saintlygames

[saintlygames]

Good Luck, Valery!!

[saintlygames]

hello chat if you were writing a paper about Themes in certain novels, what would you say could be a specific theme you took away from The Kingdoms

[saintlygames]

vs my first mars house art when it was first announced last year :,)

dance with me

[saintlygames]

I’ll stop posting about The Mars House soon (probably, maybe) but anyway. Character sketches. February or some shit idk.

[saintlygames]

dance with me

[saintlygames]

[saintlygames]

so did anyone go back at a certain point to reread what the Speaker of the House said about river gale. about how they were too boring and tedious for anyone to believe that someone would ever run away with them. about how people drew straws to pick who would sit with river so everyone else could avoid them. how bone crushingly lonely it must have been to be river gale, that we see them interacting more with the mammoths than actual people. just asking for a friend.

[saintlygames]

i finished the mars house now look at my mars babies

[saintlygames]

A Moth In The Woods

how does one share their original writing on tumblr. i don't know, but here's mine anyway

based on the prompt from this uquiz: A factory worker finds himself increasingly enamoured with a Luddite leader during the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, he harbours suspicions that his boss is not just a manifestation of capitalist evil, but of ancient, eldritch evil as well (but wlw, and reluctant co-conspirators/sort of enemies to lovers)

1825

It was snowing inside the mill. Or at least it looked like it.

Wool dust floated suspended in the air, stirred into moving only when it caught a draft. The larger tufts settled on the ground like powder snow that scattered as Emmy walked between the power looms that produced them. 

She coughed, and the sudden plume of air sent the particles swirling like frost over a puddle.

When she wasn’t checking on the looms every half-hour, most of her work consisted of sweeping the wool away, which wouldn’t have been such a dreadful task if the wool wasn’t endless. 

She skipped sweeping underneath the loom, worried that if she leaned close to reach then the gears would catch her hair and pull her in. She dismissed the thought with a shudder that left knots in her shoulders. Once she thought of bringing matches with her to just try and ignite the wool and let itself burn out, except the floorboards were made of old wood and would catch fire just as easily.

The nail of the candle clock clanged onto the metal tray, signalling that another half-hour had passed. She leaned the broom against the wall and made a poor attempt to beat the wool fibres and dust from her smock. 

Typically, women and children worked the mills, but at this hour the children were at home and the women were looking after them and cooking their dinner. And Emmy, being neither married nor a mother, was happy to take the shift for the slight extra pay. Working alone had terrible safety risks and everyone knew it, but Emmy regarded herself as skilled and not stupid. She was qualified enough. 

Each loom stood two feet clear over her head. They were laid side by side in four rows of ten, reminding her of horses in stalls. Emmy felt like machines were akin to horses too; large and useful but dangerous if one got too close without a skilled hand and an understanding of its temperament. 

She got dizzy watching the machine weave the weft and warp over the frame, so she looked instead at the finished cloth being fed out of the mouth. Fine and precise, worth days of what a weaver could do on a hand-pumped loom at home. She dragged the tips of her fingers along the front where the fabric was coming off the reed, feeling for frays and breaks in the threads, and did that for the thirty looms she was responsible for. 

When the children were working to help their mothers or older sisters, Emmy played a game with them. At the start of the shift she lined them up like a governess and had them tuck in shirts, roll up sleeves, braid away all hair and keep it behind their heads, even the boys. Taking the end of the broom, she drew a wide border in the yarn-snow around the loom. Their main job was to cut and trim threads too small for the older women to see, but if for any reason they needed to cross the border to reach the weaving or untangle the yarn from the pegs, they had to call an adult. The more instances they called for real help the more points they got—recorded on a chalkboard at the front doors of the mill—and subsequently fewer fingers were put at risk of being eaten by the gears. Whoever got the most by the end of each week got a tart. 

It was arduous for the women to keep up with every child’s summons, but it was far more laborious to care for a terrible workplace injury and have both child and caregiver out of a job. Emmy had seen enough gruesome mill injuries. 

She cocooned her shawl around her shoulders to trap her arms, keeping them well away from the churning mechanical loom and cleared herself another step back for good measure. She’d long been unafraid of the machines, but one could never be too careful. A broken horse could be tamed but still deadly if spooked. 

When she was done, she screwed another nail into the candle wax to wait another half hour.

Her ears rang dully from the clang-chang of the active looms. When she went home some nights her ears rang, so she resorted to stuffing her ears with a mix of scrap cotton mixed with wax because if not she would be deaf before she turned thirty. 

And because they worked so well to drown out the looms, she almost didn’t hear the window behind her shatter, only felt the cold and the sharp glass rain on her back before she swung around.

She had a clear three seconds to stare at the destroyed window until a man with a hammer hauled himself through. He wore a coat that looked too big for him which billowed heavily like a cape. If he hadn’t been wearing it his arms and shoulders would have been shredded by the glass.

Logic was crushed between the gear teeth. Her first thought was that she was so small that a swing of a hammer would kill her instantly. 

[saintlygames]

when natasha pulley said “he would be none the wiser and he would be staying at filigree street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn’t have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing” and “don’t tell me, just intend to, then i’ll forget if you change your mind” and “no one asked him if he wanted anything or if he was all right. It was mori who asked those things” and “i came to england for you” and “you are my best friend, you have always been that” and “you weren’t my thaniel yet” and-

[saintlygames]

gale sketches

[saintlygames]

i finished the mars house now look at my mars babies

[saintlygames]

me: I'm going to write a fic to my own entertainment

also me, writing said fic:

[saintlygames]

OKAY HI in anticipation of the mars house being published i thought i'd make a side blog for natasha pulley stuff!! and maybe general sci-fi but that pretty much already goes on my star trek blog (which is @agios-rio) my main is @calnrio :)

(my fav pulley book so far is valery k -- i suspect that'll change once the mars house is out though)

i'm absolute shit at answering PMs but i'll answer asks and chit-chat in comments under a post so don't be afraid to say hi!

[saintlygames]

Today I learned "Jem" can be a nickname for "Jeremy"

[saintlygames]

"The stories are all remarkably similar. They all seem to describe a person, and not an actual god. They're all tricksters - you never get what you expect from them. And, they are always attended by owls."― Natasha Pulley, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Recently reread this and annotated it, which was a lot of fun. Keita Mori is still such a fun character to read about, I had to do a mock cover.

[saintlygames]

Pulleyverse MCs and How They Sleep At Night

In honor of the fact that I completely conked out after work and just woke up like 20 minutes ago at 2 am :^))))

Thaniel: he has no sense of personal space in his sleep. Just full on fuckin starfish. Mori absolutely does not mind bc Human Weighted Blanket but it takes so much fucking force to make him stay on his own side when need be. He will always apologize but there is not a force on earth that can prevent him from doing it.

Mori: he's definitely a sleep talker, but the kind of sleep talker who only says some buckwild phrase/sentence once and stops until like 45 minutes later. And since he can see into the future it's even fucking weirder bc it's stuff no one has heard of yet. I just picture him in the middle of the night saying modern shit like "wacka flocka flame" out of nowhere and scaring the shit out of everyone around him.

Merrick: SNORES. This man snores so loud I know it in my bones. Growing up Charles invested in a really nice set of earplugs because he could hear his fucking snores through the walls, and even created a will at the ripe age of twelve just so he could leave those earplugs to Merrick's future spouse so they don't have to endure it as well. It is LOUD. Poor Raphael thought there was an earthquake the first time he had to sleep in the same vicinity as him and has not recovered since.

Raphael: idk why but I feel like he sometimes just sleeps with his eyes open. He has them open when he like freezes and stuff so when he goes to sleep his brain kind of interprets it the same and his eyes just end up being open. Either that or he just ends up falling asleep in really weird positions that cannot possibly be comfortable, and gets really confused in the morning when his back hurts.

Joe: he has really vivid dreams. Not just about his memories and past lives and stuff, but he once was so fully convinced that a horse was walking around on the deck of the ship because he could remember seeing one in his dream, it took like five different people on the night rotation to convince him otherwise. And even then he wasn't 100% convinced.

Missouri: no matter what size bed he's sleeping on, he always sleeps stock still like he's in a small ass twin bed. I'm talking stiff as a board, not moving an inch just in case he manages to fall off of like a queen sized bed even when he's in absolutely no danger of falling off. He also seems like the kind of person who can fall asleep standing up for some reason.

Valery: fuckin blanket stealer. Shenkov literally bought himself a second comforter because he was tired of freezing his ass off at night, and still without fail he will end up without a blanket come the morning. He also seems like the kind of person who needs to have some kind of contact with the person they're sleeping next to, and if they move he wakes up immediately and is very much worried that they now suddenly hate him. He just wants to be Cozy your honor :(

Shenkov: he's such a light sleeper that even car headlights shining through the window will wake him up, so he HOARDS melatonin and other sleeping agents like it's gold. In modern times he would have like blackout curtains, white noise machines, sleep masks, the fucking works, as well as a very elaborate bedtime routine that he sticks to religiously to make sure he can sleep for as long as possible.

Bonus Rounds!!!

Flint: he always has to read something to fall asleep. If he doesn't have something to focus on before he falls asleep he will not be able to do it bc his brain just wanders too much. Conversely, he cannot read in the daytime because it will put him to sleep no matter how interested he is in the book.

January (I'm calling my shot with this one, we'll see if I'm right or not): he seems like the kind of person who needs to wear headphones to sleep properly, but he doesn't play any kind of soothing music; on the contrary, it's very dramatic and loud music that he gets very focused on, and that's what helps him sleep.

Gale (again, calling my shot): I feel like they have such a specific and densely layered white noise setting that just puts them to sleep immediately, but if it changes even fractionally they will not be able to sleep at all. Like if one of the twelve different white noise layers gets lowered by >1% they bolt straight up in bed.