside of you, brushing against sensitive nerves that has your pussy tightening around him.

"You're so quiet, little one."

He's teasing you, poking at the way you're trying to muffle your voice in the fabric of the pillow. You can only groan in response, overwhelmed by the lewd sounds of skin on skin as he mercilessly fucks you.

"Make some more noise for me."

Not putting the taglist on this one because I would actually just die. whenever I write daddy kink I feel ashamed lmao like this was fun to write but if you mention it to me I might just evaporate

#/sigh my friend really was right it's so obvious i have severe daddy issues why must the cliche be right once more /sob #boba fett x reader #Boba Fett/Reader #reader insert #reader #mywriting

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white-collar-cannibal · 4 months

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i get so jealous of euthanized dogs

(do you ever think too much about the implications of a plastic skeleton. i do.) genloss fic about the death — and it's subsequent consequences — of frank, last name unknown. gl!sneeg/gl!frank, title from the poem of the same name by june gehringer, heavily inspired by the locked tomb series, word count: 4,004, contains: suicidal ideation, canon-typical violence, descriptions of decomposition

Frank was not in his room. This was — mostly — expected, given his sorry state the last time Sneeg had seen him. Each morning, when Sneeg rose and he snuck out of the Cabin and down to that cramped corridor to unhook Niki from a great mess of wires and shake her gingerly awake, he also picked the lock of the room two doors down, and they would look to see that empty cot and those dark monitors which did not show any vital sign or brain activity. As they stared into that unfilled space, Sneeg thought, meanly, that this was probably what they got for being so used to walking the back rooms and the far corridors of the mall that they had forgotten the dangers of the Heart.

If it was any consolation, Frank was dead before he could realize the whole plan was going to shit. Niki had bolted in the first available direction, and Sneeg had not followed her, too busy holding the disparate bits of Frank’s skull together. He did not know where Niki had gone, only that she had not made it out. She was, after three days time, in her little room, sleeping so deeply as to be three-quarters dead, powered-down and completely unharmed. The two of them had not been very productive in the following days, and by the fifth day that Niki had been returned and Frank had not, they had begun to absolutely lose it, and they had split up to walk the parasitized mall and worry where the other could not sense it.

On the seventh day, Sneeg encountered a strange sight: an open door that had not been open the day before. Sneeg did not recognize the door, but he recognized the hallway, and he recalled the third door from this end downward having been marked on their map with an inverted dagger: locked, keycard access. The door was clearly not supposed to be open. A sheet of laminated paper found itself caught between the body of the door and the mechanism of the lock, the little black keycard reader gleaming a welcoming LED green. A thin, pale fog rolled in half-formed locks out of the room, and it was making the hallway a little cold to stand in. The room beyond the door was cramped as any recycled Showfall room, stuffed to the gills with a series of large steel drawers, like lockers turned over onto their side so the shortest edge faced forward. All but one were closed, the source of that milky, breathy fog, and a metal slab had been shunted or rolled out of the drawer, which a single figure lay on top of. Approaching the thing was a miserable endeavor: laid as still as stillness over the slab was Frank — or at least, his body.

The body appeared very similar at first glance to its living counterpart, but at the moment’s close examination, the whole thing fell apart. It carried the same heavy-set brow, the same hawkish nose, the same worried marks at the corners of the mouth and eyes, but the whole lovely face had no blood in it at all, rendering it the tone of some anemic cornflower. It lay more still than Frank ever had, even in sleep, and it was a cold to the touch that made his fingers numb. Only the soft give of the skin and the flesh underneath convinced him that it was not a well done marble replacement by some singlely Pygmalion-minded sculptor. It was all very confusing. Sneeg held a deep, uncomfortable familiarity with death, but it all seemed off now. He could assume the purpose of the cold room with the inset drawers, but someone had, with precision if not care, dressed the body well and laid its hair flat and its hands in a kindly manner over its chest — they had put his face back together, for God’s sake — but the body was still dead. It was like dressing up a piece of plywood. What was the point?

Sneeg stared for a moment longer, at the remnant shell of the first person who had known him to the core of his misery and loved him anyway, and his eyes watered. Something was wrong. Something was awfully wrong. A body like this had been dead a longer time than Showfall had ever let them have between shows. He was in cold storage and not laid on the threadbare cot of his talent cubicle, waiting in pristine unaltered condition for whatever next taping Showfall had in mind. There was nothing good that would come from them leaving a cast member like this for so long, long enough for the body to pass into and out from rigor mortis. It betrayed a nearly unthinkable idea, something Sneeg could barely string together the words to comprehend: Frank was dead, and Showfall never intended to bring him back. This was it. The thought was like a bullet through his own brain, and he stood there, white-knuckling the edge of the mortuary drawer and breathing quite heavily.

Reaching into the pocket of that wrinkle-less jacket, he retrieved the silver Showfall-branded lighter, marked over in pen and marker and paint. It was a familiar weight, and found a familiar home in his own pocket. There was nothing else to do. He did not know how a real person was supposed to face a loss like this. He did not know how to say goodbye, and to mean it forever.

It was with a childish, fairytale desperation mingled with his shock and his tragedy, that, in almost a dreaming haze, he pressed his lips to the pretty, bloodless mouth of the body. It did nothing so pedestrian as wake or speak. It did not flutter long, frosted eyelashes, open pearly clouded-over eyes and smile at him. It merely lay there, cold and still. Sneeg did not know what he had expected. He watched the body for a moment longer, to ensure it drew no hidden breath, nor twitched any surreptitious muscle — and then he ran from it.

In the cage of the Cabin — the safest place he had, given its having four walls and a door he could close and lock — Sneeg had tried very hard to tar over the raw wound of the loss with the thick denial that only a child of Showfall could feel. Frank was coming back. He was coming back because everyone came back. That was how it worked. That was how it always worked. It was nigh unthinkable that it wouldn’t now, for him, but oh God, would Showfall decide to pull their fingers from their own hand only to spite him, only to plant their dagger between his third and fourth rib. They would because they hated him. They had always hated him, ever since they first took him, for all the terrible things at the heart of his being, for his inability to work to standard, or live to standard, or look to standard. He tried very hard not to think about the possibility. He tried very hard not to think of anything at all. He tried very hard to focus on the shapes the path of his breath took through his body, the stucco texture hastily plastered over the walls and the floor, the hum of the tungsten day lights. He pulled his knees tight to his chest, and tried not to cry, because it would be real if he cried.

Sneeg spent three such nights in the cage, only moving on the fourth to the too-short couch in the living room when the bones of his back protested too much to ignore. He did not want to go back to the softer, better fitting mattress of his own room in the attic, to sit in the cold dark where Frank had laid his head on his chest in secret. Sneeg had done nearly everything in secret then, and now he was doing nothing, and he was doing it quite openly. He waited around, doing a great deal of nothing in the living room, or sometimes the kitchen, or the basement, and tried to be nothing in his wait for the next taping. This was the model of the perfect Showfall student, someone who wanted nothing and did nothing, and only lived to work their fingers to the bone, and then work the bones off their hand. It was almost strange to think that Management had tried for nearly twenty years, through varying cruel and unusual means, to turn Sneeg into this, when all it had taken was the maybe-death of one cosmically disposable cast member, and the maybe-shredding of that piece of Sneeg that was convinced he knew what the warmth of the Sun felt like.

The next taping arrived, as it would even if Hell froze over. Sneeg fell into the ephemeral grasp of the Showfall filter, and he forgot his grief wholly and entirely as Sneegsnag, first son of Showfall Media, first Taken, and despair of the Founder, disappeared. He melted away like so much candle wax, and someone picked him up and turned him over and over until he was the shape of whichever character they demanded of him.

The show did not matter, only that Sneeg’s part in it ended with a bullet stuck in his second lumbar vertebra. The moment Sneeg hit the ground, he began to remember again, and when each of the actors had peeled out of the room and the cameras were turned away from him, the loss had snuck its way back into his body in lung-shaking fingers of cold. It was there, bleeding onto that tiled faux-floor, that Sneeg realized that he recognized the prop corpse in the corner, the one that the prop department would have carefully set down and fiddled with before the actors were even on set. He propped himself up on his elbows, raising himself out of that scarlet puddle which had already ruined the nice shirt he had been dressed in, and he looked at it again, just to be sure.

He hated to look at it. He hated that they had not given him the mercy of smashing that pretty face into unrecognizable mush. He hated that the body was dead, and it was not moving, and Showfall had conscripted it for such purpose. The body was dead, and this was its job now, and Showfall had gotten sick of it and was not bringing him back. Sneeg wanted to scream, and he wanted to vomit, and he wanted to go home, even though he didn’t know at all what that meant anymore. He laid back down, getting his hair wet and black with fresh blood, and he had repeated, “No, no, no, no, no,” very quietly, nothing more than a breath, until two of the well-dressed employees grabbed each of his arms and sides of his thorax, bodily hauled him with their unthinking, programmed movement onto a stretcher, and caught him in the neck with the syringe.

Later that night was the first time the ghost of Frank revealed itself to him, sat beside him in the dark, and laid its hand which carried no weight over his own hand. There was no honest sensation that came from it, as was the want of a ghost or a trick of the mind, but it had left behind the pins-and-needles feeling of a limb left too long without blood. Sneeg had finally wept then, for his lost, far away family, for his dead lover, for his damned escape plan, and for his own sorry state. He hated to weep. He hated how incapable it made him feel, how it crushed his lungs and his throat. He felt like a small child again, or more accurately, like a worm. He did not know what to do, and now there was no one around to tell him. Easily, without spoken prompt, the ghost tried its stupid, spectral best to hold Sneeg. It did not succeed a great amount in this, but Sneeg’s starving want made the paresthetic touch a good enough comfort for him to lay still and try to sleep, rather than walking out of the Cabin and throwing himself over the third-story railing.

Sometimes, each night that followed, the ghost appeared to him alive, and at other times, as freshly dead as he had been the first time Sneeg saw him. Only once had he appeared in unrestrained decomposition, and Sneeg prayed it never happen again. He had been waxen, swell with rot, a deep, lush violet where the blood had been allowed to pool, leaking a dark fluid from his nose he wiped at in intermittent intervals. Sneeg had looked upon him in desperation and hunger, and the remains of his own putrefying affection, and he had still reached out to touch the apparition — but Frank smiled, and his mouth was full of maggots, and the palm that Sneeg had reached to touch him was seized with the conviction of ten thousand worms beneath its own skin, roiling and squirming. He had screamed for only one moment, but the ghost still vanished, and his brother still appeared with a quickness and a pitying concern, both of which Sneeg disdained.

Sometimes the ghost did not speak, only lay beside him in a familiar stillness, side against side, as Sneeg tried his damnedest to make himself hear Frank breathe into the dark. Most days it did speak, and often it was to needle him about how long it had been since Sneeg had eaten, or showered, or drank water. It was difficult to remember to do so those days. Sneeg spent much of his time asleep, finding it favorable in nearly every way to waking. There was very little want in his body to do much of anything, except to lie there on his mattress on the floor until God felt it right to snatch him away.

His brother had not bothered him for one week, and then had been struck with what Sneeg could only assume was a crushing fear that God would indeed take Sneeg away, and Sneeg would be in no hurry and of no power to stop Him. He had begun placing bowls of cold porridge and glasses of room temperature water just beyond the doorway to the attic, and checking whenever he thought Sneeg was asleep to see if they had been disturbed, as if attempting to care for a stray cat. One night, in some kind of fit, Charlie had burst into the room, taken one of Sneeg’s hands between his own, between the hands that had drowned and bled and choked and killed and killed him so many times, and prayed intercessions to every saint he thought fit, and then some extra for surety: Anastasia, Raphael, Rita and Juliana and Teresa, Camillus and Christina Mirabilis, and on and on until his throat was hoarse. Sneeg watched him, and felt much like a compass that had broken somehow, no longer able to spin to point in the direction of God.

The ghost had taken this plea as sign and signal to redouble its efforts, and where God had not delivered Sneeg from his sorrows, the ghost delivered him from the IV drip and the padded room of the hunger strike. Showfall had never cared if he lived or died, but for him to waste away spoke unfortunately about how well they were paying him. They weren’t paying him, mind you, but it was about the optics of it. To this effect, Sneeg developed an unerring routine which got three nutrient rations and two and a half glasses of water into his body a day, and for his success the ghost would lay beside him at night, and leave that pins-and-needles feeling against his hands, and his neck, and his mouth. When the ghost did not appear, Sneeg comforted himself by imagining what it would be like to walk far beyond where Showfall’s patrol lines would ever find him, to break boarded windows and curl up on the floor of the condemned wing of the mall, and die like a bird which had flown in accidentally and could not get out. It was not a great comfort, and he knew dimly it was not a healthy one either, but it was enough to dull his heart and brain enough for him to sleep. In his dreams, each time he saw Frank, he felt very sick, and he would turn to Niki or Charlie or anyone that was there and ask, sorrily, “Is he there? Can you see him?” and they would look at him like a particularly sad piece of roadkill.

His brother kept praying, and sometimes he screamed into a pillow or an old shirt. Charlie knew that if Sneeg died, he would too, and Charlie did not want to die. He did not know what to do either, and vacillated between an overbearing care, as if Sneeg was a piece of glass or old china, — which Sneeg hated — and a snapping fury at Sneeg’s inability to do much of anything — which Sneeg also hated, but hated in an acute way that made him feel half a percent more alive. At those, Sneeg snapped back, and the two would fight with the familiar contempt that only grew from living together against your will for the better part of two decades. Sometimes it devolved, and ended with teeth in flesh and hands around neck and blood on the floor. Sometimes Sneeg cried — this was an arresting notion for even the most boiling over Charlie, and it made everything very strange and sad and awkward. He would place his hand on Sneeg’s shoulder, then take it away, and flap his mouth open and closed a couple times, but no noise would come out. Only once did he manage a blank “I’m sorry,” and Sneeg had just cried worse for it.

When it was clear that Sneeg was set on the rituals of self-maintenance, the ghost shunted its efforts towards convincing Sneeg to wake up Niki, and to get back on the wagon of planning their escape. He tried to convince Sneeg of this first by saying that Niki would be upset if Sneeg left her there alone much longer, which was not very effective, since he was sure she would be upset already, and then by saying that it would be good for Sneeg to get out of the house, which was not very effective, since Sneeg had nearly given up on doing things that were good for him. Then, he tried to tell Sneeg that the plan was not off yet, that there was still a chance for them to make it out, if they got together and threw themselves into it.

The problem with this was that Sneeg and Niki had no fucking clue what they would do if they got out, on account of Niki having nearly no recollection of the details of her life before Showfall had kidnapped her, and of Sneeg's having been seven at the time. As integral to the plan as Niki’s steadfast internal map and Sneeg’s memory of the timetables and the pathing of the wandering guards had been Frank’s insistence that he could hunt down the names and the contacts of those who were close to him, who he remembered with a greater clarity. But that was all gone now. Sneeg had not known it, so the ghost would not whisper it to him. Niki did not know it, despite her constant bothering Frank to tell her all he knew, so they would have one less point of failure. He had never told her, not because he did not want to, but because he only knew it in a subconscious, animal way, and not in a way that he could tell her, and now none of them knew. Each new detail, each elaboration on the loss, made the whole thing interminably worse. They were alone, and they were damned, and there was no way out.

At this thought, the ghost jabbed at him and set off the strange nerve at the point of his elbow. “Fuck off,” it had said. “You’re better than this. You need instructions? You need an order? Survive me. Finish the job.” It had looked so close to living, breathing, pressure-bomb Frank then, sharp eyes like so much burnt-up copper, teeth at fascinating and contradicting angles, that he would have done anything it asked.

Sneeg slept, and he woke, and he ate, and he told his brother, “I’m going to go talk to Niki,” and then, at Charlie’s expression, “Give me three hours before you start to worry.” Charlie turned his face up at this, but he nodded, and Sneeg retraced, in dismally slow footsteps, that familiar back alley path from the Cabin’s panel door to the dingy hallway of the cast cubicles. Niki was lying in the abyssal, dreamless sleep of the power-down as Sneeg clacked the well-worn key combination into the console, and pulled away a lot of electrodes and finger-traps. The first thing Niki did was scream, and then she thought better of it, and just sat at the edge of the cot and hyperventilated. When Sneeg had tried to speak, she got up and pushed past him, brusquely, and left the room. Half an hour later, he started looking for her, and when he did find her in one of the many uncared for corners of the mall, she was sat, knees to chest, beneath a whole herd of quite miserable chalk-drawing horses across the wall. Her hands were bunched in her hair, and she was looking somewhere far away. Her eyes were rotten, needle ice over dark water. She had a very small voice when she spoke.

“What are we going to do?” In the dark, it was clear to them both that Niki was still a teenager, and Sneeg was still as stunted as he had ever been. They sat there, two kicked, abandoned dogs, which had been cut free of leash and of collar for the first time, and were liable to start running into traffic. There was a length between them that felt like a missing molar.

“Okay. Okay.” Niki rose with a fervor that nearly toppled her over, and she grabbed each of his shoulders with vile intensity. “Sneeg. I am not dying in this hole. Get up.”

Sneeg got up. He never could ignore a direct order. Sneeg got up and got up and got up, and his heart kept beating, and his lungs kept drawing in breath. Hours fell into days fell into weeks, sets fell into sets fell into moldy corridors where Niki tried to transcribe the paths of guards with too many dashed lines and corresponding sigils. They chipped at the work in short, fervid bursts, then couldn't touch it for days. Niki never prayed, but she would hold Sneeg's hands when he did, and sometimes, thinking she was alone, she would pace in languid, looping circles and speak as if Frank could still hear her.

They spent so much time working at this dreadfully slow pace that it became very hard to tell just how long it had been. Sneeg lost count of the days since he had last asked God to just kill him and get it over with, and he thought it a success, and stopped keeping track — only to end up awake in the kitchen in the middle of the night, staring longingly at the wood-paneled knife block. Time fell through his hands like it wasn't even there, and he only realized that it had been a very long while when he went to wake Niki up, and spotted, at the edge of the hall, a new temporary label on one of the previously empty rooms. It was the same mechanized handwriting as every other label, and Niki read it out, clear and crisp: T-8: HERO.

#genloss #generation loss #gl!sneegsnag #gl!sneeg #gl!frank

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eoieopda · 1 year

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hello, ms jade!

i’d like to request a hobi x reader for the drabblepallooza, to the song “only for a moment” by lola marsh.

congrats on 1k!

- 🔭

this is a certified gd bop™️ and it gave me several different ideas that i really struggled to choose from?? i ended up assigning them numbers and then literally drawing one from a random generator lmao. anyways, here’s this!! 🤪

listen here

ft. fuck buddy hobi who accidentally stays the night. it’s implied that he and reader knocked boots the night before. brief reference to nudity, but def nothing explicit.

you stayed only for a moment / i said, "stay with me a while" / you faded like a pretty snowflake / that I was holding in my hand

When you wake up, it’s not due to the sunlight blaring through your never-shut blinds. There’s no insistent beeping of an alarm, no great clatter from the neighbor’s apartment echoing through your apartment’s crêpe paper walls. It’s warmth, surprising but perfect.

Your eyes open slowly. As they adjust to the light — seriously, you need to remember to shut your blinds at night — they settle on Hoseok’s face. Still asleep, his bottom lip flutters just slightly as he exhales through a barely-open mouth. He’s never stayed before. He came over often — weekly, for months — after dark; he was never still around when the sun came up.

This feels special. A little treat, entirely unexpected and exclusively for you.

Really, you could stare at him like this all day and never allow yourself to blink. You could map the heights of his cheekbones, the sharp L-shaped angle of his jaw, and the adorably upturned tip of his nose. Hoseok is beautiful, even while he mumbles through his dreams.

Maybe he feels the way you’re studying him. As if you’d flipped some secret switch, his eyes crack open.

Based on the shocked arches of his brows, Hoseok doesn’t recognize his surroundings. He doesn’t sit up to join you or say a word, so you both simply exist there in silence. The quiet seems to get louder as you watch his eyes scan over every surface of your room. Though he’s been here many times before, you can’t say that he’s ever truly seen it.

There’s a tiny twitch at the left corner of his mouth that prompts you to look at whatever he is: a framed photo of you and your older brother at your high school graduation. There you were, a decade ago, with your short, choppy layers jutting out like porcupine quills. You should’ve been held liable for the abuse your hair suffered at the hands of your flat iron. Those split ends are visible to you now, even from where you’re sitting. You can almost hear the way they sizzled.

Just like Hoseok, you continue to quietly assess that embarrassing old photo. Unlike Hoseok, you steal glances out of the corner of your eye to gauge the reaction. He’s smirking at the sight of you back then, thoroughly amused by the unfortunate fashion you flaunted. For you, it’s like watching a car crash: painful but compelling. You find it extremely difficult to look away.

Maybe you could forgive the unfilled eyebrows, barely registering on your uninhibited forehead. That said, you’d never get over the bright purple eyeshadow smeared — not blended — over your eyelids. There isn’t a darker color in sight to even hint at a crease? That poor, misguided baby.

You cringe a bit and glance over at Hoseok, who still hasn’t looked your way. “You stayed,” You state the obvious and try to stash the giddiness away, out of sight.

“It looks that way,” Hoseok’s voice is heavy with the sleepiness still lingering. Slightly scratchy, too. So, this is what he sounds like in the morning. He reels in the arm that had been extended under your pillow. Had he cuddled you at some point in the night? Then, when he’s free to do so, he scrubs his hands over his face to wake himself up more fully.

For the first time, his eyes flicker over to you and oh my god, you want to be the first thing he sees every morning.

“Can we make breakfast?” Hoseok asks quietly with a hand on his bare stomach. Oh. You beg your pupils not to dilate when you remember the state of him. “I’m starving.”

When your heart somersaults in your chest, it takes a considerable amount of willpower to keep from doing the same yourself. Instead, you slip out of bed like a normal human being, grinning and nodding a little too eagerly. Quick as a flash, you re-introduce your baggy sweatshirt and sleep shorts to your body.

As you head off for the kitchen, you steal a quick peek over your shoulder at Hoseok, who still hasn’t gotten to his feet. He’s upright now and facing away from you. The well-defined muscles of his back nearly have you stumbling.

Beautiful, even more so in daylight. Could you keep him — like this?

You make a beeline for your cabinets to figure out what you have at your disposal — not much — and then you turn to the refrigerator. Bent in half with your face in the cold, you holler, “Kimchi eggs or dakjuk?”

Hoseok had made no noise whatsoever as he entered your kitchen, so the suddenness of his voice right behind you makes you jump. Your head collides with the underside of the freezer door. With a yelp, you wheel around with your hand gingerly rubbing the forming lump.

Instantly, you note the way he grimaces. Gently, he reaches out and places his hand on on top of yours. “You okay?” His hand is gone again before he continues speaking, “I’m so sorry. I thought you heard me come in.”

You blink. Did he say something? You were still buffering through the feeling of this rare, non-sexual contact. He’d touched you a thousand times in places much more intimate, but this is what makes your stupid heart skip a beat?

“Kimchi eggs or dakjuk?” You repeat, barely above a whisper this time around.

Hoseok smiles at you. Then, he steps closer. You wait, wait, wait, for him to kiss you; he simply glances over your shoulder into your refrigerator. He chuckles when he comes to the same conclusion you had: you need to go to the store. Your heart drops a little lower in your chest.

“Kimchi eggs,” He hums, then he provides an explanation you wish he hadn’t, “I have to head out soon.”

You force a smile, then you nod, then you turn around to grab the carton of eggs and container of kimchi from their respective shelves. Hoseok moved again when you weren’t looking — the reflexes on that man are simply absurd — and he now digs through one of your cabinets for a pan. There’s no reason for him to know where you keep them, so he’s either psychic or a phenomenal guesser.

He looks pleased with himself when he turns back around with a frying pan in hand; the triumphant smirk on his face makes you giggle. When you reach out to take it, though, Hoseok wags his finger at you, “If I’m eating the very last thing in your refrigerator, the least I can do is prepare it for you.”

“Are you sure?” You trap your bottom lip between your teeth to keep from admitting that no man has ever offered to cook for you before. If you tell him that, who knows what else you’ll let slip?

Hoseok answers by shooing you away and clicking on the bottom-right stove burner. To your surprise, he hums while he cooks — occasionally getting so caught up in the song that he sings. You watch adoringly with your chin in your hand as he finishes, plates his masterpiece, and sets yours down in front of you on the kitchen island.

He looks so natural as he plops down on the stool next to you, but Hoseok has never joined you in your kitchen before. You want to linger at his side all day, but you know that’s not how this arrangement works. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t ache a little, though.

Clearly, you’re both famished because your meals and breezy conversation are both finished too quickly.

To your dismay, Hoseok glances down at his watch. He sucks a breath in through his teeth before he looks up to meet your eyes. “Shit,” he says sheepishly, “I’m so sorry to leave you with the dishes, but I’m apparently going to be late for —“

“It’s fine!” You chirp with a smile you’re sure doesn’t reach your eyes. It’s not, but who are you to say so? “Thank you for cooking.”

He flattens his palms against the countertop and pushes himself to him feet. Casually and gently, Hoseok bumps his fist against your shoulder with a sideways smile.

The only thing he says before leaving is, “Go to No Brand or something later, okay? Your refrigerator makes me sad.”

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lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers · 11 months

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Is 6.5% enough- Part II

This is a bit of a follow up to the post I wrote yesterday about the 6.5% rumoured pay offer for teachers. In that post, I alluded to the fact that pay isn’t the only issue, and whilst I do think pay has a significant impact on recruitment, I don’t think low pay is the main driver of people leaving teaching.

Most teachers don’t leave because of pay, although pay you can’t afford to live on doesn’t help, and many schools in expensive towns struggle to recruit more than those in cheaper parts of the same local authority. Most teachers leave because of “workload”.

But what is “workload”? Many schools have taken real strides to address the problem of workload in the last 5-10 years. They’ve got rid of bizarre, excessive marking policies. They’ve centralized planning, so you hopefully aren’t planning from scratch, at least up to KS4. There haven’t been major changes to the exam spec recently, so we aren’t having to rewrite all our schemes of work yet again. I know there are schools which are the exception to this, but they aren’t the norm any more.

That said, teachers are screwed by a part of our contract which states that we have to work enough hours to discharge the duties of our job. Legally, there’s no such thing as an unreasonable planning or marking load, even if there is a (theoretical) limit on the amount of time schools can have us in meetings or parents evenings.

In many schools, a part of “workload” is covering for absent colleagues. These could be unfilled roles within the school, or people who are off sick, or on a planned absence, such as maternity. It is very difficult to find a teacher to take on a maternity cover these days, let alone a temporary position that only lasts for, say, a term. There’s a shortage of supply teachers, as well.

This affects teachers in a few ways. One, physically “covering” the class, i.e. supervising them during a “non-contact”. But, the bigger, more insidious way, is that the remaining teachers in a department often have to take on the planning and marking for these classes. In a large department, split between several of you, it’s a killer. In smaller departments, it’s almost impossible. And often, it pushes other people over the edge into leaving, putting the school into a downwards spiral.

The worst, though, is when the school can’t make cover work that day, and so the remaining three or four teachers are sent to the hall or the library, to teach 5 or 6 classes at once. This is incredibly draining, and worse, you know the students are getting nothing out of it, so it’s putting your classes “behind” as well.

In many schools, this has been happening for at least the past few years, and, combined with covid, means you have classes entering Y11 and Y13 with major gaps. Because teachers care about their students (and because poor grades can sometimes prevent you progressing up the pay scale) teachers often run revision sessions for students after school. This is extra work, extra planning, often involves buying extra resources, and then all too soon becomes expected. Whereas in the past it might be revision or a club, it can become “revision and a club and targeted intervention”- taking up three hours a week. Technically, you can say no, so it’s not included in “directed time”, but saying no to these things is very hard.

There’s also issues around lack of “support staff”. Support staff aren’t just the teaching assistants, who do an amazing job. It’s also people like the absence officer, who chases up students who haven’t turned up to school and their parents haven’t given an explanation. Or perhaps pastoral support workers, who help students with challenging home lives. And many of the duties these people might have done get pushed on to teachers, who now, after their teaching day is over, may be ringing parents to find out why their child wasn’t in school. Senior leadership always told me this was a five minute job, but they weren’t the ones ringing home and finding out that this family had been evicted, or this parent had been a victim of domestic violence, or that a grandparent had unexpectedly died. And all these phone calls would then generate an hour or more’s work trying to find appropriate support for the student.

The truth is education isn’t the only service in this country that is crumbling. But it is the only one where we see young people day in and day out. Councils can cut youth workers. The NHS can extend waiting lists for everything from mental health support to autism diagnosis. Social services can raise the threshold at which they intervene or offer support. Or, even in a crisis, just say no-one is available, because they aren’t the ones with a crying child who’s got nowhere to go in their office.

But schools and therefore teachers have been forced to take all of this on. Schools run food banks, wash the clothes of children who don’t have enough electricity at home, try to sort out social problems like homelessness. Schools have brought counselling services in house (with all the problems that involves) and try to manage students with undiagnosed special educational needs as best as possible. All of this creates extra work for people, and it also creates extra stress- especially when it goes wrong.

If we want schools to do all of this, and in some ways, it might make sense to make a school or college a one stop shop for all the needs young people might have- then it needs to be funded. It needs to be appropriately staffed. Because trying to be teacher and social worker and counsellor to young people is breaking a lot of teachers, and soon there will be no-one left, no matter how high the pay is.

#uk politics #neu #education #teacher pay #union action #working conditions #teacher workload #teaching

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tyetknot · 1 year

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King of the Witches - A Review | Introduction

King of the Witches Introduction

King of the Witches was published in 1969 and ostensibly written by June Johns, although there is speculation that Sanders either wrote it himself or largely dictated the material presented. Alex Sanders was a bit of a showman, the life of the party, and at least a little bit a charlatan, in that many of the events described in this book very clearly didn’t happen, but in the world of 1960s – 1980s modern pagan witchcraft that is hardly unusual.

Having completed my chapter-by-chapter readthrough analysis review hitjob of Nigel Pearson’s Treading The Mill, I decided I’d take a look at King of the Witches: The World of Alex Sanders. I was recently able to get a very nice physical copy of this book which I find is a much more pleasant reading experience than going through a scanned .pdf version of it, and as it’s been a while since I read it I have comparatively fresh eyes for it. A newer biography, Coin For The Ferryman, has come out recently and I have a vague idea of cross-referencing it with King of the Witches and Maxine Sanders’ Fire Child which is even more blatant fiction passing itself off as an autobiography. We will have to see – many things happen in the fullness of time.

Alex Sanders (1926 – 1988) was the founder of the Alexandrian Tradition of Wicca, one of the two most well-known traditions of the religion. He was married three times, most famously to Maxine Sanders, and was the father of five children. He claimed that he had been given the title ‘King of the Witches’ by a council of witches, a position that has since gone unfilled in spite of some claimants who are generally unrecognized, most notoriously by Kevin Carlyon who has engaged in a variety of absurd publicity stunts largely focused on the Loch Ness Monster.

Many early Wiccans shunned the media spotlight and found that any attempts to seriously engage with it backfired horribly – reading Gerald Gardner’s The Meaning of Witchcraft shows his confused attempts to correct tabloid journalist accounts of his practices, and Doreen Valiente very famously split with Gardner because he had been trying to engage with the media (among other reasons). Witches trying to use the media against other witches to settle petty slights was a moderately common thing and it is one thing Robert Cochrane Roy Bowers is remembered for.

Sanders, however, accepted that the media existed and was something that could be worked with, and was clearly adept at using sex and showmanship to capture attention in order to grow his brand. Many iconic photos that are today instantly recognizable were taken of his coven and their rituals.

King of the Witches is presented as a biographical account of his entry into witchcraft and his life as one of its High Priests. Published in 1969, and has many sensationalist claims that defy credibility. In this column we will be going through it on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Strap in, friends, because this is one hell of a ride. It’s gonna get weird.

Introduction

The book opens with a list of illustrations, a glossary, and an Introduction. This starts out by discussing how people have always believed in magic in that 1960s “I read the encyclopedia article” kind of way. It asserts that the gods of the Old Religion became the devils of the new in a way that was very common in books on modern pagan witchcraft until the very late 90s – early aughts. It is imperative for us modern readers to remember that good scholarship on the history of Wicca did not really exist until very recently and even after Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon was published in 1999 there was a lot of resistance to accepting the truths it contained. Some prominent pagans out there still believe in the Murrayite witch-cult hypothesis. Nowadays we mostly know better, but it is important for us to keep this in mind.

“Certain aspects of white-witch dogma can be traced to ancient religions all over the world, in Druidical beliefs, for instance, and the incantations in Runic have been passed from generation to generation.”

We, of course, know that modern Druidry is every bit as modern as Wicca, and that the use of runes for divination is modern as well. But this was 1969, a different time indeed. We know today, for example, that Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, did not, in fact, have the full support of the Pope, and that their book was considered heretical because of the incorrect demonology and unlawful legal procedures contained therein, but again, 1969. This book has the usual sort of twaddle we can expect from books of the time – the Malleus Maleficarum dominated witch hysteria until the Reformation, that many Christian priests were only outwardly Christian but secretly pagan, that sort of nonsense. One line that stood out to me here was:

“Spiteful women are not confined to the twentieth century; they abounded in medieval Europe.”

Conspicuously absent is the outdated claim that the witch hysteria was aimed at powerful women, but this was published a while before books spreading that claim came into vogue. There are the usual breathless descriptions of torture and trial, of shaving and pricking and searches for the devil’s mark on the accused. One strange footnote reads:

“Or, at the start of the terror, for the mark of the three-nailed claw, known as the Witches’ Mark, with which witches used to tattoo their converts.”

This is, of course, a weird new spin on the concept that upon their induction into the worship of the Devil, Satan would bite, nip, or scar his new devotee. Some modern traditions of Wicca practice initiatory tattooing but I don’t believe this is a very widespread notion and I can only readily think of one Tradition that does it. The book suggests that people died from pricking.

“Not every witch denied the charges; many went into great detail about the spells they had worked, and were proud to be named. These same prisoners went to the gallows almost gaily, just as much martyrs to their religion as the early Christians who were thrown to the lions.”

You can just say Isobel Gowdie, it’s fine.

Notably, for all the weird crap that is enthusiastically regurgitated in this book, it mentions a couple things that are almost never brought up in modern pagan discussion of the witch hysteria – it states that only a small number of people accused were actually deemed guilty and executed, and it gives an almost-sane number of casualties – about 250,000. This is a far cry from the nine million figure that was commonly bandied about and occasionally still is, and is comparatively close to modern estimates. Unfortunately there are further absurd statements, like the following:

“The books of magic, or ‘grimoires’ as they were called, were seized upon by collectors – many of the witches’ closest secrets were discovered in the Key of Solomon, a copy of which is preserved in the British Museum. Clutching the remnants of their faith, the survivors of the witch-hunts went underground. But not for long.”

Tell me you haven’t read the Key of Solomon without telling me that you haven’t read the Key of Solomon.

The book tells us that Elipas Levi was a witch and Catholic priest – actually he left the clergy at the age of 26 and started studying the occult at 40. She also claims that Levi led the witchcraft revival which is, uh, not true at all. There are some strange claims about the person who did lead the witchcraft revival, Gerald Gardner. We are told that he was initiated to the First Degree by Dafo, started up some covens and filled out the rituals he had been given with other material. These are fairly normal statements, but it also hilariously says:

“Today, ‘Gardnerian’ witches are considered novices by hereditary witches who learnt their rituals from records handed down from generation to generation; they are accepted as legitimate witches but only of the first grade.”

This feels like a strong claim coming from someone who allegedly copied Pat Kopanski’s Book of Shadows in the garage while the other witches were in the house having a party, but go off, I guess.

The book asserts that Sanders is descended from a long line of Welsh witches, and that he was made King of the Witches in 1965, the last holder of this title having been Owain Glyndwr, the last independent Prince of Wales. I have been unable to find anything to prove this last statement, and have a sneaky suspicion that it stems entirely from the depiction of this historical personage in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1.

We are told that Sanders is “unique in that he has set himself the task of making his religion respectable.” Whether or not this respectability involves publishing photos of Maxine Sanders’ tits remains to be seen.

The Introduction closes with a plea to the reader to consider that the practices of the modern witch are no less absurd than those of other religions, which is nice, I guess.

The next chapter of the book, The Young Initiate, has the telling of a now well-known story of Sanders’ introduction into witchcraft at the hands of his grandmother at the age of seven. Stay tuned!

#Alexandrian Wicca #Wicca #Alex Sanders #traditional wicca #Traditional Witchcraft #King of the Witches #Review

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tanadrin · 1 year

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Ecology of Sogant Raha I: cytic and acytic life

The Ammas Echor took more than twenty years to decelerate from interstellar velocities as it approached the star Kdjemmu, in that time making multiple highly elliptical orbits, first of the star itself and then of the fifth planet, its destination. Sogant was the original name for this planet; the augmented form, Sogant Raha, added a religious epithet, connoting the “long-awaited world.”

The Ammas Echor settled into its final orbit in the 318th millennium of the Exile; because its people were just emerging from the long star-journeying interphase of their civilization, their shipbuilding capacity had atrophied, and developing the ability to construct a craft capable of maneuvering to the surface and returning again was a significant technological feat. The possibility of beginning with one-way journeys was contentious, due to lack of information on the perils that might await the colonists, and a desire to protect the native biosphere. The goal was careful exploration first, with colonization to follow only as safety from possible pathogens or hostile native organisms could be assured.

Orbital surveys revealed a great deal anyway; the planet was about sixty percent ocean, with warm, shallow seas; tectonically active; temperate, with minimal axial tilt and no significant permanent ice cover. Coastal features and color changes in the ocean indicated a rich aqueous ecology; the land was slightly more barren, being covered principally in low plantlike growths, akin to grasses, shrubs, and mosses, but only small patches of tall woody organisms, and few large animals. Analysis of the ecology indicated the possibility that the planet was still recovering from a mass extinction that had occurred within the last few million years, and many land-based ecological niches remained unfilled. Despite this recent catastrophe, scientists were impressed by the sophistication of the native environment: native flora regulated erosion, growth patterns seemed evolved to channel and control wildfires when they broke out, and dense mats of funguslike heterotrophs timed their fruiting phases together, giving off enough chemical heat to subtly affect weather patterns and help distribute their spores.

When settlement of the surface could finally begin in earnest, biologists noted several additional interesting facts. First, there was a great cleavage in the realms of life on Sogant Raha, one akin to the archaea-bacteria-eukaryota split on Earth, but far deeper, to the extent that a single last universal common ancestor could scarcely be imagined (though the other possibility, a world with two episodes of abiogenesis, seemed equally implausible). Each realm used substantially different genetic molecules, had very different protein assembly methods, and one, the acytes, seemed to lack any kind of cellular structure at all, not even the multinucleate cells of some of the more unusual single-celled endobiota. The cytic lineage included all macroscopic lifeforms, but the acytic lineage had a strong penchant for symbiosis, being found on, in, and even within the cells of, just about every cytic clade on the planet.

Some of these acytic organisms seemed to affect gene expression in complicated ways. Biochemists found that certain signaling compounds could induce programmed death in acytes, leaving their cytic hosts intact, and while this was fatal to many species of cytic life, others survived handily--albeit with their physical morphology and even behavior radically changed. Long-stemmed willowy grasses became small, mosslike plants; soil-dwelling grubs became thin, swift flying creatures. Burrowers that abandoned their eggs became swarmers that nurtured their young; thorny stalks that bore deadly poison became round, sweet-tasting fruit.

Moreover, the acytes interacted with each other in complex ways; they sometimes came together to form larger, more complex structures and networks, exchanging chemical and electromagnetic signals in complex patterns that spread unpredictably.

On our expedition to the deserts of the southern hemisphere, we witnessed a marvelous phenomenon at dusk: a great wind sped over the plain, kicking up dust and dirt, and gathering up the microorganisms that lived in the topsoil. As it moved toward us, our electromagnetic sensors pricked up; they were signaling to each other more rapidly now, their cries free to move further in the cloudy air than they had been in the solid dirt. As they did, they strayed into the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the whole wall of dust was suddenly aglow, shimmering against the dark sky. Soon the dust enveloped our camp, and everything around us vanished; but still as the evening wore on, and we pressed our masks tightly to our face, we caught flashes of light in the churning wind around us.

--Botanist’s report, fifth year of colonization

By far the most diverse of the cytic lineages was one the scientists termed Nexus, after both its microscopic structure and its behavior. Nexus acytes shared nearly their entire genome with one another, but appeared in a dizzying array of forms: within three years of colonization, over a thousand species had been identified. Unlike other acytes, Nexus did not seem to directly affect gene expression. It was hardier than its cousins, and surprisingly infectious. For the most part, Sogantine biology was only partly compatible with humans--there were no common pathogens, despite early fears, and though they shared mostly the same amino acids and incidental mineral nutrients, the endobiota could make no use of the native carbohydrate analogues, which were simply excreted. But Nexus spread quickly to endobiota, including humans, adapting to use glucose as an energy source; more worryingly, within fifteen years it began to show up in spinal fluid and nervous tissue. Only a year after that it was found within the human cell for the first time, though still to no apparent ill effect.

This seemed to the colonists a fine price to pay for their new home, no worse than any of the other symbiotic relationships which the human body was involved in. A few desultory experiments were performed in attempting to inoculate the human body against Nexus, but the acytotoxic compounds proved dangerous to human cells, and Nexus proved resilient against low doses. Most of the scientists and biologists of the people of Ammas Echor then turned to the task of resurrecting the thousands of Terran species of the Great Record, and of finding a way to integrate terrestrial organisms into the native biosphere so that agriculture could begin again.

In this time also, the colonists began to consider the fate of the other Exiles who wandered in distant volumes of space. Though they knew there was little hope that all humanity might once again be gathered under the same sun, they longed to call to those who might be relatively nearby, to let them know of Paradise. They began to work on a beacon of sorts, a massive signalling apparatus which could call out to the stars, if anyone was there to listen. The center of this project was a great radio array and a power source; and the engineers who worked on its design were intrigued by the possibility of using the acytes and Nexus in particular as part of its design, thinking that they might be able to use them to manipulate the planet’s magnetic field, and induce a modulation in the solar wind that passed over it would stand out to any telescope that strayed over Kdjemmu. The signal would be subtle, but it would not require overwhelming the blazing light of the star itself; and the telescopes of the Exile were accustomed to detailed observations of stars for many years at a time, seeking the signature of planets to settle amid the noise of normal stellar variability. While most scientists turned to other questions, investigations of Nexus did continue on a smaller scale, albeit along these more utilitarian lines.

There was one exception: a man named Kaituro, which was Warden in his ancestors’ tongue. By the time Kaituro began his career as a scientist within the Archive, the spacefaring era was a quickly-fading memory. Though still split between the Ammas Echor and the surface, the human population was thriving, and confident that its future was bright on this new world. Kaituro focused his work on the acytes, and on Nexus in particular, fascinated by this mysterious chimera. He soon observed that the relationship between Nexus and the human cell--indeed, the cells of all endobiota--was changing. Nexus had started to integrate itself into the envelope of the nucleus, and forming new organelle-like structures of uncertain purpose. In some nonhuman endobiota, treating samples with acytotoxic compounds made cells sluggish and weak, though Kaituro’s colleagues simply attributed this to their inherent toxicity.

Kaituro remained uneasy about this quiet visitor, concerned that some mutation or external signal might cause unanticipated illness. But in his heart he was conflicted: he was a man of the old faith, which had been born in the most ancient days of the Exile, before the eldest of his forefathers had come to the star called Rauk; and he believed ardently in the promise of Paradise, and that on this long-awaited world humanity could at last be reborn, and cleansed of the legacy of its sins.

But eventually, to his horror, his misgivings were proven correct: a disease struck the colonists, appearing at first among the elderly, who had had Nexus in their bloodstream longest. When no bacterium, virus, or prion could be found, Kaituro’s colleagues reluctantly began to entertain his hypothesis that Nexus was responsible. Search for a treatment began, but few promising leads were found outside of an intensive investigation of the signaling mechanisms and metabolic pathways of Nexus itself, a slow and laborious process.

Only a few years after this disease appeared, the age of onset was creeping downward; new symptoms also began to show themselves. The most severely affected began experiencing personality changes, chronic pain, and confusion. Some became forgetful, losing time, or recalling events no one else could remember. Careful study excluded all other possible pathogens, and Kaituro became the center of a frenzied research project.

But as their work progressed, Kaituro’s spirits sank. Nexus was frighteningly adaptable, and entirely ignored by the human immune system. Worse, of all the acytes its biology was closest to humans; any drug which was effective against it was invariably highly toxic to humans as well.

Nexus was found aboard Ammas Echor now as well; there, far from the native biosphere, it seemed quiescent for the most part. But a breakthrough occured when one of the most severely afflicted patients was taken to the ship for a round of experimental treatment; despite being thoroughly quarantined, soon after her arrival symptoms which were found only on the planet below, and not in her or anyone aboard the ship, began spreading on Ammas Echor itself. Nexus was perhaps mutating, but it was also communicating its mutation, and doing so rapidly, over improbably long distances for a microorganism.

As the symptoms of the disease worsened in the population, Kaituro’s understanding did improve. After a while, new cognitive symptoms appeared: increasingly disordered language, delusions, hallucinations, and nightmares. A child, otherwise perfectly healthy, awoke with a memory of a long life spent in a village by the sea, among different family and friends, whose eyes were all pearl-white. An astronomer looked up one evening to find his memory of the stars was wrong; when he tried to reconstruct them as he knew them, he found that according to their proper motion, the sky he remembered was more than two million years old. An elderly woman lapsed into aphasia, speaking a tongue no one in the colony understood, and found nowhere among the Archive’s records. Kaituro was overcome with the sense that Nexus was not a simple opportunistic infection, but that it was learning how to alter human thought and memory as well.

But when he broached this theory carefully to a few colleagues, they were skeptical; even the planetary ecologists, who had a deep sense of the rhythms and patterns of life on Sogant Raha found the idea that human thought was being mirrored in the signalling mechanisms of the native life difficult to swallow. And Kaituro might have abandoned his hypothesis, if he did not learn soon after that his sister, Sunjat, was among those afflicted with this disease; and that all signs indicated she would die very soon.

Kaituro devised a radical plan. Some of the metabolic levers of Nexus had been identified; he himself had worked out much of the electrochemical signaling system that regulated its activity. He sealed himself in an isolation chamber to prevent interference, with a prepared cocktail of chemicals designed to stimulate Nexus’s activity, and a small BCI of his own design, which could operate at the same low power and variable frequencies as the Nexus, and transfer signals between it and his nervous system. His goal was ambitious, but if his hypotheses were correct, not unreasonable: to try to master the Nexus through direct interface. He placed the implant under the skin of his arm, then administered the drugs; nothing seemed to happen for a long time. He glanced down at the floor of the lab, and furrowed his brow. Something seemed off. He found it difficult to remember; had it always been a black void, filled with stars?

[part II]

#ecology of sogant raha #sogant raha #tanadrin's fiction

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shsl-box-split · 1 year

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creaturea · 11 months

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Unmarked (2023)

I can’t even begin to describe this loss.

He was like those old-fashioned books,

The ones you have to split pages in just to open.

Uniform spouts of experiences and life,

Soaked into the creases of the paper.

I’m mournful now, with their faded letters,

I so desperately wish I could have read them.

He is the static from a cable TV screen,

Something that didn’t exist when he was 17.

But now, the thing that doesn’t exist is himself.

That stream of consciousness changes channels every hour.

I don’t know how my father feels, seeing his father so close to the stars,

But all I see is unfinished books.

The books he did write, the ones he didn’t.

The book that could have been our relationship.

And the leaflet that is there, instead.

I don’t know whose fault it is,

That I didn’t spend as much time with him.

But all I can do is guess.

Was it our frigid family exteriors?

Was it the split thread in the family cloth?

Or was it a fault of mine?

Too caught up in the etches and annotations of my own life.

But that doesn’t matter now.

Just like uncut pages,

Our connection is closed.

And just as a journal goes unfilled,

Your departure from the world is unmarked.

#i'm cringing #poetry #poemsbyme #poem #writers on tumblr #writing

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halechief · 1 year

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hey how does claire reconcile the difference in frank’s absence after he dies vs chris’s absence when her presidency is over? frank’s presence being a constant take and take and take under the guise of mutual respect/benefit vs chris uprooting his entire life to come support her and be an instrument of *her* vision. love you, mean it.

hey back.

so, what i think is really fascinating is that christopher's place in claire's life and francis' place in her life are actually pretty solid foils of one another all the way down, but even more so than that, the person that claire is with both of them are also foils of each other, a lot of the time. frank's absence affects claire most aggressively in its permanence, it is like a part of yourself has died and you will never, ever get it back. there is mourning, and grief, and anger, for claire, at feeling her sense of self fracture without him. she is a woman who has always considered herself an independent, and self - possessed person, it is beyond humbling to see herself shattered by loss, and left wondering what parts of her are real.

losing francis ( or even ridding herself of him intentionally as it happens in some verses, ) is a deeply painful point in claire's life and overarching story, even though that pain is felt alongside incredible relief and triumph. she looks for him, not in the life she is living but inside of herself, in the spaces that are left empty without his voice to fill them. she feels, also, like there are things of hers that he took with him when he went, and those negative spaces, unfilled by him, and unable to be filled by anything else, pulse with a regularity that feels almost supernaturally charged, enough that she begins to manufacture his commentary as some kind of torture or relief, depending on the situation. because she knows him so well, the rendition is nearly perfect. she strives to fill the space of him, she strives to return herself, to herself, to achieve a reality in which she does not have to think of him to consider who she is.

this is not the case with christopher brady. where francis wielded claire, and was wielded by her in turn, claire hesitates to consider christopher an instrument. even in the beginning of their alliance, she was almost entirely truthful with him, she led him to the truth, or at least the version of it that could be printed, and from it he pulled what he felt to be certain, and relevant. he was never under her thumb. she chose not to play him any more than she had to, and somehow, over time, he earned her respect, and then her admiration, and finally her friendship, eventually even becoming possibly the most genuine and deep relationship that she has ever been able to foster and not break, in some manner, by accident or by design. at the end of her presidency, christopher's absence affects her so deeply because of the lack of permanence in it. because he is still there, and circumstances have split them, and because if she wanted to, she could reel him back. it's possible that it is only when she fails to do this, the selfish thing, the thing that francis would have done, that she really allows herself to accept that she is not as much like him as she's let herself believe. ( or as she likes to think, at times. it is so much safer to think only of oneself. it so much less dangerous not to care, or be cared for. )

to have her primary association in her life go from being a constant pouring out of herself into someone who could only ever feel entitled to more, to having someone in her life that asks for almost nothing and often wonders how he can give more and be more, is a jolting change in perspective. i think it is validating for claire to be in the position that francis was in and instead of taking advantage, or becoming accustomed to something as self effacing as honest, genuine devotion and regard from another person, choosing to protect and preserve it at any and every cost, and ensure that he always understands that claire is there for whatever he could possibly need from her that is in her power to provide. she wants them to be equals, she wants his happiness more than her own, enough that she will cut against her own interests to ensure it. enough that she does not want him to ever have to wonder who he is without her, because he is so much more on his own, so much a self - made man, and owes absolutely none of it to her.

she does not reconcile his absence, because there is nothing to reconcile, things are as they should be, with him, always having the choice. and her, supporting him however he chooses. she does not struggle to fill that absence, either, because there is nothing that could compare. instead she learns to live by herself and for herself, for the first time in over thirty years.

#( notes. )#okay.#does this make sense im not sure i started losing myself and getting emo #( and make death proud to take us. )

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