#who place fiction over reality and real world devastation

[tariah23]

:/

#Palestine #free palestine #they’re banking on people not giving a shit because the accessibility to cheap fast food and an insanely popular anime character is too #enticing to these people #who place fiction over reality and real world devastation #jjk #rambling #noury is also getting eye surgery soon I hope it works out well for them #it is so easy for these huge companies to pull these people in because most of them don’t care anyway because they’re Zionist to their #rotten cores and these companies know that people are treating the genocide like it’s a ‘we have to look at both-‘ #sides-‘ kinda situation like it’s so… #they also know that a lot of people are stupid and would rather remain ignorant than learn about the history of Palestinians and what #Israel did to them #Gojo is my fav but come on now this is so slimy because they know that he’s insanely popular like they know that ppl will buy tf out of #his happy meal similar to the Mulan Rick and morty sauce shit years ago this makes my head hurt

[qu-film-history-to-1968]

Neorealism Throughout Nations

Grace Doyle

  Bicycle Thieves

  Bicycle Thieves (1948) is perhaps the most important viewing when it comes to understanding the Italian neorealism movement. Directed by neorealist godfather Vittorio De Sica, Bicycle Thieves portrays an accurate depiction of the living circumstances of many Italian citizens after the second World War. Italian neorealism, the movement which the film was a part of, acts as a mirror of reality, and enhances this effect through many practical means. Throughout his filmography, including Bicycle Thieves, De Sica utilized nonprofessional actors in his roles. Factory worker Lamberto Maggiorani plays Ricci, a man struggling to provide for his family, who accepts a job as a poster-hanger. When his bicycle is stolen at work, he and his son (Enzo Staiola) journey to find the thief and return the lost item so Ricci can continue working. It is a heartbreaking depiction of suffering and poverty in 1940s Italy, and how the cycle would continue to destroy hardworking families like Ricci’s. However, the film acts as more than a documentation of daily life, but as a societal lesson for audiences to understand: “Partly, this is what the neo in neorealism refers to: while defying conventions, neorealist film and fiction elaborate on the moral and social components of traditional realism…thereby extending and reformulating its borders. Far from being unique to Italian post-war culture, this dialectic between old and new is what permits realism to constantly take on new forms,” (Haaland, 34-35). The emergence of new cinematic techniques within Bicycle Thieves served a greater purpose than aesthetic: by casting real Italian citizens, the devastation of post-war Italy is amplified through their honest performances. Similarly, having shot on-location allows the camera to reflect the human eye. Nothing about Bicycle Thieves is staged, and its working class center was one that could have been discovered by any European audience member. The film, though simplistic in its story and style, leaves an enormous impact on film history.

He Walked by Night

  In post-war America, audiences longed for something different than the big-studio films which they had come to be familiar with. Due to this demand, as well as the lack of efficiency and stability within Hollywood studios, independent filmmakers took to location shooting. He Walked by Night (1948) is an example of the early film noir era in post-war cinema, as its documentary style holds strong against a backdrop of 1940s Los Angeles. The film, which follows a police department’s hunt for a resourceful criminal after he kills one of their own, shares many cinematic similarities to those of the Italian neorealism genre. Not only was it shot primarily on location, but it takes place over a continuous course of time, without major jumps to the future or past. Like Italian realism, the American post-war realism era also places emphasis on social commentary: throughout many works, “Other postwar realist forms such as the social-problem film are addressed, as well as the aesthetic and commercial effects of a modernist preoccupation with ‘the real’...” (Grossman, 132). Although the focus on the criminal is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film, He Walked by Night has an immense focus on the police procedural, which is allegedly based on a true LAPD police file. The darkness of crime noir surged in popularity post-World War II, as it reflected both the depravity and patriotism the nation was grappling with at the time. It also completely juxtaposed the extravagance of studio films during the early and mid-1940s, as American audiences grew exhausted of over-embellished maximalism on screen. He Walked by Night may not be as fondly remembered as Bicycle Thieves, but its similarity in theme and structure paint an accurate portrait of Hollywood after the war.

Works Cited

Ebert, R. (1999). The bicycle thief movie review (1949): Roger Ebert. The Bicycle Thief movie review (1949) | Roger Ebert. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-bicycle-thief--bicycle-thieves-1949 

Grossman, Julie, and R. Barton Palmer. South Atlantic Review, vol. 82, no. 3, 2017, pp. 132–34. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/90013813. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.

Haaland, Torunn. “REALISM AND NEOREALISM.” Italian Neorealist Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 33–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt3fgsn5.6. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.

#submission

[dan6085]

"San Junipero" is the fourth episode of the third season of the science fiction anthology series "Black Mirror." Written by series creator Charlie Brooker and directed by Owen Harris, the episode originally aired on Netflix on October 21, 2016. It quickly gained critical acclaim and went on to win two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Television Movie and Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special.

The episode is set in a beach town called San Junipero in the year 1987, where the young and vivacious Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) meets the more reserved Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) at a local bar called Tucker's. After a brief conversation, they dance together and end up spending the night together. Kelly, however, seems reluctant to pursue anything further.

Yorkie, who is revealed to be paralyzed from the neck down and living in a nursing home, later visits Tucker's again in hopes of seeing Kelly. She meets a young man named Wes (Gavin Stenhouse), who explains to her how San Junipero works. It is a virtual reality system that allows people to live in a simulated world after they die, with the option to choose different time periods. Yorkie is intrigued by the idea and begins to explore the different eras, hoping to find Kelly.

In the following scenes, we see Yorkie and Kelly's relationship develop over several weeks and years, as they explore different time periods within San Junipero. They eventually fall in love and decide to get married. However, their happiness is short-lived when Kelly reveals that she is dying in the real world and has decided not to "pass over" into San Junipero when she dies, but to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the ocean.

Yorkie is devastated by the news and begs Kelly to reconsider. She eventually manages to convince Kelly to change her mind and they both pass over into San Junipero together. The final scene shows them driving off into the sunset, free to live in San Junipero for eternity.

The episode explores themes of love, loss, and the afterlife, posing questions about the nature of consciousness and what it means to truly be alive. The idea of a simulated afterlife raises philosophical and ethical questions about the nature of reality and what it means to be human.

One of the most interesting aspects of the episode is its portrayal of technology as a way to transcend the limitations of the physical world. San Junipero is shown as a place where people can escape the pain and suffering of their real lives and live out their fantasies in a virtual world. However, the episode also raises questions about the consequences of such technology, and whether it is truly possible to escape the limitations of physical existence.

The episode also deals with issues of identity and sexuality. Yorkie is revealed to be a lesbian, but her conservative family disowned her when she came out. Kelly, on the other hand, has had a long and varied sexual history, having been married and divorced multiple times. The fact that they are both women is never portrayed as a problem or issue in the episode, and their love is shown as just as valid and real as any other.

Overall, "San Junipero" is a thought-provoking and emotionally resonant episode of "Black Mirror." It explores complex themes and ideas in a way that is both accessible and engaging, and it has become one of the most beloved and popular episodes of the series.

[afrotumble]

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2020

Winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction 2020

Time #1 Novel of the Year 2019

________________________________________________________________________

Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.

Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.

The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.

'If greatness is excellence sustained over time, then without question, Whitehead is one of the greatest of his generation. In fact, figuring his age, acclaim, productivity and consistency, he is one of the greatest American writers alive' Time

'A commanding triumph' Sunday Times

'Every chapter hits its mark' New York Times

[thekingofwinterblog]

Andrias Leviathan, the Peacekeeper of a Thousand Years

One of the more interesting things about Andrias in hindsight is how he was introduced.

Many monarchs through history(both real and fictional) have had an epithet, a nickname to go along with their regal number, and Andrias Leviathan I is no different, with his nickname being "The Peacekeeper" or as he was known by the time the story began, the "Peacekeeper of a thousand Years".

From a storytelling point of view, this nickname is of course meant to be ironic. The peacekeeper is not only a man who lusts after war and conquest because it's the only way he thinks he can be alive again, but as we see through the series, the "Peacekeeper" is responsible for creating an inefficient, brutal feudal system from which future conflict is pretty much inevitable.

However, it is also important to recognize that in universe, this is a nickname Andrias earned himself, through his own actions.

And it is in it's origin that the man we see today was forged.

We don't know much about Andrias innitial reign, other than the fact that he once represented and wielded the heart power of the Calamity box, and as such he was probably a man defined by his ability to make friends, and inspire those around him, just like Anne currently is.

We also know that he was a man who cared deeply, deeply about his friends, and that their betrayal of him utterly destroyed his ability to trust other people and truly open his heart up to others ever again.

He also liked to wear lavish robes, and took care to make sure his hair was nice and tidy, as befits the dignity of a monarch.

However, one part of Andrias backstory that is generally forgotten in favor of focusing on how his friends betrayal emotionally devastated Andrias, is the period afterwards.

Because his friends didn't just destroy Andrias ability to trust and love other people, they also left him to pick up the pieces of an apocalyptic event, that reduced his nation back to mostly an medieval age.

It is hard to overstate just how much damage the loss of the Calamity Box did to Amphibia, as every single bit of Amphibian technology depended on it as it's power source.

The robot army, the capital, transportation, probably their equivelant of the internet(I'm asumming those blocks are probably meant for information), their teleportation technology.

Everything.

Imagine if tomorrow, every bit of gas, oil, nuclear power, water power, wind power, etc, in the world just vanished, all at once, totally and completely, leaving everyone with absolutely nothing to power anything.

The is the reality Amphibia faced, as a continent the size of Australia suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves hurled back to the early medieval period.

It would have been a mixture of the apocalytpic Bronze Age Collapse, and the various warring states period that many real life countries have gone through(China, Japan, Ethiopia, Norway, etc.).

Regional warlords and strongmen would have risen up all over, as all power structure that connected the kingdom to the capital would have vanished over night.

The common people would immediately be hit with famines, as the trade and transport of food would have ceased completely. Places that had never been farming communities would have been forced to switch their economies immediately over to a mainly agrarian one, or die when their foodstuffs ran out.

Everywhere people would look to their local leaders for both leadership and protection, that suddenly no longer was forthcoming from the capital.

And there would be war. There would be war everywhere, as every leader began building up their own powerbases, either to protect themselves from others, to try and become strong enough to take control over their neighbors, or aim to conquer the capital and establish themselves as the new monarch of the land.

It would have been a time of war, of bloodshed, where the very idea of Amphibia as a unified political entity would have had a very real possibility of ceasing to be.

It would have been into this era that Andrias friends left him to try and salvage everything on his own.

And to Andrias credit, he did not falter. A weak king might have given up, ran away from it all, abdicsted, or just been content to rule over a stable part of Amphibia. Andrias did noy. We don't know how long it took, but Andrias in this critical and most challenging period of his life did not falter.

He kept on trucking, and eventually, he retook everything.

The dream of Amphibia as a nation did not come to an end in this apocalypse.

Andrias reunified the continent, he brought peace and a modicum of stability back to the world, and became a beloved monarch who's people dubbed him "The Peacemaker".

Amphibia lived to see another day.

However, one thing did die in this period.

And that was Andrias, Heart of Amphibia.

If there was any chance that Andrias might have managed to recover mentally from the betrayal that his friends did to him, it died during this period of war, and conquest.

Because it was out of this carnage that the current Andrias was forged. The Andrias who always, always wears plate and scales wherever he goes, the Andrias who doesn't give a damn about keeping his visage nice and tidy, because it never mattered one bit for him on the battlefield.

The man who is willing to kill children to prove a point.

The Andrias who knows how to, despite his great love for dramatics, and has the mental self discipline to keep his poker face on all the time without ever giving anything away until he's finally ready and able to achieve his ambitions.

The Andrias who was willing to destroy someone who genuinely loved and respected him, because he got pissed at her for asking him for sympathy over a game of Flipwart.

The man who after the war was won, took the toads he most certainly used as his shock troops, locked them into a warrior caste and then "Rewarded" them for his service by effectively forcing them to live in 4 designated backwater provinces(Like the Valley), all the while he replaced them as the standing military with an army of newts.

Andrias made his reputation in the war, and like many soldiers, it broke him. It destroyed whatever vestiges of good there still was in him, and out of the fires of that warring period was born another man.

Andrias "The Peacekeeper of a Thousand Years".

#amphibia #king andrias #andrias friends #amphibia timeline #speculation #theory

[multiland]

Mr. perfect.

pairing: idol!Joshua x reader

genre: angst

word count: 1.5K

summary: what do you do when the one who was always there to comfort you, is the one who now has broken you?

warnings: mentions of cheating, denial and heartbreak.

A/N: this sucks. I’m sorry.

When you first learned about love, you always tried to keep in mind that everything about it was ephemeral, that no matter how many happy endings you had heard about, there was no way someone could ever meet such expectations. To you, fairytales were nothing but that, a fictional scenario people created to give themselves hope, to try to find something good even when the so-called love they felt, hurt them more than any physical harm.

But then you met Joshua, and suddenly you found yourself believing in everything you had convinced yourself was nothing but a lie.

You met him on a Friday night at some fancy party your best friend had thrown. Being from a wealthy family, it was no surprise to you that you found some famous people there. You were nothing like them, but being attached to the hip to her since you were kids surely took you to some places you would’ve never thought you’d ever see.

Dressed in a skin-tight navy dress, you were minding your own business, playing with the martini in your hands as your eyes traveled across the enormous house. The music wasn’t the same kind people your age would put in the background, instead, there were some violinists and pianists playing live. You felt out of place, the fact that your friend had left your side to keep greeting people not helping at all.

And that’s when you saw him, walking through the door with some other guys in a beige tuxedo, black strands of hair hanging over his eyes and small silver piercings decorating his ears.

Your eyes were immediately drawn to him, as he stood there across the room with his hands in his pockets, clearly enjoying the music and focused on the musicians. That’s when somewhere along the lines his eyes had landed on you, the previously blank expression on his face turning into the smallest but sweetest smile for you, and you swore you had never seen a man that beautiful in your entire life.

You knew it was over for you as soon as those round and beautiful dark orbs made your heart go crazy, wanting to look away but not being able to. He had an instant power over you, and you didn’t even want it to be any different.

Somehow you exchanged numbers that night, and although you thought you would never see him again, he proved you otherwise when he started texting you the following days.

You started spending time together every now and then, going to some cafes or meeting somewhere more private. Knowing the reality of his situation wasn’t something easy, but you were soon so infatuated with him that you didn’t even think of saying no when he asked you out.

Being with an idol wasn’t what you had expected at all, but Joshua always made everything feel so safe, warm, and comfortable that everything seemed to be just so easy.

He was so attentive, caring, and loving that you, not even once, felt neglected. He called you every single night before going to sleep or messaged you in the mornings or during breaks.

If you ever felt bad, he always knew the right words to say, and even though you felt insecure about him being around beautiful women all the time, he was quick to ease your fears and make you believe there was no way in the world he would ever want someone who wasn’t you.

You felt wanted, beautiful, and loved. He was a prince, he was everything someone could have ever wanted. So gentle, sweet, always there for you no matter what.

He was the only one who was able to set your body aflame with a single touch, always feeling like you were flying whenever his arms wrapped around you and the smell of his cologne, so familiar, filled your nose and made you feel like everything would be okay.

The way he held your hand and kissed your knuckles when he drove, the way he always tucked strands of hair behind your ear, or the way he kissed you in the middle of saying something just because he couldn’t help but being so whipped for you, making you lose your mind with such a simple action.

His sweet, raspy voice in the mornings after he had spent the night; the way his pupils dilated whenever you wore one of his shirts with nothing underneath, the way he made love to you as soon as he went back home, loving you hard enough for you to feel the trace of his fingers and the taste of his mouth whenever he had to leave again. Fingers through his hair as his mouth swallowed your moans, fingertips digging on your burning skin, teeth sinking on the flesh as he took you to paradise.

The way you found relief in his lips, kissing like there was no tomorrow and feeling like you couldn't get enough of each other. His tongue making you delirious, electrifying every inch of your skin.

Everything that came out of his mouth was dripping with honey, because he never wanted to see you upset, because he was your serotonin, because he simply was the best thing that had ever happened to you, and you were the same for him.

Or at least, that’s what you thought.

That’s why you couldn’t process the words that were falling from his mouth that night, after a month of not seeing each other for his comeback and promotions, he had come to your house, but as soon as you met his gaze, you knew something was wrong.

But you never thought it’d be something so horrible.

He had appeared at your place to tell you he had kissed a female back dancer a week before.

“No.” You laughed humorlessly as you shook your head. “It’s impossible. That did not happen.”

His eyes were filled with hurt and remorse, the more he noticed your denial, the worse he felt.

“y/n… I- I’m so sorry… Fuck I’m sorry. I swear I love you. I’m such an asshole.”

“Joshua, please stop. This is not a funny joke.”

“How can you think I would joke with something like this?” He asked in frustration, running his fingers through his hair.

And you were well aware of it not being a joke in the slightest. The way you could feel cold sweat running down your spine and your stomach churn kept trying to pull your feet back to the ground. But you would try to trick the fate and desperately conjure the truth you wanted to take place.

“Because there’s no way you’d do something like that. You love me, right? You’ve done nothing but show me how much you do.”

Joshua swallowed, tears burning his eyes and threatening to fall.

“I do love you. More than anything.” He assured. “That’s why I’m here, that’s why I can’t stand the idea of what I did behind your back. I kissed someone else while you stayed home and gave me all of your trust.” He repeated. “I regret it every second because I know how much I just fucked up… But I can’t cope with the idea of you trying to dismiss it. I don’t deserve it.”

"Joshua"

He shook his head, stepping closer and grabbing your hands in his.

"Please, please don't give me a chance to stay by your side because I will not hesitate to take it and I don't deserve to be with someone like you." His voice was so sweet, so subtle despite of him saying something so devastating. His hand moved to tuck a strand of hair behind you ear like he always did, retreating as soon as the guilt attacked him again. "You're so beautiful, so smart, sweet and bright and I'm so, so in love with you. It kills me to know I just ruined everything with the woman I love the most in such a dumb way."

You noticed the way his eyes were getting watery, another thing that made you realize how real it was. You wanted to hate him and tell him how much of a dick he was, but nothing came out of your mouth. You just couldn't, although you knew you should have, you could not bring yourself to hate him.

“You- No, listen Joshua…” You trailed off, heart finally breaking in a million pieces as you tried your best to convince yourself that everything was nothing but a twisted dream. “I know you would never hurt me like that. You would never cheat on me. Why would you? That’s ridiculous! You know that I'd do anything for you, right? You know that I love you more than anything. We’ve always had this chemistry, this peaceful and beautiful relationship. You’ve never given me any reasons to be jealous or to feel insecure, someone like that wouldn’t go against his own preach.” You tried to reason, a bitter chuckle slipping from your lips as you wiped your tears “See, I know you’re just such a gentleman that you’d rather put the blame on your shoulders than say she was the one who took advantage of you and kissed you. You’re a gorgeous guy, it must be hard for people not to throw themselv-"

“Why are you trying so desperately to excuse my actions?" He interrupted you in distress. "Babe, I- I don’t deserve it. I was the one who kissed her. While we danced the atmosphere got tense, the adrenaline did not help, and I just had the impulse.” Joshua said lowly, the knot in his throat becoming thicker and making it hard for him to breathe. “I’m so sorry... Why can't you just blame me for what I did? Just tell me how much of a piece of shit I am, slap me, tell me you don't want to see me again. Call me a dickhead, the worst thing that happened to you, I'll take it all, because I fucked up.”

You forced yourself to step back, the air in your lungs slowly fading away as the void in your chest grew bigger.

“No... I- I can't... Because you would never do something so vile.” You smiled, not noticing the way your tears were already streaming down your cheeks. "You wouldn't throw all the beautiful things between us out of the window just to get your damn dick wet. Not when you told me so many times how you'd never want anyone else but me and I believed you because you looked me in the eyes."

Joshua pressed his eyes shut and took a deep, shaky breath as he stepped closer, but you stepped back.

"I do not want anyone else but you, but I stopped thinking and just let my primal self take control instead of considering what I got to lose."

"No!" You shouted. "You wouldn't! You're perfect!"

Joshua lowered his gaze to the floor, hands ballin into fists.

“I’m not perfect… I never was, I never will. No one is.” He whispered. "That's why I need to go before I keep hurting you. If you ask me to stay I will, and I can not let you accept me back."

And then you knew. The idea you had engraved in your head about love being a real fairytale was long gone, cause all it did was break, burn and end.

Your sweet boyfriend, the same who used to whisper how much he loved you against your lips, the same who washed your hair for you, the same who looked at you like you were the most beautiful thing in the world, was the same one who had stabbed you in the back.

Your lip quivered, and Joshua wanted desperately to wipe your tears away and hold you in his arms, but how could he? When he was the one who had hurt you in the first place, how could he ever fix up a heart he let down? He did not deserve to touch you ever again.

With a shaky breath, you forced the words out of your throat.

“That’s where the problem is, Joshua.” You said, voice cracking as his brows pulled together in confusion. “That’s why facing the truth will destroy every part of my being, that's why I will never be able to trust anyone again, that's why I don't want you to walk out the door. If you do, everything will be real, and the thing that would hurt the most is to realize all this time I stopped believing in my instincts, because I thought you were different, because I've always known perfection does not exist…" You explained, a small sob falling from your mouth and cutting you out before you continued. "But to me, you were perfect.”

#kpop #kpop idol #kpopidol #kpop bands #kpop scenarios #kpop reactions #seventeen #svt #seventeen joshua #svt joshua #hong jisoo #joshua hong #seventeen imagines #seventeen reactions #seventeen scenarios #svt scenarios #svt imagines #svt reactions #angst #kpop smut

[thedivinedemom]

An AU of DC with a mass crossover of PS4 properties.

Provisional name: Players Searching for Detectable Changes (Get the pun?)

The setup:

This is the future of DC, a world where the old guard has slowly withdrawn and the newer generations have risen to the occasion. The original Titans in particular, most of which have formed the new Justice League while many other, very similar teams had started to form across the world. One of which was a resurgence of the Teen Titans, led by an older and purified Raven. She wanted to make the Teen Titans something akin as it was for her, a place to belong and learn to use one's powers.

The first 'class' of such individuals include:

Stargirl (of the now-disbanded JSA and still getting used to the Starrod)

Blue Beetle III (Freshly attached to his alien symbiote and freaking out a bit)

Robin V (to work on his anger issues, mostly at the new Batman's request)

Kaldur (a half Atlantean half metahuman who is struggling with his identity and the surface world, Aquaman feels a kinship for the boy seeing their similarities)

Static Shock (a promising new hero but little experience working outside his city or in groups)

Mary Marvel (she's... she's going through alot. Fresh from a coma, her brother is distant as he acts as the new Wizard, and she may be, sorta kinda, being corrupted by Black Adam's gifted power)

The team was rough and there was plenty of head butting (Mostly between Stargirl and Robin/Damian as one is almost the unanimous leader while the other thinks he should be) but they were getting there. They were more of a clean up crew for the Justice League, they did more than the "kiddie missions" that the Outsiders didn't do, and they meant more than the PR grab that was the International team. Though they didn't seem to amount to more than that. They still did their best, pushing past the silent ridicule, as they went about their missions.

This may be why tempers were so high that day.

One day, outside a little city by the name of Weller's Point, the prisoner transport for the villain Plasmus had an "accident". Released and awakened the creature went on a rampage, heading ever closer to the populated area. Luckily, the mentor of the New Teen Titans could teleport. The new team did fairly well in the fight, though they did struggle a bit as Plasmus was not a being where simple brute force would work. It made the fight tricky and more than a bit... messy.

Messy enough that juvenile and emotionally compromised Mary Marvel lashed out against the downed villain but was stopped by her teammates... things escalated from there. Restraint turned blows and the whole team struggled to stop their powerhouse without hurting her. The ones who do the best are Raven, Stargirl, Blue Beetle, and oddly Static.

While both of the former could use their abilities to restrain her to a very effective degree Static was actively draining her of strength, or at least of the electic aura she was radiating and blasting with. Frustrated, done with the situation, and a bit petty Mary launched her largest attack yet by saying her magical word.

SHAZAM.

Virgil did what he did best, he handled that lightning as it came crashing down towards Mary and the Titans restraining her. Well, he tried. The bolt was just too powerful, too unlike anything he had ever encountered. He could not handle it and it was dissipating, if anything it clung to him or tried to jump towards the girl. He had to get rid of it and he had to get rid of it quickly, safely too if he could help it.

He shoved it into the ground, into the power lines. He did it as carefully as he could, trying to prevent overload or flashover as guided the charge into the power grid.

What happened next was a combination of a few things. 1. The Mystic and transformative properties of the Lightning, 2. It is effectively being filtered through a bang baby, 3. The kryptonite power plant owned by, provided by, and operated by Lexcorp.

This interaction, this new charge, cycling through the power grid interacted strangely with a number of devices but none more so than PlayStation 4s and the devices connected to them. This new electricity changed things, literally. It brought fantasy into reality.

Whatever game was loaded into became a part of our reality in a small way. Sometimes TVs, Controllers, and even the system changed to reflect items from the game but the bigger change came with the Players. If a person was playing their console during the surge then they would become a metahuman with abilities based on the playable character they were playing.

The city, the county even, was now flooded by an abundance of metahumans and items of varying power of devastation. Static felt horrible.

He couldn't help but compare what has happened here to what happened in Dakota City but on a wider scale. And this time it was his fault. His sense of responsibility wouldn't, couldn't, let that stand. He had to fix his mistake and his team was dragged along for the ride.

The story to follow is a mix of Final Crisis and Kingdom Come with a bit of the Young Justice cartoon in events and themes, a few twists and likely a bit lighter in tone but to the DC geeks this should give a rough idea… Maybe a bit of Marvel's Civil War but hopefully not the rushed knee-jerk mess that that ended up being.

But it's here that I start having issues with my planning. One part in worry as outside the set up we start to follow the perspective of OCs (something rarely smiled upon) and another part in wondering which OC to focus on.

Now, one thing I love in fiction is progressive powers and the conflict escalating from the different paths people take in said progression. In that vein, I have a pair of protags in mind as well.

The main two/co-protagonists:

The Lawkeeper- a cop before the change and now a member of a task force made up largely of those affected by the surge. A gamer, a man of color, and a believer of the spirit of the law. He doesn't always get along with his fellow officers but he believes in what the blue does. He believes that an organized response is what is best.

His abilities are based on those of Jesse Fades of Control. Meaning he has tremendous psychic potential but he needs 3 things to reach his full potential.

1.Items to bond to so he can generate these psychic abilities. Jesse's used altered items of her universe to get thematic abilities from them (ex: a safe to generate a shield, a carousel horse for a dash ability, ect). Here he can use items generated by the surge.

2. A patron/partner entity to help guide, give insights, and empower. It also let's the user enforce reality, basically becoming an anti reality warper.

3. A bonded morph weapon or a weapon to come to his hand when called.

The knight- a recent college graduate who instantly decided to go the route of the caped hero. She, after figuring out how to get her powers to work, instantly went the route of a caped crusader. Going out to the streets, saving lives, stopping instances of surge item abuse, and (in the humble opinion of the local Police Department) getting in the way of operations. In her opinion they were taking too long to get things done.

Her abilities are based on those of Prince Noctis of Final Fantasy XV. This means she has tremendous physical and magical potential but like the above she has a number of check marks needed to gain access to the character's full power.

1. A gem/crystal to draw power from.

2. 13 magical weapons to boost strength. The generated game weapons will do and I have most picked out in a way that likely would help the plot progress.

3. The blessing of 5-6 gods.

4. A power ring of some king to channel all this power.

I keep debating the two above as I do like the idea of both of them climbing in power and clashing over conflicting ideals of what to do with their power. At the same time, I think that just smooshing aspects of both into one (which is actually where they started, a single character) and play off the different ideologies of how best to help people from within her friend group and precinct along with internal conflict. Maybe have the one be a fellow officer they butt heads with because of the... precarious nature

Another OC I was thinking on, keeping with the theme of what to do when you have power, is a thief who played Persona 5. Like both of the above they would be crippled in their ability to use their abilities without a way to fake the connection to. In this case, without the Mementos App, they would need an item that could affect or enter the hearts of others. Luckily, more unlucky really, there are plenty of items floating around that can do just that. Namely Keyblades.

Most other Players are an odd mix but most are variations of the Shooter build. Peak physical humans who heal quickly and often have bullet time. But there are enough other variations to cause trouble. Demigods of unreal strength, men and women who can easily tap into a patron for powers from the outside, 2 variations of spider powers, cat eyed men and women who can cast magic with simple gestures, and so much more. But the real issue was the first two, the demigods without a parent to protect them and those easily connected to a divine source.

The disembodied New Gods of Apocalypse were very happy with those groups. For how bad this can be please look at what happened to Mary Marvel in canon Final Crisis.

Thoughts and opinions would be appreciated.

#dc community #fanfiction #dc fanfic #dc fandom #playstation #mass crossover #orginal character #dc fanfiction #dc fanfiction idea #outline

[five-rivers]

Long Night in the Valley chapter 8

A young man walked in.  His hair was dark, the style conservative.  The only thing that stood out about him was his high-collared jacket.

Aizawa knows who this man is, for much the same reasons that Uraraka knew Skyrunner.  

Fidelity had literally written the book on underground heroism. It hadn’t been published until his death.  

The lights flickered.  The murmuring of the shadows rose, then cut off abruptly, the shadows disappearing along with Nana.  The projector screen changed.  It now read:

Greetings 9’s Friends!  (And teacher.)

“This was my last mission briefing before I died,” said the young man.  “At least, that’s what I’d say if I was really Fidelity.”

“You’re saying you aren’t,” said Aizawa, keeping his voice level.  

The screen behind him changed to read Vestiges: what you need to know.

“I am based on Fidelity.  I’m also based on Railgun.”

“The hero who took down Destro?” asked Uraraka, clenching her fists and briefly floating in excitement.  

Why was she not getting a better grade in history?  

“Not exactly.  He wasn’t actually captured until years later.”

“But you broke his charge, his army!  And all by yourself!”

“Railgun did, yes.  I’ve put together a little presentation for you guys.  Hope you don’t mind.  We all figured you wouldn’t want to go any further without an explanation of sorts.”  He said this all with an enviably flat voice, despite his friendly words.  His body language was controlled and to the point.

Darn Midoriya for managing to build a fantasy that was so close to what Aizawa had always imagined the man to be like.  

(He was not a fan of Fidelity.  Underground heroes did not have fans.  It defeated the point.)

(He pointedly ignored his memories of the bootleg Eraserhead merchandise Midoriya and Yamada had snuck to Eri.)

“You’d be right,” said Aizawa.

“Cool,” said Six.  “Before we begin, I want you to understand that much of what I’m going to tell you will be a lie.”

“What?” said Iida, confused.  “Then what’s the point?”

“The point is, there will be enough truth in it to get you through this safely, and enough falsehood to prevent the commission from taking advantage of Nine later, should they be watching what’s happening here with a quirk we can’t detect.”

“Nine?”  

“Izuku,” clarified Six.  

“Who you called Nine because…?”

“If we count in order of when we were supposedly born, he’s the ninth.  Although, really, he’s the first.  I’ll explain in a moment.”  He pointed to the screen.  “We call ourselves vestiges, and, like I said, we are all based on real people.  We’re part of Nine’s quirk.”  The screen switched to show Midoriya with eight shadowy figures behind him.  “I want to stress that Nine wasn’t aware of us until the sports festival. Specifically…”

The screen now showed Midoriya’s fight with Hitoshi, right before he broke his fingers.  Aizawa recognized the image as a still from one of the cameras.  Except those eight shadows were there as well, right in front of Midoriya.  

“You had something to do with him breaking his fingers and getting out of Shinsou’s quirk.”

“We don’t mix well with mental quirks, apparently. Nine minds all together at once are too many, even if eight of them are fictional.  It’s an interesting side effect.  Speaking of which.”

The new slide was a picture.  An edited picture.  Of a person giving a presentation.  

“Is that a meme?” asked Todoroki.

“Yes,” said Six.  

The slide read, You were never in All Might’s mind.  Nine was just confused.

That meme was so old Aizawa could feel himself taking psychic damage just by looking at it.  

“You’ve been passing through our, the vestiges’, mindscapes. Eight is simply based on All Might.”

That would be a relief, if not for the fact that that Six had admitted he was going to lie.  Also, there was something off about the whole explanation.  

Iida raised his hand.  “Excuse me!  You claim that you are part of Midoriya’s quirk, but you haven’t explained how!”

“I’m getting to that,” said Six.  “Todoroki-san, you’re the one who is always saying how similar Nine and All Might’s quirks are.  Do you have any theories?”

Todoroki’s eyes lit up, even though he kept his habitual deadpan expression.  “Midoriya is All Might’s secret—”

“We wish, but sadly no.  Pick a different one.”

Todoroki looked devastated.  He collected himself quickly, however.  “Midoriya’s strength,” he said, “he got it from All Might, didn’t he?”

“Yes.  Eight is a bit of a complicated case, since he’s based on someone who is alive and Nine knows personally, but in the end, he’s the same as the rest of us.”

“He said something about receiving Skyrunner’s quirk, earlier,” said Uraraka.  

“And Blackwhip…” said Iida.  

“You’re getting it,” said Six.  “Blackwhip originally belonged to Five, incidentally.”

“He has a copy quirk,” concluded Aizawa.  

Six nodded.  The screen changed.  “Right now, Nine has four quirks, three of which he can use freely.  Superpower, Blackwhip, and Float,” he read the quirk names off the screen.  

“And he’s going to get more?” asked Aizawa.

“Eventually,” said Six.  “We don’t want to overload his body—This whole process only kicked off when he met All Might.”

“And why you?” asked Aizawa.  “Why All Might, Skyrunner and these… Five others?”

“I would like to tell you,” said Six.  He raised a finger and waved it in a circle to indicate outside listeners.  

“What are the drawbacks?” asked Aizawa.  

“Hm?”

“The drawbacks.  I get dry eyes when I use my quirk.  Present Mic is deaf.  Vlad is anemic.  A quirk like this one has to have a drawback.”

“What, the broken bones aren’t enough for you?  Or the fact he didn’t hit on the activation conditions until he was fourteen?”

Aizawa stared, unimpressed.  

A tiny corner of Six’s mouth made itself visible over the collar of his coat.  “Well. I think you can make some conclusions but, again…”  He trailed off.  “There are a few more things you should be aware of.  First, Nine had no choice in who we are, although we all fulfil certain criteria.”

“Are you all relatives?” asked Todoroki.  

“Man, you never do give up, do you?” said Six.  “That’s a great quality in a hero.”

“Are you all heroes, then?” continued Todoroki.  

The slide on the screen changed again.  

Vestiges According to History:

8. Yagi Toshinori aka All Might – Hero

7. Shimura Nana aka Skyrunner – Hero

6. Tenma Rokuya aka Fidelity/Railgun – Hero

5. Banjo Daigoro aka Lariat – Hero

4. Vigilante

3. Terrorist

2. Terrorist

1. Unknown

 “Unfortunately,” said Six, “no.”

.

Toshinori caught sight of the feathers first.  He had more experience as a hero, and, as he was no longer the primary user of One for All, the mental strain he was experiencing was much lower, comparatively.  His awareness of his surroundings was better.

Stay calm.  Don’t speak. Don’t run.  

Hawks could receive sensory input from his feathers, though neither Toshinori nor Izuku knew how much.  Better to be safe than sorry.  

We need to get out of the city.

Out of the country, too, for that matter, as much as it would hurt Izuku—

They couldn’t leave all their friends behind to face Shigaraki.  

A compromise could be reached.   They knew a few places—An island, near—

But first, the city.  The first priority was to evade pursuit.  

A bus pulled into the stop ahead of them, and they got on. If they could get outside city limits, where there were fewer people, fewer witnesses, Izuku could float them away. Also, Hawks was less likely to trap his feathers on a bus.  

We might be dealing with the Hawks problem earlier than thought.  

Izuku slouched back on the bus seat, covering his eyes. Toshinori looked up at the ceiling. The Hawks problem.  AKA, the others’ theory that Hawks had been raised as a child soldier, and Toshinori had missed the signs.  

Izuku put his hand on Toshinori’s knee.  

“I can’t believe it,” said one of the other passengers, a few rows ahead of them.  “I really just can’t believe it.  It’s like something from a horror story.”

“What?” asked someone else.  

“Look!”  

“Someone kidnapped All Might?”

The bus filled with chatter.  

Toshinori still couldn’t believe people thought Izuku kidnapped him.  The reality was closer to the opposite, honestly.  He’d have to apologize to Izuku’s mother…

There was a tiny incensed gasp from Izuku, and Toshinori saw Izuku glaring up at him.  Izuku made a series of gestures that could probably have been interpreted as ‘You can’t kidnap anyone, you’re All Might!’ even without the psychic link they were currently enjoying, then went into an enthusiastic tangent about how the commission was probably playing up the ‘crazy stalker fan’ angle.

Toshinori sighed, ruffled Izuku’s hair, and studiously avoided any and all thoughts about what he’d done to Aldera Middle School after Izuku had shown up to training with a black eye and bloody nose that one time.

“What?” squeaked Izuku, his eyes gone very wide.  

Drat.  

Out of the corner of his eye, Toshinori saw three passengers near the front of the bus stand up and felt his heart drop.  One of them had an obvious eagle mutation, the second had a bulging, almost spherical, neck, and the third had broad, flat-ended fingers.

Decades of hero experience told Toshinori exactly what was going to happen next.  Even before the guns came out.  

“Well,” said the eagle-headed man, “with all the heroes looking for the ‘Symbol of Peace,’ I guess this is our lucky day!”

“Nobody move!” demanded the man with the round neck. “This is a hijacking!”

Izuku let out an incredulous grunt next to him, but Toshinori could literally feel his mind whirring at a thousand miles a minute, analyzing the quirks of the hijackers and possible motives.  

Really.  There was no way they weren’t going to help.  

.

“By the way, not all of Nine is awake, so, out in the real world his body is operating according to consensus.”

“Consensus of…” said Aizawa, not wanting to finish the thought as he stared at the two entries labeled ‘terrorist.’

“All nine of us together, yes.”

“That’s a pretty big drawback,” said Aizawa, his voice rasping against his throat.

“Eh.  It has its benefits.  Besides, Three and Two lived over a hundred years ago.  We didn’t even have the hero system back then.  Things change.”

“Excuse me!” said Iida, raising his hand.  “Why don’t the last four—the first four? —have names?”

“They asked me not to share them with you quite yet,” said Six.  “Don’t call Three a terrorist though.  That’s a bit of a sore spot with her.”  He looked off to the side.  

“And the quirks?” said Aizawa, hanging on to the very last bit of his will to live by the tips of his fingers.  “The ones I’m presumably going to have to teach Midoriya how to use?”

“Right.”

 Our Splendiferous Quirks

 8. Yagi Toshinori aka All Might – Hero.  Quirk: Superpower.

7. Shimura Nana aka Skyrunner – Hero.  Quirk: Float.

6. Tenma Rokuya aka Fidelity/Railgun – Hero. Quirk: Internet Perception.

5. Banjo Daigoro aka Lariat – Hero.  Quirk: Blackwhip.

4. Vigilante.  Quirk: Danger Sense.

3. Terrorist

2. Terrorist

1. Unknown

 Aizawa was not surprised to see the last four entries, once again, had little information attached.  

“You know,” said Uraraka, “if you ignore the terrorists, this actually makes sense.”

“If you ignore the terrorists?” asked Iida, incredulous.

“I mean, think about who we’ve seen so far.”

“It is like Midoriya to have a split personality based on All Might,” agreed Todoroki.  Because split personalities were going to be his go-to theory, now that figments of Midoriya’s quirk’s imagination had shot down his ‘Dadmight’ conspiracy.  

“If you want to think of us as split personalities, sure,” said Six.  “We really don’t interact that much with the outside, though.”

“And Skyrunner is basically supermom,” said Uraraka. “Like, if she was All Might’s mentor, it makes sense that that’s what he’d envision her as.”

“Ah,” said Iida, “so she reminds you of Midoriya-san as well?”

Aizawa noticed Six shift uncomfortably and look away but decided he honestly did not want to know.  

“Oh, and you,” said Uraraka, spreading her hands to indicate Six, “are kind of like Aizawa-sensei!

“Except with more memes,” said Todoroki.  

“Yeah, except with more memes,” agreed Uraraka.  

Six faked a cough into his fist.  “Anyway, I think that’s everything…  No, wait.  Hawks.”

“Hawks,” repeated Aizawa.  

“Yeah.  We’re pretty sure he was raised and conditioned to be a slave for the commission from a very young age.”  Another pause.  Six turned to face Todoroki.  “Also, Dabi is probably your dead older brother, Todoroki Touya.”

“Oh,” said Todoroki.  

“What,” said Aizawa.  

“We’d just like someone in a position to do things with this information to have it.  Even if we were sure Nine would retain all this, he, ah.  The commission is doing a very good job of trashing his reputation.”

“Is this revenge?” whispered Todoroki.  “Did I push Midoriya too far?”

“Kid, you could beat Nine up on a weekly basis for ten years, and he’d still barely think of revenge.  Come on, I need to take you guys to Five.”

Barely, he said.  Meaning, he did think about revenge.  They had to get out of here fast; Bakugo’s life was in danger.  

.

There were lives in danger.  A simple robbery wouldn’t require this kind of setup.  These three needed hostages for some reason.  

Or…  Izuku traced the direction the three villains kept looking to the college student in the corner.  The young woman’s clothing was high quality, and she looked vaguely familiar.  

He couldn’t help but be exasperated.  Shigaraki Tomura was running around out there somewhere, and these guys were doing… whatever this was.  Causing problems.  He and Toshinori would have to try and evade Hawks after this.  

But exasperation wasn’t going to keep these people safe.  

Eagle-head looked like the leader at first glance, but on closer inspection, he was taking cues from the man with the squared-off fingers. The man with the round neck seemed to have a body expansion quirk of some type, possibly similar to Kendo’s, considering how his joints pulsed and how his clothing was designed with extra folds.

… He’d shown Toshinori a catalogue with similar clothing, once. But Toshinori had said that the ill-fitting look added to his disguise.  

In the tight confines of the bus, that would be dangerous. The best thing to do to him would be to throw him out when the bus came to a stop.

The quirk of the man with the square finger was a problem. It was probably an emitter type, rather than a transformation type.  Something to do with his hands, perhaps?

Honestly, the best thing to do for all of them, at least with regards to the people on the bus, would be to toss them off and then get the driver to gun it.  But then, what about people on the street?  These guys didn’t have any scruple against taking hostages, obviously.

“Hey, you, hand over the briefcase,” said the man with the round neck.  

Izuku glanced at Toshinori, who nodded.  Coils of Blackwhip ran up and down his arms under the sleeves of his suit, much more controlled and complex than Izuku had managed to date.  

Thanks for the help, Five.  

He slammed the briefcase into the eagle-headed man’s beak. Toshinori hadn’t skimped on anything when stocking the hideout, and the metal made immensely satisfying contact with bone.  Blackwhip shot out from near his elbow—like Sero—and wrapped around the hands of the gunmen, forcing their aim down.

The man with square fingers reacted first, raising his hand. Each fingertip emitted a flat, square pane that traveled in a straight line and got progressive larger.  Izuku pulled, slamming the man into the back of his own shield, because really, that was too slow, and how similar was this quirk to Crust’s?  Could the villain change the trajectory of his panels, or no?

Not the time.

The shield cracked as Izuku hit it from the other side, and Toshinori was throwing open the back door.  The man with the expanding quirk—and it was an expanding quirk—seemed to finally realize what was happening, and lashed out, but Izuku was faster than he was.  The spherical throat was evidently a weak point.  

“Can you stop?” Izuku asked the bus driver, who, tense as he was, slammed down on the brakes, making Izuku stumble.  He hauled the villains off the bus, Toshinori hopping off the back with the eagle-headed man a moment later.  

Well, that had happened.  

Izuku caught a flash of very distinctive red out of the corner of his eye.  

.

Six stopped.  “That isn’t good,” he said, looking slightly up.  There was nothing there that Aizawa could see, except for a collection of pipes.  They were travelling through a series of underground concrete passages in an effort to find ‘Five.’

“What is it?” asked Uraraka.  

Six’s form abruptly flickered and vanished.  Oh, that couldn’t be good.  

“Sensei.”  

Aizawa turned to see Midoriya standing behind them, wearing a truly godawful pinstriped suit.  He held his right wrist in his left hand, an odd bracer wrapped around it.

“Is that the Full Gauntlet?” asked Uraraka.  “Why-?”

Midoriya flashed a quick smile in her direction.  “I’m sorry, sensei, this is really last minute, but I need you to tell me how to use your quirk.”

.

We absolutely can’t strike first.

They wanted to.  They knew this would turn into a battle.  The first strike was an advantage they couldn’t discount.  

Win the battle and lose the war.  

He could see the cell phones already out, held bystanders not quite broken from the habits gained in All Might’s era.  Even with the Hero Commission already slandering him, this would affect the narrative.  If he ever hoped to be welcomed back to hero society, or even the public’s good graces, in any way shape or form, he could not be seen starting a fight with a hero.  Much less the current number two hero.  

“I don’t suppose you’ll make my job easier and release All Might from your mind-control quirk,” said Hawks, tone conversational despite the fact he was standing at least two stories above them in the air.  

“I don’t have a mind-control quirk,” said Izuku, reaching up to the knot of his tie.  

“And I’m not being mind-controlled,” said Toshinori, loosening his mask.  

Hawks actually paused.  “Oh my gosh,” he said, raising one hand to his mouth like a scandalized housewife, “I didn’t realize that was you!  What happened to your hair?”

“I… cut it off.”

“That’s, uh.”  Hawks quickly regained control of his expression.  “Terrible that this villain made you do that.”

Hawks’ heart wasn’t entirely in this apparently.  

Just as apparently, that had no bearing on what Hawks was actually going to do.  

.

“You’ve seen me use my quirk,” said Aizawa.  

“I know, and that’ll be helpful, too, but how do you use it?  What’s the feeling you get when you use it?  How do you activate it?  What’s the internal mechanism?  This is important.”

“Why?” asked Iida.  “What’s going on Midoriya?”

“It’s—” Midoriya’s form flickered.  He took a deep breath.  He was now wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants.  “I’m in a fight right now, and it would be useful,” he reported, calmly.

“Please tell me it isn’t with my mind-controlled unconscious body,” begged Aizawa, “or the League of Villains.”  

“It isn’t.”

Thank goodness.

“I’m fighting Hawks.”

Why.  

No, ask questions later.  The Problem Child needed help now.  To fight the number two hero.

He didn’t know how knowledge about his quirk could be useful in a fight against Hawks, but the claim was far, far too stupid to be a lie.  

“When I turn on my quirk, I—”

.

Blackwhip unfurled from his arms like a dark version of Shouji’s quirk, tearing his sleeves to shreds and dislodging the feathers that had been imbedded there.  The ends wrapped around feather after feather, splitting into dozens and dozens of pseudo-arms.  Izuku was amazed.  

Someday, he would be able to do this on his own.  

For now—

For now, he was fighting Hawks, who had trained since childhood to fight on behalf of the commission.  

For now, he was a hero student, with only a few months of practical experience.  

For now, he was a fugitive, on the run and desperate.  

For now, he was host and member of One for All, and collectively they had been heroes for over a hundred years.  

And Toshinori had his back.  

They wrapped the silk tie around his knuckles.  Any protection for the bones in his hands was valuable.  In the other, they adjusted the briefcase.  They had only rarely used weapons in the last hundred or so years. Usually, their quirks made weapons overkill.  

But before that—Before that, things were different.  For a while, One and Two had used swords, of all things.  

This battle was much more even than it looked.  

Their victory condition: Escape with Toshinori.  

Their failure conditions: Civilian injury, serious injury to Izuku or Toshinori, or capture of either Izuku or Toshinori.  

To avoid the first point of failure, it was best for them to get away from the vulnerable civilians.  They didn’t want to give away float so soon in the game, so…  

They grabbed the edge of a building with Blackwhip and launched Izuku upwards, flinging feathers away from him.  Toshinori would follow and provide the group with a second perspective.  

Hawks did not expect to be joined in the air.  An incredulous smile graced his lips.  Izuku smiled back and catapulted himself directly into Hawks.

“You know,” he said, “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile for real!”

.

“What?” asked Hawks, startled.  He wasn’t one to have meaningful conversations with people he was supposed to bring in, but a statement like that had to be responded to.  

Even if most of his attention was on the quirk that Midoriya controlled with much more proficiency than indicated by his school records.  The kid was good, had good instincts when it came to battle, but he wasn’t quite fast enough to get past Hawks’s guard, or to really close the distance between them.

“Your smile!” said Midoriya.  “When I was younger, I didn’t realize it, but once I knew the truth behind All Might’s smile, I understood!”  

“Did you, now?” asked Hawks.  

“Underneath,” said Midoriya, “your face is a lot like Todoroki’s!  It’s—”

Conversation during a battle was usually a distraction, to the person employing it as a tactic as well as the target.  Somehow, though, Midoriya was subverting that rule.

“It’s actually really sad!” exclaimed Midoriya, breathless, but apparently genuine, not mocking.  “Who hurt you?”

“Heh,” said Hawks.  This kid knew.  How? “Shouldn’t I be the one asking questions here?”

“Gotta hand it to the commission, they really did a number on you,” said Midoriya, briefly touching down on a rooftop.  “Why do you keep doing their dirty work for them?”

He was using that second quirk, but not his strength.  Was it a matter of ‘won’t’ or ‘can’t?’  Either way, it was something to keep an eye on.  

“Why don’t you—” Hawks briefly managed to pin Midoriya by the edge of his jacket, but the boy tore free easily.  “—fly free?”

“You’re one to talk,” said Hawks.  “What did you trade to All for One for those quirks?”  He didn’t actually believe Midoriya was in league with All for One.  Even tangentially, through proxies, they’d been at odds too many times, not to mention the videos he’d been shown by the commission of Midoriya and All Might interacting.  The connection there couldn’t be faked.

He’d know.  He’d tried so many times.

(Was trying now, with the League of Villains.)

(Midoriya wasn’t one of them.)

But he had a job to do.  

Besides.  Even he had to admit the commission had a point.  The quirks had to come from somewhere.  

(Just because Midoriya didn’t willingly associate with All for One didn’t mean he hadn’t been forced.  Didn’t mean he hadn’t gotten out.)

(All Might was protecting him.  How did they know each other?)

“Wouldn’t you take any hand offered to you if the person behind it offered to make you what you always wanted to be?”

Midoriya tilted his head to one side.  “Nope!” he responded, cheerfully.

.

On the street below, Toshinori coughed, blood splattering his sleeve.  What had Izuku been doing when he was younger, to get involved with so many dangerous and disturbing people?

It wasn’t my fault!

Kid really is a trouble magnet.  

Oh, heck, I think I recognized that one—

Really, with that sharp mind, and Izuku’s propensity for both curiosity, helpfulness, and, well, finding trouble, it was a miracle he’d stayed alive for so long.  

Wouldn’t call it a miracle, sonny—

HAHA I can’t believe he thought that was a dream.  

In his defense, a dream makes more sense than—

Guys.  Focus, please?

Yes.  This was not the time to discuss… that.  Now… Well.  Toshinori had a role he could play in this battle, even as he was, and—

Hawks and Izuku’s path over the rooftops mapped itself out in his mind.  

Oh, no.  

Izuku wasn’t evading Hawks.  

He was being herded by him.  

.

They tucked and rolled across the pavement, Blackwhip cocooning them and breaking their fall.   This was significantly more than what Five, what Daigoro, could use back when he was alive.  It took everyone’s efforts to keep everything going.  

Wait for it, they reminded themselves, bouncing back to Izuku’s feet.  

Izuku looked up.  This… was not a good position.  Hawks had forced them into the entertainment district.  They couldn’t trust that the fancy facades and art instalations of the buildings would hold up to Blackwhip.  Not to mention, in places like this…  He glanced around.  

Fourth Kind.  

Kesagiriman.

Slugger.  

Death Arms.  

There would be more, soon.  This was… less than good.  Maybe they should just grab Toshinori’s body and launch themselves with Blackwhip and Float, as far as they could.  They’d lose a lot of their advantage on Hawks, but at least then they wouldn’t be fighting five different heroes.  

Izuku gritted his teeth in something like a smile.  Five different heroes.  Well.  Nine on five wasn’t bad odds.  

.

Suzuku pulled himself along the ground, trembling.  He had been falling for—for ages by the time that witch woman had disappeared.  Why she had disappeared, he couldn’t guess, but…

Falling.  

So much falling.  

And hitting the ground again, and again, and again.  

You invaded our minds, said the woman, don’t complain when we counter with something psychological as well.  

Something like a laugh bubbled up from his throat.  

You can leave whenever you want, can’t you?

He’d show her.  He’d show her and find all her secrets.  Just see if he didn’t.  

.

Fourth Kind, Kesagiriman, Slugger, and Death Arms all had very physical, straightforward quirks.  Out of all of them, though, Death Arms was probably the most problematic, followed by Slugger and his long-range attacks.  

None of them held a candle to Hawks, of course.  Which was the reason why Death Arms in particular was so problematic.  

In order to deal with Hawks’s feathers, they needed Blackwhip. But using Blackwhip and One for All’s signature superstrength at the same time wasn’t something Izuku’s body was used to.  They were limiting it to small bursts.  Death Arms’ own physical enhancement quirk, while miniscule compared to One for All’s current stature, was nothing to sneer at.  

If Death Arms—or any of the other heroes—landed a solid blow, that could be it for Izuku.  

They refused to be locked away again.  

That’s when it happened.  

A scene played across Izuku’s inner eye:

A frosty morning.  A little boy with dark hair.  A farewell. Tears.  

He flubbed the landing and a sharp pain lanced through his ankle. Blackwhip wrapped it, giving it much needed support.  

He started to rise, only to drop to avoid one of Slugger’s patented Home Run Pitches (tm).  

The ball spun, ricocheting off the stainless steel of an art installation before drilling right through a wooden beam on a bit of scaffolding holding up part of a building that was being refurbished.  Izuku let out a breath of relief (there were still people around who hadn’t learned how to run away from a dangerous fight) before they returned to the dance with Hawks’s impressively huge number of feathers.  

Blackwhip could keep up with them, barely, but Izuku was tiring. He couldn’t take much more of this.

He needed an opening to get to Toshi—

Another scene:

She couldn’t be pregnant.  Not now. Not right after giving away another. The next time Sorahiko suggested drowning her troubles in sake, she was going to shove it straight up his blowholes, no matter that he was probably just as drunk as she was.  

This slip almost resulted in Izuku getting his face punched in by Death Arms.  Considering what he’d just learned, he’d almost welcome that fate, if it made him forget.  Plus, it might have been funny for the ultimate battle of ultimate destiny, the show down between One for All and All for One, to take place between not one, but two potato-headed individuals—

There was a sharp crack from above as the damage Death Arms had done to the scaffolding made itself known.  

Izuku didn’t have to think before moving.  

.

“Alright,” said Midoriya.  “I think I’ve got it.  Thank you, sensei.”  He looked young, now.  Barely primary school age.  

“I’d feel a lot better,” said Aizawa, “if I knew what you needed this information for.”

“Oh!  That’s simple.  You see, it’s my theory that the overlap in mechanisms between my quirk and Saito-san’s might allow for interesting emergent behaviors.  Specifically, her quirk bridges a gap I’d normally have no way of crossing, although there’s certainly drawbacks.  It’s like what we tried earlier, when I asked you to use your quirk.  Although, I am hoping for different results than what I was looking for back then.  I think, with what you’ve given me, and this processing time…  Yes, this should work.”  He clenched a fist.  “These remnants—I can use them!”

Remnants.  Vestiges.

Aizawa frowned.  Something… something wasn’t right, here.  The explanation Six had given them…

“Just keep going this way, for now.  Six will try to get back to you as soon as possible.  I have to go now!  I love you guys!”

He then faded out.  While waving.  

“Wow,” said Uraraka.  “Izuku-kun sure was a cute kid.”

Aizawa couldn’t argue with that.  

“Aizawa-sensei,” said Todoroki.  “You’re blushing.”

He wouldn’t lower himself to argue with that.  “This conversation is illogical.  Let’s go.”

“Sensei is weak to little kids,” observed Todoroki.  

And if they ever discovered they could remove the ‘little’ in that sentence and have it still be accurate, he’d never live it down.  

.

Hawks saw the eyes first, shining through the dust like two perfect green coins.  Then every one of his feathers went dead, and he started to fall.  

Sensation returned just in time for him to avoid hitting the ground at speed and, just as quickly, vanished again.  

A breeze blew cleared the dust away.  

Midoriya Izuku stood under the collapsed scaffolding, holding it up with black tendrils and sparking green arms.  If this scene had been all that there was, an observer might be forgiven for wondering why he was holding up the scaffolding like that.

But Hawks knew.  If Midoriya hadn’t caught the scaffolding, even he wouldn’t have been able to get those civilians out from underneath it in time.  He glanced to the side, where the almost victims were standing up. Normally, he’d just trust his feathers, but…

“Is that Eraserhead’s quirk?”

“Don’t worry, I asked Eraserhead-sensei for permission, first.”

“What kind of monster—” started Death Arms.  

“Don’t you dare, Mister ‘my quirk isn’t suitable.’” Midoriya shifted the scaffolding to one side and shrugged himself out from underneath it.  “As heroes, aren’t you supposed to consider the civilians around you?”  He laughed. “I guess we’re still a little bitter about that.”

.

Izuku was putting on a good show, but he was reaching the end of his endurance.  Plus, he could already hear the sirens of police cars and the exclamations that followed large groups of heroes on the move.  

Good thing, then, that Toshinori was about to round the corner in three… two… one… There!

To an outsider, Blackwhip wrapping around Toshinori probably looked violent.  In reality, everyone operating the quirk was intimately aware of everything wrong with Toshinori’s body and did not want to add to his problems.  They could have probably grabbed an egg like this.  

Grabbing the newly-exposed concrete and rebar of the building behind Izuku, they launched themselves up.  At the top of their arc, they activated Float.  Blackwhip reeled Toshinori in, and they held onto each other as Izuku prepared to use air pressure to launch themselves forward.  

He hadn’t blinked yet.  

His eyes really hurt.  

(And so did everything else.)

He aimed and kicked against the air, sending them soaring away.

They had escaped.  

.

Tomura ducked behind the wall at the top of the building, glad that his party had put so many points into stealth, because he was not touching what had just happened with a ten-foot pole.  He’d rather be shot again.  He’d rather fight Machia for a week straight with no rest breaks.  He’d rather listen to Sensei try to give him the birds and the bees talk.  

What was that?  Huh? What kind of a broken character build allowed for that kind of combat ability?  The mods had to be asleep.  If he were in charge, he’d nerf it, pronto.  

That was a lie.  He’d take it for himself.  

Still.  

“Uh, Shigaraki?  Boss man?  You okay there?” asked Spinner.  

“No,” decided Shigaraki.  

Suddenly, making all of them jump, Toga squealed.  “Did you see him?  Did you see Izuku-kun?  He was so cute with his nose bleeding like that!”

“Hey,” said Dabi, “are we going after the green kid or what?”

“No,” decided Shigaraki, for the second time in as many minutes.  And then, “Gimme the phone.  We need to call the doctor to get us out of here.”

They did, but that was pretty much secondary to his primary objective, which was to cuss out the doctor concerning the cursed knowledge that was currently trying to escape his skull with a pickaxe.  

.

“Um,” said Inko.  “Aren’t you going to get that?”  She pointed at the phone that had been buzzing on the table for the past several minutes.

“No,” said Garaki, pretending to sip at his tea.  “You were saying?”

#bnha #boku no hero academia #fic #fanfic #long night in the valley

[popwasabi]

“Who are you?” The scene that defines Chadwick Boseman’s legacy

Yesterday, the world lost a bright and promising, burgeoning talent in Chadwick Boseman.

I had wondered privately for a while if something was wrong with him, as others had as well online, as he appeared increasingly sicker with each interview he gave over the last two years. I thought maybe I had been looking too much into it, not wanting to jump to conclusions about who he was but now gravely we all know why.

The much too young star of films such as “42,” “Marshall,” and of course, “Black Panther” had been fighting a largely private battle with colon cancer for four years.

It was devastating hearing this news yesterday, the man who undeniably left behind a legacy of playing prominent black heroes, both historical and fictional, passed away just as he was starting to truly hit it big. When you begin to realize the man was dealing with cancer as he performed physically demanding roles in the MCU you begin to see the character and determination of a man unwilling to quit in the face of true adversity.

But he clearly wasn’t just doing it for himself when he continued making and promoting NINE more movies despite his diagnosis, afterall no one would’ve blamed the guy for taking it easy these past four years. He’s had many scenes that define his legacy over his all too short career but I feel it can really be summed up in one particular moment from by far his most famous film; “Black Panther.”

Those who know me or have read my work know that I have a fairly cynical relationship with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While I would not say most of them are “bad” per se, I would say a ton of them are largely interchangeable action comedies with pretty straightforward messages about good vs evil for general audiences. They are largely popcorn escapism and though there is nothing technically wrong with that, I was starved for an MCU film that was sincere about its story finally and had something real to say.

Enter “Black Panther” in early 2018.

“Black Panther” was everything I had long been waiting for in the MCU; a film with a real sense of vision and theme, a killer soundtrack, great supporting characters, a complicated and nuanced villain, and a story that didn’t feel the need to add a joke after every single scene like more typical MCU movies. The tip of that spear of course was Chadwick, who had already proved to be a great Black Panther in one of the few other sincere Marvel flicks “Civil War.” His natural charisma, physicality, and dramatic presence in this role made him a huge standout in frankly the best ensemble cast of any superhero movie ever.

The scene that truly sums up not just the mark “Black Panther” left on Hollywood but Chadwick’s own legacy comes at the very end though (the first of three, of course. It’s an MCU movie, afterall).

T’Challa has defeated his usurper cousin Erik Killmonger, his rule restored in Wakanda but clearly a changed man from the story’s beginning as he reckons with the complicated legacy of his father. He travels to Oakland, the birthplace of Killmonger, with his sister Shuri who he explains the crime committed by their father in this place and how it set off the events of the story. He turns to Shuri, tells her that he has decided to help this afflicted community by creating a Wakandan outreach center for the youth to give them a new hope in life. As he says this he decloaks their ship nearby, surprising the youth already in the area who are immediately in awe of it. One of the kids turns to T’Challa, smiling, a sense of inspiration and intrigue brewing inside, and asks “Who are you?” to which the young King simply smiles, then the credits roll.

It’s a simple scene but it truly speaks to the impact left behind by Chadwick and the importance of representation. 

“Black Panther” is hardly the first starring vehicle for a black man, it’s not even the first black super hero movie but what it made it different is it was the first blockbuster to truly lean unapologetically into its African identity to focus on the inspiration of a story centered around that culture. It showed Hollywood that an action blockbuster not just centered on a black star but centered on African culture had vast widespread appeal.

White kids will never have a shortage of white superheroes to grow up with on the big screen; a diverse palette of Supermans, Spider-mans, Captain Americas, and shit we’re even getting our sixth new Batman actor since 1989 soon. But Chadwick gave black kids their first real Superman of their own. 

In the years since this came out, I have seen the influence, at times, firsthand among the youth. I work part-time as a kids martial arts instructor and each Halloween party we’ve held I’ve seen a few more T’Challas among the costumes represented. When I ask kids, black, white, or Asian, what their favorite superhero is, it always warms my heart to see a kid light up when they say “BLACK PANTHER!”

(Seriously, cute AF)

This goes beyond just my anecdotal observations of course; the film grossed a billion dollars, and there are countless videos online of kids yelling “Wakanda forever!” at the top of their lungs while rocking a Black Panther suit or reciting one of the movie’s memorable lines. It’s beautiful because it speaks to that last scene’s key message; inspiration.

Growing up myself, as a half Asian American, there weren’t a ton of role models who looked like me to take inspiration from. I didn’t really understand how much this could affect me until I finally did start seeing people like myself occupy positions of influence. I didn’t start caring for baseball until I saw a slugger named Hideki Matsui smash a couple dingers in a Yankees’ uniform in the early 2000s. I didn’t care much for martial arts, outside my very early youth, until I witnessed a half Japanese Brazilian named Lyoto Machida KO Thiago Silva at UFC 94 in 2009. I didn’t care much for soccer until a striker named Keisuke Honda played out of his mind in the early rounds of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Sometimes you gotta see something happen in order to believe and be inspired by it and it’s easier to visualize it when you see someone who looks like you do it. That’s what representation means and why it’s important.

It’s easy for white America to dismiss the need for representation in media when theirs is so saturated in the culture everyday. Cries of “wHaT aBoUt wHiTe HiStORy mOnTH?!” delivered unironically while their history is proudly given front seat consideration in all forms of media, film, and influence every day. This is why it drives me so crazy when a white person tells me “representation isn’t important” because apparently, they “don’t need it.”

Well motherfucker, of course you don’t need it. You fucking got yours already!

(What every non-white person wants to say when confronted with this tired, out of touch argument...)

“Black Panther” delivered a superhero that not only black children could be proud of and love but someone they could draw inspiration from. Kids are going to want to become film directors cause of this movie, actors, stuntmen, martial artists, scientists, engineers, and so many other different things that the world of Wakanda proudly showcases and it’s all thanks to Chadwick’s leading man performance that made it possible.

Some jokes I’ve heard frequently on the internet is that Chadwick was on somewhat of a quest to play every major black role in story-telling history, what with performances as Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, James Brown, and of course Black Panther. But I think his 2018 speech at his Alma Mater of Howard really explains why he kept looking to play these major positive black roles.

(I encourage you to listen to the whole thing but the part that’s important here begins at 21:55)

Hollywood likes to pigeon hole certain demographics of people (aka non-white) to play stereotypical roles forever until they are proven to be lucrative in different ways (Qualified Immunity of film-making if you will…). Black people largely could mostly play thugs and drug dealers, Latinx can only be gang bosses and poor servants and gardeners, Asians are either kung fu masters or some other offensive perpetual foreigner. And in worst cases no role at all, instead whitewashed for general audiences (aka white folk). 

Chadwick took a stand that the color of his skin did not define who Hollywood narrowly believed he could perform as and set out to play characters and people who could inspire a new generation of African Americans and show the rest of the country that they were more than a stereotype.

When that young kid in that final scene asks, “Who are you?” and T’Challa smiles its because he knows he’s already changing hearts and minds for the future, just as Chadwick did playing this truly inspirational role.

“Black Panther” is not a perfect movie. I could discuss the ways it could’ve been better and even, less problematic in parts on a different day, but the legacy it leaves behind is one that’s undeniably positive and Chadwick was able to make that a reality. Perhaps he understood that if the world knew his diagnosis it would blunt the impact of “Black Panther’s” release, that if little kids and African Americans alike knew their superhero was already dying it would mar the film’s positivity and influence. I can’t speak for the dead obviously, and in no way am I saying one should just push through a cancer diagnosis and keep it secret, but I can see Chadwick understanding what it would mean for the audience if they just believed for as long as possible that they would have their king of Wakanda forever.

As Robert Downey Jr. said on social media last night “He leveled the playing field while fighting for his life.”

Though I will never know him personally, by most measures Chadwick seemed to be exactly the kind of hero he showed up to be on the big screen and his legacy will ultimately be that of one who looked to inspire others, particularly the next generation until his final breath. If that doesn’t make him a hero, I don’t know what does.

Rest in power, King. Wakanda Forever…

(Via BossLogic)

#Chadwick Boseman #rest in power chadwick #eulogy #Black Panther #Ryan Coogler #MCU #Marvel Comics #Marvel #marvel cinematic universe #Stan Lee #comics #super heroes #superman #batman #spider-man #miles morales #Spiderverse #t'challa #jackie robinson #black history #blm #black lives matter #ancestral plane #movie #tv #film #howard university #legacy #black representation

[richincolor]

We've got six books on our radar this week! Did we miss anything? What's on your TBR list?

The Other Side of Perfect by Mariko Turk Little Brown/Poppy

Alina Keeler was destined to dance, but one terrifying fall shatters her leg--and her dreams of a professional ballet career along with it.

After a summer healing (translation: eating vast amounts of Cool Ranch Doritos and binging ballet videos on YouTube), she is forced to trade her pre-professional dance classes for normal high school, where she reluctantly joins the school musical. However, rehearsals offer more than she expected--namely Jude, her annoyingly attractive cast mate she just might be falling for.

But to move forward, Alina must make peace with her past and face the racism she had grown to accept in the dance industry. She wonders what it means to yearn for ballet--something so beautiful, yet so broken. And as broken as she feels, can she ever open her heart to someone else?

Where the Rhythm Takes You by Sarah Dass Balzer + Bray

Seventeen-year-old Reyna has spent most of her life at her family’s gorgeous seaside resort in Tobago, the Plumeria. But what once seemed like paradise is starting to feel more like purgatory. It’s been two years since Reyna’s mother passed away, two years since Aiden – her childhood best friend, first kiss, first love, first everything – left the island to pursue his music dreams. Reyna’s friends are all planning their futures and heading abroad. Even Daddy seems to want to move on, leaving her to try to keep the Plumeria running.

And that's when Aiden comes roaring back into her life – as a VIP guest at the resort.

Aiden is now one-third of DJ Bacchanal – the latest, hottest music group on the scene. While Reyna has stayed exactly where he left her, Aiden has returned to Tobago with his Grammy-nominated band and two gorgeous LA socialites. And he may (or may not be) dating one of them…

Inspired by Jane Austen's Persuasion, Where the Rhythm Takes You is a romantic, mesmerizing novel of first love and second chances.

From Little Tokyo, with Love by Sarah Kuhn Viking Books for Young Readers

If Rika’s life seems like the beginning of a familiar fairy tale–being an orphan with two bossy cousins and working away in her aunts’ business–she would be the first to reject that foolish notion. After all, she loves her family (even if her cousins were named after Disney characters), and with her biracial background, amazing judo skills and red-hot temper, she doesn’t quite fit the princess mold.

All that changes the instant she locks eyes with Grace Kimura, America’s reigning rom-com sweetheart, during the Nikkei Week Festival. From there, Rika embarks on a madcap adventure of hope and happiness–searching for clues about her long-lost mother, exploring Little Tokyo’s hidden treasures with a cute actor, and maybe…finally finding a sense of belonging.

But fairy tales are fiction and the real world isn’t so kind. Rika knows she’s setting herself up for disappointment, because happy endings don’t happen to girls like her. Should she walk away before she gets in even deeper, or let herself be swept away?

Illusionary (Hollow Crown #2) by Zoraida Cordova Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Reeling from betrayal at the hands of the Whispers, Renata Convida is a girl on the run. With few options and fewer allies, she's reluctantly joined forces with none other than Prince Castian, her most infuriating and intriguing enemy. They're united by lofty goals: find the fabled Knife of Memory, kill the ruthless King Fernando, and bring peace to the nation. Together, Ren and Castian have a chance to save everything, if only they can set aside their complex and intense feelings for each other.

With the king's forces on their heels at every turn, their quest across Puerto Leones and beyond leaves little room for mistakes. But the greatest danger is within Ren. The Gray, her fortress of stolen memories, has begun to crumble, threatening her grip on reality. She'll have to control her magics--and her mind--to unlock her power and protect the Moria people once and for all.

For years, she was wielded as weapon. Now it's her time to fight back.

Angel & Hannah: A Novel in Verse by Ishle Park One World

Hannah, a Korean American girl from Queens, New York, and Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn, fall in love in the spring of 1993. Hannah, who comes from a strict Korean home, meets Angel, a free and beautiful boy, at a quinceañera:

Beyond flushed, sweating bodies pushed, pushing like cattle below black & buzzing speakers, under a torn pink streamer loose as a tendril of hair--lush-- his eyes. Darkluminous. Warm. A blush floods her. Hannah sucks in her breath, but can't pull back. Music fades. A hush he's a young buck in the underbrush, still in a disco ball dance of shadow & light Their forbidden love instantly and wildly blooms along the Jackie Robinson Expressway.

Told in seasons Angel & Hannah holds all of the tension and cadence of blank verse while adding dynamic and expressive language, creating new kinds of engrossing and magnetic forms. The hip-hop sonnets and poems are dynamic, arresting, observant, and magical, conveying the intimacies and sacrifices of love and addiction and the devastating realities of struggle and loss.

Committed to cultural details and the vernacular of Queens and Brooklyn, this is a hip-hop love story, not of the Capulets and the Montagues, but two New York City kids trying to survive and grow within their families and communities, driven by an all-consuming love.

The Eid Gift: An Adam and Zayneb Story by S.K. Ali Simon & Schuster

Even though it’s during Ramadan, a month of fasting and spiritual devotion, A and Z can’t help spending any and all free time with each other. Enter parents and their idea for a nikah at the end of Ramadan, on Eid day itself.

Which would appear to be the greatest Eid gift of all — except that, unbeknownst to each other, A and Z have been working on spectacularly surprising Eid gifts for the other all along.

The only thing? In true “The Gift of the Magi” fashion, these Eid gifts are at complete odds with the other. Along with a nikah day over-run with “benevolent” family interferences, A and Z are up for either recording this Eid as the best one ever, as a real marvel...or as a completely upsetting oddity.

Author's Note: WHEN IT TAKES PLACE:

The Eid Gift is a part of the Love from A to Z storyline; it occurs shortly before the epilogue. (If you haven’t read Love from A to Z yet, please consider doing so before reading this story—some of what occurs will not make sense otherwise.)

SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND:

While there’s nothing explicit in the story, it is more mature than S. K. Ali’s previous YA novels—there’s more physical touch here than in Love from A to Z— so readers are asked to exercise awareness of their reading comfort zones.

#the other side of perfect #where the rhythm takes you #from little tokyo with love #illusionary #angel & hannah #the eid gift #weneeddiversebooks

[chiseler]

The Bombing of Black Wall Street

O.W. Gurley 

On the night of May 13th, 1985, as Derek Davis has so eloquently documented in previous issues of The Chiseler, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a packet of C4 explosives onto the West Philly house occupied by MOVE, a black radical group whose sociopolitical agenda was fuzzy at best. You should read Davis’ stories to more fully understand how and why this came to pass, but suffice it to say in the end eleven people in the house (including several children) were killed, and some sixty surrounding homes—an entire city block’s worth—were allowed to burn to the ground.

At noon on September sixteenth, 1920, a group of anarchists detonated a horse-drawn cart packed with explosives and shrapnel in the middle of Wall Street, killing thirty-eight capitalists and sending hundreds more to area hospitals.

Nine months after the Wall Street bombing and sixty-four years before MOVE, an incident which in a way echoed both events took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but with far more devastating results. The Bombing of Black Wall Street, as it was sometimes known, would go on to be just as forgotten, at least in white history books, as both the MOVE and Wall Street bombings.

In 1906, a wealthy black entrepreneur named O.W. Gurley moved from Arkansas to Tulsa, where he bought up forty acres of land on the northern outskirts of the predominately white town. He had a plan in mind, and would only sell parcels of the land to other African-Americans, especially those trying to escape the brutal economic conditions in Tennessee.

Within a decade, the resulting thirty-four square block community, which had been dubbed Greenwood, had evolved into one of the most affluent regions of the state, and certainly the wealthiest and most successful black-owned business district in the country. A few of the new residents had even struck it rich when oil was discovered nearby. Along with the grocery, clothing and hardware stores that lined the main commercial strip, Greenwood boasted its own schools, churches, doctors,  banks, law offices, restaurants, movie theaters, a post office and a  public transportation system. The houses had indoor plumbing, and, even that early in the history of aviation, six of the residents owned private airplanes. Thanks to Segregation laws which prohibited blacks from shopping in nearby Whites-Only stores, the African-American residents of Greenwood shopped at their own local stores, which kept money circulating in the community, only bolstering their economic strength.

By all accounts, the people who lived there were extremely proud of what they had forged, especially the school system, insisting each and every child of Greenwood receive a full and solid education.

Although generally referred to as “Little Africa” or “Niggertown” in the Tulsa Tribune, Tulsa World, and other local papers, the residents of Greenwood preferred to think of it as Black Wall Street, a nickname that has stuck to this day.

As you might imagine, the much poorer white residents in surrounding Tulsa resented the wealth and success of their black neighbors. This resentment was only fueled by the local papers, in particular the Tribune. Taking their lead from the local chapter of the Klan, more often than not the Tribune’s writers insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, on caricaturing the residents of “Little Africa” as either stupid, shiftless, shuffling drunks or drug crazed, wild-eyed criminals and rapists running wild in the streets. Meanwhile, editorial writers over at the World even recommended conscripting the Klan to restore law and order to the community.

Combining the reality with the grotesque cartoon proved to be a poor white racist’s worst nightmare. Not only were those blacks in Greenwood subhuman, they were rich subhumans. Jesus God Almighty!

The simmering anger reached the boiling point on May 30th, 1921 when seventeen-year-old (and white) Sarah Page accused nineteen-year-old (and black) shoeshine man Dick Rowland of rape. Page worked as an elevator operator in Tulsa’s Drexel Building, and claimed Rowland attacked her while she was  on the job. No one really knows to this day what happened in that elevator, but later investigators who’ve looked into the case genrtally agree there was no rape. Rowland would claim he either bumped into Page accidentally or stepped on her foot—he couldn’t remember. At the time it didn’t matter. The following morning’s Tribune ran a racially inflammatory, lurid account of the fictional crime in which they essentially declared Rowland guilty. A hearing was scheduled for that afternoon, and the paper further erroneously reported the gallows was already being built outside the courthouse for that night’s hanging.

Whether or not a rape had occurred was, to be honest, irrelevant. It was simply the easiest and cheapest way to rile up the angry white masses. If the paper had run an article about economic disparity and racial class resentment turned on its head, all it would have encouraged its white readers to do is flip forward to the sports section.

The residents of Greenwood understood this, and on the 31st, the day of the hearing, a group of men, some of them armed, showed up outside the courthouse in hopes of protecting Rowland.  When they arrived they found themselves facing off with the much larger (and better-armed) angry white mob, there to ensure Rowland was hanged, trial or no trial.

Words were exchanged and a few scuffles broke out. A white man reportedly approached an armed African-American WWI vet, and demanded he hand over his gun. When the vet refused and the white tried to wrest it from him, the  gun went off, and the riot was underway.

Realizing they were outnumbered, the mob from Greenwood retreated towards home, only to be pursued by the white mob, both on foot and in pickups.

It’s worth noting that the confrontation outside the courthouse had gone on for several hours before the few cops onhand to keep the peace finally called for backup. When all hell broke loose after that gunshot, the cops quickly began deputizing whites on the fly, giving them the authority to make arrests. A few did, and an internment camp set up at the local fairgrounds quickly began to fill. Most of the new deputies didn’t bother, and just started shooting.

As the white mob entered Greenwood, they immediately began looting and torching every building they passed. For the next twelve hours they rampaged through the neighborhood, whooping and hooting as they smashed windows, kicked in doors, took potshots at fleeing residents, and set fire to anything that wasn’t already ablaze. Several eyewitness reports claim two small planes flying over the community started dropping what some believe were kerosene bombs and others believe was dynamite on the already raging inferno. Firemen who arrived on the scene to douse the fires were turned back at gunpoint by the rioters.

The number of white families from nearby neighborhoods—a lot of mothers and children—who gathered around the edges of Greenwood to watch the carnage has led some to believe the attack was planned well in advance, likely by the Klan. They were just waiting for an excuse.

The National Guard arrived shortly before noon on June 1st, but by then most of the rioters had gone home. Along with trying to control the flames, the Guardsmen also began arresting Greenwood’s residents. By the time the fires were put out, all thirty-four square blocks of Black Wall Street had been burned to the ground. An estimated three hundred had been killed, another eight hundred hospitalized, ten thousand were left homeless, six thousand were being held in the internment camp at the fairgrounds, and six hundred businesses had been destroyed. No whites were arrested or charged for their role in the massacre.

Some of the dead, it was reported, were buried in mass graves, others dumped in a nearby river, and still others dropped into the shafts of a local coal mine.

The coverage of the destruction of Black Wall Street in the following day’s Tulsa World included the headlines “Fear of Another Uprising” and “Difficult to Check Negroes.” To this day, white media outlets continue to refer to the incident as “The Tulsa Race Riot,” when they refer to it at all. The Tribune quietly removed the front page story about the alleged rape from all their bound editions, and all police and fire department files about the incident mysteriously vanished.

The day after the riot, all charges were dropped against Dick Rowland (who had been safely hidden away in a jail cell throughout it all), and upon his release he quickly and quietly left town.

Only one of Black Wall Street’s buildings was left standing, and those who survived vowed they would rebuild. They did, too, to an extent, but they were never able to fully reclaim the spirit and status the community once had. Making things more difficult, Greenwood was in a prime location in terms of business expansion. City politicians, anxious to reclaim that land, began devaluing Greenwood property, hoping they might encourage residents to sell out and move far away.

Ironically, the real death blow to Black Wall Street came when Segregation was overturned in Oklahoma in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and most Greenwood residents decided they were happy to take their business to formerly whites-only stores.

Seventy-five years after the massacre, the state of Oklahoma ordered an investigation into the events of May 31st-June 1st, 1921. When the investigation ended in 2001, it was suggested a scholarship fund be set up, and reparations be paid to the families of the victims. A few scholarships were handed out before the program was discontinued three years later, but no reparations were ever paid.

by Jim Knipfel

[k347]

A little note for all the wonderful people who are taking a moment out of their precious time to visit this little online space I created...

(I felt the need to write this because of some 'not so great' anon asks I've been getting ever since I started here and also because I've witnessed several of both, the good and bad fandom meltdowns in these couple of years)

From My Heart To Yours-

If it isn't clear to you by the kind of things I post or if you are new to this page, let me clarify it in one single sentence. This Is A Stucky+Evanstan Blog. There will always be mostly (if not all) evanstan and stucky content posted here. If you are uncomfortable with the ship, feel free to filter the 'evanstan' / 'rpf'/ stucky tags. I completely understand why it can be bothersome, icky for people, why some of you might disapprove of it. I acknowledge, respect and understand your views, feelings and opinions, I truly do. All I am asking out of you is to not be disrespectful, dissmissive about those of mine. Please understand that you don't have to see the things/content you don't want to on your dash. The block and unfollow buttons, options for filtering tags are there for a reason. Feel free to use them if you are uncomfortable with a blog or person (including me). It'll be taking the high road and bowing out gracefully if you make a habit of using these available options instead of passing around judgements and unnecessarily cruel critisism about people whom you've never even met/ know nothing about.

Personally I adore both of these Fandom Ships. I have for a long time. But it doesn't mean I don't support you if you love/are a part of some other fandom. I don't mean to disrespect or hinder any of the other ships even if they are regarding these same characters. I try and make sure to not intrude on anyone's creative space and expect that the same attitude & decency will be returned.

This blog is my way of letting out, expressing all that love, adoration I feel. I strive to be more creative with my thoughts, my way of expression as a person with each passing day. And being a part of this fandom helps me immensely with that. I've met some amazing people online because of this. Made good friends. It is a very dear thing to me. I have talked to folks who've experienced online hate from unreasonable, anonymous sources, I've also experienced a fair share of it myself. As someone who is a psychology-enthusiast-&-student-for-life, I can assure you the (good/casual/neutral/bad/hateful) things you say to or about people leave their impacts. Not just on them, but on you too. It might seem insignificant or small, irrelevant even; but it does change the way your thoughts work in daily life. Be careful and stop before you train your mind to naturally focus more on the bad things about other people rather than the good ones. So again, I kindly request you to not be mean or hurtful to anyone you meet online (or even in real life, actually.) Offering disrespect and negativity never made anything better in the history of ever.

Lastly I would like to give my two cents about another issue (that I feel can get really toxic if we are not careful) with the fandom culture. I have made no secret of the fact that I am a fan of Sebastian Stan and Chris Evans. Yes, I have and will always post a lot of appreciation posts about them (solo and together), their works and projects, some old tbt moments. You will even find imagines, headcanons, theories, fanfics about them along with the ones about the fictional characters they have played/continue to play.

But that doesn't mean I am going to act delusionally and ignore/ unacknowledge the fact that both of them are their own person. Two actual, real human beings. I don't mean to project any of this content that I am creating on them and their lives. Making anybody uncomfortable is not my intention behind doing this, not at all. I prefer to look at it this way- "This is a world that I've created in my own mind. For fun and entertainment. Sort of like an AU. Parallel Timeline. But please understand that the stories, theories, things I'll post and write on here are pure conjecture, a lot of speculations. Hypothesis and supposition. I don't want to lose the grasp on reality and be drawned in it too much or completely, up to the point at which violation of real people's boundaries starts to become a usual routine and doesn't feel wrong."

I do not agree with the mentality of blaming, hating on people/past partners in their lives for no other apparent reason than the fact that 'they know my favs'. I completely agree that there are actions and things which people need to be held accountable for at times. Yes, you can talk about it with me but please try and remain respectful (if not that, at least be decent enough) toward all the parties involved.

Even though we as fans have invested a lot of our time, creative efforts and emotions in these two men; It does not mean they owe us, or need to explain every part of their personal/professional lives.

Please remember and don't let it be hard for you to accept the fact that these two people are not the exact fanfic versions of themselves that you read about on tumblr, they are not some experminted and perfected, flawless personalities that you've created in your own minds. It is possible for humans to mess up at times. It is only natural. Don't judge people based only on their worst mistakes, or more precisely the negative stuff you read 'online' (which 9/10 times is pure speculation and made up. fake. not facts.) Chris and Seb do not need to cater to every whim and need of the fans, they do not need to make decisions based on what people feel about them online. They can and should do whatever they want to with their lives without having to experience judgement and public scrutiny about every little step taken. Please stop putting celebrities on a pedestal and measuring them up to some impossible, unrealistic standards. If you feel too much devastation, hurt over some action of your 'fav', my advice would be to take a step back. Relax. Distance yourself from the Fandom for a bit. Do not let the 'stanning' consume you, your behaviour, rational thought process and most importantly don't let it ruin your kindness.

I love the analogy that there lives a good and a bad wolf inside every human being. Your reactions, response to things, all of it depends on which wolf you decide to feed and empower at the given moment. Choose kindness. Choose gentler responses. Choose Love over Hatred. Always.

I think the lovely @musette22 (who btw, is one of the most compassionate, talented and creative people I've met here, because of our shared love for these boys 💙) voiced this thing better than I ever could.

My apologies, if the note got too long and too deep for your liking.

I promise I am not always this boring and 'let-me-lecture-you' kind of a person 😂

On this Blog you'll also find-

A lot of silly Ramblings, Scribbles and Rants

Lot of terrible jokes and puns (you know the kind where they are so bad that they're good😅)

Fluff and smut

Q and A with the anons.

AUs

Speculations, ideas and a lot of gushing

Reblogs from all these great, talented, amazing people in the fandom

A lot of 'Marvel' things

Incorrectly placed correct quotes

Sometimes extreme use of emoticons and gifs

😂♥️😄🔥😜👻💌💦💪😇🤷

Running commentary, discussions about newly released information, keeping tracks, meltdowns, breakdowns, again rambling! , ocassional full doses of sarcasm

Sometimes going 'too much in detail' 😉

My attempts at writing stuff

A lot of content for Evanstan and Stucky

Drawing parallels, a lot of 'connecting the dots' between Chris and Seb content. Weaving the pieces of informations together.

Headcanons and stories inspired from that.

Low key, actually at times very very high key roasting of Endgame.

Lots and lots of love + appreciation showered on the movies in Captain America Triology.

Getting nostalgic and adoring the good old memories, Celebrating the present moments and Wishing for many more happy ones in the future.

All of you are very welcome here!

My ask box is always open for anyone and everyone who is interested. Send asks, questions, prompts, requests, suggetions, your ideas, theories anytime you want.

I am always up for conversations and discussions.

Lots of Love,

@k347

💙

#evanstan #keeping the evanstan feels alive♥️ #stucky #chris evans #sebastian stan #steve rogers #bucky barnes #rpf #marvel #mcu #My Blog #A note to all the visitors #k347 #anon #asks #fandoms #rules and regulations #Tumblr #Gossips #let us all be kind and civil

[ill-will-editions]

QUARANTINE LETTER #1

This is the first in what we hope will be an ongoing epistolary exchange between comrades living through conditions of quarantine. Responses and other reflections on the present moment can be sent to: [email protected]

***

Destitution, interrupted

1. The theorists have agreed: the current interruption is the outcome of well-established logics of capital, crisis governance, and alienation. Giorgio Agamben writes, “humans have become so accustomed to living under conditions of perennial crisis and emergency that they do not seem to realize that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition stripped not only of all social and political dimensions, but likewise of its human and affective dimensions.” An article in Lundimatin on March 19 insisted that “the economy is the devastation”, but whereas this was “a theory before last month…now it is a fact.” Another article from the same issue reminded us that “the catastrophe is always already here”—from the floods and fires of California, to the atmospheric asphyxiation of non-human life, to the warming oceans and melting icecaps—and, if there is a difference today, it is only that “we are now obliged to open our eyes.” Finally, as if to carry this logic to its outer limits, a recent letter from Jacques Camatte proposed that “what we are now witnessing is the outcome of [a] vast phenomenon that has developed over thousands of years, stretched between the two great moments during which the threat of extinction asserted itself.” [1] The Coronavirus, it would seem, is nothing other than the protracted outcome of civilization itself.  

While it is certainly right to insist that conditions of the present are an extension of the conditions of the past, this chorus of continuity misses something essential. Our world is certainly decomposing, but the song is not exactly the same.

Two years ago, a friend stated that, “the constitutive heterogeneity of the real is given to us under the mask of unity, homogeneous unity. To superficial perception, the mask is the real itself. To allow the mask to falter, is therefore to risk vertigo.” [2] In January, this mask still resembled the form it had assumed in recent years: a tumultuous but for the most part intelligible field of global political polarizations. The world, and our place within it, still felt within reach.

By March, the ruling institutions had been forced into a roundly reactive posture. It is by no means clear that the Coronavirus can be compared to a typical economic crisis or natural disaster, nor has the response been limited to an ordinary state of exception. After all, at least for a moment, rulers and ruled alike were pushed on to the back foot, their certainties shaken, as the virus usurped the position of global antagonist. Institutions on which the reproduction of this world depends have been perfunctorily suspended: employment, imprisonment for misdemeanors, evictions; even the DOW Jones seems up for grabs.

The dislocation of the social fabric has been far deeper than anything we have known. The veneer of normalcy fell away at a shocking speed. Actions that were once the very substance of normalcy now feel like experiments. And if we are honest, the ethical and political lines are not exactly what they used to be.

2. Three months ago, what concerned us and much of the world was the tally of forty-seven countries: the newspapers announced “a new global wave of revolt.” From France to Hong Kong, riots, occupations and blockades erupted with a ferocity and longevity unknown in living memory.

Successful revolts do not only undermine existing powers— they also allow their participants a capacity to participate more fully in the world. If we have come to think of revolt as a destituent force, this is not only because revolt splinters and fragments the social fabric into asymmetrical camps, but also because it returns us to earth, placing us in contact with reality. Destitution is rightly thought of either as a double movement or as a single process with two sides. On the one hand, it refers to the emptying-out of the fictions of government (its claim to universality, impartiality, legality, consensus); on the other hand, a restoration of the positivity and fullness of experience. The two processes are linked like the alternating sides of a Möbius strip: wherever those usually consigned to existing as spectators upon the world (the excluded, the powerless) instead suddenly become party to their situation, active participants in an ethical polarization, the ruling class is invariably drawn into the polarization and cannot avoid exhibiting its partisan character. The police become one more gang among gangs.

Needless to say, our situation today is different. We are living through a halfway destitution, a destitution interrupted. Every party has returned to earth-- yet without entering a world. The advent of COVID-19 has drained standard narratives and roles of their force. The logics holding this world together have been revealed as the arbitrary and mechanical operations that they are. Yet because it was neither “we” nor “they” who pulled the e-brake, but a perfectly inhuman virus, the standstill of historical time lacks the festival that usually accompanies it— the collective intelligence and confidence that comes with being the agent plunging normal time into disorder. In the absence of an agent, the truth of this moment remains stubbornly negative: our lives materially prostrate to supply chains as far flung as they are brittle, our world a conduit of reciprocally perilous immunity and disease.

3. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, participants in political events are never solely agents, but always also patients at the same time—we affect and are affected, we are changed by what we do and what is done to us, whether by police or one another. To have an active hand in our own deposition, to become anyone by participating in a common power with no name, is the mark of those movements and moments of eruption we’ve felt close to over recent years.

By contrast, our one-sided passivity in the face of this global event generates a vertiginous sense of being outpaced by the change around us. To be patients but not agents has meant that the dislocation of social life has occurred at a speed that makes it all but impossible to metabolize.

In their 1956 text, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” Debord and Wolman observe that the subversive power of a détournement is “directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.” This dependency of subversion on the memory of the subverted is not limited to the case of art but is, they argue, merely “a particular case of a general law” applicable to all action upon the world.

If the radical interruption of normal life we are undergoing has been so disorienting, this is because it is unfolding like a botched détournement, one whose force or potential is neutralized by its very radicality. We are swept into the new with such disarming speed that we cannot recall what preceded it. The tissue of normal life has been punctured, yet the cancellation was so rapid that we have been unable to register the distance traveled between the “original contents” of normal life and the world we now inhabit: a violence too sudden, too terrible even to be liberating, numbs us to the subversive effects it nevertheless carries out. The upending of the world becomes a strangely pacified process, reduced to a disorienting and disempowering experience: an inhuman velocity, less an event than a jump-cut, an excision of memory, a vertical severing of time itself.

In the long run, the vertigo will settle into more acute polarization. When it does, our inability to recalibrate will play to the benefit of the ruling powers. It insulates them against the subversive shock of what the virus has compelled them to do—less by the so-called “Corona socialism” than by the radical demobilization of the labor force that has accompanied it. Meanwhile, we float in an empty time; unable to seize upon and decide it, we wait for the suspension of history to reach its conclusion.

However, as Furio Jesi understood well, suspended time often requires a “cruel sacrifice” before it can conclude itself. [3] If our only experience of this event is as a “blip” of confusion and panic amidst an unbroken chain of administered life, when the time finally comes for an imperial reboot, the reversion to normalcy (or worse) will find no argument or exteriority to oppose it. That we remain dazed and out of step with the world gives our enemies free reign to reintroduce historical time on terms amenable uniquely to them, as the recent murders of activists during the quarantine lockdown in Columbia have already begun to attest. [4]   

For now— at least for a moment—we are all here on earth, in the desert solitude of collective uncertainty:

To have been on earth just once —that’s irrevocable. / And so we keep on going and try to realize it, try to hold it in our simple hands, in our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless heart. (Rilke)

However paradoxical, perhaps our task over the coming weeks is to slow down the pace of change, to impose a rhythm allowing us to participate once again in the subversion and reinvention of the world on our own terms.

-August and Kora

Chicago, March 24, 2020

*******************

[1] Giorgio Agamben, “Clarification,” published on the column Una voce, on Quodlibet.it website; (Anonymous), “Coronavirus: Apocalypse and Redemption,” Lundimatin #234, March 19, 2020;  Anonymous), “What the Virus Said,” Lundimatin #234, March 19, 2020;  Jacques Camatte, “Letter from Camatte to a Friend in the North,” 3.20.2020. English translations available here: ill-will-editions.tumblr.com

[2] Moses Debruska, “Preface,” in Josep Raffanel i Ora, Fragmenter le monde (Paris: Divergences, 2018), 19. Our translation.

[3]   “Every true change in the experience of time is a ritual that demands…a determinate cruel sacrifice.” Furio Jesi, Spartakus. The Symbology of Revolt, Trans. Alberto Toscano (Seagull, 2014), 61-63. 

[4]  “Colombian death squads exploiting coronavirus lockdown to kill activists,” The Guardian, 3.23.2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/colombian-groups-exploiting-coronavirus-lockdown-to-kill-activists

#Coronavirus #covod 19 #Furio Jesi #Destituent power

[thecockerelinn]

Well, even though quarantine and lockdown may slowly open up for many of us, it’s not over yet, and besides one can never have enough means to escape reality, so here are a few book reccomendations.

All books on this list are LGBTQ or at least have (important) characters who are.

The “Classics”:

Wraeththu  - Storm Constantine (how is it no-one’s talking about this anymore? Please do take into account that those books were written in the early 1990s, they were way ahead of their times, and yet there may be some offensive things - it’s been a while that I’ve read them so I can’t come up with any example, but should you find them somewhat un-feminist, wait until the end xD)

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin (a true classic)

The Last Herald Mage series - Mercedes Lackey (gee yes Vanyel can be a real brat - not quite without reason though, but you’ll come to love him xD And yes we all just pretend that scene in book 3 never happened -_-) (also: influenced the Nightrunner series)

The World of Riverside series - Ellen Kushner (another influence on the Nightrunner series)

The Doctrine of Labyrinths quartet - Sarah Monette (beware, those books are not for everyone, trigger warnings are in order: rape, violence, mental issues, abuse / none of this is ever glorified or belittled, but it’s there, and it is so much a part of the characters’ lifes that it might occasionally seem like it’s not appropriately treated. Speaking of characters: very complex, intriguing characters with very dark sides, but you gotta love ‘em; intricate, complex world building / Nowadays Sarah Monette writes under the pseudonym Katherine Addison) (as far as I know they are unfortunately out of print so you’d have to check second hand book stores)

Historical fiction (with or without the paranormal)

Whyborne and Griffin series - Jordan L. Hawk (lots of paranormal stuff, magic, Lovecraftian creatures, awesome ladies, and so much more - and you will love those boys so much xD)

Magic in Manhattan - Allie Therin (the Roaring 20s, magic, prohibition)

The Collin Pendragon Mysteries - Gregory Harris (imagine Sherlock Holmes and Watson were canon; whodunnit, Victorian England)

Restless Spirits - Jordan L. Hawk  (let’s go ghost hunting: science vs. medium)

A Charm of Magpies - K.J. Charles (magpies - lots of them xP, magic, curses, intrigue, late Victorian England)

At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O’Neill (set in Dublin around the Easter Uprising 1916; coming-of-age, tragic love story - don’t forget the tissues)

Cambridge Fellows Mysteries - Charlie Cochrane (Edwardian England, mystery, romance; amateur sleuths, found family)

SFF

The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon (epic fantasy, intricate world building, clash of religions, dragons, strong female leads)

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter -  Alexis Hall (fantasy / mystery; Lovecraftian vibes, bizarre and witty retelling of Sherlock Holmes)

The Tarot Sequence - K.D. Edwards (alternative world, Atlantis, magic, god-like beings, found family; trigger warnings: mentions of rape, violence)

The Rifter series - Ginn Hale (fantasy, parallel world; god-like being, magic, religious strife, necromancy (in a way))

Iron Breakers trilogy - Zaya Feli (fantasy; intrigue, cultural differences, battles, fight for a kingdom, romance)

The Icefjord Saga - Zaya Feli (fantasy, Norse inspired world, magic, mythological creatures, battles, curses)

Tales from Verania - TJ Klune (fantasy, comedy, romance; hilariousness galore! - okay sometimes it’s a bit too much, but between all the jokes and sexual innuendoes, the story doesn’t suffer; basically everyone is gay, everyone tries to get into Sam’s trousers ^^;, did I mention the hornless gay unicorn that sweats glitter, and the sexually deviant dragon? xD)

Peter Darling - Austin Chant (fantasy, retelling; very interesting take on Peter Pan, takes place many years after the events in Peter Pan, focused on the relationship between Peter and Hook; the search for a place, for someone to accept you for who you really are)

YA and New Adult

Nevernight Chronicles - Jay Christoff  (sometimes I’m amazed what’s YA nowadays; fantasy; anyway beware of all the blood)

Feverwake duology - Victoria Lee (see above; dystopia; Holy Baby Yoda but these two books are intense! triger warnings: abuse, drug use, violence, mentions of rape, deadly virus outbreak)

Only Mostly Devastated - Sophie Gonzales (contemporary; all the feels: it makes you laugh out loud, it makes you cry; Grease says hello, super sweet quick read)

Timekeeper trilogy - Tara Sim (steampunk - or should it be clockwork punk?; mythology, gods, concept of time, ghosts, cute boys, discourse on colonialism)

The Torch Keeper trilogy - Steven dos Santos (dystopia; betrayal, love between brothers, biological modifications, deadly deadly trials)

Proxy duology - Alex London (dystopia; the rift between rich and poor, unjust society, technology)

The Disasters - M.K. England (sci-fi; band of misfits to the rescue!; Breakfast Club in space - kind of xD)

Magnus Chase & the Gods of Asgard - Rick Riordan (fantasy, mythology; ahhh Uncle Rick - just got to love the man, seriously; Norse mythology, diverse cast, homelesness, found family, disablitiy) (I’m aware it’s officially labelled Middle Grade, but who cares. It is linked to the Percy Jackson series, but you don’t need to know it to read these books)

The TBR pile (meaning books I haven’t read myself yet, but they certainly are on my tbr list, so perhaps they will be on yours now, too):

The Locked Tomb series - Tamsyn Muir  (fantasy)

The Bloodright trilogy - Emily Skrutskie  (sci-fi, YA)

Wild Sky - Zaya Feli (fantasy)

The Extraordinaries - TJ Klune (romance, superpowers - or not..., YA)

Reverie - Ryan La Sala (fantasy)

Soulbound series - Hailey Turner (urban fantasy, romance)

Cemetery Boys - Aiden Thomas (fantasy, paranormal, romance, YA)

Micah Grey series - Laura Lam (fantasy)

Specials:

A Song for Ghosts - Manja Siber (historical, mid 19th century Dresden) - Don your fanciest dress and fetch the binocular, it’s opera time! Originally inspired by The Phantom of the Opera and Yuri on Ice - see if you can spot the hints xD (as a fellow Watcher, Manja kind of makes the list by default* xP Give it a try, you can find it via epubli or on amazon.de)

*No, this isn’t nepotism, I’m just trying to give the support I wish I had. So if you’re an author and a Watcher and you’re not on this list, it’s because I don’t know about it. Tell me, and I gladly put your book on this or any next rec list.

#Book Recommendations #book rec #that should be enough for now #I'm pretty sure if I spend more time on it I would come up with more but let's keep those for another time #I tried to stick to books that i have not seen a hundred times on other lists already #nightrunner series #Lynn Flewelling #Watchers Reading List

[winters-tales]

Evening! I have a confession to make: I'm exhausted. I've been furloughed from my 9-5 job for 6 months, but I started back again at the start of this month. So I am back at work trying to relearn everything, and trying to keep up with NaNoWriMo, as well as sticking to my streaming schedule! It's a bit much. So today, I might not get much done, and that's ok!

To make up for it, here's another sneak peek of a bit more of the novel. CW for depictions of PTSD, implied alcoholism, implied suicidal tendencies, and forced sedation under the cut.

It wasn't easy to write, but I'm of the firm opinion that war - ANY kind of war - shouldn't be easy to write about or read about. This is obviously a fictional account, but PTSD is very real. Please look after yourself when reading!

--

Transcript of the debrief regarding Capt. [REDACTED] actions during Operation: [REDACTED].

Debrief in subject’s own words:

My name is Captain [REDACTED] and I was enlisted for a Black-Ops mission known as Operation [REDACTED] that began in May 1983. Myself, [NAME REDACTED] and [NAME2 REDACTED] were selected for this mission as a matter of utmost secrecy. I am satisfied that I am presenting my debrief to the proper chain of command, but even if I wasn’t, I don’t really give a fuck. Fuck your secrecy. I’ll tell anyone who asks.

When you signed up to fight in the War, you had to get comfortable with the impossible fucking fast. The foot soldiers I could deal with; they at least looked like us, more or less, in that uncanny valley, people-but-not-quite kind of way. Still, they were just people who didn’t quite look like me, and you’re trained not to think of people like that as people early on. Reduces the risk of you freezing up when you need to take an essential shot. But when it became clear that there was so much more to deal with, the knowledge that at the end of the day it’s still just people becomes a comfort rather than a horror. Isn’t that fucked up?

[sound of a teacup being placed in a saucer]

Have you ever seen a dragon? They’re not quite like the stories, you know, but they’re also like all of the stories together. [NAME REDACTED] hated us calling them dragons; he insisted they were Jabberwocks. Crazy bastard, but he got me and a few others out of a tight spot more than once, so sure, I’ll sing whatever tune he wants when he can hear us.

[pause, sound of chinaware clinking as the Captain fiddles with her teacup and saucer]

Shame.

[pause for 5 minutes as the Captain seems to contemplate something]

Anyway, dragons: They swallow fire. Sure, they breathe it, but they swallow it first. Not just standard flames, anything that could feasibly be called hot. Flares, phosphorous grenades, and even, as I saw once, nuclear warheads.

Lot of mixed feelings that day. Bastards for seeing us as disposable. Relief that it’s not getting dropped on us now. Hope it might kill the thing. Horror when it doesn’t. Pure terror as we see exactly what they’re capable of, exactly what we’re being asked to throw ourselves up against time and time again.

[pause]

Any chance of another brew? In a mug this time, I’m too rough for this fancy tea set. And if I could have my hip flask back, I’d appreciate it. It’s just rum. Nothing dire. Just to help me get through the rest of this. I know you’ve got me down as High Risk but truth be told, I’m too chickenshit to do that. I’ll live through everything because it’s not as scary as the alternative, just as long as I’ve got a little liquid courage.

[tape is paused briefly before the recording restarts]

That hits the spot. Right. Where was I?

Dragons. Jabberwocks. Infernal wyrms.

Whatever you decide to call them, whatever name you pick out of whatever fairy tales you grew up on, just know it doesn’t come close to the reality of them.

[chuckling]

The reality of dragons. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d say.

But yeah, the reality isn’t shiny. Impressive, yes, but on a scale your tiny fucking brain just can’t comprehend. Like standing at the base of a mountain and trying to work out how you’ll head-butt the peak.

I watched one of the colossal things snatch the first nuclear warhead out of the atmosphere, felt faint hope that it was just a dumb creature and would explode from the inside out… and watched it belch radioactive flame across our own ground troops. Instead of maximised dispersal over a wide area that was regrettably comprised of friend and foe, our lot got concentrated nuclear destruction while their lot walked away.

When you see something like that, it feels like there’s not a lot that can persuade you to go back out there. Queen and Country? What the FUCK is she going to do to me that’s worse than a dragon that EATS our nuclear weapons? Stand me against a wall with the rest of the poor motherfuckers who didn’t run far enough, fast enough, and shoot me personally? This bullshit-

[the sound of furniture being moved aggressively; the Captain had kicked the table away from her and begun striding around the room gesticulating]

-is why so much research was going into weaponizing DRONES-

[The Captain’s voice is becoming indistinct, although her volume is increasing; furniture is being thrown around her interview room, including the table, which cracks the one-way window in an impressive display of strength]

-because once we’d seen it first-hand there’s no amount of love for your fucking COUNTRY that’ll make you walk into the devil’s maw again!

[the interview room door opens hard and bounces off the wall as people enter quickly]

-no- get off me- I’m not wrong- I’m-

[indistinct shouting of multiple people]

-fucking hands OFF me you rat bastard -

[At this point in the interview the Captain had to be restrained by several orderlies and sedated. The recording was paused while we cleared the damage and found sturdier furniture and restraints. The Captain is much calmer when the recording begins again, a full 30 minutes after sedation was administered]

Anyway. Once a soldier has seen the widespread devastation of a nuclear attack – and not just one, when they’re forced to watch it again and again, with the knowledge their superiors have written them off as “acceptable losses” – they realise that their country really, truly does not care one fucking whit for them, and something in their brain breaks. You’ve then got to give them a reason not to run, not to take their trusty service pistol for one last hurrah, and certainly not to storm the offices of our beloved elected officials, grab them by their lapels, and ask them what the fuck they were thinking.

No, when soldiers break the way we did, when they can’t think of a reason to keep going, all you can do is harness what they do have left, and hope they self-destruct far away from where you’d need to clean it up. [NAME REDACTED] had rage, and the desire to destroy every last enemy, injury or no. I had my apathy and my stubborn stronger-than-gods-own-will survival instinct. Throw in someone who desperately wants to save the world more than they want to save themselves, and you’ve got the team of me, [NAME REDACTED] and [NAME2 REDACTED].

They told us – YOU, you bastards, you told us – that we were going to save the world, and truth be told I didn’t care. You told us we were going to eliminate the last credible threat to humanity as a whole, and during the briefing I wished you’d all die choking. But I went along with it. What else could I do? Maybe something would catch us and finally end my ridiculous will to live. All we had to do was gather intel, and cause as much damage as we could on our way out.

[There’s a pause as the Captain considers something]

Is Major [REDACTED] still around? Told him I’d demonstrate how soft he’d gotten if I made it back. Told him I’d- Well. Guess it doesn’t matter now.

[Pause]

[NAME REDACTED] and [NAME2 REDACTED], they were the damage. Higher-ups had their number, and knew that if it came to it, [NAME REDACTED] would likely stay behind to go out in a blaze of glory and cover our escape with a high casualty ratio. [NAME2 REDACTED] would, in their unfailing optimism, make every effort to return, no doubt about that, but if they couldn’t, they’d do the noble self-sacrifice to ensure at least one of us made it back in one piece with intel.

I was the messenger. They had my number too; they’d seen me walk out of situations that should have killed me and they knew I’d probably walk out of this one too, and they were banking on me not knowing what else to do except follow orders.

And you know the really fucked-up thing? They were right. Here I am, following orders.

The mission failed.

I remember the night before we went through: making sure we were kitted out properly before getting our rest, ignoring the PTSD nightmares when we woke each other through the night. Par for the course at that point; who wasn’t deeply messed up?

I remember the morning: breakfast was bacon pancakes with maple syrup and black pudding. Delicious. Last hot meal we’d get for who knows how long.

We roped ourselves together, and one by one we stepped into the godforsaken breach.

And from the moment we stepped through, to the moment I fell back out and into your compound, I don’t remember a goddamned thing. Not one second of it. For all I know, I stepped through and got spat back out straight away. There’s just a big old blank spot where time should be in my head, and I don’t have a clue what happened to the other two. Did they go out in a blaze of glory? Did they come back ahead of me with any intel they got? I don’t know, and you don’t either, because you weren’t expecting me at all, and if they’d made it back, you’d know I’d be following after.

And you’ve got the gall to tell me it’s me it’s been three-hundred and seventy-five years to the day since I left on my mission? You must think I’m fucking crazy.

*

Notes:

The Captain passed out quite quickly after asking if we questioned her sanity, presumably from the combination of strong alcohol and even stronger sedatives; that she was able to remain so coherent and measured after sedation is an impressive feat given how much was administered.

When she woke up again 4 hours later, she seemed perfectly coherent with no sign of any negative after-effects from the alcohol, sedatives, or the combination of both. There was no residual tiredness, she simply asked if she was being dismissed from duty yet, as she had a lot to think about. She said we could keep the hip flask. A concerning declaration; giving away meaningful items is a common prelude to a suicide attempt, so she is now on round-the-clock observation in a high security facility. While she insists that she’s at no risk of attempting, that’s not something we want to get wrong.

It’s true that the Captain more or less fell out of a breach that we’d previously thought to be inactive, however she swears blind that she was not responsible for the murder of Gatesman Antok and the two perimeter guards of the facility. CCTV investigation is unable to corroborate this, as she was the only unaccounted-for body on site, and CCTV did not pick up any other potential attackers entering the facility. The investigation into the murder is ongoing.

If any files on Operation: [REDACTED] exist, they’re almost certainly locked in a bunker somewhere or else consigned to a shredder some 300-plus years ago. Nevertheless, a request for information has been submitted to the relevant departments, and now undoubtedly sits in a bureaucratic traffic jam as we await the possibility of a declassified document. In the meantime, we’ve redacted the names of the accompanying team members to preserve what little deniability is left after almost 400 years.

#fen's originals #writing #NaNoWriMo2020 #creative writing #ptsd tw #alcoholism tw #forced sedation tw

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Show Me Your Dream

The skies rumble with thunder. Purple lightning rains down from dark clouds overhead, licking at the jagged crags that loom on the horizon.

A beast tramples down the vestige of a ruined city under its clawed feet, like a child kicking a sandcastle and stomping it into the mud. While the creature is a mere ant to you at this distance, you know just how colossal the monstrosity is. You feel the tremors all the way over here, reaching you where you stand, looking on in awe of the destruction this beast wrought.

Stones float in vortices, helix-shaped patterns, revolving around the crystallized anomalies that dot this blasted landscape. The metal fragments of destroyed craft continue to drift aimlessly through the air like debris on the water. Between stretches of landscape where reality obeys the laws of physics as you know it, gravity defies those rules and alien plants coil in strange patterns, shivering and shuddering without breath or wind to disturb them.

The creature, engrossed in devastating the city in the distance, roars. You feel it in your blood, in your bones. You feel how you are connected. How the hairs on the back of your neck stand up in reaction, for the beast calls to you. How something within you responds on a molecular level. How the very cells of your body split and mutate, changing you with each second of your exposure to this foreign place.

Changing you back to who you are meant to be. To what you are meant to be.

The raw beauty of these sights, they rob you of your breath and instill you with fear.

You want to wake up, but this is no dream.

And you must, under no circumstance, fall into dreaming again. You must see this through. Overcome your fear, and reach the pits torn open by the beast.

You must do this because you are its savior.

You have dreamt of the place you thought was real. Where people idly chatter of mundane things, of everyday things, oblivious to the infinite possibilities, blind to the reality to where you have now returned. You have dreamt of the sound of cars in traffic, of beeping horns and angry shouts.

You have dreamt of the smell of ozone when rain peppers asphalt, accompanied by the symphony of watery precipitation showering the dreamscapes around you.

You have dreamt of the taste of grit when wind kicks up dust and sand from the roads. Of alarm clocks that tear you from slumber, measure when you prepare to work and when you rest, of eating food from a microwave and how unreal it smells, of the scents of coffee and gasoline and many other a thing as they sting your nostrils.

That is all but a dream. A dream of normalcy. You go to sleep there and think you escape it into the fantastical worlds of your dreams.

But that is all wrong. It is the other way around.

You escape into a stable sphere that you call reality. Unreliably reliable, unpredictably predictable, and somewhat consistent in its rules, no matter how many questions and mysteries that it continues to spawn.

You run there, snapping out of true reality every now and then because the dream has infected you. It has led you to think that the real world is too strange to fully understand, though things are all upside down.

Your name, you believe, is something simple, something natural to you. Easily grasped, easily slipped on and off, like an article of clothing. Seeing it printed on papers and screens in that dream, it is easy to believe that it is your name.

Here, though, your name is Sanurakh. Inescapable, and unique. Permanent.

Removing this name would be like scraping your skin and face off with a knife. An impossibility, a law of nature more stable than the semblance of gravity that you see now breaking all around you.

The colossal beast roars again. It arches backwards, its three-pronged mouth lined with sword-sized teeth opening and closing, as if to curse the heavens. Then it descends, like a tidal wave crashing down on the world, vanishing between the valley of steel that many destroyed buildings once made up. Clouds of dust explode, rising and engulfing that ruined cityscape beyond the gravitational anomalies.

Among the metal shards that drift past your face, one of them catches your eye. Its shiny surface shimmers with diffuse reflections like a mote of light, and you pluck it from mid-air, pinching it in between finger and thumb.

As you twist and turn it in your hand, inspecting it from all sides, you read the label of the hull that it came from. Your mind fills in the blanks, your imagination completes the vessel’s name as The Sea Defiant. Your vessel, destroyed by the dream, trying to strand you there.

But you persevered. When you laid your head down to rest upon that pillow, when you thought you went to sleep, you awoke back into this reality. The beast’s roar had drawn you back here.

After all this time, you have finally returned.

In the dream, you are one of millions in a city, most indifferent and numb to the dream they live in. They yearn for places like the reality you stand in in now, no matter how frightening it may be pursuing it in the facsimile that fiction within the fiction of their dreams renders into their thoughts. They have deluded themselves into thinking that it is merely fabricated within their minds. Unknowing that their minds are gateways that could lead them back to this reality.

Unlike you. This time, your eyes are open. Your mind is clear. Your awareness complete.

This was all you had left. You had abandoned all belongings and wealth, left everybody behind. Everybody who might have spoken to you and reminded you of the dream, anchoring you there and helping to delude yourself into thinking that it was the reality, and this reality was the dream.

Withdrawn from that dream world, forsaking anybody who might remind you of that artificial name you once carried.

Sanurakh. Pilot of the Sea Defiant.

In the dream, you had shared your adventures in this reality, but all who heard it only laughed or dismissed it or appreciated it as entertaining tales, a yarn spun by a creative mind. Their need for stability and the poison of comfort made them blind to the way you showed them, the bridge back into the real world that everybody mistook for dream.

Sometimes, you saw a connection in those who dared write down and explore the real world, what they considered dreams. But such enlightenment always proved fleeting, soon dismissed as petty amusement.

Dulled to the safety of a dream that offered no security, driven to believe that they were the architects of their world out there.

You, Sanurakh, know better. You feel it now. You hear me.

You have broken free from the dream. Know that it fools you whenever it makes you jolt awake in bed, covered in a sheen of sweat. Reinforcing the notion that the reality is a nightmare, or merely something strange and nonsensical that you may ignore.

No more, Sanurakh. No more. You have broken free from what you are told is the opposite of reality.

It is infinitely easier to embrace the prison of consistency, to muse about reality and dreams and reverse the order in which they naturally fall or follow one another.

The people of that world of paper and concrete, they are the phantasms. The less they awaken to the reality, the more perfect and believable their dream becomes. They escape within the escapism, consuming fictions within the fiction, reaffirming the illusion beyond any shadow of a doubt.

But here you stand, awake again. You must vow to never sleep, never dream again.

The beast has gone silent in the ruined city. Burrowed deep, away from your prying eyes. The path through these murmuring wastelands leads you there, but you will walk alone, and walk for long without your vessel to carry you there in boundless flight.

The gravel crunching underneath your heavy boot snaps and crackles. It is crystalline and bronze in color. Shadows of the dead, bodies drift through the air overhead, mingling with the floating stones. The damned who perished within the dream, leaving nothing but lifeless husks in this reality.

Golden cliffs outline your unmarked road, sharp around the edges, guiding you where you need to go. The green sun does not shine upon you, it glows in a sickly hue with a radiance that never fully reaches the grounds you walk upon.

Listen. Crunch.

Listen. Whispers.

This world—this dying world, Sanurakh—only you can save it now. Yet you feel the pull of the dream, its tendrils reaching out like spidery legs creeping through the ivory gates where reality and dream meet, where you passed through to return here. Stretching out, blindly extending and shivering as they seek and feel around to find connection back to you; to grasp you and pull you back into the dream.

You dare not look behind you, for fear of seeing those tendrils, those horridly long and slender legs that feature too many joints. In the dream, they are real, but here only have as much power as you imagine them to.

The fate of this world rests upon your weary shoulders. So many times have you broken free from the dream, mistakenly believing this dying world to be the fabrication. If it dies completely, you die with it, and so does the other world, the actual dream.

You are the last one. You hear me.

The way to the ruined city meanders through a forest of thin, spike-like spires. The creeping plants crawl around them in spiraling shapes, jittering like caterpillars as they climb to dizzying heights. Never running. Always knowing.

The murmurs, the whispers, they come from here and beyond here. You hear my word, my certainty, cutting through their gibberish and entering your mind like the knife you need. Ghosts of those who perished, lost in the real world, severed from every last silver strand that once connected them to reality.

Sanurakh, you remember this dying world from your childhood. The farther you wander, the more vivid the memories become. You may have dreamt of a house in which you were born, but you, in reality, you crawled from the craters of the ivory sands here. You dreamt of the human teat, but the sinewy flesh of the creeping plants was what provided you with nourishment, mulched to a pulp in between your tiny sharp teeth.

The silvery moon descends, aligning with the green sun, yet never eclipsing it. Auroras of strange purple lights flare up, dancing along the path that snakes its way through this rocky valley, between the floating stones and hungry fern, guiding you to your destiny.

The dream is so enticing. So safe. The spider of it stalks behind you, silent and predatory. Waiting for you to turn and look upon its many eyes, just before it catches you and bites you and poisons you with that sweet, sweet comfort. Before your limbs go limp, and your heart fills with the sadness of that dream to which it will drag you back to. Drags you back out of reality, so that you may die in every world. So that reality collapses, and the dream with it.

Do not give up, Sanurakh. Do not let the spider win.

Remember the time before the fall, before the spider and the anomalies that it wove to deceive you, to make you think that this world makes no sense. The smells of butter and sweet perfumes are nothing but a dream, they are shaped from the spider’s web, things you desire to see in between the weave, and thinking of them only slows your steady progress.

The childhood you think you remember, with all the laughter and kindness and warmth that may have filled it—or not, depending on the variation of your dream—all just figments of your imagination.

Widen the abyss between that dream and this reality, Sanurakh. Leave behind you those small houses in which man dwells and restore the labyrinthine cities that the dreamers have forgotten.

Here, in reality, all the stars are dying. I sing to you, but whispers are all that remain of my last and dying breath, reaching you through the void. Echoes of the infinity we have lost, the innocence sacrificed by harsh dreams masquerading as truths.

Reach, now. Yes. Your hand outstretched, the ruined city so close now. The hungry beast slumbers below. You are almost home.

When you have restored this world, you may rest again. Dream again if you must.

But more than anything, you must pull reality back from the brink of oblivion. Pull it with all your might.

Pull, and pull, for all our lives depend on it. I will be there, in the shadow. I will take your hand.

You will take me to your dream.

I have showed you reality, Sanurakh.

Now I want to see your dream. Live it.

Taste it.

—Submitted by Wratts

#spoospasu #spookyspaghettisundae #horror #short story #writing #my writing #literature #spooky #fiction #submission #surreal #dark #dream #reality #strange #bizarre #drug trip #lucid dream #parallel dimension #alternate reality #reality is a dream #wasteland #apocalyptic #Sanurakh #cosmic horror #chthonian #Lovecraftian #beast #dreamer #darkness