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dustedmagazine · 4 years ago

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Dust Volume 6, Number 13

Trees

It’s four in the afternoon and already getting dark, a foot of snow on the way. One year is nearly over — and yes, we’ve got some essays on that coming up after the holiday break — and another one is taking shape in our inboxes, mail chutes and hard drives. But for right now, let’s take another look at 2020, doubling back on the records that caught our ears without exactly fitting our schedules, the ones that almost got away. Here are the usual free improvisations and long drones, hip hop upstarts and cowpunk also-rans, a harpist, a cellist, a tabletop guitarist and at least one stellar punk record that has us hoping for sweaty live music again in 2021. Contributors this time included Bill Meyer, Bryon Hayes, Andrew Forrell, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Arthur Krumins, Ian Mathers and Ray Garraty, heck let’s call it a quorum, and see you again in the New Year.

Mac Blackout — Love Profess (Trouble In Mind)

Love Profess by Mac Blackout

Mac Blackout owes his surname to his membership in the Functional Blackouts. That’s a garage combo that was once the subject of an article about how they’d been banned from various venues on account of the destructive chaos of their live performances. But you can’t do that forever, and nowadays Mac’s a painter and solo recording artist. His latest sounds are unlikely to make anyone want to put a chair into the mirror behind the bar, but they might send you flipping through your record collection, looking for the sounds that you and he have in common. Love Profess opens with a burst of piano-pounding, sax-overblowing free jazz, but that lasts for about nine seconds before it gets swallowed by some John Bender-worthy synth throb. Give “Wandering Spheres” a couple more minutes, and Mr. Blackout goes full La Dusseldorf on us. By turns spacy, spooky and seriously compelled to vent nocturnal loneliness, this half-hour long LP is both as familiar and as unknown as a well-shuffled deck of cards.

Bill Meyer

Ross Birdwise — Perfect Failures (Never Anything)

Perfect Failures by Ross Birdwise

Vancouver-based electronic improviser Ross Birdwise rails against spatio-temporal norms. The concepts of tempo and rhythm are malleable in his universe. Architecturally, Birdwise is Antoni Gaudí, working in fluid lines to build incomprehensible structures. With Perfect Failures, he leaps even further away from the orthogonal grid of musical construction, dissolving beats into grains of sound. The warped rhythms found on Frame Drag are divested in favor of an approach that more resembles electroacoustic composition. As a matter of fact, the title track comes on like a digital recreation of a piece of classic musique concrète. Birdwise avoids venturing into purely ambient territory yet borrows some signifiers from the genre: keyboard melodies, elongated tones, washes of sound. He overlays these seemingly innocuous elements with crashes of noise, oblique jump cuts and hyperkinetic sequences, constantly forcing us to shift focus to make sense of his soundscapes. The febrile nature of the music is what intoxicates, but the discordant melodies are what enthrall.

Bryon Hayes

C_G — C_G (edelfaul recordings)

C_G by C_G

Belgium-based French electronic artist Eduardo Ribuyo (C_C) and Israeli drummer Ilia Gorovitz (Stumpf) join forces on C_G, a one-take collaboration of molecular machine noise and improvised percussion. It opens as a slow creep, Gorovitz playing minimal rhythms that sound like someone walking through the pre-dawn streets of an awakening city. Ribuyo accretes whirrs, cracks and electrical pops to evoke the dread of a night not over. On “Normalising Cruelty,” for instance, the discomfort builds, the drums tumble in flight, the noise intensifies. The relative conventionality of the percussion tracks seems intentional and serves to focus attention on the granular details Ribuyo conjures from his machines. Think the experiments of similarly minded Mille Plateaux and Raster Norton artists. When played through headphones at volume, its full queasy Room 101 buzz and grind squirms most effectively into the brain. Easy listening this is not, but if and when home gatherings resume this would be an ideal way to clear the house.

Andrew Forell

Che Noir — After 12 EP (TCF Music Group)

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If you’ve been paying attention to hip-hop in the last few years, Buffalo’s Griselda camp has dominated the “old heads” conversation away from whatever the kids are vibing to on TikTok. But there’s life away from an Eminem partnership, and not just in the form of Benny the Butcher: Witness Che Noir, who has been on fire throughout 2020. After starting off the year with the 38 Spesh-produced Juno and following it up with the Apollo Brown-produced As God Intended, Che’s closing things out with this self-produced seven-song EP that covers a wide range of territory without dipping into tales of street hustling, just the age old struggle to get some respect. “Hunger Games” is an early highlight that shows her chemistry with Ransom and 38 Spesh, while she completely takes over in speaking to the times on “Moment in the Sun,” which is the clear emotional highlight of the EP. Amber Simone’s pleading chorus on closer “Grace” is another stylistic turn and closes things on a high note. The last words you hear are Simone’s as she sings, “Imma go get it”; the lingering effect is that you know Che Noir is already showing you as much. Miss this one at your own risk.

Patrick Masterson

Cong Josie — “Leather Whip” b/w “Maxine” (It Records)

Leather Whip / Maxine (AA single) by Cong Josie

Frankie Teardrop rides again in this smoking synth punk single from Australia’s Cong Josie. “Leather Whip” is about as menacing and minimal as synthesizer music gets, braced by the hard slap of gate-reverbed drums and a claw-picked bass sound (maybe electronic?) and Cong Josie’s whispery insinuations. “Maxine” is just as stripped, with blotchy bass sound and swishing drum machine rhythms framing a haunted rockabilly love song. It’s very Suicide, but isn’t that a good thing?

Jennifer Kelly

Divine Horsemen — Live 1985-1987 (Feeding Tube)

Divine Horsemen “Live”1985-1987 by Divine Horsemen

With Divine Horsemen, Chris D of the Flesh Eaters had a brief but memorable run in vivid, gothic, country-tinged punk. This disc commemorates two red-hot live outings from 1985 and 1987, the first at Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach, California, the second at Boston’s The Rat. A sharply realized recording shows how this band’s sound fit into the cowpunk parameters set by X, with strident guitar clangor and hard knocking rock rhythms (the ax-heavy line-up featured in this recording included Wayne James, Marshall Rohner and Peter Andrus on guitars, the Flesh Eater’s Robyn Jameson on bass). The secret weapon, though, was the ongoing and volatile vocal duel between the front man and his then-wife Julie Christensen, a classically trained soprano with an unholy vibrato-laced belt. You can hear how she transformed his art by comparing the Flesh Eater’s version of “Poison Arrow” with the one here. It’s as aggressive as ever, musically, and Chris D. is in full florid, echoey, goth-punk mode. Christensen, however, is molten fire, letting loose cascades and flurries of wild vibrating song. There’s a scorching, stomping romp through the vamping “Hell’s Belle,” and a lurid rendering of mad, howling “Frankie Silver,” and, towards the end, a muscular take on the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” Christensen later made a mark as one of Leonard Cohen’s favorite backup singers, and Chris D is still knocking around with a reunited, all-star Flesh Eaters, though there’s some talk of getting this band back together as well. I’d go.

Jennifer Kelly

Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger — Force Majeure (International Anthem)

Force Majeure by Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger

Harlem harpist Brandee Younger and bassist Dezron Douglas faced down New York’s early months of quarantine with a series of live broadcasts recorded in their apartment on a single microphone. This document of intimate resilience collects highlights of the Friday ritual. Younger and Douglas perform covers of spiritual Jazz, soul and pop songs as well as the delightfully titled original “Toilet Paper Romance.” The music is so close you feel the fingers on the strings and frets. Younger’s harp playing is a revelation, pianistic on John Coltrane’s “Equinox”, pointillist yet robust on his “Wise One” which they dedicate to Ahmaud Arbery. Douglas provides vigorous and sympathetic accompaniment and his solo rendition of Sting’s “Inshallah” is a tender tough exploration of his instrument. Along the way there are lovely versions of pieces by, amongst others, Alice Coltrane, Kate Bush and Clifton Davis. Douglas closes with the words “Black music cannot be recreated it can only be expressed” and Force Majeure demonstrates that the same goes for humanity and creativity.

Andrew Forell

Avalon Emerson — 040 12” (AD 93)

040 by Avalon Emerson

It’s been a big year for Avalon Emerson, who started 2020 prepping a move from Berlin to East Los Angeles and ends it back home stateside with an almost universally acclaimed DJ-Kicks entry to her credit. This three-song 12” for the label fka Whities is a nice way to close out a triumphant year, illustrating her penchant for bright melodies and percussive detail. “One Long Day Till I See You Again” is a welcoming slice of beatless percolation to close; “Winter and Water” leans heavily on rhythmic tricks in the middle. That makes A1 “Rotting Hills” the ideal lead as a balance between them. There may not be so obvious a gimmick as a Magnetic Fields cover, but that makes it no less valuable for showing what Emerson can do. Call it one more fluorescent rush.

Patrick Masterson

End Forest — Proroctwo (Self-released)

Proroctwo (The Prophecy) by End Forest

For some of us, the fusion of folk music forms with crust and metal mostly issues in obscenities like Finntroll (yep, a Finnish band that makes folk metal songs about…trolls) or in politically toxic, Völkisch nationalist fantasias. But some bands get it right; see Botanist’s remarkable work, and see also End Forest, an act just emerging from Poland’s punk underground. Singer Paula Pieczonka employs a traditional Slavic vocal technique that roughly translates to “white singing” — but before you get creeped out by any potential fascist vibes, please know that the “whiteness” at stake in the phrase is purely an aesthetic value. And her voice is really great, open and soaring. “Proroctwo (The Prophecy)” has the sweep and drama of a lot of contemporary crust, and all of the genre’s interest in symbolic violence. The lyrics envision a future wrought and wracked by social conflict, a coming conflagration of torn bodies and of piles of dislodged teeth housed in some horrific archive of viciousness (that’s quite an image). It’s harrowing stuff, big guitar chords accented by sitar and flute. The track is available on Bandcamp, along with several inventive remixes by Polish musicians and DJs, like Tomek Jedynak and Dawid Chrapla. End Forest indicates that a full record is forthcoming sometime in spring. Looking forward to it, y’all.

Jonathan Shaw

Lori Goldson — On a Moonlit Hill in Slovenia (Eiderdown Records)

On A Moonlit Hill In Slovenia by Lori Goldston

Goldson creates movement and tension in an arresting way with a rough-hewn approach to the cello. This could be a good entry point to her solo work, which is varied and bridges the gap between DIY attitude and elevated levels of musicianship and considered approach. The flow of her playing here evokes the almost brutal scrape of the strings, which gives a welcome texture to the melodic squiggles.

Arthur Krumins

Hot Chip — LateNightTales (LateNightTales)

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The LateNightTales series of artist-curated mixes has seen a fair bit of variation over the years since Fila Brazilia first took up the torch in 2001, which makes a certain amount of sense; how we spend our late nights can differ wildly, of course. Hot Chip’s instalment in the series hits some of the expected notes (at least one cover, in this case a deeply moving one of the Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” they’ve been playing since Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard were in high school together; a closing story track, in this case Taylor’s father reading a bit from Finnegan’s Wake) and otherwise depicts the kind of late night Dusted readers might be more familiar with than most; one where a clearly voracious and eclectic listener is keeping their own private party going just for another hour or so, but always keeping things just quiet and subtle enough to not wake up anyone upstairs. The three other, non-cover new Hot Chip tracks all make for standouts here but there’s plenty of room for accolades, whether it’s for the smoothly groovy (Pale Blue, Mike Saita, Beatrice Dillon), the more avant garde (Christina Vantzou, About Group, Nils Frahm) to just plain off-kilter pop (Fever Ray, PlanningToRock, Hot Chip themselves). The result works as both a wonderful playlist and a survey of the band’s sonic world; and it does work best when everyone else is in bed.

Ian Mathers

Annette Krebs Jean-Luc Guionnet — Pointe Sèche (Inexhaustible Editions)

pointe sèche by Jean-Luc Guionnet, Annette Krebs

Annette Krebs and Jean-Luc Guionnet recorded the three long, numbered tracks on Pointe Sèche (translation: Dry Point) over the course of three days at St. Peter’s Parish church in Bistrica ob Sotli, Slovenia. Location matters because this music couldn’t happen just anywhere; Guionnet plays church organ. Krebs was once part of the post-Keith Rowe generation of tabletop guitarists, but since 2014 she has abandoned strings and fretboards in favor of a series of hybrid instruments called konstruktions. Konstruktion #4, which appears on this record, includes suspended pieces of metal, a handful of toy animals, a wooden sounding board, vocal and contact microphones and a couple touch screens that manage computer programs. While both musicians have extensive backgrounds in improvisation, this recording sounds more like an audio transcription of a multi-media collage. Guionnet plays his large instrument quite softly, extracting machine-like hums, brief burps and dopplering tones that flicker around the periphery of Krebs’ fragments of speech, distant clangs and unidentifiable events. The resulting sounds resolutely defy decoding, which is its own reward in a time when so much music can be reduced to easily identifiable antecedents.

Bill Meyer

KMRU — ftpim (The Substation)

ftpim by KMRU

If you happened to catch Peel, Joseph Kamaru’s wonderful release on Editions Mego in late July, but haven’t paid attention before or since, early December’s half-hour two-tracker ftpim done for (and mastered by) Room40 leader Lawrence English is a Janus-faced example of the Nairobi-based ambient artist’s power. As Ian Forsythe put it in his BOGO review of both Peel and Opaquer, “Something that can define an effective ambient record is an ability to disintegrate the perimeter of the record itself and the outside world,” a line I think about every time I listen to KMRU now. “Figures Emerge” feels more immediately accessible to me as a relatable environment where the gentle, pulsing drone is occasionally greeted by sounds outside the studio, while “From the People I Met” is more difficult terrain, a distorted fog of post-shoegaze harmonic decay — no less interesting, but perhaps more metaphorical in its take on the outside world. (Or not, given how 2020 has gone.)

Patrick Masterson

Paul Lovens / Florian Stoffner—Tetratne (Ezz-thetics)

Enough years separate drummer Paul Lovens and guitarist Florian Stoffner that they could be father and son, and Lovens membership in the Schlippenbach Trio, and Lovens role as drummer in the legendarily long-running Schlippenbach Trio establishes him as an august elder of free improvisation. But the partnership they exhibit on this CD is one of equals committed to making music that is of one mind. Whether matching sparse string-tugging to purposefully collapsing batterie or burrowing sprung-spring wobbles to an immense cymbal wash, the duo plays without regard for showing us one guy or the other’s stuff. The point, it seems, is to how they imagine as one, and their combined craniums generate plenty of imagination. They operate in a realm close to that occupied by Derek Bailey and John Stevens, or Roger Smith and Louis Moholo-Moholo, but their patch of turf is entirely their own.

Bill Meyer

Mr. Teenage — Automatic Love (Self-Release)

Automatic Love by Mr. Teenage

Melbourne, Australia’s fertile garage punk scene has squeeze out another good one in Mr. Teenage, a Buzzcockian foursome prone to short, sharp riffs and sing-along choruses. A four-song EP starts with the title track, whose arch talk-sung verse erupts into rabid, rip-sawing guitar, like Devo meeting the Wipers. “Waste of Time” piles palm muted urgency with explosive release, with a good bit of the Clash in the crashing, clangor. “KIDS” struts and swaggers in a rough-edged way that’s close to the violence of early Reigning Sound or Texas’ Bad Sports. “Oh, the kids these days,” to borrow a phrase, they’re pretty good.

Jennifer Kelly

Nekra — Royal Disruptor (La Vida Es Un Mus)

Royal Disruptor by Nekra

Remember punk shows? Remember half-lit, dusty basements and fully lit, dirty kids? Remember your sneaker soles sticking to scuffed, gummy linoleum? Remember greasy denim battle jackets and hand-drawn Sharpie slogans? Remember warm beer (watery domestic suds in cans and cups) and cold stares (angsty bravado and bad attitude for its own sake)? Remember anarchists arguing with nihilists, and riot grrrls arguing with rocker boys? Remember people laughing and people smoking and people shouting and people spitting, all without masks? Remember the anticipation that crisps the air when the amps switch on? Feedback from the cheap-ass mic stabbing your ears? Beefy dudes elbowing through the press of flesh? That volatile, stomachy mix of happiness and truculence? Those warm-up thumps of the bass drum and the initial strums of crackling guitar? Remember all that? For the time being, in the United States of Dysfunction, here’s the closest thing you’ll get: an EP of feral, fast punk songs that sound like they’re happening live, right in front of your face. Thanks, Nekra — I really needed that.

Jonathan Shaw

Neuringer / Dulberger / Masri — Dromedaries II (Relative Pitch)

Dromedaries II by Keir Neuringer, Shayna Dulberger, Julius Masri

Yes, Dromedaries II is a sequel. It follows by three years a debut cassette which was sold in the sort of microquantities that 21st century cassettes are sold. So, it’s more likely that you have heard another of the bands that the trio’s alto saxophonist, Keir Neuringer, plays in — Irreversible Entanglements. While the two combos don’t sound that similar, they share a commitment to improvising propulsive, cohesive music that will put a boot up your butt if you get in the way. While IE focuses on supplying music that frames and exemplifies the stern proclamations of vocalist Camae Ayewa, the trio plays instrumental free jazz that balances individual expression with collective support. Neuringer, double bassist Shayna Dulberger and drummer Julius Masri play like their eyes are on the horizon, but each musician’s ears are tuned into what the other two are doing. The result is music that seems to move in concerted fashion, but usually has someone doing something that pulls against the prevailing thrust in ways that heighten tension, but never force the music off track.

Bill Meyer

Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song (Smalltown Supersound)

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One of the distinctive things about Kelly Lee Owens’ marvellous debut LP a few years ago, as noted here, is that it felt so confident and distinct that it could have easily been the work of a much more seasoned producer. That impression, of a deftly skilled hand at the controls and a keen artistic sensibility and taste shaping it all, certainly doesn’t recede on Inner Song, whether it finds Owens homaging the grandmother who provided support and inspiration (“Jeanette”), gently but firmly rejecting unhealthy relationships (the utterly gorgeous “L.I.N.E.”) or teaming up with John Cale to make some bilingual, deep Welsh ambient dub (“Corner of My Sky”). And that’s one pretty randomly chosen three-song run! Owens continues to excel at both crafting gorgeous, lived-in productions and maybe especially with her handling of voices (her own and others), and she’s comfortable enough in her own skin that if she wants to open up the album with an instrumental Radiohead version (“Arpeggi”) she will, and she’ll make it feel natural, too.

Ian Mathers

San Kazakgascar — Emotional Crevasse (Lather Records)

Emotional Crevasse by San Kazakgascar

You won’t find San Kazakgascar on any map, but give a listen and you’ll know where this combo is coming from. Geographically, they hail from Sacramento CA, where they share personnel with Swimming In Bengal. But sonically, they are the product of a journey through music libraries that likely started out in a Savage Republic and sweated in the shadow of Sun City Girls. They likely spent time in the teetering stacks of music collections compiled in a time when the problematic aspects of the term world music were outweighed by the lure of sounds you hadn’t heard before. More important than where they’ve been, though, is the impulse to go someplace other than where they’re currently standing. To accomplish this, twangy guitars, rhythms that straighten your spine whilst swiveling your hips, bottom-dredging saxophone and a cameo appearance by a throat singer who understands that part of a shaman’s job is to scare you each take their turn stepping up and pointing your mind elsewhere. Where it goes after that is up to you.

Bill Meyer

John Sharkey III — “I Found Everyone This Way” (12XU)

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Has Sharkey mellowed? This early peek at the upcoming solo album from the Clockcleaner legend and Dark Blue proprietor suggests a pensive mood, with liquid jangle and surprisingly subdued and lyrical delivery (albeit in the man’s inimitable hollowed out and wounded snarl). But give the artist a power ballad if that’s what he wants. The song has a graceful arc to it, a doomed romanticism and not an ounce of cloying sentiment.

Jennifer Kelly

Sky Furrows — Sky Furrows (Tape Drift Records/Skell Records/Philthy Rex Records)

Sky Furrows by Sky Furrows

Sky Furrows don’t take long to match sound and message. As Karen Schoemer drops references to SST Records and Raymond Pettibone, bassist Eric Hardiman and drummer Philip Donnelly whip up a tense groove that could easily have been played by Mike Watt and George Hurley. Mike Griffin’s spidery, treble-rich guitar picking is a little less specifically referential, but does sound like it was fed through a signal chain of gear that would have been affordable back in the first Bush administration. The next track looks back a bit further; Schoemer’s voice aside, it sounds like Joy Division might have done if Tom Herman had turned up, pushed Martin Hannet out of the control room before he could ladle on the effects and instead laid down some space blues licks. Schoemer recites rather than sings in a cadence that recalls Lee Ranaldo’s; pre-internet underground rock is in this band’s DNA. The sounds themselves are persistently cool, but one drawback of having a poet instead of a singer up front is an apparent reluctance to vary the structure; it would not have hurt to break things up with some contrasting passages here or there.

Bill Meyer

Soft on Crime — “You’ve Already Made Up Your Mind” b/w “Rubyanne” (EatsIt)

7'' by Soft on Crime

These Dublin fuzz-punks kick up a guitar-chiming clangor in A-Side, “You’ve Already Made Up Your Mind,” which might have you reaching for your old Sugar records. Sharp but sweet, the cut is an unruly gem buoyed by melody but bristling with attitude. “Rubyanne” is slower, softer and more ingratiating, embellished with baroque pop elements like flute, saxophone and choral counterpoints. “Little 8 Track” fills out this brief disc, with crunching, buzz-hopped bass and a bit of guitar jangle under whisper-y romantic vocals. It’s a bit hard to get a handle on the band, based on such disparate samples, but intriguing enough to make you want to settle the matter whenever more material becomes available.

Jennifer Kelly

Theoxinia — See the Lapith King Burn (Bandcamp)

See the Lapith King Burn by Theoxenia

Students of Greek mythology will grasp it right away, but in the internet age, it doesn’t take anyone long to figure out that when you name your record See the Lapith King Burn, you’re casting your lot for better or worse with the party animals. The Lapiths were one side of a lineage that also involved the considerably less sober-sided Centaurs, and the two sides of the family had a bloody showdown at a wedding that has been taken to symbolize the war between civilization and wildness. Theoxinia is Dave Shuford (No-Neck Blues Band, Rhyton, D. Charles Speer & the Helix) and his small circle of stringed instruments and low-cost repeating devices. If you were to dig through his past discography, it most closely resembles the LP Arghiledes (Thrill Jockey) in its explicitly Hellenic-psychedelic vibe. But, like so many folks in recent times, Shuford has decided to bypass the expanse and aggravation of physical publication in favor of marketing this LP-sized recording on Bandcamp. If that fact really bugs you, I guess you could start a label and make the man an offer. But if fuzz-tone bouzouki, sped-up loops and unerringly traced dance steps that will look most convincing when executed with a knife between your teeth and the sheriff’s wallet poking mockingly out of the top of your breast pocket sounds like your jam, See the Lapith King Burn awaits you in the realm of digital insubstantiality.

Bill Meyer

Trees — 50th Anniversary Edition (Earth Recordings)

Trees (50th Anniversary Edition) by Trees

This boxed set presents the two original Trees albums from the early 1970s, The Garden of Jane Delawney and On the Shore, with the addition of demos and sundry recordings from the era. Here the band took the UK folk rock sound emergent at the time and drew it out into its jammy and somewhat arena rock guitar soloing conclusion. It’s good to have all of this in one place to document the myriad ways that Trees wrapped traditional material into new forms and with a bracing, druggy feel.

Arthur Krumins

Uncivilized — Garden (UNCIV MUSIC)

Garden by Uncivilized

Guitarist Tom Csatari presides over NYC-based large jazz ensemble known as Uncivilized, whose fusion-y discography stretches back a couple of years and prominently incorporates a cover of the Angelo Badalamenti theme from Twin Peaks. This 27-track album was recorded live at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works space in 2018 with a nine-piece band, who navigate drones and dances and the multi-part Meltedy Candy STOMP, a sinuous exploration of space age keyboards and surging big band instruments. Jaimie Branch, who lives next door to Csatari and was invited on a whim at the last minute, joins in for the second half including a smoldering rendition of the Lynch theme. It’s damn fine (though not coffee). Later on, Stevie Wonder gets the Uncivilized treatment in a pensive cover of “Evil,” led by warm guitar, blowsy sax and a little bit of jazz flute.

Jennifer Kelly

Unwed Sailor — Look Alive (Old Bear Records)

Look Alive by Unwed Sailor

Johnathon Ford, who plays bass for Pedro the Lion, has been at the center of Unwed Sailor for two decades, gathering a changing cohort of players to realize his lucid instrumental compositions. Here, as on last year’s Heavy Age, Eric Swatzell adds guitars and Matthew Putnam drums to Ford’s essential bass and keyboard sounds. Yet while Heavy Age brooded, Look Alive grooves with bright clarity, riding insistent basslines through highly colored landscapes of synths and drums. The title track bounds with optimism, with big swirls of synth sound enveloping a rigorous cadence of bass and drums. “Camino Reel” is more guitar-centric but just as uplifting, opening out into squalling shoe-gaze-y walls of amplified sound. Ford, who usually leans on post-punk influences like New Order and the Cure, indulges an affinity for dance, here, especially audible on the trance-y “Gone Jungle” remix by GJ.

Jennifer Kelly

Your Old Droog — Dump YOD Krutoy Edition (Self-released)

Dump YOD: Krutoy Edition by YOD

American rapper Your Old Droog has been releasing solid music for years. He never had ups for the same reason he never had downs: he never left his comfort zone. Dump YOD Krutoy Edition (where “krutoy” stands for “rude boy” or “badass”) may be his breakthrough album. He always kept his Soviet origins in check, and here for the first time he draws his imagery from three different sources: New York urban present, Ukrainian folk and Soviet and post-Soviet past (even Boris Yeltsin makes an appearance). In this boiling pot, a new Your Old Droog is rising, among balalaikas and mean streets of NYC, matryoshkas and producers with boring beats, babushkas and graffiti writers.

Ray Garraty

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jadelotusflower · 4 years ago

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November Roundup

Some writing success this month - I finished and posted a new chapter for Against the Dying of the Light, and made progress on The Lady of the Lake and Turn Your Face to the Sun. I didn’t work much on my novel, but I did do some editing on the first third so that’s progress.

Words written this month: 6647

Total this year: 67,514

November books

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo - joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize (with The Testaments by Margaret Atwood) this was an engrossing and interesting read. Stylistically unusual formatting and scant use of punctuation that is a bit jarring at first, but you quickly adapt as you read. There’s no plot as such - instead the story is formed by vignettes of twelve black women and their disparate yet interconnected lives. We have mothers and daughters, close friends, teachers and students, although the connections aren’t always obvious at first - we can be exposed to a character briefly in the story of another with no idea that she will be a focus later on. It’s very skillfully done, to the point whereupon finishing I wanted immediately to re-read (but alas, it was already overdue back to the library). There is so much ground covered that we are really only given a glimpse into the characters lives, but there is a diversity of intergenerational perspectives of the African diaspora in the UK, and I highly recommend.

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett - after finishing The Pillars of the Earth I had intended to read the sequel, but this was available on the library shelf and I had to place a hold on World Without End, so the prequel came first. Set sixty years before the Conquest (150 before Pillars) it primarily addresses the growth of the hamlet of Dreng’s Ferry into the town of Kingsbridge, through the lives of a monk with a strong moral code, a clever and beautiful noblewoman, and a skilled builder, working against the machinations of an evil bishop. Sound familiar? This is Follet’s most recent work, and I do wonder if he’s running out of ideas as this covers very similar thematic ground.

Ragna is a compelling female character, but once again the romance-that-cannot-be with Edgar is tepid, Aldred is a very watered down version of Prior Philip, and there’s no grand framing device such as building the cathedral to really tie to all together (although things do Get Built, and it’s interesting but not on the level of Pillars). This is the tail end of the Dark Ages and it shows - Viking raids, slavery, infanticide - and while it seems Follett’s style is to put his characters through much tragedy and tribulation before their happy ending, I wish writers would stop going to the rape well so readily. But at least the sexual violence isn’t as...lasciviously written as in Pillars? Scant praise, I know. But Follett’s strength in drawing the reader into the world and time period is on display, made even more interesting in this era about which we know very little.

Women and Leadership by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala - I have a great deal of respect for Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister who was treated utterly shamefully during her tenure and never got the credit she deserved, perhaps excepting the reaction to her iconic “misogny speech” whichyou can enjoy in full here:

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Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was the first woman to be Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs in Nigeria, was also the former Managing Director of the World Bank, and currently a candidate for Director-General of the WTO.

This is an interesting examination of women in leadership roles, comparing and contrasting the lives and experiences of a select few including (those I found the most interesting) Ellen Sirleaf, the first female President of Liberia, Joyce Banda, the first female President of Malawi, New Zealand’s current Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and of course, Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala themselves.

November shows/movies

The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult - I’ve been following the NXIVM case for a while now, when the news broke in 2017 I was surprised and intrigued that it involved actresses from some of my fandom interests - Alison Mack (Smallville), Grace Park and Nikki Clyne (Battlestar Galactica), and Bonnie Piasse (Star Wars). Uncovered: Escaping NXIVM is an excellent podcast from that point in time that’s well worth a listen. There’s been a lot of discussion comparing these two documentaries and which one is better, but I feel they’re both worthwhile.

The Vow gives a primer of NXIVM as a predatory “self improvement” pyramid scheme/cult run by human garbage Keith Reniere, from the perspective of former members turned whistleblowers Bonnie Piasse, who first suspected things were wrong, her husband Mark Vicente who was high up in the organisation, and Sarah Edmondson who was a member of DOS, the secret group within NXIVM that involved branding and sex trafficking. Seduced gives more insight into the depravity and criminality of DOS from the pov of India Oxenburg, just 19 when she joined the group and who became Alison Mack’s “slave” in DOS - she was required to give monthly “collateral” in the form of explicit photographs or incriminating information about herself or her family, had to ask Mack’s permission before eating anything (only 500 calories allowed per day), was ordered to have sex with Reniere, and other horrific treatment - Mack herself was slave to Reniere (as was Nikki Clyne) and there were even more horrific crimes including rape and imprisonments of underage girls.

Of course each show has an interest in portraying its subjects as less culpable than perhaps they were (there were people above and below them all in the pyramid after all) - Vicente and Edmondson in The Vow and Oxenburg in Seduced, but what I did appreciate about Seduced was the multiple experts to explain how and why people were indoctrinated into this cult, and why it was so difficult to break free from it. This is a story of victims who were also victimisers and all the complications that come along with that, although I’m not sure any of these people are in the place yet to really reckon with what happened and all need a lot of therapy.

Focusing on individual journeys also narrows the scope - there are other NXIVM members interviewed I would have liked to have heard a lot more from. There is also a lot of jumping back and forth in time in both docos so the timeline is never quite clear unless you do further research. I would actually like to see another documentary one day a bit further removed from events dealing with the whole thing from start to finish from a neutral perspective. The good news is that Reniere was recently sentenced to 120 years in prison so he can rot.

I saw value in both, but you’re only going to watch one of these, I would say go for Seduced - if you’re interested in as much information as possible, watch The Vow first to get a primer on all the main players and then Seduced for the full(er) story.

The Crown (season 4) - While I love absolutely everything Olivia Coleman does, I thought it took a while for her to settle in as the Queen last season and it’s almost sad that she really nailed it this season, just in time for the next cast changeover (but I also love everything Imelda Staunton does so...) This may be an unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t completely sold on Gillian Anderson as Thatcher - yes I know she sounded somewhat Like That, but for me the performance was a little too...affected? (and someone get her a cough drop, please!)

It is also an almost sympathetic portrayal of Thatcher - even though it does demonstrate her classism and internalised misogyny, it doesn’t really explore the full impact of Thatcherism, why she was such a polarising figure to the extent that some would react like this to her death:

youtube

But I suppose it’s called The Crown, not The PM.

Emma Corrin is wonderful as Diana, and boy do they take no prisoners with Charles (or the other male spawn). I was actually surprised at how terrible they made Charles seem rather than both sidesing it as I had expected (but perhaps that’s being saved for season 5). It does hammer home just how young Diana was when they were married (19 to Charles’ 32), how incompatible they were and the toxicity of their marriage (standard disclaimer yes it’s all fictionalised blah blah). The performances are exceptional across the board - Tobias Menzies and Josh O’Conner were also standouts and it’s a shame to see them go.

I was however disappointed to see that the episode covering Charles and Di’s tour of Australia was not only called “Terra Nullius” but the term was used as a very tone deaf metephor that modern Australia was no longer “nobody’s land/country”. For those who aren’t aware, terra nullius was the disgraceful legal justification for British invasion/colonisation of Australia despite the fact that the Indigenous people had inhabited the continent for 50,000 years or more. While the tour was pre-Mabo (the decision that overturned the doctrine of terra nullius and acknowledged native title), there was no need to use this to make the point, especially when there was no mention at all of the true meaning/implication of the term.

The Spanish Princess (season 2, episodes 4-8)- Sigh. I guess I’m more annoyed at the squandered potential of this show, since the purpose ostensibly was to focus on the time before The Great Matter and give Katherine “her due” - and instead they went and made her the most unsympathetic, unlikeable character in the whole damn show. (Spoilers) She literally rips Bessie Blount’s baby from her body and, heedless to a mother’s pleas to hold her child, runs off to Henry so she can present him with “a son”. I mean, what the actual fuck?

I’m not a stickler for historical accuracy so long as it’s accurate to the spirit of history (The Tudors had its flaws, but it threaded this needle most of the time), but this Katherine isn’t even a shadow of her historical figure - she’s not a troubled heroine, she’s cruel and vindictive, Margaret Pole is a sanctimonious prig, and Margaret Tudor does little but sneer and shout - the only one who comes out unscathed is Mary Tudor (the elder), and it’s only because she’s barely in it at all. It’s a shame because I like all of these actresses (especially Georgie Henley and Laura Carmichael) but they are just given dreck to work with.

This is not an issue with flawed characters, it’s the bizarre presentation of these characters that seems to want to be girl power rah rah, and yet at the same time feels utterly misogynistic by pitting the women against each other or making them spiteful, stupid, or crazy for The Drama. I realise this is based on Gregory so par for the course, but it feels particularly egregious here. (Spoilers) At one point Margaret Pole is banished from court by Henry, and because Katherine won’t help her (because she cant!) she decides to spill the beans about Katherine’s non-virginity. Yes, her revenge against the hated Tudors is...to give Henry exactly what he wants? Even though it will result in young Mary, who she loves and cares for, being disinherited? Girlboss!

This season also missed the opportunity to build on its predecessors The White Queen/Princess and show why it was so important to Henry to have a male heir - the Tudor reign wasn’t built on the firmest foundations and so needed uncontested transfer of power, at the time there was historic precedent that passing the throne to a daughter led to Anarchy, and wars of succession were very recent in everyone’s memory. At least no one was bleating about The Curse this time, which is actually kind of surprising, because the point of the stupid curse is the Tudor dynasty drama.

But it’s not all terrible. Lina and Oviedo are the best part of the show, and (spoilers) thankfully make it out alive. Both are a delight to watch and I wish the show had been just about them.

Oh well. One day maybe we’ll get the Katherine of Aragon show we deserve - at least I can say that the costumes were pretty, small consolation though it is.

#november roundup #long post

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elichorph · 4 years ago

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𝗧𝗔𝗦𝗞 𝟬𝟬𝟮 ( 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗙𝗔𝗠𝗜𝗟𝗬 ) ↝ 𝗔𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗬 𝗝𝗘𝗢𝗡𝗚

pov: your name is avery jeong and you are being kicked out of your house and family at age 18 because your sister snitched about some drunk mistake you made 2 years ago

as of right now, avery has no relationship with his parents and a minimal relationship with his sister, lilia. however, avery was always treated as the baby of the family. he was set to take over the drug ring when he got older and was given minimal information about it to shelter and protect him from anything that could potentially make his views on the family’s business turn sour. despite this, avery really had no plans to actually take over the business and was going to hand over the position to lilia once she became old enough even though he didn’t tell anyone about this. before avery got the chance to step up, lilia told their parents about how he had broken one of the main family rules by telling someone he’d just met at a party about what the jeong family really did behind the big pharm cover. their parents were absolutely livid and forced avery to move out and denounced him from the family.

refer to liza’s task for more family info idk we really just hate these parents so bad

𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗦

𝗠𝗢𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗥 ↝ iris jeong

our least favorite capricorn sun gemini moon out there! god this woman is the worst! song seonmi fc, this woman is LETHAL. iris’ side of the family were the ones who started the drug ring so miss thing was seriously into it. it was her life, she grew up with it, and she took it so seriously that anyone could tell. she had extremely high expectations for avery to take over too and had originally planned to school him on family law and how the business worked as soon as he could walk, but eventually ended up babying him when it came to preparing to the position thank to her arranged husband’s influence. iris kind of let avery do his own thing growing up, made sure he was on top of his grades and was the one who suggested that he go to a specialized school just to make sure that he was reaching his top brainiac potential to be smart enough to run the show. the little that avery knew about the drug ring came from iris too, but she would always here comes the choo choo train it into his brain so it wasn’t too much for him to take. she knew her son was smart and fit to take over, but she feared him not being able to do so which was frankly her own fault. honestly receiving any sort of care from iris is out of character she literally is scary as hell. their relationship? really didn’t have one. i guarantee if you asked either of them at any point in time to name one personal fact about the other, they wouldn’t be able to come up with one. they just worked as mom and son, stood respectfully at a yard’s distance and only interacted when they needed to for the sake of the family. however, they Really interacted after lilia snitched on avery. iris was the one who came up with the idea to kick avery out and was so assured in her idea that she didn’t rest until he was out of the house and never came back that night. even though they have had no contact in the five years since avery was forced to leave, iris continues to blame every single family issues that arises on avery even if he has nothing to do with it. avery holds so much resentment for iris that it frankly makes him sick!!!!!!!!! and while he might be able to forgive lilia and his father, iris will never be on the docket.

𝗙𝗔𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗥 ↝ tobias jeong

tobs ... the tobster ... aqua sun cancer moon brain rot. this man fixed up an old jeep and made it his entire personality. ya’ll ever had one of those science teachers that couldn’t spell and always lost their glasses when they were really on their head? yeah that’s him. also a certified doormat. and maybe a kim joohun fc but like give him more bill nye wannabe looking vibes. avery and his father had a good relationship for the most part. tobias was really chill, understood maybe 1/3 of what happened in the family. he tried to stand up for avery and lilia in certain situations and understood that iris was absolute trash (even he didn’t truly want to marry her, it was more business between their families than anything), but he was so compliant that he never actually made an impact. however, tobias was the one that truly made avery’s childhood ... good. he’d pick up avery from school in that old jeep he fixed up, play some classic dad music, and drive around for a while so they didn’t have to go see iris so soon. the night avery got kicked out, tobias was the one that actually stuck up for avery. even though it was one simple statement that maybe avery should stay, it was the only time anyone stood up for avery that night. of course, tobias was quickly shut down by iris and he didn’t try to have avery stay after that however he probably feels so much regret for not doing more that night. avery truly was so angry that tobias didn’t try to do more to get him to stay, but like it’s whatever! what the fuck was tobias supposed to do! a few months after avery was kicked out, he actually called his dad at a super low point ( see this gif set ) but even then tobias wasn’t willing to fight for avery to try to come back even after hearing at how he had nothing and didn’t know what to do. avery never truly hated his dad, but he now resents him for not trying when there is so much more he could have done.

𝗦𝗜𝗕𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗦

𝗦𝗜𝗦𝗧𝗘𝗥 ↝ lilia jeong

if there was one member of the jeong family that avery truly loved, it was lilia. avery loved being her big brother. he cared for her more than anybody in his life and truly thought she was capable of so many good things which is why he never had any intentions to take over the drug ring. avery had always wanted that position to go to her because he believed that lilia was the right one to take it because she easily could have done so much better than he could’ve. growing up, avery wasn’t that much of an open book as he is now. if he had a secret though, lilia was the first one to know. he basically told her everything, from explaining some project he’d been working while they walked through an apple orchard or the biggest mistake he’d made in his life which was spilling the family secret. the last thing he was expecting was for lilia to tell their family about that, especially after so long and in a manner that seemed almost self serving after she promised to keep it a secret. even though lilia's decision to snitch literally turned his life upside down and really fucked him over, he’s never been able to see lilia as anything besides his sister. sure, he’s felt true betrayal and never thought he would get screwed over like that, but avery is always one for second or third or fourth or fifth chances even in situations like this. no matter how hard avery wanted to convince himself that he didn’t want lilia in his life, he was never able to do it. lilia always stayed his emergency contact even when they weren’t speaking and no matter how many new people avery met that were closer to new haven hospitals.

for now though, their shit is tbd! avery is too afraid to talk to lilia about everything because bringing up the past pains him and he’s also unsure of how things will work out. also, he’s most likely expecting an apology first and foremost. everyone knows they’re siblings, but the reason why they’re not close are all lies. they tell everyone that they grew apart and lilia began to tell others that avery fucked up a business deal and made the choice to leave the family which avery goes along with simply because he assumes it’s what lilia wants. sometimes he wished that they actually had just grown apart rather than having to experience all the shit that happened.

even if avery knows he’s already willing to give lilia another chance, he wants an apology and he knows he’s deserving of that at the very least. until then, you can catch avery gazing longingly into the windows of music shops at acoustic guitars that resemble the one he would always play on for lilia and had to leave behind after being kicked out. those same few songs are always stuck in his head. avery hasn’t been able to eat ripe peaches anymore because the taste reminds him of sticky handed food fights and hiding one in their parents’ closet to rot. one time he went on a date with a girl whose favorite band was the moldy peaches and he promptly left to throw up in the bathroom. every time he would enter the underground fighting ring he would try not to lose because that meant lilia might have to get the call that he wasn’t alright even though he wanted her to know if anything happened to him.

#elitetasks002 #⌗ 𝗠𝗨𝗦𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗦 | 𝘼𝙑𝙀𝙍𝙔

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luhlust · 5 years ago

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Lost but Found a Mystic Messenger Scenario

Pairing: Zen/Hyun Ryu X Reader

Overview: You are a sheltered daughter of a wealthy man who escaped through the help of a red haired hacker.

Note: This is part 1! Enjoy :)

•-—-•

The sun's rays peek through the curtains of your room somehow blinding you in your sleep. You let out a few grunts, annoyed at the sudden disturbance that forced you to sit up in disdain. Mornings are something you are and most definitely will never be fond of. Waking up felt like a chore especially during those days were all your body long for is stay under the comforts of the fluffy sheets on your bed.

You yawned softly, stretching your arms in the process of adjusting yourself to the brightness in the room, hearing faint sounds of footsteps walking pass your bedroom door—you wonder what time is it. Your head turned towards your clock that read 7:15 AM and the date, Saturday.

Just one glance, that is all it took for you to bolt out of your room getting rid off any traces of drowsiness in an instant. "God..," you blurted out upon being greeted by the large steps of stairs that you hate greatly. Without wasting another second, you hurriedly step down from several flights with your nightgown held up by your hands to prevent any unwanted accidents.

"Pardon me!" You yelled out, alarming different people along the long hallways in the mansion you call as your home. Exerting maximum effort, you are able to dodge both human and non-human obstacles along your way with ease, earning a surprise gasp every so often.

No one knew why the lady of the house is running at full speed barefooted even. You almost look like you were being chased by danger itself.

Then again, it is not an unusual scene. They brushed it off as another one of your shenanigans, all of them are used to you being a magnet for trouble where you are always finding ways to either be threatened or be the threat. Handful as a child, all those involved with you can testify with that and they cannot entirely blame you though.

You, who is being stuck inside 24/7 a mansion all the days of your life filled with servants and maids that you are not able to even converse with, it is no surprise. No matter how big of a space one is confide in, a prisoner will always feels imprisoned.

Your father is a strict man with a strict set of rules in which your life revolved around in. Everything is made to be prepared for you—schedules, outfits, and meal plans, every single thing, it is all controlled.

If you do not comply, punishment is to be expected ranging from mild ones like a time-out or being locked up, to severe and physical ones but not to the point where you are hurt. God forbid that you are ever laid hands on or to even get a strand of a hair plucked out on you! Your dad went ballistic once and fired every single employee in charged of you when you fell down from a high platform and scraped your back, leaving a small but visible scar.

Your father hired several personal bodyguard for you and a guardian whose job is to keep an eye in you. Your guardian made sure you are to follow your schedules and being productive in your studies; his punishments does not seem too bad anymore.

All the days of the week, you are stuck with her. You even got all her lines and the way she scold you in your head. You could even recite them in front of her.

The day you met her is the day you were deprived of independence.

You could not hate your father though despite the differences in the two of you. He is the one who took you in after your parents abandoned you and he had done nothing but treat you and give you the best of the best!

You know he still cares for you even under his cold demeanor. But, there is a price for everything.

You are not allowed to step foot outside the mansion no matter what reason you give unless your father is to tell you so.

This is the rule your father placed countless of measures to make sure it is not to be broken by anything. You have never even seen an door to the outside in your mansion and that is coming from someone who is in a constant look out for it.

This lead you to harbor ill feelings towards your father.

It started with fighting with him and questioning his actions.

Sure, you did experience hell but now, you can say it was all worth it.

Months of rebellion gave you the opportunity to be proud and say that your father granted to give you a day to yourself where you do not have to do anything that is tasked for you. He figured it would help increase your productivity rate and you hate to admit but it does work.

After a short discussion on the lengths of your proposal, bargaining and meeting in the middle included, he is pleased to see how you developed in subjects more specifically in languages, arts, technology, and almost anything except your charm class that bores you the most.

Your excuse? You are just not ladylike at all!

Today is one of those days where you can freely roam around the mansion with the most plain dress in your wardrobe that did not irritate you in any sort of way. Considering your situation, you always joked how maybe you are of royalty or some sort since you are practically treated like a princess with your frilly dresses and lessons teaching you good manners where slouching is even a crime!

It is not your fault that you act this way, you just cannot force yourself to be who you are not.

Your father insisted it was for the best and that was it. You would understand him more if you are aware of his intentions but he hardly says anything about it other than you should follow him, frustrating you more. His excuse became less credible as the day passed.

You could not help but hate your life, why in the world is it forbidden for you to go outside? Your adventurous soul aches in solidarity though you do acknowledge his concern for your safety after-all, he is a powerful man with different enemies and you could be a catalyst of a battle between them.

Still, with all those in consideration, it is not enough to justify on why you are to spend your life in the mansion solely. Sometime, you think that your father value his desires more than you in which you regret after you are reminded of things you are to be grateful of, dismissing the prior statement with a sigh escaping your lips.

Yes, you are blessed to be privileged in living this life but if you are to be given a choice, you rather die outside in your own adventure than to rot inside the mansion waiting for death itself to take you.

"Still in your nightgown and even barefooted, if it isn't one of your so-called 'me days,' I would give you several lectures for today, Lady (y/n)." You rolled your eyes at the sight of your guardian prepping your breakfast. She turned her back, slicing some fruit you hardly recognize. A grin slowly took place on your lips as you stuck out your tongue at her, unaware that your reflection can be seen through the silverware.

"I saw that." Your guardian scolded, you puffed out your cheeks and crossed your arms. Well, that backfired. "Of course she did." You uttered to yourself, maybe your theory that your guardian has an third eye on her back is true since she is very aware of what you are doing even when her back is turned.

You grimaced at the monstrous green drink that she blended out for you. Your motto in life: anything that is green is not to be trusted with in terms of flavor! Your guardian seemed to have read your mind, pushing the glass and the bowl of low-fat cereal mixed with different fruit, saying, "Eat everything up. Do not even try to outsmart me."

Defeated, you are do as you told and prayed to all the gods you know before chugging down the poisonous green drink. You immediately tried to wash away the after taste with cold water, making a mental note to mess with her before the day ends.

Your guardian have left you alone, much to your relief, she is off to supervise the other worker. You do not really care what she is or who she is as long as she is out of your sight.

Out of sight, out of mind, you continued to eat your flavour-less breakfast, mind in the state of daydreaming and excitement at the day ahead.

After filling yourself up, you cautiously walked around the mansion.

You know your father is a secretive person, you do not actually have other information about him other than he is rich and he has adopted you.

That being said, the mansion has it fair share of secrets too and being the nosy person you are, you may or may not have find a blueprint of the mansion and is knowledgeable about a secret passageway to the outside.

It has been already been a month and you actually have not discover a single clue on where the passageway is located! The secret passageway really lives up to its name.

You cannot rule out the possibility that it is not the updated version of the mansion and renovations may have been done but giving up is not an option for you.There is nothing better to do anyways, you are glad to be having your fun in your own adventure. Its either this or nothing.

“I don’t think I have been in this part of the mansion before, wait, where exactly am I?!” You brought out your sketch in which you have a copy of the blueprint drawn by yourself beforehand as bringing the blueprint will surely attract attention and that is something you would like to avoid for the rest of your life.

You are definitely skilled in arts, it piqued your interest as you believe it brings out the best in you, a you that you never really knew you had.

A you, in which can only be expressed through the stroke of your brush. You used to paint all day in the indoor garden, different colors stained not only the canvas but the painter itself, ruining several dresses that made your guardian does not approve of your leisure activity.

“Why did I draw this so poorly!” You complained upon being confused of your sketch. Looking around, trying to see if there is anything that would stand out and would somehow make you remember in which part of the mansion you are in.

After analyzing for a good 5 minutes, you can confirm that you are lost as everything looks foreign to you.

Throwing the piece of paper on the ground out of annoyance, you did your best to calm yourself down. “I should retrace my steps, that will help right?” You talked to yourself, it is a habit that a has grown on you since you do not really have anyone to converse with at the first place—the maids and servants are all too boring and too scared to talk to you.

You turned around, only to see a shadow lurking at the end that quickly vanish as soon as your eyes set on it. All the hair in your body felt like standing up, anxiety creep in your heart and mind, “What was that?” You stood frozen, not sure, if your mind is playing tricks or you.

You slowly approached the corner, mind disarrayed with questions. Was it a ghost? Is the mansion haunted as well? Or is it an intruder?

Whatever it may be, you are scared shit-less. Now, you are someone who is taught that cursing, in any form, is unpleasant. "Triple fucking shit," but that does not mean you do not curse.

Your breath stilled, it was empty, the halls are empty; not a single object in sight. Letting out a nervous chuckle, you settled with seeing something out of the creativity of your mind. Surely it is impossible for an intruder to get inside, you cannot even go out.

Ghosts are another story though.

“Lady (y/n)! Your father is looking for you!” You screeched, surprised to see one of the maids behind you, panting heavily which you somehow feel guilty for. “A-Ah yes! I’m sorry, I got lost and I-” You took another look at where you saw the shadowed figure is, the maid followed the trail of your eyes, confused on why you looked like you saw something you should not have.

“Lady (y/n)? Your father said it is an emergency.” You snapped out of your gaze, smiling sheepishly before following the maid who is escorting you to your father. “Wait, father..?” What does your father want with you? Your guardian did not really say anything about meeting him today, or did she? You racked your mind with possible reasons on what the agenda today might be. “Don’t tell me...he found out about the blueprint?” Your face paled, breath hitching at the opening of the door.

You definitely screwed up.

“Sir, I have brought Lady (y/n).” The two of you bowed out of respect for your father who merely nodded, taking this as a hint for the maid to excuse herself out, leaving the two of you alone in silence.

“You requested my presence, father?” You questioned, taking a seat situated in front of his desk. "Yes, I am truly sorry for ruining your scheduled break my child but something important came up, please do understand," he brought out a folder with files clipped inside, placing them on his wooden desk.

“What is this father?” You grabbed the files, skimming through the pages. It was a bio-data of a CEO, perhaps your father’s new business partner?

“As you might have guess, that is the company’s newest thresholder. Today is the contract signing and they asked for you to be there as well.” Your ears perked up, eyes blinking in disbelief over realizing what your father is implying.

“Are you telling me, you're taking me outside?” You asked for confirmation, your father could not help but find your reaction humorous. Your eyes were similar to a deer caught in headlights; only you are excited to see the headlights. Your father pressed the buzzer, speaking over the microphone connected to the speakers of the mansion, “All (y/n)'s personal maids are to be called and to aid in helping (y/n) get ready for a special meeting in an hour. Good day.”

The door swung open, your guardian immediately dragged you out of the room and sent you straight to have a proper bath. As soon as your father was no longer in sight, your guardian began to remind you about your lectures about basic etiquette in which you let it pass through one ear and out to the other. “I'm going outside,” you softly spoke, your guardian sighed seeing how you were completely out of it but that did not stop her from letting out a small smile that was immediately replaced with a scowl.

“Lady (y/n) we do not have time to daydream! Strip!”

“W-Wai-No! Stop!”

#mystic messenger #mystic messenger scenario #luciel #saeyoung choi #saeran choi #jumin han #jaehee kang #yoosung kim #hyun ryu #zen #zen x reader #v #jihyun kim #hyun ryu x reader

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blackypanther9 · 4 years ago

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Part 17 - New...

Your POV....

I lived in Freiberg for 2 months. After that I traveled around a little. I saw almost everything of Germany. I like it there. I can speak the language too and I had money. Much. I ended up in Merseburg in Saxony - Anhalt. It was cool and I never wanted to move away again. I had a flat and was happy. But I was also in Haiti...actually right after I left Freiberg. I found a cave and a friend. He was some kind of sorcerer and blocked the only way in and out, with a symbol... I will explain to you now what happened...

Thanos will find me, if walk around in the open. I knew that. I can be safe 4 months, then I need to hide good. I was invisible in Asgard and Jotunheim for some reason. I was safe. This cave...was the best hiding spot.

The sorcerer assured me of that. He even made a marking on the stone, which blocked the entrance and escape. It had the helmet of Loki on it, but nobody can see that symbol. It's Magic. Just if I want to be found, it shows up. I love Magic.

Anyway. Then I said again, that I was in Merseburg. I was. Here is the tricky thing... I am still in the cave, but also on another place. I will never leave the cave, ever. I can transform, thanks to meditation, my soul into a body of another being. I knew someone from here, she sadly died long ago. I talked once with her about these problems, and she said, if she dies...I can use her body as my host... I know it sounds cruel and all, that I use her body now...but I don't have other options. My old and actual looks are too fucking obvious, I had to do it. My soul is in that body of my dead friend and my real body meditates and is in a freezer. My old body doesn't need to rot away. In the freezer and in my Jotun Form, I would need thousands of years to have one rotting spot. I am safe. Just so you know. That also means I look very different...well actually not....

My hair is more short, like hair of a boy...The vertex was more left than in the middle. So the hair was right, the front, longer and more oblique than left... It was black (Or your favorite colour !), the skin had more color (Or less color !) and the voice was a little, A LITTLE different. Not completely different, just a little higher, but the difference was almost not to hear... The rest was looking like me. Same high, wight, eyecolor and the clothes I wear so dearly... did fit on this body too. I bought a TON of Midgardian clothes, faked my papers and acted like everyone else here to fit in this Realm. Well... 1 year and 6 months had passed... And there was still no sight of Loki... He probably died. I gave up hoping, of his return. He is probably dead now... But I didn't want to go back to Asgard too. After 6 more months passed... I was about to pack, one night, my things up. I think it was 2 weeks after the celebration of the second year here. I did not want to return to Asgard again, but I had to. Loki is dead. The others argued with me in my head, but I made up my mind and was ready to go. Suddenly the doorbell rang at my door...

"Coming ! Just a second !", I called.

I closed my bag and then I ran to the door. I looked through the spy and saw a weird man on my door. Then I remembered who he is ! He is in the TV ! I learned fast how to use what, believe me... I was a fast learner. Once showed, forever in mind. Ha ! That guy on my door was the playboy Tony Stark. What was he doing here ? I slowly opened the door and looked at him confused.

"With what do I have the honor to have you on my door, Sir Stark ?"

He turned to me and smiled a little.

"Hello. You are Lucie Anster...right ?", he asked.

"Yes. That's me...Why ?"

I really had this fake idendity...

"S.H.I.E.L.D. is offering you a job with us. You are good at chemistry and electrics...right ?", he asked me.

"Yes...?"

I am honest...I lived in another Universe on Earth...pretty often and well....I can a lot....I am a devilish genius ... at least most of the time...

"Well...you can fight ?", he asked me.

I looked around a little nervous. I opened the door a little more and gestured for him to come in.

"Please come in...I don't think anyone needs to know about what we talk here..."

He nodded and stepped inside the house.

"Thank you.", he said.

"No problem... Follow me, I will bring you to the living room."

We arrived at the living room and I went in the kitchen.

"Take a seat on the sofa. Do you want some coffee or water ?", I asked him.

"A cup of coffee doesn't sound bad... Thank you."

I made myself a cup of tea and Tony a cup of coffee. I took the milk and sugar out of the shelves and brought them to the table in the living room. After that, I brought his coffee and my tea inside. I placed the coffee infront of him on the table and then went around the sofa to sit on one of my chairs and placed my cup of tea infront of me on the table.

"Thank you again, Lucie.", he said.

"No problem...", I answered, while I put a few pieces sugar in my tea.

After 5 minutes of silence, I broke it.

"So...about what else do you ask me ? Yes I can fight. Yes I am a genius in chemistry and electrics, at least most of the times. Why is it so important that you know that ? Not to be rude..."

"It wasn't rude. I understand it. I need to know also if you are good in mythology..."

"Well....about some things I know much things, but not about everything in myth..."

He nodded. He slowly took a sip of his coffee, he stared at me surprised after he took a sip of it. He put the cup down.

"Wow... This coffee tastes really good ! Better then my own ! What is your secret ?", he said amazed.

"I won't tell."

He sighed and looked down.

"Damn..."

"Maybe I will tell you sometime.", I winked at him.

"Cool !"

"So...back to business... Why do you ask all this ?"

"Well...we met two strange guys...from As....As....Ard ?"

"......Asgard....?"

"Yes ! That's it ! Well since two days...someone stole the Tesseract, kidnapped Clint Barton and a few scientists..., killed in these 2 days 80 people and has a weird Scepter...."

I looked at him in shock and confusion.

"The one who killed and all, calls himself....Loki.... and someone called Thor was after this guy too and the Tesseract...."

"Wow...."

"Do you ever heard of these two ? In myth I mean."

"I did. Quiet a lot..."

"Do you mind helping us with this case ?"

"Do you have any papers or something about Loki ?"

He nodded and shoved to me a fact file. I opened it and saw a picture of Loki. I closed it quickly again and gave it back to him.

"I pack my things and we can go !"

"You accept ? What do you want in return ?"

"Nothing. For now at least."

"So...That guy is really Loki ? The God of Mischief and Lies ?"

"100%. It is the Loki."

He nodded again and I ran into my room, packed the rest of my things and then I ran back. With all my things. I just had one problem...I had a cat...A real one, named Luna... He saw her and me with worry in my eyes.

"I guess animals can't be taken there ?", I asked.

"Oh... If it is a good cat...it can come too."

I smiled at him.

"Thank you."

"Don't worry about it....But I can pet it sometimes, right ?"

"If it isn't too scared of you...Why not ?"

She meowed at me and I calmed her a little.

"How do we get there, Mister Stark ?"

"Call me just Tony. We take my jet and fly there.", he answered.

"Cool."

"Yup."

We went outside and he took from me some bags and put them in the luggage space. I took my cat with me on the seat and stroked her the whole flight. She didn't lose hair. Her hair was always on her and no matter what you tried...it doesn't get off of her body.

Tony was amazed, as I told him that and he quickly came behind my secret...I experimented on something like that...I had some little mice and tried it out. Until I did it right. I gave my cat a little of that into her food and since then, she doesn't lose hair anymore. 20 minutes later we arrived there and Tony told me, that they had captured Loki and he was in a glass - kind - prison.

Why would he start havoc ? What had Thanos done to him ? This bastard ! We immediately went into the office of the Director...Fury, Tony said, was his name. After we arrived there I saw Thor immediately. I clenched my fists.

"- He is my brother."

"He killed 80 people in 2 days.", the red haired woman said...Natasha....or better Black Widow....

Thor hesitated.

"He is adopted."

"Director Fury... I brought Miss Lucie Anster. She accepted the job almost immediately.", Tony interrupted.

Someone with blond hair stood up and streched out his hand for me to shake.

"It's nice to meet you, my name is Steve Rogers. I am Captain America.", he said.

I took his hand and shook it.

"Nice to meet you too."

Then Thor was on it. He opened his mouth but I shushed him.

"You are from Asgard. Thor the God of Thunder. I know you already."

He smiled at me and I a little back.

"Ah...Miss Anster...It is great that you could join us and help us with this case.", the man with a covered eye said....I guess this is Fury.

"It's a pleasure that I can help here.", I responded.

"We have questions about this....Loki....", Fury said.

"I know a lot about him. Even more than the others who study mythology. What should I tell you ?"

"Is Loki Odin's brother ?", Fury asked.

I laughed.

"Hahaha ! They all say that ! No. He isn't. He is the adoptive brother of Thor. Loki is Jotun. The Jotuns are Frost Giants. If you get touched by them, you get a mean frostbite."

Now it comes !!

"Then how could we touch him ?", Tony asked and Steve nodded.

"Well...that is complicated. Odin took him and I guess he put on Loki a magic spell. So that his powers of a Jotun are hidden and in his Asgardian form they won't work."

"Ah...", Steve said.

"Loki is a troublemaker. Not just because of his title. He was someone who got a pretty difficult life...I don't know. At least myth says it."

"He really is a troublemaker.", Thor agreed and chuckled.

"Where is Loki ? I need to see him.", I said.

The others looked at each other.

"Are you sure ?", Thor asked me worried.

"Yes. I need more details... They all say he looks like slenderman in some way.",

Well...in school in other Universes they did....The others laughed.

"Follow me kid. But please...be careful and don't push any buttons.", Tony said.

"Okay."

"Meow !"

I got startled. I turned around and saw my cat walk after us. I smiled softly at her.

"What is actually its name ?", Tony asked.

I smiled.

"Her name is Luna."

"Oh, a girl. She is very sweet.", Tony complimented.

"Thank you."

My cat followed us the whole time. We stopped at a door and Tony gave me the keys.

"Your cat can go in too. Just watch out. The key is for just this door here."

Tony tapped at the door. I nodded, smiled at him and then unlocked the door. I went in and held the door open, to look at Luna again. I clicked my tongue. She looked up at me.

"Do you want to join me, sweety ?", I asked her lovely.

She started to purr and walked in too. She cuddled with my leg after that.

"Good girl.", I said and stroked her.

"She truly is. How did you do this ?How did you raise her to be like that ?", Tony asked.

I smiled at him.

"Much love.", was my only answer.

He smiled and walked away, I closed the door and then turned around to see Loki. He had a little longer hair. They were no longer smoothed out... They were now more free and... the hair tips stand off like small spikes. Nice. He stared daggers into my eyes...that's new... And his eyes....WAIT !! ARE THEY BLUE ?! WEREN'T THEY GREEN ?! THAT BASTARD !! I need to look later what this means for me...

"Loki...Nice to meet you.", I said.

I will have my fun anyways.

"Don't you dare to talk to me, pathetic mortal !", Loki said with venom in his voice to me.

"Wow... You really became an asshole...", I said.

"How dare you !"

"I dare what I want you idiotic, pathetic, foolish Dumbass !"

Loki shuts his mouth, in anger and clenched his fists. I came very close to his glass and whispered....

"Because, you once told me...if you act like an ass towards me, I can call you whatever I want. Mischief - boy."

His eyes furowed.

"She is on Asgard, you don't look like her."

"And still, I know all the nicknames she gave you. Mischief - boy, Loks, Lo, Trickster, Prankster and Frosty. Correct ?"

He stared at me in his eyes pure anger.

"You are not her."

I chuckled.

"We will see, Loki....Laufeyson."

His eyes widened and I turned around and went for the door. I stopped at it, before opening.

"I will find a way...to heal you. I know he did this. You should have listened to me, where you still had a choice... Now you will need to fear, to run your whole life away from him. I hope you are proud of your mistake.", I said.

"Come Luna. Say Goodbye to Mister Frosty and Mischief, and we go.", I told my cat.

She walked to the glass as close as she could. She put her forepaws on it and looked at him, he looked back down at her.

"Meow !"

And with that she was again on all her fours and came to me. He looked at me and the cat a little confused.

"Oh ! Your Magic probably doesn't work... She said...'Until next time, Frosty.'", I told him.

He nodded.

"If you like...I bring next time some books with me and you can at least read something. Deal ?", I asked him.

"Deal.", he responded.

I smiled, opened the door, walked out with Luna, closed the door and locked it again. I went down to the office again and saw just Fury.

"Director Fury, Sir ?", I asked.

He turned to face me .

"Yes ?"

"Where is Tony ?"

"He is in the lab with Dr. Bruce Banner.", he answered.

"Thank you.", I said smiling at him.

I turned on my heel and went to the lab. Tony told me exactly where it was.

Part 18

Masterlist with all Chapters of this Story click here !

#Thor #Marvel #Loki Odinson #Loki Laufeyson #Loki x Reader

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1800gotspook · 5 years ago

Text

The Death of a Millionaire

Summary: "If you were to ask Amity's teens about the house, most will tell you it's haunted. You will hear a hundred stories, a tangle of rumors about who lived there." A young resident of Amity park digs into Urban Legends and discovers the greatest mystery surrounding the town.

For the DannyMay2020 prompt “horror” although it’s probably more “creepypasta” esque.

[Read on AO3]

If you drive south down Grimme Road you'll eventually reach the end of the street. Past the City Hall, past Casper High, past the power plant. At the end of the road, turn left and keep driving. You will eventually find a road that borders the woods. Follow that road. It slowly becomes less and less structured, lacking maintenance. Cracked by the roots of trees. Littered with potholes and chunks of concrete. Any street lights left are no longer powered by the city. You will regret if you came at dark.

Driving far enough down that battered road, the trees will thin out. Ahead on the right you will find a wide open property. A tall, intricate, wrought iron fence circling a vast, overgrown yard. Rolling hills of what was probably once lush green grass, now covered in unkempt bushes and weeds, stretching over a brick driveway, even more crumbled than the road you entered on. Weeds and vines peeking up through the cracks. No sign of human intervention in at least thirty years.

Keeping you from trespassing is nothing more than a pointy steel gate. Large enough for vehicles to pass through. The chains holding it shut are probably easy to pull apart. Break the rusty links and force the long-dormant hinges to whine. But you have no interest stepping on this property.

Looking up the drive, you can see the stone path just barely through the weeds. Winding up and around the land to reach its focal point: the house. You could even call it a mansion. Elegant brick laid outside. Once expensive drapery, now bleached a sickly yellow by the sun, sits in the windows. Even the front door, although dusty and rotted, exhibits an air of refinement.

If you were to ask Amity's teens about the house, most will tell you it's haunted. You will hear a hundred stories, a tangle of rumors about who lived there. No matter how peculiar, entertaining, or sensible the stories become, they never quite answer my question:

Why would a person like this, with so much class and so much money, choose to live in Amity Park?

During my research into Amity Park records, I discovered that the house actually belonged to a once renowned millionaire by the name of Vlad Masters. For most of his adult life, he resided in an even larger home. Not just a mansion, but a castle, you could say. This original home was in Madison, Wisconsin. In 2006,he suddenly decided to move to Amity Park, shortly after his election as mayor. That's right. A completely unrelated millionaire from Wisconsin, despite never stepping foot in Amity Park, was elected mayor. This brings up some questionable thoughts, doesn't it? Was he really, legitimately elected?

After his election, it appears he took no real action for the betterment of Amity, except to establish a myriad of anti-ghost protection measures. Long after his death, he was discovered to be involved in many scandals. All the more proving that his election wasn't short of the same. But how he could pull that off? That may never be known.

Investigators never uncovered his true intentions for becoming mayor. Was he just crazy? Power hungry? Was this all a part of some big plan?

The most baffling mystery, however, is what brought Masters to his death.

He lived alone. His body was only found after his several absences from mayoral duties. Nobody was able to contact him. A poor secretary found him eighteen hours later. She said he was covered in burns all up and down his body. Face barely recognizable.

Along with those injuries, scorch marks were peppered all over the study where he was. Investigators said each burn in the room showed signs of explosion on impact, as if someone had accidentally set off a batch of fireworks indoors. However, there were no signs of combustible material anywhere. No scraps or gunpowder. No ashes, no paper shavings. No chemical traces. No debris or fuel at all. The source of the explosions entirely a mystery. If Vlad Masters was attacked, the assailant's trails were expertly covered.

It must have been deliberate. Investigators were sure of that. Despite the scorch marks all over the room, his body was most prominently burned. He was clearly the target of the explosions.

Yet the burns aren't what killed him. According to autopsy reports, his heart had stopped, independent of the little fireworks. There were also no signs of Vlad Masters having previous heart conditions, yet arrhythmia was most likely the cause.

Some detectives in the papers considered the possibility that Masters was electrocuted. It could explain some of the burn marks on his body. But that fell through, as other damages to his body and room went unexplained.

Months after the electrocution theory, more information was uncovered. Because of his bodily reaction to the injuries, they were actually discovered to be chemical burns. They still couldn't figure out what exactly had burned him, as there was no sign of residue or foreign substances to be found.

Further investigation of his injuries was cut short. Curiously, the body could no longer be studied after the initial autopsy. For some reason, each time they tried, results grew more and more inconsistent than the last. Certain burns on his body from previous tests could no longer be found. Each time they tried to study his body, there was less and less to examine. It was almost like he was reverting back. Like his body was healing.

Some say that his body was completely back to a perfect condition by the end of the week. Some say that his funeral was open casket. They say if you went to the funeral, you could walk up and feel his ice cold skin. Not a sign of the burns. If you looked at his face, you could see the hint of a smirk, forever plastered there. Unable to be broken. Unable to be moved by his muscles. They no longer carried blood. No longer kept warm by a beating heart. Stuck grinning about his own mysterious fate.

They searched his house thoroughly in an attempt to uncover anything about his death. Any hint of a struggle. Signs of an ex-friendship. A piece of hate mail. Something to give them a lead. They couldn't even find evidence of an intruder in his house. Masters had security cameras surveying the yard, yet not a single one picked up another being. Not the day of the incident, nor for weeks leading up to it.

Despite all of this security, Masters only ever monitored the outside of his home. He was clearly a secretive man if he was willing to sacrifice safety for privacy.

Investigators searched for alternative entrances to his home and made a shocking discovery. A lever in the study. When pulled, the bookcase made a click, then slowly opened inward. Behind this new doorway, a staircase to the basement. With no other apparent entrances. Some old laboratory. Banged up equipment that once had various uses. Syringes and test tubes, all sterile and unused. Large contraptions with several sleek levers and buttons, never labelled. Investigators peeled the contraptions apart to discover each one empty. Core identifying structures like computer chips and motors were removed, leaving only a shell behind. Horrifyingly, some of these shells resembled guns. But they weren't quite guns. Some resembled household appliances. One looked like a high-end toaster. Its sleek exterior in porcelain white. No power cord, but a hole in the side where a charger might go.

There were also strange containment pods and large glass boxes, fit for an aquarium. They lined the walls at one end of the spacious room, also missing any identifying features.

At the other end of the room, a gaping cavern, easily twelve feet long. Lined with steel, and a few holes at the entrance. But once again, nothing could be derived but more confusion and open-ended theories.

Computer system: destroyed. File cabinet: empty. Fingerprints: besides Master's? Nonexistent.

Acidic substances littered the floor. Broken vials and common chemicals corroding away at the sleek tile. Some substances were entirely unrecognizable.

One common theory: Masters experimented with chemicals, and got carried away, getting himself killed in the process.

But I refuse to believe that after all his misdeeds there wouldn't be someone after him. Somebody to kill him. Somebody who learned the ins and outs of his mansion, and took every precaution. Someone who wanted to destroy his lab. Whatever work he was doing, it was unlikely to be for a good cause.

The police asked Amity for help. If someone knew anything about this case, they would be grateful.

Living in what was once the most haunted town, many people wondered if ghosts were involved in the incident. Local ghost experts who were old friends of Masters decided to help. After obtaining plentiful details and performing endless studies, the ghost experts concluded that spectral entities were not involved in the incident. It wasn't possible. Ghosts always announced their misdeeds. If ghosts were the cause, Amity would have known of Masters' death instantly, and exactly who was to blame. The ghost experts could not identify the unknown substances.

Is it possible that because these ghost experts knew Masters personally, that they chose to withhold information. Yes, it is a considerable theory. But still, why would a ghost target Masters specifically? Because he conducted anti-ghost measures for the city? Even so, it's no question that Vlad Master had a ghost shield on his property. It simply isn't plausible to assume a ghost could attack him that easily.

Some argue Masters' death was his own doing, whether an accident or not. Others claim the government, or a secretive organization, chose to eliminate him. Remove Amity Park from his clutches. Would the government really be involved but create such a baffling mystery? Why would the police beg the town for answers? Yet another addition to this elaborate mystery.

Angela,

Let me know how this essay reads for you. I've been studying urban legends of the town for a while now, and I compiled a lot of stuff to write this. I want to release it to the entirety of Amity (and the world) but I don't know where to post it and if it will be taken seriously. You know how much I love this kind of stuff. I trust you. So please please please do not share.

Riley

#Danny Phantom #Vlad Masters #horror #dannymay2020 #urban legend #warning: death #future au #next gen au #guess which lemon demon song this is inspired by :)

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birdlord · 5 years ago

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Every Book I Read in 2019

This was a heavier reading year for me (heavier culture-consumption year in general) partly because my partner started logging his books read, and then, of course, it’s a competition.

01 Morvern Callar; Alan Warner - One of the starkest books I’ve ever read. What is it about Scotland that breeds writers with such brutal, distant perspectives on life? Must be all the rocks.

02 21 Things You Might Not Know About the Indian Act; Bob Joseph - I haven’t had much education in Canada’s relationship to the Indigenous nations that came before it, so this opened things up for me quite a bit. The first and most fundamental awakening is to the fact that this is not a story of progress from worse to better (which is what a simplistic, grade school understanding of smallpox blankets>residential schools>reserves would tell you), in fact, the nation to nation relationship of early contact was often superior to what we have today. I wish there was more of a call to action, but apparently a sequel is on its way.

03 The Plot Against America; Philip Roth - An alternative history that in some ways mirrors our present. I did feel like I was always waiting for something to happen, but I suppose the point is that, even at the end of the world, disasters proceed incrementally.

04 Sabrina; Nick Drnaso - The blank art style and lack of contrast in the colouring of each page really reinforces the feeling of impersonal vacancy between most of the characters. I wonder how this will read in the future, as it’s very much based in today’s relationship to friends and technology.

05 Perfumes: The Guide; Luca Turn & Tania Sanchez - One of the things I like to do when I need to turn my brain off online is reading perfume reviews. That’s where I found out about this book, which runs through different scent families and reviews specific well-known perfumes. Every topic has its boffins, and these two are particularly witty and readable.

06 Adventures in the Screen Trade; William Goldman - Reading this made me realize how little of the cinema of the 1970s I’ve actually seen, beyond the usual heavy hitters. Ultimately I found this pretty thin, a few peices of advice stitched together with anecdotes about a Hollywood that is barely recognizable today.

07 The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton - A love triangle in which the fulcrum is a terribly irritating person, someone who thinks himself far more outré than he is. Nonetheless, I was taken in by this story of “rebellion”, such as it was, to be compelling.

08 Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis; Sam Anderson - Like a novel that follows various separate characters, this book switches between tales of the founding of Oklahoma City with basketball facts and encounters with various oddball city residents. It’s certainly a fun ride, but you may find, as I did, that some parts of the narrative interest you more than others. Longest subtitle ever?

09 World of Yesterday; Stefan Zweig - A memoir of pre-war Austria and its artistic communities, told by one of its best-known exports. Particularly wrenching with regards to the buildup to WWII, from the perspective of those who had been through this experience before, so recently.

10 Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing; Tim Parks - A writer finds himself plagued by pain that conventional doctors aren’t able to cure, so he heads further afield to see if he can use stillness-of-mind to ease the pain, all the while complaining as you would expect a sceptic to do. His digressions into literature were a bit hard to take (I’m sure you’re not Coleridge, my man).

11 The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences have Extraordinary Impact; Chip & Dan Heath - I read this for work-related reasons, with the intention of improving my ability to make exhibitions and interpretation. It has a certain sort of self-helpish structure, with anecdotes starting each chapter and a simple lesson drawn from each one. Not a bad read if you work in a public-facing capacity.

12 Against Everything: Essays; Mark Greif - The founder of N+1 collects a disparate selection of essays, written over a period of several years. You won’t love them all, but hey, you can always skip those ones!

13 See What I Have Done; Sarah Schmidt - A retelling of the Lizzie Borden story, which I’d seen a lot of good reviews for. Sadly this didn’t measure up, for me. There’s a lot of stage setting (rotting food plays an important part) but there’s not a lot of substance there.

14 Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy; Angela Garber - This is another one that came to me very highly recommended. Garber seems to think these topics are not as well-covered as they are, but she does a good job researching and retelling tales of pregnancy, birth, postpartum difficulties and breastfeeding.

15 Rebecca; Daphne du Maurier - This was my favourite book club book of the year. I’d always had an impression of...trashiness I guess? around du Maurier, but this is a classic thriller. Maybe the first time I’ve ever read, rather than watched, a thriller! That’s on me.

16 O’Keefe: The Life of an American Legend; Jeffrey Hogrefe - I went to New Mexico for the first time this spring, and a colleague lent me this Georgia O’Keefe biography after I returned. I hadn’t known much about her personal life before this, aside from what I learned at her museum in Santa Fe. The author has made the decision that much of O’Keefe’s life was determined by childhood incest, but doesn’t have what you might call….evidence?

17 A Lost Lady; Willa Cather - A turn-of-the-20th century story about an upper-class woman and her young admirer Neil. I’ve never read any other Cather, but this felt very similar to the Wharton I also read this year, which I gather isn’t typical of her.

18 The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months of Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country; Helen Russell - A British journalist moves to small-town Denmark with her husband, and although the distances are not long, there’s a considerable culture shock. Made me want to eat pastries in a BIG WAY.

19 How Not to be a Boy; Robert Webb - The title gives a clue to the framing device of this book, which is fundamentally a celebrity memoir, albeit one that largely ignores the celebrity part of his life in favour of an examination of the effects of patriarchy on boys’ development as human beings.

20 The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will be Glad that You Did); Philippa Perry; A psychotherapist’s take on how parents’ own upbringing affects the way they interact with their own kids.

21 The Library Book; Susan Orlean - This book has stuck with me more than I imagined that it would. It covers both the history of libraries in the USA, and the story of the arson of the LA Public Library’s central branch in 1986.

22 We Are Never Meeting in Real Life; Samantha Irby - I’ve been reading Irby’s blog for years, and follow her on social media. So I knew the level of raunch and near body-horror to expect in this essay collection. This did fill in a lot of gaps in terms of her life, which added a lot more blackness (hey) to the humour.

23 State of Wonder; Ann Patchett - A semi-riff on Heart of Darkness involving an OB/GYN who now works for a pharmaceutical company, heading to the jungle to retrieve another researcher who has gone all Colonel Kurtz on them. I found it a bit unsatisfying, but the descriptions were, admittedly, great.

24 Disappearing Earth; Julia Phillips - A story of an abduction of two girls in very remote Russia, each chapter told by another townsperson. The connections between the narrators of each chapter are sometimes obvious, but not always. Ending a little tidy, but plays against expectations for a book like this.

25 Ethan Frome; Edith Wharton - I gather this is a typical high school read, but I’d never got to it. In case you’re in the same boat as me, it’s a short, mildly melodramatic romantic tragedy set in the new england winter. It lacks the focus on class that other Whartons have, but certainly keeps the same strong sense that once you’ve made a choice, you’re stuck with it. FOREVER.

26 Educated; Tara Westover - This memoir of a Mormon fundamentalist-turned-Academic-superstar was huge on everyone’s reading lists a couple of years back, and I finally got to it. It felt similar to me in some ways to the Glass Castle, in terms of the nearly-unbelievable amounts of hell she and her family go through at the hands of her father and his Big Ideas. I found that it lacked real contemplation of the culture shock of moving from the rural mountain west to, say, Cambridge.

27 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of Lusitania; Erik Larson - I’m a sucker for a story of a passenger liner, any non-Titanic passenger liner, really. Plus Lusitania’s story has interesting resonances for the US entry into WWI, and we see the perspective of the U-boat captain as well as people on land, and Lusitania’s own passengers and crew.

28 The Birds and Other Stories; Daphne du Maurier - The title story is the one that stuck in my head most strongly, which isn’t any surprise. I found it much more harrowing than the film, it had a really effective sense of gradually increasing dread and inevitability.

29 Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Faded Glory; Raphael Bob-Waksberg - Hit or miss in the usual way of short story collections, this book has a real debt to George Saunders.

30 Sex & Rage; Eve Babitz - a sort of pseudo-autobiography of an indolent life in the LA scene of the 1970s. It was sometimes very difficult to see how the protagonist actually felt about anything, which is a frequent, acute symptom of youth.

31 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party; Graham Greene - Gotta love a book with an alternate title built in. This is a broad (the characters? are, without exception, insane?!) satire about a world I know little about. I don’t have a lot of patience or interest in Greene’s religious allegories, but it’s a fine enough story.

32 Lathe of Heaven; Ursula K LeGuin - Near-future sci-fi that is incredibly prescient about the effects of climate change for a book written over forty years ago. The book has amazing world-building, and the first half has the whirlwind feel of Homer going back in time, killing butterflies and returning to the present to see what changes he has wrought.

33 The Grammarians; Cathleen Schine - Rarely have I read a book whose jacket description of the plot seems so very distant from what actually happens therein.

34 The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network; Katharine Losse - Losse was one of Facebook’s very earliest employees, and she charts her experience with the company in this memoir from 2012. Do you even recall what Facebook was like in 2012? They hadn’t even altered the results of elections yet! Zuck was a mere MULTI-MILLIONAIRE, probably. Were we ever so young?

35 Invisible Women; Caroline Ciado Perez - If you want to read a book that will make you angry, so angry that you repeatedly assail whoever is around with facts taken from it, then this, my friend, is the book for you.

36 The Hidden World of the Fox; Adele Brand - A really charming look at the fox from an ecologist who has studied them around the world. Much of it takes place in the UK, where urban foxes take on a similar ecological niche that raccoons famously do where I live, in Toronto.

37 S; Doug Dorst & JJ Abrams - This is a real mindfuck of a book, consisting of a faux-old novel, with marginalia added by two students which follows its own narrative. A difficult read not because of the density of prose, but the sheer logistics involved: read the page, then the marginalia? Read the marginalia interspersed with the novel text? Go back chapter by chapter? I’m not sure that either story was worth the trouble, in the end.

38 American War; Omar El Akkad - This is not exclusively, but partially a climate-based speculative novel, or, grossly, cli-fi for short. Ugh, what a term! But this book is a really tight, and realistic look at the results of a fossil-fuels-based second US Civil War.

39 Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation; Andrew Marantz - This is the guy you’ll hear on every NPR story talking about his semi-embedding within the Extremely Online alt-right. Most of the figures he profiles come off basically how you’d expect, I found his conclusions about the ways these groups have chosen to use online media tools to achieve their ends the most illuminating part.

40 Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm; Isabella Tree - This is the story of a long process of transitioning a rural acreage (more of an estate than a farm, this is aristocratic shit) from intensive agriculture to something closer to wild land. There are long passages where Tree (ahem) simply lists species which have come back, which I’m sure is fascinating if you are from the area, but I tended to glaze over a bit. Experts from around the UK and other European nations weigh in on how best to rewild the space, which places the project in a wider context.

FICTON: 17 NONFICTION: 23

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victorluvsalice · 4 years ago

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AU Thursday: Tell Me Where To Find Shelter -- Layers of Victor

Saw this meme going around the #fallout4 tag a while back (I believe I specifically ganked it from @radbeetle), and thought it might be fun to do for my Sole Survivor!Victor. And my Malkavian!Alice, but let’s start with SS!Victor. XD

LAYER ONE: THE OUTSIDE

- Name: Victor Fitzwilliam Van Dort

- Eye Color: Very dark brown – it can be very hard to tell the difference between pupil and iris!

- Hair Style/Color: Black, generally combed back with two "tufts" of bangs falling over what little forehead he has

- Height: Six feet three inches (and thin as a rail)

- Clothing style: Relatively formal pre-War – he grew up in a household that impressed upon him that you wore ties and suits whenever you were in public, and often even in private. Post-War, he spends a lot of time switching between a pair of upgraded Vault suits from Vault 111 while looking for clothes that actually fit his lanky frame. He's a lot more casual in his style once he does – though he still likes a good sweater vest, and he keeps a few suits if he needs to look fancy.

- Best physical feature: Victor would personally say his hands – he's a pianist and a tinkerer, and he appreciates his long reach over a keyboard, along with his ability to finely handle delicate parts when upgrading or repairing things!

LAYER TWO: THE INSIDE

- Fears: Total darkness (as in you can't see ANYTHING – as long as there's some sort of light source, he can manage); blindness (related to previous); small enclosed spaces (being locked in a cryonic pod will do that to a guy); losing those he cares about again (he – has a lot of trauma from seeing Victoria shot, Shaun kidnapped, then trying to open Emily's pod after he finally got out, only to see her corpse half-rotted inside)

- Guilty pleasure: Pre-War, it would have been comics – he was always a little embarrassed about how much he continued to like the adventures of Grognak and the Unstoppables and whatnot after his teenage years (not helped by his mother sneering at the stories). Post-War, though, he ditches the "guilty" part – especially after meeting Kent Connolly and getting to play Silver Shroud. XD I'm not sure he has one post-War – he occasionally feels weird about how much he enjoys modifying his weapons and armor? But that's quite practical as well as pleasurable, so. . .

- Biggest pet peeve: Being rapidly promoted in organizations that he's only just joined (Preston, you're easily one of his best friends, but SERIOUSLY, dude, GENERAL?)

- Ambitions for the future: To continue keeping his little portion of the Commonwealth safe, and start training up someone with some more Charisma to be the General of the Minutemen once he retires (he's still not sure why people follow him when he's so socially awkward)

LAYER THREE: THOUGHTS

- First thoughts waking up: Depends on what wakes him up. If he's waking up on his own, it's generally a variation on "Breakfast? Where breakfast?" If someone else wakes him up, it's generally "Why are you shaking/licking me, I don't wanna get up yet." And if it's combat nearby, it's generally "SHIT WHERE'S MY GUN oh wait are they shooting at me still should find gun."

- What they think about most: All his various responsibilities – finding his son, acting as General of the Minutemen, working with the Railroad, helping the people on the settlements, wondering what the hell is going to happen between him and the Brotherhood of Steel, or him and the Institute. . .it doesn't do much for his anxiety, is what I'm saying.

- What they think about before bed: If he's not exhausted enough just to collapse onto the nearest sleeping surface, then probably what I mentioned above. He's probably up late trying to plan routes to help settlements that have called for assistance and follow leads on the Institute and whatnot.

- What they think their best quality is: Victor would consider it his willingness to be helpful whenever possible. He generally enjoys helping people, and it makes him feel better in general to help improve the Commonwealth in some small way. (Not to mention, him helping out personally with the problems of a lot of the families/communities in the Commonwealth has earned him a lot of friends for his Minutemen! A General so hands-on seems to impress people.)

LAYER FOUR: WHAT’S BETTER?

- Single or group dates: . . .this gets a little harder to answer when he was in a polyamorous relationship pre-War, you know. XD But yeah, Victor prefers one-on-one, or one-on-two in the case of Victoria and Emily. A group date puts the pressure on him to perform like the perfect boyfriend/husband, and he doesn't need the extra stress. Maybe he'd be okay with a double date if it was with some very close friends.

- To be loved or respected: Victor would rather be loved, or at least liked – though part of that is low self-esteem telling him people aren't going to respect him. (Or like him, for that matter.) It's what informs his desire to help people, at least in part.

- Beauty or brains: While Victor isn't immune to a nice face or body, he really likes having someone he can talk to about stuff. Sharing interests is fun, and he appreciates someone who will at least try to keep up with his nattering on about butterflies and robots and whatnot.

- Dogs or cats: Dogs! Victor gets along decently with cats, but he is first and foremost a dog person. He had a dog named Scraps when he was a child, and he, Victoria, and Emily were making plans to adopt one before the bombs fell. Meeting Dogmeat at the Red Rocket really helped pull him out of his post-War "almost everything I knew is gone and I'm a stranger in my own state" funk.

LAYER FIVE: DO THEY?

- Lie: Yup. Victor will tell the usual social "white lies" (even if he's not very good at them), and he's done bigger lies in the past – like not telling his parents that Emily was more than their "roommate." (Of course, that was done not to have a family blowout about him and his wife having a girlfriend.)

- Believe in themselves: Not usually – as stated, Victor has pretty low self-esteem, thanks mostly to growing up with a mother who was criticizing him and everything he was when she wasn't absent doing social climbing stuff. It's hard for him to think of himself as being someone who has worth, sadly. He gets better when he starts seeing more results of his actions in helping the Minutemen and the Railroad, and realizes he's genuinely making a difference for people.

- Believe in love: Yes – his relationship with Victoria and Emily was one of the high points of his pre-War life. He was utterly heartbroken when Victoria was shot, and Emily later died due to the life support to the other pods being cut off. But then later he meets Alice, and. . .well, it takes some time, but he manages to come around to loving and being loved again.

- Want someone: Pre-War, not really – he was in a happy threesome and wasn't currently looking to expand. Post-War, most of his life precludes wanting anyone – though he does develop a bit of a crush on Piper as time goes on. And then, of course, he meets Alice, and eventually ends up wanting her. . . (Yes, in-game I intend for him to romance Piper – and there's a chance in the AU he, Piper, and Alice would end up in a poly situation. We'll see where this goes!)

LAYER SIX: EVER?

- Been on stage: Pre-War, never officially – Nell had him play piano at some of her parties (which was always stressful, as he felt all her guests were either judging him or just hated him for being related to her), but that was as far as performing got. He of course had the speech he was asked to do that he was practicing the day the bombs dropped, but – well, the bombs dropped. Post-War – he probably will have to give some inspirational speeches to his Minutemen troops, which he will somehow get through and then go have a little quiet panic attack somewhere.

- Done chems/drugs: . . .I have occasionally toyed with the headcanon that Victor was unwillingly dosed with Psycho, or a drug like it, back in his Army days and has been haunted by the experience ever since. But other than that, not the hard stuff – Victor doesn't even smoke (he tried once – after nearly coughing up a lung, he refused to ever try again) and he tends not to drink (he's tried that too, and discovered he's an embarrassingly chatty drunk, so he doesn't typically indulge). He will, of course, take Rad-X and Rad-Away, because those are freaking necessary to survive in parts of the Wasteland.

- Changed who you were to fit in: Occasionally attempted, never stuck. He's not good at keeping up a facade. One of his most embarrassing memories is trying to ask a girl to dance at a party his mother dragged him to when he was about 16, imitating the more popular "jock"-kinda guys, and getting laughed at so much he retreated to the buffet for the rest of the night.

LAYER SEVEN: FAVORITES

- Favorite color: Blue

- Favorite animal: Dogs, butterflies

- Favorite movie: Victor will confess to a love for schlocky monster movies, so he was quite enamored of Night of the Fish Men's Revenge when it came out (he's quite excited when he sees it in the projector in Eden Meadows Cinema, and quite sad that he can only get it to play the title screen). He also enjoyed Another Day In the Monster Factory for much the same reasons.

- Favorite game: With his affinity for comic books and a secret love of roleplaying (which becomes not-so-secret once he starts Silver Shrouding), Grognak & The Ruby Ruins quite appeals to him. He likes that it has some replay value too, with changing up your party and whatnot. The action of Pipfall appeals to him too, though that time limit can be stressful!

LAYER EIGHT: AGE

- DOB: June 9th, 2050 (he was 27 and a few months when the bombs dropped)

- Day of their next birthday, they will be: His next birthday according to the game would be June 9th, 2088 – he'd be 238 in terms of time passed, 28 in terms of biology

- Age they lost their virginity: Twenty – Victor had been yanked by the Army into Canada to help with the Sino-American war shortly after graduating high school, but got some leave around his twentieth birthday to go home. He immediately caught back up with his high school sweethearts, Victoria and Emily, and ended up doing the deed with Victoria. They managed to keep it a secret from their conservative parents, fortunately.

- Does age matter: In general? Victor is willing to listen to advice from those older than he is, certainly – though he tends to take it with a grain of salt depending on their obvious biases. In a relationship? Unless one of the parties is a minor, Victor won't get involved, though bigger gaps will probably make him wonder what exactly they see in each other. (He allows this is hypocritical of him to a degree, as Alice is much older than him even taking into account the freezing – but on the flip side, she was Embraced at 20, he was frozen at 27. . .)

LAYER NINE: IN A BOY OR GIRL

- Best personality: Victor likes people who are sweet and kind, but have a tougher or sassier side to them as well. Victoria leaned mostly toward the "sweet" side, but was also pretty determined when it came to getting what she wanted from him; Emily was cheerful and enthusiastic, but if you angered her – wooo boy; Alice of course is snark incarnate, but is kind to people and generally likes helping others. Even Piper is one of the kinder companions, but doesn't shy away from sarcastic comments.

- Best eye color: Well, Victoria and Emily both had blue eyes (of differing shades), and Alice's green eyes were one of the first things that struck Victor about her, sooo. . .blue or green!

- Best hair color: I'm not sure Victor has a preference here – Victoria was a super-light brown, almost gray; Emily was a blonde; Alice has dark hair that looks black or brown depending on the light/how well cared for it is (and she says her hair was almost red when she was a kid!); Piper has dark brown/black hair. I guess pre-War he went for lighter; post-War he goes for darker?

- Best thing to do with a partner: Victor likes finding some sort of creative interest they can share, or at least do at the same time. He would sit in the living room and draw while Victoria embroidered in the afternoons; and he and Emily both played piano, so they'd often have little duets. With Alice, he probably ends up illustrating some of the stories she tells – maybe eventually they throw together a book of sorts, with Piper's help!

LAYER TEN: FINISH THE SENTENCE

- I love: Alice! And the rest of my friends too, of course.

- I feel: completely out of my depth, most of the time.

- I hide: how anxious all of this makes me – not sure how well I'm succeeding, but. . .

- I miss: the life I had before, in Sanctuary.

- I wish: that Victoria and Emily hadn't – that t-they were still here to meet the friends I've made.

#tell me where to find shelter #layers meme #sole survivor Victor #I did alter the wording of a question or two #to make them more comprehensible #I'm not sure what the original wording of the 'date of their next birthday you will be' was going for #but yeah I liked doing this #I'm not sure about the Psycho thing #especially since I have Victor has a field mechanic during his time in the Army #but on the other hand this is the Fallout verse #we know the government was pulling some shit #the movies I grabbed from the Fallout Wiki looking for in-universe entertainment #'Night of the Fish Men's Revenge' is one of the movies 'playing' at the theater in Far Harbor #and 'Another Day in the Monster Factory' shows up in poster form #it's apparently an inside joke for the character creators at Bethesda?#I mean I know who I thought of when I saw that #Final Pam approves?#queued

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mittensmorgul · 5 years ago

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9.06, Heaven Can't Wait.

YAY! BOBO!

so I neglected to mention Buddy Boyle and Bartholomew the fallen angel, and all the angel factions forming in the 9.03 report because I was trying to get through it as fast as possible, but ugh... guess I gotta mention them eventually. There, I mentioned them, just about as much as this episode did. :P

But this is directly relevant to Cas's current state of mind, which is relevant to the overall plot of this episode, because of Rit Zien angel and why he's come to this town where Cas has tried to make a life for himself as Sales Associate Steve. The Rit Zien seeks out pain-- originally mortal wounds on battlefields-- and either heals or else "humanely puts down" angels he cannot heal. Except, as Cas will explain in this episode, he doesn't understand human emotions, and that emotional pain is temporary... and then we learn that the Rit Zien was drawn to this town by the magnitude of Cas's suffering specifically. Which, if that's not a statement on Cas's current emotional state, I don't know what is.

The first victim we see is a man who literally hangs up on a suicide prevention hotline because he lost his wife. He even has a gun, but changes his mind when faced with the Rit Zien, but he gets exploded into pink goo anyway.

The next is a high school girl suffering a normal level of teenage angst, telling a friend she could just die of embarrassment because her boyfriend broke up with her in the cafeteria in front of everyone but in no way meaning it literally, and poof... pain disintegrated.

Despite his own pain having been kicked out of the bunker and feeling completely abandoned by Dean, Cas still calls Dean to alert him to the strange cases in town, but tells Dean he won't participate in the hunt. Dean manages to track Cas down working at the Gas N Sip anyway (Cas never told him where he worked), and pulls Cas into working the case with him.

There's the whole Nora thing, which Cas thought was a date but was actually a babysitting job... When the Rit Zien shows up for Cas, he thinks it's for the baby, running a fever and crying. But he's actually there for Cas.

CASTIEL: How'd you find me? EPHRAIM: Because you're warded? The same way I find all my patients – I just followed the sound of your pain. You have no idea how loud it is. I could hear you for miles.

And then the question we've been waiting on an answer for ever since:

EPHRAIM: Shh-shh-shhh. It'll be over soon. I'll take the pain away. CASTIEL: I want to live. EPHRAIM: But as what, Castiel? As an angel? or a man?

Because back in s9, this question remains directly tied to PAIN. To SUFFERING.

CASTIEL (to the baby): Nobody told you. Nobody explained. You're just … shoved out kicking and screaming into this human life, without any idea why any of it feels the way it feels, or why this confusion, which feels like it's … a hair's breadth (The baby stops crying.) from terror or pain. You know, just when you think you do understand, it'll turn out you're wrong. You didn't understand anything at all. Guess that's just how it is when you're new at this.

He thought he understood, and he's only just beginning to truly understand (and I mean, Crowley as almost-human this season too, despite having been human originally long ago, still suffers with the burden of human emotions, equating what demons and angels are capable of feeling even way back here, long before 10.03 when Cas will make that same comparison).

Cas is feeling the guilt of what's happened to the angels, and he's already hurting over it. So when Sam and Kevin discover (with Crowley's help) that the angel fall spell is irreversible, Dean doesn't tell Cas that fact thinking he's protecting Cas from even worse guilt. But meanwhile, it's still a major source of Cas's pain (and Dean's pain, because hell if he doesn't want to bring Cas back to the bunker here, but can't as long as Sam isn't healed enough...)

EVERYBODY'S SUFFERING! Lies all around. Dean specifically tells Sam that he won't be seeing Cas on this hunt, and yet he spends the entire time pretty much with Cas. But also Dean, lying to everyone, trying to manage his mounting lies in the name of protecting (or in the language of 14.08, "not wanting to burden them") or just out of pure FEAR because this situation is officially so far above his pay grade and he can't even talk to ANYONE about how bad it actually is without the whole thing crumbling down around him... and that's not even considering the Fallen Angels Fighting Amongst Themselves situation on top of all his personal shit...

Which interestingly is paralleled in the experiences of young Dean in the flashbacks in the next episode...

spn 9.07, Bad Boys.

Dean's put in a situation way above his pay grade, having been left to "rot" by John after getting in trouble for shoplifting enough for him and Sam to eat while John was off somewhere else on a hunt and Dean had been left in charge again. John had demanded that Dean tell Sam a very different story, one that not only covered Dean's "shame" at having been caught shoplifting and abandoned by John for several months while Sam was "shipped off to Bobby's" (and remember, Sam would've been about 11 years old at the time, ie old enough to have understood the truth of the situation, but maybe not why John refused to get Dean from Sonny's, that to John this was a form of punishment for Dean-- both isolation from everything he's ever known AND forced separation from Sam, like John was punishing him for failing to take care of Sam by isolating him completely...), but also was about John hiding his OWN culpability in any of this happening in the first place. Child abandonment, neglect, the fact he regularly left the boys on their own and disappeared for weeks or months at a time leaving them to fend for themselves on whatever meager sum he left them. Which, I mean, YIIIIIKES.

And this episode was really the start of my "sanitized for sammy" and "the story became the story" tags, of how fundamental to their codependency these small lies have always been, since they were children (and yeah, we saw that going all the way back to s1, with 1.18, 3.08, 4.13... pretty much all the flashback episodes, but this is where Dean gave that calculated deception a name-- "the story became the story.")

We really see the extent of Dean's lifelong struggle with managing all these secrets begins to break down, which exactly parallels his "bigger story arc" issues in early s9. With all that in mind, it's no wonder he breaks and feels his ultimate failure connected with the collapse of the tower of lies that all started with the best of intentions, and just spiraled out of his control. All in the name of protecting his loved ones.

Kinda like Dean trying to keep John's horrific final words from Sam back in s2 (even though that only lasted a few episodes), kinda like Sam hiding the truth back in s4, kinda like Cas hiding the truth in s6. So now they all will have this fun little problem in common (less dumb, less ass...)

But more interesting to me than the actual circumstances of this episode specifically, is how these lies begin to slowly unravel throughout the episode, and how the truth finally coming out affects everything going forward.

First Sam begins to learn the truth about that time, but it's still not really the whole truth. Dean plays it off as his own fault, shrugging the experience off. Sam also can't figure out why Dean's not only kept in touch with Sonny all these years, but also actually told him the truth about the hunting. The deeper truth slowly comes out in bits and pieces. And then there's Robin, who Dean never told the truth to in the past who learns it all in a shocking way... seeing it first-hand.

This had been Dean's one real "escape to normalcy" of the sort that Sam had spent most of his life running away toward (and which Dean's being forced by circumstance now to push Cas toward... let's not forget that the original airing order of these episodes put 9.06 AFTER this episode... which is why I've smooshed the two of these into one way-too-long post). And let's remember that it was only Dean's need to make sure Sam was safe that got him to leave Sonny's and return to John. He talked about his interest in fixing cars in this episode, and he could've had that life if he'd chosen to stay, because Sonny agreed to fight for him if he wanted that.

But even by the end of the episode, Sam only knows part of the truth, and Dean's still trying to protect himself with that tiny shard of a lie:

Sam: You just got lucky? Kind of like you did with this place. I mean, here I was thinking this was the worst part of your life, and it turns out it was the best. Why'd you ever leave? Dean: Never felt right. Sam: Really? Dean: It was two months, Sam, okay? And I couldn't wait to get out of here. I don't know what to tell you. It wasn't me.

And he can't bring himself to burden Sam with the truth, that it was literally Sam himself and his duty to protect him that made him choose to leave.

Then there's Timmy, losing his mother in a fire, Dean thinking it's the "I Clobber Evil" action figure that the mother's ghost is tied to, when in fact it was Timmy himself. Because it's not exactly that Dean sees himself in Timmy-- repeatedly running away from foster homes, clinging to "imaginary friends" -- It's SAM. He talks to Timmy like we have to imagine 16-year-old Dean would've talked to SAM. And doesn't that just say it all here.

And using this “decoder ring” of a couple episodes to help us unravel what happens when these dudes try to protect each other, to “not burden each other” with these sorts of secrets, things almost universally go sideways. Because this is, yes, what Cas was thinking in hiding his deal with the Empty to trade himself for Jack, but it’s also the sort of smaller concerns from each other regarding Jack’s behavior after 14.14. Each of them were worried for Jack, each of them had noticed small things in Jack, but NONE of them wanted to admit the truth to themselves, let alone to each other. Each of them held their tongues, not wanting to worry each other over Jack, or unfairly burden each other for nothing when all they really have are their individual suspicions and no actual concrete evidence that Jack’s soul is actually gone, you know? But the consequences of trying to protect each other are far more grave in s14...

#spn 9.06 #spn 9.07 #winchester family dynamics #lies and damn lies #the story became the story #sam sympathizes and dean empathizes #s14 hellatus rewatch #spiders georg of the tnt loop #the scheherazade of supernatural #spn 14.08 #spn 14.14 #it's spirals all the way down

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civilians-of-nothingtown · 5 years ago

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BUCKLE IN BITCHES HERE WE GO

small lil summaries on the changes of le stories. Hopefully tumbly will let me Post

Tyler Alexeev - Works the night shift at a 24/7 Walmart. He's nocturnal. He takes care of Elias (more like keeps him in the basement). Elias talks to him, somewhat twisting his outlook on reality -- however, their relationship is complicated.

Elias ???? - A werefox that got turned into a lich. He attempted to use magic to make himself immortal, however it backfired and instead subjected him to the eternal torment of continuously rotting from the inside out. He's technically dead... However, he found Tyler, who quickly locked him up in his basement due to thinking he was dangerous -- and that's because he is.

Salem Agnelli - Freshly turned fallen angel, and fresh out of college (biomed degree). Works for Leo's company, Phantomflux Entertainment. Specializes in the chemical makeup and functions of the brain. Got recognized as a prodigy in college, and was hired by Leo. He even graduated early from college, which is why he's 18.

SR700 - He's still the same, however the technology is foreign to the public. People dislike the idea of him being on the police force, however he means no harm and wants to simply help people.

Rose ???? - One of the most decorated FBI agents on her team, however, she disappeared under suspicious circumstances for a few months and was never the same afterwards. She never talks about her experience, or who took her, although she has a strong hatred for Phantomflux Entertainment and has worked with authorities to tie them to other mysterious disappearances... However, due to the positive reputation of the company, nobody really believes her.

Zeksis - Zek's parents were part of the "mysterious disappearances" pinned on Phantomflux Entertainment, leaving him an orphan. He's pretty much the same as before, however Leo has terrorized him before over reasons unknown to Zek himself.

Rogue Milano - Exact same story, however, the regulating collar he wears is secretly controlled by Phantomflux Entertainment. They use it to gather data, unbeknownst to anyone else.

Adonis Errus - More or less the same story. Adonis was a volunteer for Phantomflux's beta testing, which left him with... Unsavory memories. These still haunt him at night.

Anxietatem - Anxietatem still resists the hive mind, but the hunger for humans is no longer an instinct. It is a glitch that acts as a crutch, since cyberdemons are inherently technology-based.

Jakkal Sibuna - The demigod who punished Elias for his attempt at immortality. Still a bouncer at Virgil's club, "Fallen Domain".

Thorn - Cyberdemon that was a result of alpha testing. She's basically an unfinished prototype. Also a bouncer at Virgil's club.

Alex - Thorn's son still. Nothing has really changed, except that he's 16 and going to school with Hamlet and everyone else.

Max [Morthraxul] - Naive young demon who fell in love with Tide, a human addicted to demon blood. Little does he know that's really the only reason Tide keeps him around.

Tide - Still the same corrupt priest. Addicted to the power demon blood gives him.

Leonard Mac Domhnaill - Child (17) CEO of Phantomflux Entertainment, which specializes in everything from revolutionary technology, to weapons, and especially virtual reality games. His parents, whom belonged to a very powerful and royal demon family, died in an accident, leaving him the company... However, their death led to a curse being passed on to him -- driving his young mind to insanity. This drove him to turn the company towards a more sinister goal... And for him to drive most of his friends away. He's after the secrets of the cyberdemons to aid his cause -- but doesn't have the technology or abilities to do so.

Reese Volkov - Student at The Conservatory, a high school that prides itself on having something for everyone while still being a prestigious institution. Reese is quiet, and nobody is sure what happened to him, except that his sister is extremely protective of him -- which is why he's so mysterious. And has no friends.

Sasha Volkov - Works as security detail for Phantomflux Entertainment.

Clark Smith - Gifted with clairvoyancy and telekinesis, she works as a therapist, surprisingly.

Karnarka - Killed in one of Phantomflux's beta tests.

Natalia & Virgil Amius - Still business partners in owning "Fallen Domain". Despite their inherent illegal practices, they hold a hatred against Phantomflux Entertainment. They know the truth behind the company and what it's done.

Vazamoth - Works at an underground hospital for supernatural beings and such. And for humans who can't afford normal hospitals.

Gabriel - Falling hard for Vazamoth. Works as a nurse at the hospital he runs.

Tenki Gyaltsen - Also killed by Phantomflux's beta tests.

Lena Metzger - Also security detail at Phantomflux.

Kaskae Tikaani - Killed by Phantomflux's beta tests.

Fen Kuang - Now dating Enid. Designs clothing.

Andreas Schmidt - In prison for trying to kill Leo, in an attempt to get revenge for Kaskae's death.

Enid - Now dating Fen. Very mysterious woman who runs a shop that sells occult items.

Njord Sangster - Quiet lumberjack who lives in the woods still. He was hired by Phantomflux to draw the cover art of their games and design product labels.

Ari Norophine - World-renowned astrophysicist. Consults for Phantomflux.

Nikolas Norophine - Police Chief. Rose and SR700's boss.

Project 56 / Mezzurith - Staying with Anxietatem after having escaped from Phantomflux. He doesn't remember much of his life besides being in captivity. The company kidnapped him in an attempt to study him, and one day, they put him through too much -- and he snapped.

Kazuhiro Maresuke - Stayed the same.

Kynelle Lawson - Stayed the same.

Tex & Rakkus - The same.

Ikra Hilton - 17, ink demon. Transferred to The Conservatory after killing someone.

Sage Fleming - Ate / drank their boyfriend dry after turning.

Remi ???? - Chaotic Lesbian. Hates authority. Can't stand school.

Hamlet, Helena, Kassandra, and Fabian are all still the same.

Arakiba - Stayed the same.

The Inner Circle actively fights against Phantomflux.

Kiel - Stayed the same.

Theo - Same, observed by Phantomflux.

Rinen - Leo's personal plaything. They hate it inside Leo's home, having to bend to his will, but Rinen was Leo's very first success in a new brain implant that lets him control minds easily. While Rinen still has their own will (because it would be no fun to have a mindless slave, in Leo's opinion), they can't resist Leo.

Zephyr - Head scientist at Phantomflux, one of Leo's most prized employees.

All other aliens stayed the same.

#okay there u go #theyre all there #every single civilian

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centaurianthropology · 6 years ago

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The Magnus Archives ‘Civilian Casualties’ (S04E05) Analysis

Well, that’s not an ominous title, now is it? Come on in to hear my thoughts about ‘Civilian Casualties’.

The statement is one a lot like ‘Grifter’s Bone’, though almost not as interesting to me. I suppose occasionally there will be one that just doesn’t play into my fears, and violent death and gore just don’t really frighten me. The vast and uncaring void? Oh, yeah. The weirdness of the Flesh? Definitely. But the Slaughter as a power just doesn’t have that effect on me. This is certainly not a knock on the story, which was fairly well-told, if a tad cliché, but it just didn’t dig into my own fears, so I’m probably not the one to say if it achieved its goal of spooking people who are spooked by such things.

So the statement itself felt fairly unremarkable for me, but there were a few points of interest regarding the happenings in this story compared to other Slaughter stories. Jon concluded that it involved a Leitner, given that there was a book clutched in the librarian’s hand with nothing but blank pages. The effects, though, feel very close to what Grifter’s Bone managed to do to people. Possibly a connection between band and book?

Whatever it is, it left Jon musing about control, which definitely feels like a developing theme. And he’s certainly right that there’s a definite degree of fear in losing all control, just as there’s a different but equally powerful fear that all his actions, no matter how horrible, are totally his own. Because blaming a monster would be easy. Hell, it might even be partly true. The Archivist’s distinction from Jon is questionable, moreso now that Jon’s given in and started calling himself by that name. But Jon still seems very much in possession of his faculties. He seems to know himself almost more now than he did before his coma. All that paranoia is stripped away, and he has to face the man he really is.

And that’s potentially terrifying, depending on what he realizes about himself.

Jon is also very much turning inward. With Martin actively avoiding him, Jon is at loose ends. He’s spent his time since last episode wandering around, apparently, and though he’s seen signs of other powers (the Darkness, the Web, and maybe even the Stranger), it’s interesting that none have actually approached him. None have attacked him. Is that an effect of the Archivist or an effect of the Lonely keeping everything at bay?

And yet somehow, through all that, Jon started drawing conclusions still. Somehow, he realized that the bullet in Melanie’s leg was what was turning her so rapidly toward the slaughter, and that it was getting worse. His plan, of course, was to enlist Basira to dig it out while Melanie had drugged herself to sleep. What’s interesting is that Jon’s idea was apparently to talk to Melanie and get her cooperation first, while it was Basira who insisted they get the bullet while she was asleep. It’s good to see Jon want to reach out to his friends, though I imagine that Basira’s greater experience with Melanie’s rapid decline informed her own approach. Apparently both she and Basira are sleeping on camp beds in the Archives, so I imagine Basira has heard and seen a lot in these six months. Martin isn’t sleeping there, though his arrangements were uncertain.

What is certain is that Jon’s powers have taken on new dimensions. When he looked at Melanie’s leg, he could see through it to the rot inside, complete with Archivist static. He could see the bullet that wasn’t there. That’s … a lot more than we’ve seen from him so far.

As, apparently, is his ability to gather knowledge. Not only did he know what happened to Melanie and even potentially how to address it, but Jon’s Beholding brain decided that a normal local anesthetic wasn’t enough. Nooo, he had to go for what sounds like a fucking femoral nerve block.

Sorry for a bit of a medical detour, but that’s HARD. Like, trained anesthesiologist hard. It’s almost always done with ultrasound because where you need to inject the femoral nerve in order to take out sensation throughout the front of the thigh and knee (my best guess is that Melanie was shot in the meat of the thigh), you need to inject high up, almost at the groin. The problem is that the nerve runs right next to (and I mean bundled in the same sheath with) the femoral artery and vein. Inject high-potency local anesthesia into one of them? They swing back around, stop your heart, and you die. This is not a low-risk procedure. And even if she was shot somewhere else? Those other nerve blocks are just as difficult, almost always performed with ultrasound, and are also very risky if not done by a highly trained professional. But Jon nailed it, literally. That’s insane. That means that he not only has knowledge, but can put that knowledge into highly specialized practice.

And he got it, right before she awoke and everything went nuts. He’s the breakdown, as far as I could hear it:

Melanie, realizing she couldn’t feel her leg, immediately freaked out and fought back. She got her hands on either the scalpel or the scissors and stabbed Jon. Basira tried to calm Melanie, while Jon apparently insisted they both leave. I actually thought it was Martin at first, coming in and dragging Jon out. I’m still not entirely certain I didn’t hear Martin during the final scuffle, but Jonny confirmed that Martin hadn’t been written into the episode, so either Alex went off book or, more likely, his credit in the episode was erroneous.

Which is really too bad, because it would have been an interesting dynamic to explore that Martin is apparently lurking and watching and had to step in. But apparently not. He either knew and didn’t step in, or simply wasn’t there. So, instead we have Melanie freaking out, Jon injured, and Basira caught in the middle. No Martin anywhere. No telling where he is.

And after that reveal on the Discord, I’m a lot less hopeful after the episode. I was really hoping that the entire Archival staff ended up together at the end, but instead we just have a mess. It’s not clear if Jon can get out, or if how much Melanie wants him dead and how much she’s just terrified and confused. The bullet is out, but Melanie is still clearly affected by the Slaughter. The infection isn’t gone, even if the nidus has been removed. That’ll take her system a lot longer to clear, and it’s liable to leave certain scars behind. I’ll be interested to see if she can improve now that the bullet’s out, or if she’s changed in certain ways for good. I’ll also be interested in her perspectives on losing herself to the Slaughter, because, if she can see him as something other than a monster needing killing, Jon could learn a lot from her experiences.

There is some glimmer of hope that things can get better with that end, but it’s only a slight glimmer. The fact that Basira could recognize that something was wrong with Melanie, and trusted Jon enough to work with him to save Melanie was encouraging. And though she talked a big talk about letting Melanie kill Jon if she woke, Basira immediately stepped in to talk her down rather than let her escalate further.

Melanie sounded less infuriated at the end, and more terrified. The thing that’s been creeping into her system for so long is gone, and the awakening was clearly brutal. She’s got a new set of instincts and abilities that are not her own, just like Jon, and just like him she must question how much of her is HER.

And I do appreciate that Jon wanted to talk to Melanie, rather than sneaking in and digging the bullet out in secret. It’s a sign that he really is trying to be a better person. And while I’m disappointed that the voice at the end saying “We have to get out of here!” which I could have sworn was Martin, was actually Jon, I’m hoping that we’ll address his situation sooner rather than later. I would love to think he’s been watching over the Archives and stepped in right at the end, but apparently no. So we’ve got three of the people in the Archives at least stumbling away from complete disaster, and the fourth still AWOL. All in all, things are still fairly bleak, with only a hint that things might get better.

Conclusions

Not a lot more to say about this one. An unremarkable statement led to a pivotal conclusion for Jon, and may have led to Melanie being saved from falling completely to the Slaughter. It’s at least some promise, but things are still pretty bleak for the Archival staff. There’s no telling how much of Melanie is left in Melanie, Jon’s been stabbed again, Basira’s caught between them, and Martin’s still AWOL. I’m hoping that we’ve started the turn toward something less unremittingly depressing with this action, but I suppose we’ll see how everything falls out next week.

#The Magnus Archives #analysis

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forbidden-celestia-lore · 5 years ago

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so what's the haunted house then

well, thank you for asking, person who was definitely not sending this ask from their work computer!

first, bit of backstory: off the tail end of some Wizard Shenanigans, we followed a rider from the Whispering way to this tiny little fishing village, which has been experiencing a bit of Bad Luck for the last few months. The mayor personally welcomed us, hiring us to figure out what the fuck is up with the local church, one of a sea god, supposedly. We (read: Thela) broke into investigated this church, found… some headless bodies, a chest that smells like fish, some freaky ass carvings, a bloody altar, slugs that posses you and make your head explode (remember this one), and a giant spell casting crab monster. Suprise! it’s a cult. We go in the next day at noon like the chumps we are and get ambushed, killing a bunch of the priest/cultists, and finding some more Loot. We tell the mayor, and he tells us that the head priest disappeared into the woods a few days ago, heading off to some mansion thing. We want our money, and we may as well finish the job, so we pack up and follow.

Got all that? Great.

So we’re heading out to this random house in the woods, right, and my idea is that the head priest is part of the Whispering Way, cause we found the rider we were following headless in the slug room (don’t ASK me how that works), and that he was going out with a bunch of local contacts or smth to do Secret Plotting. So we get there, actually we haven’t really even “gotten” there yet, as the map hadn’t even been drawn when my dad asks us for a perception check, which we all of course fail. Or we think we’ve failed, because all he tells us is that we see a ripple on the nearby lake, putting us all on edge. A fitting start!

So we’re at this house, and I don’t think we’ve ever entered through the front door in our lives, which means that we pick the wing closest to the path we came in on and sneak up to it. I’m pretty sure my dad was internally screaming (or laughing, depending) at this point, because when we got in (undetected I might add!) and kinda sorta relaxed, and Jafar sat on the fucking couch a SWARM OF TICKS POURED OUT OF THE FUCKING COUCH. TICKS. So Celestia screams (literally, I had her do that canonically, would have totally ruined our stealth had there been anyone around to care) and runs out of the room, ducks through the first doorway she sees and immediately starts changing into her cultist disguise, in case someone did hear her and is coming. Thela climbs into the air using her immovable rods, Obezyana and Krono (who were by the door) run back outside after setting Jafar, who is now covered in ticks, on fire. And then from outside they do it again. And maybe one more time I’m not sure, but fire was the only thing we had that would hurt those ticks, until Obezyana had the legit bright idea to use color spray, which stuns every critter in a certain area. My dad was gracious enough to let him warn Thela, so she wasn’t affected, but the ticks were STUNNED and we LEFT as quickly as we could.

We regrouped in the main entry hall, Celestia now in her Whispering Way garb, and decided to look at the second wing before going into the main hall. All that was in that wing was an old storage room, where a fight of some sort had taken place recently, and we found a box that used to have a statue in it (the statue had been stolen from a museum, and we’d had to prove it wasn’t the beast Simon who stole it, but the Whispering Way, so we Knew they were here). We also found a horse! Clearly the horse the Whispering Way agent had ridden, but they’d been there for a few days without food or water or anything. We fed it, watered it, and made our way to the main hall.

On the map, the house was drawn as one big circle in the middle, representing the main hall, with two rectangles coming off of it at a little more than a 90* angle. It turns out that the house was constructed this way because the main support beams for the central structure were a fucking druid circle, creepy ass alter included. We actually found a secret compartment on the Cursed Altar that had a Big seed in it, which we did Not touch. At which point and actual literal Giant came through a door on the other side of the hall and asked us what we were doing. I, being the diplomat of the group, told everyone to shut up and pretended I was supposed to be there, can’t you see I’m part of your cult (which I wasn’t but I didn’t know that)? This sufficiently confused the giant, letting us march past him, except then we had to act like we knew what we were doing which meant that we went through the first door we saw, and of course it was the one with the Head Priest behind it. Thankfully he was merely a pathetic spellcaster (I say, a spellcaster), so we were able to subdue him in two rounds and render him unconscious in like, three. Except!!! Surprise!!!!! He’d been possessed by one of the slugs!!!! And his fucking head exploded into tentacles!!!! Celestia screamed and scrambled backward. Thela jumped. Obezyana took a step backward. Jafar screamed and tried to shove them back into his fucking neck.

We may have panicked a little.

Eventually (and surprisingly quickly) by doing the combat equivalent of hitting him over the head with a baseball bat and screaming we were able to kill whatever the Fuck he’d become, except!!! Another surprise!!!!! He exploded AGAIN!!!!! This time into more slugs!!!!!! Six of them!!!!!!! What fun!!!!!!! Kill me!!!!!!

Turns out arrows work really well on those bastards, which is great because it meant that Obezyana was able to shoot like three all at once while Jafar smashed another one or two, but three of them slimed away out the open window into the woods.

“OH NO YOU FUCKING DON’T” said Obezyana, leaping over the balcony railing and running off into the woods after them, the speedy bastards.

“Let’s burn this place to the ground” said Thela thoughtfully. “Great idea but let’s loot if first” said Celestia, greedily. “NO” said literally everyone, smartly. “But MONEY” said Celestia with her singular braincell, running off down the hall and opening the first door she found.

Now TO BE FAIR, she didn’t like, fling it open. She may be careless and greedy, but she’s not stupid. Good thing too, cause behind that door was a library, half collapsed and rotted away, inhabited by a pair of bloodthirsty ghosts! Thela had wanted to leave, but once she knew there were undead there she was obligated to at least try and help them leave, for Pharasma reasons. So she stayed behind with Jafar while Celestia was like “OKAY GREAT LET’S KNOCK THIS HOUSE OUT AS FAST AS POSSIBLE I’LL JUST RUN AHEAD” and powerwalked into the next room.

The room right next to the Ghost library was actually an empty bedroom, excepting a cradle and a mobile made of seashells hanging above it. There was no draft, but when she had to roll a perception check and it moved when Celestia opened the door. She didn’t go in.

The room after THAT was actually more of a fancy hallway, with a desk in the middle of it, looking away from some stunning views from the floor to ceiling windows behind it. THIS time Celestia actually did good on her perception check, and she was able to notice (and identify!) the yellow powder covering the desk as a type of mold that fucking EXPLODES into a POISONOUS CLOUD when disturbed!! Because what ELSE would this house have!! NORMAL dangers??? don’t be ridiculous (still tried to open it tho)

But after deciding aGIANST that, she went to the door at the other end of the hall room, because Celestia’s completionism knows no bounds. This entire time, Thela and Jafar had been dealing with the ghosts, and I don’t remember their bit very well? I think I wasn’t paying attention (or it was literally happening concurrently with my little adventure, whoops), but the gist of it was that the ghosts were Not up for conversation and FLEW at the pair of them, and Thela slammed the door in their faces and walked quickly on over to Celestia. So when Celestia opened the door at the other end of the hall, which will now be referred to as The Bedroom Door, Thela was there too, to help her out! Which was good! For reasons to be explained!

Behind The Bedroom Door was, well, a bedroom obviously, but it was. Hm. Literally cursed? It was dark, with a large, blood stained bed, and the ornate carving of a ship on a storm tossed sea above it carved into, just, cut to pieces. Someone had carved “THE PACT HAS BEEN BROKEN” into this fuckin ruined bed in this ruined house, and I think Celestia could see… things. The shadows were moving, or wrong, or something, but it meant that she did NOT want to go in. Thela, however, could be convinced by loot, and since she has a stupid high stealth snuck into the room to try and get into the attic.

So part of the fun of Pathfinder, or any ttrpg really, is that not only do you get to roleplay, you get to act and see what the Universe thinks of your decision. So when Thela rolled very, very high, it really added to the experiance that my dad (the DM) sighed with relief before describing the room. +31 stealth! I’ve got the second highest at +16! Sage rolled REALLY HIGH! SIGHED with RELIEF!!

The, things, that had such a high perception, were… not, dogs. They were large, shadowy, quadrupedal, with long, long thin legs and mouths full of teeth. Glowing eyes. And when you looked at them, you could feel your mind… twisting. Thela had to roll stealth again. A little farther into the room. Then she noticed that they weren’t… they were completely visible (well. no. they never were.) but they weren’t standing in the room. She could see them as if there was nothing in the way, but they were also very clearly standing outside of the second story bedroom. She signed this to Celestia (they both know sign), succeeded her final stealth check and BOOKED IT upstairs and away from the not-dogs. (here’s a drawing I did of them, if you’d like to look)

Celestia went downstairs, while Thela went upstairs to the attic. She found a book up there! Called smth like Non Euclidean Geometry. Written in Abysmal. Fun!

She also found the smashed corpse of a Whispering Way cultist, in a crater, and realized it must have been dropped from a very high height, which didn’t make sense considering there was only open sky above her oh my god what the fuck is that. SURPRISE!! I GIANT FUCKING FLYING BIRD DRAGON REPTILE GRIFFIN BUT NOT THING!!! IT REGULARLY EATS ELEPHANTS AS LIGHT SNACKS!!! AND OBEZYANA IS OUTSIDE!!!!!

anyway I’m gonna add the next bit in a reblog because this is getting long and tumblr doesn’t let me save this as a draft so this is all on my clipboard, making me nervous.

#campaign chaos #the haunted house

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vore-scientist · 6 years ago

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Fantasy Soap Opera #1: Ice Princess

I honestly don’t know where I will ever put this into a story in it’s entirety so im putting it here... It’s a really weird disjointed infodump.

No vore or GT sorry, just really weird shit. Nothing that needs warnings. it’s just odd and crazy.

What are Fantasy Soap Operas? They are Soap Operas that exist in Mystic Woods. People use magic mirrors to watch them performed live*. Each episode is performed for one week, three times a day (note: weeks are 8 days). There is then a 7 day break as the next episode is rehearsed. On the 8th day the episode is performed one more time (well three more times in one day), the next day the new episode starts airing.

[each show has several casts, usually 4, each one performing two days a week]

*(Magic Mirrors are VERY EXPENSIVE MAGIC ITEMS! With the advent of Fantasy Soap Operas, simplified mirrors were made that can connect to only the mirrors of the desired theater companies, like buying a cable subscription. This is significantly cheaper than a True Magic Mirror which can connect to any mirror and even find/show things where mirrors do not exist if a spell is applied and the right question is asked)

Soap Opera Summary #1: Ice Princess

This is a world much like yours and mine, but always on the brink of calamity thanks to unseen factions that were always fighting. Witches, wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, magicians, and archeologists.

They are all after The Ice Princess. A legendary diamond unearthed and cut by one of The First Mages. The tales say that it contains unlimited magical power.

But it was just a story...

Until recently, as Archeologists uncover evidence of it’s existence, the magical powers that be all want to find it.

Backstory ( That is slowly revealed in show!!! and of course, in many versions, each time more is added or the story is retold very differently!!!)

The Ice Princess is/was a diamond. The First Mage found it, cut it, and then gave it life, gave it a soul. As the Mage aged he feared his knowledge would be lost! He needed to extend his life. He got progressively crazier and moody, and eventually bonded the Ice Princess to his heart. Either his life would extend and or the Ice Princess would take over, but retain his memories, which achieve the same goal.

Note: the First Mage was one of 6 First Mages, all identical. They were arguing over who would bond to the Ice Princess , but one of them eventually did it in secret. Two of them ended up dead, killed by the Ice Mage who went insane. The other three fled with their notes to the far corners of the world.

Anyways, the process didn’t even work the way The First Mage had hoped. Instead of extending his life it shortened it [note: He was like 30 at the time, the 6 mages were just stupidly worried about the future]. But bonding his soul to the Ice Princess, becoming The Ice Mage, did gain him it, they, something. Clarity. They were going to die soon, but the Ice Princess could live on, it just needed a body that wouldn’t rot away. So The Ice Mage built an automaton, powered by their now crystal heart. Separating the Heart from the Body separated the souls of Mage and the Princess, but not perfectly. So desperate was the soul of the Mage to live on, as the body without a heart used it’s final breaths to install the heart into the automaton. It managed to “leave fingerprints” on the Princess, leaving it with memories, and some of the Mage’s personality. So traumatic was the experience of the soul being torn, the automaton shut down only a few hours after activating. Laying dormant in the ancient Mage Laboratory. So powerful was the magic used to even attempt this feat, the ground had shaken, and the Laboratory sunk into the earth, buried. Volcanoes had risen around it, and lava flowed over top, sealing the laboratory. The land was reclaimed and is a lush jungle now.

A thousand years later, when his siblings made an attempt to find him, they found nothing. No trace. And while they had each individually extended their lives (One by body jumping (evil), one by becoming undead (less evil), one with a terrible curse to live forever in a cycle (no longer evil). Such cycle is undefined as of now). They go their separate ways again.

Another thousand years pass and that’s where the current story really takes place (aside from flashbacks, which more of then not are inaccurate and constantly ret-conned)

Unbeknownst to the factions, several high ranking members are direct descendents of the First Mages. And some of the new rookies as well.

Several of the factions have members who are in secret relationships, or spies for other factions, or related to people in other factors, or a mix of all of these. Members who are also undead, or monsters, or have ulterior motives of revenge unrelated to the Ice Princess.

Each episode focuses on one faction, rotating through the six, and sometimes pausing to show seemingly unrelated groups, normal guilds like blacksmiths or tailors, people with normal lives who end up falling into the mess of the Factions.

---

Where the show is currently::

A group of rookies, an unlikely friendship of one person from each faction, were each sent to the same jungle on a fools errand. They found each other and keep finding odd creatures, mutated, magical, otherworldly, as they get closer to the center of the jungle. (that’s the recap. But there’s been like 100 episodes of crazy treasure hunting and maps and conspiracies and lies and switching sides and betrayals, red herrings, battles! The new season started with introducing these rookies, or rather, bringing them to the forefront, following them each into the jungle)

Now to the current episode:

Where they find a massive tree growing over the chasm entrance to a cave. Inside is even weirder, plants and animals that are living on magic, not light. The cave starts to be less natural, more constructed.

The lab has been found! The automaton activated by the presence of other lives, and spotting one of the rookie Wizards, attacked, convinced they were their sibling come to steal their heart. Turns out that rookie is one of those direct descendants who just didn’t know. They are lauded and a bunch of people love and hate them for their famous lineage (so far, no other descendants have been revealed, that comes later, most of the backstory is completely unknown. Right now it’s 1 First Mage though pieces of a story about some love between the diamond and the mage and soul bonding is being pieced together).

Escape the Lair: The terrible automaton tries it’s best to kill the rookies, and does kill the sorcerer (who will rise as a undead thrall), maims the archeologist (who slowly becomes infected with some magical disease from the wound). Getting out is very difficult as crystals are springing from the walls ceiling and floors, but they make it out, only to find every nasty beast converging on the cave. They escape and the massive tree uproots itself to try and snatch the fleeing people, but falls into the cave. It cannot get out, but it also effectively is guarding the hole.

They get back and within each faction they are celebrated. They do not mention the others, they tell it as if they were alone.

The episode ends with the reveal that The rookie of The Warlocks is actually one of the original First Mages. But after so many cycles they stopped trying to retain memories and just, lives new lives. They dont remember. They remember now, but do not show it. They are given a few days off to recuperate, and go to The Mages, as they are secretly sleeping with a head magician. they do have sex that night. The Magician notes that they seem different, they did things tonight they had never done, it was like they slept with a different person]. They reveal who they are and kill the magician. (end episode. Note: that magician does not stay dead, and comes back for revenge!)

-----

If you are still confused at the airing schedule for the show I made a kinda calendar that shows how a month of episodes works out (about 2 episodes per month, example if the first day of the month was also the first day of the week). A checkmark means the episode airs that day, at three different times.

months all have 32 days

#fantasy soap #mystic woods #mystic woods extras

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purplesurveys · 6 years ago

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440

Looks and Personality

What do you look like? I tick all the marks of a Filipina - kinda tiny, black eyes, morena, flat nose. I’m on the slender side, have thick, wavy hair that gets frizzy when it’s hot, and huge thighs when I sit down.

How often do you bathe? I don’t really have a constant schedule. I take a bath everyday when I have school; I could take a bath everyday especially during summer; but I can also opt to do it every other day when I feel lazy/when it’s colder.

How do you wear your hair? Down, low ponytail, high ponytail, or in a bun depending on what I’m wearing.

What colours do you tend to wear? Black, white, and any muted shade. I have very little color in my wardrobe.

Do you have any tattoos? What, where and why? Nope. I had always wanted to have a ton until I realized I was scared of needles.

What kind of clothes do you wear? My style is a mix of classy and trendy, so I’ll wear little black dresses with flats but I can also sometimes wear a simple top with culottes or long dresses paired with sneakers. Idk, depends on my mood for the day really.

What kind of jewelery do you wear? I’ve stopped wearing jewelry. The two necklaces Gab got me already broke and I haven’t had them replaced with any new ones. Not a fan of rings and I don’t really have bracelets.

Is there anything else you often wear? I’m not too picky with what I put on. My must-have is just a black hairtie on my wrist.

Would you say you had a “look”? Yeah I think so. I’ve molded my style to make it akin to Audrey Hepburn’s, who’s like my biggest idol eveeeeerrrrrrrrr.

When going out, do you dress up or down? Depends on what period of the sem I’m in. I’ll definitely dress up at the start because I want to look good in front of new profs and classmates lmao. But by the end of the sem when all the deadlines are piling up, I’ll go to class in the same shorts I wear at home, a hoodie with nothing inside, and NOT CARE.

What do you wear to bed at home? The thinnest clothes I could find, because it gets really hot. Tank top and shorts will do, but sometimes I’d opt for a tank top and just underwear.

What do you wear to bed when you’re somewhere else? I cover up of course. I’d switch up the tank for a t-shirt, but still keep the shorts.

Is there a place you keep any prized/secret things whilst you’re away? No. That place is my room already.

What’s your favourite food? Either pizza, curry, or sushi. I’m a sucker for all variations of the three.

What’s your favourite drink? Iced caramel macchiato is always so refreshing. OH and I FINALLY recently found out how I like my coffee! Hshssksh Kate poured me a cup of coffee last week and her mix was SO good omg it was 2 packets of cream, 1 packet of sugar, and it can take or leave milk. I’m so excited about this because I never learned how to make coffee that wasn’t just the instant one that does all the work for me. Now I finally feel like a grown-up hahahahaha

What’s your favourite dessert? Chewy chocolate chip cookies, macarons, cheesecake, and souffles.

What’s your favourite type of food (e.g Mexican)? Indian and Korean. Japanese is a runner-up.

Do you have any mental problems? Yes. I don’t have the time, the money, and the courage to get myself checked and so I just try to get by and get better everyday.

Do you have any phobias? What? Why do you think you have this/them? Cockroaches, needles, and roller coasters. Cockroaches are fucking ugly and we had a lot of them (flying ones!) in our old house; needles are sharp and they hurt; and as for the last one, I generally get bad motion sickness but the whole phobia thing got worse when I had a particularly bad experience on a roller coaster in Singapore.

Why might somebody dislike you? I’m super nice but I’m not denying that I can snap whether it’s warranted or not. I come off a little strongly and it might rub people off the wrong way.

What skill do you possess that you are most proud of? Seeing things through. Like if I want something to work, I do it and I make it work. I hate failure and I like looking like I get a lot of work done.

What is your greatest strength (e.g. honest, loyal, brave)? Loyalty.

What’s your greatest shortcoming or flaw (e.g. cowardly, alcoholic)? My competitiveness can make me a coward. Like I will back out of things as soon as I can detect that I can possibly lose or fail.

Who do you most admire? I don’t really admire anyone.

Who do you most love? Animals.

What three things do you look for most in a partner? I don’t like boxing people into just three standards...I do take a liking to people who kind of stand out from the rest, are intelligent, and have the same stances as I do.

Do you like crowds? Depends on the type. I only like crowds I’m comfortable with, like a concert crowd.

What are your hobbies? Trying out new food.

If you can’t get to sleep in the middle of the night, what do you do? I’ll watch YouTube videos or scroll through Reddit. Knocks me out instantly.

What is your favourite animal? Dogs, cows, elephants, or pigs. Can’t really choose.

What is your favourite colour? Pink.

If you could ask God (to athiests - IF there was one) one question, what? Why’d they make the universe? What’s all of this for? Cheated for using two questions, but whatever.

Background

Where were you born and raised? I was born in Manila and raised in a city a little east of Manila.

Briefly describe your family. We’re five in the immediate family - my mom and dad have been married for 22 years and I have a younger sister and brother. I don’t talk to my brother anymore after an incident a few months ago; my sister and I are generally close. I have three grandparents that are still alive, but I’m generally closer to my grandma on my mom’s side since she lives nearer. I have 11 cousins but the number just gets so much bigger if you count second- and third-degree ones.

You must choose one - your childhood was calm/peaceful or tragic/turbulent? It was both, honestly. Since I lived with extended family growing up, I had relatives with drinking and violence problems on one side, but also relatives who strove to protect us from them and tried to give us a normal childhood. I can’t really pick one for you, because I experienced both.

Did you have any role models? I looked up to wrestlers from a very early age. Shawn Michaels and Lita were my childhood favorites.

What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you? [Trigger warning: suicide] Attempting suicide multiple times, summer 2017.

How did it affect you? [Trigger warning: suicide] Profoundly. I wouldn’t have met my orgmates if I succeeded, because I only joined my college org after the attempts. At the time I did it, I had no friends in college so looking back on it can feel surreal. I also realized that I am scared of myself knowing that I’m capable of physically getting to that point.

Have you ever had any recurring nightmares or themes in nightmares? When my depression was a lot worse two years ago, I would always get dreams of either me or Gab dying. It was always either of us getting shot.

What were they? ^

Do you currently have a boyfriend/girlfriend? I do.

Do you have any close friends? Yes <3

Briefly describe your best friend: She studies architecture, has a mole on the left side of her face, has a classy sense of style, loves The Maine, has two shihtzus named Hailey and Kennedy (the latter after Kennedy Brock from The Maine), and is one of the most genuine, caring, and smartest people I know.

Any enemies? I don’t think so, unless people have a problem with me that they aren’t telling me.

Who? What are they like?

Would you risk your life for your best friend? (not lover or family member!) For Angela? Easily.

With who was your most important romantic relationship? Gabie.

Of what are you most proud? Going to school in UP.

Of what are you most ashamed? My home life. I’m an open book except for this aspect.

Alignment, Ethics and Religion

What is your religion? None. Atheist.

Where do you stand on abortion? Pro-choice. Ez.

Where do you stand on the death penalty? I’m against it mostly for the fact that execution is literally the easiest way out. For shitty people who have done shitty things, let them rot in prison until they die. For people who have done shitty things but want to be better, let them be better and give them a second chance.

Where do you stand on wearing fur? HATE IT. Wear faux fucking fur if you’re so adamant on wanting fur on your outfit.

Do you have a moral code that you follow? What? Don’t we all have our own compasses?

Could you kill somebody? If my loved ones are involved, absolutely.

For what reason would you kill somebody? If my loved ones are seriously harmed. For self-defense too.

Would you SERIOUSLY CONSIDER killing anybody right now? No, not right now.

Do you trust easily, or not? I trust in the first place; but I can easily take the trust away if it’s abused.

What are your political beliefs (anarchy, communism, democracy etc.)? I’m a social democrat. < God, I don’t really pay attention to labels lmao but this seems pretty accurate.

What, if anything, WOULD you sacrifice your life for? Gabie and/or her family. Way too important to me.

Would you ever, for any reason, abandon your friends in an hour of need? I don’t think I can.

Motivation

What are your dreams/ambitions/goals? Complete college, find a job that pays well, pay for a house, travel abroad, start a family.

How do you plan to reach them? Work my ass off I guess?

How would your ideal partner look? I already have one.

Do you ever want to have a family someday? With children? Yes. I’ll be crushed if I don’t get one.

Who would you want to start this family with, or do you not yet know? My girlfriend, ideally.

What would stop you from reaching your goals (e.g. death, retirement fund)? I’m very money-oriented, like I would rather earn a lot in an okay job than be in a job I’m super super super passionate about but has a lower pay, so I think anything with inadequate pay will definitely demotivate me.

What do you see yourself doing next year? This time next year I’m already polishing up my thesis. I’ll be graduating in a few weeks, and I would have already come out to my parents.

What do you see yourself doing in twenty years? Having a family and being at that point in life where I’m just accomplished. I’d want to be feeling that way by the time I’m 41.

Would you ever have an affair? NO.

Would you ever have a one night stand? Idk, not really for me.

What are your greatest fears? Being a failure.

More information

If you had a month of nothing (no work, no obligations) what would you do? Provided that money wasn’t an issue, I’d eat out. Always. I’d try out new restaurants and the quirkiest food out there.

How do you relax? Sleep, talk to my friends, watch YouTube videos, and, if I have time, take surveys.

What one thing would you change in this world (free Tibet, abolish Sweden)? Do something about pollution or climate change.

Would you ever choose a career or job where your life was at risk? You mean, a journalist? Hahahahaha hell no. But again, unless the job pays well, then no.

Why? In the case of being a journalist, it’s just not worth it to me...which is sad, because I used to be very passionate about becoming one. But when I realized the horrible reality of taking up such a career, it was very easy to turn away. I’ll always be sorry to my 13 year old self.

How would you like to be remembered after your death? Someone who went out of her way to look out for people, no matter the situation. As simple as that.

Random questions

Where you present at any major historical events (e.g. 9/11)? Nope.

How did they affect you?

Do you have any famous relatives? I have relatives in the local government, plus my maternal grandfather’s clan pretty much owns all of Mindoro Oriental so there’s that. I don’t have celebrity relatives though.

Do you have to try and live up to your family’s expectations? Of course.

Are you a loyal member of any organizations? Just the one I applied for in my university haha.

General Information

Name: Robyn.

Age: 21.

Date Of Birth: April 21st.

Race: Brown.

Height: 5′2″

Weight: Uh like 90 something lbs. Idk, it always fluctuates around the 90s.

Are you happy with this? I could gain more weight honestly. I’m a little underweight, and clothes I wanna wear sometimes don’t fit or suit me for being too thin.

Desired weight: A little over 100 would be healthier for me I think.

Sexual orientation: I don’t fucking know anymore lmao. I can be bisexual one day, pansexual the next, and demisexual the next. I don’t really answer when I’m asked this.

First language: Filipino. Second/Third/Fourth etc. languages (if any): English.

Why did you take this survey? I haven’t taken a survey in such a long time because I was swamped with work. Tonight is the first time in two weeks I had enough time to squeeze in a survey.

#survey #surveys

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