#“drowning in the sewer” is a reference to →

[floortile34]

i feel lost. scared. lonely

step out into the sun. into the endless pain. alone in an opaque void, or maybe i just can't see through it enough to notice i'm not alone. it burns. is rotting in the darkness worse? drowning in the sewer?

infinite mazes of light, nobody aroung. this isn't real. the real light burns, this doesn't. i see so clearly yet there still remains no-one. fields of empty space, knee height. marble floors with no temperature

mirages of others. of company

endless seconds ticking by. however many millions. running around searching for a way out, tiring myself endlessly, never collapsing

my flesh bleeds – oozes, almost – with sickly purples

(legs numb now. alternating between writing tags and main post segment whatever this is called)

dragging my forearms across the subtle rough texture of the tiling. they bleed. they fall apart so easily. so weak. so brittle. so rotten through

i need ..... . .......i don't know what i need

please, i need whatever that thing is

someone tell me what i need

someone tell me what to do. where to go. i'm so lost in here. i'm running out of battery. it's always ticking down, never reaches 0, i feel like it's a lie. shepherd's tone

my sanity's slowly falling deeper and deeper into the infinitesimal abyss, or maybe not and it just feels like that. i don't know anymore. i don't remember anymore. i don't remember what i am. my family's fading from me. i'll be alone soon. without them

my ideas are running out yet i must keep writing. this is my purpose in life for... however long it's taken now. 10 minutes? i didn't check when i started.

...... ..............

■■■■ ■■■■■■ shall claim me soon

[her-satanic-wiles]

October 24th

Sex Toys, Cumulus x Reader

Masterlist

Words: 1k.

Warnings: Sex toys; sapphic; thigh riding; multiple orgasms; nipple play; thigh spanking; ngl, I struggled with this one. I wanted it to be better than it was but the Aurora fic kinda meant that nothing else would live up to it lmao;

Taglist: @sodoswitchimage @enchantedbunny @bitchywitchygardener @thew0man @sodomiser @the-did-i-ask @copias-sewer-rat @gehrmansbignaturals @deetz-ghuleh @onlyhereforghost @zombiesnips-blog

🔞 MDNI 🔞

Amidst the tranquil stillness of a moonlit night, a sense of anticipation hung in the air, as if the world itself held its breath in eager anticipation of what was to come. You were wrapped up in Cumulus’ arms, soft bodies pressed together and connected at your lips, where your tongues danced together. Both of you were completely void of clothing, and thighs pressed up against each other’s most sensitive places, hips moving and seeking as much pleasure as possible. The sound of your gasps and moans were the only noises that could be heard in the stillness of the room. Just two people desperately trying to reach an end by any means necessary.

As your clit continued to rub against Cumulus’ thigh, you allowed your hands and lips to wander over her body, pinching and playing with her nipples as your tongue laved over her neck. Her own hand had moved down to your thigh and pulled on it, tugging you ever closer to her centre in order for her to get as much pleasure from your body as she possibly could. The longer she rubbed against you, the wetter your thigh became, but you felt like you could drown in that feeling - knowing that it was you providing her with everything she needed to cum.

She came first - her face and body contorting with the feeling of the powerful orgasm washing over her. Her hips moved faster in a desperate effort to add to the intensity and her fingernails dug into your skin purely because she didn’t know what else to do. You soon followed her, your own body reacting in a similar manner and rubbing against her thigh needily prolonging the orgasm you were experiencing, her sweet, melodic voice whispering sweet nothings in your ear with breathless words as she was coming down from her own high. Her body, despite her orgasm being strong enough to make her eyes close in exhaustion, continued to move against you, silently begging for a second release.

“Can I get it?” She asked you, voice barely above a whisper.

“Please.” You answered, knowing exactly what she was referring to.

If you both spent the rest of the night humping against each other like animals, you’d never stop and work yourselves into oversensitivity. Thus, she pulled away from you temporarily, reaching into the bedside drawer and pulling out the only item you both favourited and frequently used: your wand vibrator. As soon as it was plugged into the wall, she moved back to her original position, placing your thigh back over the top of her and returning to that lazy, sideways missionary position you’d both been in before. The vibrator was placed between the pair of you, adjusting it so it sat between both of your clits before she turned it on.

Even at its lowest intensity it was incredibly powerful, both of your mouths falling open in pleasure at the low rumble now vibrating through your entire body. You both rubbed against it, the pressure from her movements pushing the vibrator harder against your clit and vice versa. “Oh fuck.” You moaned loudly, the pleasure proving too much for gentle whispers. Your body needed to expel that energy somehow, and your voice was the only way it could.

“Oh, just like that.” Cumulus’ voice was just as strained as yours, oozing with unbridled bliss.

Your body pushed you upwards, the need to move your hips faster too great for the position you were in. You sat up on your knees, still with your clit connected to the vibrator and began to rub against it, your hips moving at a much faster pace, which, in turn, kept the vibrator bouncing off Cumulus and made her noises increase in volume.

“Fucking just like that!” She exclaimed, hand coming to pull at your thigh once again for purchase.

Cumulus always loved it when you rode her. She got to lie back against the pillows and watch you take what you needed, see your body move as it bounced against her own. She loved watching your hands roam over your breasts, pinching and pulling your nipples for extra stimulation. You were truly a sight to behold when you were on top.

You, on the other hand, got to watch her body as it moved with the force of your thrusts, the way her breasts jiggled with each movement of your hips. The way her bottom lip would tuck up between her teeth and her eyebrows would furrow. The way her blown-out pupils would roam over your body, focussing on your pleasure points and screaming each time the vibrator slipped over a particularly sensitive spot on her clit.

The hand that was clutching onto your thigh slapped against the flesh, gently at first, but knowing that you liked it to hurt a little bit she slapped a little harder each time, rubbing at the redness between each it.

“Faster, baby, please.” You begged as you bent over her body and placed a desperate kiss to her lips.

She obliged, kicking the vibrator up a notch. Her eyes widened at the increase of intensity, and her back arched. You could tell by the way her body had begun to spasm that she was about to cum again And if you were being honest, you were close as well.

It took maybe two or three more thrusts against the vibrator before you were doubling over, head resting between the valley of Cumulus’ breasts as you came for a second time that night, mouth open in a silent scream as your hole clenched tightly around nothing. Cumulus came at the same time as you, her fingernails digging into your shoulders and her eyes squeezed tightly shut, mind wiped completely blank as all she could think about was how good you’d made her feel.

She practically threw the vibrator away from you both from the oversensitivity, and once again you found yourself wrapped up in her arms as you both lay there in bed, breathless and dozing off into a peaceful sleep.

Previous Day ⛧ Next Day

[porcelainseashore]

The Other Son - WoD HalloZine "Haunting"

Commissioned art by @medeaft

Author's Note: It’s been such a joy to take part in @vampemoqueen’s WoD HalloZine—my very first zine! Thank you so much for this experience and putting it all together. Here’s a short story of Kai, my beloved Ventrue, and the shadows of the past that haunt them.

Content Warnings: Brief references to drugs, self harm, maybe suicide (if you squint?), nihilism, and murder of a child.

“Jesus!” they cursed as their feet plunged into the silty drainage and mud squelched underfoot.

It had only been a little over half an hour since Kai entered this godforsaken place, burrowing their way underground like vermin. Beyond the manhole covers overhead, cars zoomed by and train tracks rumbled. They were still close to the surface, close enough to hear the city breathe.

However, down here, filth and grime carved out names for themselves on the grooved walls. At first, they gagged at the stench, finding it unbearable, but as their senses adjusted, one smell blended into another, like a sickness they could no longer distinguish. 

Under normal circumstances, they would never be caught dead wandering around the sewers downtown. But since when were things normal? Like all fledglings turned neonates, they had been obeying tall and elusive orders every night since their Embrace. Except, they weren’t like the others—they were groomed to succeed and never to fail.

There was another splash as the ground sucked them in, causing them to sink knee-deep.

“For Christ’s sake!” they yelled again in frustration.

All at once, they heard the scolding voice of Liezel, their mother, resounding in their head just like it was yesterday, “Kai! How many times must I tell you? Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain!” 

They mouthed the words as it came. Liezel’s arms were akimbo, her brows furrowed as spittle flew across the room. She had rapped their knuckles harshly with the wooden handle of a feather duster for good measure.

Kai could feel the sting of pain upon their hand, as clear as day, but sharper still was the humiliation, the hurt pride. Their younger stepbrother, Alfie, had giggled to himself in the corner. They clenched their fists. People said they took after their mother’s temper, and more often than not, they found themself agreeing.

At this point, their tailored pants and leather shoes were soaked through and ruined. Even dry cleaning wouldn’t be able to salvage them in their miserable state. Grimacing, they brushed beads of waste water off their waistcoat—it was Sisyphean, almost—as new drops replaced old, blooming in piss-drunk patches across silk weaves. 

Why had their sire, Elena, sent them here again? Oh yes, “The sewer rats,” she said. “They’re hiding something from us. Find out what it is.”

They flipped their damp bangs away from their face in annoyance. Nearly two decades as a Kindred and they were still an errand runner—to Elena, to Lady Josephine, and in turn, to Baron Judge, the overarching Camarilla… Stringing them along with faint promises of power, like seductive wisps of smoke unfurling from their tongues, slithering into their ear and making a home in the hollow cavity of their skull.

Well, there were no sewer rats here. Through the dimmed shadows of light, all they could hear was the sound of sewage flushing through the system, pipes hissing and shaking, and molded moisture leaking from the arched ceilings. As they took a right, a group of vagrants huddling over a naked fire in an oil drum eyed them suspiciously. One crawled out from his tattered cardboard bed and shambled over to them.

“You got any er—”

Fentanyl. Meth. Heroin. He probably thought he could score some. The mole people—the homeless, the addicts, the outcast. They lived underground, in the flood tunnels, because there was nowhere else to go. Sometimes the water would reach so high that a bunch of them would drown. Not being quick enough made them easy pickings for the Nosferatu, but still bad blood all around.

Kai scrunched their face in disgust before relaxing their expression. Maybe they would have some use for this pitiful thing in front of them. With a practiced smile, they simpered, “I do… but first, tell me, how well do you know this place?”

The man coughed and shivered, grinning with swollen gums and putrid teeth. “Like the back of my hand.”

A guide. The gatekeeper of the sewer entrance had talked at length about its subterranean depths. Perhaps this man would know more. Raising an eyebrow, Kai focused their gaze, making sure their eyes met. A thin ring around their irises glowed—subtle, enticing, yet demanding. “Take me to its belly.”

He blinked slowly, once, twice, and then nodded. “This way,” he beckoned, turning around and trudging off through the labyrinth like a good soldier.

And so, Kai carried on, past winding corridors and forgotten lairs, crushing soiled glass and used needles beneath their heels. At the sides, strange altars decorated with melted wax candles and rotting pomegranates honored secret gods. The tunnels got darker and colder, so much so that they had to rely on their phone light to brighten up the path, but the guide didn’t seem bothered. In fact, he became livelier the deeper they went, as if he were drawing energy from some unknown source.

“Albert and Persephone would have a field day with this,” Kai grumbled under their breath, mocking the two absent members of their coterie behind their backs. Sarcasm dripped from their lips, cloying and condescending. 

They recognized that same unease they felt whenever Albert conducted one of his ceremonies, or the time they witnessed Persephone casting eerily-shaped shadows from her bare hands. The taint of Oblivion clutched at their unbeating heart and made their skin crawl.

Distant screams and moans from an alley interrupted their thoughts and a gnarly hand tugged at their arm. “Not there,” the guide warned before taking off again along another passageway.

The metallic stairs they descended afterward screeched on its hinges, clanking against the wall. Kai wondered how far down they went. It felt like they had been walking for miles. At some point, their phone light flickered and went out, and they stood in total darkness on the suspended staircase swaying in the chilled air.

It was so silent you could hear a pin drop, which was weird, precisely because they heard nothing. No creaking, no footsteps, not even the sound of one’s breathing.

Where had their guide disappeared to? Was this some kind of twisted prank they had fallen for? But it couldn’t be, that mortal should’ve succumbed easily; they saw him submit, enslaved by their will, he couldn’t—

“Kai! Help me, please!” a shrill cry pierced their left ear, shocking them to the core as they stumbled blindly forward, tumbling down the flight of stairs.

When they finally hit the rock-hard ground, something wet and sticky trickled down the side of their face as a dull, throbbing ache blossomed from the crown of their head. “Shit,” they muttered, tasting tangy iron on their lips, like licking a battery.

Dazed, they tried to pick themself up, only to slip on the waxy surface, falling into the muck on all fours. Shame and embarrassment rushed in twofold, rising like waves of heat towards their chest. That prickly feeling at the back of their throat returned, threatening to come apart. This couldn’t be happening—not to them, they didn’t deserve this.

“What do you think you deserve?” the same voice whispered in their ear. Cold, unnatural, and unfeeling, but uncomfortably familiar.

“I deserve a lot more than you!” Kai had screamed, back when they were kids playing on the cliffs along the coast. Resentment reared its ugly head as they glared down at their stepbrother. His chubby hands grasped the cliff’s ledge while he dangled in mid-air, squirming beneath Kai’s feet.

“I deserve all of this!”

They could crush him right now, that stupid weakling who’d never worked a day in his life, who’d everything handed to him on a silver platter, just because he was the favorite. 

No one would know. 

Crush him.

Do it.

The whispers grew louder as they buried their head in their hands and growled.

“Kai! Help me, please!”

They took one more look at their stepbrother’s soft brown eyes and the ocean of tears that had welled up in them, before setting their foot down on his tiny fingers, treading on them like ants. Alfie lost his grip and Kai had watched quietly as his body was reduced to a simple ragdoll in the tempestuous wind. His limbs tossed about wildly as the howling gust drowned out the boy’s cries. Jagged bedrock by the cliffside framed its subject like a moving watercolor painting. If they squinted, they could pretend it was a bird diving to catch its prey.

They waited, patiently and then some more, until the red sea foam turned pale, and all that was left was a memory of what once was. One less mouth to feed, one less child to fawn over, one less rival to tussle with. Time didn’t bring any remorse. Perhaps they had been a monster even before they were reborn.

From afar, an unearthly roar and mechanical whir shredded through the stillness, jolting them back into the present. Was this what the Nosferatu were hiding? Kai had heard stories of otherworldly entities that existed on this plane, undecipherable, unseen to the naked eye. There were more than just Kindred around, and they were beginning to realize that they weren’t on the top of the food chain.

Bolting forward, they couldn’t care less if they looked more animal than human as the sludge clung to their feet. It felt like a mass of hands creeping up their legs, dragging them down into the dirt where they belonged. They should’ve been put down for what they did. But they felt nothing. Years and months of nothing. At the funeral, they pressed a shard of glass into their palm, squeezing it within the pocket of their trousers, so that they would cry. Liezel couldn’t look at them for weeks.

Maybe this was the day of reckoning, their last chance to repent, but was there really something to feel guilty for? They had merely taken what was rightfully theirs from the beginning—before their mother remarried another man they were forced to call father, before they were told to sacrifice whatever they had for the sake of the other son.

They had reached the end, knowing this to be so as loose stone and rubble gave way, crumbling into the void pit below. It was pitch black, a long drop into a vortex of emptiness. For every second they stopped to pause, the darkness enshrouded them further, heavy and suffocating as it seeped in through their orifices.

And they were back on the cliff, at the scene of the accident. Although, instead of Alfie, it was Kai who was standing at its edge, waiting to be pushed.

“How does it feel to be in my shoes? How does it feel not to exist?” The tone was derisive, contemptuous.

Did Alfie expect them to accept their fate? To beg for forgiveness and mercy? They convulsed with laughter, the sound ricocheting off the walls. Their body was hollowed out, empty, a vacuum where nothing could be replaced.

There was only one thing left to do. Fear and weakness had no place in the Clan of Kings.

“Don’t you know?” they remarked, eyes black as coal. “I always win.”

And then, they jumped.

Dividers by @diableriedoll

[frnkiebby]

I found this drowned greasy ass sewer rat (I have never seen such a T H E R E picture of Frank with his dreads b4 and it’s wild I needed this as a reference for a drawing like forever ago where tf was it???)

(Also send help my dog keeps hitting my face with her face and she refuses to stop it’s hurting my feelings)

this fuckin greased up sewer rat jfc those godforsaken dreads

i wish i was the one to chop those fucker off.

also pls i will need that drawing in my inbox asap thanks~🎃

[lea-andres]

Okay, so, if I could mod, which I can't for multitude of reasons (mainly "my computer is dying" and "I has the dumb"... Also "I cannot art") I would make a horror mod SO FAST-

"Lea SDV is supposed to be cosy, not scary" first of all *points at all the yandere mods*, second of all SCARY IS COSY TO ME-

*coughs* Anyway-

So, the framework would be as follows: On a random night in Fall (ideally a rainy night but idk if that's doable), your spouse would have a nightmare. You would then become the hero of said nightmare and solve whatever horror scenario is happening. With it being just a nightmare it wouldn't permanently alter your game so I COULD KILL WHOEVER AND DESTROY WHATEVER I WANT YAY!

It would work like a festival I suppose? No time actually passes? IDK if that makes sense but it does to me.

You would probably get hearts from this assuming you're not at 14 Hearts with them already even though you technically didn't actually do anything lmao. ✌️

Okay, so, each bachelor and bachelorette nightmare would go something like this maybe (AND REMEMBER: THESE ARE NIGHTMARES THEY ARE HAVING! CANON BEHAVIOR DO NOT APPLY):

-Harvey: OOPS HE INSPIRED THIS WHOLE IDEA LMAO. You know how he's got an... Alarming amount of dialogue regarding losing patient worries? Yeah... His nightmare would essentially be Frankenstein... Except Harvey's Victor. Which would just go SO POORLY... Let's all revel for a bit in how beautifully poorly that would go... 💕

-Maru: Maru makes the Blob, Blob destroys half the town. Pretty cut and dry, honestly. Just... Blob. 💕

-Penny: The children are being replaced during the night by doppelgangers. Wrong, unsettling doppelgangers. You and Penny investigate why, taking you into the sewers (IT WON'T BE KROBUS BEHIND IT, I PROMISE, I WOULDN'T DO THAT TO KROBIE 😭)

-Shane: SO, things are being destroyed in the night, sometimes animals turn up dead, town's getting freaked out, you're tasked with investigating because sorry you're the main character lmao. Turns out Shane's therapist is hypnotizing Shane and he's getting programmed to go do these things during the night YAY! Poor guy.

-Sebastian: Here, have this, we all know you want it! *tosses vampire Sebastian at you*. (I'm not particularly fond of Sebastian, in all honesty, but I'm sure vampire Sebastian would make his fans V Happy lmao. Yes, you'd get to let him drink from you, you freaks. /aff)

-Leah: ...Kel's a slasher now? (Sorry, I don't particularly care for Leah either, but hey. I assume you guys enjoyed punching Kel. You'll probably enjoy killing Kel in a brutal battle of self defense right?)

-Elliott: Ya'll seen Creepshow? (*Everyone starts groaning because I haven't shut up about Creepshow since the green rain*) Okay, there's a story where Leslie Neilsen (Naked Gun, Airplane, THAT Leslie Neilsen) drowns a couple in the ocean and their corpses break into his home to get revenge. It's that except Elliott didn't kill them. Because nightmare, you and Elliott are back in his cabin on the beach, bodies are coming out of the water, and quickly becoming yours and Willy's problem. (No Willy didn't kill them either. Probably.)

-Alex: He's on a gridball team, Coach is having him take some experimental drug so he plays gridball better, something something Werewolf. Let him and Dusty run around together lmao. Except oh no he accidentally spooks the town! :(

-Abigail: LOOK. It's me, I have to reference Evil Dead somewhere. Abigail seems like she'd be the most irresponsible if handed the Necronomicon, so she's getting the Necronomicon.

AND I HAVE NO IDEAS FOR EMILY, HALEY, AND SAM NOOOO. I FAILED THEM 😭 Pretend I have great thought out ideas for them, they deserve them.

[cyber-streak-2]

Thundercracker, sighing, referring to Starscream and Megatron: They’ve been fighting since they woke up.

Skywarp: Good! I’m glad they’re back into a little healthy competition.

Frenzy, giggling as he enters with Rumble: They’re trying to drown each other down in the sewers as we speak.

[phen397]

Sonic adventure 2 but told through notes I took while playing part 3

Time for the mines

A knuckles level

Gonna be tougher than he thought

Oh God it is a water temple

Water level unlocks and locks different areas

Drowned

All 3 get

Back to the city

Always alot of police around when u don't need them

Facts sonic

No signal from emeralds

Space only explanation

Knuckles in the sewers

The mines connect to the sewers?

Amy leave his head alone

Again Tails buddy I am sure it is important but can we get the audio guy to chill out here

Tails is tracking the president

Definitely not illegal at all

He has hacked the president's phone

Almost took knuckles' head off tails chill

Tails ain't waiting Amy he is gone

Route 101

Gotta get the president

Mario cart time

Drift king

Found you mister president

Reports say country is in crisis

What u want Egg boy

Full surrender or boom

Sonic heard that though the window

Now in the president's car

And cutting people off again

Good question Mr president

Hey wait

Signal from agent

They really raided the president's car, dissed Eggman, then jumped out a window and refused to elaborate

Pyramid time

Eggman went in there

Bat girl again

Time to kick some empireal butts

Lots of tails love for these last few levels

Hidden base

Avoid the quick sand

Blow up Egg blocks

Lots of animals omg

Is the colour of the animal it's rarity?

The animals shall be sacrificed to the child

Can I but him in the transporter thing?

I CAN

Okay he is in there now

Pyramid cave time

Half pipe time

Hourglass doors

Swing poles

Oh thing

Bounce bracelet

Bounce jump thing?

Doors that need a key

More half pipe

Done

Let's see if I can leave my Chao

I cannot

Wtf

Okay take the child out of the transporter

Headed to the center of the base

Eggman like machines

Gotta have a spare spaceship

Need key

I GOTTA GET IN THERE

Knuckles find key

Worlds greatest treasure hunter

Took me way too long to find the hammer gloves

Can now break metal boxes

Oh

I killed omachao

Didn't even think to try

Oh

Nvm

He back

Lots of digging through walls later

Key gotten

OK

Let's try to win a race

Mushroom race

My boy can run now

Wipes contest

Canyon

Wiped

Crab time

Easy work

Valley now

Jump off a cliff for the win

All level 1 races won

Got a sonic thing

What that noise

Bug ghost

King boom boo

Boss

Run around the circle to get behind him while he is busy attacking

Hit the little guy with the Hourglass to open skylights and fey boss

Dig up boss when he tries to hide

Smack da ghost

Rinse repeat

Knuckles looks like his only thought the whole time is"oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit" as he runs around

Boss done

Door open

What did you guys do?

Eggman here

Leave it to sonic

Eggman gonna kill us

Big golem man

I AM THE EGGMAN

Second boss in a row

Egg golem

Run around big boys ring climb his "back stairs"° hit big weak spot oh his head

Boss done

Nice try rocky

Cutscene

Pyramid opens

Space ship inside

Sonic run

TO SPACE

So this is the ark

Hit a rock

Knocked open the cargo bay and ditch the master emerald pieces

Don't touch that lever

*all scream*

What's up with that tyrannical knuckles

Place shut down after "incident" 50 years ago

Was advanced but now empty

Not much time

Impenetrable from outside attacks

Tails has a fake emerald

Anti emerald

Destroy power supply

Switch emerald out

Win

Amy got nothing to do and is gonna bitch

Running through ship with tails

Gole in hull claim me a few times

Bazooka

Big gum go brrrrrrrrrrrr

Like proto Chaos guys are here

Destroy generator for the win

More tubes for the child

The child for reference

Gonna hang put witht the kids till next time on this exiting adven- hold on one of the kids is drowning as I write this(not even kidding)what a little guy

[demonsteapot]

What type of music do you like / have you been jamming to recently? Any recommendations?

(my internet died halfway through this so i nearly had to rewrite it)

you caught me at a bad time i was schmooving to a sewerslvt playlist yesterday ;-;

okay to be serious for a moment. uh. i don't think i have super good or interesting (or normal) tastes in music? i can point you to some of the things i think are cool and good, and i can also point you to things that i listen to for mood.

ive also probably mentioned some of these before (probably all of them?) so sorry if there's repeats

(okay this ended up being longer than expected so cut vv)

good (mostly not depressing stuff?):

Bill Wurtz – weirdly dreamlike jazzy stuff (?) i recommend 'At the Corner Store' and then i recommend you listen to all his other stuff

Ujico*/Snail's House: ive probably ranted about this guy before; 'Cosmo Funk' is probably your entry level snails house song. sweet adorable future bass, my go to for free serotonin

Heaven Pierce Her – Ultrakill: Violence, the game's newest EP. generally melancholic but really sick especially in context. 'War Without Reason' is probably my new favourite track in the whole game? (you can tell i like amen breaks lol)

also ofc i have to mention john / TOOBOE!! shout out to @donutinsideofashark for introducing me to this guy. some recs: 'Tablet', 'Roman', and 'Appare kanpai' – stuff goes hard and makes me wish i knew jp so i could actually remember lyrics

mood (depressing and/or weirder stuff):

vivivivivi's Dead but Dreaming: concept album about a dead god, mostly chiptune instrumental stuff until the second-last track – personally I LOVE this album, but as someone said, it probably sucks unless you have autism (disclaimer: i'm not diagnosed autistic, this is a reference to the pinned comment). this particular album influences a lot of my works to be honest

two more vivivivivi beepbox albums, ones that are a little more lively: Sisyphus and Silly Little Songs from my Silly Little Head. probably not to the tastes of sane and normal people but i like the beeps and boops :)

sewerslvt: breakbeat stuff from a dark place. people seem to not like sewerslvt fans which is why i'm reluctant to talk about this one but whatever. idk what you'd call their genre (i've heard it described as ambient jungle, trance, something or other dnb, but most importantly NOT breakcore. call sewerslvt breakcore and you are signing up for a hell of a flamewar) listen if you like amen breaks and hate yourself (i hope not…) idk what to even recommend here… i stumbled across her first with Drowning In The Sewer years ago. i've been getting back into their stuff recently, which is probably not a good sign for my mental health… currently listening to 'was it weird that i listened to im god by clams casino's when i lost my virginity' which is a hell of a title

Heaven Pierce Her again – The Enigma of Heaven and Other Daily Delusions: weird album about religion and the internet. since this is hakita again there are amen breaks. good if ur fuckin WEIRD. i recommend most of HPH's work

i've also been listening to an ultrakill fan artist called Marzuku, who does – guess what – more amen break stuff. i don't know man, but 'At Ends' is pretty good

shit fuck of course the jvne section ends up being a whole paragraph just to say don't listen to their stuff.

THAT'S IT IT'S TIME TO WRAP THIS UP THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK. damn this got long. this is what happens when you ask me about my interests LMFAO

[i-restuff]

a personal Mario movie review from yours truly.

ok, so, I'm very natural over Mario franchise. I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. so this review is mainly from someone who is there only for the animation (also for Jack Black ofc). cool? cool. alright.

spoilers below

I'm going to be super upfront with the "good stuff", and sorta detailed with the "meh stuff". mostly because the good stuff is very self-explanatory while for the negative ones I feel like at least I should give a little bit of reason why I feel that way.

good stuff

I love the world-building, everything is very well-detailed and the environment is insanely rich

character designs? love it. they look absolutely alive and expressive

the casting. I think they're all really good???? I personally think Chris Pratt is alright too ig? I mean I kinda don't care, I was distracted with everything else in the movie. but he's fine.

Jack Black. nuff said.

I love Toad. I love Peach. DK. BROWSER??? everyone's very likable damn.

I'm obsessed with the 3d models ngl. there are times when I was focused more on the models than I was on the story. It's really distracting in a good way.

Storywise, I think it's decent but also fun!

love love love the dynamic between Mario and Luigi. Peak dynamic, really.

Such a nostalgia trip. I for one who doesn't know much about Mario had such a blast listening to all the soundtracks and looking at the itsy bitsy references and such.

obsessed with Lumalee. let em die :(

/////////////

the credit animation is super colorful I wish I could eat it.

^ I was watching this with a friend who is obsessed with Mario. there are times when he went absolutely insane and explained some stuff that I didn't know. which I think it's cool! it's crazy how there are literally easter eggs and fan service everywhere, it doesn't feel forced too. I really could see why people love it so much.

meh stuff

ok, imma be honest. I'm just gonna complained about the plot holes here,, It didn't really effect the story, but it did confuse me a bunch of times. again, this is coming from someone who doesn't know much about Mario. I might miss some stuff.

the transition when Mario/Luigi got teleported from Brooklyn to the Mushroom Kingdom. like, why? what's so special about that specific pipe?

also before that. why's Brooklyn drowning all of a sudden lmaoo. that part kinda felt forced just so Mario and Luigi had a reason to go below the sewer. it sorta makes sense I guess? but the pacing is pretty dang weird.

how does Peach know her own kind? "you're a human!". she was a literal baby when she first got to the Mushroom Kingdom

I love love love Toad character. I just don't understand his presence? I mean sure, he's bringing the comedy, but you could find the "comedy" elsewhere too. so his character is a bit useless despite him being the protector. long story short, the movie would be fine with or without him < this is how much his character matters imo.

the pacing after Mario agreed to fight with DK and then suddenly he's on the stage. tbf this isn't really a big deal? but the transition kinda bugged me.

I don't know what exactly they wanted to do with Mario and Peach relationship. do they like each other romantically? it doesn't feel like it despite being teased a few times.

my dude Luigi has to sit in the cage for how long now? kinda suck. I wanna know more about him, I wanna see him more in action.

that being said. I wish they did more with Luigi, give him something to develop on. because seeing him fighting Browser doesn't feel as rewarding as how we see Mario. all he did most of the time was get caught and sit in a cage while Mario had to go through all those bullshit. but I get it though. storytelling wise, Luigi is supposedly Mario's goal. to get him back and all that. I get that.

I can't feel sad for Mario for some reason??? (this has nothing to do with Cris Pratt btw). his supposedly "emotional" scenes didn't impact me at all. in fact, I felt awkward. I honestly don't know why though.

the final fight scene is also awkward? I mean it's cool, don't get me wrong. I think it has to do with where they're fighting? I guess imma blame Brooklyn for this.

the 80's pop songs felt out of place, but maybe that's just me.

personal rating? 7.

but I genuinely get why people love this movie.

[poorchoicesarebettr]

LOOK MY WAY SPOILERS

Some ranting from me for he new music video, spoilers under the cut!!

First of all, the visuals were fucking beautiful and eye pleasing. I specifically like these shots/scenes:

The lineart part was stunning and I'm still rewatching again and again as I'm typing

Next, I just liked a small detail of a locked book

The symbolism, I am sobbing. When stolas says "let me hold you" he is holding a full moon, the nights they meet. When mentioning you it's it reference to a full moon when they get to meet and im crying.

Also any shot were Stolas was crying I'm sobbing.

And final point: TW for Sewer slide

I personally hate the fucking theory about Stolas dying, but the ending scene where he was "drowning", really hurts. And idk why but my first thought is that if Stolas is left without blitz, he might kill himself. He's not happy anymore, he has to take drugs that seem to come from Belphegor herself based on packaging (probaly means they're extra strong if a sin has to make them). I don't think he would because of Octavia but if angst writers and readers needs it there ya go.

[doorrobloxstuff]

RAMBLE TO US KING, TELL US ABOUT RUSH'S BACKSTORY

So, Rush’s backstory, abridged. [MAIN AU/MAIN AU VARIANTS ONLY]

DOES NOT APPLY TO TO POLY AU/INGENS RAPAX

Originally, I was gonna make a fic called gutter rat but I lost motivation. But I’ll leave the undeveloped version so I can slowly develop it later.

Doing/releasing this for fun! Yipee!

Born into the sewer to a single mother. Either the only survivor of its litter or it had no siblings to begin with.

Earliest memories are of it kneading into its mama’s fur and running water.

Rush might’ve actually learned a different language from her, but I’m not going to force ANYTHING NEW about Rush.

Yep, Rush is a mama’s boy.

They both lived underneath

She was big, soft. She had smoky fur like Rush’s. The smile. Though she was

Rush’s mother also was extremely sick and very, very hyper paranoid that something would happen to her only living offspring. So they never, really fully entered the hotel.

To be fair, a lifetime in the sewers will do that to you.

The two lived in the sewers beneath the hotel, Rush would occasionally emerge from the sewers and play with the other tiny entities under its mother’s surveillance.

Rush played with Ambush the most frequently.

Rushlet and Ambushling. :)

Rush would return and curl up next to its mother at night and eat little things of sewer algae and whack at tiny bits of algae.

It was a good life.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end.

I don’t know how Rush’s mother died yet, since it’s notoriously difficult to kill an entity. But Rush found her cold. Fading away into flaking pieces. Her energy field collapsing and decomposing.

It curled up near her and just..cried. Because it was a child and it didn’t know what to do. Kneading cold skin and fur.

Rush tried to go to the hotel but got lost in the sewers.

And it spent YEARS in what it considered to be emotional and physical hell.

Also how it learned to swim. (Nearly drowned a few times in floodings. Traumatizing it more.)

Would get into nasty piss fights with other entities down there, would occasionally receive injuries from hitting sharp parts of walls.

Became a HUGE asshole to protect itself physically and emotionally and started going out of its way to attack or bully entities who were in its territory.

Eventually, it found the hotel again.

Decided to start living there.

Unfortunately, Rush was still a bully. Especially towards Figure (who, was a child of a single parent..and lived happily. Yipee! Projection!) But

Would tear up Figure’s books in front of it, steal books from its hands, knock shit over on the library, say rude shit.

Rush was a young adult by then just a reference for time passed.

Uhhh the bullying quickly ended when Figure told Rueben about the bullying and one night, Rush comes into the library and the little fucker gets knocked out by a angry tiny man in a cowboy hat.

Imagine the markiplier punching you meme. That’s Rueben. Pissed off country boy gave Rush the gatlinburg gas fire.

Once it was knocked out it dragged that lil shit out of the the library door and yelled “- AND IF I TRACK YA DOWN IN THE ACT OF BROWNEATIN ‘MAH KID AGAIN BY JAMES I’LL PUT A GODDAMNED BULLET HOLE IN YER HEAD!” Before tossing it out like a sack of potatoes.

Right in front of everyone too.

ANYWAYS.

Ambush still had a crush from when it was a child that never really went away.

“I mean, it’s not like it bullied me yet-“ *Depth stares in horror.*

Depth was scared/mad when it found out because Rush at the time was a walking red flag and definitely not the same entity they played with as a child.

Ambush went ahead, and somehow managed to befriend Rush.

Rush also, had a crush. Thought to be honest it had a lot of self loathing so. didn’t think it deserved nice things.

Eventually, Rush had a mental breakdown (still trying to figure out what triggered said event ^) and went back to the sewers, but Ambush followed.

Rush showed its metaphorical underbelly to Ambush that night and expected to be killed but instead its pain was validated and it was comforted..??

..and then the two confessed to each other and then Ambush had a really important conversation with it.

Basically the TDLR is “If you want me, you need to treat other entities with the same love, dignity and respect I treat you with.”

And baby girl /gn just.

Folded.

All (almost all ) the hate for itself, the world and others melted out of its body. Leaving something soft behind that Ambush gently embraced.

Not to say all the mean parts left..but..

Yea its life changed in that sewer.

They also loudly made out down there.

When it came up it apologized to Figure and eventually everyone realized Rush kinda just. Unassed it’s hole.

Ambush really said “I could fix it” and then DID.

Well, I mean too be fair, It was mostly all Rush but if the two hadn’t revealed their most deepest, intimate secrets and traumas to each other I don’t think they would’ve gotten anywhere good.

Other stuff:

Yes. Ambush is aware of all of this.

If Rush ever saw the movie it would cry during the entirety of the Bambi movie.

“It’s okay pookie! The fawn grows up and falls in love!!” “RWAUUUGH HE LOST HIS MAMAAAA!!”

Rush HATES the cold. HATES. HATES. And if it feels too cold it’ll start to excessively groom itself, Ambush, and its children until it they feel warm again.

The leftover asshole parts still linger I just gotta figure out which parts of Rush’s psyche would lash out in an unjustified manner.

[seldomscilence16]

Whumptober Day 7:

"I paced around for hours on empty. I jumped at the slightest of sounds"

Alleyway | radio silence | "can you hear me?" 

Fandom: TMNT

Prompts used: All

Oof poor Mikey in this one. I may make a part two for this as well, but i'm debating it cause it may be a little more mature. I took inspiration from several places (if you catch the references let me know!) But a collection of one shots on ao3 has its hooks in me (the curse of being the cute one) and would maybe be the direction of the continuation… so it may not be a whumptober thing. Anywho, Drowning TW and Thoughts of Dying. And mentions of dehumanization? Briefly.

…

Michaelangelo had terrible luck when it came to villians. He may argue that his brothers are just as much trouble magnets as he is, but he knows in the back of his mind that he has to have a stronger pull. It seems like every time he goes anywhere, he's getting into some kind of trouble- or rather it finds him, since he's even more tired than his family is when it comes to these situations. 

It's why he had no qualms when he'd learned of his brother's plans for the night, Why he had been alone to begin with. Leonardo, Raph and Casey had egged each other on into an obstacle course type patrol, gone before anyone could blink, laughter echoing down the sewers. Donnie had taken that as good enough permission to get together with April and Leatherhead to do… something. Mikey had not been told exactly what, Donnie had claimed it was too complicated for Mikey to understand, and while that had hurt, he'd waved Donnie off with a smile. That had left him and Master Splinter alone, his father had given him a long look as he made himself tea and Mikey was sure he was about to get lectured into extra training.

"You know my son, a change of scenery may at least have your sighs giving your lungs fresh air." He says finally, whiskers twitching as he heads for the couch to watch his programs. 

'Leave me in peace.' Goes unsaid

"Leo doesn't like me going topside alone." He should just thank Sensei and run, but the mental image of a Leo lecture is enough to make him cautious. 

The look Splinter gives the ceiling has Mikey flinching just a bit.

"You are just as capable as your brother's Michaelangelo, Leonardo is simply blinded by his protective instincts. I trust you my son." He grabs the remote, a dismissal, but throws one more comment over his shoulder, "Do send them a message though, it is better for them to know then to not." 

"Thanks Sensei, be back before sunrise!" He grabs his skateboard since he'll have nothing better to do, an ache in his chest as he leaves the lair with only the sounds of a tv behind him. 

He loves his family, he understands that they dont always want to be together, he understands that he's not the easiest to have around. The title of youngest hangs heavily on his shoulders despite how little the age difference is. But it's fine, seeing his family and friends happy is all he really wants, even if that means he takes a step back. His t-phone remains silent, his text unanswered, he ignores it as best he can as he reaches the surface and takes his board to the roof tops. 

It's a quiet night, like it had been for the past couple days. They'd had a larger fight at the beginning of the week, which is probably why Leo felt comfortable with their smaller patrol group. He hoped they could have some fun tonight, Raph and Leo were always so tense… 

His neck tingles so abruptly he fumbles his landing on the next rooftop, missing the skateboard and tumbling head over heels before correcting and sliding into a crouch. His eyes scan the area, heart beating wildly in his chest, his brothers may doubt his instincts, but if his senses say he's being watched, 9 times out of 10 he is. The shadows lay still, but Mikey knows that something set him off. 

A noise below has him stiffening, staring at the edge of the building and the gap he'd just jumped over. It could be a cat, he had a thing with cats after all, and if the cat needed help, Mikey should help 'em… but if it was a creepy creep, well Mikey supposed he would be in trouble. But he could handle a creepy creep, he was a capable ninja, with natural born talent and stuff… 

He needed to chill out on the horror movie marathons.

Slinking carefully across the rooftop, steps silent and breath nonexistent, he swears to whoever's listening that if it's his brothers down there, he will be very unhappy! He peeks over the edge, and as before finds nothing out of the ordinary. He's ready to laugh this off as paranoia, to continue about his night and never speak of this again, but of course that can't be the case. Before he can turn, the prickly feeling returns to his neck, too quick for him to react, something plunges into his shoulder and a jarring wave of exhaustion hits him, so thick he can't even move, the last thing he sees is an empty alleyway.

 

"We're home!" Leo calls into the lair as they enter, awaiting Mikey's excited questions and maybe a snack. 

"Welcome home my sons, how was your run?" Sensei comes from the kitchen, likely getting ready to meditate before bed. 

"Beat this knucklehead by a mile!" Raph grins widely, the mood light and easy for the first time in a while.

"Only because you cheated with that light pole turn!" Leo's own smile is brighter than its been as he shakes his head at his brother, speaking of. He cranes his neck to peer into the kitchen, finding it empty however, "Where's Mikey?" 

Splinter raises an eyebrow,

"He went out for some fresh air. As his message should have stated."

Leo takes his t-phone from his belt, a single message in the group chat, sent hours ago. 

"He went topside alone?" 

"Yes, as you and your brothers have all done. As I have trained you. Was I to keep him cooped up while you three had a night of enjoyment?" Splinters eyes speak volumes, and guilt hits Leo like a truck. 

"Still… Sensei, it's like the bad guys are drawn to him-" 

"He is a ninja." Splinters staff hits the floor with a silencing thwack, he shakes his head, obviously done with this conversation, "I'm going to meditate. I suggest you think about how you treat Michaelangelo, and ponder on his feelings of said treatment." 

The two eldest are left in silence, when Raph holds up his own T-phone,

"Is now a bad time to mention Mikey's tracker is offline." 

Two panicked 'What's!?' Echo across the lair. 

Mikey will never live this down. He'll never be allowed anywhere alone, he'll be lucky to leave the lair at all. 

His body is working against him, sluggish and heavy, hard to move. His head aches in swimming waves, and his scrapes from his rooftop stumble sting annoyingly. His mask has been taken, his weapons, pads and even his wrappings, he feels naked, vulnerable, he hates it. Around his wrists, manacles are locked tightly, a trail of chain leading to where wall and floor meet, where it is embedded deeply. His wrists are already raw despite his sluggish mobility. 

"Comfortable Mabayui hikari?" Above him lies the entrance, a rusty ladder leading down, two drainage pipes- barred up- are on either wall adjacent to the ladder. The head peering down at him is clad in foot clan garb and thus hidden, but Mikey knows a smirk when he hears one. 

"We prepared this place just for you Akarui chī. Since we know our new pet needs his water source." Another head appears, the largest foot ninja he's seen. They both chuckle as if they'd made the best joke, but Mikey can only think about the down hill slope his night has taken. 

"If you survive, maybe Master Shredder will keep you as his own pet. Or maybe we'll keep you our little secret, I'm sure we could have lots of fun." 

"See you when high tide ends, or not." 

The door slams closed and Mikey's panic skyrockets. They were serious. Those stupid drains were gonna let water IN, and Mikey was way too short for this ride! Wondrous adrenaline fills his veins as he struggles into a sitting position, yanking at the chains hoping something will give so he can get the heck out of here before he tests just how long he can really hold his breath. 

"He's not answering, I don't even think it's going through!" Casey calls as he enters the lair.

"I can't get a read on his T-phone. Last known location is from over 3 hours ago, so either someone must have the strongest signal jammer ever, or his phone's been destroyed." 

"Who da hell'd be stupid enough to take our brotha?" Raphs knuckles are bruised, likely from a destroyed draining dummy.

"Are we sure it didn't just die? I mean Mikey's usually good at keeping it charged but it's been a weird week, maybe he's fine and headed home now!" April has been wringing her hands since her arrival- no since the phone call- but she would much prefer this over what her anxieties are telling her. 

"Mikey knows better than to go radio silent for this long. It's not like him." Leo's crossed arms hide his pale knuckled fists, as he tries to keep a calm head about him. 

"I can sense something is wrong, We must hurry." Sensei exits his room, looking shaken from whatever his meditation had brought him. 

"Do you know where he is, Sensei??" 

"I believe I can get us close."

Mikeys paced the length of his dungeon more times than he can keep track of, chains keeping him from reaching the ladder and even the drains. He's yet to find anything helpful, wrists bleeding at this point from how much he'd struggled against the chains. Not even a grain of dust had been shed from where they connect to the wall, and it's freaking him out. Sounds echo around him, and each one is driving him more over the edge than the last, wondering if the waters finally come, or the foot, or Shredder himself. His stomach churns against nothing but bile and his head still spins with whatever they used to knock him out.

He hates this. Maybe his brothers are right, about everything. What good is he? He only causes trouble, and he can't even seem to get out of it, and this one should be easy! No, it shouldn't have happened in the first place. He should have stayed home, he should have been more cautious, more careful, more aware. Some ninja he is. Defeated by chains and-

Water. 

The floor is wet. 

It's begun.

Shell.

"Sensei the dock is too big, how are we supposed to find him!?" Donnie's panic is obvious, scanners going ninety to nothing, and eyes jumping this way and that as if he'll miss something. 

"Focus, my sons, you have been connected from the start, search that connection, and your brother we will find." 

The others watch as the three turtles make eye contact and tentatively do as they are told. Eyes closed, the family steadys their breathing and widens their senses, clearing their minds of nothing but their baby brother. 

"Mikey,"

"Come on lit'lle brotha,"

"Mikey, can you hear me?" 

Mikey kicks his feet, shoulders straining as he works to keep his head above water by leg power alone. His heart is pounding out of his chest, as he tries to calm his breathing, he needs to be calm, he could hold his breath longer than his brothers, he just needed to calm down. The water slowly climbs his neck and Mikey inhales before he's completely submerged. His extra lids slip over his eyes, he wraps the chains around his arms, wondering if the water would do anything to help his predicament. But his struggle only has bubbles escaping him, his last hope is to wait it out. 

He closes his eyes and simply floats. 

He couldn't tell you how long had passed, but the burning in his lungs and non changing water level indicates his fear. He wonders if the Shredder will boast about this, or if his brothers will forever be in the dark on how he died.

'Mikey'

He can practically hear them now. He hopes they had a fun night before he ruined it. 

'Come on lit'lle brotha'

Will they take care of Klunk and Ick? Who will cook Leatherhead his pizza soup? Who will get Raph to calm down, or Donnie to eat and sleep, or Leo to smile, or-

'Mikey, can you hear me?'

Guys, I'm sorry. I'm gonna miss you.

The three gasp at once, 

"Hurry!" They've taken off before the word even left their mouths, but the others are on their tails. 

The situation dawns on the others one by one, as they push to go faster, trying to think of how long the tide had been in. Their guts twist at the thought of being too late, what was the last thing they'd said to Mikey? Was it nice? Why did they have to wonder that? 

Raph slams into a door hard enough for its hinges to break right off the wall, the smell of wet hits them hard, of mildew and rust and sea water and age. The place is lightly furnished, but they are drawn to the hatch in the floor. Leo breaks the lock, Raph throws open the door, Donnie is the first to jump in, his brother a split second behind. Splashes are heard and breaths are bated. 

Mikey watches the bubbles drift upwards, chains holding his limp form in place, his lungs burn, he cant… he cant do it much longer. A disturbance above him, more bubbles, splashes of color, his eyes slip closed. 

He gags on the feeling of water swirling up from his lungs and stomach, the burn of no air and wrong pipes, he can barely get enough air in to cough any out, he's turned on his side, something is shoved down his throat, something hits the middle of his plastron, and water expels itself from every part of his face that it can. Nose, eyes, mouth, probably his ears, maybe his very pores. But finally, air enters his lungs after who knows how long. 

A tired glance shows his family, he offers a shaky smile, tears streaming faster, before it wobbles and falls, and he collapses into the nearest friendly. They could lecture him after a nap,

"We've got you little brother. It's okay now." 

And maybe it is…

[bruinhilda]

So.  It seems they did a movie “based on” the Missile Alert debacle back in 2018.  Only, y’know, they made it an actual missile and all. 

The trailer is painfully bad.  The vibe I’m getting from the ads is that this is a Christian film desperately trying to hide that fact.  There is a review on IMDB gushing about how wonderful it is and how it changed the reviewer.  Please note that the film won’t be released for another two days.  Funny how this review is dated from 2020 on a 2023 movie.

As someone who lived through the actual event, let me go over what actually happened:

On Saturday, January 13th, 2018, a large portion of cell phones in the State of Hawaii went off with the emergency alert.  Until this event, this was not an unusual thing.  We’d get this every goddamn time it rained hard, because any rain can cause the streams to flash flood and drown anyone fooling around nearby.  However, as it was bright and sunny that day, everyone went, “uh-oh.  Tsunami?”  As tsunami alerts are the other thing out here you can expect to set off the emergency alert tone on your phone.

I believe my exact words upon picking up my phone and seeing the missile alert message was, “you have got to be fucking kidding me!”

We hadn’t opened yet, so step one was get all of the staff in the work room to minimize the number of windows we were next to.  Step two was try to find any official word from anybody about what was going and and what we should do, if anything.

There was no word from ANYBODY, official or otherwise, for over half an hour.  Not even a,”yeah, we got this message, we’re trying to find out what’s going on” from the TV or radio news.  Nothing on the official websites either.  The period is referred to as the “38 minutes of terror,” and this was the main scandal, aside from the fact it happened at all.

Some people did panic.  There was an incident of parents putting their kids down into the sewer in Honolulu.  Reportedly, there was at least one heart attack caused by it.  People parked in the tunnels on the H-3 highway.  Some stores hauled people in off the street, and put them in back rooms or coolers or anywhere it seemed like shelter.  Wal-Mart, by contrast, reportedly threw ALL their customers outside and locked the doors.  A lot of people called loved ones to say goodbye, just in case.  Our security guard would end up being several hours late, because his neighbors were military, and they dragged him to the bomb shelter on the base, which was crowded with people, because in spite of the official armed forces “we knew it was fake,” stance, they still put their people into their bomb shelters until the official all-clear.

But for the majority?  Concern mixed with general disbelief.  The sirens never went off in most areas, which probably kept the panic down, but the lack of any word for so long actually made some of us wonder if it was for real, and that the people in charge just couldn’t find their own asses, or be bothered to give anyone instructions.  Certainly the news before this had been full of “North Korea has missiles that can probably reach California, therefore they DEFINITELY have missiles that can hit Hawaii.  We’re boned, people!”  Which is probably why our first thought wasn’t tasteless prank, or hacker trying to terrorize people.  It was plausible to us.

The Governor FINALLY got into his Twitter account, and word got around that it was a false alarm after all.  We opened at our normal time.  Some people laughed, some were pissed.  Pretty much everyone was glad it was a false alert, rather than an actual nuclear threat.  (I discovered my coworkers had never even heard of Duck and Cover, much less had any idea there was actual advice, pointless or otherwise, of what do do in the event of a bomb.)

The investigation found some shitty management in the department (said managers all resigning pretty much that week, because they knew they done fucked up), but the actual fuckup was caused by a dipshit on staff who set if off, apparently thinking the drill was the real deal, and then refusing to do anything to fix it, or even move out of his chair, while his coworkers scrambled to unshit the bed.

I call this person a dipshit because he subsequently refused to take any responsibility for the fuckup, went ON THE NEWS insisting he wasn’t to blame (while his superiors had taken great care to not release any identifying information about “the individual” in order to protect him from death threats and lawsuits,) and couldn’t decide on “I thought it was real,” or “I knew it was a drill but triggered it by accident,” as his defense. The official report noted that pretty much all of his coworkers had been complaining about his incompetence for years, while management did nothing.  Even the union apparently agreed, because he was fired.

Nobody has any confidence that they’ve really improved the system.  What did change is that Hawaii will no longer issue alerts for ballistic missiles.  As in, if it happens for real, we will NOT be informed beforehand.  Obviously that’s easier than making the alert system better, and/or creating actual shelters and plans for the civilian populace.

So, y’know, if you do decide to watch this “20 Minutes” movie, keep that in mind.  We will first know about an incoming missile when it explodes something.  Nobody’s gonna tell us beforehand to give us time to “get right with Jesus” or whatever.  And while I love me a good bad disaster movie, just the trailer made my head hurt.  I’m not watching any more of THAT.

If I want a completely fake “based on real events” movie experience, I’ll go watch Cocaine Bear, a movie that loudly and proudly owns its ridiculousness.

[waiting-on-a-dream]

My Milgram ocs as long palette names because making the twst version was fun

Based on this post from @.fivepointpalettes + later palettes. Let's go!!

Just Friends But We Kiss Sometimes - LITERALLY DAISUKE AND RYUTO I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO SAY

Let Me Be Your Unreliable Narrator, Baby! - Every prisoner lmao

Focus On Me (Ignore The Blood) - Suzume, Haku

I Touch You And My Hands Burn My Hands Burn My Hands Burn (What Have You Done) - Daisuke, Suzume

Well First Of All I Am Positive What You Did Is A Criminal Offense / And Second Of All Why Didn’t You Invite Me - Suzume (She seems like the kind of girl who would feel left out when it comes to activities like this)

What’s A Little Murder Between Friends - Rin (This is kind of mean but its funny 💀)

I’m Sorry I Chewed Through Your Walls But You Must Understand I’m Calcium Deficient / Please Be Mindful Of The Evil Yoghurt Demon In The Freezer - I don't know why but these reminded me of Ichiro

Being In Love And How It Sucks Sometimes - Daisuke, Suzume, Rin, Noa (Sad little meow meows)

Do You Remember When You Told Me That You Love Me When You Told Me That You Love Me When You Told Me That You - Suzume

I Loved You I Did So How Did We End Up Like This - Daisuke, Rin, Noa

This Will Hurt You More Than It’ll Hurt Me - And That’s Okay! - Akane, Daisuke, Haruto (They're vibing guys)

I Need You To Understand That I Really Do Want What’s Best For You - And That Simply Isn’t Me - Noa

I’m Always At Least A Little Bit Scared Hopeless And Frustrated - Akane, Yui, Noa, Mayumi (This is the opposite of girlboss)

Can You Help Me Find What’s Wrong With Me / An Unhealthy Relationship With One’s Own Identity - Ichiro, Daisuke, Suzume, Yui, Rin, Noa (They are not having fun)

Biting Into A Rubber Ball Like An Apple While Maintaining Full Eye Contact - Haruto (I think he would do this just to spite someone)

I’m Just A Normal Functioning Member Of The Human Race And There Is No Way Anyone Can Prove Otherwise - Kiyoshi, Mayumi

The Magical Princess’s Strawberry-Scented Battle Axe Of Infinite Bloodshed - Suzume

I Hate Citations Why Can’t You Just Trust Me - Suzume, Noa

Doctors Say You Need A Consistent Amount Of Sleep To Be Healthy So I Consistently Sleep For 4 Hours A Night / Too Cool To Sleep At A Reasonable Hour / I’m Sick But The Bags Under My Eyes Are Sicker / Who Needs Sleep When I Can Just Drop Dead For A Rest - Haruto (I can't- Giving him these palettes are so funny 💀💀💀)

Lonely Sewer Cryptid Looking For Love - Ichiro

The Privilege Of Being Born Somebody Else - Ichiro, Suzume, Yui, Kiyoshi (I don't like what this says about them)

Look At Her Go Biting Everyone Who Comes Near Her Like A Champ - Akane, Mayumi (One day they're gonna snap)

I Apologize If You Found Finding This Place Difficult But You Must Understand I Am Currently Evading Detection And Arrest For Crimes Undisclosed - Daisuke

And If You Thought It Was A Threat It Might Have Been - Daisuke, Suzume, Haku, Mayumi, Haruto

Putting On A Show To Seem Alive / When I Don’t Feel Alive - Daisuke

Time Has Stopped Passing A Long Time Ago - Everyone in Milgram should be getting cabin fever by now, right?

Once Again A Cold Rainy Winter Gives Way To A Cold Rainy Spring - Rin (Him and his seasons theme)

Here’s Cheers To The Man Who Stole My Heart Away - Suzume, Noa

The Sort Of Love You Only Feel When Drunk - Daisuke (Yes another 'On love' reference I can't stop)

It’s Past My Bedtime And I’m Thinking Of You - Rin

Oh Baby Don’t You Know Our Sort Is Locked Out Of Heaven - Haku, Mayumi (I REALLY don't like what this says about them)

You Have To Stop Making So Many Enemies - Haruto @ most of the prisoners (Its actually just the guilty prisoners lmao)

Keep All Body Parts On The Inside Of The Vehicle At All Times As Failure To Comply May Result In Having Them Unwillingly Removed - Haruto (This sounds like something he'd say)

Drowning In A Coffee Cup (What An Awful Way To Go) - Noa

My Overconfidence Is Astounding And It’s A Surprise I’ve Never Been Killed - Haruto (He's lucky my prisoners are all so chill)

I Understand Where You’re Coming From But Where Did You Get The Gun - Daisuke

Well That Was A Little Unnecessarily Brutal Don’t You Think? - Sender: Daisuke (He said he wasn't cut out for his work), Receiver: Akane, Suzume, Haku, Kiyoshi

Tender Words And Hellish Screams - The entirety of Milgram

You Smell Like Nonsense With A Hint Of Melancholy - Noa

I Live In A Room With No Windows / I Haven’t Left The House In Months - People are getting depression from being cooped up in Milgram for so long, right?

Forever Dizzy In This Lonely World - Ichiro, Akane, Suzume, Rin, Noa

Summer Lasts A Week At Best But My Dedication To Sweater Vests Is Eternal So Look Me In The Eye Little Teacup And Melt If It Bothers You So Much - Mayumi

You Can’t Just Ask A Guy Why He’s In Love - Daisuke

Can’t Let It Slip That There’s More To Me Than Little Old I - Kiyoshi

I Know I May Look Like A Real Person But I Am Actually Not A Real Person At All - Ichiro (I don't know what kind of mental illness he has but he sure has one or a few)

You Know How Sometimes An Unwanted Guest Comes Over And You Do All You Can To Make Them Leave While Remaining Polite / Fizzy Brained Children Are So Troublesome - Mayumi (They both apply to her so I'll put it like this even though the palettes have nothing in common)

You’re The First Descendant In A Line Of Workaholics Utterly Convinced Your Willingness To Sacrifice Your Own Health Determines Your Worth As A Human Being And Promptly Working Yourself To Death To Provide Unto Others What You Never Had A Chance To Understand You Deserved Yourself - Kiyoshi, Mayumi

I Am The Mirror In Which You Can See All The Evil In The World - Ahaha, everyone in Milgram

My Brain Operates On Frequencies You’ve Never Even Heard Of - Again, whatever Ichiro has going on /pos

Being Told I’m Allowed To Make My Final Class Project About Any Topic I Want Awakens A Demon Inside Me That Makes Me Subject My Classmates To Only The Finest Of My Obscure Interests - Noa

The Only Thing Greater Than My Ego Is My Impostor Syndrome - Daisuke, Haruto

The Cons Of Being My Friend Greatly Outweigh The Pros - Rin

You Are Who We Say You Are Because Public Opinion Beats Self Worth Every Time - Kiyoshi

Murder And Other Expressions Of Love - Daisuke, Suzume, Haku, Rin

You Locked Me In A Cage And Threw Away The Key And When You Found Someone Better I Was Left To Gnaw On The Bars For My Freedom - Suzume, Rin

What Do You MEAN There Was A Fire - Haruto (Poor warden-san)

A Little Weirdo Driven By Consumption - Ichiro

Your Love Has Brought Me To The Point Of No Returning - Suzume

Go To Sleep In The Morning And Wake Up At Noon Only To Go Back To Sleep Till Evening And Wake Up Full Of Regret And With A Headache - All that sleep deprivation finally caught up to Haruto

A Toast To Our Special Little Brand Of Sin - Milgram~!

The Man Of Wine And Cigarette Smoke / You And All Your Money That You’ve Stolen From The Poor / Thank You For Your Loss - Daisuke (His mafia side makes an appearance!)

Learn To Forgive Yourself - Noa (The only true innocent prisoner here /j)

I Don't Know What's In Your Head Why Are You Asking Me - Haruto (I can imagine the prisoners asking him what went down in their MVs and him going: does it look like I know?)

[caltropspress]

FEEDBACK LOOP #14: Voodoo Macbeth: Armand Hammer's "Windbreaker"

…Each new morn / New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face…

—Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth (1623)

They use me wrong, so I sing this song to this day.

—Nas, “I Gave You Power” (1996)

1.

Once upon a time, woods “had a gun once.” “Windbreaker” is woods’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedie Macbeth. Stories retold and resold—twice the first time, like Saul Williams once said. Not until you’ve listened to Rakim on a rocky mountaintop have you heard hip-hop. And not until you’ve staged Shakespeare in a sludge-slicked 150th Street Harlem sewer have you heard hip-hop either. A young Orson Welles directed what became known as Voodoo Macbeth on behalf of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project in 1936. Featuring a full African-American cast, the play took place in a quasi-Haitian setting complete with tropical-cum-skeletal stage design—palm fronds and bone altars. We live in Storyville where the population density reaches hypersensitive levels and the murder police can’t keep up with the homicides. (Meanwhile, the Second Witch busies herself with “Killing swine” [1.3.2] in Macbeth.) We’ve been here before, before. Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” (1988) told us to bite our tongues, that this ain’t funny so don’t you dare laugh, it’s just another case about the wrong path. He warned, in a playful and pajamaed manner: “Straight and narrow or your soul gets cast.”

2.

“Windbreaker” is a [re]mixture in the witches/bitches brew of Nas’s “I Gave You Power” (1996), too. The power, you could guess, is a wily one capable of possession. “Possession” in a legal sense—nine-tenths of the law and so forth; possession of a firearm [see: S. Carter, B. Sigel, Shyne, et al.]—but also the possession the gun holds over its owner. Those finding themselves possessed by the gun—a weapon which “made you buckwild,” in Nas’s terms—should brace for berserk behavior modifications. We can splice together epileptic seizures and Santería and call it spirit possession just the same. The possession is pervasive—everywhere. The ubiquity of guns in the collective imagination takes up serious real estate—we’re talkin’ eminent domain land grabs—and Nas’s psyche is no exception:

I was around a lot of guns then. Guns were in my sleep, in my car, in my home. Guns were on my person, guns were on my friends. That’s how much they were around. There was so much around me that I rapped about it. It’s crazy to think about that today, but it was my reality. It was in my head 24/7.

“Windbreaker” functions as an exorcism of that exact sentiment.

3.  RECKLESS WHAT

Blow wind! Come wrack!

—Shakespeare, Macbeth (5.5.58)

The wind forebodes. woods gets handed the gun “late night, right on the porch,” and it must be windbreaker weather. woods’ jacket rustles in the gusts. “I’ll give thee a wind” (1.3.12), the Second Witch says to the First, and the “wind” she refers to is what the witches bestow upon each other to exact revenge. woods, though, breaks their wind (true to the song’s title and his heroic epithet, likely). He’s not susceptible to their marshy shufflings, their murky hells. He “speak[s] things strange” (1.2.52-53), as Lennox says of the worthy Thane of Ross.

But the winds are everywhere (like guns)—they be blowin’ like Maceo Parker in a buhloone mindstate. They blow the horrid deed in every eye and “tears shall drown the wind” (1.7.24-25). Word to the RZA and Wendy Rene: after the laughter comes the tearz. But the winds swirl and cyclone and gyre skyward. woods, “like a naked newborn babe,” survives by “Striding the blast” (1.7.21-22) as a cherubim might, riding the breeze. He’s Kong learning to stop worrying and love da bomb. He straddles and hoots and hollers from the hydrogen missile. A hard acid reign’s a-gonna fall [RIP to Gajah].

Of Macbeth’s poor murderers, the second says: “I am one… / Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world / Hath so incensed that I am reckless what / I do to spite the world” (3.1.121-124). Shakespeare knows the sway of poverty over moral decisions, like the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet whose “poverty, but not [his] will consents” to selling illegal, poisonous drugs to Romeo. woods gets beat back by the gale-force winds, but he bests those “buffets of the world.” Everything’s for sale except for the Beaufort scale.

4.  YO-HO-HO

The gun, in the case of “Windbreaker,” is equivalent to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Black Spot. That is to say, the song isn’t so much a billy woods metanarrative as a twice-told tale of Billy Bones in Treasure Island (1883). Passed from pirate to pirate, the Black Spot is a black-sided death sentencing, a Last Judgment on a scrap of paper. Biblical bad luck. A Book of Revelation back-page pressed into a fist. Maritime connotations aside, the Black Spot signals that it’s marring time, so make yourself scarce or knuckle up.

woods claims to have only had the gun “for about a month,” and he was none too keen on keeping it. The gun, we assume, had traveled many travails and trials, tribulations too; that it had “been in the hands of mad thugs,” as Nas puts it. Mad meaning “many” but also “crazed” and “deranged.” Mad like diaries maintained by gravediggaz. Pick, sickle, and shovel-wielding men. The gun, the “brandished steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution” (1.2.19-20) is bequeathed to woods as it was to so many others. Less a gift than a curse. “Sick of the blood,” Nas-as-gun raps, “Sick of wrath of the next man’s grudge.” This gun—like any gun, perhaps—is one that harbors a self-consciousness. Maybe it is the guns that kill people, personified with malevolence [male violence].

Unlike countless others, woods doesn’t choose to use the gun to cement his masculinity. As Macbeth tells his wife, woods is already man enough, and “who dares do more is none” (1.7.52)—a negation of that manhood. Overkill, let’s call it. Mac daddies and MAC-10s: Nas is like the phallocentric Asian, half-man, half-guns blazing. “The barrel’s my dick,” he explains, “Uncircumcised, pull my skin back and cock me.” Macbeth, meanwhile, questions his hallucinating senses, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” (2.2.44-45). The blade is bloody, possibly with menses, yet he still grapples for control: “Come, let me clutch / thee” (2.2.45-46). In doing so, he’s giving mics menstrual cycles. “The game is so irresistible to touch,” LL Cool J once said of the mic phallus, “You should see me when fiendin’ for microphones that I can clutch.” 

In a letter to his wife, Macbeth writes that he “stood rapt in wonder” (1.5.6), explaining what he witnessed held him in thrall. On the porch, billy woods is likewise “rapt withal” (1.3.60). Banquo knows “instruments of darkness tell us truths” (1.3.136). But woods is “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness” (1.5.17) to use the gun; he doesn’t have “slaughterous thoughts” (5.5.16). And even if he does, his ignorance and mystification prevent him from reaching for the strap.

5.

A dagger of the mind, a false creation…

—Macbeth (2.2.50) 

The story told in “Windbreaker” raises questions of realities and false narratives, actual fears and imagined ones, authenticity and authorship—in short, the friction that exists between fiction and figment. woods mixes up the simulacra of hyperreality like the guy Quelle Chris knew on “PSA Drugfest 2003” that “mix[ed] up a spliff like witches with newt eye.” We’re pulled in by woods’ first-person point-of-view (“I had a gun once,” followed by a proliferation of Is) but put off by his reluctance to divulge the details. He bleep censors the name of who he “got it from.” By doing so, he protects the innocent, the guilty, and every gradation of conscience in between. The unidentified person who gives him the gun could be a peer, an elder, a mentor, a bad influence, or some combination thereof. Regardless, the nameless and faceless figure—a mysterious character, if we choose to lean into the fictitious realm—“showed [woods] how to load it” in the “same place [he] showed [woods] how to roll a blunt,” linking two illicit activities, both requiring punctilious attention to detail. Of gats and ganja; of heat and hemp. 

woods demonstrates the blurry border between fact and fiction in the scene details. The gun is handed off clandestinely under the cover of “late night,” yet the location (“right on the porch”) is indiscreet. This doubling (call it down-low and out-front) plays out anadiplotically when woods says, “[They] was speaking soft, / Soft pack of ’ports.” The sibilance of “speaking soft” suggests secrecy (if worse come to worse keep this on the hush, Lil’ Cease might say), but the point-blank alliteration of “pack of ’ports” sounds like when your guns go pow-pow (word to Big L). Furthermore, the soft pack of stoges—though its connotation implies silence—has a plastic wrapping that crinkles like a windbreaker, attracting unwanted attention.

6.

The gun given to woods is far from perfect, in fact, the weapon is “scratched and marred where the numbers was filed.” Like the bleep censors, the redaction of the serial number safeguards against snitching. But, as the pattern of the one-verse song shows, that which is criminal is liminal. Those defaced numbers, well, “you could still see ’em.” One thinks of Macbeth’s dagger cloaked in hemoglobin: “...on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood” (2.1.58). One remembers Nas’s encounter with “a wrecked-up TEC with numbers on his chest that say: / 5-2-O-9-3-8-5 and zero.” The TEC yearns to confess, “hoping one day police would place where he came from, / A name or some sort of person to claim him.” But with his “serial defaced,” the TEC shares the same fate as Lady Macbeth: beyond saving. Just as doctors can’t “raze out the written troubles of [Lady Macbeth’s] brain” (5.3.52), so too can’t you resurface a scratched-off serial number. 

To include bleeped names and scratched-off serial numbers is to engage in a sort of scriptorium subterfuge. Historically, we’ve seen this in novels, as John Barth explained in “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967): “Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability. Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means.”

Uncertainty abounds. woods can’t even accurately identify the weapon he’s handed: “.38, .22—I’m not even sure.” It could just as well be Nas’s Desert Eagle, a “semi-auto with lead.” These redactions, this unknowingness, inevitably leads to confusion. One must forgo epistemic approaches and settle for feels. Nas’s aforementioned Desert Eagle, as an example, measures at “seven inches” and weighs “four pounds.”

7.

Emotional liftin’—please use the proper form: / Bend at the knee.

—“spongebob” (2019)

But little and heavy as a dead child. The game is the game, but the gravity of the situation increases with woods’ somber simile. That uzi, or .38, or .22— weighs a ton. But it’s the emotional weight that’s so exhausting. “Windbreaker” opens with a bevy of words with short-u sounds—words with heft, words that carry bend-at-the-knee weight: gun | once | month | blunt. A significant weight, like Biggie’s ubiquitous uh adlibs. woods throws haymakers, heaves shots. By all accounts, he’s acting “wild truculent” (as Breeze Brewin once said on “Weight” by the Indelible MC’s). woods holds the gun with “Macbeth hands,” a phrase he drops on Armand Hammer’s “Duppy.” Macbeth speaks of “dread exploits” (4.1.164), and woods works in dread[ed] talk (s/o to Velma Pollard), that Iyaric, a protest language and flexi lexicon, to ward off the weight of what violence he might have the capacity to engage in.

You show loyalty; they learn loyalty. But Macbeth disregards the value of his commander Banquo even after leading Duncan’s army alongside him. He keeps the plot to murder Banquo “from the common eye” for “sundry weighty reasons” (3.1.141-142), most of which are purely practical. The Thane of Cawdor doesn’t consider the guilty conscience he’ll have to carry. He doesn’t contemplate “that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart” (5.3.54-55). woods does.

On “Heavy Water” (emphasis on the heavy—we’re talking some brine pool shit), woods told us “the play-within-the-play was G. Dep as Macbeth,” and thus hands us a key. G. Dep, who confessed to killing an innocent man seventeen years after the fact, couldn’t function under the weight of what he’d done. “I didn’t feel free and clear,” he said from prison where he’s serving 15-to-life. “Everyday I was faced with this memory, with this heinous act, that didn’t really have to happen….I had to do what I had to do to get that burden off my chest.” That burden off his chest. “Burden” from the Old English byrðen, meaning “load, weight” but also “a child.” (But little and heavy as a dead child.)

G. Dep endeavored to lift the weight off his chest, but woods prefers to hide the weight in a chest. woods secretes the gun—and his shame at even accepting it—in various places, all of which prove porous. He “had it hid under bed”—those deadweight d’s burying any misdeed deeply—but he “couldn’t sleep” like some Princess and the Piece. He’s a sensitive soul, feeling it penetrate his back leaving him black and blue all over his body. Mattress upon mattress upon mattress, and he still felt its presence. No quitter, woods seeks other unseen spots—ahem, hiding places—like “in the shed, somewhere Moms couldn’t reach.” I was made to kill, Nas rapped, and “that’s why they keep [the gun] concealed.” Nas tried to squeeze “under car seats” and sneak into clubs. By verse three of “I Gave You Power,” he’s “still stuck in the shelf with all the things that an outlaw hides.” As we see, any attempts at avoidance are mostly ineffective.

8.  THE WEÏRD TURN PRO

woods is unsettled. Who can make sense of machine gun etiquette? The man feels damned. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” he raps, noticing “both shoulders had demons.” Can’t brush ’em off. As Macbeth says, “Cannot be ill, cannot be good” (1.3.144). Out, damned spot, out, I say! One. Two. (5.1.37). But the spot is blown, and Lady Macbeth can’t do a damn thing about it. She can try to sound like Biz Markie as much as she wants (“...a one-two, a one-two…”); she can make like Special Ed and fetch the Cascade, but there’s no getting those red stains off her hands.

“I was scared,” woods tells us, “’cause [redacted] heard [redacted] was tryna rob me.” But even self-defense shuffles closer to self-destruction. “I was more scared,” he explains, “when I took the gun, to be honest.” He fears both the threat on his person and the weapon intended to ward off any such maneuvers. He feels stuck: “By then, too late to say I didn’t want it.” We can assume his “dome was aching” like the man in Nas’s song who reaches for the gun, finally. woods “walked home in the darkness,” in his frantic thoughts. Somewhere along his route he was detained by “three witches on the marshes.” 

Rewind back to the beginning of the song. “And I know it better than before,” Fielded sings, “they want me to notice—even out the score.” Fielded becomes all three Weïrd Sisters in one: she turns to they. For weïrd read “fateful.” Depending on which Shakespeare folio you’re flipping through, the word is also spelled weyward and weyard. They all come from the Scottish form of wyrd, though—the Old English word for fate. The Weïrd Sisters, or witches, are tied up in some real Hussein Fatal/Fatal Hussein business. I’m pretty sure that I won’t be ready when they come through that door, Fielded sings with “the syllable of dolor” (4.3.9), evoking the lurking evil, the looming dread, that woods experiences. Fielded—whose stage-name is near-synonymous with the marshes and heaths on which the witches appear—sings of seething vengeance (“even out the score”) and simmering nervousness (“I got somebody coming for me in the night”).

Fielded, in their role as the Weïrd Sisters, is warmer to woods than Macbeth’s encounter with the witches. Fielded warns him, it sounds like, not to cross them. In an evasive move, woods goes metaphorical. He feels like a “dinosaur in the tar pit.” He marks sharks as “all cartilage.” (The witches include “maw and gulf / Of the ravaged salt-sea shark” [4.1.24-25] in their cauldron ingredients, by the way.) Sharks for woods; scorpions for Shakes. “O, full of scorpions is my mind” (3.2.41), Macbeth moans. woods feels his “blood cold as the water is,” while Macbeth looks to the “multitudinous seas incarnadine” (2.2.80), meaning the ocean turns blood-red. The arrival of Banquo’s ghost at dinner is likened to the approach of “the rugged Russian bear, / The armed rhinoceros, or th’ Hyrcan tiger (3.4.122-123). Bears, rhinos, sharks, scorpions, and tigers…oh my!

9.  SLUMB’RY AGITATION

A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, / And yet I would not sleep…

—Banquo, Macbeth (2.1.8-9)

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.12-13), the witches say in unison. woods hovers through the fog and filthy air thinking, Fuck a fair one—I get mine the fast way, like Biggie on the “Flava in Ya Ear” remix from ’94. On “Halloween Fell on a Weekend,” woods was talkin’ witchy: “Fair is foul, / Awkward smile.” Nas, for the record, noted how the intrusive gun thoughts were “making every ghetto foul.”

But what’s really foul and utterly unfair—a flagrant foul, a Flagrant 2—is the sleep troubles. “I slept with no dreams,” woods raps. But his dreamless sleep is more of an insomnia. “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!” Macbeth says, turning over in the sheets to speak to himself in the third-person, “‘Macbeth does murder sleep’” (2.2.47-48). woods looks a ghost now, a somnolent wanderer: “Asleep on my feet, / Awake when niggas sleep.” The repetition of sleep at the start of one clause and at the end of the next signals the circularity of the story being told. 

We can’t help but summon Nas’s “cousin of death.” And Macduff refers to “downy sleep” as “death’s counterfeit” (2.3.88). woods is restless, “tempest-tossed” (1.3.26), enduring the night where “wicked dreams abuse / The curtained sleep (2.1.62-63). “Headlights splashed the curtains,” woods raps, and instead of sheep he’s “counting every car passin’ in the street.” He may as well be midnight marauding like Lady Macbeth with a taper. When the Doctor notes that Lady Macbeth’s “eyes are open,” the Gentlewoman clarifies that “their sense are shut” (5.1.26-27). Nas, Queensbridge-bred, opens his penthouse lids to “see some cold nights and bloody days.” If only Lady Macbeth had been as alert as Nasir Jones or billy woods.

10.  BLACK MACBETH WILL SEEM AS PURE AS SNOW

The gun, which was described as “little and heavy as a dead child” (G. Dep’s debut was called Child of the Ghetto, as fate would have it), returns to haunt us at the end of “Windbreaker.” The baby image, in Shakespeare’s terms, becomes “doubly redoubled” (1.2.42). When the hurly-burly’s done, it’s the kids who suffer. A generational pain that folds back in on itself. An inheritance of the horrific. Look around: dead babies are everywhere.

Ross speaks of Macduff’s murdered household where he discovered “babes / Savagely slaughtered” (4.3.240-241). Nas delivers a choral ode about how he, as gun, “might have took your first child.” Slick Rick rapped of “a little boy who was misled.” That boy found himself in a woods-like dilemma, calculating the consequences: I’ll do years if I pull this trigger. If not a corporeal death, a death of the spirit. 

The Weïrd Sisters promise Banquo that he’ll father kings—bank on it, they say. And so Macbeth fears Banquo’s children will be the future kings of Scotland, usurping his throne. Macbeth decides: Banquo’s gotta go. Not only his brethren-in-arms, but Banquo’s son Fleance, too. Fleance “must embrace the fate / Of that dark hour” (3.1.156-157), Macbeth determines, all in order to assure his place on the throne. When Macbeth ambushes Banquo in Act 3, Scene 3, Banquo implores his son to “fly, fly, fly” (3.3.25)—he tells him to supa fly, to supa dupa fly. To be fresh, wild, and bold, too—like the Cold Crush would advise.

woods, as Banquo, is drawn into a terminal life, a posthumous life, when he is given the gun. That hand-off arranges his end. “Banquo when I think of my kids,” he raps. “Banquo when I kiss my son in his crib.” This is the Fleance farewell. But woods is unwilling to go the way of Banquo. He doesn’t only want to save his son—he wants to save himself. “Stunningly,” Nas says, “tears fall down the eyes of these so-called tough guys.” woods rebuffs the “heavy as a dead child” gun. The only weight he wishes to feel is his son asleep in his arms.

11.  THE WOOD[S] OF BIRNAM

It felt wrong knowing niggas is waiting in Hell for him.

—Nas, “I Gave You Power”

“Here’s a knocking indeed!” remarks the Porter in Act 3, Scene 1. He considers the vocation of “porter of hell gate” and mocks the incessant knocking: “Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ / th’ name of Beelzebub?” (3.1.1-4). Careful what you ask for and be wary of the knocks you answer to. woods can knock the hustle. He’s none-too-anxious to join the mobb of “murd’ring ministers” (1.5.55) we hear about in the Scottish play or Track 4 on It Was Written. Still woods, eventually, commits to composing a kind of murda muzik—equally bloodletting and bloodshedding in its emotional registers and range. “[T]he blood-boltered Banquo smiles” (4.1.138) knowing he’s secured futures for his kids. He rests easy. It’s presupposed that the gun gives power, but on “Windbreaker” we learn that the weapon deprives us of power, leaving us with nothing to pass on but the curse.

Images:

Photograph of the Nat Karson design used to create the backdrop for the Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1936 (detail) | Opening of the Federal Theater Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem (1936) | Winslow Homer, Hurricane, Bahamas (1898) | Andy Warhol, Gun, black, white, and red on pink (c. 1981-82) | Ravi Zupa, Mightier Than Guns sculpture series, disassembled typewriter, stapler, and scrap metal (c. 2016) | G. Dep, Child of the Ghetto album cover, 2001 (detail) | “Macbeth visits the Weird Sisters (Three Witches) on the blasted heath,” title page by John Gilbert for an edition of Shakespeare’s works (1858–60) | Canada Lee as Banquo in the Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem (1936) | Photograph of the Nat Karson design used to create the backdrop for the Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1936 (detail)

[lex-munro]

[Suicide Squad Scrap] Princess pt. 20

self-indulgent batjokes-flavored SS/BvS/JL, installment 20.  errbody love Brucie.  my Arkham layout is mostly similar to the Arkham gameverse’s version.  we’re gonna handwave the composition of the basement flooring in that particular building, even though realistically there should be several feet of dirt and conduit space between any drain/sewer systems and the building (unless the Arkham family built it all at once as a single structure like a damn castle—y’know what, that’s not out of character).

the piece as a whole is rated Mature for pervasive language, varying degrees of violence, use of controlled substances, sexual references, questionable ethics, and themes of mental illness.  set from Flag’s POV, with references to (and oblique spoilers for) Birds of Prey, but not compliant with The Suicide Squad.

***

Joker dozes intermittently on the drive, which is deeply inconvenient since he’s giving directions.  They leave a hotwired Olds parked by the curb of the swanky two-level.  It sounds like there’s a minor party in the pool at the back (splashing, laughter, clinking glasses, but only muted music).

Joker pauses on the porch and reaches up into the overhang to pull out a spare key.  (Flag hopes the neighbors aren’t looking, because Joker definitely looks more like a meth-head trying to break in than a guy who lives in a place like this.)

They walk in the front door all but unnoticed.

Joker leads them to the den, where a bubble of silence spreads as people catch sight of him.  He sidles up behind a guy (still talking to some busty redhead whose big blue eyes are currently fixed on the gun in Joker’s hand), and settles both hands on the guy’s shoulders.  “Hoooney, I’m hoooome,” Joker coos.

Flag wonders what clichéd line will come next.  It’s not what it looks like, is always a favorite.  Maybe, I can explain.

“Welcome back, Mister J,” the guy says, and his voice barely shakes.  “Club’s running like a dream, Queenie’s a big hit, shipments are all on schedule.  How was Arkham?”

“Boring,” Joker says, and heaves a long sigh as he clambers over the couch to sit between the henchman and the redhead, armed hand still hooked over the henchman’s shoulder.  “Then Boy Scout back there took me to meet Satan, and she had me doing her dirty work in between drug comas.  Good times.  But she once again has something of mine, and this time, oh, this time…”  Joker leans his head back on the couch.  “Fuck just shooting our way in, grabbing my property, and getting out.  She needs to be taught a lesson.”

“Belle Reve again?”

“Possibly.  We’ll have to look into it.  Anyway, Daddy’s princess is gonna set fire to anything and anyone that gets between me and my Batsy.”  He lifts the pistol to trail its muzzle over his henchman’s jaw.  “All of you better remember who built all this.  Remember who killed Carmine Falcone and Hamilton fucking Hill and Rupert goddamn Thorne.  Remember who’s broken out of Blackgate three times and Arkham seven.  I’m gonna go rinse off and get dressed, and then we’re getting Harley’s girl outta Arkham for her.”  He presses a loud, theatrical kiss on the man’s cheek, leaving a morbid red smear, then hops up.

Flag would tell Lawton to follow him, but the assassin does it anyway.

“Fuckin’ weak,” complains Ratcatcher.  “I was hoping he’d, like, cut the guy’s nose off, or drown him in the pool, or feed him his own balls…”

The henchman gets up from the couch and turns to them.  “I’m Mike.  I’m Mister J’s number one guy.  You want anything, you come to me.”

Flag sees right through the bravado.

“Pretty obliging for a guy Harley said stole the whole operation when Jay and the Bat had their little talk,” Ratcatcher notes.

Mike goes as pale as Harley and Joker at the accusation.

Flag smirks.  “Call me Flag.  That’s Arcee.  I’m sure Deadshot needs no introduction, even if he’s playing bodyguard instead of assassin.”

Mike nods agreeably.  “You want anything?  Beer, bourbon, tequila?  We got a shitload of pizza in the kitchen, too.”

“Pizza, hell yeah, that’s what we smelled,” Ratcatcher says, to a chorus of eager squeaking in her coat.

Flag rolls his eyes and follows her, clocking each armed member of the gang and catching them doing the same to him.  Seven in the den, one in the hall with his hands up a girl’s skirt while she giggles and almost (but not quite) spills her drink down his back.  Three more talking sports in the foyer, two in the kitchen debating the underlying literary themes of Banks’ sci-fi work.

The two in the kitchen freak when eight big rats scamper out of Ratcatcher’s clothes to politely inspect the food and make their selections.  Ratcatcher grabs them paper plates from the stack and everything.  She catches the gangers staring and says (with her mouth full of what looks like mushroom-bell-pepper), “You wanna get down on this?”

“No thanks,” one says while the other just stares and looks green.

“They had a bath yesterday, and they only touched their own food,” Ratcatcher tells them reprovingly.  “They’re probably cleaner than you are.”

By the time she and the rats are finished, Joker sweeps into the kitchen.  He’s wearing a tailored purple three piece suit with a tail coat, lavendar pinstripes on the vest setting off the loud magenta trim.  His silk shirt is an eye-gouging shade of mustardy yellow that matches a hideous paisley tie.

“Noice!” says Ratcatcher.  “Looking fully pimp, Mister J!”

Flag can’t help the look of horror he gives her.

“That’s the face I made, too,” Lawton says.  “Buuut, we do need to get noticed.”

“This is a classic,” Joker informs them.  “I wore it to the GCPD Christmas Charity Ball the year I met my Batsy, and spilled red wine on Isabela Maroni after she insulted my poor hardworking tailor.”

Lawton frowns.  “Didn’t you throw an entire bottle at her face?  Just, like…corked and everything?”

“It spilled,” Joker insists.

“After it shattered on her nose.  Sal’s the only guy who’s ever been both dumb and brave enough to try to hire me to kill you, y’know.”

“What’d ya tell him, sweetcheeks?”

“Haveta have a death wish to take the contract, ‘cause anybody skilled enough to actually get it done would be dead within a week, assuming the Bat didn’t get there first.  This was before the psychotic break—pretty sure he’d kill ‘em these days.”

“What can I say?  Daddy doesn’t like people touching his things,” Joker says with a grin.  “Come on—we’re picking up some thermite from my stash before we meet back up with Croc and Boom.”

“And these guys?” Flag asks.

“Mickey and the gang will meet us at one of Croc’s old haunts, and he’ll guide us in.”

“Sewers?” Ratcatcher asks a little too eagerly.

Joker just keeps grinning.

“Oh, I almost forgot…”  She stuffs the last of her pizza slice into her mouth while she digs in her coat.  She pulls out a couple of knives—an antique ivory handled switchblade, yellowed with age but still proudly sporting an engraved motif of card suits; and the green-handled butterfly knife that left a permanent smile on Vinnie’s face.  “My buddies snagged these when Satan’s cronies stripped and straited you.”

He takes the blades, stows them in opposite pockets (left vest, right trouser).  “Not bad, Minnie.”

“‘Not bad’?  Lick my ass!  It was cool and you know it.”

He barks a short, sharp laugh, and Flag gets the feeling she’s impressed him, somehow.

“Macky, got something for you while you’re out,” he says.  “Go to this address, say ‘Location compromised, get your bug-out bag,’ and take the charming young lady to the club.”

“Mike,” the henchman corrects in a long-suffering tone.

“Gently,” Lawton stipulates.  “Every scratch on my baby is a bullet in something tender of yours.  And don’t try to tell her we’re friends, or you work with me, or any of that bullshit, or she’ll probably mace your ass and run.”

On their way out the door, Lawton lingers over Flag’s shoulder to mutter, “He’s still in and out.  Almost busted his skull open in the shower.  Keep a sharp eye.”

They swing by an outdoor storage place to grab three heavy duffel bags full of metal canisters.

Back at Harley’s place, Croc is busy being fawned on by Harley, Huntress, and some leggy black girl while a grumpy Latina ignores Digger’s attempts to make small talk with her (admittedly impressive) cleavage.

“What the fuck is he wearing?” the grumpy one asks when Joker sidles in and gestures to the door.  “Holy shit, isn’t that the suit you wore when you danced with Bruce Wayne after you threw a wine bottle at Sal Maroni’s wife?”

“Don’t do that, Montoya!” Harley scolds.  “Don’t remember his antics, or you’ll just feed his obnoxious narcissism!”

Joker grins.  “You know you love it.  Croc-baby, we’re going in through the storm drains, and then we’ll melt our way into the props department.  Told the crew to meet up at your old place under Amusement Mile; you’re on point, big guy.  Ladies, I recommend following us as far as the island, but after that, we’ll be drawing far too much attention to ourselves.  Let’s go get Ivy and nab some anti-ARGUS intel.”

“Well, somebody needs to stay here and babysit Brucie, so you lot have fun with that,” Digger says, petting the hyena sitting beside him on the couch.

Flag rolls his eyes, but Joker strolls over and plops down on Digger’s lap (the Aussie freezes like a skunk in headlights).

“You are so right, Boom-boom,” Joker says sweetly, one hand stroking suggestively over Digger’s chest.  “And I know you are gonna be the best puppy-sitter in Gotham, because Brucie here is important to our galpal Harley, and if a single fuzzy hair on his precious little mug were to be harmed, you know that Harls would rip your balls off with her teeth and go play baseball.  And I know you know how important it is to have a good puppy-sitter, because if it were anything less vital and you thought I might need your help getting my Batsy away from that smug evil asshole with the kitten heels, you would definitely give it to me so that I wouldn’t have to hunt you down and put a pretty smile on your face like I did the last guy who screwed me.  You remember Vinnie, right?  Or were you too busy with the Human Crepe impression?”

“I remember,” Digger squeaks.

“Oh, good.  Then you stay here and take very, very good care of Brucie.”  And he plants a loud kiss against Digger’s cheek, leaving a dark red lipstick print, somewhat less smudgy and disturbing than the one he left on Mike’s face.

Harley snorts.  “My little business partner is on her way here, too, so watch your manners, Boomy.  Her ‘n Brucie are besties.”

The storm drains are surprisingly clean.  Jones leads them along loud, wet tunnels far below the streets of always-rainy Gotham, taking a maze of turns while Harley tells her girls all about ‘the fun we all had killin’ a bunch of eyeball zombies or whatever’ in Midway City.  Then she tells Lawton (specifically him, definitely ignoring Joker and with an air of maybe having already told Croc) about ‘this diamond full of blackmail that Sionis put a bounty on,’ which is how she met the Birds and her ‘little buddy, Cass.’

“And thanks for the price on my head, by the way,” she adds sourly.

“If you couldn’t handle that drippy little fuckstick, you’d’ve deserved to get your pretty little face cut off,” Joker replies easily.  “I have faith in your ability to solve your own problems, Doctor Quinzel.  You did chase after me on a motorcycle after I specifically told you we were done and you bored me.”

“And then you made me un-boring, right?  Whatever.  I coulda had a psychotic break and a mutated epiphany all on my own, you know—I didn’t need you for it.”

“And I didn’t need you to fuck with my memory, but here we are, Doc.  And it’s not like I pushed you—you jumped.”

“Focus up, Jay, we got shit to accomplish,” Flag says before Harley can continue their little slap fight.

“She started it.”

“And I’m stopping it.  Behave yourself.”

“Yes, Mommy,” Joker snarks.

Flag almost misses the moment when Joker falters a step and Lawton catches him—it’s disguised in a single smooth motion that looks like Lawton pushing Joker to keep him moving.

Great.  Unpredictable mood swings on a guy with a short, bloody temper, and lingering drug interactions on top.

They arrive at a huge cistern, where Mike and some guys in Halloween masks wait with guns.

“Brought the guns, Mister J,” says Mike.

Joker sways again; he catches himself on Flag and turns the motion into a few steps of a rather forceful waltz.  “That’s what I like to hear!” he cries with a brief burst of laughter.

“Get off me,” Flag grumbles, but steadies the maniac.

“Grab some cans, gents—the usual color codes apply.”  He and Croc throw down the bags from the outdoor storage unit, full to bursting with aerosol cans, and the cannon fodder hurriedly gear up.

They make it to the island without getting too wet; Croc leads the way with confident ease, despite a dozen twists and turns and detours.

A couple hundred feet in, Croc pauses at a ladder.  “Drain here comes out below admin central offices,” he tells Harley.  She nods, and the girls split off.

He leads the rest of them farther in, through a few more turns, and stops to listen.

“Yo, Arcee—your little snack packs hear anything above us?”

He hoists her up as she holds a rat up to the ceiling.  After a few seconds, she shakes her head.

“Computers about twenty feet the way we came.  Footsteps fifty-ish feet ahead.”

Joker looks up and counts bricks.  “Gimme a boost, Croc,” he says, grabbing a purple canister and a green canister from some nearby goons.

He sprays the two compounds in a broad rectangle and shoves a fuse into it.

“Might step back and close your eyes,” he suggests.  “It’s gonna get a little toasty.”

In point of fact, it gets hot as hell near the blinding conflagration that results.  Clearly, the mad chemist makes good thermite.

A goon sprays the stuff down with a pink canister, once the section of brick and mortar has collapsed into the tunnel with a minor cloud of dirt.

“Finish up for me, boys,” Joker commands, and his men hurry to clamber into the new gap and spray more chemicals on the freshly exposed metal.

“Nice of them to line it with steel instead of concrete,” Flag scoffs.

“They were thinking of people digging in and out, not melting in and out.”

The chunk of floor panel drops with a raucous clang, and Joker’s masked gang spray down the edges and climb up as someone shouts in the distance and keys fumble at a lock.

Gunshots, and sounds of pain.

Joker throws his head back and laughs, arms spread wide and waving, conducting a symphony of destruction.

“Get up there, you,” Flag says, nudging Joker toward the hole.

“A gal could break a nail,” Joker says with a pout.

Croc just tosses Joker over his shoulder, gives Ratcatcher a boost, and jumps straight up into the darkness.

“Such a gentleman!” Flag hears Joker say.

“I could be taking a nap in my cell right now,” Lawton grumbles, but climbs up.

By the time Flag gets through the hole, Joker’s people have fanned out and the man himself is hunting through boxes of personal items, apparently with a very specific list in mind.

~Cameras are about to go down,~ says Harley.  ~It takes three minutes for the system to reset.  They’re on the same system as the cell doors for Intensive Treatment, so we’ll give you exactly five minutes to get everything open before we bring ‘em down again to get out.  Synchronize watches or whatever—radio silence starts now.~

“All clear for now,” says Lawton.  “It takes just under three minutes for the higher-end security staff to gather and deploy, so the timing should be about perfect.”

“Assuming nobody spotted us earlier,” Joker puts in.  “Mm, love a good ambush…”

Out in the corridors, lights and sirens are going off.  They make it up the stairs without seeing any new guards.

Croc and Ratcatcher take down the two guards controlling the airlock into Intensive Treatment and get the doors working (after some minor bickering about how to work the controls).  Joker’s people stay to hold the corridor against the guards that are definitely on the way.

The ominous flickering sign stares down at them as they move on toward the control booth, and Joker steps inside only to have an Eskrima rod brandished at his face.

“Joker—I should’ve known you’d…”  Nightwing trails off, looking confused.  “If you’re breaking out, how come you’re not in scrubs or a jumpsuit?”

Joker rolls his head on his neck.  “Just gimme a ten-minute head start, kid.  Or go home, either way suits me.”

“You promised Batman—”

“We’re helping Batman,” Flag interrupts.  “You’re gonna have to trust us on this.”

Nightwing crosses his arms over his chest.  “Look, I already know Batman’s in trouble; he’s been out of contact for twenty hours and he hinted at somebody trying to catch him with human bait.”

“Not a very flattering description for the love of a guy’s life,” Joker grumbles.

“You’ve got ninety seconds before the cameras reboot to explain why I should let you go.”

“Y’see, when daddies and princesses love each other—”

Lawton, fortunately, has both the balls and the sway to put a hand over Joker’s mouth and hurriedly say, “Jay was recruited to work with us in a top secret government task force in exchange for guaranteed visits with the Bat.  Turns out he was bait, now the Agency—ARGUS, that is—has Batman.  If Jay’s loose, the Bat can sit tight, but if they get him, game over.  Meanwhile, we ain’t the type to sit on our asses, so we’re breaking the Agency’s other schemes wide open.”

Nightwing nods.  “Okay.  In seven seconds, somebody needs to hit me, and make it look good.”

“Don’t look at me,” Joker says, hands in the air like he’s surrendering.  “I’m not allowed to hit birdies anymore.”

“Eh, fair enough…”  And Nightwing pins Joker to the wall with one Eskrima rod, the other poised to strike.

The control panel lights up, right on time.

Flag swings in from behind and gets him in a sleeper hold, which he fights with several uncomfortable strikes to Flag’s ribs before Lawton readies his wrist magnum.

“Stand down, boy,” he says.  “This don’t concern you.  Run on home to Blüdhaven.”

“You won’t get away with this!” Nightwing declares.  “Batman will—”

“The Bat ain’t here,” Flag says, tightening the fake hold enough to put on a good show.  The kid almost over-sells it with his swoon, but Flag thinks the cameras won’t see anything amiss.

Joker reaches over and flips all the release switches for maxsec.  A new siren adds itself to the cacophony, red lights flaring for extra measure.  He rolls his head again, eyes hooded and neck long—it’s the most predatory Flag’s seen him in a while…even more than Vinnie the smiling lookout and the fixation on Mercy Graves after.  “Bring the kid,” he purrs.

For just a fraction of a second, Flag is sure Joker has something awful planned for Nightwing.

“‘Kid,’ my ass,” mutters the Blüdhaven vigilante, still playing possum over Lawton’s shoulder.  “You’ve only been doing this a year longer than I have, asshole.”

Joker giggles in reply.

They step into maxsec to the sight of seven open doors, four bewildered inmates, four unresponsive guards (drooling and swaying on their feet), and one smug redhead.

“Good evening, gentlemen, milady,” Joker says with a flourishing bow and a tip of the stolen top hat.  “We come bearing gifts from the personal effects locker.”  He flicks the coin at Two-Face, tosses the top hat at the little guy (‘J Tetch,’ according to his shirt), and unzips the duffel with the wooden dummy in it.

“Oh, oh my,” murmurs ‘A Wesker,’ who looks like a sweet little old man.

“Thaaaat’s right, Arn,” says Joker, eyes round and metallic teeth glinting, “your old boss, safe and sound…”

A skinny guy in glasses (‘E Nygma’; Flag remembers him having that huge Rubik’s puzzle before) clears his throat meaningfully.  When Joker ignores him to gently hand over the puppet, he clears his throat again and says, “Don’t you have something for me, too?”

Joker turns, and Flag can’t see, but he knows the guy well enough now to know he’s making shark-faces again.  “Can’t fool me, Eddie,” he drawls, sidling up close.  “I know a man of your intellect neither wants nor needs the assistance of ‘a pasty poser clown whore.’“

“Naturally,” ‘Eddie’ says with suicidal bravado.

Joker grabs him in a chummy half-hug.  “Besides, I’m sure you know all about the escape tunnel.  Gun Bunny, be a doll and put Nightlight in my old room.  The Boy Blunder will be along later to let him out, and we’ll all be sipping champagne somewhere while he dies of embarrassment.  Maybe the Iceberg Lounge—I’m feeling fancy.  Run along, jailbirds…Croc will be holding the door.”

‘P Isley’ rolls her eyes.  “Come on, boys,” she tells the guards under her thrall.

The wooden ventriloquist dummy chimes in with a Hollywood mobster accent, “If it’s all the same to youse, I think me ‘n Dummy will stick around for a while.  I gotta make some guards pay for the way they treated my numba one guy.”

“Oh, dear,” says the little old man, but he seems happy enough at the proposition.

“Us, too,” says Two-Face.  “But thanks for the hand, clown.  We owe you one.”

Flag breaks radio silence to say, “Pack it up, kids, we’re on our way out.”

~Jackpot!~ Harley calls back.  ~Okay, we just wrapped up, too.  Cameras back down in sixty seconds.  Meet you at the rendezvous point.  How’s my Pammy look?~

How the hell is he supposed to answer that?  “Uh.  Judgy?  Kinda smolder-y?”

Harley giggles.  ~That’s my Pammy!~

.End.