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thetriumphantpanda · 7 months

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pining & desperately waiting | javier peña

take the weight off his shoulders - chapter two

Chapter Summary | As much as he’s trying to keep his distance there is just something about you that Javier cannot stay away from. Drawn to you like a moth to a flame, so to speak. He's worried about you too, putting yourself in harms way for your work.

Chapter Warnings | Mutual pining, slow burn, sexual tension, flirting, mention of smoking and drinking alcohol, mention of drugs, drug deaths and the drug trade, explicit smut - masturbation (F)

Pairing | dbf!Javier Peña x F!Reader

Word Count | 3.2k

Authors Note | When I tell you I love this (specific) man, I am telling you I love him. He consumes me. Thank you to @hellishjoel for letting me scream about these two with her and helping me figure this chapter out! If you like this I would love for you to join me in my ask box for screaming and please consider reblogging to support me! If you enjoyed this, you can make a donation to my Ko-Fi if you'd like to support me that way.

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You dream of him every night for a week after that night at the bar. They’re filthy, depraved sometimes, and you always wake up, slick pooling between your thighs, fingers working furiously before your alarm goes off to try a satiate you, or at least tide you over until you can climb back into bed that night and really take your time to imagine all the ways Javier would take you apart with his fingers, with his mouth, with his….

“Are you even listening to me?”

You want to answer honestly and say no, you were busy daydreaming about getting railed by your dad’s buddy, but when you look across the table and see your boss practically glaring at you, you realise it’s probably for the best to lie a little.

“Sorry,” You mumble, picking up your pen, “Didn’t sleep well, what were you saying?”

“The fundraiser tomorrow,” She speaks, “For Dylan’s foundation, would you be okay to cover it?”

You nod, because it makes sense for it to be you. Dylan had overdosed just over a year ago – seemingly on top of things, doing well in school and incredibly bright, found slouched over on a street corner, dead from an overdose before he’d been able to leave the small town for whatever bright lights he was destined for. He was just one of a string of drug-related deaths over the past twelve months – an ‘epidemic’ as they had coined it – the town too close to Mexico to escape the trade that Javier himself had worked so hard to quell. Dylan’s parent’s had set up a small foundation after his death, hoping to help other young kids who could be lured into this stuff to have other opportunities in their lives.

“What kinda thing are you thinking?” You ask, starting to jot down notes as she speaks.

“Just some reaction from people there, why they’ve decided to come out and support, maybe try and grab one of his parents, just the usual really, and we can run a story in the following days, might help drum up some more support for them if nothing else.”

You nod, doing your usual with your notes of underlining the important parts, making notes on the kind of questions you’ll ask when you speak to people, “How many words have I got to work with?”

“I think we can give them a page,” She says, looking to her boss who nods in agreement, “So whatever you produced for last month’s story, that should be good.”

You nod, making a note of that too, and then continue to zone out for the rest of the meeting as everyone talks amongst themselves, mind going right back to Javi and what he would feel like putting his weight on you, settling between your thighs. You really needed to get a grip.

“Oh, isn’t it so nice to see such a good turn out today?” Your mom gushes, looking around at what feels like the whole of Laredo milling about a number of stalls that are selling all sorts of different things.

“Sure is good to see,” Your dad agrees, putting his hands on your shoulders to give them a squeeze, “You want us to leave you to your reporting, pumpkin?”

The nickname makes you wince a little, a moniker from your early days, before you’d filled out into your body. It was cute, but at twenty-five years of age, you do sometimes wish he’d find something else to call you.

“I shouldn’t be too long,” You turn around and smile at him, “I can come and find you in a little while.”

You wander around, introducing yourself to a few people asking them questions and jotting down notes. You’ve just finished speaking to Martina, famous throughout town for owning her own candle business, about why she’s supporting the foundation, when you step back and feel two sturdy hands holding onto your waist. You’re about to turn around and slap whoever it is for touching you, when that deep voice hits your ears.

“Careful, querida,” Javier fucking Peña, “Almost stood on my foot.”

You whip around, mainly to put a bit of distance between the two of you, because it felt like his lips had been inches from your ear. He drops one of his hands, but keeps the other ghosting at your side, maybe to keep you steady more than anything as you wobble from the speed at which you’ve turned around.

“Maybe you shouldn’t stand too close then?” You offer, making sure it comes out more playful than anything, because actually, all you really want is for his body to press against you more often.

“Fair point,” He shrugs, “Thought I recognized you so I wanted to say hi,” He finally lets that other hand drop from your waist, “So hi.” Is... Is he nervous?

You chuckle a little, “Hi,” you respond simply with a smile, “I didn’t expect to see you here,” You say honestly, this wasn’t his kind of scene before, you can’t imagine it’s any more appealing to him now, “Didn’t think it was your kind of scene.”

He rubs a hand nervously over the back of his neck, “It’s not, I’ve been made to come,” He nods his head behind him where Chucho is talking to a group of other ranchers, “Apparently I’ve got to start showing my face more.”

“Well, it’s a nice face,” your mouth speaks before your brain can catch up with what it’s saying, you inwardly cringe when you realise what you’ve said, “I mean, I’m sure people are happy to see you around.” Is all you can think to say to try and get him to forget the weird compliment.

He seems to smile, but like it had been across the table almost two weeks ago, his smile seems forced, “Just wish I could skip the bullshit about everyone being proud of me.”

“But it’s true,” You shrug, moving away from the stall with him so other people can in front of you to look, “You did really good things out there.”

He scoffs now, shaking his head a little, “You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, querida,” He speaks, “Surely you should know that more than anyone.”

You don’t know what he’s actually trying to say, but you decide to play it light, “Are you accusing me of lying in my stories, Peña?” You say with a smirk.

“Perhaps not you,” He offers, “But I know plenty of journalists who know how to twist a story to get what they want,” He looks down at his shoes, kicking at the gravel a little, “Just don’t want you thinking I’m something I’m not.”

“Been gone a long time,” You muse, “You might have to spend some time reminding me who you are.”

It’s flirting the lines of maybe being too much you think, but you’ve not said anything that’s not true. He has been gone a long time, and if what he’s said is anything to go by, he will have to remind you of who he is or show you how he’s changed.

“Not sure you’d like who I am now very much, querida.” He says simply.

You’re about to open your mouth to respond, tell him you’re pretty sure that wouldn’t be true and that there isn’t a thing he could do on this earth that would make you think he was a bad person, but before you can, Chucho is coming up behind him, a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Ah, mija,” He smiles at you, “You here alone?”

“Hey Chucho,” You greet with a smile, “Mom and dad are around somewhere, I’m just here working on a story.” You hold up your notepad and pen.

“Let’s see if we can’t find them, huh Javi?” Chucho muses to his son, “Get you a nice cold lemonade for when you’re finished?” He motions to the blazing sun and then back to you.

“Sounds lovely, thank you,” You motion over their shoulder to where Dylan’s parents are stood, “I just need to speak to them, and I’ll come and find you.”

Javi doesn’t say goodbye, just follows closely behind Chucho as they disappear into the crowds, leaving you to wander over to Dylan’s parents. They’re not strangers to the paper, your boss had written a story with them not long after Dylan’s funeral, trying to spread awareness as to just how deep the drug problem ran in town. The Laredo Morning Times had always been supportive to them, so you didn’t feel the same anxiety you normally did when gathering information for stories, cold calling or knocking on doors trying to introduce yourself before doors are swiftly shut in your face or phones are hung up with a ‘no comment’.

They’re warm with you as you speak to them, thanking you for coming, thanking the paper for agreeing to cover the event, they even smile, which for a pair who lost their only son in such a horrible way still shocks you for some reason. Their loss hasn’t defined them, only made them stronger, made them determined to stop their pain from happening to anyone else. You make a note to write something equally as poetic in your article.

The crowds are thinning out a little as the midday sun does its worst. You can feel beads of sweat gathering behind our knees and you curse the fact you hadn’t remembered your hat. You can feel the heat prickling your skin as you spot your parents, sitting on a picnic bench with Javi and Chucho sat opposite them. When you’re close enough to the table, you can see everyone has plastic cups full of lemonade, but there’s one, put in front of the spare spot on the bench next to Javi, that is pink in colour instead of the cloudy yellow of everyone else’s.

“You get everything you need?” Your dad asks, as you try and fight your legs over the bench in the most graceful way possible.

“Yeah,” You nod, “Think it’ll make a great piece, Dylan’s parents seem really positive about it all,” You pick up the cup and take a sip, pink lemonade, your favourite, “Thanks for this.” You nod in the direction of your dad.

“Don’t thank me, Javi got these,” He smiles, “Remembered you preferred pink lemonade and everything.”

It actually makes your heart swell in your chest. He was always thoughtful, even before he left. Observant almost to a fault. But even after all these years, all of his stress, everything he’s seen, he still knows you well enough to know you prefer the sweeter pink lemonade. You turn your head to him to find him already looking at you with a little smile on his face.

“Thank you.” You say quietly, sipping through the straw.

“You’re welcome, dulzura.”

Javier Peña is doing a piss poor job of staying away from you, even by his standards. He lasted less than a week before he was waltzing over to you, hands on your waist, buying you pink lemonade because he knows you prefer it. There hasn’t been a night where he hasn’t wrapped his fist around his cock and made himself cum over the thought of you. He finds it easier to drop off to sleep once he’s done it, but his nights are still fitful, full of nightmares, tossing and turning, waking up to sweat soaked sheets and a heaving chest. He wonders briefly, when he lies awake watching the dawn arrive through his curtains, whether your body next to him would ease his nightmares? But then he thinks what if it doesn’t. What if you have to wake up, look at him with those innocent doe eyes and see him for what he really is? No, he can’t let his darkness cloud you, you don’t deserve that, you deserve someone that going to be gentle with you, someone softer, not him with all his jagged edges.

He's currently sitting in his truck, just outside of the liquor store, contemplating how badly he wants that packet of cigarettes and the bottle of whiskey he’d driven out to buy. He’d done alright so far, chewing on his Nicorette gum, but his fingers are itching for the familiarity of a cigarette between his fingers, and he’d finished the bottle of whiskey last night.

Then, almost like he’s being punished by God, which would make sense really, all things considered, you’re in his eyeline, walking down the street with a woman who is a little older than you, with your notepad and pen clutched in your hand. It’s late and he wonders where you must be going to report at such a late hour, and then he worries, because in his experience, nothing good happens after dark that worth making the newspapers. As the two of you approach him, he leans further out of his open window, holding his arm out to catch your attention.

“Hey Javi,” You smile, coming to a stop in front of his window, “What are you doing in town?”

“Just picking a few things up,” He answers simply, because this isn’t about him, he needs to know where you’re going, “Where are you going this late?”

You turn to the older woman you’re with, tell her to go on ahead and you’ll catch her up, “There’s been some kind of drugs bust a few streets over,” You explain, “Sounds like it might be quite big so we’re just going down to see what’s happening.”

“Your dad working it?” He asks, because if he is, he knows you’ll be okay.

You shake your head, “Nah, he’s not on nights right now,” You’re shifting back and forth on your feet, clearly itching to get going, “I’ll be alright though, sounds like plenty of dad’s officers are down there.”

He turns his head back to the steering wheel and then back to you, “Be careful, alright?”

You smile at him again and if he’s not careful, he really could get used to being the person who draws that from you more often, “I know what I’m doing,” You chuckle slightly, and he doesn’t doubt it, not really, “Been covering this kinda shit for a while.”

Without really thinking about it, he leans over, roots around in the glovebox and pulls out the little card he knows that’s in there. He passes it over to you, letting you take it, “It’s got my number on it,” He explains, “I’ve been in this shit and I just…” He trails off with a sigh, “Just, call me before you write something that might get you in trouble, okay?”

“Worried about me, Peña?” You smirk, and he thinks above your smile, he’d like to make you smirk more too.

“I’ve just seen too many good journalists write things that ruin their careers,” He shrugs, trying to play it off but probably doing a terrible job of it, “Don’t want you to make the same mistake.”

He watches as you turn the card over in your fingers a few times, before smiling at him one last time, “I’ll call you if need you.” And he really hopes you do.

In that moment, he gives up on trying to resist the call of the liquor store, pulling out his keys from the ignition and opening his door, climbing down onto the pavement. He stalls a little, before he puts a hand on your shoulder and gives it a squeeze, “Go and get your story, reporter.” And then motions his head for you to go.

He buys a bottle of whiskey and two packs of cigarettes, smokes two of them before he gets home. He thinks if he were a stronger man he’d have managed to quit, but he’s not, especially when it comes to you. Sure, he knew you before, but this new you? He’s known less than a month and he’s already struggling to stick to his own rules. He steps down from his truck back on the ranch, walks in and pours himself a healthy double, trying to convince himself it’ll be okay, he just needs to keep to himself, but when he’s led in bed at night, thinking of your sweet smile, he thinks this might just be another thing he fails at.

It’s late. Too late for you to be awake when you have to be at the office in the morning, but you can’t stop looking at the series of numbers, printed on the little card, underneath the words ‘Javier Peña, DEA.’ It’s out of date, clearly, the DEA nothing more than a memory to him. But it’s the principle of it that matters most. He’s worried about you, and he would only worry if he cared right?

You set it on your nightstand, switch off the little lamp and plunge yourself into darkness, right at the same time as you plunge your hand under your sleep shorts and through your folds. You’re soaked, because you always are when you think about him, it’s actually sort of pathetic. You sink two fingers into yourself, only briefly, letting out a satisfied breath, dragging your slick fingers back you to slowly circle your clit.

It's new, the way you always need to take care of yourself. The brief relationship you’d had in college with James hadn’t given you much to work with, you hadn’t really felt desperation to get yourself off like this before.

Your other hand, currently running over your peaked nipples through your tank top, is itching to reach across to your nightstand, pick up the phone and dial that number. You want to breathe down the phone at him, tell him you’re being so bad, that you need him to help, need that deep voice to guide you through it. As you press your fingers harder into your clit, speeding up your circles and bucking your hips, you wonder what he’d actually do if you did call him. Would he tell you to get lost? You don’t think he would, you think he’d do exactly as you asked, talk you through it.

You imagine his voice in your ear, telling you how good you’re being for him. You imagine his hand replacing your own, sinking his fingers into you, using his thumb to work your clit, the rough of his moustache running over the skin of your neck as he kisses you there. It’s the image of him looking down at you, smiling as he makes you cum that tips you over the edge. That flood of relief that rushes through you as you bite down on your bottom lip to keep you from whispering his name as your body shakes through your orgasm.

You wipe your slick fingers on the skin of your thigh, roll over in bed so your back is to the phone, trying to get your breathing under control. You drag the covers up under your chin, closing your eyes and trying to sleep without imagining his strong arm around your waist, his broad chest against your back. Does he snore? You wonder as you try and fall asleep. Would he keep you warm? It’s all running through your head as you sleep, conjuring up dreams that come morning have you realizing something has to give, you have to know, you have to have him. You needed Javier Peña more than the air you breathe, no matter how bad it was to admit that, no matter what it meant, no matter what it would cost, you needed him and you think to yourself as you drive to work, that he might just need you as much as you need him.

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marypsue · 9 months

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I'd love to hear your thoughts on S1 of ST being a tragedy! No main character dies, so I never thought of it that way before

I mean, nobody has to die for a story to be a tragedy (at least, in the modern definition. I'm pretty sure '(almost) everybody dies' is a requirement of Greek tragedies and Renaissance revenge tragedies). But also, no main character dies in season one...if you take season one as part of a series. Which it wasn't originally conceived as.

I am not going looking for copies of the original pitch bible, because I am lazy, and also I only saw them floating around this webbed site. But the show changed a lot from the initial pitch (Joyce had a Long Island accent! Lucas' parents were divorcing! Murray was there and named Terry Ives! Most of what ended up in Hopper's character originally belonged to Mr. Clarke! The original pitch bible is fascinating). And part of the original pitch was a proposal for possible sequels.

The Duffers' proposal for a possible sequel was "It's ten years later, and Eleven is dead".

So that's the setup. Everything that came after season one was made up wholecloth after season one was a hit and people wanted more, but also people loved the adorable little psychic murder child (cue the Duffers shockedpikachu.jpg) and Netflix obviously recognised it would be a bad call to make a new season without her in it. So it makes sense to take season one as a unit, as a self-contained story on its own. You can also take it as part of a whole, but it makes sense to read it first as a complete story. Especially given the thematic drift of later seasons and the way they are...I'm just going to say it, each new season is very much added-on to what came before rather than being built on foundation that the earlier season(s) laid. It is very clear there was never a planned five-season story arc from the beginning. (This isn't necessarily always a bad thing, when it comes to sequels, but it does mean it makes sense to 'read' each season as its own thing.)

Okay, now that we've established all of that. Season one has one very clear goal, one very clear stake for the characters: save Will Byers from the Upside Down. (I like this. It makes the stakes both extremely high and extremely personal, it makes it very easy to understand each character's motivation, it also keeps the stakes grounded in reality. I like this a lot.) And by the end of the season, that goal is accomplished. So at first blush, you're right, season one doesn't look like a tragedy.

But when you start to unpack it a little, you start to see just how many important things were lost along the way. It's most glaringly obvious with Mike and El, with Nancy and Barb. The whole Wheeler family is fractured down the middle, with Mike and Nancy on one side and Ted, Karen, and Holly on the other, and Karen, who's been trying so hard the whole time to be part of her children's lives and understand what's going on with them, is aware of the ever-expanding gulf between them but will never be able to cross it, and will never fully know why. Hopper's finally managed to snatch a kid out of the jaws of death, save a woman he obviously cares about from the pain of losing a child, and Joyce has finally had someone believe her, support her, trust her. But it became blindingly obvious to me on my fourth rewatch that Hopper's plan, from the moment he went to leave the middle school gym, was always to trade El for Will. And that decision (and the fact that Joyce obviously understands that he did something to get the lab to let them go after Will, but she obviously doesn't dare press him on what) has broken her trust in him, and left him with what looks like an equally heavy burden of guilt as what he was carrying before. The lab stays open. The government gets away with everything. No one will ever know the true extent of the hurt they've caused.

And in the end, none of it even saved Will. He's back. He's alive. But he's spitting slugs in the sink. He's permanently marked by the Upside Down, and by trying to hide it from his family, he's putting a crack down the centre of them, as well. They're losing Will, just as surely as they had when they thought he was dead, just without him going anywhere.

And there's still a hole in the world.

The fragile bonds of community, the things that people share in common, the way catastrophe can bring people together and bring out the very best in them, are the major thematic threads woven through season one. Human connection is the only thing that can change what seems inevitable, the only thing that can bring back what's seemingly lost forever.

And it's still not enough to protect anyone from the random tragedy of the world.

The love was there. The love mattered. The love bent the entire course of the world around itself.

And it still wasn't quite enough.

If that's not a tragedy, then I don't know what is.

#stranger things #the pitch bible is also part of why I think they're gonna kill el for real at the end of s5 #and that the final epilogue scene of s5 is going to be a callback to the eggos-in-the-woods scene #a) the show's ending so they don't HAVE to let her survive. and we all know the duffers love it when other people are upset #b) they've said themselves they're 'going back to season one'#c) netflix would absolutely cream their pants for an opportunity to update the nostalgia marketing for this show to the now-trendy nineties #d) and also would want to leave the door open for 'well MAYBE she survived you don't know that we're not going to resurrect this franchise!#one of many many many reasons why I'm not bothering to watch any more of this show #I'll stick happily with my s1-s2 duology and steal characters from other seasons thanks #it's so frustrating because it's so CLEAR in season one that the love MATTERS #that these people care about each other and that MATTERS #even though it's not enough.#and by season four it's just like. well what if we just kept introducing new characters so we can kill them. aren't you sad about it #like there are so many ways to write a tragedy well and 'kill everyone kind of indiscriminately' is not one of them #okay rant over. i am climbing off the cafeteria table

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wvbaandtheboys · 7 months

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it's huggin time!! (bear hugger hcs)

hiiiii i need to pick up this series again... but anyways here's your warnings: CW/TW// Animal Death, Death, Gore

Bear Hugger, named Elijah Moore, was born in Saskatoon, Canada. He had three siblings: Nolan Moore, Emily Moore and Gabriel Moore. He was the eldest son of his family.

Nolan was the second eldest, Gabriel was the youngest, and Emily, their only sister, was the eldest of them all. Elijah and his siblings lived in a rundown farmhouse near the woods on their single grandfather’s property. Their grandfather, John Moore, was a carpenter that worked on faraway community projects to bring in money. (Taking reference from Bear’s SPO poster that said was a carpenter.) As such, Elijah and Emily were usually the ones policing their younger siblings in their grandfather’s absence. (Which was frequent.) Though they also had the minor responsibility of caring for what few farm animals were present.

Though, when John could be present, he taught Elijah the tools of the trade, intending for Elijah to take up the profession for when John had to retire. As the guy was of course getting older and was already struggling with health problems.

Unfortunately, Elijah back home was not a very happy and jolly man like he is today as Bear Hugger. In fact, Elijah was rather irate on a daily basis thanks to many things, namely his brother Nolan being, well… not the best at doing things. He was always fucking up one thing or another from small to big. It wasn’t help by his reluctance to take accountability for his fuck ups, so it really made Elijah and his’s relationship sour.

However, Elijah had a soft spot for his little brother Gabriel. An innovative and curious boy, though Elijah was not at all the kindest brother, he tried to be encouraging of Gabe’s little spirit. (He even drove many hours into a nearby town just to get Gabriel a little toy construction set once for his birthday.)

However, Nolan didn’t like Gabriel. He would often bug the little guy for whatever reason, seeing that he was getting better treatment from Elijah than he was.

Emily, however, kept a level head throughout their time together having to look after their siblings. Sure, there were times she’d get fed up and end up reprimanding Nolan. But she did it out of love.

Until one day, all four of them received news of a horrible accident: John had been crushed due to a rickety foundation crumbling while the builders were still on site. Though he was rushed to the hospital, he was pronounced dead soon afterwards.

This devastated the siblings. It especially hurt Elijah on account of him being the closest to their grandfather out of all of them. However, they were given the remaining sum of money the company would have paid to John, giving them more savings to thrive.

Years later, while in the woods working as a lumberjack, Elijah stumbled upon a bear’s den. There, he found an older female grizzly that clearly wasn’t well. Taking pity upon the animal, he gave it some nourishment and stayed with it for a while. It perked up.

When Elijah left the site for the day, the grizzly followed him home, but gave no signs of hostility or ill intent. It was friendly, and didn’t want to be left alone.

When talking it out with Emily, she also took pity on the animal but worried for the safety of Gabriel, as the boy was naive when it came to assessing danger. Elijah and her made a compromise to keep the bear in its own space away from both the farmhouse and the other animals. They gave the bear the name Forrest.

Forrest lived with the Moores for a while, being a kind bear who loved attention but made it clear when she wanted to be left alone. In a time of great stress and misery, Forrest gave Elijah the relief he needed. They had a close bond.

Things got troublesome one early morning, though. Emily awoke to the sound of commotion coming from outside. She checked on both Nolan and Gabriel’s beds, and found that they were both gone. She rushed outside of the house to find a horrifying sight.

Forrest was being antagonized by the other animals, making her increasingly agitated. And there was Gabriel, running out into the field in his pajamas and hefty boots to go see what was wrong.

As Forrest turned her attention to Gabriel, she stood on her hind legs and roared. Emily knew what that meant.

She cried out in horror as the bear charged at her brother. Forrest attacked Gabriel quickly, catching his head in her jaws and wrestling him to the ground where she mauled him. He died in seconds. The next thing she heard was Nolan yell in anger at the bear. When she looked in his direction, she saw him hauling a shotgun in his hands while charging towards Forrest. She again could only watch in horror as Noel shot her, killing her instantly. The worst part?

Elijah hadn’t left for work yet. He came running at the sound of both his sister screaming bloody murder and hearing a gunshot, only to see his animal friend and little brother dead on the ground. With his brother shaking, rattling the gun in his hands. And as they made eye contact, he saw a look on Elijah’s face he hadn’t seen before. Intense rage.

The emotions of losing both his brother and old bear, plus seeing his brother holding a gun and still having it pointed in the direction of them was Elijah’s breaking point. All sense of patience, rationality and awareness left him. And he charged towards Nolan with tears in his eyes, roaring in anguish as he hoisted his axe overhead. He was intending to hurt him. If not, kill him.

Nolan shrieked and ran right for Emily, who pulled him inside of the house and shut the door, turning the latch. Elijah broke it down with a single swing of the axe, forcing his way in. Emily ran with her brother up the stairs while hearing her brother scream and curse at her to stop running. Running to her and Eli’s bedroom, she shoved her brother inside and locked the door in the nick of time. She tried desperately to reason with a grief stricken Elijah, but ended up just getting shoved away and knocking her head on the ground.

Oh god. Nolan just had to sit there and watch as Eli took down the bedroom door and peered in at him one more time before actually knocking it down. Terrified at the thought of his axe wielding brother’s wrath, Nolan tried to clamber out of the bedroom window and escape, but Eli grabbed his leg. And dragged him kicking, screaming, begging back into the bedroom. He then proceeded to beat him by kicking him repeatedly, before lifting the axe up and striking his brother’s leg without thinking. He chopped off up to the midpoint of Nolan’s left calf, leaving a bleeding stump in its place. It was only then when Eli heard his brother cry out in intense pain and terror, as if he was about to die, that he realized what he had done.

Emily shook Eli out of his stunned stupor and he called emergency services while Emily made a makeshift tourniquet for Nolan and brought him out to the yard. They made up a cover story about Nolan also being attacked by Forrest, and that they panickedly thought that they needed to remove the leg that had been mauled. Thankfully it was bought by the paramedics that rushed all three to the hospital. Nolan ended up being taken to intensive care where he remained for a month. But everything that had happened in that one day was just too much for Elijah to bear. So, after tying up everything he could like burying his little brother on the farm grounds, burying Forrest where her makeshift home was, saying goodbye to Emily and telling her to relay a message to Nolan, he left.

He migrated to Salmon Arm, Canada. He was unable to continue being a lumberjack for a long time after the incident, as everything would remind him of the decision he made. How he nearly killed his brother in a blind rage. In need of something to do, he became a foster for animals. This is where his love for animals truly blossomed as he took in whatever critters he could and gave them all the affection and care he could give. They slowly helped him heal enough to pick up the slack again and become a lumberjack again, even if he did find it hard to deal with for a while. This was also when, just like back in Saskatoon, he found an abandoned bear’s den with no parents. But, there was a lone cub in there. A little girl.

He took it in without hesitation. Memories of Forrest plagued his mind as he watched the cub grow, but she was different from Forrest. She was always willing to receive affection, and was playful. But she looked like her. Eli would eventually name the cub Maple. And she would be his lifelong companion. But unfortunately his work output in lumber started failing not too long afterwards (memories, man) and he had to quit yet again.

Later on, Elijah would move to New York to find his new place in the world.

- Hugger and Piston? Best friends. Funnily enough, they both met around the same period that both came to New York. They hit it off well enough, even if Hugger was kind of somber and Hondo was struggling with his temper. Hondo was the reason Hugger got into boxing in the first place, as the two would spend more and more time together until Hugger found out his friend was signing up for boxing. He signed up with him. - God, Hondo was a godsend for Hugger. Hugger was struggling with a lot of untold emotions about the incident (which he’d mentioned to his buddy but never said anything specific.) Hondo was basically the therapist friend (even if, again, he himself was having issues at the time, he was delighted at having a bud) that helped Bear express himself about what happened, allowing him to get it all out. He felt a hell of a lot better after that. - Hugger of course had to bring Maple with him. She was the only animal he actually kept, well probably cause she wasn’t a foster going out to anybody- But yeah she just lives at his cabin. She’s chill and loves her owner to bits, so don’t go fuckin’ around or ya might just find out. The way he actually met Pine (his squirrel) was because Maple caught him snooping around and Hugger had to get her to let him go. Since Pine has a knack for getting himself hurt and being ironically clumsy for a squirrel, Hugger just lets him stay at the cabin. - Getting the joy he needed from the Major Circuit guys really helped shape Hugger from a somber mess to an up-beat and sometimes cheeky boxer. He loves all of them and would definitely do anything he could to keep them safe. He also has a belly laugh cause why not! -But thanks to the incident, it did permanently give Hugger issues with overcompensating for rage, and having a shorter fuse but just being good at hiding it. And never speaking about when he feels upset. His friends are trying to help him though! We love having the Major Circuit being a supportive friend group. But the times he does get mad, it’s not pretty at all. (Ong Hugger could be smiling and seemingly having a nice day and Great Tiger will float up to him like “You’re upset. Is something wrong?”) -Damn, this man can cook. He’s got tons of cookbooks just laying in a random drawer in his kitchen. One could say he’s a better cook than Don, and Don certainly does also know how to cook. (Don’t tell Don what I said though. He’s gonna get jealous lol.) - Hugger’s the type of dude to find something shiny and take it. He has shelves full of weird nicknacks and doodads. But hey, he thinks they’re neat. - Dad. Dad to the max. He might have been angry at Mac for hurting Pine when he did, but they eventually made up and Mac now has yet another boxing dad. - Don’t let his cuddly kindness trick you. He does love giving people a good scare once every so often, ESPECIALLY Mac and Peter who love causing their own mischief sometimes. And with how big he is, it’s super effective. Tell me you wouldn’t go white as a sheet hearing someone like Hugger chuckle menacingly while you couldn’t see him. Or hearing him growl quietly. He never fails.

#punch out!!#punch out wii #punch out #punch out bear hugger #bear hugger #elijah moore #punch out headcanons

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loremonster · 4 months

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Okay there's a misconception about Germany being The First Country To Do Genocide and I need to lay this out real quick

Concentration camps were a thing done by colonizing forces wherever they went. If a power intended to take land, they also intended to take the PEOPLE of that land and Use Them For Slave Labor.

What made Germany different is They Did It To White Europeans. That's the Big Horror of World War II, that everyone was SO USED TO THIS KIND OF BRUTALITY being used abroad that WHEN IT CAME HOME no one could condemn it without ALSO condemning colonialism and the treatment of indigenous populations around the world that had been rounded up into camps by invading colonial powers.

... So they didn't. Britain's first strategy to deal with Germany was Appeasement; give the Reich what they want and tell them "You'll get that and no more". And then Germany would reach out for its next terrirorial gain, and Britian would be SHOCKED, SHOCKED I TELL YOU! That Germany didn't abide by their treaty! Not that Britian broke treaties and promises ALL THE TIME when they decided the land belonged to them, all of it, and you better start laboring at whatever Britian tells you to or you will be starved, beaten, and eventually killed.

Calling someone in Britain an Appeaser was a deep insult that I feel needs to be brought back. When a violent group states their desire to take over by any means necessary, giving them what they want by refusing to protect your neighbors won't protect you. It will EMBOLDEN said violent group.

Don't give away your friends to appease an enemy. Viewing humans as Disposable Under The Right Circumstances is what governments do to rationalize horrible crimes like genocide while they draw up the plans and give the orders.

Governments are made up. Their ability to divide the land between them is a fiction, enforced by centuries of violence, meant to Secure Labor ( PEOPLE ) and Resources. Your passport is a Certificate Of Ownership from the nation you were born under, so other nations know Who You Belong To. Like the branding on a cow's ass. That nation calls Dibs on any labor you do, no matter where you do it, so They Get A Cut. You can wander where you like to graze, but They Get The Milk.

Work, the idea that you're supposed to spend so many hours a day Doing Some Kind Of Ordered Labor, came from colonies working the locals to death to build their homes under threat of death, maiming, or intimate violation and forced pregnancy. Shift work comes from mining operations which are STILL run with slave labor in many places of the world. When we talk Human Trafficking, where do you think those humans GO? Some end up in prostitution situations, which is horrific on its own, but they also end up in mining and timber operations with no money, no documents, and surrounded by people with guns who will make them into a corpse.

Ever seen a Fair Trade seal on a bag of coffee or a bar of chocolate? That means that the product you're looking at had its entire supply chain inspected and certified as not being a product of forced labor at any point. That the people who grew the plants, processed the produce, and shipped the goods were not pressed into that labor. That's how much slavery is mixed in with work; it's Assumed To Be There And Not Mentioned. NOT having cruelty as part of your supply chain is the EXCEPTION and thus gets marked and called out.

Germany was not the first government to murder massive groups of innocent people in the name of a nation. They just dared to do it to white people, and the world freaked out about something that has ALWAYS been vile and indefensible coming back home.

To say, aloud, Genocide is Wrong, invalidates the foundations of every colonial power that still exists in the world. So say it often. Call out appeasement when you see it. Whenever someone claims Reconstruction Efforts, look into it and see if its a Forced Labor operation where food and housing is only provided if civilians agree to labor for the occupying military force. Keep an eye out for fair trade products, share them with your friends, and talk about how slave labor is Still A Thing and how nice it is to have a treat that didn't involve people with guns standing over child slaves like Hershey's does.

If you live in a place that was colonized, remember this; the nation has no claim to you or the land you stand on. Your time is yours. Your LIFE is yours. The land you stand upon is the nourishing base that every creature depends upon, from trees to birds to you. And we will all return to it in time, spurring on new things in the future none of us will live to see. The idea of a nation is small. The world is huge. And you're part of it. The people around you are part of it.

No one has the right to grab another creature by the neck and force them to start digging. It's been wrong since the first time it happened, and continues to be wrong. And the nations that colonized other lands, stole their people and their resources, are built upon foundations of unacceptable cruelty. And They Know That, and Don't Wanna Talk About It.

Which means we NEED to talk about it. We need to never stop talking about it.

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toxic-gorgon · 3 years

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Yandere Dio Brando x Reader: Useless

Synapsis: You are one of the last hamon users and while the practice itself has died along Lisa Lisa, except for a tiny handful of users. While most are willing to allow their gifts to die out and go about their daily lives, you want to put yours to good use and join the crusaders.

Content Warning: Extremely dark themes, click the read more at your own risk! Non-con, blood, yandere Dio, depression/hopelessness, corruption kink, breeding kink, dirty talk, talks of su*cide, violence, and extremely spicy themes. 18+, minors DNI! By continuing to read, you understand the risk.

When you joined the Speedwagon Foundation, you knew the chances of you dying for Mr. Joestar’s cause was almost inevitable. Your gifts were nothing compared to the powerful and unique stands that you came across during the start of your journey. You were one of the last remaining hamon users, but instead of allowing it to fizzle out like the others who trade their gifts for normal lives, you wanted to help and be useful! Lisa Lisa long passed and you heard stories of how hamon saved the world. Allowing hamon to die was allowing a part of yourself to die.

Hamon was useless against stands, but worked wonders against humans and vampires. However, you primarily used yours for healing and support! The crusaders could use all the help they could get, so it made sense when the directors approached you for the task. Their lives are in your hands, and if it means to put an end to the vampyric Dio’s reign, then you’ll do your part and make sure these boys stay alive.

That’s what you thought at the beginning, back before your days meshed together and all time seemed to stagnate.

You weren’t sure how many days it’s been since you first arrived in this suffocating manor in Cairo. The dark and coldness inside the manor contrasts the warm and vibrant colors outside your window during the day. You were ever the spunky one when you first arrived, you knew your friends were well on their way and you had no problem voicing that fact loudly in Dio’s presence. He would scoff, flashing you an amused grin, after all you were (as what he puts it) like a fangless, clawless feline. You don’t pose any real threat, but it’s cute to see you try.

Dio is every bit what the rumors said. His raw charisma and power alone should frighten you, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle that’s Dio Brando. His beauty was truly breathtaking, much more so in person, his shirtless form proudly displayed like a painting hung carefully in the Louvre. His voice charmingly suave, almost a mesmerizing melody that beckons you closer like a siren’s call that you can’t block out. Worst of all was his eyes, that piercing gaze of his that can see right through you, all your worst fears and highest hopes, nothing can be hidden from this man.

When you first arrived at his mansion, you were awestruck. Cat-got-your-tongue indeed as you drank in the imposing monster of a man, your enemy. What could he possibly want from you? His smirk makes your chest clench as the hairs on the back of your neck stood up. You wanted to run, and you would’ve if it wasn’t for you being so goddamned weak. You were completely at his fucking mercy, all he had to do was give the word and you would meet your end. You expected to die right then and there, surely a man like Dio would take out his enemy while he had the chance, just so later down the line it won’t bite him in the ass. You weren’t sure if it was out of pity or amusement, but your death never came. Instead, the cocky asshole smriks and gives you his blessing to tour his home. Hell, he even allowed you access to his library, on the grounds that if you did decide to run, you would be all too easy to catch. You were convinced this man had no real plan for you being here, besides making things much harder for the crusaders by stealing away their healer.

You were determined to keep your head held high and wait for your knights in shining armor.

But now, you’re just a shallow husk of despair. All the hope and conviction you had died little by little as the days went by, as those dark thoughts that Dio would mock you with began to take root. There’s no point in brainwashing you when your conviction can be shattered so easily. During the day, Vanilla Ice and Pet Shop watch over you. You absolutely loathe Vanilla Ice. His blind devotion towards his master churned your stomach, all the while he’s looking down on you and lack of stand ability. His words stung, but now they mirror static, background noise for your chaotic thoughts.

Pet Shop was your preferred caretaker. He’s a bird, so he can’t talk like your other wardens. However, you could’ve sworn you saw that bird smirk once or twice, and his steely gaze mirrored his cocky yet powerful master. Perhaps the bird was silently judging you, even mocking you for being more caged than he was. After all, Pet Shop was allowed to move past the mansion’s windows and enjoy the fresh air and sun, even though he stayed within his bounds. A murder hawk has more freedom than you do.

The nights are always the worst. Screams of ecstasy or pain, you weren’t sure which anymore, filled the halls. After a while of being imprisoned, they all sound the same. How long before you’re next? You felt like it was any day now, and eventually your captor will grow bored of your constant banter. Perhaps that would be for the best, you’re dead weight anyway as long as you remain here.

Your friends were on a mission to save Holly, which you admit is more important than rescuing you. You knew the risk after when you joined this crusade, you just didn’t think it would end here in the lion’s den. You contemplated jumping out the window, not caring how painful the initial impact would be. You always decide against it, and instead sit and wait, chalking it up to being a coward as well. Everyday when your saviors hadn’t come, the little bit of hope inside was crushed gradually until barely anything was left besides tears of frustration and a luxurious queen sized bed to help you sleep.

Since you’ve been here, Dio took the liberty of making sure you’re fed three five star meals a day and accompanying you with a wine glass of blood. Such a gentleman, he even made idle chit-chat while you refused to take a bite (no matter how many times he told you it would be a waste poisoning you). Dio boasted about his many achievements, including how he stole Jonathan Jostar’s body, which you weren’t sure if he was just bragging or making sure that even in a casual setting, the threat still lingered. Was this supposed to impress you? Because the only responses you ever gave him were snide remarks and silence. Sometimes he would treat this like a silly game, but on days when he was more temperamental, you wisely chose to nod your head and actually eat what’s in front of you.

He made sure you were treated well, despite your situation. You bathed in a tub fit for a princess with fancy soaps and perfume, and was dressed in the finest of authentic Egyptian gowns that money could buy. All of which were gifts from Dio. He even took the liberty to do away with all your drab belongings and anything that didn’t fit his opulent aesthetic. He even gave you art supplies once. Whenever he gave one of these gifts, he always made sure to attach a rose with it. You always throw them out.

To occupy yourself when your host is gone and taking time for himself, you like to venture to his library and thumb through his vast selection. You’re sure you read over half of his stock by now, but something new always catches your eye to pass the time with. Usually you would saunter off into your room, avoiding the underlings as much as possible, but tonight was one of those nights where Dio met you there.

“There you are darling, I was worried I missed you.” His smooth voice did little to put you in ease.

“What do you want?” you sighed, making your way to the bookcase and browsing through different titles. Dio playfully scoffs, as always everything you say is just a game to him, and the disdain in your tone goes unnoticed. You didn’t move an inch when he moved closer to you, towering over your much smaller frame.

“You wound me dear, I only wish to spend time with you.” He leans in close next to your ear, his warm breath tickling your lobe. “Alone.” Now that’s laughable! Dio Brando isn’t a man who did anything out of kindness or ‘quality time’ without something in return. Did he run out of bodies to satisfy his hunger? What could you possibly offer him besides a snack?

“Spend time with you? I’ve seen what you do to the men and women who throw themselves at you for a sliver of attention. Their dead carcass lay about your manor like furniture when you’ve drained them.” You barely whispered. Why were you explaining his misdeeds to him like a child? You weren’t sure if you were trying to reason or reach the last thread of humanity within, but doubt was clearly written on your face. You wanted this to end.

You balled your hands into fists and shook with rage. “Just kill me and get it over with! I’m tired of you and I’m tired of being here!”

Dio couldn’t help but sneer at your sudden outburst. How can you say these things? He’s given so much to you, and this is how you repay him? Do you not realize what you do to him? How weak he is while in your presence? How absurd. You had to have known, and perhaps you were testing his patience on purpose.

Reaching up and gripping your chin roughly, Dio kept your gaze on him. “I ask very little of you and have given you everything you could ever ask for. Tell me darling, are you truly unhappy?” his lips brush against your own, and his voice dangerously low that it sent shivers down your spine. Your voice was caught in your throat, this tower of a man standing over you so domineering makes you seem insignificant. Like a large cat ready to pounce on his prey.

Tears run down your cheeks and you had no will to stop them. Why was he doing this to you? As if to answer your question, the blonde captures your lips and wraps his arms around your trembling form. With a jolt of energy you tried to shove him off you in defiance for your space. “Please stop, I don’t want…” you mumble. Growling, Dio pulls away and glares into your glossy puffy eyes, his brows furrowing when you don’t give in so easily.

“Pet.” he said through gritted teeth, his hand drifting down to your neck and squeezing rough enough to cut off air supply. “You’re being selfish. All I asked from you in return is your loyalty and to surrender yourself to me.” He picks you up by your neck and amusingly smirks when you gasp and attempt to wiggle free, your hands desperate for air. Your nails grazing his skin with little scratches did nothing to phase Dio, instead he chuckles.

“Funny, isn’t it? The man’s body I’ve taken, the only man I would ever call my equal, possesses the same power as you do.” Black dots formed in your vision and your legs grew tired from flailing. He lets you drop from his grip, and while you sit slumped over and choking on air for your burning lungs, Dio looks down with his ruby hues. “Suppose my interest in you is fate, or perhaps you remind me of him.” Bending down to kneel in front of you, Dio pulls you towards his chest and picks you up bridal-style with very little resistance from you. He smirks and leans in to whisper in your ear “However, your strength will never match his.”

Dio took flawless strides towards the desk on the other side of the room and pinned you down on your stomach against the harsh oak surface. With the wind knocked out of you temporarily, Dio traced his long nails along the soft chiffon fabric of your golden gown before tearing it to shreds down the middle, revealing your back and ass as the now useless fabric pools at your feet. Looking back at your captor’s sadistic smirk, your bloodshot eyes widen with realization. You were observant, he didn’t need to spell out what his intentions were.

Almost immediately, Dio parts your legs with his knee and runs his fingers along your slit, examining it’s beauty before he decimates it with his cock. Squirming, you tried to push yourself up from the desk. As weak as you were, you had to try! Even though you knew Dio had more than enough strength to overpower you. As if he read your mind, he takes both of your wrists in his strong grip and pins them against your back.

“Careful dear, you wouldn’t want me to break your arms, would you?” You stopped your struggling and stilled. It was best to get it over with and maybe if you comply, he won’t be as harsh with you, right? Just let him do what he’s going to do and don’t make it worse for yourself. “That’s better!” He smiles. “Lay there and trust your Lord Dio. Don’t worry about a single thing.” Don’t worry? How can you not? But, you did as he said and Dio goes back to running his fingers along your pussy, this time his index flicking against your clit.

Biting your bottom lip, you shut your eyes tight. Be strong….be strong…. You chanted, but the small shocks of having your clip played with after being in turmoil for so long, it was difficult to not give yourself over for anything that can make you feel a moment of blissful ignorance. You were convinced that either Dio was a mindreader, or you were just so painfully obvious, but he stops his ministrations with your heat and leans in closer, he carelessly grinds his clothed hardened cock against you. He was quite proportioned.

“Let’s enjoy ourselves, hmmm?” You shuddered at his words (and sizable bulge), a small whimper escaping you. Pleased with your sudden turn around, Dio leans back and without missing a beat, undoes his pants, allowing his cock weeping of precum to spring free. You swallow down a moan when his cock rubs against your clit, teasing your lips. Your cunt quickly became sloppy, as you were beginning to come around and throw caution to the wind. Dio must’ve noticed, because chuckles and mutters. “Don’t hide your cute noises from me now.”

With his cock soaked with your juices, he thrusts in and you do as he says, allowing a hoarse moan erupt from your throat that’s muffled by your face against the desk. This wasn’t going to do, not for Dio. While thrusting at a brutal pace, he yanks your hair back and lifts your head so he can listen to your lustful melodies more clearly. While you pant like a bitch in heat whenever he hits that spot to make you see stars, Dio releases your wrists in favor of gripping your hip tightly, leaving bruises.

Gasping, you didn’t move your wrists for fear of your lord stopping or worse. Pleased by your obedience, Dio’s pace quickens, just for him to slow down to a tortuous pace. Flustered you cry “W-Why? Please….please….m-more!” You try to turn your head, but his strong grip keeps you in place. What a wonderful development! Definitely a change in the right direction from how you rejected him a few moments ago. But, Dio wasn’t quite satisfied yet. He wanted your everything, not only your spur-of-the-moment submission. He’s Dio Brando, Lord Dio to his brood. He doesn’t settle for less than satisfactory.

With a grin, Dio knew just how he would achieve this. “You beg so pretty darling, I see you’re finally coming to understand who owns you. But begging isn’t enough.” When he started moving again, this time his cock kissing your cervix, your mouth hung agape in a silent scream. Your thoughts thoroughly scrambled with nothing but the pleasure that Dio was offering you. Hell, you weren’t even coherent when your position changed to you being on your back with your legs spread wide and exposed, only for Dio.

He picks up his pace, your cunt constricting around him as he pounds into your sore pussy, his hand now free from your hair pressed down your abdomen. He felt the slight belly bulge from him delving into your sweet cunt, simply delicious. “Darling-” He said too sweetly. “- You’re absolutely stunning so full of my cock, but I have a wonderful idea. I didn’t appreciate your attitude this evening, but I know how we can fix that!” You were too fucked out to comprehend his words, but nodded like the dumb slut you were. His dumb slut. “I’m going to breed this pussy of yours, fill you up with my cum, and you’re going to take everything I give you. Wouldn’t that be great? You grow big and round while your breasts are full with leaking milk.” He pauses as his hips sputter, his cock pulsating with the vision of you growling his children within your womb.

“Yes..I think motherhood will suit you well. Forever my ___.”

Whimpering, you nod in agreement. Whatever he wanted, as long as he didn’t stop. You were so very close! You mumble a breathy fuck when Dio pushes your legs up to your shoulders, diving in much deeper than before. Chanting strings of curses under his breath, Dio’s hand on your stomach drifts down to vigorously rub your sensitive nub and in almost no time at all you cum around his member, your juices rushing out to soak the desk and his cock.

“Oh god...oh god...oh god..” you chanted, making Dio’s ego inflate more if that were possible. Smirking, he lets you ride out your orgasm, before picking up the pace yet again, this time losing control of himself for once. Brutally he fucks you, his cockhead slamming against your cervix, as your pulsing walls from your aftershocks urges his throbbing shaft, begging to milk it. After a few final thrusts, Dio stills and his cock paints your womb with his seed.

He wasn’t done yet. Chuckling at your fucked out expression, it was so much like Dio to push for more. He wanted to mark you, make everyone but mostly yourself to know who you belong to. Your chest will do and his mark will be on full display. Using the nail on his index finger, Dio carves his name into your chest, pebbles of blood dripping down your sweaty and spent body after each scrape was made. When he is done, he admires his work, his name etched into your skin almost makes his cock spring back to life. What was he kidding, he could go a few more rounds anyway. But first, he leans in and laps up the blood, waste not want not right?

“There you are, how stunning. Darling, I wish you could see yourself right now.” Your eyes grew heavy, you were so exhausted and ready for a nap. Dio picks you up and doesn’t bother to cover you with your shredded rags. “No, no, don’t pass out now. We have a long night ahead of us.”

#jjba #JoJo's Bizarre Adventure #jojo no kimyō na bōken #dio brando #yandere #yandere dio #dio x reader #hamon user reader #y/n #dio x y/n #extra spicy #dark themes #part 3 #stardust crusaders #jojo's bizarre adventure x reader

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philipkindreddickhead · 3 years

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I often seen critiques of make up from an existential/philosophical perspective, but I rarely see criticism of cosmetics from a stand point of the very physical bodily harm it does. I think this is because the number of dangerous ingredients is so massive, and overlapping its an absolutely daunting task. So I've compiled the information I've found and bear with me its a lot. (This is from an American perspective. Sorry, thats what I know. However I would love it if people from other countries had things to add.)

First I want to get the "simple" stuff out of the way. I think almost everyone has heard about bacteria and fungi in makeup and that makeup causes acne from clogging pores. Makeup has a pretty strict shelf life, yet consumers are entirely supposed to self-police as Ive never seen a single expiration date on any cosmetic packaging. (I guess consumers are meant to pull this knowledge out of the ether or something. I only found out about it in a tumblr PSA. I did read that expirys are on products in Europe.) Beauty blenders are the worst offender because theyre almost always moist. When I was taught makeup I was told to wet my sponge so it would soak up less product. If you apply makeup daily your sponge is likely constantly damp. USA Today had an article which said that 96% of sponges had fungi and over 60% had E. Coli in them. But I think what people talk about less is the complication of problems from using other products in conjunction with dirty beauty blenders. USA Today warns its especially dangerous to use beauty blenders if you have damage to your skin like acne, cuts, or dry skin. However the most popular beauty products for washing your face contain walnut pieces for literally scrubbing your skin and creating microabrasions. If youre a frequent makeup user you probably know about the cyclical nature of applying foundation, breaking out, and then applying more foundation to cover the breakout. You may even be using scrubbing cleansers more frequently to combat the acne creating more tears. This can lead to "blood poisoning" and, though neither USA today or Forbes mentions this, blood poisoning (not a medical term btw. Its sepsis.) according to numerous medical sites has the potential to be extremely lethal. The symptoms are so similar to a regular flu its nearly impossible to self-diagnose.

The very first thing I was told when a friend handed me a jar of finishing powder- popular with many beauty gurus for the "baking" technique and considered a must have- was a joke about "clown lung." This was a reference to the main ingredient talc. Talc causes lung problems including cancer and respiratory illness. If anyone remembers the large Johnson and Johnson lawsuit from 2019 it was because theyd been putting talc into baby powder. Talc is dangerous because it's impossible to mine and seperate from ASBESTOS. Some high-end finishing powders will try to sell you on safe talc-free formulas but all the products I looked into contained mica instead which causes pneumoconiosis, colloquially known as "black lung disease." Like fucking coal miners get. Its not just present in finishing powder either. In my research it turned out that talc/asbestos are also present in many eyeshadows and other powder products. [Googleable, evidenced in J&J lawsuit]

Another industry to examine is nail salons. Toluene, Formaldehyde, Dibutyl Phthalate, and Methacrylate compounds are all dangerous ingredients and present in various salon products. These ingredients cause a range of problems from dizziness, drowsiness, birth defects, slow fetal growth, future intellectual disabilities in the fetus, eye skin and throat irritation, coughing, allergic reactions, asthma-like attacks, short-term memory loss, nausea, dermatitis, cancer, and misscarriage. Some nail products advertise that they are 3-free meaning that toluene, formaldehyde, and DP should be absent but often the labels are found to be completely inaccurate. It should be noted that the risk is mainly to salon workers and not patrons but ask yourself if it is right to place other people at serious risk for your aesthetic. OSHA does make an attempt to mitigate these risks however not once in my years of makeup queen did I see a salon following these directives which include constant air monitoring, half mask respirators with chemical cartridges, gloves, long sleeves, and safety glasses. (And Im not even going to touch issues of human trafficking/slave labour out of nail salons one case of which occured 5 days ago two hours away from me) It should also be noted that formaldehyde can also be found in hair relaxers and hair dyes. [Found articles in Scientific American and NYT]

I also found on the FDAs website that many cosmetics include heavy metals like arsenic, mercury, and lead. (Usually accompainied by a picture of lipstick so I assume that is the product most likely to contain it, however campaign for safe cosmetics lists foundation as containing heavy metals, and The Guardian has an article about skin lighteners from Asia and Africa containing mercury.) The website stated that the amount of these heavy metals in cosmetics is "safe" if used as intended. (and I'm going to come back to the concept of "intended use" later because thats a can of worms too) However, when searching for info on heavy metal safety I found this quote in regards to metals in food:

"Certain metals, such as arsenic, lead and mercury, have no established health benefit, and have been shown to lead to illness, impairment, and in high doses, death. Understanding the risk that harmful metals pose in our food supply is complicated by the fact that no single food source accounts for most people’s exposure to metals in foods. People’s exposure comes from many different foods containing these metals. Combining all of the foods we eat, even low levels of harmful metals from individual food sources, can sometimes add up to a level of concern"

So like, which is it? Is it a "safe amount" or is no amount of metal safe? I understand that in the case of certain foods like fish some amount of mercury poisoning is always expected but fish is also something you feed yourself and nourish your body with while cosmetics are completely unecessary to your survival. The mercury problem in fish is also mitigated by health warnings when mercury levels are particularly high but cosmetics have no such warning. Another warning on the site indicated that children should ingest NO amount of lead AT ALL because it is particularly harmful for kids yet theres no effort to stop children from using lead-containing cosmetics. I worked next to a Five Below where I was shocked to find they sold Jeffree Star and Anastasia eyeshadow dupes for five dollars which amounts to fucking pocket change for a lot of kids and kids do buy that stuff. I also think its ironic the FDA would have anything to say regarding cosmetics because in the very same article about heavy metals in cosmetics the FDA says that they DO NOT REGULATE cosmetics beyond the color additives.

Mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, and brow tint often contain carbon black. This is a color additive that is an incomplete combustion of carbon-based products. It can cause lung disease, cancer, and organ system toxicity, and eye, nose, throat irritation. The effects are mainly studied in rats and those at biggest risk are industrial workers but why do other workers have to endure lung problems for something so unecessary? [Easily googleable, NIH, CDC, WHO Europe]

This next bit I only want to mention briefly because I didnt find any particularly reputable sources about it, but its a claim that cropped up repeatedly and I think its an interesting one. Parabens, estrogen, phthalates (again), and pesticides in cosmetics are apparently linked to endocrine disorders and hormone dysregulation. Im not entirely sure what is meant by this accusation. Endocrine disorders include female diseases like PCOS and possibly endometriosis. None of these diseases is very well studied and the female endocrine system itself is not well studied either. Im not saying "cosmetics cause PCOS" because we dont know if PCOS or these other endocrine/hormonal disorders are genetic or environmental or both (it appears that PCOS is largely genetic and Endometriosis is likely autoimmune related) AND we dont appear to know for sure that cosmetic ingredients cause endocrine disorder. But I include anyway for a number of reasons:

If you happen to struggle with hormonal problems you may want to know cosmetics is a potential environment factor.

These conditions are incredibly painful. It will be a battle getting your doctor to even acknowledge that pain for diagnosis. PCOS is linked to diabetes, and heart disease. [Thanks @mother-of-pearl ] There is no cure and the treatments are often throwing hormonal birth control at it and hoping for the best.

I dont anticipate the link between cosmetics and endocrine disorders being studied any time soon or any endocrine disorders studied at all because the medical/scientific field is sexist. I dont want women to suffer in the mean time.

Now again, take this with a grain of salt because I couldnt find scientific or news sources for it. Dont fucking come for me. Im not gonna respond to you. [Most reputable source was a paper from the library of medicine at the national institutes of health but it was behind a paywall and I dont have 39 dollars to be right on tumblrdotcom]

Avoiding these ingredients is not as simple as scanning the label for them. As many beautubers and the community are no doubt aware considering multiple scandals over veganism. Products advertised as vegan or cruelty free but contain non-vegan carmine or are sold in China which legally requires the products to be animal tested. Cosmetic companies will hide ingredients claiming they are "trade secrets" or they will be placed under "fragrance." Many ingredients will be known by six or seven different names and asking consumers to be aware of seven different names for multiple ingredients requires consumers to be aware of innumerable different, often complicated ingredient names. I shouldnt have to point out that's a ridiculous burden to place on women. The EU banned 1,300 hazardous ingredients that the US did not. Cosmetic companies rely on women being unwilling/unable to bring in a list of 1,300 ingredients- with multiple names- every time they pop in to the drug store, sephora, or wherever. Buying "natural" products will not help you either. Theres no established criteria for natural/organic in costmetics, the FDA doesnt test these products, and "natural"=/= safe anyway. Plenty of plants and minerals are poisonous. One good example is traditional kohl products which advertise their natural status but also naturally contain lead and reiterating that natural powders contain mica. US courts are rarely on the side of consumers either. I found an interesting lawsuit against St. Ives for their apricot scrub taken to court for their "dermatologist tested" label despite it causing breakouts and cuts to the skin. The courts ruled that this label was fine because it only indicated that the product was TESTED not APPROVED by dermatologists. However I think any rational consumer would look at this label and assume the tests concluded it was safe for use or else why put the label on there?

[Googlable XMONDO drama, googlable laws wrt china and eu, already stated about FDA, FDA website about Kohl. Googled St. Ives lawsuit.]

I want to return to the idea of "intended use." This is sort of a fucky concept a lot of companies have ways of getting around. My "last straw" with makeup had to do with a run-in I had with Anastasia over their "Riviera" eyeshadow palette. In this pallette they had two colors that were the real feature of the palette, an electric neon purple and a radioactive pink I mean every photo, every promotion has these two colors swirled together around the eye. Because again, its an eyeshadow palette. When I buy the eyeshadow palette of course there's a little insert warning in the package that says these two shades are not intended on the eye area. In an eyeshadow palette. Contacting their customer service they told me that these two shades were meant to be used as a blush. neon purple blush. Not only that, but their website and instagram featured NO models wearing the shades as blush while EVERY model one or more of the shades as eyeshadow. When asked about this discrepancy ABH stopped responding. What I find egregious about this is the amount of people who dont know, and then more staggeringly; dont care. The sephora clerks didnt know, the in store abh representative didnt know, their customers didnt know, and when I told them they would respond with "oh, [brand] did the same thing with their [shade]." Sure enough, when I demanded that store clerks open the packaging to look for warnings nearly every product had an "eyeshadow" that was not intended for use on the eyes. Relegating dark, red-toned teal to "contour" and neon grean to "highlighter" US-based cosmetic junkies will say that these pigments have been approved for use by the EU however I found absolutely NO evidence of that. I googled it a thousand ways but all I ever found were blog posts, reddit comments, and one quote from an apparently nonEuropean layman in an Insider article. I even changed my location to France on ABH's website and the Norvina palette still contains the same warnings (not to harp on ABH in particular. I just know which shades in particular are the problem there). The Insider article noted that brands who were selling pressed pigments declined to comment. If the pressed pigments were EU friendly, I would think companies would be clamouring to say so. It also still makes their market as eyeshadow colors illegal in the US. (If any Europeans would like to chime in I'd love that.) Another problem I find with cosmetics companies and their reps is the claim that the worst thing that could happen is eye irritation for those with sensitive eyes and staining. How could they possibly know? The FDA doesnt test, or approve these cosmetics in the eye area, so ostensibly no one should be using it that way.

The next one is a bit of a "duh" but I'm going to talk about it anyway. Counterfeit cosmetics are a booming market full of untold dangers. Untold primarily because these products could contain literally anything. Ive read about glue, arsenic, lead, feces, staph, and horse urine to name a few. The labels and ingredient list on these products are fake. Legitimate brands often unintentionally play into the counterfeit market. They create artificial scarcity by making less of the product than is actually needed for consumer demand to create an even higher demand. If consumers miss out often their only chance at getting the product is to turn to counterfeits. I found examples of women who had their lips superglued, lips "turned to goo" and burned to blistering, throat closures, women with stys, contact dermatitis, eye infections. I think we as a society turn a blind eye to this problem because we think "hey, if youre buying counterfeits for a discount and you get hurt you deserve it." We imagine idiots buying products for 4 dollars from ebay or perusing Canal street for FEИTY beauty. But these counterfeits can be really convincing. I myself received a gift of a huda palette that I only recognized something was weird about it because I'd swatched it at sephora about five times earlier that month. The person who bought it for me actually paid MORE than the usual cost for the palette because it was advertised as a newer, better edition. The websites can be disturbingly similar. For instance Kylie Jenner's legitimate website is KylieCosmetics.com but you can find fakes at kyliecosmeticsshop.co.uk. These fakes can buy ad space and be one of the first sites that populate when you google the products instead of typing the legitimate site into the address bar. Counterfeits can also be bought and sold through third parties on websites like ebay, wish, and amazon. (My gift actually came from Amazon.)

[Netflix doc "Broken" ep "Makeup Mayhem" Corroborated by personal experience and google]

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romanianwilkinson · 3 years

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MONSTER CAMP QUOTES STARTERS

A collection of sentence starters from the game Monster Camp. Feel free to change words and pronouns as desired. CONTENT WARNING(S) FOR: Monster Prom/Monster Camp spoilers, suggestive, cursing, crude content

“ I just have it here because [NAME] insisted that I offer it, as a marketing stunt. ”

“ And lastly, super-horny-type players no longer get a charm buff against tsundere types! ”

“ War machines don’t turn me on or anything! ”

“ I don’t wanna be weird, but do you mind if I climb inside of you and play around with your main turret? ”

“ A wine to DIE for, you say? Well, darling, don’t threaten me with a good time! ”

“ This one just says ‘ hmu with that reaper dick, daddy ’. ”

“ You on your phone, as always! Probably making blogposts on your Tik Tok page. ”

“ Yeah, you really don’t want to witness a repeat of the last time [NAME]’s diehard fans went without a selfie for fifteen minutes. My tailbone still hasn’t completely healed. ”

“ Now hold still, this will only hurt for a moment --- ”

“ Yay! You found a shenanigan! ”

“ My poems all have two or three emotions in them, AT LEAST. ”

“ CRYING IS OBVIOUSLY A COMPETITION TO SEE WHO CAN SQUEEZE THE MOST WATER OUT OF THEIR EYES! ”

“ No way, really? The way to WIN at poetry is by LOSING at life? ”

“ I dunno, maybe fall in love with someone who’s married and develop an opioid addiction? ”

“ HELL YEAH, SPEEDRUN! ”

“ It’s morbid, but... kind of romantic? ”

“ GASP! Google+? Are you kidding me? The psychopaths behind that global tragedy are here?! ”

“ Prison has changed me, [NAME]. Would you like to trade me some cigarettes in exchange for my fundamental dignity? ”

“ Undermining the laws of reality, subverting life and death, that’s the kind of stuff my followers expect. But CHEATING? No way. ”

“ Though we are imprisoned in chalk jail, we are free in our hearts. But our hearts are also imprisoned in chalk jail. ”

“ Um, no, I am NOT groveling. I am posing a dignified query to [NAME] that just so happens to be performed on my hands and knees. ”

“ I didn’t know you condoned playing the friend card to get free labor, [NAME]. ”

“ Ah, but saving the world doesn’t put avocado toast on the table. We indie seancers and necromancers need to pay our rent too, you know. ”

“ And as you know, I am illustriously Internet-famous, so if you could shower me with adoration and give me the pizza that would be fabulous. ”

“ Do you wanna fuck the pizza or not? ”

“ Are you ready to go swimming? I must admit, darling, I’ve always wondered what you would look like while... wet.”

“ Did you turn this date into an orgy without consulting me? ”

“ Gosh, I love it when you insult me! Please do it more! ”

“ Now who wants to make a baby? ”

“ What if she puts a curse on me that makes me magically forget the location of the clitoris?! ”

“ Hey, don’t knock wacky decisions that endanger us all! That’s how I always manage to stay a step ahead of my nemeses! ”

“ Oh gods, I’ve killed so many monsters, just for being monsters. This is making me question my entire moral foundation. I NEED MORE THERAPY. ”

“ I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: fish give better pedicures than people! ”

“ You’re not tricking me into parenting a stupid egg. I’ve never fucked even ONE chicken! The egg is not my son! ”

“ You came to visit me at camp, Daddy! ”

“ Don’t be ridiculous, I know your brand of horny, [NAME], and this ain’t it. ”

“ I thought we both agreed to be nothing but vague and haughtily aloof about our past dalliances. ”

“ Point EAST, compass! EAAAAAAAAST! You dumb fuckboot!!!! POINT! EAST! ”

“ One time I was told a soul’s worst fear was bugs and I inadvertantly sent The Beatles. It happens to the best of us... And the worst of us. ”

“ SOMEDAY I SHALL DEFEAT YOUR FIVE STRANGE FEET! ”

“ Why do you keep suppressing your monster half? Embrace your true nature! ”

“ Wow. I didn't think this was possible, but I guess I was... wrong? About social media? Oh dear God, is this how grandparents feel?!?! Am I a GRANDPARENT?! ”

“ I don’t know! I was relying on my friends to cover up my bold and idiotic statement! ”

“ ... I ate the oars. ”

“ PSYCHE. The ocean can eat my ass. ”

“ So pucker up, [NAME]! I'm about to declare mouth war on your FACE! ”

“ YOU FOOLISHLY FOOLISH FOOL! You're showing our inexperience! YOUR HONOR, THE ENTIRE LEGAL TEAM PLEADS THE FIFTH! ”

“ That's right. I'm talking about a classic Transylvania Hot Tub, a Seth Brundle, and a REVERSE Reverse Romanian Wilkinson. ”

“ Sorry, I was in your ribcage seeing if I could use it to cut strips of crepe paper into confetti and then I got lost in your kidneys. ”

“ There's nothing sexier than a doomed romance between a dating sim player and a hot fictional character. ”

“ That's right! I secretly replaced one of you with a bear while no one was looking, to teach you a valuable lesson about the art of disguise! ”

“ Enchant my armor. I’m going into the lake. ”

“ For VIOLENCE REASONS! ”

“ This stupid lake monster called me short the other day, but I was too low level to crush him like he deserved. ”

“ That dumb wet dinkhole won't know what hit him! But it will be me! I will hit him! ”

“ No, YOU'RE a fuckshark! Also, what does that even mean?! ”

“ You seriously didn't notice the enormous needles those interns jabbed into your veins as soon as [NAME] got here? “

“ It all makes sense! The Camp Dome is just an elaborate ploy to distract us from the giant mouth that eats campers! “

“ This is the BEST show I've ever seen in my life, which is now at an end! “

“ Am I high, or did he just tell us EXACTLY how to foil his evil scheme? “

“ What, like a few severed heads and visions of my grandpa screaming in horrendous pain are gonna freak me out? Where I'm from, you can buy that stuff at IKEA. “

“ ERROR: Due to the sixth mass extinction, the slaying of leprechauns is inadvisable. “

“ Then why do I have half-finished scarves, decoupage, pot-holders, friendship bracelets, and a taxidermied rabbit in my skeleton? “

“ The wang elemental. ”

“ I also have an uncle who works at Nintendo as a copy machine! “

“ What flavor of ice cream AM I?! Now I gotta know. HA! You know what I should be? 'Pistachio.' Because my outside is HARD, but I'm full of NUT. “

“ I mean, life is a bit like... this sandwich! No, stay with me, I'm going somewhere good with this. “

“ A survival situation without any sexy fun time isn't worth surviving in the first place. “

“ Rut the RUCK?! ”

“ The ' ambulance of the heart ' is just a regular ambulance! Ambulances treat all organs! ”

“ Yeah, that's why I made sure that my so-called ' emotional armor ' was also ' actual armor '. “

“ And being yourself is the key to living your dreams, which is the key to self actualization, which is the key to being really good at sex! “

“ So hot I'd buy that even without free shipping. 10/10, call me some time. “

“ Hi, quick question: does it count as kidnapping if I'm abducting you so you can help me do a thing you already agreed to help with? “

“ I could be wrong, but are you just upset because you DON'T have a skeleton that's inside your body? “

“ I'm gonna get SO FUCKING RELAXED MY HEAD WILL EXPLODE! “

“ Whoah, whoa, hold up. You're fucking my grandma? “

“ No, [NAME], that is a popcorn bag full of more dynamite. Put it down. “

“ I hear that at least 70% of people on Patreon aren't murderers! “

“ If you want cash, just rob banks like the rest of us! “

“ Did it work? Do you feel any less horny? ”

“ FUCK YEAH, LET'S PUNCH THAT MOUTH IN ITS MOUTH! “

“ Yes... incidentally, we are no longer allowed to enter Italy. “

“ Is anyone else turned on right now? ”

“ Yes! Yes! I know what you're feeling! I suddenly see how marrying a corpse isn't okay! “

“ JUST LET ME IMPROVE YOUR SELF ESTEEM, MORTAL! “

“ Look, choose whatever you want, but I'm not responsible for whatever you put in your mouth. ”

#rp starters #rp sentence starters #roleplay meme #roleplay starters #rp meme #ask meme #rp ask meme #monster prom #monster camp #monster prom rp #monster prom roleplay #monster camp rp #monster camp roleplay #mine

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felassan · 3 years

Text

Jon Renish (Foundation Technical Director @ BioWare, working on DA4) recently did a Twitch stream where he played through some DAO. Although he works on DA, this is his first time playing through DAO. He’s playing through it looking at random details from a dev perspective as he’s currently working on DA4 and therefore wants to know more about the previous games.

On the stream he mentioned some tidbits on the development of DA4. There were also some insights and anecdotes about the development of DAO and similar. It’s a 3 hour stream so I collected them here in case that’s of use to anyone (for example not everyone can watch streams which don’t have subtitles/captions). The stream is a fun/interesting watch though, so if you’re curious or able to watch I recc doing so. 😊 The rest of this post is under a cut for length.

Please note that there’s some paraphrasing on my part, this is not a transcript. There are also some additions from another dev who featured on the stream to give some commentary. The stream also contains more snippets that at times I couldn’t make out (I tried my best!).

(There is a mention of Cullen’s VA in the text below.)

DA4

Jon said he can talk about things about DA4 that aren’t “consumer-facing”, but he can’t say anything about the game that would be consumer-facing but which isn’t already publicly available. There are several reasons for this. One, that’s not his job, there are people whose job this is and they let each other do their respective roles. Two, BW are a publicly-traded company, so if he said something that could affect that that would be insider trading. Three, they’re not done making DA4 yet, so if he said that they have added [x] to the game and people got all excited about that or pre-ordered on that basis, but [x] ended up being cut, people would be like ‘BioWare lied to us’, when it’s just that things changed during the course of development, as is often the case

He’s glad that fans are excited for the game but notes that fan expectations are always double-edged. It can be really tough as some people started ‘playing’ the game in their heads as soon as they heard of it. That’s fine, he loves that, but he hopes that peoples’ expectations don’t turn into requirements. Clearly BW have alluded to certain characters, like Solas, being in the game, but some fans say things like “If [say] Morrigan isn’t in the game, then, rahhh!” Y’know, there’s a lot of talk about how certain characters have to be in the game, and yeah.

On characters which are quantum (i.e. characters which can die or which can have similar end-states as death in previous games): their being quantum makes it really hard for the devs to work with those characters in subsequent games. The devs naturally aren’t going to put as much effort into characters which could have died previously. A character can have had an amazing appearance throughout/role in a previous game, but if there is a risk of something happening to them and of them being removed [effectively] from the plot, it just doesn’t make sense to have them as a major character in a subsequent game. If a character can, say, sacrifice themselves in some glorious ending, the devs have to make sure that if they use them again, in worldstates where the character didn’t do that, the character is kind of ‘muted’, as the devs don’t want to disrespect the players who made a different choice

A comment in chat expressed a wish for Shale in DA4. Jon’s response is that he has no idea on that front

Bugs don’t come out of crunch, they come out of development in general. Crunch does impact on the quality of a game though. In recent years BW are always really trying to reduce crunch, they’re currently working really hard to bring it down. The best way of doing that is by controlling scope. As creatives it’s tough to balance wanting to make great stuff and be industry-leading with the desire to constantly do extra passes over things they’ve created like the audio, art etc. Their biggest enemy is time, other ways of reducing crunch or time spent in general include iterating tools to make often-repeated processes as time-efficient as possible

I think the following was an observation on the industry in general as opposed to a BW-specific/-exclusive comment: he thinks that as a result of this sort of thing [working to reduce crunch], a lot of games are going to have to be smaller and a lot more focused in scope i.e. the devs will have to focus on hitting the key selling points of that particular game/series as hard as they can, and cut down on branching out sideways/wide on a bunch of random other stuff

Jon doesn’t personally engage in character creators in games, but he knows that for some players that expression is worth a lot of time and focus. BW want to be industry-leading in this kind of stuff as it’s something which is interesting/key/integral to their games

In a way BW have made their own nest of problems what with every DA game being so different to the previous one. Still, he notes that each game has a staunch fanbase that says that their particular favorite game is the best one in the series

He doesn’t want people who think that DA4 isn’t what they want to buy it and be upset - there are so many other great games out there! BW are going to make the game they’re going to make - if some people like it, that’s great, and if some people don’t, that’s cool. Sometimes waiting until reviews are out and/or really seeing beforehand if a game is something that you want [has things/features in it that you want] prior to getting it - as opposed to jumping right in or pre-ordering - is a good idea. Fans don’t always know what they want, but they do know what they like - these are 2 different things

He hopes that whatever they ship for DA4, people go “I enjoyed this experience”, and that then, if there’s additional content for it down the road, people can decide, “do I want this further content?”

On hair: BW are using the new hair technology in the latest version of the Frostbite engine, so they’ll see what they can do! This was said in response to a comment about the hair in the latest FIFA games (as EA make FIFA)

A comment in chat asked about a flying mechanic (griffons). Jon’s response is that flying is such a heavy gameplay mechanic that you can’t put it in a game without everything in the game being built about it (see Anthem)

Relating to the above comment, in DA4 mounted combat would be cool but then they’d have to make the game ‘around’ mounted combat and make the mounted combat feature meaningful

On the underwater concept art: it should not be interpreted as a promise of gameplay. BW have amazing artists who sit down for a couple weeks while they’re in early production and just draw loads and loads of all kinds of stuff. Concept art is like a moodboard or Pinterest board. Elsewhere in the stream he advised, take all the concept art together like a mosaic and ask, ‘what is the overall theme[s] here?’, and to zoom out from individual details. [This stuff echoes PW’s word on concept art]

BW don’t generally write things or the choices as bleak as the choices in DAO were anymore. This is a conscious choice on their part, they want their game to be fun [note: this was said when the side quest in Orzammar where the Warden has the option of convincing a dwarven mother to abandon her young baby to die was being played through. It seems to refer to intensively grimdark choices/beats of this kind]

I think this was more of a general comment on games: SSDs (solid state drives) mean that players will see shorter elevator rides (Mass Effect - was this a reference to the remaster?) and fewer switchback corridors (those are actually loading zones). Generally, these are going to change mechanically the time it takes to do stuff in games

The devs have lots of features on their backlog that they’d like to offer players but each will ofc involve implementation and subsequent maintenance, and each one that is chosen to add is being chosen over something else. And sometimes, it’s hard for them to tell if [x] feature or [y] feature would be better to add to the game

They’re about to work on a giant feature (a pure tooling feature, something that isn’t consumer-facing) that is probably going to take ~2 staff years of effort [I think “staff effort” includes multiple staff working concurrently, so 2 years of staff effort doesn’t = 2 years of time chronologically] to get done in the next few months. They’re investing all this effort across the people working on it because they don’t want their artists and designers etc to have to deal with the problem that it’s going to solve anymore. I’m not sure what this feature is but elsewhere in the stream they referred to tooling and automation and gave the example of, the better your tooling is, the fewer times you have to manually set the camera for a human vs elf vs dwarf position, for dynamically-generated [cinematic?] content and for the first pass to be automated (if this is the case, less time is spent/wasted on redoing it and manually touching it up) [see last bullet point in this section]

He doesn’t know how big DA4 is going to be but said “let’s ballpark and say like most games it’ll be somewhere between 70 and 100 GB”

If we kept our Wardens as the PC throughout all 3 games, at the end they would be so powerful that it’d be a bit like “Let’s just do [thing], I’ve killed gods before, whatever”. He thinks it’s good that they have fresh characters each time in DA in order to reset that power level. Some people want more Commander Shepard in the next Mass Effect and he feels like, ‘what else could you possibly want / what else could that character possibly do after 3 games?’

When asked how much freedom he/they have now to focus on next gen, he said that there’s actually almost no difference on that front. The problems never change. They now have better renderers, better ray-tracing, better graphics cards etc, but they have always made DA games for high- and low-spec PCs, so it’s actually about gameplay systems. The freedom isn’t power-based and them getting access to more cores and more RAM generally isn’t going to change how the games are played. The games still have to be made for hard drives on PC. Dev creativity matters more than power here. The challenge of building a BW game is more about/from managing loads of different plotstates, loads of different art pieces, etc

On the title situation (two): names are the last thing they worry about because names have to go through legal before being approved. Every name, including character names, has to be checked in case it’s a famous person, or associated with something bad, or offensive in a different language due to localization etc

They don’t do face scans of people with big beards

There was also a bit about changes/developments to/in the cinematic design process and associated tooling [?] but I found it too hard to follow sorry >< This bit of commentary begins at timestamp ~ 1:52:45 and continues til ~ 2:00:05 [keep listening through the bit where they pause for a cutscene]

General BW

There’s currently ~350 staff in Edmonton, ~200 in Austin and more elsewhere

He notes that DA games sell pretty well, but relative to EA games in general, they’re a drop in the bucket compared to FIFA

DAI

5% of players of DAI never created a character [Q: does this refer to people who just used the default appearances/presets with no editing, or people who only played multiplayer?]

The mounts don’t actually go faster than running, this is an illusion

I think they said it has 55,000 lines of dialogue. [I’m pretty sure I remember devs elsewhere saying it has 80,000 lines of dialogue]

One of the companions had to have their name changed during development because of legal/translation reasons. It sounds like the original name sounded too close to something offensive

DA2

Back when DA2 was internally code-named “Nug Storm”: this was at the beginning when it was pitched to the team on a set of slides. The image on the slide for that pitch had devil horns, a metal hand and no flesh, it was just made out of fire and flames

DAO

The engine DAO is made on is the third engine that they tried for it during development. [David Gaider has gone into the DAO engine stuff some on Summerfall’s series of DAO playthrough streams]

The cracks on the cracked eluvian asset are modelled after the crack on the Tardis in Doctor Who from around that time, as at the time some devs had been talking about Doctor Who a lot. A dev actually added this factoid to DAO’s entry on TV Tropes but someone else (evidently not a DA dev) came by and deleted it saying that it was too much of a stretch x)

Before the game had its name there was an HTML script that randomly generated possible titles for consideration, it adds verbs and nouns together e.g. “Grim Dark”. One of the craziest possibilities that it once generated that the devs always remember is "Bone Wind”

One of the portraits that’s used for decoration around the world in-game (it’s of a bearded human man) is actually of a specific BW staff member

He played through Stone Prisoner, where Wilhelm’s son Matthias gives exposition in the cellar. Matthias is voiced by GE and this had been pointed out to Jon earlier on. Jon: “I don’t think that character’s voice acting was super strong there”

On the in-game area towards the end of Stone Prisoner: Outdoor areas in games are large and one of the things needed for them is streaming, so different chunks can be ‘streamed in’. There’s a tower [?], and technically the top of the tower was made an outdoor level so that sky stuff could be there, though it didn’t really need to be. The person that made it an outdoor level chose the very smallest chunk size for the terrain mesh, which determines how fine of a streaming they do. So when playing, every time you moved like 4 meters, the game would stream out 50-100 chunks behind you and the same in front of you (this is the bubble around the player of what actually exists). Because it was so small, it was constantly thrashing the CPU and disc to do all the loading. The devs were like “this isn’t going to work”, but they barely had any time. The solution: they made a new level that was outdoor and copied all the sunlight and other settings, but with the largest chunk size. They copy-pasted the entire level from one to the other. The problem with that many chunks then is that there was a giant expanse of flat terrain sticking out of the middle of the tower. They didn’t know if the story was going to involve shots of the outside of the tower for this sequence or not, so they took the terrain deformation tool and bundled all the terrain vertices at the bottom of the tower in a giant clump. So to this day there’s a mess of vertices and twisted terrain at the bottom of the final level that probably no-one has ever seen [not sure though if this anecdote is in reference to a place in that DLC or somewhere elsewhere in the game?]

There were also some tidbits on Anthem, however I didn’t note them down (sorry).

If you think I misheard or misunderstood anything from this stream please let me know and I will edit/fix it. :)

(Thankyou to some of my friends who explained a tech detail from this to me.)

[source] <-- current rewatch link

#dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #dragon age #bioware #video games #greg ellis mention #morrigan #queen of my heart #solas #mass effect #anthem #next mass effect #i love these factoids and insights into game dev it's so interesting and fun #i actually started this post yesterday but 2 hours in I was so sleepy (it was mad late) so I called it a night

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anncanta · 2 years

Text

Parzival. Chapter 2

Fandom: Dracula (2020)

Characters: Count Dracula, Agatha Van Helsing, Bloxham

Relationship: Dracula/Agatha Van Helsing

Rating: Mature

@alma37 @hopipollahorror @ravenathantum @flutteringphalanges @ladyhaley28 @dragatha

Chapter 1 is here.

Read on AO3

Or read below

Chapter 2. The raven

‘I didn’t know Jonathan much, but I’m sure he would never approve of what is happening here.’ Agatha reached for a cup of tea and took a long sip.

‘In this world, terrible things are often done in memory or in the name of those who would never approve of this,’ said Dracula. ‘Deal with it, Agatha.’ He stretched. ‘By the way, I figured out the surveillance cameras.’

Agatha nodded absently. Her thoughts slipped away, now circling around one and the same, jumping from one to another. Too many strange things. Too many unclear. Too many events, she thought.

Putting her cup down, Agatha shivered. It was pretty cool in her new ‘chambers’, as Dracula called them. ‘The center has enough money for donors and mercenaries, but not enough money to establish a heating system,’ Dracula chuckled when she complained about this to him. In fairness, Agatha should admit, however, that she had no need for anything else.

The rooms in which she was accommodated were comfortable and spacious, she was brought several changes of clothes, modern films, and books – paper, ordinary books: endless electronic scrolls in thin tablets annoyed her. Visitors were not allowed to Agatha – and there was no one to come. Only the doctor communicated with her, twice a week after lunch he came to examine her and ask how she was feeling, Bloxham, who spoke about the center and its research, – and Dracula.

About two months have passed since their first meeting in the center. On that day, Agatha was sure that she was finished. He somehow reached an agreement with the management of the foundation and is going to complete the conversion process. Agatha was not interested in what he promised them. Maybe he controlled them all. On Demeter he acted, convincing and seducing, but not that he was particularly successful. He had to take into account the mistakes. If the staff of the center is nothing more than his obedient servants...

Returning in her memory to what happened next, Agatha felt awkwardness begin to stir inside.

‘You once again amazed me,’ Dracula reassured her after. ‘To launch a metal chair at the enemy and threaten to pierce your throat with a blunt fork…’ He threw up his hands in silent admiration, smiling at the desperately reddened Agatha.

Her memories of what had happened were sketchy – Bloxham's frightened screams, the crashing of the door, black guards filling the room, and Dracula stepping forward and instantly separating them all from her.

‘You will be fine, Agatha. Nobody will touch you here,’ he said, wrapping his arms around her and looking her straight in the eyes. ‘Nobody, including me. I promise. Do you hear me?’

Agatha nodded and passed out.

Their next meeting took place in her new rooms.

‘How can I trust you?’ was the first thing she asked him, as soon as Dracula crossed the threshold. He did not answer, walked through the semblance of a hall into a large living room, and silently sat down on the sofa.

‘No way,’ he said, looking at Agatha who followed him and stopped at the sofa. ‘So let's get down to business. Why do you think you can believe them?’

After a moment's hesitation, Agatha sat down next to him.

‘I can't,’ she agreed. ‘Now,’ she wanted to add, but she said nothing. ‘However, they at least did not try to drink my blood.’

Dracula laughed, but his laugh was unusually sad.

‘That's right,’ he said. ‘I suppose they have more ambitious plans for you.’

In the next twenty minutes, Agatha learned that Mina Murray, whom she had saved from death, and Agatha's own brother, who had previously traded silk and spices in Amsterdam, set up the Jonathan Harker Foundation in 1898. For the first few years, the only purpose and content of the organization's work was the search for Dracula and creatures like him.

‘We must give them their due – they tracked the accounts and money, learned everything there was to know about the funds of Mr. Balaur and his shell companies. They found out what his plans were, and eventually went to Demeter. After that, the investigation slowed down,’ said Dracula. ‘Months passed, turning into years, the foundation required cash injections, effort and time, and as a result, your brother, leaving to manage his part of the assets of his eldest son, went to America. A year later, Mina died of severe influenza. The foundation remained in the hands of the Van Helsings – and they experienced enough financial difficulties and, as far as I understood, had little interest in vampires. The grandfather of your recently deceased grandniece Zoe Van Helsing, who was the last member of the family – the director of the foundation, Arnold Van Helsing, decided to turn it into a medical center. Of course, with some ‘peculiarities’ – otherwise, according to Mina's will, the Helsings lost their right of ownership. The foundation performed well during several large epidemics, but in general, didn't do any great scientific discoveries and existed on the basis of separate large donations. Until recently.’

Dracula fell silent. Agatha rubbed her forehead thoughtfully.

‘Did you learn all this from Bloxham?’ She asked doubtfully.

‘Of course not. From my lawyer Francis Renfield,’ Dracula replied.

‘You have a lawyer,’ Agatha said slowly.

‘Since one thousand eight hundred and ninety-six. Do not be distracted. Two weeks ago, he started a lawsuit to get us out of here. But that will take time. So I –’

‘To get us out?’

‘Agatha, focus,’ said Dracula. He looked very serious. ‘If you want to know my opinion, it’s completely pointless to act by legal means in the case of organizations like the Harker Foundation, but it’s fine as a distraction. In addition, lawyers have connections and access to secret databases. Information is worth more than gold in this century.’ He shook his head.

Now Agatha was listening intently.

‘Renfield was able to confirm,’ continued Dracula, ‘what I suspected without him as soon as I was here.’ He frowned, seeing that Agatha did not understand. ‘Mercenaries. You were led through corridors and rooms, you saw them,’ he said impatiently. ‘Large men in military uniform, with weapons. And they didn't show up here yesterday,’ he added, anticipating her objection. ‘Not because they need to guard us. Frank got out the documents – the center has been using the services of military units since two thousand and eighteenth, I saw contracts and bills.

Agatha was silent – obviously, he hadn't finished.

‘Agatha, I don’t need bills to recognize the mercenaries,’ Dracula said. ‘I am a four hundred year warlord. I can determine immediately what they can do, how they attack, and how to neutralize them. This is not the point. The point is that people who hire private armies are extremely rarely interested in medicine – and even vampires.’

‘What does it mean?’ Agatha whispered.

Dracula shrugged.

‘That someone is behind the renewed Harker's foundation. Someone powerful and with almost unlimited financial resources. Whose support is not advertised – which is possible for two reasons: either this person is outside the law, or does not want to reveal him- or herself.’

‘Or both,’ Agatha said, leaning forward and biting her lip with impatience. ‘But how do we know?’

Dracula smiled, and she immediately blushed: entirely absorbed in the story he told, she completely forgot about her own distrust of him. Leaning back on the couch, she gave Dracula a quick glance.

‘With blood,’ Dracula replied.

Agatha went cold.

‘You will not –’

‘I don’t need it,’ he snapped. ‘Agatha, please, temper your rescue habits for a while,’ he added irritably. ‘Have you seen Bloxham's hand?’

So Agatha learned that during the operation to remove the box with her and Dracula from under the water, Kate Bloxham lost her finger, and with it – the access codes to all the electronic systems of the center.

‘I didn’t disable the security cameras in your rooms and mine – that would be suspicious,’ Dracula said. ‘When I have a free minute, I will reconfigure them so that they transmit the picture we need to the security base. So far I got Bloxham to turn off the sound in cameras. I insisted that if we were not listened to, I would be able to create a more trusting relationship with you and convince you to cooperate,’ he smiled broadly.

They looked at each other in silence for a few moments.

‘Why do they need me?’ finally asked Agatha, already knowing the answer.

‘They need you for the same thing they need me for,’ said Dracula. ‘They want to study the transformation process – and repeat it, probably. Bloxham – like everyone else with whom I had to communicate in the center – was quite kind to me from the very beginning. She emphasizes in every possible way that they are interested in cooperation – I think, they believe that I know the secret of full conversion. Therefore, they try to manipulate me, hoping that I, in turn, will manipulate you for them, and in the end, I will make you like me. Should I list why it might be needed?’

Agatha just shook her head mutely.

‘Is that why you promised not to touch me?’ she got up and went to the table.

‘No, not only because of that,’ was heard behind her. ‘Agatha,’ he called softly after a second. ‘Agatha, look at me.’

She turned around.

Dracula stood opposite her, staring intently and a little uneasily.

‘I had time to think about what happened on the Demeter,’ he said after a pause. ‘In the beginning, I didn't have much to do,’ he smiled shortly. ‘They kept me in a room similar to the one where they kept you, didn’t really explain anything, and didn’t say what happened to you. I lay on the bed, looked at the ceiling, and remembered.’ He chuckled. ‘Oddly enough, not you, but Jonathan. I was thinking about what would have been if he had agreed to go with me.’

In the silence that followed, Agatha heard popcorn crunching from afar. Damn security chief, she thought.

‘I thought about what Jonathan would say if, like you, he found himself... halfway there,’ Dracula continued. ‘Amphibians are rare – in four hundred years I have seen only three of them. There is no easy way out of this situation,’ he said. ‘You can complete the process and keep your sanity, guaranteed to turn into a vampire. You can kill yourself and most likely wake up undead. So, most likely, it would have come to the same thing as it ended in the monastery.’

Agatha was silent.

‘I'm tired of being alone, Agatha,’ Dracula said, bowing his head. ‘But I'm also tired of being hated and cursed. It’s weary over hundreds of years, believe it or not.’ She smiled. ‘Therefore, I give you my word that I will not convert you.’ He held out his hand. ‘Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ Agatha said carefully, taking his big hand. She tried not to think about how long she would be able to live as an amphibian and what this would lead to. Now they had more urgent matters.

‘When can you find out who finances the foundation?’ She asked.

***

A few days after Dracula told Agatha about his suspicions about the source of funds for the center, she met Renfield. During a short Skype session, the somewhat shabby-looking, but quite confident lawyer announced to Dracula that the hearing in the case against the Harker Foundation would take place in three months, and the chances of winning were very high. Agatha doubted that Dracula would wait so long, and she herself was not ready to just sit back. She could not escape the glances that Bloxham, who still regularly appeared in her rooms, was throwing at her, and Agatha guessed from the ever-increasing impatience hanging in the air that whoever was behind all this did not like to wait either.

‘He hurries them, Dracula,’ when they once again sat in her rooms, Agatha with a paper book and a cup of tea, and Dracula – with a package of documents from Renfield and the archives of the foundation's library on a tablet, she said. ‘He needs results. I think at first they hoped,’ Agatha swallowed, ‘that everything would be resolved by itself. That yours… yours… well, whatever it is in my blood will be enough for me to become a vampire without your participation. So that I would just… I don’t know, just ripe.’

‘Like a butterfly in a cocoon?’ Dracula raised an eyebrow. ‘I always knew that you were a romantic at heart.’

‘Stop it,’ Agatha said angrily. ‘You know what I mean. However, time passes,’ she continued, ‘and I remain a human. In any case, today I am no closer to the essence of a vampire than I was two weeks ago.’

Dracula nodded, flipping through the files on the tablet screen.

‘So far, they haven’t put pressure on me,’ he said absently. ‘But they will probably start soon.’

Agatha took a sip of her tea. There was one thought that haunted her for a long time.

‘Who at this time may need to create with great difficulty and risk something that you can just buy?’ She said unexpectedly.

‘What do you mean?’ Dracula distracted from the close-fitting text on the tablet.

‘I mean,’ Agatha hesitated. ‘Well, imagine. You need a strong army – invincible, ideally. An army of powerful fighters obedient to you.’

‘Music for my ears,’ Dracula grinned.

Agatha shot him a displeased look.

‘Why waste time and effort, huge money – not only on the process itself, but also on bribery, and possibly on the elimination of unnecessary witnesses, if it is enough to collect several hundred formations similar to those that are already working here?’

Dracula tilted his head.

‘It makes sense,’ he said slowly.

‘So,’ Agatha continued, inspired by his answer, ‘it's not about strength and power. And not about quantity. The point is different.’

Turning away from her, Dracula gazed silently into space for a while.

‘I already thought about it. War – fair enough – has a reputation as a seizure wench, but military thought is primarily rationality. The winner is not the one with the larger army. The one who is smarter wins.’

Agatha remembered how she had read in some old book about Dracula's campaign with three or four loyal warriors to the Turkish camp.

‘They have machines now, Dracula. Big, complex machines,’ Agatha said. ‘Fighting is easier now than in the days of Vlad Tepes.’

Dracula shuddered.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said that fighting is easier now –’

‘No, before that. You mentioned the name of Vlad Tepes.’

Agatha shrugged.

‘Isn't that your nickname? That is what the Hungarians called you.’

‘Exactly. Hungarians. Or rather, no, not really.’ Dracula again lowered his eyes to the tablet and began to quickly turn the pages. ‘And I kept thinking, what am I missing... In order to want the army that you described, you need to be neither a military man nor a strategist,’ looking through documents and folders, he said, ‘this is not an effective army. In battle, it would be no better than the trained professional landsknechts – whatever they are called now. Such an army would be wanted only by –’

‘The crazy one,’ Agatha finished for him, and then Dracula stopped rummaging through his tablet and began to read.

After a couple of minutes, he leaned back on the couch and licked his lips.

‘This is it. I found it.’

‘What did you find?’ Agatha leaned over to him. Dracula looked alarmed and somehow feverishly agitated.

Without answering, he pointed to the screen.

‘What is there?’ Agatha asked cautiously.

‘Our answers.’

Agatha waited patiently.

Dracula turned to her.

‘Agatha, this is Matthias Hunyadi's archive.’

‘Hungarian king?’

He nodded.

‘Did Renfield send it to you? Or is it kept in the center's library? Why do they need Hunyadi's archive?’ Agatha was surprised. ‘Was he involved…’ She frowned. ‘He lived for three hundred years before the foundation was created.’

‘Four hundred,’ Dracula said. ‘He is my contemporary. You must remember him – the chronicles mention him very often. He is now a national hero.’

‘You, too, are now a national hero.’

Dracula waved it off.

‘Hunyadi was a cunning politician and a very successful traitor. His nickname, the Raven,’ he pointed to the screen, ‘more than suited him.’ Dracula leaned back on the sofa, squinting. ‘But Matthias was never interested in vampires or the supernatural in general. I don't think he believed in anything other than his wallet. In large alterations, he was always covered by others. In his style, it was to hide behind the cassock of the Pope or ask for help from…’ Frozen in mid-sentence, Dracula turned so pale that his face became milky white against the background of a gray wall. Without looking at the alarmed Agatha, he straightened and began to leaf through the document on the screen.

‘Dracula, what's going on?’ Agatha asked. ‘What did you find?’ Without knowing why she suddenly lowered her voice. ‘To whom could Hunyadi go?’

‘I'm not sure,’ Dracula replied evenly. He turned to Agatha and looked at her. ‘But if this is who I think, then may your God help us all.’

#dracula bbc #bbc dracula #count dracula #agatha van helsing #dragatha #fanfic

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i-make-fun-of-spn-characters · 3 years

Note

i actually did think you didn't like sam and cas for the longest time, but it's more than your bias for dean is evident. it took awhile to see through that and understand you are coming at sam and cas out of love and in a fun way and just happen to like dean more. there are a lot of other blogs that make digs at characters (esp sam and cas) in a NOT fun way, but pretend they "love all of TFW" and that's on me for lumping you in with them.

You know Anon, back when I used to post absolutely NOTHING except for memes, and also had a Sam banner and icon, someone asked me who my favorite character was, and I made it a poll because I was curious how good of a job I was doing keeping my content even. Lo and behold—they chose in order by vote percentage:

Sam

Cas

Dean

Jack

Then as the poll has stayed up ever since, I think Dean and Cas have traded places in the voting (but by now everyone knows Dean is my favorite). But a very large percentage of people did not know Dean was my favorite starting out. I was surprised, because I do indeed love Dean very VERY much. It isn't that I don't like Sam and Cas—but to me, Dean is possibly one of the greatest characters of all time. I could not possibly put into words how much I enjoy his character and all of the reasons why he's touched my heart. There is just no one out there quite like him in my mind. I think my bias for Dean has come through more in recent times—especially since the finale, because I miss him very much and his shitty death gutted (DON'T) me.

I think watching the show, when you look at the story only through one characters' lens, it's very easy to resent the others for not being perfect friends/family/brothers. I have even seen someone voice the sentiment before, "To some degree, to love Sam is to hate Dean, and to hate Dean is to love Sam" (paraphrasing). The thing is, when you genuinely look at your favorite (whether that's Dean or Sam or Cas) and look at their motivations and feelings and actions, it's clear that they love each other very much. That's an unavoidable fact in my mind. Both the best and worst things they've done have been at least partially motivated by the love they have for one another. I cannot, ultimately, dislike Sam or Cas knowing how much Dean loves them. To hate them would be to hate a part of Dean that is innate to who he is—his love for his family—and the choices and sacrifices he has made due to that love. It would be to say that there is something broken inside him that makes him unable to make the right choices about who should and should not be in his life. It would be to say that the foundation of the show, at the center of which is Dean's heart and how people around him are pulled inside of its orbit, is something tainted and unworthy.

It would also be to say that Dean's mistakes are okay and theirs are not, because you will find countless parallel events and threads tying their different actions together in ways that are different but also are often very much the same, if you get their motivations.

I think, for every stan out there of any main character... it would be a good idea to watch through the show trying to see it through a lens besides that of your favorite. I did this with Sam, and I am currently doing a rewatch where one of the goals is to focus on Cas's point of view more. Nothing can give you greater compassion and understanding than trying to step inside someone else's shoes, and having done this is one of the primary reasons I can't bring myself to follow many SPN accounts I have come across on Tumblr, because resentment runs rampant in many places, over characters or ships, and I don't care for that negativity. It's also the primary reason I started this blog to begin with. I wanted to carve out a positive space, where I didn't completely refuse to engage with the characters flaws (god knows fandom won't shut up about them anyway), but a place where I pointed out their flaws only to say those flaws are okay, don't make any one of them more unworthy of love than any of the others. Those flaws (at least—the ones I agree exist... there's a lot of flaws attributed to Sam, Dean, and Cas that I don't agree with at all) are what makes them human (err... or angel, respectively). I am not interested in Mary Sues (and I am definitely not interested in fans who sand down characters into Mary Sues to escape any semblance of their favorite being "problematic"). Just show me why they make the choices they do, even when those choices are broken, and I'm compassionate and I'm fascinated. I dare anyone to do better than the characters did with the cards they were dealt—with the lives they lived.

I can't say I've had the same experience on Tumblr as you with blogs pretending to like Sam and Cas while having a clear bias for Dean... I've tended to see quite a lot more of the opposite or worse. There are, after all, several blogs dedicated to absolutely nothing except trying to spread outright hate for Dean, and there was a time not long ago that you could not even go in the Dean tag without seeing countless ugly posts spewing vitriol about him (that has faded significantly since the show ended). But I think we're all bound to be most wise to the bias against our favorites (hell—I have picked up on someone's dislike of Dean from a gif blog before... and it was later confirmed that I was right). This is also part of what feeds the culture of anti-ism in the fanbase. People watched these characters for 12-15 years, and they latched onto one of them, and they know that character, and in many cases find identity and comfort with that character, and they see that character accused of terrible things that really aren't accurate at all, and the kind of innate human response to that is to want to do the opposite—hate their favorite because they hate yours. I think it's clear that that isn't what we're really supposed to get out of SPN. I don't think the intended narrative is that Dean hates Cas or Sam or that Sam hates Dean or that any one of them is unworthy of love and acceptance or is perfect or is too flawed. People can choose the narratives they want, but I'll continue vehemently disagreeing with them and making fun of them with the tag #don't feed the stans after midnight.

#being serious for 5 seconds #spn finale poo poo #mail #don't feed the stans after midnight

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cafeinthemoon · 3 years

Text

THe Home I Crave - Chapter 10

Title: The Home I Crave

Genre: Fanfiction

Pairing: Tobirama Senju x reader

Rating: teen and up

Word count:

Chapter: 10/?

Symbols: ⭕ | ➕ | 💛 | ▶️▶️

Read the previous chapters here: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9

Chapter 10 - The Clause

Fortunately for you, Tobirama still had some matters to discuss with the Hokage, so that he saw no problem in staying while Mito accompanied you to your house. None of you had a teleportation jutsu as him, but your houses were not so far from one another and you weren’t feeling so weak that you couldn’t walk, so you just took some minutes to finally reach the front door.

The first thing you did once you were inside was to drink water: it helped you to clear up your senses and to wash away the remaining bitterness in your mouth. After that, you could breathe and talk properly. Then you took a bath and started to prepare your bed.

Mito helped you with what she could; soon everything was settled and you were sure you’d get better in some hours.

However, the conversation you started in her bathroom wasn’t over.

- Y/n-san.

- Yes?

- I told you about how our actions can influence the situation between our clans and such, but I forgot to tell you something. It is more about Tobirama than about our Village and the clans, if I’m being honest.

- Really? And what is it?

You were in your bedroom now; you were on your futon, while she took a sit on a couch you had near it. You crossed your legs on the mattress as if you were about to hear a long story.

- I told many things about him, that’s true, but I didn’t explain why he’s so attached to rules and protocols even for an advisor – she took a deep breath, as someone who had to be careful on how to speak about someone else’s issues – Tobirama might not be as open about his feelings and ideals as Hashirama, but just like his brother he always wanted peace. He grew up as a warrior and the war took two of his brothers from him, as well as many friends and relatives. Of course he was not the only one who suffered with it, but to us it’s clear that he never really moved on, you understand?

That was new to you.

- So... after all these years and with all these alliances, he is still afraid of war?

- Exactly. And this is just one of the things that don’t let him sleep – she united her hands on her lap – I suppose you’ve heard about the rivalry between the Senju and the Uchiha.

- Yes. Of course.

You knew that the creation of Konoha started with the peace treaty signed by the two clans’ current heads, Hashirama and his friend, Madara. The Uchiha was not in the Village by the time you arrived and haven’t returned yet; since your clan didn’t have formal trades with his people, you never met him in person. But you could have news about him at any moment.

- First, let’s just say that him and the Uchiha head, Madara, are not the best friends. Some time before Konoha’s foundation, Tobirama was responsible for the death of Madara’s younger brother, Izuna, when they faced each other in combat. Izuna was the only sibling left for Madara, so naturally he never forgot this. On the other hand, Tobirama’s siblings were killed by Uchiha warriors. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?

You nodded.

- Do you know about the Uchiha’s kekkei genkai, the Sharingan?

- I’ve heard many things about their dojutsu, but never witnessed it in action.

- Indeed, most of its aspects remain a secret even for the wisest ninjas until this day. However, Tobirama has studied the nature and the development of Sharingan and found out its basis before any of us could make a statement. According to what he found out, the Sharingan is a proof that the Uchiha are moved by passion above all, so much that it has to be sealed. Otherwise, it can be quite problematic, as everything can be without discipline.

- I see.

- When the seal that kept the Uchiha’s passion under control is broken, the individual awakens their Sharingan. It is true that having a dojutsu like that is very useful in the battlefield and during missions, but at the same time it represents great levels of unpredictability. To summarize, it turns people unreliable to a certain point.

You finally understood where Mito wanted to go with that.

- And when someone is not reliable, it is harder to make sure they will continue to follow the rules that have been maintaining peace and order, and since the Uchiha are part of Konoha’s base, it represents a constant risk, at least on Tobirama’s eyes.

- You’re really quick to catch things – she smiled, but there was still worry in her eyes – So… In short: Tobirama already has a struggle with passionate individuals to work on. Having one more of them under his roof might be more than he can handle. And you have to admit, y/n-san. You are a passionate and idealistic girl, and you don’t even try to hide it. I’m not saying it is not good thing, but as you can see, it makes things hard.

- As if I am the only one who makes things hard here – you sighed – Guess I don’t even need to tell this to you, Mito-san, but despite not knowing the Uchiha as well as you do, it is obvious that Tobirama will never be totally in peace with them while he’s not in peace with himself. And I just came in the middle of it, I have nothing to do with it and it is not my fault if I am what I am. We all have our issues to deal with, but he can’t just take it out on me like this. I’m trying to make it work, but I can’t do it all by myself. Now, if his resistance towards me is because he finds me similar to the Uchiha as you’re suggesting, this is a poor excuse for his behavior. He cannot forget the fact that my clan always have been in good terms with the Senju, and we never declared support to the Uchiha during the Warring Period. Bringing this back in the form of suspicions is unfair with me and my people. I won’t accept this.

Mito chose her next words with caution.

- I could not agree more. Things are happening too fast for all of us and it’s been hard to keep up with them. But let me tell you that Tobirama knows that there were some renegades from your clan who joined the Uchiha during the Warring Period, fighting beside them as mercenaries. I believe your father told you about this.

Damn it. This man just knows everything?! Yes, you were aware of the existence of renegades who left your clan to fight beside others, including the Uchiha, but the official position of your clan has always been in favor of the Senju. That should be enough, even more now that your marriage has fortified this connection.

- Yes, my father never hid this from us. But Tobirama just can’t use something from the past to make things harder for us now. We are in peace, after all.

- This is exactly what Hashirama is saying to him right now. I could have asked him to do this, but he knows his brother. He’s used to make what’s necessary to calm down the moods in situations like this. At least for now, we don’t have to worry about them.

She sighed in relief for the first time since the conflict started; maybe she was waiting for you two to be alone so that she could have a chance to show how those events were affecting her. You thanked her in silence for this; it made you feel less alone in that house.

You stood in silence for countless minutes. You were the first to speak after that.

- I still remember when you told me that there are things about a man that can only be unveiled by his spouse – she raised her eyes to you and you continued – I’ve been thinking of this since that day, and then when I saw his photograph and in the wedding day. I’ve been seeking for ways to turn this into actions. But a week passed and nothing seemed to change – you looked around the room, too large and too cold for a couple’s private space – We are still strangers to each other. We much effort I can say we are allies. Mito-san…

- Yes? – her tone was lower, sadder.

- I think you gave me a great advice. I really do. But maybe it doesn’t work if a man doesn’t want us to unveil anything.

Mito didn’t hide her deception with what she saw in your face; to her, you were giving up too soon. But what you had to endure to reach this point was something that only you knew. It had nothing to do with her.

- Y/n-san…

- It’s getting late – you stood up and walked toward the room’s door – Hashirama will get worried if you stay out for too long.

The princess didn’t try to argue. Without a word, she left the coach and walked with you to the house’s front door. For one last time, you thanked her for everything she has done for you despite knowing you for so little time.

- You don’t need to thank me – she replied with a sad smile – It is my duty to offer you support. When I first arrived at this Village, I had no one to do this for me. I just don’t want you to face the same as me. This time we can do things differently.

You nodded. You closed the door behind you after she left, your eyes burning with tears you didn’t want to let come out. You agreed with her in each point, each word. You couldn’t be more glad for having found in her a friend who was like a sister. But you already had a sister you left behind in the name of your clan, and now you found out she needed you. You couldn’t turn your back on your own family now that you were aware of the facts; that was not the point of this treaty.

Once you were sure Mito was far from your door, your ran to your room again and found the travel bag you started packing that afternoon, after Tobirama went back to his office and you were left alone to process the bad news and to prepare yourself to dinner at the Hokage’s house. You finished to put in it all the remaining items you would need for a long travel: another change of clothing, more weapons and all the money you brought with you to Konoha – you didn’t know when or how you would come back, but you had to take enough provisions with you so that you wouldn’t depend on your family to pay the expenses of your return. Finally, you went to the kitchen and grabbed some of the things you bought in the marketplace the day before; you already had decided that if you ran out of food, you could find more in a forest or buy something in a tea house.

After drinking a bit more of water, you turned out all the lights and went to the night, disappearing among the trees that grew on the way between Tobirama’s house and the Village’s gates.

***

You didn’t know if the silence in the depths of the forest that surrounded the Village’s territory was a reason for you to be worried or relieved, for it could only mean two things: you didn’t have anyone coming after you, or you had exceptionally trained persecutors tracking your path.

The air among the trees was colder than you expected too, despite the absence of winds or breeze on those parts. The humidity was perceptible, and you couldn’t help comparing it to your own land: Konoha had more rivers and lakes in its surroundings, something that you supposed to be a determining factor in its prosperity. You remembered Mito’s comments about Tobirama being a master of Suiton and thought that it was easy for one to sharp their abilities when the environment favored them. Thanks to the same logic, you and your family developed your talent with Doton to a point when you could be mistaken for shinobi of Iwagakure. You started to deliberate about which points of that land would favor your performance as a ninja and in which ones you would have to work in order to win your weaknesses.

It was true that because of your thoughts, all towards your family and your sister’s conditions, your head was too noisy, but as the distance between you and the Village grew, you started to get truly worried about the silence around you. You haven’t noticed a single sign of movement except the ones coming from yourself; not even the small animals expected to be found in a forest seem to be near your way, though Konoha seemed to be a place so full of life when you arrived. It was like the forest just died at some point after your passage; it had nothing to do with what you first saw when you passed through it for the first time with your parents.

Your eyes would go from one side to another and over your shoulder, but nothing changed. You started feeling you were walking in circles, jumping through the same branches in the high trees. Could it be you were lost? Or…

- Damn it! – you cursed to yourself, your whisper sounding like a scream in that stillness – Is it a genjutsu or am I becoming paranoid?

You stopped so suddenly that even the air around you changed. Your feet, firm on a higher branch out of your path, forced the wood and produced some crackling noises. You stood up on it and with one last look at your surroundings, you jumped on your back, doing a flip toward the ground, where your could find a better use to your abilities.

You landed on the grass on one knee and put your palm over it. You closed your eyes and concentrated your attentions on the smell of the earth, trying to catch up with every information it could bring to you. You took off the glove on your right hand and touched the soil with your fingers, sensing the vibrations that would go through it: if a person, an animal or even a bug crossed your surroundings, you would know. Those were tracking techniques your master taught you when she noticed you didn’t have sensory abilities; they have been very useful specially when you were sent to distant places and there were no sensor shinobi available to join your team.

Unfortunately, the earth and its smells didn’t tell you anything about intruders. But you were still suspicious, so that you felt the need of a second, less subtle measure: an earthquake jutsu you developed for cases like that. That jutsu was going to cost you a precious amount of chakra, that was true, but it should be enough to tell your persecutor – if they were really existed – that you weren’t willing to play.

You made the hand signs and your palm touched the ground, sending a seismic wave in circular form that started around your hand and expanded through the ground around you and further. As the earth was shaken, the brown soil, the grass and worms were spread to all sides, and the trees had part of their roots exposed. The only spot that remained untouched was the one upon which you were kneeling.

The impact must have been sensed in the Village at least by the shinobi. But if this would catch their attention or not, you couldn’t care less: the annoying part was that Tobirama probably have noticed your absence by now; if he was as talented with sensory techniques as Mito told you, he could have already guessed the direction you took, and all you did with your Doton was to give him your exact location. You weren’t sure if he would come after you or not, but whatever he would decide to do, he could have avoided this by not to hiding things from you. Besides, you wanted to make sure you weren’t caught in a genjutsu without having to hurt yourself or to stop your chakra flow when you needed it most.

When the forest went back to its previous silence, you stood up, relieved to confirm you had no company. You adjusted your backpack and looked for the next branch to reach: it was safe to continue your journey through the trees.

You prepared to jump when something sharp, shining at the moonlight, crossed your way with a hiss and buried itself on the trunk of the tree you were were going to climb. You held your breath; you looked closer at it and you identified a kunai. Wrapped around its base, there was a tag marked with a seal.

You cursed when you recognized the Hiraishin’s pattern.

You moved away from it right before he teleported to its side and could do anything to immobilize you. You let the kunai you carried under your sleeve slip to your hand; whatever was going to happen there, you were going to fight and survive to continue your journey: he was not going to take you back to the Village.

When you raised your eyes to him, however, what you saw was confusing: Tobirama was wearing full armor just like you saw him in that portrait, with the blue arm pads and the white fur covering his shoulders as if he was prepared for a mission; on his right hand he carried a bag just like yours. Was he intending to accompany you along the way?

Still, you wanted to hear it from his mouth.

- What are you doing here?!

- Tsc! – he removed the kunai from the wood and hid it in his sleeve – I am the one who should be asking. What are you doing here?

You gasp in your indignation to hear him using your words against you, but you straightened up and hid your blade as well.

- I don’t need to answer this question. My intentions are obvious, and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.

Tobirama passed the bag’s strap over his shoulder and crossed his arms, standing his ground. It was clear that if you wanted to go ahead, you would have to pass through him.

- I could say the same – he replied – But I had to come to remind you about a clause in our treaty that you happened to forget after your meeting with my brother. The treaty stated that you should stay in Konoha as your clan’s primary representative until your people arrive. Only then you could make any plans regarding travels outside our Village’s territory. Leaving like this, without warning, will be understood as treason.

- And then I will be left with two choices: to come back with you or to be killed – you crossed your arms too – Yes, I’ve read the clauses and I remember this one very well. But if you came here to try and use it to intimidate me, let me tell you that you’re wasting your time. You know I will not come back until I do what I have to do.

- You do not have to do this when my brother already sent a doctor to take care of your sister. He’s a ninja just like us and is more than used to long and difficult travels. He will reach your compound in half the time a regular ninja would do.

You gasped. Was he really calling you a regular ninja? You ran out of patience, but you decided not to get into this type of discussion: the longer you stayed there, later you would reach your destiny.

- What kind of shinobi just leaves their work for others to do and sit on their house waiting for things to get better, specially when their family is involved? – you shrugged – I know that’s not your style. Neither it is mine.

Tobirama put a hand on his waist as if he was unsatisfied to see that this discussion would take longer than he first expected. You laughed at this internally: it seemed that the man who wasn’t used to have his orders questioned finally found a worthy adversary. He could see you as a brat right now, but you were a determined, honest brat at least.

- You speak as if your sister is completely alone in your family’s house – he argued – Which is not true. Your parents, as well as your other sisters, are there with her, and you have your own doctors working on her case, according to your father’s last letter.

You raised an eyebrow; you tried to ignore your heartbeats that just got faster.

- What are you insinuating?

The Senju didn’t waste time with deliberations, saying to your face what he had in mind:

- I’m afraid you are using this situation as an excuse to run away from the treaty.

This time you couldn’t help let your bitterness out.

- Well, let’s just say that you didn’t give me much reasons to not run away – you noticed the way he tightened his lips and continued before he did anything – But this is not what I’m doing. In my family we don’t break promises, even when we have to face hell to keep them.

- If this is the case, leaving in secret does not speak in your favor, y/n-san – he took one step in your direction, but didn’t seem willing to go any further – How can I be sure you will respect our treaty and come back to Konoha?

- The same way I can be sure you will not hide anything from me again – you replied with seriousness – What do you have to say about that?

Tobirama sighed, but didn’t lose his temper.

- I know that words will not prove my point. Instead, actions will do. This is why I am coming with you.

You swallowed. So, he was really planning to travel with you? This was the solution he found to keep the treaty untouched, then: instead of killing you or forcing you to come back to the Village with him, he offered himself to go with you as a way to prove his honesty and to be sure of yours at the same time.

You wanted to smile at this: again, he managed to caught you with a surprise. But you didn’t want to give him a taste of victory so soon, so you kept a straight face.

- You don’t have to do this, Advisor. You have no obligation to agree with my decision…

But that man’s will was something as firm as the stones in your land. That caught you off guard as no enemy attack ever did.

- Yes, I do. It is the least I can do – and tightening his grip around the bag’s strap before jumping toward the same branch you once stood – Shall we?

#naruto fanfiction #tobirama #tobirama x reader #tobirama senju #tobirama fanfiction

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rovelae · 3 years

Text

Behind the Scenes of “Hologram”

Today marks exactly one year since I posted arguably my most popular fic. “Hologram” is a postgame Saiouma one-shot about escapism, loneliness, and running away from the past. I put a lot of myself into this fic and I’m blown away by all the love it’s received, not only on AO3 but in Discord servers and other social media. All that excitement made me keep thinking about it, so I thought I’d share a (very self-indulgent) behind-the-scenes of sorts about how I wrote it, as well as what I think of the story.

This essay will contain spoilers for the whole fic, so if you’d like to read it first, you can find it here. Of course, if the tags scare you off, that’s valid, but you might want to skip this post too since I’ll be quoting it throughout (so, just to be safe, expect the warnings I’ve posted on AO3 to apply here too).

If you’re a Lorde fan you’ll recognize the lyrics in the fic summary – “Nothing’s wrong when nothing’s true,” from “Buzzcut Season.” The inspiration for this fic came to me while I was on my way to an early shift at work, and I needed a good song in my head to give me the will to live for the next eight hours. Not sure why I chose that song in particular, but maybe part of it is because I like imagining stories to go along with the songs I listen to, like AMVs playing in my head, and I’d never been able to pin down exactly what this song reminded me of.

The mood of the music is really what compelled me – there’s something lonely about it, and the lyrics sound like the singer’s trying to convince herself that everything’s okay even when all evidence points otherwise. There are “explosions on TV”, and “The men up on the news / They try to tell us all that we will lose,” but “we live beside the pool / Where everything is good.” Despite everything going wrong, despite the notes of fear creeping into the pre-chorus, the character will “play along… in a hologram with you” and “never go home again.”

From there, it was an easy jump to “postgame Saiou” and that was that.

There’s a cloud of seagulls hovering in the air around him, and a dozen or so more standing just out of reach, staring him down with beady black eyes. Kokichi takes a slice of bread from the loaf he’s holding and tosses it to one of the birds, watches it catch it and stumble under the weight, watches its head bob as it tries to swallow the whole thing at once. It gets remarkably far before four other birds descend on it, shrieking wildly.

“Mine, mine, mine,” he mumbles into his folded arms, wondering if Shuichi would get the reference.

He really wishes Shuichi was here.

Kokichi upends the rest of the loaf of bread onto the sidewalk and laughs at the resulting chaos until his chest aches.

To start off, I wanted to create the same lonely mood from “Buzzcut Season” in Kokichi’s simulation. He’s not exactly trapped there, but he’s refusing to leave, because as long as he’s on the fake Jabberwock Island, he can pretend the killing game never happened. The trade-off to that escapism is that the only people he can talk to are the NPCs, who aren’t complex enough to be remotely interesting to him, and Usami, who… well, tries her best, but is more of an informational / moderation program and can’t offer him what a therapist could.

The only thing Kokichi has to look forward to is Shuichi, who he’s convinced is an extremely lifelike computer program rather than the real thing, because the real Shuichi would definitely hate him for everything that happened during the killing game. He’s so locked into this line of logic that he doesn’t let himself consider that Shuichi has forgiven him – he doesn’t even have a good answer for why the Future Foundation wouldn’t just keep the supposed Shuichi AI on indefinitely, believing it’s their way of baiting him into leaving the simulation.

It’s not a healthy or sustainable lifestyle in the slightest, but Kokichi stubbornly refuses to do anything but wander the islands aimlessly, passing the time with ice cream and feeding seagulls until the next time he can see Shuichi.

He dreams that DICE is here in the simulation with him, smiling and carefree as they explore the weird music venue. One of them has gotten the karaoke machine working, and another found a box of kazoos and maracas in the back room. Kokichi already pities anyone unfortunate enough to walk by the building tonight.

“Not going to sing, Joker?” one of his DICE asks (over the sound of their youngest member shrieking through seven kazoos at once), sitting on the bench next to him.

“Some games are more fun to watch than play,” he answers, leaning back on his hands and sighing.

“Like a killing game.”

The warm dream-atmosphere turns cold then, and Kokichi’s head snaps over to look at him—but his brother is gone and Kaito’s looking back at him instead, blood in his teeth and face ashen pale.

“You... we don’t have to do this, man,” Kaito says, but it’s a lie and they both know it, and he doesn’t want to look behind him because he knows the machine’s looming over him with its unyielding steel and slow slow slow descent—

“You’re not real,” he snaps at dream-Kaito, who doesn’t respond except to lift him up again. “Nothing’s real, none of—PUT ME DOWN! LET GO OF ME! DON’T PUT ME BACK IN THERE!”

“Death is more mercy than you deserve,” Kaito says, and Kokichi claws and bites and kicks his way out of Kaito’s grasp like a wild animal, only to end up in front of a prison cell full of—

DICE, his beloved DICE, trapped and hurt and afraid, bloodied and beaten and helpless.

“Why didn’t you save us, boss?” says his second-in-command, clutching the bars with bleeding hands. “Why didn’t you do more? Now we’re all dead and it’s because of you.”

Moments like this are my reference to Buzzcut Season’s pre-chorus, where the not-okay starts to creep into the illusion. Despite Kokichi’s valiant efforts to forget, he’s still dealing with the aftermath of seeing his family hurt and in danger, watching his friends die, orchestrating the deaths of two of them, being killed himself— and then being told every bit of it was made up to entertain an audience who sees nothing wrong with that picture. Running away is not the way to heal from trauma, and one day soon it’s all bound to come crashing down around him.

“Do you know what this … island paradise represents, Kokichi?” [Hinata] asks, and Kokichi’s really not in the mood for a lecture but he continues anyway. “Jabberwock Island … was the setting for the fiftieth season of Danganronpa. The golden anniversary, they called it. It was my season.”

Kokichi hunches over, hugging his arms over his torso and stifiling a scream. He does not want to think about this right now—

“They wanted it to be the best season of all, which, unfortunately for us, meant it was also the bloodiest,” Hinata says. “Twice as many participants, deadly traps hidden across each of the islands— they even changed the way the motives worked, like when they told Fuyuhiko to cut out his own eye so Peko could have a quick death instead of suffering for days.”

“Do I look like your therapist, porcupine-head?” Kokichi hisses. A sharp pain is pounding into his skull, and there’s a bitter, metallic taste at the back of his throat. A taste like poison and blood.

“There was so much going on that the simulation malfunctioned,” Hinata says. “When people died, their Ultimate talents downloaded themselves into me. I’m told that the stress of so many personality grafts came close to liquefying my frontal lobe. I’m lucky I woke up at all… especially considering more than half of the others didn’t.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Kokichi grates out through the static building in his head. If he opens his eyes, will he see the beach or the dull chrome of the machine closing in on him?

“Because I know how much you want to forget about what happened,” Hinata says. “Believe me, I get it.”

….

“These things that happened to us… we can’t erase them, no matter how much we want to. Some things have to be remembered.”

I’d mostly like to leave Hajime’s season up to interpretation, but there are a couple things I wanted to say about it. I imagine Danganronpa is like the Hunger Games in that it’d go all out for big anniversaries. So, there were twice as many participants for the Jabberwock Island beatdown that was probably subtitled “Bloodbath Bay” or something equally appealing. The game’s formula changed from a focus on the mystery and the trials to “look at all these kids massacring each other a la Lord of the Flies,” and since the VR system wasn’t equipped to handle that many people and their deaths, it malfunctioned, giving Hajime way too many Ultimate talents and putting half the cast into comas from which they never woke up.

Viewers either absolutely loved or absolutely hated this season, depending on whether they were DR fans because of the “blood n’ guts” factor or the “mystery and psychological thriller” aspect. Team Danganronpa faced quite a bit of backlash for actually causing the real-life deaths of half its participants, but were able to weasel their way out of serious legal repercussions because of the waivers the participants had signed beforehand (plus a lot of bribery and falling back on their longstanding popularity). So, the cast of Season 50 failed to end the killing game, but helped provide great evidence for the “Danganronpa is morally wrong” argument.

Hajime works as a victim liaison for the Future Foundation and has been trying to take down Danganronpa since he got out of it. He’s like that in a few of my fics, actually; I like the idea of Hajime acting as a big brother of sorts to the V3 cast. It’s especially entertaining to imagine his interactions with Kokichi— though maybe not so much in Hologram, since to Kokichi he’s a representation of the past he’s trying so desperately to forget and the future he refuses to acknowledge.

“SHUT UP!” He launches himself at Hinata, his hands wrapping around the other man’s throat as he uses his momentum to slam him to the ground. “SHUT! UP!”

“Ko— ghk—” Hinata coughs, eyes wide with surprise, but aside from moving his hands up to grip Kokichi’s wrists, he doesn’t seem all that worried about fighting back.

The thought only fuels Kokichi’s rage until he’s choking Hinata so hard his knuckles are white. “If you want me out of this simulation so badly, you can kill me,” he snarls. “I’m never waking up! I’m never leaving, do you UNDERSTAND ME?”

Hinata grimaces, the outline of his avatar flickering, but he still doesn’t struggle, and Kokichi hates him all the more for it, despises him with a seething malice that festers low in his stomach. He wonders distantly if he’d actually kill this man in real life. Or if he’d be able to stop himself, feeling like this.

Kokichi’s breakdown here is more out of fear than anger. Like I mentioned, Kokichi sees Hajime as another piece of what’s hurt him, and no matter how Hajime tries to help, Kokichi will always remember Danganronpa whenever he sees him.

Warm yellow-orange light casts a relaxed, cozy glow over the dining hall. It’s an ambience compounded by the flickering candles on the table, which seems overly idyllic, but Kokichi will let it slide because of the adorable way Shuichi flushed when he noticed them as they sat down. Well, if he’s being honest, everything about Shuichi right now is adorable, from the way his hair keeps falling into his eyes to the way he’s nervously fiddling wth his chopsticks. Kokichi wishes he could keep staring at him forever.

Ah, not… not in a weird way, though, just… because Shuichi’s beautiful, and when Kokichi looks at him he can forget everything bad that’s ever happened, can create some new and brighter world to exist in.

This is an idea I wish I’d had room to explore a bit more in the story— that is, just how far Kokichi will go to pretend everything’s fine. I thought about making him border on delusional, like having him talk to people who aren’t there or forget what’s actually happening around him because he’s so lost in his fiction-within-a-fiction. It would have creeped Shuichi out a whole lot.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much room for that past the plot I’d already nailed down, so I focused on his loneliness and escapism instead. I do touch on it later in this scene, though— the couple paragraphs where he slips into fantasizing about being a phantom thief having a surreptitious meeting with his detective under the not-so-subtle supervision of his DICE. There would have been a lot more of that if I’d gone with the ‘delusion’ stylistic choice, to the point where even the readers would be confused about what’s real. Maybe I’ll look into writing something similar in a future story.

Eventually, Shuichi sets down his bowl and looks away with a little sigh, and Kokichi clenches his teeth because that’s the sigh he does when it’s time for that conversation.

“Um… Kokichi?”

Kokichi’s only response is to exhale the breath he’d been holding in a quiet hiss.

“I-I know you don’t want to, but… but I really need to talk to you about something,” Shuichi says. “Please?”

“My Mr. Detective can talk about whatever he’d like!” Kokichi says with a lilt to his tone that makes it sound more sarcastic than he wants it to. He takes the last bite of curry and wishes that it burns hot enough to hurt.

“It’s about Kaito.”

This more serious part of the date scene is meant to reflect the little bridge in “Buzzcut Season”:

“Cola with the burnt-out taste

I’m the one you tell your fears to

There’ll never be enough of us.”

It’s a part of the song that sounds especially bittersweet to me, a bit of self-awareness between the insistence that everything’s okay.

Really all I think I managed was to reference it when Kokichi’s internal dialogue comments on his drink being “so sweet it tastes burnt” and then later not tasting like anything. But hopefully the mood’s still there.

“Tell him… that I have nothing against him,” he says.

“That’s … not a lie?” Shuichi presses.

Kokichi shakes his head idly, still not raising his gaze. “I wanted to wreck the killing game and he wanted to save his friend. We both got what we wanted. I’d say the end more than justifies the means.”

Was that a lie?

(I don’t want to die Shuichi I’m sorry I’m sorry save me Shuichi please I’m sorry ithurtsmakeitstop—)

His fingers tighten into clawlike shapes, nails digging sharply into his forearms.

I really don’t think Kokichi would have anything against Kaito, even if here he’s not being completely honest with how much he’s affected by what happened. It wouldn’t make sense to him to hate Kaito for something he himself proposed, but I think there’d still be a subconscious barrier between them. Too much history.

“Don’t go, Shuichi, I’m so sorry, I— that was so dumb, what I said, please don’t be sad anymore.” He’s not sure if he can’t breathe because of the exertion of running or because of the hysteria boiling over in his head. “Please don’t go, I didn’t mean to hurt you— please don’t leave, Shuichi, I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, Kokichi….” Shuichi’s tone is strange, soft and pitying, like he sees something Kokichi doesn’t, and he shakes his head slowly as more tears follow the paths of the others.

Kokichi goes to his knees, ready to grovel if that’s what it takes, but Shuichi follows him down, closing his other hand over Kokichi’s, and then they’re both crying and he doesn’t know why, and all he can do is repeat a mantra of I’m sorry and hold on as tight as he can.

It’s horrible. Shuichi’s horrible. Shuichi’s wonderful, and kind and lovely and perfect and Kokichi hates him, Kokichi adores him, and it doesn’t matter because Shuichi’s not actually here but Kokichi doesn’t want to be alone, just let me pretend some more, please, please let me have this—

“I’ll… I’ll stay,” Shuichi says at last. “I can stay a while longer.”

You shouldn’t, Kokichi wants to say, but his mouth won’t obey him. You shouldn’t stay if you don’t want to. I don’t deserve having you here. I’m not worth your mercy.

But there on the bridge, crying tears of relief, he soaks up as much mercy as he can get and hopes it’s enough to drown him.

I wanted to create a contrast between them that highlights just how the isolation and trauma Kokichi’s experiencing has affected him. He has an almost unhealthy reliance on Shuichi as “the only thing that makes this world bearable,” and panics when faced with the prospect of being alone again so soon. Part of why Shuichi’s crying is because he’s realized the extent of Kokichi’s desperation. It’s not that he thinks Kokichi’s apology is insincere, but that he’s hardly heard him apologize for anything before, so Kokichi going this far has him realizing how bad things really are.

The door rumbles and slides open when they approach, revealing the bright light of the log-out point that took Shuichi away every time, that would wake Kokichi up in his real body if he walked into it. Shuichi stops just a step away from it, biting his lip as if searching for something to say, but before he can find it, Kokichi reaches out to tug at his sleeve.

“Shuichi?” he says, distant as the waves on the beach that he can still hear if he listens closely enough. Shuichi turns back toward him. “Before you go, can I be selfish one more time?”

“Huh…?”

Shuichi doesn’t move when Kokichi steps closer, reaches up to ghost his fingertips over Shuichi’s jaw and around the back of his neck. He lets Kokichi tilt his head downward, lets him hover inches away, close enough to feel their breath mingle in the night air. Kokichi pauses there to give him the chance to pull away. He doesn’t.

So Kokichi closes his eyes and the distance between them.

That last line is a ZEUGMA! It’s a literary device where one word refers to two more in a different way. A popular example is the hyenas’ line “Our teeth and ambitions are bared” from The Lion King. It’s my favorite grammatical trick and I’d love to see more of it in fanfic.

Slowly, he slides his hand down to Shuichi’s shoulder, using it as leverage to push himself away. That hurts even more. He can’t seem to open his eyes, and he feels so weakened, breathless, fragile. Cracked open, hollowed out.

When he finally does open his eyes, Shuichi’s are wide with some mix of astonishment and a dozen other emotions. Kokichi bows his head, taking a deep breath to ground himself. “Sorry,” he whispers. “I just wanted to know.”

“Kokichi,” Shuichi breathes, like a bullet through his heart.

“Goodbye, Shuichi,” Kokichi says, and shoves him into the light.

Shuichi’s little yelp of surprise cuts off abruptly as he falls through the door, vanishing into the glow, and all too soon, Kokichi’s alone again in a dream that suddenly seems far too vast. Alone, with the faintest taste of Shuichi’s lips still lingering on his own.

And he thinks, It was enough just to know you.

It’s a lie.

Nothing to say here except that this is my favorite scene and I’m so happy with how it turned out.

Fake sun rises over fake ocean, fake seagulls glide through fake sky while fake wind tousles fake palm fronds. Kokichi lies on his stomach in the fake grass and talks to his fake family in the fake notebook. Gives them fake names and runs through everything he remembers about them. Apologizes, over and over, wishes he could hug each of them goodbye one last time. Wonders if it would be more painful to die or to never have existed at all.

He leaves the notebook of his memories on the seat of one of the Ferris wheel cars on the fourth island, because one time he promised them they’d steal the London Eye together.

He buys a can of fake soda from the fake convenience store on the first island and sits on the fake beach watching the fake waves. Wonders when he’d hit the end of the simulation if he started swimming, or if he’d drown first.

White sand, blue sea, bluer sky. Washed out, like an amateur watercolor painting.

He opens the soda can and raises it to his mouth, but … even the thought of drinking it makes him sick to his stomach. He sets it down in the sand and flicks it over, watching the bubbly liquid run down and sink into the sand. The color’s all wrong, like blood streaked against a metal floor.

He walks the fake streets of the fifth island, passing fake skyscrapers and fake commuters and their fake conversations, until he finally stops outside the factory he’s never been able to bring himself to go into. Smells like oil, and metal and machines and he can hear the sounds and he’s immediately back in the hangar, dizzy on adrenaline and desperation and leaning heavily on Kaito so he doesn’t keel over and die then and there. Kaito says something about how maybe he should sit down for a minute, and Kokichi didn’t agree back then but he does now, goes down on all fours and dry heaves.

When his vision solidifies and he can stop gasping for breath, he sits up and presses his back against the factory wall, covering his ears and hiding his face in his knees. Tries to convince himself not to imagine Shuichi’s there with him, holding his hand again, promising everything’s going to be okay.

“I’ve got you. No one’s going to hurt you anymore,” or maybe, “Breathe with me, it’ll be over soon. You’re safe now.”

I love you.

He laughs until there’s nothing left in his lungs. He called these little daydreams obsession, before, but now they just seem sick and insane.

I wanted to indicate throughout this scene that Kokichi’s gotten substantially worse. Instead of halfheartedly interacting with the NPCs or finding something to spend time doing, he’s aimlessly wandering the islands, focused on how fake all of it is. Not even talking to his sketches of DICE can make him feel better. The suicidal ideation starts to slip in even if he doesn’t realize it— a fixation on wondering what death is like, purposefully triggering himself by walking by the factory….

The thing I want to talk about most though is the italicized I love you. I left it outside of quotation marks and dialogue tags on purpose because I wanted it to be ambiguous as to who’s saying it. If it’s Kokichi’s line, it’s sudden and almost out of place, like he couldn’t hold back from thinking it anymore. But it could be Shuichi saying it, too. Since it’s outside quotation marks, unlike the previous dream-Shuichi lines, it’s more vague, almost a whisper in Kokichi’s thoughts— like he can barely bring himself to imagine it and even feels guilty doing so, because there’s no way it could possibly be real.

Which do you think?

Eh, I don’t have an answer. When I hear it in my head, they say it at the same time.

“How did you know?” he finally croaks.

Shuichi’s breathing still sounds shaky, too. “Because you said ‘goodbye,’” he says.

Kokichi finally looks up at him in a silent question.

“You never say goodbye,” Shuichi says, rubbing his sleeve over his eyes. “It’s always….”

“‘See you later,’” Kokichi finishes for him. Despite himself, a tiny huff of astonished laughter escapes him. “I didn’t even know, not until a couple of hours ago. And you figured it all out from one word?”

Shuichi bites his lip at that. “You kissed me,” he says.

Kokichi’s stomach twists and he looks away. “I said I was sorry—”

“No.” Shuichi squeezes his hand into a fist and lets it fall to thump against Kokichi’s chest, like he’s trying to knock some sense into him. “It was so honest, and vulnerable, and… and I know how much you hate showing how you really feel.” Another tiny sob catches in his throat. ��And so it felt like … like something you’d do if you weren’t going to s-see me again.”

“Shuichi….” Kokichi trails off as Shuichi muffles his cries in his hand again. He’s so breathtakingly smart. There’s no one else in the world who thinks that way, no one else who could possibly be that attentive and that clever. Not a programmer, not a team of shrinks… how can an AI manage it? How is it that Shuichi always manages to take him by surprise? How can he see straight through him when he least expects it?

Kokichi’s hand reaches up to Shuichi’s cheek. Reverently traces the path of the tears falling down it.

“I wish you were real,” he confesses in a whisper.

Kokichi’s stubborn. So, so stubborn. And he’s not used to being cared about, if the way he does everything by himself is any indication. So it makes sense to me that he’ll refuse to believe anything good can happen to him even in the face of convincing evidence. He’s pretty self-hating for someone so arrogant.

Kokichi’s weak, deep down to his core, weak for this man. Already knows he’d do anything for him, and the thought is terrifying—that one person could have that much power over him, even if he doesn’t realize it.

But what if he has realized it? Couldn’t this all be an elaborate ruse, a lie he knew Kokichi would be so desperate to believe that he wouldn’t bother questioning it?

…Shuichi’s never hurt him, though. Only that one time, when he really deserved it. Shuichi wouldn’t … betray him, even for what he thinks is Kokichi’s own good. They’re… different from each other, that way.

But still….

“I’m so scared, Shuichi.” It’s barely a whisper. “I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

“You won’t be.” It’s so hard to be skeptical, lost in his eyes. “I’ll be right there with you, for as long as you want. I won’t let you feel like this anymore.”

Promise me, he wants to blurt out. Promise you’ll stay. Promise me you’ll never leave me, Shuichi, he wants to demand, but that’s wrong, that’s manipulative and selfish and everything he doesn’t want to be for Shuichi anymore.

Shuichi, of course, says it anyway.

“I promise, Kokichi.”

…

“Kiss me again,” he says. “Please?”

Shuichi leans in close, then pauses, his brow furrowing the way it does when he catches him in a lie.

“I’ll kiss you again in the real world,” Shuichi says. “Okay?”

Kokichi shakes his head. “Shuichi, please.” Please, I don’t think I can do this. Please, I don’t want to wake up to a lie. Please, one last kiss for me to remember in case it was all fake.

Shuichi reaches out to tilt his chin up and Kokichi closes his eyes, savoring every second, burning it into his memory.

Shuichi’s soft breath ghosts over his lips.

“Trust me,” he murmurs.

Kokichi’s eyes flutter back open, searching his face. Shifting him around on the white board in his head, seeing what categories he fits into this time. Weird, of course. Suspicious, maybe not. Trustworthy?

Trustworthy….

“I do trust you,” he realizes.

Kokichi’s still hesitant to accept all of this— Shuichi kissing him didn’t magically fix everything. He’ll still doubt all the way to the log-out point, but at least now he realizes that this simulation is only hurting him— that if things are to get better they’re going to have to change, too. He’s got a long way to go before he’s all right, but he’s not going to have to face it alone anymore.

And that’s a wrap!

Once again, I’m really proud of this story, and I feel like I grew as a writer because of it. There are a few things I would change if I wrote it again, but for all its flaws it’s still my baby and I like how it turned out.

Thanks again for all your support for “Hologram,” and thanks even more if you actually waded through all this nonsense of a director’s cut. It’s a huge confidence-boost to think that people liked what I wrote, and even wanted to hear what I had to say about it. If there’s any interest, I’d love to review some of my other fics here, or theorize or brainstorm or whatever else you’re into. (Ask me what Byakuya’s Thing is in my superhero AU, I dare you 😉)

I do have a WIP in my folder of bits and pieces currently titled “boy finally gets that kiss”, and it’s a post-Hologram scene from Shuichi’s point of view to just sorta… tie it all together, have them talk things over again… and kiss, of course. We’ll see if anything comes out of that.

Until next time!

#Rov talks #Hologram #Saiouma #Oumasai #Behind the scenes #Director's cut #Fanfic review

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halvedgods · 2 years

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hello, hello, hello ! it's your friendly neighborhood mac being forced to use the new post editor because tumblr hates me and wants to stunt my creativity at every turn. i'll be playing the loves of my life, rhaegar targaryen ( 35, he/him, daniel sharman fc ) and alerie mooton ( 25, she/her, hailee steinfeld fc ). i can't wait to introduce them to you so without further ado, please look below the cut to find their introductions !

p.s. also i'm at work when this is posted but feel free to ask me for my d*scord and i'll send it to you when i'm done working !

rhaegar targaryen is the king of westeros, the eldest of the targaryen dynasty, and is known for his determined and logical nature. allegedly, he's been known to be a rather wary and shrewd man. i heard that his loyalties lie with the realm and he deeply supports to notion of peace. i wonder if the king's mind has already begun to fray — it's a targaryen's birthright, you know.

rhaegar targaryen was born at sunrise a few months after his father’s coronation as king. he would cry at night, waiting impatiently for the sunrise to come back every morning. his fascination with sunrises as a child persists, even now, in his mid thirties and a father himself.

he has a habit of waking up well before sunrise to get started on the work laid out before him as king — he’s deeply involved in the day to day running of the kingdom, not leaving his small council to their own devices, no matter how much he trusts them with the realm — so that he might sit out on his balcony and watch the sun rise over the horizon. when his children were particularly little, he would hold them with him, enjoying those moments of peacefulness.

there are parts of this man that have always been gentle, you can see it in the way he holds himself. he is a fierce warrior, the wielder of blackfyre, an expert combatant, mounted and not, but rhaegar would trade away all of those things for more precious moments. he has calloused, blood soaked hands but his eyes are kinder than many you’ll meet. he has his failings but watch the way he wraps his arms around his wife, how he greets his friends and enemies with the same warmth, how he acknowledges that he is not the smartest man in the room and wants only for the best when it comes to the people he has been charged with. he wants to be better than those who came before him, someone ready to humbly accept advice and understand opposition.

three years ago, the death of his father came a crown that felt too heavy, to the point he delayed his own coronation two weeks, deeply in prayer and conversation with his father’s hand ( a former advisor to king rhaegar, in an informal capacity ). he wrote a letter to each of the great houses, inviting them to his coronation by personal invitation, written in his own hand. he expressed his desires to each for a personal meeting ( with their current ruler and their heirs ), establishing connections he hoped might be able to serve him through his reign and for the generations after them. before he asked for faith in himself, he put faith in the people he surrounded himself with and those were some of the seeds he planted with the intention of cultivating a vibrant, diverse inner circle.

it is here that we will take a small break to discuss the way that rhaegar interacts with his family. his life has been built on the foundation of furthering the targaryen legacy and he wants nothing more than to usher in a renaissance for them. a century back on the throne ( the brief years of robert baratheon are not a stan — in fact, rhaegar has even noted that they were a necessity that allowed the targaryen family to almost reintroduce their style of rule to the kingdoms ) and rhaegar has made it his life's mission to keep the peace

an audience with the king is not a hard thing to get — be you a member of the great house, a lesser one, or a representative for the smallfolk. he is willing to meet with most at their convenient and his excellent memory for names, faces, and plights make his meetings as sincere as the smile on his face. his ability to bend over backwards with a charming smile to meet the things asked of him within his power is noted, though it seems as though no one has ever been able to successfully abuse his kindness ( after all, how can you take what is freely given ? ).

as far as faith goes, rhaegar has always identified most with the father and has viewed him almost as a patron. he has championed the faith since he was a young man and if he had been a second son, he might have devoted himself as a septon. his faith deepened when his father died and he went into mourning, begging for the redemption of his soul through good works he would make in his name and the names of the targaryens who had come before him. his crisis of faith comes now as the fifth year of his reign begins, a fear that he has not done nearly enough and there will be so much blood on his hands because of it.

do not mistake his kindness for weakness, though, even the wind stills before the onset of a hurricane and this man is a hurricane of cunning and unresolved feelings. he is a good man but good men can have their kind words poisoned, their sincere smiles turned sour. his mercy exists in one hand but his other holds something so much darker and so much more powerful.

support your local targaryen dynasty. rhaegar’s just doing his best !

alerie mooton is the lady of maidenpool, the middle daughter of the sisters three, and is known for her tactful and observant nature. allegedly, she has been known to be stubborn and impatient. i heard that her loyalty lies with house mooton and she's rather indifferent to the notion of peace. i wonder if she can explain why.

long before house mooton became a vassal to the tullys, in the time before the andal invasion, there was a heart tree that the first men protected. the original mootons worshipped the old gods of the forest, the mooton sisters still do. when the andals invaded, the first men stood their ground as best they could, hiding away their stories under floorboards and in the hearts of their children, praying they would be passed down. the old gods of the forest heard their prayers, the old gods of the forest made sure their stories were told.

when the andals brought the light of the seven with them, house mooton found what similarities they could. they promised the children they would protect the tree in the center of their household and the children gave them a gift in exchange. they approached the lady mooton who was newly pregnant and placed their hands on her stomach, promising her prosperity, foresight, and good fortune. the children kept their promise and so did the mootons. the daughters born from this promise millennia ago came in a set of three, each utilizing a different aspect of foresight. every few hundred years, three little girls come again. and again. and again. as long as they are needed, they will come.

the mooton sisters, regardless of which three you speak of over the course of the last few thousand years, always come in the same three order and always pay the same three prices. the middle of the sisters, the one who we will get to know, uses bones and fire, a risk every time she reached in her hand to the fire. wait too long and the bones crumple to ash, not enough and a false reading comes through. all gifts come at a cost and this gift balances on a moral scale: how many times are you willing to put an end to one thing’s life to learn more about a future that isn’t guaranteed ?

each of the daughters also corresponds with one of the three faces of the seven that typically have feminine characteristics. though they do not follow the faith, they make appearances as though they do so they may blend in with other houses who do not embrace the old ways, especially in the riverlands. the oldest represents the crone, the middle represents the mother, and the youngest represents the maiden.

her childhood was one of confusing, vivid dreams and intuition too sharp for a small child. she was too keen, too curious, too wild, and then the birth of her little sister came and things started to make more sense. these are the next three, the children once more keeping their promise. gods save the king.

alerie has a memory, from when she was a little girl, that told her to scatter the bones on the ground. not to clutch on to what she knew but to scatter them against the wind, to have faith in what they would say. in the beginning she wanted everything to have a meaning, for everything to be structured, and to have a clear, individual voice. but they are bones and for all their rigidity, they were fluid in meaning. every time, they might change their tune or stop speaking completely. alerie learned early on that she needed to find her own way of listening, one of those methods was fire. her proclivity for fire is inherently different from a red priestess. she did not see the lord of light in the flames or understand his message or hear his voice. instead, fire was the conduit for the bones and the noises the bones make as they burn in the fire is as important as the bones when they’ve been pulled from the fire.

quick interjection: alerie’s a greenseer ! what she thought was just “the bones speaking to her” is actually true tongue, the language of the children of the forest. rather than a language as we understand it, true tongue is the sound of the leaves rustling on a tree, the babbling of a brook, and the winds whistling through mountains. she understands and can even mimic aspects of true tongue though it’s hard for most humans to speak the language. her greenseer blood is also the reason why her eyes are almost unnaturally green, like the leaves in the height of summer’s sunlight.

so, when your life is predicated on the belief that you are gifted, and you are taught that you are gifted from a very young age, all of the things that go along with your gift are presumed to be normal. but no one ever taught alerie how to cope with the voices that sat in her head and whispered all together a discordant set of prophecies. so many things want to be heard, want to make their mark on the world, and so little of it filters through when she’s not doing a reading. she constantly feels on the edge of sensory overload.

she is not short tempered but when her anger flies, it’s with the anger of a thousand crones trying to tell her what will happen next. when she wallows in her grief, a thousand mothers try to comfort her. when she desires love, to be held, to hold, a thousand maidens rush forth and attempt to soothe her. but you can not soothe what is already broken and you can’t close the floodgates that have already opened.

alerie feels most at peace when she’s doing a reading. when she’s a functioning conduit for all the people who want to be heard. they don’t all rush forward or try to make themselves known. those with the most valuable knowledge are usually first and they all speak a little differently. some whisper easy riddles while others say nothing at all and play images through her head. some speak as though they are old friends and some are discontent that she’s asking for their help. sometimes it’s the same guides she’s heard before and those are some of her favorites. years of working together informs a healthy relationship. without them, perhaps this gift would only ever be considered a curse.

the mootons of maidenpool have had good luck in marrying their daughters into more advantageous houses for the last seven hundred years. alliances with families with a wide influence over bannermen have always been at the top of their lists and in exchange gold worth ten times their daughter’s weight. the newest alliance drawn for house mooton has come clearly through each sister’s reading — a stark for alerie to marry. elric was in their sights before his late father had made the decision to marry him off and the mooton girl, a pretty little thing plucked from the heart of the riverlands, arrived to winterfell in a rather short time after the agreement had been solidified. now she rides south, a soon to be member of the stark household.

#iaf.intro #‹ ✦ ˚ alerie. ╱ headcanon. you are not weak because your heart feels heavy. ›#‹ ✦ ˚ rhaegar. ╱ headcanon. he lingers in the shadows of the man who bore his name before him. ›

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askthekuvaqbrothers · 3 years

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It's all Fun and Games

(TW: Injury)

“I’m heading to work now.”

Hermes adjusted his coat, feeling a collision with his leg the moment he reached for the door.

“Don’t go!”

Holding in a small sigh, he knelt down and ran a hand through his son’s green hair.

“It will only be for a little while Cletus. Just be patient.”

“Then take me with you!”

“I’m going to work. It’s not a safe place for children.”

“I’ll be good! I’ll sit still!”

Hermes sighed, “You know if I take you, then the other two will want to come too.”

Cletus frowned, not at all pleased with what he was hearing, and frowned harder when his brothers came up behind him, Rufus prying at his arm.

“Come back, we can’t play Junk Knights and Orbit Pixies with only two!”

Hermes smiled, “See? You’ve obviously got a game going on. Time will fly while you’re playing, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

Argus joined in, pulling Cletus’ other arm, and successfully dislodging him from their father’s leg. Unimpeded, Hermes now took his chance to leave.

“Be good.”

The door clunked shut. Pulling from his brothers grasp, Cletus considered wailing on the door and crying for Hermes to come back, but the man’s long strides probably meant he was already far from the door, and crying was just grotty and exhausting. Besides, Rufus was already grabbing at him again.

“Back to you position pixie! I was just about to battle to the death against the evil Controller.”

“Yeah, you know it’s my favourite part.” Argus grinned, punching a fist into his palm.

“I don’t wanna. Let’s… play something else.”

Rufus pouted, crossing his arms, “Like what? It’s gotta be more fun than Junk Knights.”

“What about…” Cletus looked around the house, then to the door, before a devilish smirk grew, “Hide and Seek?”

“Lame!”

“-But we play it outside.”

Rufus’ eyes lit up, but Argus put his hands on his hips.

“We’re not allowed outside without Dad.”

“Yes, but he always takes ages with work, so as long as we’re back before him, he’ll never know.”

“Yes! Let’s gooo!”

Rufus ran straight to the window in the kitchen, being the only one that opened to let out the smoke that came with Hermes’ cooking. It required him to scramble up the cooking furnace, and once he was on top and at the windowsill, he paused to offer a hand.

“Hurry up! I already have a perfect hiding place!”

Argus stepped up, accepting the hand, and allowed himself to be pulled higher. As the space on the furnace became cramped, Rufus slipped out the window and Argus in turned helped pull Cletus (and the plush toy he never let go of) up. Once they’d cleared the fall, the three made their way to the centre of town, standing by one of Gizmo’s emergency call stations.

“Right! Since you wanted to change the game, Cletus, you’re the seeker.”

“Okay. I’ll close my eyes and count to a hundred then.”

The green haired boy adjusted Poisonous into the crook of his arm, then turned and began counting.

“One, two, three, four…”

With a grin Rufus sprinted off, vanishing into the warren of a town, Argus swiftly following after. When the sound of their steps on the metal walkways went silent, Cletus stopped counting.

“Finally.” He brought Poisonous to eye level, “Now, what should we do now that we have some peace and quiet?”

The plushie’s crooked eyes stared off.

“Impeccable idea. Perhaps we could even go for refreshments.”

--------------------------------------------------------------

It must have been almost half an hour later when Argus found Cletus lounging in the shade, absently patting his plush toy. He looked up, and tried to feign surprise when he spotted the glare.

“Oh, you found me?”

“I believe you were supposed to be the seeker.”

“Is that so? I must have misheard…”

“How long were you going to sit here?”

“Don’t know, how long were you hiding?”

Argus sighed, the one that made it known he was not in the mood to play along with Cletus’ game. The green haired boy pouted in turn.

“Well I caught on to your alternate game, but Rufus is still hiding.”

“…Can’t we just wait until Dad is back? He’ll come looking for us anyway.”

He looked up to where he could just make out the entrance to the mines. Argus followed his gaze and paused, thinking.

“I suppose that wouldn’t hurt. He can only ground us.”

Cletus relaxed, scooting over enough that Argus could have some shade too. Another hour passed by before they finally caught sight of Hermes striding out into the open, where the two chose to wave him down. When their father caught sight of them, he was clearly disappointed, until something else crept into his expression.

“Boys, what are you doing here? Where is your brother?!”

Cletus rolled his eyes, “Don’t worry, he’s probably still hiding from our hide-and-seek game.”

“How long ago was this?!” Hermes was quickly starting to panic, Rufus being the one he knew shouldn’t be left on his own, “We need to find him.”

“Sure, I guess so.” Argus stood, dusting himself off, “If we shout that he’s won he might come out?”

Cletus reluctantly stood as well, following his father and brother as they began calling out. Rufus not coming home honestly sounded like a good deal to him; no more being hit in his sleep, no more grubby fingers going through his stuff, more peace and quiet. Sure, Argus may start demanding more of him, but it wasn’t the worst trade off.

Another 30 minutes and there was still no sign of their red-haired sibling. There was also no signs of fire and/or explosive destruction, which was both a good and a bad sign according to Hermes. Good, in that they weren’t having to deal with a destroyed town, but bad in the question of what Rufus was up to instead.

“Maybe he fell asleep?”

“Maybe he fell in a hole. Maybe it’s a really deep hole, and we’ll never see him again.”

Hermes ignored Cletus’ comment, which cause the boy to frown. He didn’t understand what the big deal was, it was just Rufus. He’d heard people say that Hermes couldn’t handle three sons, so surely it would be better if he just had two now. They should just accept he was gone and go home. The sun was right above them now and the whole mountain the town was on had begun to boil, heat waves rising off every metal sheet used in its foundation, and Cletus could feel his pale skin begin to tingle-

“Found him!”

Argus was standing on a small mound, looking down into a ditch that wasn’t visible from just the normal paths. A large piece of metal on the edge of it was also free of rust, leaving it blindingly shiny and the prefect distractor. Hermes scrambled through the scrap to reach the hiding spot, dropping down to pick up the missing boy. As he re-emerged, Cletus felt his skin crawl.

Rufus’ skin looked almost the same colour as his hair, and in places it had clearly begun to blister. The idiot had been sitting in the sun the entire time, with both the sun beating down on him and the giant reflector next time him, and he hadn’t thought to move. As he was being jostled, said fool managed to crack open an eye.

“…n’fair, -in’t say Dad could help…”

To where he promptly went limp. With a semi-strangled noise, Hermes began to move back to town, giving a brief command to the other boys to follow as they beelined for Gizmo’s clinic.

------------------------------------------------------------

“Heat stroke, and a nasty lot of sunburn. You know, there’s a wonderful thing called ‘common sense’…”

Hermes bowed his head further, ready to accept the usual lecture, but all he got was a sigh from the town’s medic as he returned to his desk.

“I’ve applied some salve to the burns, which will need to be re-applied regularly. I would like to say he’ll be bedridden for several days, but considering who we’re dealing with here, I suggest you enforce bed rest and make sure he doesn’t rub off the salve as it needs to set in. No running about, no going outside, no excessive play. And make sure he stays hydrated.”

Gizmo looked to the two healthy brothers, where while Argus nodded solemnly, Cletus’ gaze remained on the floor. There wasn’t any blame being passed about for why they were outside in the first place yet, but all Hermes had to do was ask and Argus would tell, and Cletus would find himself without dinner for the next week.

‘Stupid Rufus.’

Hermes thanked Gizmo, collected Rufus, and quietly told the other boys to follow. The whole trip home was in silence, and it was eating Cletus up inside. Even when they were inside, Argus watching over Rufus on the bed, Gizmo didn’t say anything, simply lighting the stove and beginning dinner. Cletus sat himself at the table, distractedly plucking at Poisonous’ threads, running over the many possible punishments that could be unjustly given to him. It wasn’t his fault Rufus was an idiot with no self-preservation, if he’d just hidden somewhere normal and safe then they’d all get off with just a grounding but no, he had to get himself hurt and make it a big deal and all the blame would fall on poor little Cletus for just wanting some peace and quiet-

“Are you not hungry?”

Cletus jumped, completely unaware time had passed to the point that dinner was in front of him, Argus and Hermes seated beside him.

“I-I…”

He didn’t understand why their father hadn’t asked yet. In fact, he only felt more confused when a hand rested on his head, soothingly running through his hair.

“It’s alright, I know it was kind of scary to see, but Rufus will be fine.”

This was wrong. That wasn’t his hang-up at all. Sure his own skin crawled at the sight of him now, but that wasn’t the issue. Was he really not going to ask why they were outside of the house, where he always told them not to be?

He stared into his bowl, before suddenly pushing away from the table.

“Are… are you not going to ask?”

Hermes tilted his head, “Ask?”

“W-why we were outside, why we hadn’t listened to you?” Cletus trembled, a confused jumble of emotions swirling within.

Argus eyed him, “…He wants to know why you haven’t punished us yet.”

“Punish-? Oh. Oh boys.”

Hermes carefully moved to kneel by Cletus, pulling him into a hug, before he offered an arm out for Argus to join. With two sons in his embrace, he let out a breath.

“Yes, I am disappointed you ignored my rules, and that it had led to injury, but more than that, I’m just thankful you’re all still here. I never thought I’d have a time in my life to be a father, but after everything, I now can’t imagine myself without you three.”

He squeezed them both tightly.

“I just hope that this world will last for you…”

---------------------------------------------------------

“OW! DAAAAD!”

“Cletus, don’t poke you brother.”

“But he’s trying to lick the salve again! This is the only way to stop him.”

Cletus turned back to Rufus, only to see his brothers tongue going once again for the back of his hand, so he yanked at his bright red ear.

“OW!”

Now with a dollop on his finger, Cletus sniffed at the medicinal mixture, almost daring to taste it himself.

“It doesn’t even smell that nice.”

“It smells like a plant I bit once!”

There were many things Cletus could have questioned, but he didn’t get the chance as Argus came into the house.

“Gizmo said this should help.”

Hermes accepted what Argus handed him, and after turning it over in hand, he realised how it worked. With a reluctant sigh, he knelt before Rufus, and swiftly wrapped what was essentially a plastic cone around his neck. The boy squirmed, not coordinated enough to dislodge the device, before he accepted fate.

Neither of his brothers could resist laughing at the sight.

----------------------------

Bonus: The scribble that inspired this

#Deponia #Rufus #Cletus #Argus #Hermes #Kuvaq Brothers #Gizmo #Injury #Sunburn #Back when I was musing on when I foolishly got sunburnt a few months ago

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boop-le-snoot · 3 years

Text

PARTY FAVOURS I A VENOMOUS INTERLUDE

Did y'all know symbrock is canon? Well, now you do. Reader's favourite deadbeat surrogate uncle is in town and he brought a... Friend. No warnings, just a boatload of crack and fluff, as usual. Reader being mouthy. Takes place a little bit into the future - around after chapter 32: spoiler alert is useless because we already know a tonybrucestrange/reader quartet is the endgame. 💖💝✨

"What," I had to pause for a second for my brain to catch up with my eyes. "The fuck?!"

It was truly a miracle I could say anything out loud, at all. Words weren't valid enough to describe my shock and confusion. The scene unfolding in front of me resembled and unholy cross between a B-rated horror movies about demonic possession and some deep-sea Eldritch monstrosity.

The eight-feet tall black, oozing dude in front of me? Yes, you, with the teeth. Ctulhu called, he wants his tentacles back.

The creature honest to god rippled, like some nightmare-fuel goth Jell-O, rapidly shrinking in size within seconds. As more of the black tar-like substance receded, a much more human form started to appear under it. Worn jeans, leather jacket, ungroomed beard and the look of a biker gang member coming off a serious bender.

"Uh, Princess?"

"Eddie. Fucking. Brock. Uncle Idiot." I punctuated each word with an increasing widening of my eyes. The world was fucking nuts. Two and two did not compute - Eddie might have looked threatening to some people - like white suburban Karens - even without the... Gooey squid-on-steroids thing he had going on. The man was built like a fucking brick shithouse, but I knew him way too well. Eddie couldn't be that badass to save a life.

"You two know each other?" Tony shrieked indignantly, a coarseness in his voice that indicated only one thing: my boo was well into his third drink. Hell, I didn't blame him - that gaping toothy maw was fucking gnarly.

Hands on my hips, I caught myself slipping into a mute rage, storming over to the 200lbs worth of pure dumbass and knocking him right in the face. "You! Didn't tell! ME!" A black tendril wrapped around my wrist, carefully but firmly securing it and preventing me from causing my non-related uncle any more physical damage. Although I must admit, my knuckles probably were more affected than his jaw. "You! Are! A MUTANT!!! HOW COULD YOU?! How could you NOT tell ME?"

I trusted the man with my soul and most embarrassing drinking stories. Hell, I called Eddie in a stoned haze the very same night I lost my v-card. I just thought we were bros, you know? I saw his whole fucking life implode more than once and personally flew to California to ice his injuries and his hurt ego countless times. I was done dirty in the worst way.

"I'm not-" Eddie's sigh was long-suffering. "I, uh, I have a parasite..." He sounded meek, in the same way he used to describe his drunkenly misconduct when I made our family driver bail out his ass outta jail in the morning.

"TAKE THAT BACK!" A deep gravelly voice thundered, seemingly coming out of his chest?

"Okay, okay," Eddie smiled. It was strangely soft and un-eddie-like. The only person he smiled like that was... used to be Anne. "This is Venom. They're an alien and we're, uh, a thing. It's a recent development." The tentacle unwrapped itself from me as I took an involuntary step back.

Even barring the fact that Eddie was dating an alien, this was way too fucking weird for 3 o'clock on a Sunday. I always knew the reporter was, for the lack of a better word, a little weird but he really took it to new heights. With Thor and Loki looking... Like that, I could see a human dating some sort of a hot alien. But with Ctulhu looking the way he did just minutes ago? Did Eddie seriously let all of those teeth in close proximity of his dick?

I had a "ERROR 404, common sense not found" hanging over me for the longest time. The others were quiet behind me, too, even Tony - one of my boyfriends, the most likely to cause utter chaos, was hanging back and expecting me to do something.

"Venom," I clarified, just to fill the silence with some noise while my brain processors re-synced.

"WE ARE VENOM." The tentacle that was sleek and black now had two completely white eyes and a smaller-scale version of the toothy grin that had drooled all over the common room carpet. Their voice had an interesting effect: it was so deep, the air around them vibrated slightly when they spoke.

I tilted my head examining the appendage. It was considerably less terrifying when it wasn't five times my size. "What are you?" And most importantly, are you a threat to my favourite non-related family member? I left that statement unspoken although it was obvious I was ready to fight it? Them? If need be.

"A SYMBIOTE," They replied, swaying the head-tentacle slowly. "WE LOVE EDDIE AND KEEP HIM ALIVE AND HEALTHY." So, they understood the actual question.

"Which is fucked up because Klyntar usually behave in the opposite way." Hearing Thor swear was, perhaps, even more unsettling than finding out about the symbiote-alien-boyfriend thing my uncle had going on. The thunderer himself was nursing a jug of golden liquid. The good Asgardian stuff, he must've been really fucking bamboozled.

"Okay. So anybody wanna fill me on the details before I beat up my favourite idiot?" I sighed, pointedly looking at Tony.

"I thought I was your favourite idiot!" He immediately retorted, hurt, but nonetheless opened his arms to give me a grounding embrace. We may have sucked face for a few seconds, because why the hell not, Tony was an amazing kisser and his tongue down my throat was very calming.

"Hold up, what the fuck?" Now it was Eddie's turn to act all offended. "Aren't you a little too young for him?"

"You and your most likely carnivorous goth space pudding can fuck right off if you're not going to be supportive of my very inappropriate, very polyamorous relationship with three incredibly hot boomers," I shot back, slipping into some resemblance of normalcy. Me and Eddie go way, way back and shitting on each other's bad life decisions was the founding stone of our bromance. Hell, he was the guy who showed me the wonders of sarcasm at an early age! Wonderbaum!

"There's three of them?" Eddie's voice pitched and he gaped, palming his face.

"SHE HAS A POINT, EDDIE. WE EAT PEOPLE. BEING UNSUPPORTIVE WOULD MAKE US LOOK LIKE AN ASSHOLE." Eddie's buddy stated, sounding almost fed up. So, they were sentient enough to recognize how much of a pain in the ass Eddie could be. I could work with that, disregarding the cannibalism comment, of course. What the fuck was up with that?

"Yes, Eddie, I also periodically bump uglies and trade disgustingly sweet text messages with the Hulk and a badass wizard," I rolled my eyes at the reporter's following gasp and angry muttering. "Venom, I like you."

"WE RETURN THE SENTIMENT. YOUR CHOICE IN MATES IS VERY WISE, CONSIDERING YOU ARE A WEAK MORSEL. THEY CAN PROTECT YOU."

"Shut up, Squid. I'll still kick your motherfucking ass if you hurt Eddie."

The emo space goo laughed, a terse scratching noise, showing way, way too many teeth for me to feel comfortable but I allowed myself to be placed on the couch between Tony and Eddie nonetheless. The initial shock of seeing a talking octopod with fangs passed quickly - I've seen Stephen's "trophies" he brought from his otherworldly journeys and Lovecraftian horrors were, honestly, pretty low on the gross/creepy scale.

"Both of you, explain. For the love of fuck," Tony sighed, emotionally exhausted and drained of his usual bravado.

"Eddie was my dad's friend until he moved to Cali, I've know him for fifteen years, give or take. He taught me how to ride a bike and bake the best pot brownies," I shrugged. There wasn't much to say. "I visited him whenever I could but you know, with school and then you guys, there wasn't that much time to iron out the details." I have Eddie a death glare, pointing to Venom's floaty head with my eyes.

Eddie nodded. "What she said..." And then launched an elaborate tale about some company called Life Foundation, some evil dude named Drake and his own alien pudding named Carnage, who was one ugly motherfucker judging by Eddie's and Venom's combined "ew" face, their aching need for human brains to survive and other, more trivial things, like mental breakdowns in a lobster tank and getting dumped by a fiancé and eating their way through a HYDRA base after being captured and tortured. What a wild fucking ride.

"Sounds like you had a rough year," Everybody's dumbfounded silence was ended by Tony who took a slow swig of his whiskey before speaking.

"Yeah, no shit," Eddie muttered, twisting his black coated fingers in elaborate but frankly pretty shapes. His alien wrapped around his neck like a tube scarf and additional tentacles appeared between Eddie's hands, gently prying them open and enveloping them in a sort of a hug? It was hard to compute, the black mass appeared to be totally amorphous.

"How's your anxiety?" I asked, damn well knowing Eddie's mind tended to run like Tony's: zero to sixty in point five with no clear destination. Having an alien inside of him must've really thrown Eddie for a loop.

"It's, uh, better. Venom helps," The reporter admitted, still staring at his hands but the crease between his brows had disappeared and the expression he wore was kind of fond.

"Good. You know, Venom," I thoughtfully addressed the definitely sentient creature. "Eddie is a bigger dumbass than me, which is saying something. You ought to keep a really close eye on him. If not for me, he'd probably be dead from alcohol poisoning, like, years ago."

"WE ARE AWARE. WE CAN ACCESS EDDIE'S MEMORIES." A head manifested itself on a thicker tentacle, floating over to look me in the face but maintaining a respectful distance and staying out of my personal space bubble. "AND WE ARE THANKFUL. EDDIE IS THE PERFECT HOST. WE LOVE EDDIE."

I felt the corner of my mouth tilt upwards at the alien's proclamation. It was child-like in its blunt honesty but carried a certain weight with it. It told me whoever tries to separate those two in any way would get eaten faster than they could say "SIKE!". And honestly? I would help Venom hide the evidence.

"I literally had you for thirty minutes but I would kill everybody and then myself if you two got hurt. This is too soft, I can't." I snorted, extending a curious hand towards Venom. They looked so shiny. I had to touch them.

And they let me. Venom butted their head into my palm and let me gently run my fingers over their slightly cool, slippery flesh. It felt like putting my hands on a surprisingly sturdy yet bouncy piece of flubber. I purposely avoided the small maw and the endless rows of sharp teeth but managed to accidentally brush against something rough and scratchy - as it turned out, the Symbiote had a very long, very dexterous tongue. And didn't that give me a bunch of interesting mental images.

"Oh my God, NO!" Wanda moaned from somewhere, the voice mortified and disgusted.

"Why are you touching the people-eating alien?" Bruce yelped, entering the room with several people in tow. The scientist looked worried, a little bit green around the edges. The tablet in his hands beeped periodically, signifying the ongoing sciencing bender he was in process of.

"WE WOULD NOT EAT THIS HUMAN. WE ARE FOND OF THE MORSEL." Venom defended, well, venomously. Eddie wisely choose to stay silent, trading a knowing look with Tony.

Stephen Strange sighed, briefly closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose with a jagged movement. "One day, Princess, one day you will stop collecting people that are obviously bad for your health and your future. That, or space in the tower will simply run out." With a deeper, calmer sigh, the sorcerer landed in front of me on the floor, sitting cross-legged and subtly begging for a head scratch. Which meant just placing his always neatly trimmed curls under my free hand. His jealousy was about as subtle as a foot in the face.

"I'll just ask Tony to build more floors, duh," I rolled my eyes with force at the obvious solution, giving into Steph's demands, beginning to card through his hair. It was calming both of us, really.

Bruce came over to give me a kiss and my other boyfriends didn't even grumble about the scientist placing himself in my lap, crawling over both Tony and Stephen to get comfortable.

Our dynamic was unconventional and more than a little weird, but it worked for us and the rest of the team most certainly didn't complain about the vast decrease in conflict that came with the territory. Come to think of it, all of us were more tactile than just a group of friends sharing a house and I was very much on board with that. None of us except select few (looking at you, mister doctor) were hugged enough as children and we were making up for it in spades right fucking now.

"Girl has a type," Wanda remarked, like the messy little shit she was. I stuck out my tongue in retaliation.

The Avengers' brain trust began talking about Venom's slightly inconvenient diet that directly resulted in multiple felonies for one Edward Brock, and as much as I tried to follow the flow and make my own, however feeble, contributions to the scientific side of the conversation, the new life form was much more interesting. I asked Venom several questions and they deemed them acceptable enough to answer - which evolved on both of us absolutely geeking out over the differences in our physiology. The space pudding didn't hold back one bit, insulting the inferior human biology with gleeful gusto.

"They need a chemical called phenethylamine," Bruce sighed, having deduced it through discussion since Venom and Eddie both protested aggressively against any kind of invasive testing. "I can synthesize it. No more head-chomping, no more murder."

It made perfect sense. Except it didn't. "Brucie-bear, you're a brilliant fucking scientist but a shit psychologist." I interrupted whatever came next. "Venom is a person, like me and you and, yes, even Hulk. Tell me this: if you found a way to get rid of Hulk, would you stop sciencing in the gamma radiation field?" I looked my boyfriend straight in the eyes, hoping for a spark of common sense. "Do you see my point? You science, Tony engineers, Steve draws and Clint bakes. Venom hunts. It's who they are, you can't give them a pill to make it go away."

The weight of my word landed in the room like lead, heavy. The only source of sound was the TV, playing the news quietly in the background for the longest time. Those few minutes felt like hours until Thor expectantly turned towards Eddie/Venom.

"IT IS SO. WE ARE AFRAID WE CANNOT INFLUENCE OUR INSTINCT TO HUNT PREY. KLYNTAR ARE APEX PREDATORS." The little black goop sounded almost apologetic. It was hard to hear undertones with their voice being so deep and grating. "BUT WE CAN TRY." Okay, I could totally hear the hope. Finding out the Eldritch horror could make puppy eyes was... Terrifying, to be honest, because they fucking worked.

"Got any better ideas?" Tony asked me sarcastically.

"I do, actually." I leveled a look with Natasha. She understood. "HYDRA goons. The aliens that, for some reason, keep invading New York every month or so. Stephen's adventures in Hell. Do I need to continue?"

"Wait, hold on," Steve raised his palms. "We don't kill HYDRA, we deposit them in SHIELD custody."

I snorted at the naïve Captain. "And what do you think happens to them there? Did you honestly think they just let torturing, murdering, world-domination planning psychos back on the streets?"

Steve frowned in confusion. "They go to prison?"

Natasha choose that moment to step up. "It's not uncommon for them to possess certain enhancements to be deemed too dangerous to be released back into society. Some of them are low-tier mutants and inhumans. Trust me, Steve, the lethal injection is a much more humane treatment than solitary life imprisonment in a ultra-high security prison." Romanoff stated with a trace of compassion. "And some mutants, we can't contain for prolonged periods of time." She added quietly, looking away.

Rogers was staring blankly into the wall, mulling over the information in his head. His intensive thought process was plainly visible on his face. I heard about some kind of fiasco with HYDRA agents suicide-bombing a city in Europe few years ago and Steve was there, along with Wanda and Sam.

"Venom is a whole person, and even if they look like they could be the main character in Call of Ctulhu video game, we can't just disregard them like they are some kind of badly behaving pet. They're my honorary uncle's boyf-sorry-significant other, for fuck's sake," I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation. "Y'all should know I don't fuck with people who give shit to one of my own. Don't disappoint me like that." I finished, feeling more tired than I had in months. I didn't regret giving into the found family dynamic, however I didn't exactly sign up for hard choices like them vs my long lost uncle, y'know?

Great, now I had a headache and three very concerned boyfriends glaring at me for unknown reasons. The urge to pace always manifested strongly within me as the emotional atmosphere rose in the room. With Bruce dangling off my lap, I couldn't do even that and I felt the restlessness blossom into irritation more and more with each passing second of my existence.

Eddie remained silent, looking down. Venom had mostly receded into the reporter's body, save for a few tentacles tightly wrapped around Eddie's palm.

"Alright," Steve suddenly said. "We can work with that."

"Princess, you look like you're either going to cry or yell any second," Bruce said softly, squeezing my shoulder and pulling me closer.

I immediately hid my face in his chest, taking several deep, shaky breaths. "Eddie is family. Y'all are family. It's terrifying to have to choose between the two." I said, after a brief moment of hesitation.

The reporter made some sort of a choked gasp, quickly masking it with a cough - I knew him way too well to miss the way he was fighting back tears of his own. Bruce understood, he really did understand me - hopped off my lap and let me hug Eddie properly, my happy-sad tears soaking through the collar of his tee.

"You're, uh, welcome to stay. I'll have a guest room prepared." Tony cleared his throat, passing his half-finished glass to Stephen who swallowed the liquid in one gulp. My boyfriends were so fucking emotionally illiterate. Disaster humans.

Huh, I really did have a type.

Later that night, I made the mistake of barging into Eddie's room with a bottle of really fancy whiskey I liberated from Tony's overstocked liquor cabinet. Visiting my uncle and boozing and smoking on the balcony, for old times sake, was my plan and...

I failed the mission successfully.

I didn't bother knocking. As soon as I saw a pair of bare feet, my eyes traveled further up on the couch on their own volition. There were so many tentacles, a writhing, oozing silky black mass and Eddie was making sounds, unmistakable noises-

"UNSEE. UNSEE. OH MY GOD, UNSEE, UNSEE." I stumbled back into the common room shivering.

"What happened, is everything okay?" Bucky stood up as soon as he saw me enter the doorway with my face scrunched in a grimace of regret. I felt like I've gone through the five stages of grief in the shortest time possible for a human being.

Somwhere, I heard Wanda's sudden moan full of pain and misery. "Please, stop THINKING about it!"

"Brain bleach, oh my God," I cringed. "Where's the Clorox?! I have decided I don't need my eyeballs-"

"Oooh," Tony's proverbial lightbulb lit up. The engineer sounded like he was about five seconds away from building a space ship and permanently moving to another planet. "They're together-together..." Tony intercepted me nonetheless, doing the most effective thing to make me stop speaking and thinking bullshit. He kissed me. With lots of tongue.

THE TAG LIST IS NOW OPEN! @another-stark-sub @mostly-marvel-musings @vozit @littlegasps @pilloclock @shereadsinquiet @downeyreads @hermione-grangers-wife @individualistfem @sleep-i-ness @capbrie @lillsxd @agustdowney @dee-vn @justanotherblonde23 @fanngirl19 @persephonehemingway @softie-socks @schemefrenzy @letsby @cutenessloading @romeo-the-cactus @jelly-fishy-babie @mikariell95

#party favours #bun writes #tony stark x reader #bruce banner x reader #stephen strange x reader #eddie brock #venom #stephen strange x y/n #tony stark x y/n #bruce banner x y/n #tony stark x you #bruce banner x you #stephen strange x you #venom is babey fight me

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