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random-thought-depository · 2 years ago

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Have some Blindsight vampire OCs from my Blindsight elsewhere fic set in the early Holocene (around 8,000 BCE)! You may have met Heron, meet her (surviving, adult) kids!

I might use it pronouns of ancient vampires in my fic, but for now I'll just use conventional ones.

Heron has three surviving adult children: Magpie, Drowning, and Stargazer:

Magpie is Heron's oldest child (she had another one before him, but that one died of disease in infancy).

Magpie is not the child of Heron's regular mate/partner at the time. Different ancient vampire families were very distrustful of each other and mostly just avoided each other, but they did sometimes trade or otherwise cooperate. A feature of ancient vampire "diplomacy" was that they'd often send a breeding-age female near ovulation to the other family to do the deal, with the understanding that she'd get gang-banged by some or all of the males of the other family. This made the other family less likely to kill her, as she'd thereby be a potential pathway for the proliferation of their genes. It also increased the genetic diversity of the species and the family, and thereby mitigated the low genetic diversity of ancient vampires and the tendency of their social structure to compound this by promoting inbreeding. Magpie was conceived in such a union. This means during his early life his blood relatives had to protect him from Heron's regular mate, who'd have killed him to free up space in the family for his own offspring if he could have gotten away with it, much as male lions will kill the cubs of rival males.

Magpie got his name because as a child he made a sort of friend of a magpie, feeding it little scraps of food until it trusted him enough to perch on his shoulder. A normal vampire might do something like this, but probably with the intent of betraying the animal and eating it later; when Heron and her mom asked him when he was planning to do this, they noticed he seemed a little upset by the idea. This was one of their first clues that there was something odd about him.

Magpie is different.

Another early clue was that Magpie did not go through the normal ancient vampire childhood phase of torturing small animals. Vampires are far less playful than humans, but they are a highly intelligent species closely related to humans and play is part of how humans learn and a common trait of intelligent creatures, so play is also a normal behavior of vampire children. An unfortunate but common manifestation of playfulness is sadistic play, which is common even in human children (in our species it is often directed toward other human children), and vampires are an aggressive species with a strong hunting instinct. In ancient vampires, sadistic play with small prey items during childhood was a normal part of how the hunting instinct "wired up" during brain development. Thankfully, usually by the time a vampire reaches adulthood the sadistic impulse has become very tightly coupled to the hunting instinct and thus the sadistic play phase has passed; gratuitous cruelty is rare in adult vampires; it would make them less efficient predators. The worst an adult vampire was likely to do was take a few moments to gloat over cornered and/or wounded prey before delivering the death blow (the most horrific plausible human-vampire interaction is what might happen if an unsupervised vampire child in the sadistic play age range encountered a lone and vulnerable human child young enough to be easily overpowered by a maybe 3-8 years old or so vampire child). But Magpie never went through a sadistic play phase, and even seemed uncomfortable when his mother, grandmother, and grandfathers/great uncles (Heron's mom mated with a pair of brothers, so unclear which is which) were teaching him how to hunt, fish, and trap nonhuman animals. He even sometimes showed altruism to animals; his relationship with the magpie has already been mentioned, and he may even have sometimes tended injured animals back to health and fed and protected them until they could fend for themselves again.

The family also noticed subtler things about Magpie; how gentle he was with his younger sisters and how enthusiastic and attentive he was in helping his older relatives look after them, how attentively he protected Stargazer from her older sister Drowning's attempts to target her for casual low-level sadistic play, how eagerly he volunteered for small tasks around the camp...

Magpie is neurodivergent in the same kind of way as Cassie/First from The Nightmare Stacks; a relatively high-empathy high-altruism individual in a species where sociopath-adjacency is the norm. Compared to a normal vampire, Magpie has an abnormally high capacity for pro-social impulses such as affective empathy, altruism, compassion, and guilt. Empathy is connected to imagination (as it is, after all, fundamentally a matter of imagining what it's like to be something or someone else), so Magpie is also atypically playful for a vampire, in a broad sense of playfulness that includes things like abstract curiosity and the capacity to appreciate art. Another early sign of Magpie's difference was a tendency to doodle representational art. Normal vampires sometimes also make doodles as a kind of stimming, but they are usually geometric rather than representational; for instance, Magpie's grandmother has a tendency to doodle spirals with notches separated by the exact length of a segment of one of her fingers (a human with a measuring device would be astonished by how precise they are for a casual free-hand drawing). Magpie may be a little bit of a runt as a consequence of the genes responsible for his neurodivergence, kind of like how autism often comes with poor sensorimotor coordination and chronic digestive problems in humans, but the effect isn't very severe; he may be shorter than either of his sisters, but within the normal distribution of ancient vampire male size (vampires have lower sexual dimorphism than humans and Stargazer is big). He may also have a mildly neotenous look as an adult (compared to ancient vampire average), as some of the genes responsible for his neurodivergence may be related to the ones involved in domestication syndrome and the ones involved in making Homo sapiens the most neotenous and hypersocial hominid, but again, the effect would be noticeable but not super-dramatic; to vampires of his own time he'd look a bit distinctive but normal-ish.

Around 1-2% of the ancient vampire population were like Magpie, comparable to the occurrence of autism, sociopathy, and transgenderism in humans. This is common enough that Magpie's family were aware of the existence of vampires like him and had that as a reference for his (to them) strange behavior, but rare enough that he was the only person like him in his family (with the partial exception of Stargazer) and, given the ancient vampire social structure, Magpie was the first person like him that any of his family members had extensive interaction with.

Empathy and compassion for your prey has obvious potential liabilities. So does being more altruistic than the other members of your social group. There is a reason Magpie is not typical. In a sense Magpie is a rather lonely and profoundly tragic person. But being kinder than your fellows is not necessarily entirely a negative in terms of personal or reproductive success. Magpie's family benefit from his abnormally high altruism and therefore value him as an ally. If you were a cold-hearted rational selfish killer, whose company would you prefer, another one like you, or somebody more altruistic and compassionate than you, who treats you better than you treat others? The unkind can still appreciate receiving kindness and recognize its source as an asset they wish to preserve.

When Magpie was around 9-11 years old he observed his younger sister Drowning getting casually slapped around by Heron's mate because she'd irritated him. Vampires mature faster than humans, a 9-11 year old vampire is a very different thing from a 9-11 year old human, at that age Magpie was already smarter and more physically powerful than most adult humans ... but he still had not yet reached his full adult size and strength, and Heron's mate was a particularly physically impressive specimen of vampire-kind, bigger and stronger than Magpie would ever be, and would be eager to kill Magpie given an opportunity/excuse. Magpie walked up to him and basically said "If you ever hit my sister in anything but necessary self-defense again, I will attack you. I realize that if that was a one-on-one fight I'd basically just be committing suicide by doing that, as you are a physically powerful adult male and I am a child and you really want to kill me and would have done it when I was a newborn baby if mom and grandma would let you get away with it. However, consider this: mom, grandma, and grandpa/great-uncle value me more than you, because I am their blood relative and you are not, and also because I'm nice to them while you're kind of a jerk even by vampire standards, if I attack you they will take my side and you will end up taking a beating at best and getting expelled from the family or killed and eaten at worst. As you mentally process that, factor in that I would be willing to take what you in my place would consider an unacceptably high risk of getting hurt or killed to protect my sister cause I'm a freak like that. I expect you to now examine my game theory, find it impeccable, and change your behavior in the way I've demanded." It worked! Vampires are highly observant creatures with the memories of metaphorical elephants and if you cross them - or help them - they will remember. You bet Drowning was taking mental notes during that incident and referred back to them for the rest of her life!

I've been talking about this in terms of pure selfish cold game theory logic, but there is also a dimension that humans might find more sympathetic. Even neurotypical vampires have some capacity for affection (it still served important social functions in ancient vampire social groups). It wouldn't be very anthropomorphizing to say that Magpie's mother, grandmother, and fully vampire sister think he's a precious beautiful cinnamon roll too good for this world, that the way he acts toward them plucks at calcified and atrophied but still existent strings in their cold vampire hearts, that his kindness toward them endears him to them, and that they have the same kind of concern for him that human parents often have toward a child who is different in a way that makes them vulnerable.

Of course, like just about every ancient vampire who survived much past their fourteenth birthday, Magpie is by human standards a serial killer. He can basically function normally in ancient vampire society, and he's now in his thirties, which means by now he's personally killed a number of humans that's probably closing in on double digits.

It would be very hard for an "ethical vampire" to survive in Magpie's time; their only plausible options for obtaining the protocadherins they needed would be scavenging by grave-robbing (very unsanitary and therefore dangerous, and inefficient) and non-fatally bleeding humans (very inefficient). A vampire who refused to hunt humans would probably be expelled from their family. But also (and related to the previous sentence), Magpie has never been taught human morality, and insofar as ancient vampires had something like morality it was like tribal/mafia morality taken to its ultimate logical conclusion: the family was everything, entities outside it weren't moral patients, and it was laudatory and often even mandatory to harm or kill outsiders if doing so would benefit the family. To refuse to hunt humans would be to betray the only concept of pro-sociality Magpie has been taught; his obligation to fulfill his social role in his family by, among other things, participating in food acquisition. Magpie's mother, grandmother, etc. recognize that killing humans is emotionally distressing for him and even feel a kind of compassion for him and attempt to offer him a kind of emotional support, but this support is mostly oriented toward trying to make him more OK with killing humans. Magpie finds killing humans unpleasant (they are so similar to his mother, grandmother, sisters, and grandfathers/great-uncles!), but the ecological context and culture he's embedded in is not conducive toward developing this discomfort into any sort of moral principle.

To say that killing humans is "emotionally distressing" for Magpie understates how horrific the experience is for him. The vampire brain habitually constructs much more vivid and tangible remembered and imagined experiences than the human brain. By human standards, Magpie has hyperempathy.

The most common unit of social organization in ancient vampire society was the matrilineal family. The usual procedure was for male offspring to be expelled from their natal family when they reached adulthood, around the age of 14, after which they would seek a family with a new "eligible bachelorette" alpha and try to join it as the alpha's mate. This was a dangerous period in a male vampire's life that they often did not survive; alone, they were easy prey for vampire families seeking to free up trophic space for themselves by killing and cannibalizing a rival, they had no-one to help them if they were wounded or got sick, and also vampire courtship was terrifying, with a high risk of the male suitor experiencing literally lethal rejection (on the flip side, male vampire courtship strategies included things like "kill the alpha's present mate, kill all her existing kids, that way the future kids you impregnate her with will have no competition," and even a courting vampire male might get lethally skittish in the presence of a stranger, so it was pretty terrifying for the females too). Magpie's family decided not to subject him to this experience. For one thing, his atypically high altruism is beneficial to them, and they did not like the idea of losing that asset and transferring it to a rival family. But also, they like him, were concerned about what might happen to him if he had to fend for himself (e.g. his atypically altruistic nature might lead to him being taken advantage of), and just didn't have the heart to exile him. He was therefore allowed to remain in his natal family as a non-reproductive helper. This means he'll probably never get to reproduce, but he'll be safer, and he can still ensure the proliferation of his own genes by helping the reproductive success of his mother, and potentially in the future his sisters and nieces. This is pretty similar to the "deal" many female vampires get, and he's...

... Settling for it in the absence of any clear better options, but not exactly content with it. As I said, in a sense Magpie is a profoundly tragic person; a brilliant, observant, sensitive, compassionate person born into a species of (similarly brilliant and observant) cold-hearted killers, condemned to a sort of profound emotional isolation, forced to prey on beings heartbreakingly similar to himself if he wants to survive. I think Magpie would love to trade places with a modern vampire; he'd be so much happier in some lab somewhere eating ethically produced synthetic protocadherin supplements and writing software or something, getting to work and socialize with a human prodigy or three, who I think he might relate well to (I think they might seem kind of like big intellectually precocious kids to him, in a good way; curious, friendly, playful, intelligent enough to challenge him intellectually, much more fun company than most of his own kind). It's one of history's tragic ironies that the PfizerPharm bio-engineers had only the most common vampire genotypes to work with, had no clue vampires like Magpie existed; vampires like him probably have fit much better into twenty-first century human society than the neurotypical type. Modern vampires are... kind of like if aliens re-created humans in the distant future and only had the most common human genotypes to work with so they ended up creating a version of humanity that's 100% neurotypical cisgender heterosexuals; we've re-created a simplified, impoverished, homogenized version of the original species.

Drowning (or maybe River, I haven't decided - which do you like better?) is Magpie's younger sister, the middle child. She's about five years younger than Magpie (ancient vampires usually had relatively wide birth spacings) - at present, she's about thirty. Drowning is Magpie's half-sister, being the daughter of Heron's regular mate at the time, and unlike him she is neurotypical by vampire standards. She's Heron's only adult vampire-neurotypical child, as her older brother is neurodivergent and her younger sister is half human; by vampire standards she's "the normal one." She's firmly next in line to be the next alpha (breeding female, kind of authority figure) when Heron hits menopause. Despite being the middle child, she has a kind of "big sister" attitude toward her siblings, perceiving that their difference is a kind of vulnerability and being protective of them; this is especially true of her relationship to Stargazer, who is mildly disabled by vampire standards.

She's called Drowning because when she was a young adult she once swam after a teenage human girl and killed her by holding her underwater. :(

Stargazer is a vampire-human hybrid Heron deliberately produced because Heron and her mother decided it would be useful to have a family member who was immune to the crucifix glitch and could pass for human. Stargazer is Heron's youngest adult child. To create Stargazer, Heron picked a nice healthy-looking young human male and spent a few months stalking him while slowly implanting a hypnotic command that, when the trigger stimulus was provided, made him see her as a girl in his community he had a crush on (similar technique to the one Valerie used to implant seizure cue in Echopraxia). From there it was a simple matter of catching him alone, showing herself, giving the trigger stimulus, arranging a meeting in a secluded spot, and... well, you can imagine the rest. That human was relatively lucky; he didn't realize what was happening and came away from the episode alive, intact, untraumatized, and with some subjectively pleasant false memories (though the discrepancies between his memory and that girl's might have led to some pretty awkward questions later); it could have been a lot worse.

Stargazer is human-looking enough to pass for human, albeit a funny-looking human (to humans, the vampire nose would never be fooled). She's very tall and she has a lot of funny-looking features by human standards (big jaw, big ears, etc.), but the only really blatantly inhuman thing about her appearance is her tapetum lucidum, which isn't noticeable in daylight.

Stargazer is very tall; she's the tallest person in her family! Ancient vampires and humans had a sort of tiger/lion/liger dynamic where the hybrid was bigger than either of the parent species. This was a consequence of ancient vampires being taller than humans but having serious problems with lack of genetic diversity, like cheetahs. This lack of genetic diversity, combined with being forced to prey on a very closely related species, meant that infectious disease was a grave problem for ancient vampires and they usually suffered high allostatic load. Modern vampires are bigger than ancient vampires because they don't have this problem. Because Stargarzer has a human father, her immune system and physiology presents a very different disease-resistance profile than most vampires, so she is much more resistant to infections (in fact, she is more resistant to infections and parasites than most humans because her hybrid physiology is so unusual; there are no species-specific parasites well-adapted to live in her). In other words, Stargazer has hybrid vigor. Stargazer's family has noticed that she is rarely sick, she recovers from illnesses quickly, and her injuries heal quickly (especially wounds). This hybrid vigor also meant more vigorous childhood growth.

Stargazer has a much higher metabolism than normal vampires, and she doesn't do the vampire thing where they mostly keep their blood in their core and only periodically refresh the outer tissues. Her skin is much warmer than a normal vampire's; her family think she's great for cuddling up to on cold nights. Because of her higher metabolism, she's much more active than a normal vampire. She has a much more human-like sleep cycle, sleeping 7-10 hours per day and being fully awake the rest of the time. She tends to find the normal ancient vampire lifestyle of spending most of their life in a cramped hiding place rather boring and get restless, although at least it's more pleasant for her than it probably would be for a human (how would you feel about spending most of your time inside a claustrophobic tomb-like hole, sharing it five other people who spend most of their time sleeping?).

Stargazer's higher metabolism and large size means that, by vampire standards, she has a very big appetite. However, Stargazer has a functional human copy of the protocadherin y gene, so she can make her own protocadherin y and does not need to eat humans. In her entire life, Stargazer has only eaten a few bites of human flesh, once or twice, out of curiosity. Her appetite imposes no serious burden on her family; vampires are very efficient predators of nonhuman animals.

Heron originally created Stargazer with the thought that, since a hybrid would be immune to the crucifix glitch and could pass for human, they'd be good at sneaking into human villages and towns and abducting children for the family to eat. They gave up on that idea the first time they took Stargazer with them on a human-hunting expedition and it was a disaster.

Like Magpie, Stargazer has hyperempathy. Magpie is able to be an effective human-killer despite that because, like a normal vampire, he has a brain that's relatively good at shutting down unwanted trains of thought, he has a pain response wired around the assumption that he can't count on help or mercy if sick or injured, and when he's in hunting mode he's in a state kind of like dothe where he's able to ignore even very severe pain if he has to. Stargazer's more human-like neurotype gives her a strong tendency toward perseveration, she doesn't have hunting/combat mode as a distinct physiological state the way a normal vampire does, and she has a pain response more like a human; adapted for a highly social species that can usually count on help if sick or injured. So...

... One of her relatives stabs a human in the stomach with a spear. Stargazer knows gut wounds hurt a lot (ancient vampires had a pretty good knowledge of human anatomy and pain response, partly as an extension of their own medical lore cause they were closely related to us, partly to be better able to kill us). Stargazer imagines what that would feel like and experiences mirror neuron activation and instantly collapses to the ground clutching her own stomach and screaming from the pain of a sympathetic imaginary wound. It really feels like she's being stabbed in the stomach herself! She might start doing a Midsommar empathy maiden sort of thing where she's mirroring the movements and screams of the victim - it's not an affectation or a mind game, she really is feeling their pain! Worse, she naturally perseverates on the distressing idea and stimulus, she can't stop imagining what it would feel like to be stabbed like that, so it doesn't stop when her family get her away from the situation. She spends hours, maybe even days lying near or in the family den, writhing on the ground and screaming from the pain of a completely imaginary wound! I think she might have been stuck in this state until she killed herself with adrenalin overload if her family hadn't eventually managed to basically help her CBT herself out of it. After that, her family gave up any idea of using her to hunt humans and she's completely excused from that; she's the only adult in the family who's never killed a human.

Normally, an adult ancient vampire who can't or won't hunt humans is in very grave danger of being expelled from their family or filicided and cannibalized by their own family (the selection pressure of this is probably part of the reasons vampires are supermajority sociopath-adjacent). Thankfully for Stargazer, she has another value to her family that makes her worth keeping around and alive to them. Because she can pass for human, she can be used to trade with humans. Theoretically, ancient vampires and agricultural humans are natural trading partners. The vampires are excellent at trapping and hunting wild nonhuman animals and being wired for hunting they even enjoy it (hunting was one of the closest things ancient vampire culture had to institutionalized fun!), and being so few in number and having low metabolisms they need little meat themselves, so it would be easy for them to produce a surplus of hunted meat, skins, etc. for trade. Agricultural humans have labor-intensive and resource-intensive manufactured goods like pottery, textiles, and bappir; these are by default "expensive" or unattainable in vampire society, because a vampire family-nation's entire material culture must be almost entirely portable by usually less than two dozen people or disposable, and because labor (or, more precisely, drudgery) is relatively expensive for vampires because there are so few of them and because they are very independent-minded and very lazy. Pottery is particularly valued by vampires; a good pot or two is useful for preparing soups, broths, and medicinal concoctions, and is compatible with the vampire lifestyle, though a bit awkward, heavy, and fragile; most vampire family-nations in the Hilly Flanks region of this era have bought or stolen a pot or two and treat them as valued heirloom possessions, like their meteorite iron axes and knives. A few of these bought or looted pots even pass along tenuous ghostly vampire long-distance trade routes, from family-nation to family-nation, reaching regions where the local humans are still mostly nomadic hunter-gatherers who don't make pottery (this behavior is an extension of an ancient practice dating back to the vampire happy time or maybe even earlier by which resources like obsidian and meteorite iron are spread around). If humans were as coldly selfish and rational as vampires, there would probably be a thriving inter-species trade between vampires and human agriculturalists! But humans are not so logical; humans fear and hate vampires too much to easily trade with them (even humans willing to trade with vampires are disincentivized from doing so because they are often regarded with hostility, as traitors, by others of their own kind who find out about it). In a way, this is a sort of meta-level rational irrationality; by acting this way, humans deny resources to their predators and weaken them. Stargazer's ability to convincingly pretend to be a human (to humans) and trade with humans is therefore useful to her family. Because of her, her family's consumption of grain (mostly in the form of hard dry breads like bappir, which keep relatively well and can be readily eaten) has increased dramatically in the last five or seven years or so; agricultural humans are often willing to trade venison or other wild game meats for grain at a ratio very calorically favorable to the vampires (the agriculturalists are getting a good deal too; their food system is good at producing cheap calories but not so good at producing protein), and agriculturalist-grown grain now makes up a substantial percentage of her family's calorie intake.

Human agriculturalist products acquired by Stargazer in this way include beer. Vampires sometimes accept beer as a kind of food, it has water and calories, but to a vampire getting drunk is a very disagreeable experience; vampires have a strong instinctive sense of a dangerous world and dislike being vulnerable, and drunkenness is a kind of vulnerability. But Stargazer sometimes finds beer therapeutic. She would say that sometimes the inside of her head is "noisy" and sometimes has "too much going on" and beer "quiets" it. She has human-like tendencies toward fantasy, mind-wandering, and self-reinforcing recursive thoughts, but combined with vampire-like sensory hyperawareness, HSAM-like memory, and memory and imagination so vivid it's often experienced like a series of parallel subjective sensory realities almost as detailed, vivid, and tangible as the input from her senses (vampires don't use the past tense because they don't experience the past tense, they don't remember the past, they relive it, remember?). The result is that she's prone to literal overthinking! For her, a cognition-impairing "downer" like alcohol is sometimes kind of like holding down the power button on a computer with too many running programs, shutting down some of her excessively proliferating trains of thought and clearing her head (her family's attempts at breaking her out of her hyperempathy loop episode may have involved getting her drunk, and they might have been at least contemplating trying a "hard force quit" of knocking her out by hitting her really hard on the head).

Stargazer's higher metabolism and more human-like neurotype means she has more human-like play impulses (broadly defined) and enrichment needs. Stargazer has some very strange habits by ancient vampire standards. She makes visual art, such as carving intricate, complex, repeating patterns into spear shafts and other tools. She also makes a kind of music, using instruments she has fashioned or improvised from odds and ends lying around along with her own voice. She's also adorned herself with a kind of scarification-based body art (more on that later).

Being more active and playful also means Stargazer has more abstract curiosity; the name her family gave her is a reference to one manifestation of it. She watches and studies the stars at night, sometimes seeking high places to better do so. Ancient vampires sometimes studied the stars, but only for utilitarian reasons such as to predict availability of seasonal plant foods or movement of game herds. Stargazer is curious about the cosmos. With her vampire-like eyes she can probably see much more in the night sky than a human can without a telescope, especially as I think she might be able to use her vampire-like sensorimotor system to do something like long-exposure photography; she might know about the moons of Jupiter and other celestial bodies humans won't discover for ten thousand years. Highly intelligent, she's studying the apparent movements of the stars and planets and may also have done things similar to Eratosthenes's experiment measuring the size of the Earth (relatively easy for her to do given the far-ranging nomadic lifestyle of ancient vampires and that she has excellent visual memory); she's trying to figure out the structure and nature of the cosmos...

One time Magpie saw her stargazing and asked if she was planning to eat a star, since in a normal vampire that sort of still posture and attentive observation of distant objects would usually be hunting behavior; vampires can have a sense of humor! The rest of her family are mostly uninterested in her stargazing (it registers to them as weird and pointless but apparently not doing her much harm, so just sort of something to shrug at), but Magpie often joins her in stargazing now. His higher empathy and higher altruism make him willing to show interest in her strange pointless unnecessary work because he can tell that it makes her happy when someone does that, but also, his neurodivergence makes him a little more imaginative and curious than a normal vampire. He'd never study the stars like this on his own initiative, but now that he's doing it anyway, he finds it kind of interesting. From Stargazer's end, it's nice to have somebody show interest in her weird human-like interests (being a person like her in ancient vampire society is rather lonely), and two eyes are better than one, and Magpie's fully vampire eyes may be at least a little bit sharper than hers. Magpie is similarly more-or-less Stargazer's only appreciative audience for her art; he will look at her carvings and listen to her music to make her happy, and will even sometimes make art of his own to show her because that makes her happy too, and he can appreciate her art a little and take a little joy in making art in a way his neurotypical relatives never would.

Stargazer and Magpie are close. They have somewhat similar neurodivergences. They aren't exactly alike; Magpie is neurodivergent but he's still fully vampire, with a vampire metabolism and vampire feelings, instincts, and preferences regarding stuff like preferred activity level. Still, Magpie and Stargazer have some very significant similar personality traits and experiences (Stargazer also has much higher empathy and altruism than a normal vampire), and a shared sense of difference from their neurotypical relatives, so they have a strong bond. I think they'd also be close because... Drowning has a close older sister sort of relationship to Stargazer now, but their relationship did not get off to a great start. By vampire standards, Stargazer is slow, spastic, and probably has other impairments too; this activates the circuits in Drowning's brain that identify vulnerable prey, with the result that child Drowning (called something else back then) saw Stargazer as a good target for predation practice/sadistic play. During those years Magpie spent a lot of time hovering around Stargazer (also called something else back then), protecting her from the casual cruelty of her older sister. Stargazer is half human, and humans feel gratitude to those who help and protect them. Stargazer is half vampire, and vampires take notes on who helps them and who harms them and remember.

Squickly by human standards, as adults Stargazer, Drowning, and Magpie are a polycule as well as siblings. This was a common ancient ancient vampire behavior; ancient vampires knew about the dangers of inbreeding, but they had little inhibition against non-reproductive incest, and since vampires can smell how close a female is to ovulation birth control was easy for them. Stargazer has a somewhat atypical sexuality by vampire standards. Normal vampire sexuality is very tied to sensory and social cues. Stargazer has a human-like tendency toward daydreaming, fantasy, and fantasy-arousal feedback loops. One of Stargazer's odd activities (as her family thinks of it) is masturbation; autoerotic activity is very rare in vampires. They see it as of a piece with her uselessly embellishing tools and uselessly staring into the sky at night and see all these things as connected to her higher metabolism, and they're not wrong!

With the assistance of her siblings, Stargazer has adorned herself with a kind of scarification body art. Stargazer gets Drowning and Magpie to use their sharp teeth to carve patterns into her skin, and maybe then rubs pigments into the wounds to make crude tattoos of a sort. When they do this her siblings get to lick up her blood, which has a little protocadherins in it and therefore is tasty for them, which is nice for them. It wouldn't be wrong to see this as a kind of kinky intimacy.

Most of Stargazer's fantasies are non-sexual; most of Stargazer's fantasies are artistic and abstract. Like many neurodivergent people, Stargazer tends to retreat into her own head, into an imaginary world that is friendlier and more sensible to her than the real one. She has a human-like tendency to daydream and fantasize, combined with a vampire-like ability to construct imaginary and remembered sensory experiences almost as detailed and tangible as the real one. She essentially has a sort of personal Star Trek holodeck in her head that she carries with her at all times, and she creates most of her art in there! Stargazer's fantasies are mostly visual/sensory rather than narrative; she occupies much of her time and mental energy creating imaginary pictures, soundscapes, and smellscapes. What she does blurs the line between imagination and art, as to her these imaginary sensory worlds are almost as detailed and tangible as the real world; she can create an imaginary object that looks and feels to her like a real object, she can imagine rotating it in her hands and it feels like touching a real physical thing, etc.; to her the difference between fantasy and reality is more intellectual than tangible; she knows her creations aren't real because she knows she created them with her thoughts. Some of her creations are representational, e.g. of animals and landscapes, but most of them are highly abstract, often representations of mathematical patterns. In this her behavior is an outgrowth of a common vampire stimming behavior (see: her grandmother's spiral doodles), but her version is much more elaborate and sustained. In a sense, Stargazer's physical artworks are simultaneously her most ambitious and some of her least ambitious creations. In her imagination, Stargazer is a goddess, able to create immense and intricate structures at will; she need merely think it and an impossible sculpture as high as a mountain rises on the horizon or impossible complex tetrahedrons encase the sun and moon or the horizon folds and the distant sea becomes the sky. In the real world, she is limited by physical resources, her own physical strength, and the limitations of physical objects.

A normal vampire could theoretically use their imagination this way too, but normal vampires have little motivation to use their imaginations this way. The closest normal vampire equivalent to human fantasy is an expression of grief; a grieving vampire will sometimes become withdrawn and spacey as they retreat into their memories to spend time in the company of their lost loved one there. It is, in a sense, one of history's tragic ironies; vampires evolved to have incredibly vivid imaginations but mostly use them only pragmatically, while humans evolved to take great joy in imagination and fantasies and paracosms but can construct only comparatively minimalistic wire-frame imaginary worlds. In this, Stargazer's neurotype is in a sense a rare and precious blessing. Stargazer is also in a sense unusually blessed in having vampire-like senses and a human-like sense of beauty.

Stargazer will sometimes describe one of her imaginary creations to Magpie, so he can make a version of it in his own mind. In this way, she is able to share some of her otherwise invisible internal creative life with someone.

Some of the novelties and challenges Stargazer presented for her family while she was growing up and some of the challenges she faced as a child with human-like emotional needs being raised by vampires:

Vampires have a shorter childhood than humans but their language acquisition is slower. Stargazer mostly matured more slowly than a vampire child, but by vampire standards she was a precocious talker. I think she'd have been a slow talker by human standards, but she started talking earlier than a vampire child usually would, and at a lower level of general brain development.

An exhausting hyperactive hellion when she was little! Vampire children are more active than vampire adults and do play, but they're still kind of low energy and sleep a lot compared to human children, they have a strong instinct to cling to and remain close to their mother or other parental figures, and they quickly develop an intuitive sense of a dangerous world that makes them usually stay close to their parental figures (though I think they'd love hide and seek and pursuit games, so they might indulge in that when they feel safe). Little Stargazer had a higher metabolism, more human-like playfulness, and less of an intuitive sense of a dangerous world, so she was more energetic than a normal vampire child and more prone to wandering away. This was mixed with a Magpie-like disinterest in sadistic play, relative disinterest in predation practice, and discomfort when her parents were teaching her to hunt, trap, and fish (I think her hyperempathy might give her problems even when hunting nonhuman animals like deer).

Stargazer's rearing would have been a special challenge to her family because compared to a vampire child Stargazer had higher demands for socialization, enrichment, affection, touch, and positive reinforcement. Vampires by default spend most of their lives in a kind of very shallow open-eye sleep, and they're a lot more touch-averse than humans, and then of course there's the whole sociopathy thing. Imagine a child with the activity level, sleep cycle, and emotional needs of a human toddler being raised by people like that! Thankfully, Stargazer's parental figures were aware of this and wanted her to grow up into an adult who would like them (as that way she would be more willing to cooperate with them), and even vampire parents, in their own way, tend to like their children and want what is best for them, so they tried to adjust their parenting style accordingly, to parent her more like human parents would. In this she was much luckier than modern vampires raised by humans, as her parental figures actually knew approximately how human parenting works; they had opportunities to observe human parents interacting with their children, and ancient vampires were attentive students of human behavior, with a large body of cultural lore about it (in order to more effectively and more sustainably predate on humans). So, considering that she was raised by sociopath-adjacent people-eating monsters, Stargazer's childhood was surprisingly OK and untraumatic; her terrifying people-eating mother, grandmother, and grandfathers/great-uncles treated her a lot better than a lot of human parents treat their children, even by human standards. However, I think it might be difficult for vampire parents to avoid inflicting some understimulation and emotional neglect on a child with human-like emotional needs, even if they were making a real serious effort to not do that. Little Stargazer's favorite elder was Magpie (who'd have been nine or ten when she was born - that's most of the way to adulthood for vampires, but still prepubescent!), who was more patient and attentive to her because of his higher altruism and empathy and had more genuine sympathy with her because of his higher empathy.

As a hybrid, Stargazer is immune to the crucifix glitch. When her grandmother first (carefully!) showed her a cross-shaped talisman taken from a human victim at the seizure-inducing degree of visual arc, Stargazer's reaction was a small involuntary spasm, a giggle, and her language's version of the words "It tickles!" Stargazer soon discovered that the little pair of sticks terrified Drowning, and promptly saw the opportunity to turn the tables on her childhood tormentor and had a lot of fun chasing Drowning around with it, marveling at how her older sister cringed and fled from a harmless pair of sticks. Her grandmother eventually dissuaded Stargazer from this behavior by asking if she was curious what a crucifix glitch seizure looked like and, on being given an affirmative answer, offered to let her induce one on her by holding the cross up close to her face (I'm going with an interpretation that crucifix glitch seizures are usually not fatal in themselves, the big danger to the vampire is they leave it helpless in the presence of its enemies). This wouldn't have worked on a neurotypical vampire child, but Stargazer has much more affective empathy than a neurotypical vampire, and seeing grandma contorting around like a possessed person in an Exorcist knock-off while exploding from both ends with shit, piss, and vomit before passing out was enough to make her decide she'd really rather not inflict that on anyone again. Heron's mother is very emotionally intelligent by vampire standards!

There might have been a mildly scary experience the first time Stargazer cried as an older child, past the age at which weeping normally becomes physically impossible for vampires. She might have been worried that something was wrong with her eyes, and her family might have been like "Is this a neotenous/human distress response or an eye injury or irritation or infection? Can't tell, guess we'll just have to wait for her to be less sad and see if her eyes clear up then!" An epidemiologically vulnerable species with low genetic diversity, ancient vampires were very afraid of infections!

Similarly, there was a bit of a Carrie moment when Stargazer reached her menarche; being closely related to humans, vampire females have a menstrual cycle, but they don't bleed like that; it was a little alarming for her until her family reassured her that, no, that's... probably normal for you? Human females do that! It was also a bit alarming because it made her smell a little like a wounded human, enough to arouse vampire predatory impulses; her family have the self-control to not attack her, but there's a kind of disturbing period every month when her mother and sister are very obviously fighting down the impulse to do that (the selection pressure this represents probably has a lot to do with why vampire females don't bleed like that).

#Blindsight #project Blampire fanfic #cw: people-eating #cw: injury #cw: filicide #cw: cruelty to animals #cw: bullying #kinda #cw: sex #cw: incest #cw: gross body function stuff #cw: villain protagonists #warning: long

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fuckyeahisawthat · 4 years ago

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Still thinking about Primo and Paul as mirrors of each other. Thinking about them both as these feral teenagers running around through two VERY different adult worlds unsupervised.

For Paul it’s getting kicked out of every school he’s enrolled in, taking it as a personal challenge to see how fast he can get kicked out of the next one, wild in the way that privileged kids are, with the certainty that no consequence can be too serious or too permanent. It’s living with friends in an apartment in Rome at 15, “on his own” except for the fact that his mom brings him food a few times a week. (She loves him, but she has three other children to raise, and she’s long since given up on trying to control him.) It’s wandering around through his dad’s parties at 13, 14, 15, always looking a few years older than he is and learning how to carry himself to add a few more years to that, doing drugs and having sex with people who don’t ask how old he is, or don’t care. His dad letting him traipse around Marrakesh or London with the kind of neglect that feels like freedom when you’re a kid. And it’s also dealing with blackouts and bad trips and puking his guts out in the bathroom with no one to help him but maybe some single-serving party friend, if he’s lucky. It’s watching someone OD and being the only person in the house who’s not too fucked up to try to help them.

For Primo it’s being a different sort of wild, like a predatory animal you’re not really sure was ever tame in the first place. Spending hours and hours up in the mountains hunting, an excuse to be out of the reach of the adults in his life and anyone else, an absence that’s allowed because he always brings something home. But it’s also taking care of the animals and the garden when his dad’s passed out drunk or too hungover to get out of bed or gone on some errand for Salvatore without bothering to say when he’s coming back. Learning early that there’s no one else to do certain things for him, and so learning to do them himself. (Learning, probably, that there are certain things that just aren’t for him at all, like any kind of comfort or emotional caretaking from the adults around him. Learning to self-soothe with cigarettes or alcohol or drugs or driving recklessly fast around the mountains, and later with loud clubs and anonymous sex and more drugs.) The kind of neglect that feels like maturity when you’re a kid. And at the same time being expected to handle an adult world of violence and high stakes and irreversible consequences at a young age, to have a soldier’s discipline and emotional self-control and stoicism in the face of violent death at 15, 16, 17, maybe younger.

Here is Primo who deals with loneliness by making sure he doesn’t need anyone, detaching himself almost completely from the social fabric of the place he grew up in, a place most people never escape, being ready to cut any tie that becomes a liability, with a bullet in the head if necessary. Not settling anywhere, not growing roots anywhere, maybe not knowing how to, when everyone he grew up with is getting married and starting families in the same small towns their parents did. Making himself anonymous in a big city, so anonymous that to speak his name risks death, coming home to somewhere he knows he’s not really welcome only when he has something valuable enough that he’s confident he’ll be tolerated because of it.

And here is Paul who deals with loneliness by surrounding himself with co-partiers: friends, lovers, drug buddies, artistic collaborators on grand projects that may or may not ever happen, sometimes just a bunch of strangers sharing the same dance floor in a club; and with sensation: drugs to consume, art to take in, people to touch, hold, dance with, fuck. He knows everyone, he’s friends with everyone, he charms everyone. He lets himself fall into love of all kinds eagerly, almost compulsively, hoping, this time, maybe it will stick.

#trust fx #primo nizzuto #little paul #headcanons #they are so fascinating as parallels to each other

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simplepotatofarmer · 3 years ago

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It is so cool that you’ve worked with wolves! That sounds like really satisfying work, since those wolves still need someone to look after them.

it was!

at the time, i lived some place really rural so i had the space and the area i was in didn't have restrictions on owning exotic animals so people would just. get animals they thought were 'cool' and then dump them when they became too much.

all animals are a lot of work but wild/exotic animals truly shouldn't be pets and at the very least there should be requirements, for everyone's safety.

but you're right, they still need and deserve to be cared for since people put them into this position in the first place. most captive bred wolves and 'wolf hybrids' end up abandoned before age two and most end up being put to sleep. they also can face severe health issues due to lack of vet care and poor diet (commercial dog food can literally make them sick, i had to feed them raw meat and offal). bramble ended up with stomach cancer, sadly. they're not easy to care for. you need a lot of space, specific enclosures, and patience.

anyway, it's something i'm passionate about. i hate that i lost most of my pictures moving countries and my family refusing to send them to me but i do have some!

top picture is bramble when he first came to me with his emotional support dog, lucy. it's actually highly beneficial to have a dog that can help guide them especially when they're young. next picture is bramble.....four or so years later? he was out with me for a walk and there were some deer so we just kinda chilled, watching them.

this is snowflake and she was one of the wolf hybrids i had. now snowflake was the sweetest, sweetest thing but she was HUGE. the original owner literally could not handle her. luckily, she responded so well to positive reinforcement training and adored kids (though we never let them be unsupervised). she lived until she was 17 and i miss her so much.

toddler for scale, she was so dirty here because she'd go roll in the horse pasture while i was feeding them. snowflake was one of two that i would let off lead because they were well trained but i have to stress that these were both hybrids, not captive bred wolves. i never let any of the wolves off lead except for tala and then it was only when she was in the.... it was like a room that's outside but not? idk what to call that, we called it the screened in porch and we had an old couch for the animals and one for us and i'd sit out there and read and the one time i left her alone she ate the couch so. RIP in pieces couch.

anyway, i tried to find a picture of lupe, the other hybrid we took in, and of tala and the others but i don't have any. i didn't keep them for long, i was like. a waypoint until the rescue i worked with found a permanent place, mostly because it's so much work to care for captive bred wolves, it's not good to attempt to care for too many unless you're a big operation. there was one very close to where i lived, well. about a day or two drive so that's why i was like. the in between stop. bramble, snowflake, and lupe were the ones i kept and later what the rescue believed was a 'coydog' named ani who was both partially blind and deaf and had a host of health problems but i loved him.

the only other picture i found was of the baby deer that the neighbor's dog attacked (they lived about a half mile away and never kept their dog up, i literally had to get her spayed myself). the dog had chased it into the pond so i had to jump in to get it out and the damn dog ended up biting me a few times as i walked back. you should always leave baby animals alone or if they're in a dangerous situation, remove them and leave them near where you found them (like if there's a baby bird and you can see the nest, put it back), but if a domestic animal is attacking them.... well.

luckily there's a deer sanctuary about three hours or so from where i lived and they took it in.

wow i'm so sorry i rambled so much, i love animals okay. i just. love them. here's the baby deer to make up for it:

(the bottle is full of the formula that they sell at the farmer's co-op for like. baby cows/goats/sheep etc. since it was the weekend. but one last thing: if you have to feed a wild animal baby, always always make sure the animal is warm before you do. if the animal is cold, it won't be able to digest the food.)

#loyal answers things #this is the longest ask i've ever written i basically just info dumped i'm so sorry

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ficsilike-reblogged · 5 years ago

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Precious Inexperience

A/N: Welp. Should I be posting this on Easter? Probably not. This was written under the influence of the lack of sleep and the over-abundance of wine. This is for @darkficsyouneveraskedfor’s “What’s Old is New Again" Challenge. I used the prompt #14, “I do not know how to kiss or I would kiss you. Where do the noses go?” - Ingrid Bergman

Pairing: King!Robb Stark x F!Reader

Rating: M for DARK THEMES including dub-con, death, death of children, Robb being a dick, a bit of smut, and canon-typical sexism

Warnings: Again, dub-con/dubious consent, talk of pregnancy, men being terrible-PLEASE DO NOT READ IF THIS TRIGGERS YOU

Word Count: 2.8k

Summary: The King in the North was now King of the Seven Kingdoms. Peace reigned. But Kings need heirs.

The King in the North they called him. King in the North even as he sat on the Iron Throne. Robb Stark was King of the Seven Kingdoms—won with bloody battles and dead wives. Alliances were sewn with marriages and Robb had easily taken a wife when it meant more men for his armies, more food to feed them, a stronger claim to the throne that had taken the head of his father all those years ago. A Frey girl. She’d been pretty. Pretty for Frey with small hips and a nice smile. She died in childbed—their son along with her. Then there was Margaery Tyrell. The beauty of the Reach. With the Reach under his command, Robb was unstoppable. Food was plentiful even as Winter came and went and the remaining forces loyal to the Crown starved and died.

Yes, she made a beautiful queen for a year. When her face turned purple and blood poured from her eyes, everyone cried “poison! Poison!” and pointed fingers at the Greyjoys, still refusing to bend the knee to their new king. No one ever truly knew who had murdered The Gracious Queen Margaery, but the heads of hundreds of Greyjoy bannermen decorated the pikes outside the Red Keep until the last Greyjoy, Yara, finally accepted his rule.

The Realm had peace, it seemed. The Dragon Queen had stayed in Essos with her army and her dragons and the Wildlings to the North had been eliminated under the command of his bastard brother, Jon Snow.

Peace, they said.

But, Kings need heirs.

The Westerlands submitted their prettiest maids from the best houses. The Stormlands, too. The Vale followed, along with the Riverlands, and the North. And Dorne, who had skillfully played both sides of the board during the war with the lions, had been slow to send a proposal.

The Martells were skittish, for good reason, to marry into another royal family. But that did not mean they did not want a Dornish woman to marry their new king. Robb had been kind to Dorne; knew their worth and history. He met with Prince Doran in the Water Gardens, personally, to broker an alliance and laughed with Ellaria Sand and Prince Oberyn at their feasts. The Northern King knew the power Dorne held. It had been no secret that Robb had sought Dorne’s council on many things.

But it came as a surprise to Y/N when Prince Doran sent for her and her father to come to the Water Gardens and meet with him. Her house was small and held modest power, nestled on the westernmost coast of Dorne, just south of House Dayne of Starfall. It was mostly a small naval fleet port and trading post with merchants from the Reach and Westerlands. As the fifth child of her family, she was often over-looked in many regards as her elder sister was groomed to one day take her place as head of the family. It was no bother to her, mostly. She was able to read and spend her time racing horses. Her Northern-bred mother was aghast when she had first learned of a few Dornish customs, but had softened immensely when she learned her firstborn, her daughter, had not made her a terrible wife. She’d produced an heir, after all. But the one frivolity she could not and would not condone was any sort of romantic interludes. She did not care that the rest of Dornish nobility embraced paramours and bastard children.

Y/N and her seven siblings were raised with Northern sensibilities in that regard. No men were left near her unsupervised. She was given little education on the art of romance other than the books she had to smuggle away from her mother’s prying eyes and, because she cared little for most people, it did not bother her in the slightest.

Marriage was not something she thought about often. Her house was secure with her sister and her marriage to Prince Doran’s son, Trystane. Her sister was pregnant with her second child already, much to the happiness of her family and the Martells. Her elder brothers were prosperous knights and her younger siblings were contemplating becoming maesters or a septa. The family coffers were plentiful. She needn’t marry for advantage in any regard.

Or so she had been led to believe.

When Prince Doran reached for her hand with a soft smile, she gave it to him readily, even as his heir, Princess Arianne could not offer a comforting expression. “The King has asked for a bride. You shall be our envoy.”

There was no argument. No brokering. No tears.

It was a strange sort of fog that clouded her mind as her father thanked Prince Doran and Princess Arianne for “the honor” and then tried to ready her for the trip to King’s Landing and the long days spent in the wheelhouse on the journey north. She hardly remembered any of it. The ladies maids were frantic about her, as they helped her dress in a pretty golden gown and pressed sweet-smelling perfume to her neck and wrists. All of it felt like it was happening to someone else. Not to her. Things like this didn’t happen to her. She would read and race horses and get scolded by her mother for smelling of hay or stealing berries from the kitchens.

It was a cattle show, if she had to give it a name. The potential brides were scattered about the throne room, their fathers at their sides, all primped and ready for inspection.

“Stand up straight, girl,” her father chided, a soft tone betraying his love for his second daughter.

“Yes, father,” Y/N murmured in return and did as he bid. “But, truly, you cannot believe he will even look at me.” She had always thought herself plain. It was no bother, really. Her sister was the heir and beauty and it took all the pressure of being a lady away. Her sister was kind to her, too. Perfect in every way. If she were standing here, Y/N was sure she would have been proposed to by now. And her younger sister was so enthralled with religion she hardly spoke of anything else.

“Prince Doran knows the King very well. He chose you for a reason.”

“Fine. But when we get sent home, I-”

“Your Grace.” Her father bowed and she quickly followed with a curtsey, grimacing at not noticing when the young King had stepped in their direction. “May I present to you my daughter, Lady Y/N.”

The King was handsome, obviously. His russet hair curled over the tops of his ears and even with the growing beard, he still had a young man’s roguish charm. Her heart suddenly constricted as he held out a hand toward her and her fingers shook as she placed her hand in his. “A pleasure to meet you, my lady.” His words were murmured, beard scratching against her fingers.

“L-likewise, Your Grace.”

Robb stood straight with a smirk and there was a gleam in his eye that made her stomach twist. He nodded to her father and walked away to greet the next lady as she deflated, breath rushing.

“Well, I hope are happy, Father. I did my part on behalf of Dorne.” She was ready to go home. Now. The look the King gave her left her unsettled. There was a darkness behind his pretty eyes, one she had only seen when faced with feral animals that would howl in the night outside her family’s castle walls.

But then some man in a grey and black surcoat, embroidered with a snarling direwolf, stepped to her father’s side and whispered in his ear before his unfamiliar eyes flickered to her. The exchange lasted barely a few seconds and soon the man was walking away, following his king through the shadows.

“What is it?”

Her father frowned and dropped his voice to a low whisper she had to strain to hear even as he bent to her level. “You’ve been requested to meet His Grace in the gardens tonight.”

“Tonight?” She parroted. “Will you be there?”

“No. This is to see if you would be compatible.” Even as the words left his mouth, she knew he did not understand them.

“Must I go?”

Her father nodded. Sealing her fate.

The gardens were quiet except for the chirping of an incessant bird hidden somewhere in the greenery. The only other person she had seen while following the map she’d been handed just after dinner, was a guard at the entrance who looked at her with hard eyes from beneath his helmet before letting her venture in to the twisting, turning paths of green.

She squinted at the crudely drawn map in the dim moonlight and hoped she had found the right place. There had been a statue, a few turns ago, of the King’s sister, Sansa, holding the head of Cersei Lannister on a platter. Before that, a statue of the slain Stark boys, Rickon and Bran, astride their direwolves—a dead lion was crumpled under their paws. Arya had to be somewhere, too. Y/N was sure of it. She wondered what her statue depicted her doing—Arya was known throughout the Realm for her vicious nature and love for her family. She had set sail to the West not long ago with her new husband, Lord Gendry Baratheon.

She sat down on the stone bench and folded the map, putting it away before chewing at the side of her thumb. Whether it was boredom or trepidation, she wasn’t sure. The entire situation seemed…off kilter. There was something bubbling beneath the surface she didn’t understand.

“My Lady.”

She quickly stood and curtseyed as the king walked around the corner and into the small clearing. “Your Grace.”

He reached for her hand and pressed another kiss to her knuckles. “I’ve been told you are the fifth of eight children.”

She frowned at the strange start of the conversation but did nothing to deter it. “Yes, Your Grace. Two sisters and five brothers.”

Robb hummed and nodded, eyes raking down her form. “And your sister? She’s pregnant with her second child. After only two years of marriage.”

She nodded. “Yes. They are hoping for another boy.”

Robb’s eyes closed and another smile touched his lips, this one much more relaxed, as he settled on the bench behind him. “Good. That’s good.” She moved to sit beside him when he pressed a hand against her stomach and pushed her back. Her feet stumbled and he caught her at the waist, pressing his fingers into her skin with a grip that stung. “No. I want to look at you.”

Standing tall, she tried to even out her breath as she felt his eyes start to roam. His hands moved to her hips and his thumbs dug into bottom of her stomach, pulling a gasp from her lips. “Y-your Grace?”

“These…” He squeezed her hips. “These could do nicely.”

She looked down at her hips he seemed to be so attentive to, wondering what he could possibly mean. “Princess Arianne said I had my mother’s hips, perfect for children.” The compliment had always been a strange one, but the Princess assured her it was good.

Robb dragged her close, feet once again tangling and almost careening her forward as the young king kept her mostly steady. “Your father and Prince Doran have assured me that you are pure. I will ask you this only once. If you lie, I will know and the consequences will be severe. Do you understand me?”

“Y-yes, Your Grace.” Her heart was hammering a painful beat against her ribs as he looked up at her. “I understand.”

“Have you ever been with another man?” His eyes pinned her, cold and knowing.

“No. I have never even…” her words trailed off as heat washed down her spine.

“Finish what you were saying.” Another squeeze to her hips.

“I have never been kissed, Your Grace, let alone laid with a man. I am afraid my inexperience will only disappoint you.”

Robb’s answering smile reminded her of his family’s sigil; sharp, snarling teeth. As he stood, his hands slid up her sides, thumbs brushing the sides of her breasts, and dragged her close. “You are mistaken, my lady. You have made me very happy.” And he kissed her then, stealing her breath as he pried her lips apart and shoved his tongue into her mouth. Shaking hands found purchase in his dark-colored tunic as she tried to keep up with his mouth that seemed determined to devour her whole.

The examination by the maester had left her shaking. “She is untouched, Your Grace,” the maester said to Robb as he waited outside her chambers. “As promised.”

The door hadn’t even closed and he was basically shouting her purity to the halls of the Keep. She curled into a ball on her featherbed and drew a pillow to her chest as if that would help take away the embarrassment and the discomfort from the Maester’s previously prodding instruments and fingers. She barely heard them speaking of fertility, her mother’s, her sister’s. Hers. Her bed dipped with the weight of someone sitting but she didn’t turn to see who it was, expecting her father.

“Could I have some tea, please, papa?” The old nickname for her father slipped out. “I feel like…I feel like my body doesn’t belong to me anymore.”

“It doesn’t.”

She sat straight at the sound of the king’s voice, fright grasping at her heart. “Your Grace, I-I-I-”

Robb suddenly loomed over her, legs bracketing her thighs and pressing her against her pillows. His hand slithered its way under her chemise to press against her bare stomach and she felt her heart try to lodge itself up in her throat. The scent of him, of leather and spice and ale, flooded her senses as he leaned closer to breathe his words against her mouth. “This belongs to me. All of it. All of you. I will make you round with my children as many times as your body can take if it pleases me.”

“Y-your Grace-” Her scared eyes looked over his shoulder to see the door to her chambers had been shut, sealing her away from the world.

“You will give me an heir that is mine without question and then you will give me more. More children to fill these cursed halls with something other than the whispers of politics and subterfuge.” He sat back on his heels watched her heaving chest with a smile that looked too soft for him now. “You have made me a very happy man, Y/N.”

Her name sounded strange on his tongue.

And she hated how much she liked it.

The ceremony had been ornate and befitting of the young king and his new queen. She traded her father’s colors for black and grey and silver and felt the snarling direwolf pressing against her back with the new bridal cloak even as his pretty lips pressed against hers and the crowd cheered.

She was Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.

His third queen.

The festivities came and went and soon she was alone with him in his chambers and he hardly kissed her again before her dress was discarded and her chemise torn to near shreds. And it hurt. Every slap of his hips as he rutted against her brought her closer to some strange precipice she couldn’t name, cresting between pleasure and pain. Coiling tighter and tighter in her stomach like a terrible snake.

“You’ll give me a boy,” he said, breath hot against her ear as he dragged her ever closer. “You’ll give me children.”

“I will,” she whimpered in return, fingers trying to find a grip on his slick back. A scream nearly wrenched its way from her throat as he sunk his teeth into her shoulder. “I will!”

His thrusts turned animalistic and her head nearly hit the carved headboard as he pushed her further and further up the overstuffed featherbed and then, with a final thrust, he sunk his deepest yet into her and stayed there as warmth shot through her.

And her coil snapped, legs shaking and eyes rolling with convulsions she couldn’t stop.

He stayed inside her for a while, prick softening. And it was the gentlest he’d been with her since the ceremony, letting his hands roam her torso, sponging kisses to her face and breasts, murmuring how she’d give him an heir.

“I will,” she said again, words not her own, body still reeling with aftershocks. “I will.”

Robb held her face in his hands and kissed her slowly, almost repentantly. “You will. Or you will see The Stranger just as Roslin and Margaery did. Do you understand?”

It was only after she had ‘accepted’ his proposal had she learned that Roslin had birthed a boy that could never have been Robb’s son, born too early to have been conceived by him, and Margaery had been barren. She nodded and gently pushed the hair away from his eyes, now uncaring that they held very little warmth when they looked at her. Maybe they would when she gave him a son. Maybe he could love her then.

When he finally pulled out of her, he canted her hips up and shoved a pillow beneath them to keep her aloft. “Stay like that until morning.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

A/N: Well, there you go. Please tell me what you think.

Part two

#Robb Stark x Reader #roosoldhollywood #darkfic #dub-con #Robb Stark #game of thrones #dubious consent #dub con #trigger warning #tw: dub con #tw: dub-con #tw: dubious consent

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yuurivoice · 4 years ago

Note

Do you have any tips for first time cat owners? I’m not getting one any time soon, but I’d love to have one in the future.

If you can, try to get a good vibe for the kitty before you get it. If you’re wanting a sweetheart, you probably want to see if there’s chemistry first. There’s no science to it, and some cats will be too young to even know how they’re really going to be when you meet them anyway, but...sometimes you know. For example, my friend has a delightful cat named Sweet Tea, who chose us as we were looking around a Petco. Her and her siblings were cute, but as we watched, this kitten only seemed to call out to us, and actively shied away from others who stopped by. For some reason, she knew she liked us. So, my friend adopted her, and she’s a very loving sweetheart of a cat.

Now, ever cat adoption story isn’t that magical, so just keep that in mind. Try your best to steel your heart and not just fall in love with the first fluffer that purrs for you. It’s a big decision, and the cat will be with you for a long time.

Making sure your environment is cat friendly is an even bigger deal. If you’re a cluttered, chaotic type of person at home, that’s going to stress a cat out. If you’re worried about that, watch a few cat behavior shows, Jackson Galaxy is fantastic and a lot of his stuff deals with what to long time cat owners might seem obvious, but to newbs might be a huge revelation. Things like litterboxes, food and water placement, and cat-safe spaces and furniture matter a lot. Even if your cat would be happy with a box and some discarded paper, it is better to be overprepared than under. For example, for my kitten I completely catified my bedroom, I’ve got three pieces of cat furniture and steps up to my bed, a litterbox in the bathroom, etc. and ya know.....she just sleeps between my arms on my desk, but having a cat friendly space is still important because she’ll grow into things.

Know your lifestyle and know what kind of cat is compatible with it. If you’re working full time and live alone, it can be a struggle for a cat to adjust depending on their age and temperament, but the more cat friendly your space is, the more you can do to create a situation that works. Like if you put a cat in a room with the aforementioned cardboard box and discarded paper, food, water, and litter...that cat is going to be bored out of its mind in 5 minutes.

If you had a complete “catified” room on the other hand, you have a lot more space to do whatever you need to do without worrying about your new cat friend going nuts in your home unsupervised. Then as they grow and learn and feel a sense of ownership over the space and you, you can expand their space and give them more room. That’s a very careful way of doing things, and again, it’ll depend on the cat’s history and socialization and alllll that stuff. But I think giving any pet a place that is theirs is really important. Learning how to put yourself in the shoes of a pet is important. If you were just carted away from a shelter, or your mom and litter mates for the first time ever, and dropped into a new location with a stranger...that’s scary! So creating room for them to become confident and secure is the very first building block of developing a good relationship with a happy pet.

Can you tell I watched a lot of animal videos recently? LMFAO I had pets my whole life and suddenly suffered a huge wave of doubt and anxiety, so I logged several hours of research over the past month.

#Anonymous

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bravo-four-seal-team · 3 years ago

Text

Profile: Ashley Sawyer

Thought I’d share my OC profile so people know more about her when reading.

So yeah, here's Ashleys profile, basically how I remember what I'm writing

Name: Ashley

Middle Name: Caroline.

Surname: Sawyer

Age: 31

Height: 5’3

D.O.B: 14/03/1990

Nickname/call sign: Song Bird(when drunk and singing) , A.C, or Ash.

Occupation: Marine, joined in 2007-8.

Family: Older Brother Trent Sawyer.

Rank: Staff Sergeant (E-6 ) (10-11 years enlisted)

Gunnery Sergeant (E-7) (12-13 years enlisted by 2021)

Emergency contacts for injuries in field:

Trent Sawyer

Scott Carter (Boyfriend)

Amelia Carter (Friend)

Trained in:

Medical (First aid), hand to hand close range combat, heavy weapon combat, heavy vehicle combat. Long distance targeting.

Injuries/Trauma:

3 Months worth of torture.

Broken ribs, punctured lung, broken leg, dislocated shoulder, electrical burns, cuts/slashes, whip marks, waterboarding, starvation. Stabbed, shot. Taken out by walking into a door.

jumped on a grenade.

Drinks: Whiskey, beer, tequila.

Personality type: is classed as a Defender trait, always ready to protect her loved ones, protect those who need it, dedicated and warm, loyal, though doubts herself at many stages.f

Personal Details:

Hair: Dark blond, almost brown. Shoulder length. Usually tied up in a bun.

Eye Colour: Grey

Height: 5’3 (shortest in her family while her brother is 6’2)

Relationships: Dated in the past, engaged once.

Wounds?: Multiple scars across torso and back. Along with Electrical burn scars on legs.

Children: None (though secretly wants a kid though.)

Phrases: “Well shit” “Well someone left me unsupervised” “Don’t be mad” “Fuck” “Oh boy”

Car or Motorbike: Both

Shows and Movies: Historical, action or sci-fi, crime.

Music: Country, some sea shanties and classic rock and occasionally emotional songs.

Favourite Food: Anything that is not an MRE - she can cook, but only if she is really in the mood to make pizza from scratch. (However later finds a place with amazing Onion rings)

Most used swear: Shit.

Emotions: Chooses to ignore them. Just like her health

Health: Ignores that, gets hurt? No big deal. Sick? Who cares? She doesn’t care.

Other :

She hates spiders and is claustrophobic. Has a fear of hospitals, being left alone in one.

Does not like to talk about things going on in her head - will shut down and if annoyed will fight.

She won't care if she's bleeding out,someone else gets hurt and she needs to check on them.

Massive Fear of Needles, three responses, pass out, punch, complain/sarcasm.

2 tattoos, one on her shoulder of a Compass and one on her ribs Marine logo with Semper Fi (only type of needle she isn’t scared of)

Hidden Talent: She can sing and is pretty good at it. And knows how to play guitar (deployments can be boring)

Facts:

She told Trent she had enlisted in the Marines when he had some downtime before deployment. (she was studying)

She met Metal when visiting Trent, who at the time was not home. He was drunk.

She was held captive for 3 months and tortured.

She finds out Trent is in a good and stable relationship.

She has been part of the support for Bravo, when a Marine team is assigned.

She has had the worst dating experiences. Her last boyfriend tried to kill her. - She woke up tied to the table and him preparing surgical items, she got out. He was killed.

Worries constantly about her brother - she is scared that one day it’ll be his funeral she attends. - but doesn’t know anyone on his team to ask them to have his back.

She joined the Marines because Trent got blown up, she never wanted him to be alone again on the field, she has been trained to provide tactical support to SEAL Teams, Trent is unaware of this.

Didnt speak to Trent for 5 years. - Massive fight 2012, later in 2017 reached out to him in August.

Other Points

Ashley is confident, put her beside metal? She will be a flustered mess.

Ashley loves all kinds of animals, however she is really allergic to dogs, that does not stop her from petting every dog she sees.

She spends time at the shooting range. - Especially after arguments.

If she's hurting she shuts off from people and will not answer anyone.

If something traumatic happens i.e losing a friend - she will go radio silent, stop eating and nearly end up in hospital because of this.

She will hide when she is struggling, refusing to ask for help.

She hides injuries a lot. - She can literally have her arm in a cast and says “Who got injured? Wasn’t me.”

Will look them in the eye and steal their beer. (especially with Metal.)

She hunted Amelia down to see exactly what she was like, she ended up somehow befriending her.

Dating her

She lives for being able to just cuddle. - or just have physical contact.

Her love languages are Emotional connection and physical contact.

She is sensitive when it comes to scars being touched, or being asked to talk about what is going on in her head, (it probably runs in the family.)

Will steal her partner's clothes. Especially for when she's deployed. Will walk around base in their hoodie to have a piece of comfort.

She's loyal, loves with all her heart once you get past the walls

Someone hits on her; she just smiles sweetly and will promise to hurt them is they speak to her again.

Break down those walls of hers? You got yourself an Ashley for life. - She does not cheat, but always has a fear that her partner will as it's happened twice before.

Will admit things she won't tell her brother. - which is a lot. But only after she's managed to convince herself she won't be hurt by her partner.

Childhood

Locked in the trunk of the car by her father for ‘talking about an unwanted subject’

Father and Mother did not want her, Father tried to kill her. Head smashed against the wall claimed she ‘fell downstairs’

Has always looked up to her brother (both for what he does and because he's taller)

Had a stuffed bear in camo gear (Father burnt it one night.)

Would go see Trent off and be there for when he returned from spin ups and deployments.

Was obsessed with Archery and archers from Robin Hood to Hawkeye.

Spent time avoiding Trent as a teenager after his injury. - parents thought it would be easier for both kids.

Cut her hair and dyed it and her father was angry.

Did stupid stunts which resulted in a dislocated shoulder.

Was selected to do training for the Olympics in archery, dropped it when she decided to join the marines.

#B4writes #OC: Ashley Sawyer #OC profile #tw: injury #tw: childhood trauma #SEAL Team OC #ao3 series #B4queue #written up: 21/07/21

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florvinhara · 3 years ago

Text

my detectives (part 2)

celebrating the end of this semester w infodump part 2 ft luna! (part 1)

Luna [redacted] Kingston

Romances A or M

Age: 27

Birthday: September 12

Star sign: Virgo

Height: 5'3"

Hair: black, wavy and shoulder length w choppy front bangs

Eyes: dark blue

Other appearance details: eyesight is bad enough that she usually wears glasses but she can still mostly see w/out them. long scar on neck from the murphy attack. old scars on knees and elbows (the Klutz special).

Languages: Conversational fluency in lots of them!

Stats:

Charming/Intimidating

Impulsive/Cautious

Sarcastic/Genuine

Friendly/Stoic

Easygoing/Stubborn

Heart/Mind

Optimist/Pessimist

Team player/Independent

Primary skills: Deduction & people

Strengths: Outgoing, kind, trusting, creative thinker, jack of all trades, open-minded, thoughtful, devoted, loyal, strong-willed

Weaknesses: Guilty, flighty, overactive imagination, clumsy, low self-esteem, unfocused, nervous, dishonest, impetuous, irrational at times

Personal:

her middle name is currently [redacted] bc im pretty sure rook's sister is Evil and for the Drama im gonna make luna's middle name the aunt's first name ;) if it turns out the aunt isnt a villain then.... idk maybe she still will be in my heart <3

she's worn glasses since she was 12, but her vision is. Technically good enough that she can mostly get by without them, leading to her always putting them on top of her head and subsequently losing them

in my heart she's an investigative journalist who moved back to wayhaven after sm things went down at her old job that made her want to find out what really happened to rook and reconnect w rebecca, but then got caught up in the murder plot with UB starting book 1, but in the vein of canon, she joined the force to follow in rook's footsteps etc.

she was kind of a weird kid, always daydreaming and making up her own very in-depth games and stories in the corner- she was pretty shy! sometimes she wld write them down and that's what first got her interested in writing

the car is named Tracy and she is a LADY who is doing her best!!!! at this point tracy is a cherished friend, jokes about her being bad will Not be well received >:(

she's very much in her head all the time, smtimes her sentences sort of meander and just go off on tangents and then kind of drift off at the ends

rebecca sent her to boarding school for a while following an Event in luna's childhood that made rebecca feel like wayhaven wasn't safe for the time being, she had lots of fun but that's kind of the time when luna started to worry she'd done smth wrong and that's why rebecca didn't want her around, since she'd kind of blocked out the Incident

many nervous habits! including but not limited to: cleaning her glasses, braiding small strands of her hair, jostling her leg, cracking her knuckles

she is actually v smart! in a book sense at least :0 she's clever and good at solving puzzles, and she remembers a lot of rlly obscure info abt lots of things- look into her eyes and you can basically hear the mii music playing, but she is intelligent!

she loves animals :') walking anywhere with her takes Ages bc she wants to stop and look at birds and if there's a worm on the sidewalk everything comes to a Halt while a rescue operation is performed

rocks!!!!! she's a huge geology nerd and she Loves them sm, fun crystals and pebbles alike :) she collects them all and if you picked one up and asked her abt it she wld know exactly when and where she got it

she hates seasonal music!!!! halloween songs and Especially christmas songs!! she cant explain why but it drives her up. the. wall. during the last few months of the year she's like that gif from community of the woman hitting the guy with a candy cane like "its December 10th!!!" its the one thing about the holidays she doesn't like

lots of her favorite books are from the golden age of detective fiction! she also reads a lot of poetry and history books, and loves nonfiction :D she's a sucker for any book with really in depth worldbuilding and/or a map on the front inside cover- she DID read the entire silmarillion AND enjoy it! she loves animated and stop-motion movies, laika is her Favorite studio and she owns every studio ghibli movie

she loves any food or drink where the main ingredient is sugar <3 catch her eating lucky charms dry straight from the box! she'll only drink coffee if it has like. vanilla or sm other sweet flavoring added to it along with 12 packs of sugar

her sleep schedule.... oh no! she had insomnia even before murphy, and now with the nightmares, it's even worse :( it's ok though! she uses the nighttime to work on art or baking or writing etc.

she listens to lots of indie/folk music- the oh hellos are one of her favorite bands! also she's a big fan of fun pop music- carly rae jepsen, bleachers, hayley kiyoko, HAIM, etc. also smdfnsj she Does listen to lofi music

she's loved chess since she was a kid and often plays against herself or another opponent- she also usually has a puzzle she's working on, and really likes crossword puzzles/sudoku games!

background noise is a Friend <3 it rlly helps her focus!

she loves her potted plants a lot! she has very detailed instructions on how to take care of them and she does talk/sing to them to help them grow

her house Looks minimalist? she values the aesthetic but she cannot commit- open any drawer in her house and you'll find like 7000 receipts she hasn't thrown out yet

she is Sweet but! untapped Rage is there... she has a tendency to bottle things up until one tiny thing makes her Go Off with all the stress and anger she's been holding back :( she Will cry and yell and then be completely horrified and spend the next 3-4 weeks apologizing profusely

she feels bad about. Everything :( she blames herself a lot,, it's easier to tell herself that things are going wrong bc it's her Fault and she did smth wrong rather than accept that it's out of her control

on that subject things with rebecca are Awkward!! they kind of drifted apart and luna feels like she shld have tried harder to keep in touch

her primary love language... probably words of affirmation or physical affection! she's very open w her affections and telling/showing people she loves them (to the extent they're comfortable with it! she prefers to let whoever she's with dictate the pace of the relationship)

if you see her Sleeping on the floor.... just leave her be,, she's sleepy

she is. weirdly lucky at small things and games of chance? catch her being dealt a full house right out of the gate during card games or finding quarters on the street all the time! she wins carnival games like nobody's business <3

absently she knows all the Lucky things to wish on! shooting stars, ladybugs, eyelashes, pennies, 11:11, etc :)

she dresses like. a very specific kind of influencer lowkey, w the oversized t-shirts and jeans ksdfm, the Sweaters/coats, etc.

hot weather does Not spark joy- she owns like 700 fans and loves getting to wear all her cute winter clothes :)

she's not allowed to watch cooking/baking shows unsupervised anymore, following the Incident where she watched one and then spent the entire night building a Giant gingerbread mansion spreading across the floor of her apartment

she deflects. a Lot! not even intentionally really but it just Happens :/ she's naturally a pretty open person but smtimes she just naturally is Not Talking abt it and tries to play things off, especially personal things abt her feelings/reactions to things <3

she is Nervous,, her base level of stress is. kind of up there! surprises Do Not work bc she will just Shriek and drop what she's holding sndfsjn.... it was like that even before murphy but. you know. it's more pronounced now :/

in her heart she is like. a human golden retriever! she's excited!! she wants to be friends!! she's roaming around,, take her for a walk and maybe she will find a cool stick to carry!!

she walks with a little bit of a skip in her step! on her toes a bit so nobody can tell she is Short... (it doesnt work)

#clown girl has entered the arena #my softest oc BY far jsvskssb she is wholesome but also <3 a lil bit of a fool #twc

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straynstay · 5 years ago

Text

Seungmin - Hybrid AU!

you crossed your arms staring down at Seungmin, the annoying Shiba Inu hybrid that you had the misfortune to be around since pre-school

yes, canine and feline hybrids are considered natural enemies

but Seungmin and you took this rivalry to the next level in 1st grade after he placed some black eraser shavings on your hair and spread the rumour that you had fleas

you hated Seungmin with all your being and never forgave him for being such a coward liar

you had the worst years of your life after his prank until you were finally transferred to another school, a bigger one, before high school started

but your luck didn’t last long since Seungmin became your classmate the following year after being transferred

and you hated him even more because he wouldn’t leave you alone

even if you complained about it, you were seen as the “bad hybrid” because he was everyone’s favorite, including your teachers

so you had to put up with Seungmin again

but you were glad you’re both seniors now and in a few months you’ll get rid of him forever

“this is my seat” you had just placed your backpack on the seat and got off the bus to drink some water at school before leaving for the field trip

you didn’t expect him to be occupying your spot

“I didn’t see your name on it” you rolled your eyes at Seungmin's childish answer

“my backpack was on it, idiot”

“your backpack was on both seats”

“yeah, cause I didn’t want a mutt sitting next to me”

“take your seats, we’re leaving in a minute!” your owl hybrid teacher said and went to the back of the bus to start counting the students

“find another seat” you told the annoying boy

“you find another seat”

“I was here first”

“I don’t care”

“take your seat” your teacher said with a serious face and hooded eyes

you sighed in misery, plopping down next to Seungmin and almost crushing your backpack

“I hate you” you hissed feeling your claws coming out to strike him, but you kept your hands to yourself

“I couldn’t care less about your feelings for me” Seungmin gave you a too polite smile and put on his huge headphones

the idiot had taken your seat by the window, so you had to travel with people nudging your shoulder every time they got up to go to the bathroom or take something from the minibar in the back of the bus

you were regretting going on this field trip already, it’s not like you’re actually needing those extra points

when it comes to grades, being lonely and friendless pays off since you have no one to interrupt your studies or invite you to cool parties on the weekends

and that’s something you should thank Seungmin for

he may have ruined your social life when you were six, but at least you’re gonna have a brilliant career in the future

-♡- ♡- ♡- ♡-

“please, behave, you’re representing our school, so don’t do stupid things, alright?” your teacher said after giving some instructions about the trip

you were gone to see a forest reserve and an animal shelter where they helped rescued wild animals into rehabilitation to their natural habitat

since you were all hybrids, you'd be divided into groups according to your family groups

luckily you didn't share your animal DNA with Seungmin, so you'd be spared from his presence during this trip, which was quite therapeutic to think of

“alright, we’ll go over the instructions again once we reach the shelter, but I cannot emphasize enough that you should all listen to the caretakers, please!” your teacher said when everyone left the bus

“just because we’ll be with our DNA family doesn’t mean that we’re equal, so don’t be too cocky, alright?” you all nodded “then let’s go”

you all began walking the trail to the shelter and you decided to stay beside your teacher just in case Seungmin tried anything with you today

you’d be unsupervised pretty much this entire field trip, so you had no idea what to expect from him and his antics

once you reached the animal shelter, the workers were there to welcome the group

there were some human caretakers, including the supervisor, who greeted you all with a lot of enthusiasm

he explained how and why he started the shelter, giving a brief summary of its history and doings

you tried paying attention, but there was one of the human caretakers that caught your attention and you couldn’t take your eyes off of them

you sniffed the air discreetly and their scent reached you

he had a feline kind of smell

yes! luck was indeed on your side today

“shall we split this great group?” the supervisor clapped his hands in excitement

“caprines and equines over here, please” one hybrid caretaker raised her hand and a couple of people gathered around her

“porcines with me” two people went there

“birds over here” more students left you behind

“canines this way” a caretaker called and almost everyone went his way

“felines?” the cute human looked around and you raised your hand shyly

“there’s only you?” they asked coming your way

“y-yeah, I guess”

“hm, I think we might need some help, there’s too many felines for you to take care of”

you thought that maybe they could be your only help

it would be really nice being around them the entire day and having their exclusive attention

“I think I can handle” you said rubbing your arm in embarrassment

“I don’t doubt that, but having help is gonna be better, trust me” they answered and told you to wait for a bit while they went to pick another student

oh, no, please don’t let Seungmin come

not long after the human was back with Eugène, a Percheron hybrid with French bloodline and you sighed in relief

-♡- ♡- ♡- ♡-

everything was flowing like a calm river

your day was going great and you found out Eugène was really nice, but maybe it was because it’s the first time you’re talking to each other

the cute caretaker complimented you many times in the way you were handling the tiger cubs and you couldn’t feel happier

you all had to stop your activities for lunch and gathered at the main entrance of the shelter

your teacher gave more instructions you clearly weren’t paying attention to, and the group walked to the restaurant at the main house

Seungmin was already there picking his food, and you decided to stall a little bit just to see where he would seat so you wouldn’t have the infortune of sharing the table with him

but destiny was never in your favor

and when all the students in front of you in line sat among the caretakers, you saw yourself with no place to sit

you even tried sitting at the table with your teacher and the supervisor, but they shooed you away

you would rather sit on the floor than having to eat in Seungmin’s presence, but that would be seen as really rude

so you took a deep breath and marched on his direction

you plopped down without saying anything, and completely ignored him while eating

you never swallowed food so fast in your life, and you were sure you’d be sick afterwards, but desperate times call for desperate measures

Seungmin had already finished before you, so he got up with his utensils and you could breath a bit better

but your happiness didn’t take long before you saw him coming over again with two pieces of cheesecake

he put one in front of you and began eating the other

you were too annoyed by now because that’s how he always acts, pretending to be nice around everyone in school when you’re the only one who knows the douche he is

and he’d be stupid to think that you’d eat the cheesecake just because he brought it to you

you finished your food and took your plate away, handing it to one of the kitchen workers behind a tiny window

“your boyfriend already took your dessert”

“my what?!” you exclaimed

“your dessert, the cheesecake” that’s not what you had asked, but you understood what she said the first time

you felt your limbs going numb, but anger soon filled your body, making you move when more students showed up behind you

you went back to the table, rage boiling inside your stomach, and you felt your claws coming out to strike that stupid face staring at you

“you told people we’re dating?! what the hell is wrong with you?!” you tried to be as quiet as possible to not call people’s attention

"they said we're a cute couple, I just thanked them" Seungmin shrugged as if was no big deal

"we're opposites, we don't mingle, we're not even friends!"

"why are you so pressed about it? they'll probably forget it by tomorrow, do you know how many school kids come here in a year?"

"but I won't forget it, Seungmin, I never forget what you do to me" you hissed showing your fangs and left the restaurant, teary-eyed.

-♡- ♡- ♡- ♡-

you knew Seungmin had offered to switch places with Eugène just to get on your nerves

but you wouldn’t let him know he was winning

so you just focused on your task of taking care of the remaining tiger cubs and moved on to the three young tigers that were on an open space so they’d get used to nature

you didn’t say a word to Seungmin, doing all the work by yourself and not letting him get closer to you

rage was still running in your blood, and you were probably releasing some pheromones unknowingly

and that incited the young tigers

they were becoming more aggressive, but you didn’t notice until you went to feed them and took some time to place the raw meat on the floor

the three of them jumped on you, making you fall on your back

the hungry animals attacked you mercilessly

they were trying to get the meat, but were biting you too in the process

you hissed with your fangs and claws out to shoo them away, but to no avail

you could feel the scratches and bites taking blood out of you

they were hurting you too much

suddenly, a strong growl filled the area, forcing the tigers to turn their attention to the sound

another growl made the young tigers hiss and flatten their ears, getting in position to attack whoever disturbed them

only when they left your body you could get up and see what was actually happening

and you were shocked to the bones

Seungmin was crouching, fists on the floor, body forward, and maintaining eye contact with the felines

his ears pointing up and and he was showing his teeth like and angry dog

you would’ve made fun of him if this was under another circumstance

but since he was saving your life and buying you time to run, that’s exactly what you did

you ran as fast as you could, screaming your lungs out looking for the feline caretaker

they found you quickly and before you could say anything, they were already running towards the sounds of fight

you couldn’t move, still shocked after what happened

when you felt your teacher’s arms around you, you passed out

-♡- ♡- ♡- ♡-

“thank you” you said when the teacher helped you sit on the bus

“everyone sit so I can count us before we leave” the teacher went to the back of the bus and Seungmin showed up to take his seat

the whole trip was cut short because of what happened, but you didn’t mind

you were alive despite the bandages covering the scratches and bites

and it was all thanks to Seungmin

“I’ll get up, hold on” you were by the window, his seat on the way here

“no, don’t get up” he took your backpack and his, placing on his lap, and sitting beside you on the corridor “I’m fine here”

there was an awkward silence between you, but as soon as the bus began moving, you let out a deep breath

you looked at Seungmin, who only had a few light scratches on his arms, and sighed

“thank you” you turned your body to face him, your eyes watering “I had no idea you’d help me like that, so thank you”

Seungmin fidgeted on his seat until he placed his face on his hands

you decided to let him be

you shouldn’t expect more of your natural enemy

he had already done too much for you

and you had already done what you wanted to do, which was to show your gratitude

but Seungmin’s words soon took you off guard

“us hybrid dogs are over excited, we often don’t know how to express ourselves clearly and we’re not really smart sometimes” he let out a small laugh “but we are loyal and we’ll defend those we care about until we die”

“Seungmin… I didn’t know you care this much about me”

“I do, ever since we were kids” he looked at you

“then why were you a jerk back then?”

“because… well, I was a kid and you were so nice and smart and beautiful and kind and everyone was always gushing over you and I got jealous because I wanted you all to myself” Seungmin’s ears and cheeks were red in embarrassment

“you really hurt me, Seungmin” tears were ready to roll on your face, but you held them back

“I’m sorry, I really am”

“we could’ve been friends”

“I know... I ruined all the chances of a long-lasting friendship with you just because I was scared of losing you, but it was too late when I realized it” Seungmin sighed “and I had already lost you by then”

you both sat in silence again

your mind was overthinking the past hours and the past years with Seungmin

until this morning you were absolutely sure the feelings you nurtured for him were hatred in its pure form

but now

now you don’t know anymore

because no one has ever risked his life for you like Seungmin did

and it messed with your head

and now that you know what Seungmin actually feels, you think it’s unfair to keep pushing him away

so you decided to open up your heart just a little bit and give him another chance

“maybe I’m not completely lost” you started “and maybe, just maybe, we can actually try being friends” it sounded more like a question than an affirmation, but neither of you cared

Seungmin’s ears perked up, and although he tried to hide it, there was excitement written all over his face

“I would really like that”

and when you both smiled kindly at each other for the first time, you wished you had made this decision a longer time ago

#skz #stray kids #stray kids scenarios #stray kids imagines #stray kids hybrid au #stray kids AU #stray kids hybrid #kpop scenarios #kpop imagines #seungmin #8/9 #kpop au #kpop hybrid

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eueden · 4 years ago

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⟨ MAUDE APATOW. CIS FEMALE. SHE/HER. ⟩ though the mist might prevent some from seeing it, EDEN KOPPELMAN is actually a descendent of H E S T I A. it’s still a question of whether or not the TWENTY-THREE year old VETERINARY from CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA has taken after their godly parent completely, but the demigod is still known to be quite THOUGHTFUL & QUIXOTIC.

hi, hello, allô, hola, ciao, ella here again with another character. okay so there’s not much to say about me that most of you don’t already know, i have no life and i’m always lurking even if i never do replies (don’t tell the admins) hgsghssghs anyway, this is eden and in a shocking turn of events i actually have a good idea of who she is and look i even made a graphic, if that’s ain’t dedication then i don’t what it is.

basic information.

NAME: eden atara koppelman

PRONUNCIATION: EE - d uh n

NICKNAME: E?? idk

GENDER: cis female

PLACE OF BIRTH: brisbane, queensland, australia

HOMETOWN: cape town, south africa

DATE OF BIRTH: june 26, 1997

AGE: twenty-three

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: heterosexual so far but secretly curious

MAJOR: veterinary

EXTRACURRICULARS: president of the jewish student association, vice president of the herpetology club, president of the volunteer service, women in leadership member, student government member

SPORTS: captain of the climbing team and co-captain of the track & field team

character inspo.

Jessica Day (New Girl) ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖

Elliott Reid (Scrubs) ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖

Amy Santiago (Brooklyn 99) ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖

background.

tw: death, infant death, car accident, fire

Eden was born in Brisbane, Australia. She comes from an animal lover family. Her grandparents are very popular down under because they had an animal TV show à la Steve Irwin. Her dad followed their footsteps and it’s a well-known zoologist who also had some TV shows (think of Bear Grylls).

TW: death, infant death, car accident. Matthias Koppelman (her dad) had been previously married but lost his wife and child in a car accident and after that he isolated himself from the public eye and moved to Namibia.

At twenty-eight, he felt the need to climb Mount Everest as one does, ya know? But ofc this man hadn’t climbed in years (he had experience but he’d been too sad to climb mountains. I mean he could barely leave bed, let alone climb Everest). That didn’t stop him and he did.

He almost d worded there bc as I said he was not ready but that’s when Hestia queen of fire showed up and warmed him (in a non sexual way bc she’s pure okay) and he was like oh that was a near dead experience and didn’t think much.

After he conquered the Everest with the help of Hestia, he moved back to Australia and oh surprise a few months later he opened his door and voilá a bebé was there with a note that said “you deserve to have a family, love hestia”

He was shocked like “did i just impregnate a fantasy?” but then Hestia was kind enough to send another and explain everything.

Anyway, Eden lived in Brisbane for four years before her dad took a job in South Africa. They moved to Cape Town (and her grandparents came with them) and pretty much had a happy life surrounded by animals.

TW: fire. When she was nine, her dad took her to a game reserve in Limpopo and by some reason a fire started endangering animals and flora. Everyone was panicking bc I mean wouldn’t u? But Eden was attracted to the flames like a pyro (the good kind tho) and since everyone had better things to do than taking care of a child, they left her unsupervised and she delved into the fire.

Ofc nothing happened to her because ✨immunity✨ but guess who showed up again? Hestia!!!! Being a great goddess and mom, she taught Eden how to use her powers so she could absorb the fire and save all the animals and people.

Everyone was like holy shit a miracle and the firefighters were like “the fuck? we did shit but we gonna take the credit lol”

Eden was like “did that just happen?” and yes, it did but she was like “meh that was imagination” and her dad was like *nervous chuckle* “yeah…” because he didn’t want to tell her the truth since that could put her in danger.

At 13, she had her bat mitzvah and it was all fun and games until fire lady showed up aka Hestia. Her dad and Hestia explained everything and Eden was like:

Hestia claimed her and off to camp she went. For the next few years she went to camps all over the world as a treat.

She never went on a quest bc she was afraid and also because she couldn’t put herself in danger and risk losing her life bc her dad already had lost a child… so yeah

Her dad remarried when she was seventeen and a year later she welcomed a new baby brother and that’s why she decided to take a gap year to be with her bro and also work with her dad in the reserves.

She moved to Athens when she was nineteen and decided to go into veterinary school. So yes Ella will get her dog one way or another idc what the admins say :chaos:

Ahhhh that’s all folks!!! We did it!

FULL BIO (yes, i completed it this time)

personality.

Eden never loses her sense of curiosity. You could say that she sees life through rose colored glasses as if she lived on the edge of a mirror country where worldly objects come to life, where flora and fauna assume almost human qualities.

She has the ability to see the good in almost anyone or anything and tends to sympathize with even the most unfriendly person. She often hides the extreme depth of feelings from her, even from herself, until circumstances elicit a passionate response.

She has a deep sense of idealism that comes from a strong personal sense of right and wrong. She sees the world as a place full of possibilities and potentials and is governed by her intuition. She is quite reserved and is not easily manipulated.

She is a good listener and considerate, they try to care for and understand others in a deep way. She can be very calm and intuitive with the people around her, being able to search for hidden meanings in the actions and words of others.

Of course, all of life is not rosy and Eden is not exempt from suffering the same disappointments and frustrations that are common to others. She tends to be a perfectionist and often strives for personal ideals that can be exhausting or very difficult to obtain.

She also struggles with time management, always leaving everything to the last minute claiming she “works better under pressure” but the truth is she’s just a procrastinator.

Very sensible, she cries almost every day either because of a commercial or a sweet story she read on Facebook. It doesn’t matter, if it’s slightly emotional she will shed some tears.

powers.

pyrokinesis: This power first manifested when she was nine years old and she helped to save an animal reserve from the flames with the help of Hestia. Since she was claimed when she was thirteen, she’s learned how to use this power. Now she can summon fire without any problem and put it out just as fast. This is very helpful because she loves baking but she’s a bit clumsy so she often burns herself, but thankfully, she’s immune, so no pain. However, Eden has never been able to create a hot wall of flames nor she has ever asked how to do that, she just hopes she never has to use it.

serenity inducement: Eden avoids conflict at all cost, not only it makes her cry but also makes her very uncomfortable and anxious which is why this was the first power she manifested. She was just a child but from what she remembers it was during a class in preschool that a kid started hitting another one. Eden panicked at such an act of violence she went there and touched the bully’s shoulder which immediately calmed him. Back then she didn’t know it was a power but after finding out about her true identity, many other events like this started to make sense. This is the power she uses the most, also with animals which is why she makes such a good veterinarian because she can calm an animal's nerves.

bond manipulation: She wouldn’t say this is one of her weakest powers but it’s one she didn’t use often growing up because she came from such a stable family that it didn’t seem necessary, however, she sometimes catches herself using it in group projects or at her workplace, you know, to keep things healthy and positive.

ability to summon food: By far the one she uses the least (personally speaking), she likes cooking and baking, so she doesn’t see the point but she does use it to feed stray animals.

headcanons.

Eden speaks fluent English, she has a mixed South African and Australian accent but she can switch. At school, half of her classes were in Afrikaans, so she also speaks it fluently. Greek comes from her demigod side, but she also took some classes back in school upon her father’s request. Growing up in a very Jewish family, her grandparents believed it was pretty important that Eden learned Yiddish and Hebrew, she can read it perfectly but struggles speaking it, especially Yiddish because she also attended Hebrew school. As for French, she learned in high school and she still takes lessons at Eonia but she hates it.

Her father started taking her to a climbing gym when she was five and by the time she was ten she was already climbing 6a routes which is pretty much an intermediate level and very impressive for her age.

She had her own TV show on Discover Kids titled “Eden’s Wildlife Adventure” in which she explained the importance of different types of animals. The first seasons were shot between Australia and South Africa, but in later seasons she traveled across Africa and South America. The show ran from 2005-2011 (which was when she was claimed).

Dreams of climbing Mount Everest before her 30th birthday.

Her father is a classic rock band and so is she. Her animals have been named after influential musicians. Right now she has a cat named Hendrix, a horse named Cobain, a dog named Mick. Growing up her father took care of a baby lion which they named Little Richard because he was smaller than most lion cubs. Over the years, his father and grandparents have fostered several wild animals while they recover or before they are sent to a reserve. Among the animals they have fostered are elephants, giraffes, zebras, cheetahs, leopards, hippos and more.

While she loves rock, she’s also a sucker for 2000s pop. Please don’t ask her about modern artists because she’s clueless.

She’s fed up with the Mean Girl jokes, we get it she grew up in Africa and she’s white.

She is a proud Jewish girl and follows many traditions. She does attend the local synagogue during Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. And of course, Hanukkah is her favorite holiday. Her family practices Reform Judaism, so she doesn’t follow a kosher diet.

Eden was raised as a vegan and her whole family is vegan. In the past years, she has been in the process of becoming vegetarian.

Favorites: Anything written by Agatha Christie(book); Say Anything (1989) (movie); Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fear (song);

Again, no one asked me but I will reply: “Ella, does Eden hate Iker?” “Well, thanks for asking. In a shocking turn of events, no she doesn’t. How come you might ask? Well, she doesn’t hate anyone but if she ever did then yes, she would hate him.”

pinterest | wanted connections

#euintro

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lablass-2882 · 4 years ago

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The Links vs Amusement Parks

A modern Au where the Links go to an amusement park. Enjoy the chaos.

Part 1 The Coaster!

Why me?

Twilight sighed as he slowly approached the rollercoaster with Wild and Wind. Why? Why did it have to be me; he asked himself again. Why did he have to go on this death trap with his most mischievous younger brothers? Why couldn’t War, or Legend go with them?

Twilight didn’t have to ask himself twice, he already knew the answer. It was equal parts, Wild being Wild, War and Legend being in the midst of another betting war and Twilight being the most responsible of his brothers. Argo. He, had to ride the deathtrap with Wind and Wild. But he asked himself again anyway. Why me?

Wind was absolutely gitty with excitement. Almost to the point where Twilight thought he was going to vibrate through the metal guardrail that lined the walkway. He had been waiting weeks for this brand-new coaster to open. And for weeks, Twilight dreaded another visit to the Amusement Park.

He could not fathom why Wild and Wind loved this place so much. Granted, he was one of the few who didn’t like this place. Most of his brothers loved going here. He however really wished that he was somewhere, anywhere else.

Wild punched him on the shoulder. Come on Twi, it’ll be fun.

Tell that to my already curing stomach.

Really, already?

I don’t do coaster, Wild……

Yeah…. But this one will be different.

Different how?

Different by how fast it flings you up and over that peak. Wind pointed towards the peak of the coaster. It's 400ft in the air and you get shot up it like a cannon! AND-

I know Wind! It is all done by water pressure. You’ve nagging me about it for weeks.

Wind pouted. It's cool. That’s all.

Twilight sighed again.

Sorry, Wind… I just-

Don’t like coasters, we know. Wild finished. BUT! Look on the bright side. It’s better than doing chores, right?

Or drills, or being grounded? Wind added.

Twilight groaned. He’d rather be mucking out the stables than being flung up a straight incline on a slingshot.

Meanwhile, near the carnival games….

I cannot believe that we lost to Sun. Again!

YOU lost to Sun. Again. I demand a rematch! Best 37 of 75! Legend’s eyes were set ablaze with anger and determination. War, on the other hand, looked utterly defeated and pleaded for mercy.

~Okay Legend~, Sun sang in her usually sugar-sweet tone. One more round. War you want in? She glanced back a Warriors with a cunningly sweet smile. War wisely opted out.

Nope. I wasted enough money for one day. Legend you are on your own.

Traitor!

Nope! Not falling for it. Nope, I am out. I have already wasted 200 bucks on these stupid games and I am done. Warriors stomped over to where Time and Sky were sitting. Time merely raised his eyebrow as Warrior sat down next to him.

Don’t even ask.

Fair enough. Time shrugged and watched another round of chaos with Sky and Warriors.

He’s going to be broke by the end of the night. Sky hummed.

I’m surprised he's not broke already. Time questioned.

He is. He keeps phone his boyfriend for more money. Warrior grumbled.

Oh! Are he and Ravio finally official? Sky beamed at Warriors with a hopeful smile.

No. Legend lives and breathes deniability. They could be married and Legend would insist that they’re “just friends”

Not that you're doing any better there, playboy. Time pointed out.

Okay first off, Rude. Warriors dramatically scoffed. And second. Just because you’re the only one of us that’s married doesn’t mean that you get to stand on any moral high ground here. I still remember all the trouble you and Ruto got into, mister.

I was twelve and it was a schoolyard crush. Malon’s my wife and that the end of it.

Um… Sun and I are engaged so-

Doesn’t count yet Sky. Warriors cut him off. And “school yard-crush” my ass! That “crush” lasted until high school buddy.

Freshmen year hardly counts as high school

So, you admit that it wasn’t just a schoolyard crush. Anything else you want to own up to? I’m all ears.

War… this isn’t the time nor-

I saw you kiss a guy, last week. Time added smugly. And knowing you… there was probably some tongue.

Warrior’s face was beet red in embarrassment. He was also stuttering and flaying about; searching for a response.

Oh! Do we get to know his name this time? Sky leaned over knowingly, with a mischievous look on his face. Or was it just another taste?

Meanwhile at the waterpark with Four and Hyrule.

I am not too SHORT! Four shouted at the teen managing the water slide.

I’m… sor…sorry…s..sir. The teen stuttered out. My man.. man.. manager will fire me if I let another kid go down the ride. The last two near broke their arms in a fight.

KID?! Four was beyond riled up by this point

Let it go Four, we’ll just find another ride.

But?!

There’s no need to risk anyone's job, let's just…. go…. Before we cause another scene. Hyrule tried to quiet down his angered brother, while also not thinking about the growing number of eyes staring at them.

FINE!

Four stormed off back down the steps. With Hyrule on his heels, quietly trying to not meet anyone’s gaze as they did. Once at the bottom and well out of sight of the crowds, Four unleashed his anger.

Can you believe this?! KID? KID! Just who does that guy think he is? I am not a kid. I’m goddess dammed sixteen years old for goddess’s sake!

Four… just…. Take a breath…. And … calm down…..

NO!

Please? Hyrule whined. I really don’t want to get banned from another ride. Especially after what Wind and Terra did last time we were here.

Yeah, yeah, I remember. They got into a huge fight and dragged half of the kids in the park into it. Broken bones, and pride all around.

And they both got banned from the waterpark. Not to mention we’re food court, the video game lounge, the petting zoo, the-

I get it. Four stopped Hyrule from listing all the places he and their brothers have been banned from for… questionable behavior.

Honestly, I’m surprised they haven’t banned us from the park altogether.

It’s because the other parks are paying them to keep us so that we don’t go to any other park. Four joked.

Hyrule laughed. Yeah, you’re probably right. All the other parks quake in fear of the Link brothers. Ooohhh spooky. A family of nine brothers that cause utter chaos where ever we go.

Speaking of spooky, Four pipped up. You want to ditch this place and go check out that new haunted house? I heard that is super scary.

Ha, you know it. Let’s jam! Hyrule pointed finger guns at Four and did his best Cowboy Bebop impression.

Ugh. Hyrule, we got to work on your reference game.

Hey, I thought I did pretty good this time.

Four just shook his head. Why his brother loved 90’s anime, he would never know.

Back at the coaster.

Twilight looked up at the looming coaster. He tried not to think about it.

He tried not to think about being flung at high speeds up a vertical incline while being strapped into a metal cart. He tried not to think about how the safety bar is essential a thin and a very breakable metal bar across his waist. He tried not to think about the computer that calculated the weight of the cars messing up and not launch the cart up the slope with enough speed. Causing the cart to come sliding back down to the platform only to recalculate and be launched up again. As Wind was so kindly explaining to Twilight as they stood in this goddess forsake long line.

You think we’ll crest the top on the first try? Wind oh so innocently asked with his best “I’m-not-causing trouble-voice”.

Maybe? Wild shrugged. He tuned out Wind ramble about an hour ago. He was too busy texting new recipes to Sidon to notice Twilight growing paler with every passing minute.

Goddess, I hope not. Twilight sighed. One ride is enough

OH, come on Twi. It's not that bad. Plus, we get a free ride out of it. Wind quipped back.

We have membership passes, Wind. All the rides are free.

Okay…. We get a second ride without having to wait in line….?

Twilight sighed again. Can this line move any slower? I want to get this over with before my stomach upchucks from worry.

HA! You’re becoming a worry-wort just like the Old-Man. Wind teased.

Well with brothers like you, who can blame me.

Hey.

Gess, Twi. Calm down. We can ride one of your favorites when we’re done. Maybe go to the Petting Zoo? Wild tried to calm down him down, finally registering how pale he had gotten.

We’re banned from the Petting Zoo. Twilight glared.

Well…

And the Food Court, and the Video Game Lounge and-

We get it! You don’t like it here, alright. Don’t blame me for wanted to have some fun. Wind pouted.

Twilight grimaced. Sorry, Wind. I know you’re excited and you’ve been looking forward to this. I’m…. just… not a coaster fan.

Then why’d you agreed to come? Wind glared back with puffed-out cheeks.

Because you two are my brothers and I like spending time with you two.

And, Malon would kill you if you left us unsupervised? Wild added

And Malon would kill me if I left you two ding-bats unsupervised. Twilight repeated

Wind snickered. Nah. You could just use your puppy dog eyes and blame it on Time. Malon listens to your lies.

Hey! I don’t lie.

Wind and Wild glare at Twilight with raised eyebrows.

Often……

Back with Legend and Sun.

GGAAHH!!! How! HOW! In the NAME of the Goddesses! Do you keep winning! Legend yelled with all the fury of a sore loser.

Better luck next time, Legend. And no more calling your bf for more funds. We made a deal. Once you’re out, you are out.

GGAAHHH!!

Sun giggles.

AND! Ravio is not my Boyfriend. We are just friends. Got it. Legend was pointed at Sun with a crimson blush across his checks.

Aww Legend, you don’t have to deny your feelings. You know (Sun enters scheming mode.) Sky and I can offer some love advi-

I don’t need your advice.

I can flirt just fine on my own. AND! Ravio and I are JUST friends. I don’t need your mettling.

ME! Mettle in my future brother-in-law’s affairs? Never. Sun playfully scoffs.

Says the woman trying to set up Twilight with her classmate and Warriors with her personal trainer.

I can’t help it if I have an eye for match-making.

You really don’t.

Sun’s eyes narrow. Okay! Mister Denial. If you and Ravio are not together… Then you won’t mind if I post these pictures of you two from Warriors Party last week? Or on longs walks? Or at your sister Aviary?

Your lying! There is no way that you have pictures.

Oh! But I do. Your sister and I text quite often. She takes out her phone and waves in front of Legend.

Legend face blushes an even brighter red. Your…. Your lying….

I think this one this the cutest. Sun chimes as she shows Legend a picture of him and Ravio sitting happily on a bench holding hands and drinking coffee.

Delete that!

Nope.

Sun!

Never! Sun takes off in a run.

Sun get back here!

Meanwhile not paying attention to a nearby Bench….

Okay! But you have no room to talk here, Time.

I can and I will. You are far too judge.

It’s called standards!

It’s called being a damn prick! You’ve been sleeping around with strangers for months now.

I have not!

You’ve had three different partners in the past two months, War. Sky leaned in. We’re not judging. We’re… just… worried that’s all.

You don’t need to worry. I am fine!

You’re in as much denial as Legend.

That’s a low blow coming from you, Mister. Warriors pointed at Time. That’s a grand statement coming from the man that took two years to pop the question to Malon. Even after you bought that damn gaudy rings.

I wanted the perfect moment! Sue me, for putting thought into purposing to the love of my life.

Two. Goddess. Damned. Years.

That was a lot of time…. Time….. Sky pipped up again.

Sky. Stay out of it. You wanted to purpose to Sun after the second date.

Hey. Sky shrugged. When you know, you know.

Warriors rolled his eyes.

And pry tell how you even describe that feeling, Sky? You fall in love with a cup of coffee every morning.

Sun makes really good coffee. Sky chimes in.

Of course, she does. Warrior sighs.

Malon makes good coffee…

Not you too!

End of chapter one.

The rest of it is posted here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30189333/chapters/74384583

I’ll update it soon.....ish....

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lesetoilesfous · 4 years ago

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ON THE RIGHTS OF MAGES - AND THE LIBERATION OF THEDAS

(Here’s my version of Anders’ manifesto. I wrote it for my Fenris/Anders fic, A Song of Love from Long Ago, but I figured it might be fun to share with y’all. I cannot believe I have now written a manifesto for a video game, but here we are. Also, writing manifestos is HARD. Please be kind)

The Maker’s Children

Andraste suffered at the hands of magisters. Thus, she feared the influence of magic. But if the Maker blamed magic for the magisters’ actions in the Black City, why would He still gift us with it? The oppression of mages stems from the fears of men, not the will of the Maker.

Andraste said “Those who bring harm without provocation to the least of His children are hated and accursed by the Maker.” Perhaps mages are the least of the Maker’s children: if they were, would not harm without provocation break the law of the Maker?

What provocation justifies the harm of children in the eyes of the Maker? If a child breaks a pot, is this provocation? Without magic, certainly not. And yet with magic, I have seen children barely walking harmed severely for far lesser crimes. At what point is a mage child provoking harm? By using magic? This is as natural to them as breathing, weeping, laughing.

Can a follower of Andraste truly say they have listened to Her words, and obeyed them, when they would harm a child for existing?

Furthermore, are not we all children in the eyes of the Maker? Magic is more than just a weapon. It heals. It brings joy. Only turn your gaze to such apostates as the Darktown Healer for evidence of this.

If those who bring harm without provocation are accursed and hated by the Maker, what of those who prevent healing? Who would stop mages using their Maker given gifts, who would extort the free citizens of Thedas for the privilege, and keep their healers locked and beaten behind walls built by slaves?

No citizen of the Free Marches should live in fear of abuse. This includes the mages.

The Fereldan Blight

Where do donations to the Chantry end up? Following the Fereldan Blight, thousands of refugees found themselves on the shores of Kirkwall, neither welcomed into the city nor able to return home. This, surely, was a time for the holy sisters and mothers of the Chantry to act - for the Templars to act, to provide aid and safety to all in need.

Are we not all the Maker’s children?

But such action didn’t come. Hundreds died of their injuries below the cliffs of Kirkwall. Hundreds died of starvation and disease. Many who survived those first months and years came to regret it later, forced into work that was dangerous or illegal or both. What freedom is this? Can it be called Justice?

The plight of the Fereldans, like so many in our free lands, could have been eased by magic.

Mages can heal: even the most common hedge witch can prevent infection. They can help boil water and purify it, clearing disease. They can cook food, prevent illness. But where were Kirkwall’s mages, when they were so badly needed?

They were locked in their tower. They are still locked in their tower. Reader: the mages wanted to help. The Circle would not let them.

On Community

There is much that the poor of Thedas and its mages have in common. If you have lived as a citizen of the Free Marches, you have seen its injustices. You have seen the way in which ordinary people are treated by the rich and powerful. How many amongst you have lost a sibling or a child to an Arl’s lustful eye? How many have served in so-called noble houses only to be kicked and beaten like dogs? This is not justice. This is not freedom.

If you have lived with your head bowed, afraid of meeting the eye of the rich and powerful, then you know what is to be a mage.

We are not so different! Together, we are so much stronger than the sum of our parts. Kirkwall was reclaimed by a slave rebellion. We can free Thedas. Freeing the mages returns power to the people of the Free Marches, redistributing it across our lands. No longer are the mighty only those with coin enough to buy a sword. Our power is in our children and our neighbours, our friends and our lovers.

Our oppressors seek to divide us. They seek to make us hate one another, because it is so much easier and less frightening than engaging in a battle we may not win.

Remember these words: We can. We shall. We will.

The Matter of Tevinter

If Mages are to have their freedom, it cannot follow the route of destruction cleared by the Tevinter Imperium. Freedom built on the backs of slaves is no freedom at all.

Many believe that mages in Thedas see Tevinter as a paradise. This is not true. Consider the following, and you will understand why no mage should ever wish to be a magister.

Point the first: the matter of the elvhen. In the Circles of the Free Marches, there are many powerful, respected elvhen Enchanters. First Enchanter Orsino is a great example, a man with a reputation for kindness and just dealings. The human mages of Thedas are not taught to see elvhen people as below them. They are their colleagues and friends. No human mage would wish the perverse brutality of the Tevinter magisters on any one of their friends, on anyone at all. This includes the elvhen.

Point the second: the question of power. Not all mages are powerful. Their power, like the body’s strength, varies from person to person. If one woman can lift a hay bale, another boy might not. It is the same with mages. Some apprentices may only ever be able to summon sparks. Others can rain down fire storms. In Tevinter, weak mages face slavery and humiliation as much as those without magic. As with the body’s strength, ‘weak’ magic is normally tied to factors like diet, lineage, and illness. Our weak, our poor, our sick, would be enslaved. That is no paradise.

Point the third: common suffering. Do you truly think a mage who has fled across the Free Marches - who has risked Blighted townships and beast infested mountains just to seek their liberty, has no concept of how it might feel to be a slave? It’s true that the brutality faced by slaves in Tevinter is exceptional, and not every Circle is as cruel as that of Kirkwall.

But mages do know something of captivity. If you have too, you will understand why they would not wish to inflict it on another.

The Brutality of Templars

One of the most crucial arguments for the liberation of mages is the abuses of the Templars. Founded under allegedly noble principles, the order has become a sanctuary for the cruel and cowardly: people who hide behind the name of Andraste, and use Her name and kindness to excuse everything from needless humiliation to the torture of children.

Both within and without the Circle, the Templars rule with an iron fist, and it is the poor, the elvhen, the mages, who suffer for it. Unsupervised, corruption runs rife, with Templars extorting innocent neighbourhoods for protection money and inspiring fear in the vulnerable populations which they claim to protect. This is to say nothing of the illegal trade in Lyrium.

The working people of Thedas do not see a Templar and relax, knowing themselves to be safe and guarded by a servant of the Maker. They get out of the way. There is something wrong, here.

If you have ever known the edge of a Templar’s blade, consider now the plight of the mages. Most are sent to Circles in childhood, where they are kept away from the sun and open fields, where their magic is monitored and leashed. They are not taught to fight: why would they be?

Never mind that their Harrowing will demand the greatest struggle of their lives. It serves the Templars far more effectively to see their mages defanged and dull. If the result is a few teenage corpses which could have survived their Harrowing, had they only been taught how to lift a sword? So be it. It is a sacrifice the Templars are willing to make in the name of Andraste, regardless of Her will.

Free mages: apostates and hedge witches, must learn to fight if they are to survive, and resist the attentions of thieves and slavers, as so many citizens of the Free Marches are forced to do. But if you are an ordinary person, if you must work to eat, if you have ever known a Blight or been a refugee - then you understand the profound disadvantage at which lack of coin might leave you.

How can a poor hedge witch who has only ever served his community afford anything that will protect him from greatswords and plate armour? How can an apostate, with her stolen staff, hope to protect herself from cavalry and crossbows? We are hunted, like animals. And we are beaten when we are caught.

Magical Knowledge

The improvement of magical knowledge is a thing that is not only of use to mages.

Any person who has been treated by a magical healer should know this: because almost every healer owes what they know to the mages who have come before them. Circles have long been centres of study and learning.

Reader, it is not the Circle itself with which I take issue, necessarily. It is the removal of choice. It is control by the Chantry. It is the abuses of the Templars. It is the limitation of magical knowledge.

Due to an increasing atmosphere of paranoia and outright slander, the Chantry has begun to stifle magical learning with more and more prejudice in recent decades. The progression of magical knowledge in Thedas has ground almost to a halt, whilst our neighbours in Tevinter have moved forward in leaps and bounds. I do not, perhaps, need to explain to you the danger of having a power-hungry slave-trading nation at our borders which knows more of how to weaponise magic than we do.

Beyond the practicalities of war, perhaps the most egregious area in which this suffocation of knowledge has taken effect is that of healing. Issues that were solved in Tevinter half a century ago are barely understood here: treatments for chronic illness and disease, ways to ease pregnancy and childbirth, effective and safer methods of surgery. For what possible reason could the Chantry wish to limit this knowledge, and restrict the movement of those who could use it for good?

I can find only one conclusion. They fear mages more than they claim to care for their people. To use a Fereldan idiom: they would cut off the nose to spite the face. The Chantry has decided your sacrifice, your illness, your injury, is a price they are willing to pay. Have you?

Safety in the Circle

The fundamental principle behind the Chantry’s interference in the Circles of Thedas is, ostensibly, one of safety. They claim that the Templars exist to protect the mages - from external threats, from demonic temptation, and, if necessary, from themselves. The reality of course is that the Chantry oversees the Circles in order to control them.

The Chantry has at its fingertips a concentrated force of every healer and magic user powerful enough to present a threat to them. Thus, they stifle the possibility of rebellion. Thus, they wield more power across the Free Marches than any city-state.

Templars do not protect mages. Some might claim to do so, might even mean to do so. But throughout their training Templars are taught that mages are poisonous and corrupt, fallen from the Maker’s light, spurned by the mercy of Andraste. Combine this with the common side effects of the lyrium onto which they are weaned: obsession, paranoia, waking nightmares and delusion - and perhaps you can imagine how a Templar begins to abuse their charges.

Heavily armed as they are against unarmed mages as young as six, there is little that can be done to protect oneself from a Templar within the Circles. They see crimes and disobedience everywhere - agitated by their lyrium, haunted by their faith. And this is only those who would not otherwise have seen the opportunity to bully and intimidate hundreds of unarmed people and exploited it without hesitation.

Templars of both schools run rife throughout the Circles of Thedas - mad and cruel, they rarely see consequences for their actions. Instead, mages learn to live with these abuses, and do as they are told, even when what is asked for them is violent or humiliating. Even when it is a violation.

I repeat. There are mages in the Circles as young as six. Is this the will of Andraste?

The Freedom to Love

In the Circle, love is only a game. It gives the Templars too much power over the mages in their care if there is something they couldn’t stand to lose.

Can you imagine that? Being afraid to love, from childhood, for the rest of your life, for fear that you and your lover would be torn apart?

Over the centuries, mages have found other ways to share these things: coded languages and secret intimacies that are all we can borrow from the simple freedoms enjoyed by the people of Thedas outside our towers. We cannot marry, we cannot have children. We can only exchange secrets, and take one another’s hands in the hope that no one sees us.

If you are one of those who has loved a mage, you will understand something of the agony of this. If you have been in any way imprisoned, or abused, or enslaved, then you may well understand the things of which I speak. If you have not, I am afraid I cannot explain it. Only look at the people you love, and imagine being as afraid of your own affections as you are commanded by them. It is a terrible thing, to be afraid to love.

Instead, within the Circles, mages are forced to perform a twisted mockery of love. It is not uncommon for Templars to become fixated on one or more of their charges, driven by the madness of lyrium and obsession. The mages are asked to do ‘favours’ for their captors. I will not detail the nature of these things. Suffice it to say that there are children in our Circles, and that these are things that should never be asked under threat of violence, from anyone.

Tranquility

The Rite of Tranquility is intended to protect a mage and those around them from suffering the devastating effects of demonic temptation. It is, legally, meant to be used only on mages who have not passed their Harrowing. A mage who has passed their Harrowing has proven, at risk of their own life, that they are able to resist the many dangers of demons in the Fade.

However - not only have multiple mages who have passed their Harrowing been illegally made Tranquil, many more have been prevented from undergoing their Harrowing in order to force a Rite of Tranquility on mages deemed troublesome or, in too many unsavoury cases, desirable, by their Templar keepers.

Some mages request the Rite of Tranquility. This, to an uninformed reader, might be difficult to understand. I must remind you: we are taught from birth that we are poison. Corrupted. Demonic. Evil. We repeat these lessons daily. We are taught to love Andraste, we are taught that she despises and fears us. The most common cause of death for mages in a Circle is suicide. It is not difficult to find books on parenting in Thedas that suggest drowning a child is a better fate than letting them live with magic.

I am sure that there are some mages who make the choice to become Tranquil with a clear mind and peace in their hearts. But I am also sure that there are many who make the choice out of fear and self-hatred, sickness of the mind and grief of the heart.

Imagine how unhappy you must be to willingly forego the right to dream, to love, to laugh, to live freely and with feeling as you once did, only in order to cut away a part of yourself.

Then imagine that you could not, would not part with those things. Imagine the anger that has kept you alive when you were in danger, the grief you felt for those you lost, the love you have for your companions. Remember the joy you feel when you dance. Imagine these things being taken from you, against your will, because you disagreed with a Templar.

The Rite of Tranquility is unjust.

Every mage in Thedas fears it, and the Tranquil themselves - who are still thinking, living, breathing people - are treated as little more than slaves. At best, they are tolerated. But they receive no care, no reprieve. They make convenient workers because they do not possess the desire to protest. So they work.

If the mages of Thedas are to be free, the Rite of Tranquility must be abolished.

If the people of Thedas are to be free, we must treat the Tranquil with respect and dignity, as we should do to all. They are people. They must be treated as such.

Revolution and Freedom

It has often been said that if those who are oppressed seek freedom, they must pursue their cause with non-violent means. It strikes the writer that it has most often been said by those who wish to perpetuate oppression, or else live among the ranks of those powerful and privileged enough to live freely and safe from harm.

Who, in our society, defines what we count as violence?

Is it violent to imprison someone for the rest of their life because of who they are?

Is it violent to remove children from their parents?

Is it violent to force lovers apart?

Is Tranquility violence?

Peace is, always, an ideal to which we must aspire. Violence is chaotic and unpredictable. It is not moral. It cannot be moral. None of us can ever predict the true consequences of our actions.

However, if one group of people assigns moral superiority to their own violence and calls it Justice, what must we do then?

We are asked, told, taught, to turn the other cheek as we are beaten. Our priests demand that we accept our suffering as divine, even when it is borne from the hands of men.

I do not wish to start a war. It has already begun. I only want it to end.

We cannot defeat an army without violence. Others have tried. They were murdered.

My people are dying. Our people are dying. Children are dying.

We must fight.

It will not be perfect. It will not be right. The greatest lie ever told is that there is morality in violence. There is only suffering, and survival.

But I am a man, and I love my people. I want to survive. I want to be free.

I believe it is the right of every person, in every land, to live freely, to love freely, and to exist without fear of abuse.

If you agree, reader, I have one final question.

Will you join me?

#long post #anti chantry #da2 #anders #anders was right #mage rights

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oranolio16 · 4 years ago

Text

You knock quickly on Comte’s office door before barging in. Arthur grins at you before pointing at Theo and Vincent in the corner of the office. “I took the liberty of inviting them luv, thought they’d want to see your amazing thing.” He looks at the group you pulled in behind you, “ Ahh you got the rest too.”

You nod quickly, thankful that Comte’s office is actually quite spacious.

“Okay guys, sit down.”

They do, looking at you expectantly.

“This thing here is called a Smartphone. People in the future use it all the time.”

You wave the sleek black rectangle at them. You point to Isaac, whose on the edge of his seat, “Ask me any question, I’ll try to answer it.”

“What’s it for?”

“In the future, there’s this thing called the internet. It’s like a huge, free library. Or an alternate world. There’s everything in it, from Music to Art to Scientific stuff. You literally search it up, I mean type in the name of the thing your looking for and you’ll find it instantly. You can even date on the internet.” You grin at that, catching Arthur’s eyes.

The Men look shocked and interested.

“It’s completely free?” Leo asks curiously.

“Yup, you only need a smartphone. Mines made by a company called Apple. It’s an IPhone.”

Dazai elbows Isaac, “Looks like your descendants made the company. Apple though?”

“ANYWAYS,” you break in when it looks like Arthur will join Dazai, “I wanted to teach you the culture of the future. People in the future find Vampires very sexy. In fact, Vampires have stories dedicated to them. Very popular stories.”

“WHAT?” Jean looks Shocked and horrified. “Do people know we are undead, bloodsucking monsters?”

You nod sagely, “It turns people on in the future. Ladies would pay to get bitten by a vampire.”

Jean makes a strangled sound in the back of his throat. Arthur looks entirely too happy, “The future sounds amazing! Can I go through the door?” He gives Comte a pleading glance.

“No. Never. You, in the future? Unsupervised? It’s a disaster waiting to happen!” Comte looks horrified while Dazai laughs and high fives Arthur. Isaac and Mozart join Jean in looking disturbed.

“So, I’ve decided to read you all one of the greatest works of literary fiction. You’ll enjoy this Jean.” You swear Jean shudders at your grin. Sebastian looks as amused as you do, whipping out a notebook and Pen.

“This story is called Twilight. It is a riveting tale about a teenaged girl who moves back to her home town named Forks. She meets a Vampire who has the ability to read people’s thoughts. They meet at school. They fall in love in the most dramatic way but the vampire, Edward, doesn’t want to bite her. She wants him to bite her. He thinks he’ll hurt her and leaves, she’s heart broken but he comes back. Any questions?”

You glance at Jean who’s muttering prayers under his breath, looking shocked. “Well, that guy has no class. Who woos a lady by leaving her?” Arthur demands, looking disgusted. “He wants to keep her safe, that’s why. Or were you not listening you fool?” Theo snaps back. “I think that’s incredibly romantic!” Vincent offers, “To have the strength to leave your love to keep her safe is chivalrous.” Napoleon nods in agreement with Vincent.

“But the ability to hear thoughts? He’s powerful, is he a pureblood?” Comte asks you. “He’s not alive but no, he was turned by his adoptive Dad called Carlisle. He also has four other Siblings, Alice, Rosalie, Emmet and Jasper.” Comte smiles at that, “How nice.”

“So, let me continue.” You open the file on the screen and clear your throat. “My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue. I was wearing my favorite shirt — sleeveless, white eyelet lace; I was wearing it as a farewell gesture. My carry-on item was a parka.

In the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington State, a small town named Forks exists under a near-constant cover of clouds. It rains on this inconsequential town more than any other place in the United States of America. It was from this town and its gloomy, omnipresent shade that my mother escaped with me when I was only a few months old. It was in this town that I'd been compelled to spend a month every summer until I was fourteen. That was the year I finally put my foot down; these past three summers, my dad, Charlie, vacationed with me in California for two weeks instead. It was to Forks that I now exiled myself— an action that I took with great horror. I detested Forks.”

“How stupid. Why would she go then?” Mozart criticised.

“Maybe she wants to be with her Father?” Vincent suggested.

“But he comes to her. There’s no point.” It seemed as if Mozart had developed a disliking for Bella before she’d even done the really stupid stuff.

Isaac looks at you and asks, “What’s an Airport?”

“It’s where they store Airplanes and people go to travel on them. Think of Airplanes as flying carriages that can go over everything, sea and mountains. They’re shaped like giant birds and carry people over long distances.”

“Oh.” He looks dissatisfied.

“I’ll show you pictures later.” He perks up at that.

You glance again at Jean, who looks nearly catatonic. “Flying carriages? Mon Dieu, what’s that? Sorcery?” You can’t help the wheezing laugh that escapes.

“It’s engineering Jean, not Sorcery. Promise.” He looks at you dubiously, obviously unconvinced.

“Listen, do you really think the Pope would condone people flying in carriages animated by sorcery?” Jean frowns as he focuses, then asks you, “ Have you flown in them?”

“Yes. Hundreds of times. They’re perfectly safe. Well, not perfectly, but adequately I suppose.”

“They do crash often don’t they, though? Your always at risk, aren’t you?” Arthur comments slyly, watching Jean pale dramatically at the thought of you falling out of the air in a magic-powered carriage. “Plenty of people die in them-“

“Arthur, No. Stop scaring Jean. Jean, I promise I’ve never been in a plane crash and hopefully I never will.” Jean still looks unconvinced, but he nods.

“Right. Any more questions?” No one asks, so you continue. “I loved Phoenix. I loved the sun and the blistering heat. I loved the vigorous, sprawling city.

"Bella," my mom said to me — the last of a thousand times — before I got on the plane. "You don't have to do this."”

Mozart looks highly irritated and turns to Vincent, “See? She doesn’t have to go. Her mother doesn’t want her to do this. Honestly, she’s being unnecessarily dramatic.”

Vincent looks confused, but sympathetic. “Maybe her mother’s only saying it to reassure her? Maybe she actually would appreciate her daughter giving her time on her own?” Mozart gives him a sceptical look.

Theo just gives the book a look of disgust, “She’s Vervelend. Does this get better, or is future literature so... terrible?”

“Guys, it does get better. I think. Just sit through this and I’ll show you anything you want, promise.”

Dazai gives you an approving nod, “Bribery. I like it.”

You roll your eyes at him and look back at the story, “My mom looks like me, except with short hair and laugh lines. I felt a spasm of panic as I stared at her wide, childlike eyes. How could I leave my loving, erratic, harebrained mother to fend for herself? Of course she had Phil now, so the bills would probably get paid, there would be food in the refrigerator, gas in her car, and someone to call when she got lost, but still…”

“That’s an irresponsible mother. Is she raising the child or the child raising her?” Napoleon mutters to Isaac, “I don’t blame the daughter for trying to get away.”

Isaac nods, “But what if it isn’t her fault? I mean, it could be a medical condition.”

“I want to go," I lied. I'd always been a bad liar, but I'd been saying this lie so frequently lately that it sounded almost convincing now.

"Tell Charlie I said hi."

"I will."

"I'll see you soon," she insisted. "You can come home whenever you want — I'll come right back as soon as you need me." But I could see the sacrifice in her eyes behind the promise.”

“See? That’s actually very sweet of her.” Vincent tells Mozart.

“We’ll see.” Mozart replies cryptically.

"Don't worry about me," I urged. "It'll be great. I love you, Mom." She hugged me tightly for a minute, and then I got on the plane, and she was gone. It's a four-hour flight from Phoenix to Seattle, another hour in a small plane up to Port Angeles, and then an hour drive back down to Forks. Flying doesn't bother me; the hour in the car with Charlie, though, I was a little worried about.”

Comte looks uncomfortable at the last sentence, “I do hope her father is decent, and that he isn’t...”

“A scumbag.” Leo finishes the sentence off for Comte. “But he might be. Why would her Mother leave, otherwise?”

#@heavensbabygirl #@heavensbabygirl prompt #@sadshaxk #ikevamp #twilight

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pilot-boi · 4 years ago

Text

New Residents: Chapter 1

Okay fine, maybe running off on a space adventure with no money and jobs wasn’t the best idea in the world. They needed more help, the kind that could actually help out.

Now all Ren had to do to achieve that was corral his friend. A friend who had the best intentions in the galaxy, but the attention span of a golden retriever.

They could barely support themselves enough to keep fuel in the ship and food on the table. And it didn’t help anything that Jaune kept trying to bring home strays.

Man’s Best Friend

Traveling the galaxy unsupervised was all well and good. Unless you got distracted by everything that moved.

AO3 LINK

“We are just here to get food, and that is it,” Ren told Jaune. “No distractions this time. We don’t have enough money for that.”

“I didn’t get that distracted,” Jaune argued.

Ren gave him a stern look.

“I said I was sorry! They were very persistent.”

“Sorry doesn’t buy fuel, Jaune. Or food. We don’t have that much money left, and we need to get supplies.”

“I’ll be careful this time. I promise.”

“Good,” Ren grabbed their packs, leaving their ship. “Let’s go.”

The planet that they were on was mostly markets. Ships came and went, buying and selling goods constantly. There were some shops that stayed, but most were only around for a day or two at a time. It was a merchants dream.

Buyers from all around the galaxy, a vibrant array of items to sell and buy, and a reputation that could improve a merchant’s sales immensely. Fortunately, despite the ever-changing layout of shops, it was always easy to find whatever was needed, and sometimes, what wasn’t.

Jaune and Ren made their way into the depths of the crowds. Merchants shouted their various wares from stalls lining the streets. A few kids pushed through the legs of the adults, chasing after a ball. Scents from food stalls wafted over the crowds.

Jaune’s stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten all day, and he swore he could smell dinosaur chicken nuggets standing out among the other scents. He looked up at Ren, who was scanning the stalls around them for one selling fuel.

“I’m hungry,” he whined, putting on his best sad face.

“We’re buying food.”

“No, I’m hungry right now.”

“We’ll have food we can make on the ship.”

“You sound like my mother,” Jaune grumbled, folding his arms and pouting.

“At least one of us does,” Ren countered. “We can’t afford to buy from the stalls here. They’re all going to be overpriced, and you know it.”

They passed by a stall selling juicy racks of meat with roasted vegetables. Jaune’s stomach rumbled loud enough to hear over the crowds.

“Please,” Jaune begged. “I’m gonna starve, Ren.”

“You’ll live,” he handed a list to Jaune. “Now go see if you can find a stall that sells this fuel. I’ll handle food, since I don’t trust you to not spend all our money on vendor food.”

Jaune huffed and snatched the list out of Ren’s hand. “Aren’t you going to give me any money to buy said fuel with?”

“No, because I don’t trust you.”

Jaune rolled his eyes and turned on his heel, stalking out into the crowd. It was impossible to walk without bumping into someone. The crowds were tightly packed, and it seemed that every tall species had decided that today was the day to shop. Jaune couldn’t see a damn thing.

He pushed past a pair of bickering Velms, not bothering to apologize, and emerged in front of a food stall selling fresh fruits. One of the people who had just bought some of the fruit took a bite, the juice dribbling down their chin.

“Shut up,” he muttered to his growling stomach. Jaune had to strongly resist the urge to just pick one fruit from the basket of an unsuspecting customer. He couldn’t get in trouble here, especially not when he was separated from Ren.

Ren wouldn’t know. It would be fine. Right?

No, it would be wrong to steal. Jaune didn’t want to steal.

Suddenly, the customer he had been eying pushed past him, jostling the basket hooked on their arm. A single pear-shaped fruit bounced out, and Jaune caught it deftly in his hand. The alien appeared to be completely unaware of their loss, and disappeared into the crowd.

Jaune looked around, checking to see if anyone noticed him holding the sort-of-not-really-stolen-fruit. He then took a bite of the delicious fruit and kept walking, a grin plastered on his face.

Ha! Take that Ren. He’d gotten food without spending money or stealing.

He was just about to take the last bite of the fruit when he noticed something staring at him from one of the alleyways. Curious, Jaune took a few steps towards it, keeping his body low.

The creature backed up into the alleyway, keeping their distance. They were afraid of him.

“It’s okay,” Jaune said softly. “Here.” He held the rest of his fruit out in front of him.

It slowly moved forwards, stepping cautiously out of the shadows. It looked like a dog, but made of a green, goopy substance. The goo was dirty, like they hadn’t been cleaned in a long time.

Jaune smiled at the creature, and it cautiously moved towards him, taking the fruit out of his hand and leaving behind some green slobber.

“Aren’t you just the cutest?” He moved to sit down. The goopy dog scuttled backwards and Jaune froze. “Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay. See?” He held up his hands, slowly lowering himself down. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m nice. Nice Jaune.”

The creature hesitated, and then approached again. It licked one of Jaune’s hands with its gooey tongue, licking off the remaining juice from the fruit. It felt almost soft, and was hardly stickier than the fruit had been.

“See? Nice,” Jaune smiled at the dog. Slowly, he lifted his other hand and began to pick off bits of litter that had gotten stuck in the poor animal. He moved slowly, making sure that the dog knew he was trying to help. Sudden movements still seemed to scare her.

Suddenly, Jaune’s communicator began to blink and beep softly. The dog seemed intrigued by the flashing blue light. She moved closer, almost touching Jaune. He stayed as still as he could, letting the dog stare at the dancing lights.

Slowly, Jaune moved his other hand to press the answer button. Ren’s voice came through suddenly, slightly muffled by the crowd apparently around him.

“Jaune, where are you? Have you found fuel yet?” Ren sounded worried, as usual.

“No, not yet,” Jaune replied standing up slowly. “I got sidetracked.” He could hear Ren’s frustration from across the communicator.

“By what, Jaune?”

“I found a dog? I think. It looks like a dog, anyways. Like if a dog were made of green goop. She’s really friendly.”

“We’re not getting a dog, Jaune,” Ren said sternly. “We can hardly afford to feed ourselves.”

Jaune sighed. He looked down at the dog, searching for a collar. There was none. “Can I at least try to find the owners? I can’t just leave her here.”

Ren sighed, “Fine. Where are you?”

---

They had been going around to stalls for what felt like ages. The twin suns were beginning to set, and floating lanterns began to light up. They had everything they needed to leave, but Jaune was dead set on finding the owner, or owners, of the dog, which he had named Petey, much to Ren’s chagrin.

Jaune refused to be embarrassed when Ren brought up that he’d named an actual living creature after his favourite cereal. And also shut up Ren, Petey could be a girl’s name, shut up.

“Why are you so determined to find this thing’s owner?” Ren asked as they walked away from a fish-selling stand. “It’s not really your business.”

Jaune looked over at him. “It’s… it’s just a thing my dad taught me.”

Ren faltered. Jaune didn’t talk much about his dad anymore. His dad had died when they were in high school… it had taken a lot out of him.

“One time my dad took me to one of the few lakes on Ventos Beta,” Jaune began, “His home planet was almost entirely water, so he always liked it near the lake. We were walking along the shore, and there was this Balces dying on the dry land. That wasn’t unusual.”

“They constantly swam too close to shore and got left in the tide pools once the water receded. But my dad…” Jaune shook his head, smiling fondly. “He just picked it up and threw it back out into the lake. Everytime we saw one, he picked it up and threw it back.”

“Wasn’t that kind of pointless?” Ren asked. “Those things are stupid. They’d just keep coming back. It doesn’t matter.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Jaune said. “And I asked my dad that. He just tossed another one back and said, ‘it mattered to that one.’ I guess it kind of stuck with me. There could be hundreds of stray pets on this planet, and I’ll never help all of them, but I can help this one.”

Ren hadn’t ever really gotten to know Jaune’s dad. He knew that he was a quiet, kind man who always came to school when Jaune got in trouble. He never yelled at Jaune for getting into fights. Never got angry or lost his temper. He just tried to help him be better.

He had been a good dad.

Finally, a shopkeeper waved them over. He had two sets of arms, one set waving, the other set clasped tightly around the handles on a basket of fruit. He smiled as the trio approached, waving at them causing the two green and yellow lines that ran down his arms to flash in the light.

“I believe you’re looking for that Dulcosi’s owner?” the shopkeeper asked, gently setting the basket of fruit down behind him.

“Yeah, do you know where we could find them?” Jaune asked, excited at finally finding a lead.

“Sure don’t,” the alien replied. “They left here ages ago. The poor thing-” He gestured to Petey. “-has been here ever since. No one wants the responsibility of taking care of her full time, but some of us food vendors will toss her something to eat when we can.”

Jaune knelt down next to the dog and rubbed gently behind her ears, still looking up at the shopkeeper. “She was abandoned? That’s awful.”

He felt sick. Who would abandon their puppy like that? He’d only known Petey for a little while but she was already the sweetest girl he had ever known.

“Sure was,” the shop owner said, shaking his head. He pulled a fruit out of the basket he’d set down and gave it to Petey. “They’re good pets. Loyal. Just need a family.”

Jaune looked up at Ren, putting on his best pleading face. This wasn’t just about his empty stomach anymore. This was for Petey.

Ren heaved a sigh, rubbing his forehead. Jaune wasn’t going to leave without this dog.

“There’s a pet supply shop just a couple streets down,” the shopkeeper said, winking knowingly. “Tell him Luxverd sent you, and he should give you a discount.”

Ren’s face was buried in his hands. He seemed to think that if he didn’t see Jaune then he would disappear. When he uncovered his face, however, Jaune was still there, holding Petey in his arms now.

The combination of Jaune’s pleading face, along with the dog happily panting at him with her tongue sticking out and wagging her tail was too much.

“Fine,” Ren groaned. “Where’s this shop?” He pulled out his map and let Luxverd point out where the shop would be. Not too far away. Ren shouldered his pack, forging out into the crowd. “Come on, Jaune.”

Jaune and the dog followed along behind, shit-eating grin plastered across his face, and Petey’s tag wagging furiously.

---

The shop was brightly lit, toys and pictures of various pets plastered on posters in the windows. The shopkeeper was waving goodbye to a happy looking alien who was carrying a kitten-esque creature in their arms.

The shop owner looked to be the same species as Luxverd, except instead of green and yellow lines, he had two dark blue lines running down his cheeks. He turned his smile to Jaune and Ren as they approached.

“How can I help you?” he asked, extending one of his arms to Ren. “My name is Caelrune.”

“Ren,” he shook his hand. “We are… um…”

Jaune ignored the shopkeeper, darting to the toy shelf with Petey.

“I recognize that Dulcosi,” Caelrune said. “I suppose Luxverd sent you?”

Ren nodded, looking behind the shopkeeper to watch Jaune. He had set the dog down, and was showing her different toys. Every time Petey showed any interest in one, he added it to the growing pile in his arms.

“I should-” Ren started. Caelrune held up one of his arms, stopping him.

“Make sure your friend doesn’t buy my entire stock, yes.”

Ren nodded gratefully and walked past Caelrune and into the shop. Jaune was looking at bags of food now, the toys all in one basket. The dog was sniffing the different bags.

“Which one is it, girl?” He asked. “What do you want to eat?”

Petey leaned in to sniff a bright pink bag. Once she determined that she liked it, she butted her head against it, turning to pant at Jaune. He beamed and picked up the bag in his arms, almost toppling over from the weight.

“We’re not buying all of these toys,” Ren said, taking the bag of food from Jaune, who looked relieved. “We can’t afford all of them. We can barely afford to take care of ourselves!”

“We can manage,” Jaune said. “We always do.”

“At least put a few back,” Ren said, half-pleading. “She doesn’t need thirty different toys.”

Jaune frowned. He picked a few toys out of the basket, but didn’t like that decision so he put them back and picked a few different ones. He couldn’t decide which ones to put back. Petey deserved them all. Finally, Ren grabbed a random few and put them back on the shelf.

“This should be good,” he said, holding his arm out to stop Jaune from grabbing the toys again.

“Excellent,” Caelrune smiled at them and began calculating the cost.

---

Ren stared sadly at the small handful of currency they had left, while Jaune bounced happily alongside, playing tug-of-war with Petey. He sighed. He couldn’t stay mad at Jaune. Not when he was so happy with having a dog.

Still… they needed money. Ren knew it wasn’t going to be easy when he had decided to join Jaune on this adventure. Nothing had ever been easy with Jaune.

They were going to have to find somewhere to earn some spare currency or this adventure was going to be cut short.

#rwby #jaune arc #lie ren #mine #my writing #space rwby #new residents #chapter 1

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