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robininthelabyrinth · 5 years

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Eyestealer 9 - ao3 link

Fandom: Naruto Pairing: Senju Hashirama & Senju Tobirama (mostly gen, hints of other relationships)

Summary: Hashirama really doesn’t approve of the thoughtful way his father looks at his younger brother’s bright red eyes. He’s sure it doesn’t mean anything good for anyone.

He’s right.

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Of course, even with Izuna now (somewhat reluctantly) supporting their plans to build a village, peace wasn’t as simple as all that.

Even once they get over the yelling, screaming, and death threats involved in the negotiation process of setting up a peace treaty, even once they've gone through the officially mandated cool down period, and even once the village has started to actually be constructed, there are still – problems.

Tobirama’s eyes, for one.

Madara was right about his clan’s elders not being happy about Tobirama remaining outside Uchiha clan control, village or no village. They’re no longer calling for his head, which Hashirama begrudgingly supposes is something, but a number of them clearly and very loudly prioritize the protection of the Sharingan and its secrets over Tobirama’s total non-involvement with the original theft.

(It's sad, really, that the Uchiha clan records from that particular period of time have become too badly weathered for them to identify whose eyes exactly were the ones that were taken, so that even if there are rumors they cannot be confirmed. Very sad, very unfortunate, but what can they do, there's simply no other way to be entirely certain. Also, on a totally separate and unrelated note, it turns out that paper remembers enough about the plant it used to be, whether wood or rice, to be susceptible to Hashirama's Mokuton, and also Hashirama has exactly zero regrets about doing what is necessary to ensure no one has proof they could use to support a claim his brother's eyes as the price of a blood feud.)

At first, the bitter Uchiha elders limited themselves to trying to keep Tobirama from learning the jutsu techniques necessary to help him deal with it. When Madara teaches him some of them anyway, particularly the ones relating to sleep, the elders escalated to lodging formal complaints about Madara’s leadership, which he only repels with Izuna’s assistance. If they hadn't been able to get Izuna on board beforehand, Hashirama shudders to think about the result - but they do, and the elders are defeated and forced to abide by their clan leader's decision.

But when that doesn’t work…well.

They’re apparently even more bitter about the whole situation than Hashirama thought.

“Anija. Your feelings are –”

“I’m aware that my feelings are warping the architecture again,” Hashirama says tightly. “I’ll fix it later.”

“It’s really disturbing how you manage to keep smiling while radiating that much killing intent,” Madara observes, his chin on his hands. He had his own desk in what they’d tentatively dubbed the administrative center of their new village: they all did, given the vast amount of paperwork that creating a new village seemed to involve. “I mean, I always knew you were the type to smile all the time, but I didn’t realize there was so much effort involved.”

“He made a vow about it,” Tobirama says with a sigh. His eyes are blindfolded, which the Uchiha have confirmed helps reduce the strain on his chakra, but it’s not impeding the speed of his paperwork in the slightest. Hashirama rues the day his brother learned to sense chakra-infused ink. “I think he was four at the time? Possibly three. He was apparently a very stubborn child, which I’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone.”

“I don’t like being angry,” Hashirama says.

“So instead you’re…happy with a side of stabbing?”

“I’m not –” Hashirama pauses, looking at the remains of the chair that had been leaning next to the door. It was now impaled on multiple long thin spikes that have emerged from the wood of the wall. Also, the top part of the chair appears to be drowning in kudzu and blackberries in a method that would work quite well to smother a person, if one had been sitting there. “...yes. Apparently. But I haven’t stabbed any people.”

“Yet.”

“Yes, exactly, no people yet – hey!”

Madara sniggers. “I’m just glad Izuna’s away on mission,” he says. “He’d react even worse than you are. Even when they were only enemies, he didn’t even approve people other than him trying to kill Tobirama.”

There’s an audible crunch from the direction of the chair.

The ‘head’ of the chair is now less smothering, more exploding.

“…should I not be mentioning the elephant in the room, then?” Madara asks, but he has a shit-eating grin that suggests he will be mentioning this particular instance of Hashirama’s temper for the rest of their mutual existence and possibly longer, depending on how one felt about reincarnation.

“It was just an assassination attempt,” Tobirama says irritably. “It’s not that big a deal.”

“You shouldn’t have to deal with assassinations –”

“I’m a shinobi.”

“– from inside the village, Tobirama! It’s our village. It should be safe.”

"Safe from what, though?" Madara muses. "Let us all take a moment to remember exactly who it was that nearly killed my brother in a sparring match."

In Tobirama's defense, Izuna had approached him and requested the match, wagering that no matter what Tobirama's mysterious new jutsu was, he would still come out the victor, or at least even as always, and of course Tobirama could never resist an opportunity to test out his new jutsu, particularly in near-battlefield conditions.

Unfortunately, they'd both gotten so accustomed to outright attempts to kill each other that they'd forgotten it was a spar about ten minutes in.

It also turned out Tobirama's new jutsu (the hiraishin, he called it) really could defeat the Sharingan.

Luckily for everyone involved, Tobirama realized he was supposed to be pulling his death-blows a split-second before he followed through on the strike. Not that Izuna particularly appreciated being only partly stabbed.

He did (somewhat begrudgingly) appreciate being healed, first by Tobirama in an attempt to keep him stable and then by Hashirama when he'd come running hard on Madara's heels to find out what had so alarmed his friend.

‎It'd very nearly been a disaster - Tobirama exhausted his chakra trying to heal Izuna, causing him to collapse, helpless; Madara nearly took off Tobirama's head in revenge for his brother’s apparent murder before Hashirama stopped him by virtue of throwing himself bodily in the way; Hashirama panicked when he saw that Tobirama was nearly unconscious and bloody and started to heal the wrong person even as Tobirama tried to smack him away, unable to explain; Madara freaked out even more when he saw that he’d nearly cut Hashirama in half by accident…

And, just to top it off, what felt half the Uchiha clan was hanging out around the sparring field watching and the sheer amount of killing intent everyone was pouring out activated all of their Sharingans, which meant the entire fiasco was now permanently seared into their brains.

Luckily for everyone, Izuna figured out what was going on before anyone else did and started laughing hysterically at the sheer absurdity of the four strongest shinobi in the entire country accidentally murdering each other after years of having tried very hard and failed to do that very thing, which in turn turned out was enough to distract them all from escalating the situation any further.

So in the end it was more comedy of errors than disaster.

Albeit just barely.

(Much more funny was letting some of the Uchiha sit in on Tobirama’s quarterly presentation of his newest jutsu research results, in which Hashirama usually spends the vast majority of time just sitting there saying, “Kinjutsu. Kinjutsu. Kinjutsu. No, I don’t care if it’d be effective, we’re not doing that. Kinjustu. Kinjutsu. Kin – I’m sorry, you can do what with people’s blood now? Huh. Okay, we can keep that one. But that specific usage of it is kinjutsu!” Their expressions were priceless, particularly when Hashirama subsequently informed them, after Tobirama had stormed away to sulk the way he always does when he feels his brilliance is being impeded by something as silly as ethics and basic humanity, that Tobirama had single-handled caused the Senju list of forbidden jutsu to triple in size.)

‎"That was a mistake, though," Hashirama protests. "This is different. This was targeted -"

"It wasn't even a good assassination attempt!" Tobirama exclaims. "Anija, I saw it coming a good ten minutes before it happened. Why are you so worried?"

"Because it wasn't a good attempt!" Hashirama exclaims.‎ "That means it was a feint to lull us into a sense of security for a future attack!"

‎"Hashirama," Madara says after a few long moments of silence. "That's paranoid. And trust me, I know paranoid."

Hashirama pouts. "It is, though," he insists. "Elders don't make it to being elders by being bad shinobi. You might know paranoia, but I know when people are trying to be underestimated, okay?"

"Hashirama..."

"Don't you 'Hashirama' me! There's something happening, okay? Something we haven't figured out yet."

"I still think you're exaggerating.‎"

"And I still think you have trouble realizing that your clan is capable of being guilty of more than just bad temper," Hashirama says, even though he knows it's uncalled for even as he says it.

It's true, but also uncalled for.

Sure enough, Madara scowls. "How can you say that? You know perfectly well that we're literally a cursed clan," he snarls. "Tobirama's even seen the tablet, if very briefly -"

"Speaking of which, I don't trust that so-called 'tablet'. Why would Indra leave one to his clan and not Ashura? Suspicious."

"First off, it was the Sage who left it, not Indra, and secondly, you've never even seen -"

"I don't need to see something to know bad advice when I hear it -"

"Either way, there's nothing we can do about it now," Tobirama interrupts, practical as ever. "But if there is another attack, I'll do my best to see it coming. So to speak."

He taps the blindfold pointedly.

(More people know about that now – not everyone, certainly, and it’s mostly rumor and speculation, but…people know. Some people act differently, others don’t, and a few guilty-looking souls among the Senju have put two and two together, judging by the way they avoid both of their leaders. Hashirama sincerely hopes they choke on their complicity.)

Seeing that Tobirama and Madara are in rare agreement, Hashirama sighs and droops into his favorite sulking pose - head down, shoulders curled in, general aura of gloominess around him. "I just want to protect you, Tobirama," he says with a moan of despair‎. "I'm your big brother. It's my job."

"Then stop sulking and get back to work," Tobirama says mercilessly. "Something which, let me remind you, is also your job, except unlike taking care of me, it is literally your job."

‎"He's not going to be any use to anyone until he gets this out of his system," Madara says, not wholly incorrectly. "We could spar -"

"One of you is doing this paperwork with me."

"Fine, fine. Hashirama -"

"I'll go take a walk," Hashirama sighs. He can tell when he’s being more of a burden than a help. Given his focus issues, it's not that uncommon a feeling when paperwork is involved. He tries, he really does, but no matter what he does he keeps on drifting off to think of other things a few minutes in and ends up writing out poetry or ideas for a new taijutsu technique instead of reviewing the mission reports he's supposed to be dealing with. And that's assuming he maintains the ability to sit in one place for that long... "But don't leave Tobirama alone, okay, Madara? If I'm not back before moonrise, you can stay at our house."

"Anija -"

"Promise me," Hashirama demands, ignoring Tobirama's expression of long-suffering annoyance.

"I promise, I promise," Madara says. "If my clan elders try anything, I'll be here to stop them. Okay? So you can calm down and stop doing the creepy vine thing."

It's not creepy. It's just what vines do.

...when they're extremely vicious and also subject to about three seasons growth in the space of ten minutes.

"It's kudzu," ‎Hashirama hears Tobirama tell Madara behind him as he hops out the window in search of anywhere-but-here. "Invasive, parasitic, and extremely destructive – the other one’s blackberries, which is if anything worse, don’t let it get out anywhere, we'll never get rid of it – and if you think you can't get sick of a fruit, let me tell you -"

Hashirama goes for a walk.

Normally the sight of his budding village is enough to calm him and make him happy - the sight of all those people, living in peace side by side; no longer just Uchiha and Senju but other clans, more and more by the month as they realize where the centralized shinobi power in Fire Country now lies - but today it just grates at his nerves.

They really need to get a police system up and running. Madara already agreed that his clan would take leadership of it - it was only reasonable given their abilities, just as the considerably higher proportion of Senju with iryo ninjutsu skills made them the obvious choice to run the hospital - but they haven't worked out the kinks of how or who will be involved.

If they had a police, maybe they could have already set up a system of punishment for when people try to murder other people for no good reason.

...no, walking through the village isn’t helping.

Hashirama decides to go walk through the forest instead.

(The Forest of Death is not a garden. It’s just where he keeps the more…interesting manifestation of his powers, that’s all. Not a garden.)

Today, though, even tending to the large carnivorous sunflowers and the snowdrops that have taken to spitting acid – listen, okay, Hashirama doesn’t like being angry and he’s great at sublimating that, but those feelings have to go somewhere and apparently when you have the Mokuton the answer to where they go is into the local plantlife – isn’t really doing the trick.

Maybe if he went outside the village?

Yes, that’ll be nice. Some real wild forest, free and growing and smelling of green – that’ll help him feel better.

Except it doesn’t.

Hashirama frowns.

The restless, anxious feeling that’s been bothering him all day – more than all day, for several days, maybe even a few weeks – is much worse out here. Much worse.

And that means the feeling isn’t his.

Hashirama reaches for the plants.

They don’t actually reach back, don’t whisper back the way he imagined when he was a kid, but they’re there for him, always, and through them he knows that something is wrong, and where.

Not what – trees are frankly terrible at understand what animal life is up to, still stuck on wondering why in the world anything would want to move around as much as all that, and while moss is surprisingly good at figuring out human motives (people apparently have a lot of sex on moss) it’s also functionally blind, so there’s that – but at least they can tell him where.

Something draining, apparently. Something a bit like a hole in the ground, a bit like weed-killer or worms, the bad ones that eat at roots instead of munching on dirt, but also apparently growing-plant-like in a strange way, a bit like lawns?

(No one likes lawns. Not even the grass in the lawn like it.)

Well, since being a sensor isn’t one of Hashirama’s skills – he likes to think he wouldn't be totally blind if he really tried, but between Madara (unusually strong) and Tobirama (not worth comparing to), he’s never had much reason to practice it all that much – the only thing for it is to go see what it is himself.

Hashirama is aware that the correct thing to do is to send a message back to the administrative center and get someone else to do it, like a proper Hokage, but that would involve going back into the village and his nerves are still scraped raw from the bad-plant-feeling and the assassination attempt on his baby brother for something he didn’t even do, and damnit, they call him the God of Shinobi, he can check out a threat that has somehow made its way to their front door without even Tobirama noticing without calling backup.

He’ll be fine.

Now, Hashirama admits that sometimes he’s an idiot. Usually, he’s the sort of idiot that’s just talented or lucky enough to get himself out of whatever stupid situation he ends up in.

This is – not one of those times.

The clearing seemed fine, when he finds it, but oddly enough the trees inside the clearing aren’t responding to him.

It’s not until he walks in to figure out what’s going on that he suddenly realizes that they aren’t real trees, they’re made of something else, something different, something white and artificial and wrong and he’s falling –

#senju hashirama #senju tobirama #uchiha madara #eyestealer #my fic

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bubblesandgutz · 5 years

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Every Record I Own - Day 378: ENDON Bodies

This is a 12″ featuring remixes of the Japanese band ENDON by Justin Broadrick and Vatican Shadow. I received it from the band’s manager after Russian Circles played with ENDON in Tokyo back in 2014. The band impressed me so much that I interviewed them for Noisey. The article is reposted below:

The first time I went to Japan on tour, I was treated to a performance by an opening act consisting of two tiny Japanese girls at a small club in Shibuya. One girl played acoustic guitar and sang in a cute, sweet, elfin voice not unlike Satomi Matsuzaki from Deerhoof. The other girl was playing some sort of motion-activated sampler device. She would make karate chop movements over the small glowing piece of equipment that would trigger samples of gong hits. It was the most Japanese thing I’d ever seen. I just wished there was a hologram Anime character doing lead vocals.

I toured Japan again earlier this year and our host informed me that we would be playing with “the most extreme band in Tokyo”. More extreme than the girl duo with the gong sounds and the martial arts moves? Doubt it. But then I bore witness to ENDON. I can’t say how the band weighs up against other acts in the region—this is a culture that birthed Melt Banana and Masonna, after all—but I’d be hard pressed to envision any other Tokyoites coming close to their level of aggressive dissonance. The drummer plowed through the set with an unrelenting barrage of blast beats. On stage left, a guy was beating a black box strapped to his chest. At first I thought it was old piece of stereo equipment—an old CD player, perhaps—but on closer inspection I realized it was some homemade device with a series of springs stretched across the front. He was beating the springs the way a heavy-handed guitarist strummed guitar strings. Harsh noise thundered out of his amp. Stage right, a guitarist churned out a caustic wash of distortion that sounded Burzum’s Filosofem and the Mohinder discography getting sucked into a turbine engine. Next to him, another band member hunched over a bank of blinking lights, cranking out electronic squalls. At the front of the stage, vocalist Taichi Nagura loomed over the crowd. Built like a tank with a shaved head and a well-groomed moustache, Taichi would be perfectly cast as the intimidating bodyguard Tamaru in a movie adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. While the band doled out their sonic punishment, Tamaru shrieked, howled, whinnied, growled, and bellowed his way through the set, occasionally chucking a beer cans at the audience along the way.

I was shell-shocked by their set. A few weeks later, I was able to get a hold of Taichi to talk about what I’d witnessed.

Brian (B): I remember talking to you over dinner before seeing you play and you described ENDON as “noise metal”. That’s probably the most straightforward description of what you do. But in the States, noise metal usually refers to bands like Today Is The Day, Dazzling Killmen, or Deadguy. Those bands seem tame in comparison. For the sake of not confusing or misleading American readers, we need to come up with a different genre name for you guys. How about power-electronics-violence? Or white-noise metal?

Taichi (T): I love both of the suggestions, really appreciate it. They hit the mark. I know I should be modest, but how about “catastrophic noise metal”?

B: “Catastrophic noise metal” it is, then. So how does a catastrophic noise metal band like ENDON even start? Did you have an idea of what you wanted to sound like when you first got together?

T: Originally, we started ENDON in order to make noise music more functional on an entertainment level. In the extreme music scene in Japan, combining general rock sounds and noise has been a very popular subject for many years but it has mainly been made through collaborations between established bands and noise musicians. We were not satisfied or comfortable with it, because there were very few bands that focused on it as one unit. I think there should be more artists with these terms. Typically, these collaborations tend to add harsh noise as an addition to the higher frequencies of the guitar, like a shoegaze sound. We would like to stay away from that. We wanted to offer listeners a different style. And there is another reason we wanted to make our own sound: general noise and avant-garde styles in Japan have been too close to free-jazz or free music. We still like that stuff, but it’s gotten to be too much, too limiting in its criteria.

B: I would guess that the songwriting originates around guitar riffs, since the guitar seems to have the most concrete and recognizable structure. Am I right? Does the creative process ever start around the noise elements? Lou Reed has that famous quote about cymbals eating guitars—do you ever run into the problem of the noise eating the guitar?

T: Exactly. In most cases we wrote music with guitar riffs first just because metal and hardcore music was a major reference for most of the songs on this album. However, the guitar in “Pray For Me” was written last. For our previous EP, we did lots of jamming and improvisation over and over again to arrange and shape songs. But now we write more with the guitar first. When there is no context or specific ideas, a tiny little motif from an instrument is a great lead. With the invention of black metal, combining noise and metal is not so difficult to imagine anymore. Harsh noise and black metal have an affinity. At the same time, an affinity means a competitive frequency level, especially between guitar and noise. It is very important how we control and arrange them. That’s fun though; we never feel that the structure between guitar and noise is annoying. It is the best part of our songwriting. We usually adjust the equalization between noise and distortion, which leads to a definitive result for listeners. For example, we adjusted our amplifiers a little bit before a recent show and played our usual set. We saw a review later that said ENDON played a bunch of new songs that night.

B: I know Atsuo from Boris helped record your new album MAMA, and I could imagine there being some crossover between ENDON’s audience and Boris’s audience, just because you both have one foot in the metal world and one foot in the experimental music world. And Boris obviously has the occasional collaboration with Merzbow to add the noise element. But aside from that, ENDON and Boris are very different beasts. Do you feel like you have any musical peers in Tokyo? Do you feel a kinship with the Japanese hardcore scene?

T: Atsuo knows exactly what we would like to do, even more so than us! I am so proud of our first full-length being so well made despite our noisy and complicated style. I know we are absolutely in Atsuo’s debt. Yeah, Boris and ENDON have similar tastes in some ways, though they are the pioneers of this genre and no one can be like them. We respect them a lot. ENDON has also been very good friends with a sludge-core band called Zenocide and an industrial unit called Carre. They are the same age as us and often do collaborations together. We also have lots of friends in Tokyo’s grind and noise scenes. Personally, I don’t think ENDON belong to the hardcore music scene in Tokyo, though our favorite venue Earthdom is a mecca of the local hardcore scene. You can still see legendary Japanese hardcore bands there, bands we grew up seeing over and over again. My impression is that the cool and interesting bands at our age used to be hardcore bands that then try to do another thing. Zenocide, who I mentioned earlier, used to be crust punk guys, for example.

B: I think the hardcore vibe I was picking up on comes from the strong antagonistic vibe to your live show, as if the music and performance is meant to punish the audience. Do you feel hostility towards the crowd? Or do you ever feel like the crowd is hostile towards you?

T: No, it’s not intended to be against the audience at all, but against myself. It’s me against the world. In order to act like that, I prepare songs without words. I have no idea what makes me so irate. I see no major difference among each and every individual besides an unspecified mental condition. I try to put myself in that headspace for the purpose of the show. It is not only a punishment but also a sweet pleasure to me. When I act like a master and try to pretend to punish the audience during our show, I feel like I am released from my sin and am buried in happiness. My shows with ENDON are kind of a tragedy in that way. In fact, during the early days of ENDON, there was a lot of fighting between the audience and me…

B: A lot of singers in the world of extreme music tend to fade into the background on record because they have a limited vocal range. With ENDON, it sounds like you have 5 or 6 different singers because the timbre of your voice changes so much. It literally sounds like an entire family—father, mother, son, daughter, family dog—attacking each other. Is this a response to the monotonic quality of metal vocals? Or is it just what naturally came out of your mouth at the first practice?

T: To me, screaming and shouting within the limited range of extreme music sounds so boring. It’s just laborious, a kind of duty they have to fulfill. Of course, what I do is partially a response to monotonous metal vocals, but more than that I would like to keep myself happy as opposed to responding to or attacking others. In that sense, my vocals need to be done unconsciously. Most importantly, ENDON as a whole should prepare our sounds and arrangements to make our music operate unconsciously. As you’ve pointed out, I have tried to do several vocal styles, like one voice that has multiple characters. And I show a relationship among those characters in a psychoanalytical way, like family therapy role-playing. Certainly, there have been good examples of other people doing this. A few singers from great depressive black metal bands have an impressive scream that has both the characters of victim and assailant in one. Multiple characters in one voice… I wanted to move ahead in that direction.

B: Speaking of family therapy, have any of your parents ever come to see you play? And are you still welcome in their homes afterwards?

T: It’s annoying to say that my parents don’t recognize I am crazy at all even though I am doing crazy stuff in ENDON. They are baby boomers that enjoyed Western art, culture, and music during their youth, and they view themselves as the first generation that brought that Western culture over to Japan. They still try to tell me what is best when it comes to music. That is one of the major reasons why everyone in ENDON and I try to focus on musical and cultural “parricide” with songs like “Parricide Agent Service” and “Etude For Lynching By Family”.

B: So I take it that’s a “no” then.

#endon #everyrecordiown

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larondareddamnxssd · 6 years

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UF Magic Prologo

Ford looked once more at the strange machine in front of him, today would be exactly thirty years that his brother had been sucked into another dimension, thirty years he had been betrayed, and Rose's blind eye society had, picked up part of his memories . In front of her was one of a series of diaries containing the secret of Gravity Falls and the key to her brother's return. The book had a strange symbol of a golden six-fingered hand, held a pink flower in its center. For a moment Ford let himself drift through the memories that the strange symbol brought him, memories of a better and calmer time, of research and friendship, he, Rose, Pearl Garnet and Amethyst, together as a team, together as friends, unraveling the secrets of Gravity Falls and fighting against corrupted gems, together as a family. The tears came to Ford's eyes, those had been good times, but now was not the time to cry, there was still a lot of work to be done, and little time to do, he still had to look compatible and make sure the energy emissions stayed low enough for anyone to notice, the last thing he wanted was for the government or the Crystal Gems to find out what he was doing. "Just a little more, just a little more," Forde said as he tapped the control panel again. A crash shook the entire cave, debris began to fall from the ceiling on the engine starting, Ford ran to the control panels in an attempt to prevent the portal from activating. A huge part of the cave ceiling hit the control panel, luckily Forde managed to dodge at the last minute. "No, no ... it's not ready yet," Ford said desperately as he ran to the manual cancellation module in an attempt to keep the portal from opening. But their efforts were, proved useless, soon an explosion of light ensued and the cave completely collapsed. Ford closed his eyes waiting for the inevitable end, but it never happened, realizing that he was still breathing. Ford opened his eyes, rather than a huge wall of stones on him or anything that indicated he was still trapped in the cave, Ford now was on a hilltop. Just below the city of Gravity Falls was ablaze the most diverse creatures coming from the realms of the nightmare, ran through the city tormenting or maiming their poor human inhabitants. The great Temple of the Crystal Gems was now in ruins, the giant woman with six arms and two faces now was nothing but ruins you throw in the earth, which one day was Gravity Falls. In the middle of the city was a huge dimensional ripple that stretched across the sky, Bill was flying over the city, laughing like a madman. Rose Quartz was trapped in her right hand, while Perola, Garnet and Amethyst were fastened on the left, Bill looked especially at Rose. "So Quarzty, what do you think of the decor that my friends made in the city?" Bill said as he mocked Rose for showing the ruined city. "You're a Bill monsters." Rose said as she tried to pull herself out of Bill's clutches. "Ahh Quarztys, I did not know you cared so much" "But unfortunately we're out of time for games" with these last words Bill made a blue fire emerge from his hands and destroy the Crystal Gems once and for all. Ford could only watch inert when he saw the destruction of what remained of his friends and Rose, he knew that his mind would be completely tarnished by these memories. Suddenly the ground began to tremble and a huge figure rose from the earth, it seemed a human, its gray skin and covered with wounds, its hair was white and messy as if they had not seen a comb for years, one hand was missing , the wound was still open by the enormous amount of blood that was flowing. The figure appeared to be wearing a brown jacket and blue trousers, but most of it was covered with an immense layer of dirt, as if it had not been washed for many years. More than anything else Ford was his face, not as he did not recognize, his last had filled for countless nights without sleep, or recurring nightmares of the day of the accident, Ford knew very well who this face belonged to. "It's your fault," the figure shouted as his eyes exploded in flames. At this moment a woman appeared next to Stan, her hair was white, she wore a blue ribbon to tie her hair, it consisted of nothing more, a simple shirt and a red blouse with a white collar. The woman had a huge pointed nose and a wart under her left eye, her eyes were brown yet, they were full of pockets as if the woman had not been sleeping well for several years. "Why did you leave the Ford family, why did you do what you did!" Said the woman before shedding tears. "Why?" Said a new entity appearing behind Ford. She was a red woman, wearing a strange blue cloak that seemed to sway in the wind, though there were none. A long row of golden curls stretched across his head, his eyes as black as the night his clothes looked like a strange medieval armor with huge thorns coming off his shoulder. Despite her human appearance, the woman had a huge cracked gem embedded in her forehead. "I thought we were friends! Why did you abandon me? Did not I serve you well enough?" Said the strange female figure. Ford tried to speak, but his mouth was dry and the words did not come out. "Why did you leave us? Why did you leave us?" Said the three figures as they slowly approached Ford. Ford tried to run over, but the ground opened and again the scientist found himself swallowed by the earth, the only thing he could see were the people he had lost in his life. Closing his eyes to wait for him as he fell, Ford looked once more at his brother's face, his last thoughts, were "I'm sorry." Ford floundered like crazy, sweat trickled down his body, his heart was a thousand, the images of his dream were still vivid in his mind. "Keep your cool now, Ford, you can not go mad, not now that you're so close," Ford said, pulling a pair of glasses down to the nightstand. "Just a little longer," Ford said one last time before getting up and preparing for the arrival of his nephews, he knew he could not go back to sleep, the death of his old friends was still etched in his mind. The corridors of the old hut, now more like the tunnel of time, the pictures on its wall told its story. In the first photo, he showed a Stanford Pines smiling as he saw the first structures of the hut being erected. The following portraits showed a collection of diplomas and doctorates framed on the wall along with a photo of a young Stanford Pines holding the hands of a young scientist wearing a green coat with a black tie and a white shirt beneath his face was a small pair of glasses that leaned against his nose. Stanford was also different, he was much younger, in this image his hair was dark brown, just like his eyes, he wore a sleeveless brown vest and a blue shirt on his face was a pair of new glasses, Stanford smiled as he shook hands from your old friend That image flickered in tears in Ford's eyes as he remembered his old friend. "One more life I ruined," he weighed as he mourned the day he was persuaded to join his old college friend in building the portal. Going forward with an image showing today, Ford's hair was already white, old wrinkles were already appearing on his skin and little traces of aging could no longer be hidden. Ford carefully took the picture, looking specifically at the three people along with him, the first person was a tall and overweight young man, he wore a huge green shirt with a question mark in the middle, his hair was covered, to a ball With his hands covered with thick leather gloves, the young man wore a tool belt equipped for any emergency, which was Soos Ramirez, who did everything in the small Ford workshop. The second figure was a girl a little smaller than Soos, about the same size as Ford, her hair was long and red, her eyes were a reddish brown, she wore a plaid green sweater, a pair of blue pants with black boots with white outlines that formed a strange design throughout the artifact. Her fighters were fastened by a belt with a huge buckle that had a huge runic knot design, she carried two axes on her back, but not the typical woodcutter ax found in the stores, the girl's axes were much more detailed than could be seen As far as the quality that both axes possessed was far superior to any other ax in the region as if they had been specially made for war, they also had runic sculptures at the edge of the blades. That girl was Wendy Corduroy and probably the strongest and scariest girl Ford had ever known in her life. Wendy looked like a typical cool teenage girl who did not care about anything and nothing could bother her, but underneath that carefree outside beat in the heart of a warrior. Ford still remembered when he had shown one of the secrets of Gravity Falls that he had discovered years ago, the girl turned completely, when she put something in his head, there was no one who could stop her. The last member of the group was the young dark-skinned girl who could not have been thirteen or twelve years old, her hair was black and her eyes were a dark brown, almost the same tone of her skin, she wore a green blouse with blue shorts that day on his neck was a golden sword-shaped pendant, fastened by a silver chain on his face was a huge pair of glasses that, if one approached, would realize that they did not have glasses. This was Connie Maheswaram, who, though unrelated to blood, thought she was practically her granddaughter. With a smile, Ford grabbed the image on the wall and looked fondly at his new family, remembering his past and the people he lost, there was still pain, but now seeing that image in his hands the pain seemed to subside. "This time, we'll be ready," Ford said with a determined look, once again returning to the image for its location on the wall.

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originaldetectivesheep · 6 years

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A Life of Riley Part 1 - The Problem With Grinckles ch 1

As these things go, at least this time of the year, around here, this wasn't far off a perfect day. The sun was still coming up, but there was enough light that Wybert Avenue was a pure riot of orange and red and yellow all the way down the long hill out of West Campus to the slough where the old rail trail crossed, and there was just the right amount of cool, damp autumn fog in the air to give the smell of the fallen leaves the right zing. It was a good feel – the kind of day you hoped your classes were light, that you didn't have a lab due, that there was a good game on late, that one of your un-tenured profs might want to come out and invest a couple pitchers in good reviews at the end of the semester, that somebody on scholarship might have a spare roll of quarters for the pool table. It was as good a fall day as you could ask for; nearly good enough to make up for the fact that I was up and walking through it at seven in the morning on a weekend, or that I'd gotten kicked out of bed because of having to get up – or more accurately, of who I had to go and see.

I couldn't really blame Fred – hookups are kind of like this – but he could have stood to be a little nicer about it. I had my pants half on and was trying to jam a foot into one of my boots when he rolled up on an elbow and rubbed me on the shoulder. "Leaving so soon? Do you really have to? Can't you stay a little longer… and then we can go get breakfast somewhere after?"

I thought a little, and set my boot back down on the floor with a clunk. "Yeah. I can stay. We can stay in for a little. I do still have an errand I have to run this morning, but I can do it after, on the way over if we want to go to Rhoda's Cafe on the other side of the eng campus. It won't take a second – I just need to go up to the AP lab and check in with a friend there about this wire-run list." I set my hands on my belt to push my pants off again, but when I turned all the way around, Fred was backed into the wall, his mouth hanging open in shock and horror as if I'd said "I lied about not having herpes" or something, not "I need to go run an errand sometime".

"AP," he said, struggling to speak, his thin beard and moustache twisting around into rope-lasso contortions. "AP – the Applied Physics lab?" I nodded. "And your friend, your friend who asks you to check their harnesses, your friend is Riley Kannacheskis?" I nodded again, slowly. None of this was news to anyone – Riley was probably the most-well known lab head on campus, and if you asked some rando freshman linguistics major or whatever to name a specific lab, they'd probably say "Applied Physics". But that was kind of the problem – it was why Riley, and the AP, and the stuff they got up to were infamous all over campus that was the problem.

Fred leaned past me and picked up my boot, then shoved it into my lap. "I'm sorry, sweetie," he said, "but if you're really involved with those AP people you're going to have to go." Now it was my turn to sit there dumb and shocked, mouth hanging open. "Don't get me wrong, Leo, I like you, you're still a cutie, and the sex was good, but I'm not going to stay hanging around with you and risk getting attached and then worry when you get roped into something mega-stupid and might get killed. The sex wasn't that good. And I definitely definitely don't want to hang out with you and get involved myself. No way. Period. Those people are too weird, and anyone who gets too close to them gets stuck in their weirdness too. I had a fun time, but this is it for us." He raised an eyebrow, and pointed over at the door.

That was that, and so here I was out too early in the morning without a kiss goodbye and a half-lie to maybe do it again sometime or even so much as a goddamn cereal bar, but even though I was still sore about it, you had to admit that Fred had a point. The AP lab was a weird place where weird people built very, very weird machines, and Riley as lab lead had a weird personal magnetism that without fail, always drew lab members, their friends, and any innocent bystanders who got too close in to the very heart of whatever fundamentally bizarre problem the lab had created for themselves, or decided to tackle for some desperate no-hoper.

Because that was the Applied Physics lab's thing: they applied physics, and built machines. Weird machines, but sometimes amazing ones – like the quantum-state dislocator that should probably have won Riley and Yuping a Nobel Prize if the power supply hadn't slagged itself into a slurry of molten copper and burning motor oil the third time they turned it on. But because they weren't an engineering lab, and thus not always building really practical machines, they had a hard time getting funded, and so Riley was always on the lookout for some kind of back-channel, back-alley deal for parts, or favors, or just future goodwill to stretch the lab's budget and let them keep doing cool experiments. But because the AP lab was what it was, and Riley's solution to virtually every problem seemed to involve doing something extremely weird, usually with a machine that was liable to explode or set itself on fire or polarize everyone's dental fillings in a three-block radius, it pretty quickly got to be that only the very, very weirdest and least solvable problems got brought over; everyone else did something more productive and less likely to result in major property damage, like calling the police or lighting a candle to St. Jude.

The last time that I'd gotten involved with one of the Applied Physics lab's problems, back in the spring, I'd ended up face down in the mud of a drained pond while Riley fired a DIY autocannon over my head at a giant lizard cosplaying as a washing machine. And this wasn't a one-off: there was that time where I'm pretty sure I mugged myself and stole my own wallet in the state dislocator, and that time where Carolína went to deliver some notes and got like stuck inside someone's math problem for three days, and if that thing where Remy's ex-girlfriend drank a gallon of ham and had to get her stomach pumped wasn't strictly an AP lab thing, he had been doing something for Riley when his bike – which we were fishing for when the lizard thing happened – somehow went into the Horse Pond, and he still hadn't really told me what the hell was going on with that at all. I could go on. This was the kind of lab where they ought to have "Abandon All Hope of a Normal Life, Ye Who Enter Here" over the door, instead of just "Danger – High Voltage Equipment In Use, Knock Before Entering".

And yet, here I was still going over there. It's not like Riley and the rest were bad people, not really, and nobody'd gotten badly injured or permanently poisoned yet, and Carolína was able to get herself out of that demogorgohedron pocket dimension or whatever, and nobody'd even gotten arrested after that cannon thing, which had to be like a billion times illegal each way. There was never a dull moment around the Applied Physics crew, and usually everything was safe enough; Fred had freaked out over nothing – he probably thought I was going to beg out of treating for brunch – and was worrying about nothing at all.

I followed the bike path off the street, keeping to the side as it wound its way through the Back Yards of cheap dorms, un-managed woods, and half-maintained rec facilities in towards the main engineering campus, idly looking over the flyers and stuff posted to the trees and lampposts, which always got thicker once you got onto actual campus again. Learn Serbian Today with the Jevrem Obrenović Society. Sydney Pollack complete filmography marathon at the A.T. Burlton, continuous running no readmittance. A protest from yesterday against the validity of the last Kenyan presidential election. Volunteers wanted for an experimental scabies treatment. When you really got down to it, there was a lot of weird stuff going on at this school that didn't have anything to do with the Applied Physics lab. I hitched my shoulders up, thumbs in my belt; I was coming up on the Horse Pond, re-flooded and lizard-free, but still a reminder of how unrelated weirdness could quickly become the Applied Physics lab's weird problem.

The pond was looking healthier for the cleanup, but was ringed in a whole array of new signs, one after the other like those flipbook ad posters you sometimes get in the subway: University Property Sensitive Habitat Please Respect; Vulnerable Wetland No Dumping; Please Do Not Dump Active Nuclear Materials (This Means You Riley, someone had scribbled onto that one in laundry marker); Clean Up After Your Pets; Do Not Use Pet Waste Bags To Dispose of Grinckle Offal; Do Not Re-Release Caught Grinckles. The last couple looked new, and there were a couple buzz-cut freshmen from China or Vietnam squatting by the water's edge with fishing poles and a bucket – so at least somebody thought that the grinckles had gotten over here too.

I'd been working over the summer, back home, and nobody I was friends with from school was really interested in fish or fishing, so it was kind of weird, getting back on campus, to find this weird thing happening where there were these grinckles, which I guess was some kind of spiny invasive fish that I'd never heard of before, in all the ponds and lakes that nobody had ever cared about before, let alone ever found any fish in back in the spring. But now like every third email alert was about grinckles, grinckles as a wading hazard, grinckles possibly contaminated, do not just throw piles and piles of grinckle guts into your dorm trash bags. There was a rumor that they tasted like rutabagas, but I'd never tasted one of those either, had never seen let alone tasted a grinckle, and had no interest in ever doing so. I was just glad that this was an inextricably weird thing at school that was never going to come up in the AP lab; I mean, it was a fish. It's biology, not physics, and it's just a stupid fish, even if it's getting in somewhere it shouldn't. It was someone else's problem, and it was going to stay that way. I checked my phone as I cleared the last bunch of trees onto the eng quad; too early for the bagel stand, but maybe, if Riley had been working overnight, I could borrow something for breakfast at the lab along with my circuit diagrams.

Chapter 2

#nanowrimo #alifeofriley #fiction #so glad hypertext is a thing and i don't have to do comic-book-style callback notes

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