#Children of the crack epidemic

[organicbeing]

"Crack Babies vs. Percocet Babies: The Hilarious (and Slightly Terrifying) Evolution of America’s Toughest Kids"

Let me start by saying, this blog isn’t meant to offend anyone, just to shed some light—with a healthy dose of humor—on the generational shift in American kids from the crack baby era (pre-Y2K) to the percocet baby wave (post-Y2K). It’s no secret that certain American children, particularly those born into more challenging circumstances, have developed… let’s just say, unique survival…

[transmutationisms]

what's your opinion on medications that require pregnancy testing? like accutane, I think they end your prescription if you get a positive pregnancy test, due to birth defects. i personally refused accutane for several reasons but the mandatory pregnancy testing was a big one

wow i literally just mentioned this to someone the other night lol. yeah it's pretty paternalistic. obviously fetal health complications should be taken seriously but it's very noticeable to me that the medical presumption here is that the automatic course of correct action is to prevent people access to their prescriptions, rather than, yknow, discussing options like abortion.

i know dorothy roberts ('killing the black body') and i think also jacqueline wolf ('cesarean section') have discussed the development of the concept of a 'maternal-fetal conflict'—ie, the notion that there's a conflict between the interests of a fetus and those of the actual pregnant person—and argued that american medicine's current tendency to prioritise the fetus has its roots in plantation medicine. the idea was that enslaved women were negligent, at best, or even outright infanticidal (as in, because they were trying to spare their children from being enslaved) and therefore white doctors and enslavers needed to treat the fetus as the patient, presuming its interests were of more economic relevance and overrode the actual human person. and this framing has been echoed since abolition, such as during the so-called 'crack epidemic' w/ state and medical discourses about black women specifically being unfit mothers who therefore needed to be legally regulated, separated from their children, &c. anyway i would guess that there are probably some echoes of this history in the decision to so tightly regulate pregnancy testing wrt accutane as well, plus ofc the legacy of the thalidomide scandal.

also, like, although risks obviously vary with different meds, it's not like isotretinoin is the only drug that can harm a fetus; many benzos and antibiotics do as well, for instance, and probably lots of other things that people are not routinely required to be pregnancy-tested for. so that also does make me wonder if part of what's going on is that accutane/isotretinoin is considered to be a 'cosmetic' (read: frivolous) intervention and therefore medical authorities have been more comfortable deciding to just yank people off it in case of pregnancy rather than, yknow, providing full information and advocating for patients to have full reproductive choice and such. this is rly just speculation though lol.

[gothamnewsnetwork-official]

Gotham’s prodigal son buying Cocaine...from his brother?

Independent journalist ( @secretidentie ) posted a conversation they claimed to have overheard between the three eldest Wayne children earlier this evening, sparking a host of controversy surrounding the Wayne family (see post here)

The journalist claimed to have overheard Tim Drake, CEO of Wayne enterprises, ask his older brother, Jason Todd, to buy him cocaine so he could fit in with the other ‘young finance bros’ of the Gotham Elite. To this the journalist claims Mr. Todd initially refused, stating that while he might be a crime lord he was not a drug dealer, and their older brother Dick Grayson stepped in.

They then claimed that Mr. Grayson agreed with Mr. Todd, showing concern for his younger brother’s health and safety and threatening to tell their father, billionaire and philanthropist Bruce Wayne, that the second youngest Wayne son was attempting to restart the crack epidemic in Gotham (though this journal would like to point out how it has never truly gone away, and the sheer absurdity of the claim that one boy could restart an entire drug epidemic).

The entire interaction ends with the independent journalist claiming that Mr. Todd threatened to buy a ‘fuck ton’ of cocaine to ‘rub it in’ Mr. Drake’s face. Following this Mr. Drake is silent for a few moments before the journalist claims he asks if Mr. Todd could buy him meth instead.

This publication would like to squash these rumours as the sheer absurdity of the whole altercation would make more sense in one of the Joker’s schemes than a conversation between the eldest sons of the Bruce Wayne.

On top of the obvious sensationalism, the fact that the independent journalist in question failed to provide any proof of this incident nor how they may have acquired such information brings to question the credibility of any of their prior claims.

For further explanation we reached out to Mr. Drake himself who confirms that this article is completely fabricated, stating that he and his brothers would never do such a thing. He stated that he and his family were deeply offended that anyone would ever even insinuate that they would partake in the less-than-legal side of Gotham, after which he went on to voice his concerns for the oral health of anyone who participates in such activities.

Though the other Wayne children involved in this situation were not available to comment, we wanted to put the minds of the Gotham people at ease. We do not believe that the original article has any truth within it and would like to stress the importance of fact checking and reliable reporting (of which we, the Gotham Report, are certified).

As always, we’d love to here your thoughts on the topic (here)

For ways to check if your news source is reliable, click (here)

The Gotham Report is certified in unbiased and reliable journalism

[mmgwritings]

I'M GONNA TAKE MINE OF YOU WITH ME

Character: Kaz Brekker / Wife! Reader

Prompts: There is a word for children who lose their parents, but there is none for parents who lose a child.

Warnings: Canon divergence; Angst; Character death; Grief; Kaz suffering; i'm sorry :(

Never trust the Saints; they give and take away.

Initially, a curfew was imposed. Without prior warning, patrol officers closed all clubs, brothels and merchant mansions, causing a commotion among the population that was soon violently suppressed. Later, when the disease spread from the interior of Kesh to the suburbs of Ketterdam, the healers' homes became crowded, and before long even the healers needed the assistance of the Grisha in the merchants' hospital.

Thus, Ketterdam remembered how to act. They had faced an epidemic before and would face this one with the same practicality. The funeral bells echoed incessantly throughout the day, while the bay south of the city was used to transport the bodies, piled on fishing vessels confiscated by the Council of the Tides. The former party town, Ketterdam, has transformed into a highly efficient funeral operation.

Burials were strictly prohibited. Thus, when the boats failed to remove bodies from the city quickly enough, in less favored neighborhoods, residents were forced to dispose of their loved ones on improvised pyres in the middle of the street.

This was the first scene we saw upon arriving in Ketterdam through the northwest gate, when the carriage had to make an abrupt stop in front of a pile of twisted ashes, which at first glance appeared to be the remains of slaughtered animals. However, horror soon hit us when the coachman, in a state of shock, vomited and exclaimed: “They are people, Saints, they are people!”

From the windows of the houses along the street, I could briefly see thin faces peering through the cracks in the windows. They were, without a doubt, the relatives of those poor burned creatures. Their looks were blank, as if they had already resigned themselves to the idea that the remains of their loved ones would end up on the street. I hastily closed the windows to hide the cruelty, but it remained etched in my eyes even when I closed them.

The trip was quick and extremely stressful, from Lij to the capital it was just two days of march that lasted the longest a lifetime. The exhausted horses showed visible signs of fatigue when the coachman left us at the hospital doors. However, as quick as it was, it apparently wasn't enough. The little girl was remarkably pale, her lips were dyed purple and her eyes were trembling under the weight of nightmares caused by the fever. My dear girl, a gift bestowed by the saints, the reward for any act of benevolence I have done in this world.

My mother used to say that the saints' mercy was unfair to mortals, because, as divine beings, they no longer understood the pain of any sacrifice, they no longer understood what it was like to lose someone. They were above everything and everyone. But I was a stupid young woman, I ignored my poor mother's advice because I thought it was the condescending words of a woman with pagan customs.

“Mommy,” she whispered, her voice hoarse with exhaustion, her eyes barely opening.

"I'm here my love. It’s going to be okay,” I whispered as I took her small, feverish body into my arms. At the beginning of the year, I could barely hold her on my lap for long, she was growing fast and turning into a beautiful, healthy five year old. Now, feeling how light her body was in my arms, my heart squeezed with pain.

Despite it being the early hours of the morning, a small crowd was sitting on the steps. They were probably sick people, but not sick enough to get a bed inside the hospital. I was trying to carefully pass between them, when, at the door, Nina appeared.

She was dressed in the black clothes of the doctors, with the distinctive blue apron of the merchants' wing, stained with small drops of blood.

“Y/N, come this way, sweetheart. I’ve already prepared everything for her,” said Nina, her kind face and caring voice leading me down a corridor to the east of the main hall. She was different since the last time I saw her, during the holidays. She looked sterner than ever.

“Any news from him? Did Kaz send any letters? Do you think he will arrive today?” I asked as I followed Nina through a corridor packed with doctors, heartrenders, healers and all sorts of people. I must admit that, little by little, the composure I had managed to maintain during the last two days of the journey from Lij to Ketterdam was starting to crumble. Felt like I was on the edge of an abyss, spiraling into darkness.

Nina looked at me with sadness as she led me into a small, but well-lit room with a comfortable bed, where I rested my daughter. She was in a restless sleep and quietly muttering nonsense words, the fever must be getting worse.

“Kaz didn't send any letters, none of them. Y/N, they must be on the way,” Nina reassured me. “Now, I need you to stay calm for her, please. We will examine her immediately, but you also need to undergo tests. You could be as sick as she is.”

“No, you don’t need to. I'm not going to leave her alone here” I said, freeing myself from Nina's hands the moment when a tall, tired-looking man entered the room, he seemed to be middle-aged, even though he was visibly a Grisha.

Nina walked over to him and they started talking in whispers, probably discussing the situation. It was not uncommon for merchants and their families to seek privileges in cases of calamity, but being Kaz Brekker's family, these privileges often extended to any kind of perk. Obviously, by now, the entire hospital knows that the wife and daughter of Ketterdam's biggest criminal are looking for help.

I sat next to my daughter, holding her soft hand and massaging her temple with my fingertips. Just like she is my joy, she is Kaz’s world. The gravity, the humanity, the warmth that keeps him alive. She looks much more like him: her light eyes, her dark hair and even her pert nose. At times, they seemed to share the same thoughts, to the point where I felt like I was somehow invading their space. She was his world.

Kaz would be able to destroy cities to protect her from her enemies, but that would not be enough to protect her from death.

Death came. It invaded my life so abruptly that I didn't even have time to cry for mercy. One moment, my daughter was in a restless sleep, and the next, she was convulsing, with blood pouring from her eyes and nose... The harrowing sounds were the most terrifying, they seemed to echo endlessly in my mind; it was the sound of her choking as she tried to breathe through vomit.

When it was all over, as my daughter lay on the bed with her head at an awkward angle, a horrible sound filled the room, resembling a wounded animal. I couldn't take my eyes off her to find the source of that sound. Only then did I realize that I was the one issuing it.

Once, when I was a child and still enjoying my hunting adventures with my brothers, we witnessed a fox with its cub in a trap set by my father. The cub was trapped, one of its paws shattered between the iron teeth of the trap, it was still too small to understand human antics, and its mother, whether out of compassion or instinct, killed it before we could get closer.

In those minutes when I was afflicted with acute pain, I reflected on that fox mother facing the suffering of her cub. I thought about how I didn't have the same courage as her, about how I would rather rip my own legs off with my teeth and offer myself to the hunters in exchange for freeing my cub from his torment.

Later, when Nina released me from her embrace with a pale, tearful face, speaking words I could barely understand, I considered how naive both I and the hypothetical fox were being in placing our faith in the benevolence of a superior, divine being. Tearing out my legs, my heart, begging, crawling – would that make any difference? Probably not. Yet even so, I would be willing to sacrifice myself for centuries on end in exchange for my daughter's life.

When I got up from the ground, with shaky legs and still immersed in a painful lethargy, I walked over to my daughter. The heartrender had cleaned her face, but there were still bloodstains on the collar of her blue dress, the same one she had received as a birthday present from her father and which she loved because it made her feel like a fairy.

When I held her little face between my hands she was still warm, it seemed like at any moment she would wake up and smile and tell me it was just a trick. But it wasn't, I spent a long time holding her face waiting for this trick to end and it didn't happen.

When I placed a kiss on her forehead, my tears fell on her face. It was an eternal kiss, I didn't want it to end, I didn't want it to be the last. However, when I pulled away, Nina wrapped me in a comforting hug. Finally, she retreated to a corner of the room, leaving me alone to watch over my pain.

I held my daughter in my arms, I ran my fingers through her hair, her face, memorizing every little detail of her. Finally, when she was starting to feel cold and heavy, I moved closer to give her another kiss, and this time, it was Kaz's goodbye kiss.

It was outside the hospital that Kaz found me. Nina took me outside when a team of healers told us they needed the room. In Ketterdam, the city of death, they are very practical about sorting things out. I was sitting on one of the steps, trying to catch my breath and looking at nothing, when Kaz, Inej, Wylan and Jesper arrived in a grain truck.

I didn't understand what emptiness was, nor how distressing it could be. I had no idea that it could be deafening, that the blood would rush through my veins and that everything around me would feel cold to the touch. Emptiness was the absence of all emotions, and at the same time, it contained them all. And the pain of emptiness made it extraordinarily difficult to notice anything around me other than the image of Kaz.

He was disheveled, his black coat was dirty with dust, and his hair was messy, as if he had spent the last few hours pulling out the strands. His usually restrained blue eyes were showing all of his emotions. A shadow hovered over them, something I had never seen before: fear. And I didn't know how to act other than getting up, walking a few steps, and finally succumbing at Kaz's feet in the hope that the ground would swallow me.

My breathing is heavy and shallow, sobs tear from my throat. There were no more tears, it seems that I was no longer able to produce them, however, a rain began to fall on us, as if it could cry what I was unable to. Above me, Kaz was standing still. He was like a wall that refused to fall under a storm, under the weight of reality. He refuses to vocalize whatever he's thinking, I think he's also feeling empty. It's as if any trace of humanity has been drained from him.

Would he become Dirtyhands, being all practical while he waits for the poor creature I've become at his feet to pull herself together? Or would he become the fox cub caught in the trap, hoping I could rip his throat out when he, for the first time in his life, didn't have a plan to get around the situation?

“Y/N, darling,” whispered Inej, as if calling my name could tie me to the ropes of the earth again. Besides, what else could she say?

Is this the moment when I would hear the lamentations, the pity, that would follow me for the rest of my life when they found out about the daughter I lost?

“She's gone,” I said, lifting my head and looking at Kaz. “We were waiting for you... but she got worse, so I came to Ketterdam. I really thought she would get better, but she's gone, Kaz” my voice broke completely.

I think whatever strength had kept Kaz up until that moment was gone. He turned his back on us, walking toward the side of the building, his steps swaying as if he were drunk, until finally he collapsed. A scream tore through his chest, a scream of rage, of frustration and sadness. But above all pain.

There is a definition for children who lose their parents, but there is none for parents who lose their children.

What are we now? A mother without a child? What would I do now? Just go home and put all her things together in a box like party decorations?

I got up and walked over to Kaz, hugging him from behind. We lay huddled in the rain, me holding Kaz's body as he thrashed about in a horrible cry. I offered whatever comfort I had: I kissed his head, whispered empty words, held him close to me. If I wasn't a mom, then Kaz wasn't a dad.

He would never hold her in his arms again, he wouldn't smile when she played with his gloves, which were too big, and he wouldn't stand by her bed on sleepless nights, watching her sleep.

“Kaz, she loves you more than anything” I said. Loved, whispered my treacherous brain. Then, fighting the lump in my throat, I said, “They've already put her with the dead people.”

Kaz shuddered, the crying became silent. The vision no parent, least of all Kaz, wants to imagine. Like any other death in Ketterdem, whether of the poor or the rich, our daughter's would be treated with little ceremony. No mourning, no funeral.

She, who was always warm, was now alone in the cold of the Harbor.

On the days when Kaz couldn't bear any touch, she was the one who defied him by clasping her little hands around his neck. Or on the worst days, when he came from the Barrel with someone's blood on his sleeve, she covered him with kisses and smiles. Kaz loved her the moment he saw her, covered in blood, wet, crying... and warm. When she was a baby he treated her like porcelain, if he could he wouldn't even let me touch her.

My hands met Kaz's, he was clutching his chest as if he wanted to rip out his own heart. I held him, afraid that he would somehow disappear under the weight of his own grief. If he leaves too...

“On the trip, when she was awake, I told her that you love her. That you love her so, so much,” I whispered in his ear. Then, the worst. “I gave her your kiss goodbye”

How can we survive this?

“No, Y/N,” Kaz said in a pleading tone, “I’m sorry, please. I'm so sorry"

When we lack words, guilt appears. It's our fault? Were we really that horrible?

The Saints. They give and they take.

[ansbobcar]

Questioning Innocent Zero's Reproductive Life (crack theory)

Big manga spoilers sorry, I just can't stop thinking about Mashle it's getting to weirdly technical point.

For context: Innocent Zero was like 80 something when he had Doom (who is age 30). I'm not saying that it's impossible to reproduce at that age (Haven't studied proper biology in ages). After all, he still has a baby face in the canon story where he's like 118 years old or something.

ANYWAYS the gist of it is:

Innocent Zero is a male widow of 3 women.

Sounds crazy right? WRONG! I'll prove it to you with his children!

First of all, why 3 wives/ppl who birthed his kids instead of 1 or 4+?

The kids' marks!

(I'm too lazy to pull up the manga panels so have the fandom wiki instead)

Doom, Famin and Epidem's arrows face up/north.

Delisaster's arrows go down.

Domina's marks goes up AND down.

Initially, I theorised that IZ had 2 wives due to the big age gap between Delisaster and Domina.

I know 1 wife could also work becuz big age gap siblings exist too but lowkey I doubt that would be possible based on the fact that we KNOW that Domina's upbringing was crazy hell. Imagine what sorta upbringing the first 3 kids went through and the toll it would take on their biological mother.

He probably had connections to getting a wife candidate by disguising himself to look younger through magic and probably some sorta shady love bomb/potion method. Personal mini theory is that he planned to only have 1 wife to birth his kids so he put the most effort to getting the 1st wife.

But the 1st wife died after birthing Epidem so he scrambled for babysitters, inanimate or living and ended up having a fling with a babysitter aka the 2nd wife and BAM she also dies while giving birth to Delisaster not a year later after taking care of the other brothers.

IZ takes a break from making kids because he thinks that 4 are enough but by the time Doom turns 5, he realises that he needs to invest in making them bring terror

17 years before canon he has another fling needing backup/extra babies because he misread shit. Now equipped with baby infrastructure, he sees his 3rd wife as the most disposable to which this woman dies after giving birth to twins aka Domina and Mash.

Innocent Zero now doesn't need anymore kids. But like bro was like 100+ with that last fling TwT, I think he actually stopped being able to reproduce because when he did that body augmentation thing, he fully sacrificed that stuff.

Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.

[supremacyproject]

Kingpin: Ronald Reagan served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 – 1989. The Iran Contra affair, which played a vital role in creating the crack epidemic by funneling cocaine into the US and using the proceeds to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, took place during his second term. From addiction to militarized policing to disproportionate sentencing that followed, the toll on Black communities cannot be understated. A conviction for possession with intent to distribute 5 grams of crack carries a five-year sentence. Possession of 500 grams of cocaine with intent to distribute carries the same five-year punishment.

The President was infamous for flooding the country with the drug, while the First Lady was famous for imploring the children left in its wake as a result of his egregious decisions to “Just Say No.”

[lilkrissmuffett]

Tithonus Aeternus

Perfect Cell/Fem!Reader

NSFW. Approximately 4,800 words.

This was a request from a lovely anon :)

Read it on Ao3 here!

You had never believed in love at first sight. 

Hell, you doubted you would ever experience true love at all, let alone have faith in something so…childish. Romance was a foreign concept, a magic word plucked straight out of some fairy tale— far removed from the cruel reality of your maddeningly dull existence. Such fantasies had no place in the real world, you thought, convinced that every person you met would just break your heart. The gods only knew you’d had your fair share of time spent picking up those pieces; prickly shards sticking in your skin like tiny splinters of glass, difficult to see if not for the pain.

Pain. Suffering. Debilitating dread for the future that lay ahead. 

This was all you knew.

…Until you saw him.

You’d practically dragged yourself out of bed that morning, blinking blearily at the cheerful sunlight invading the slats between your dusty blinds. Steeling yourself for another long day of enduring your thankless receptionist job, you ground the heels of your palms into your sleep-crusted eyes until you saw spots, forcing yourself more securely past the waking threshold. The commute to the small dental practice in downtown West City was an absolute pain in the ass even with a semi-reliable car, but at least the pay was just enough to keep up with the rent on your tiny apartment and put food in your belly.

Pulling your fluffy pink bathrobe a little tighter around your bare shoulders, you shuffled your slippered feet into the kitchen to prepare a meager breakfast that might tide you over until your lunch break. After pouring some boiling water over a bowl of chalky-looking instant oatmeal, you plopped down on your creaky old futon and switched on the TV to catch whatever miserable news was occurring that day. How many innocent people had vanished without a trace during the night, only to leave a pile of rumpled clothing behind? You weren’t sure you even wanted to know.

In the past week alone, maybe less, multiple towns in the surrounding area had reported record-breaking amounts of missing persons cases, a few of which were either completely abandoned or evacuated altogether. You wondered just how long it was going to take for this bizarre epidemic to reach your own pathetic little village. Hey, at least it would save you from having to deal with all of the screaming children, the shrill whine of the dentist drill that could pierce your eardrums bloody even from behind the barrier of a noisy waiting room. 

But the top story which greeted you this fine morning had come completely unexpected. Even as you flipped through the few stations that the cheapest cable package could provide, you found that you were inundated by the exact same image no matter what channel you landed on…a face to be precise, and a handsome one at that. Confused, but morbidly intrigued, you lifted your finger off the button and dropped the clicker, settling against the cushions to listen to this man’s speech, taking solace in the steaming aroma of comfort food wafting up from your lap.

At least, the mysterious speaker certainly appeared human at first glance…though truthfully, he was far too beautiful for you to consider him anything less than a deity. His name was Perfect Cell, he announced in a smooth, commanding voice, practically turning the already bland oatmeal to ashes in your mouth. He had wings like an angel, black as obsidian, and wore a pointed crown upon his head; resembling a prince from one of those old stories you resented with such vehemence. And those eyes–! You could’ve sworn that Cell’s penetrative, magenta gaze could see right through the cracks in your weary little heart…only to shatter it all over again with a charmingly devilish grin.

Oh, you were done for.

You didn’t even care what he was saying, or why he was saying it…all you knew was that you had to meet him. Witness such perfection for yourself, so that maybe you could say you had experienced something truly beautiful for once in your meaningless life. With your breakfast so quickly forgotten on the coffee table, you slowly crawled down to kneel on the rug with your robe hanging limply off your shoulders, your figure haloed by the cold, impersonal glow of the TV screen. Just…staring— drinking in everything that he was, imagining what it would be like to touch him, to run your fingers over that immaculate, ivory expanse of flesh between the elegant column of his throat and shoulder. You could see the finely-honed muscles twitch, either in excitement or agitation you knew not which. The way the definition of each tendon in his neck created a sinful hollow, shadows that dipped down into the junction between a pair of equally elegant clavicles.

Now you were salivating like Pavlov’s fucking dog, drooling at the mere idea of being close to something…someONE…so utterly flawless. You wished that he would swoop through your living room window and fly you straight to the moon. He could even crush the life from your body with his bare hands, collapsing your lungs before the vacuum of space could do the job for him. Despite all this, surely you would die happy having known his presence, however fleeting.

Worth it.

You stayed just like that through the remainder of what would soon come to be later known as the infamous ‘Doomsday broadcast’, eyes half-lidded and glazing over, trembling hands resting in your lap, resisting the urge to reach out and brush away the lines of static that threatened to obscure your beloved’s perfect features. Near the end, your ears perked up when Mr. Perfect Cell revealed the precise coordinates of where he would be waiting. Exactly what he was waiting *for* mattered not in the slightest as you frantically scribbled down every word he spoke onto a napkin, partially stained by coffee creamer. The delicate paper ripped several times in your haste, but you could thankfully still read it (sort of) when all was said and done. GPS would tale care of the rest.

In fact, you were so wrapped up in your blossoming infatuation with the monster, you barely registered the blast from Cell blowing a massive hole in the wall of the TV station with a lazy wave of his hand, the deafening sound clipping the audio of every microphone in the newsroom. Even the terrified cries of the numerous casualties he left in his wake were nothing compared to the frantic beat of your hopelessly twitterpated heart.

Much to your relief, the ensuing chaos that erupted throughout the city ensured that nobody would give a shit if you didn’t bother to call in sick that morning. After all, you had much better things to do. Bigger fish to fry, so to speak. Or maybe a bigger bug, you giggled to yourself, clutching the steering wheel of your old junk-box a little tighter. Veering off the beaten path towards a secluded grassland smack dab in the literal middle of nowhere.

~

That was all little more than a month ago, before Dr. Gero’s greatest creation achieved the ultimate victory at his own sinister game; hardly above flouting the rules and playing dirty to get what he wanted, despite his self-proclaimed perfection. You stood on the sidelines— the only one spared amongst the bodies and bloodshed littering the arena— and you watched, powerless yet rapt with fascination, as Perfect Cell descended upon the feeble populace of Earth like a one-man plague of locusts.

“Eat up, sir.”, you urged gently, nudging the plate closer to his spot at the table, only to be met with an icy silence. You frowned, having gone through a lot of trouble to procure enough ingredients for this dinner, wanting to make it special. Fresh meat was hard to come by without having to hunt down the damn cow yourself, and even basic produce like potatoes and carrots were a rare commodity now that most supermarkets were nothing but hollowed-out ruins, crawling with looters. Just one side effect of the collapse of society as you knew it. But despite it all, you put in the effort for him, you always did. To cook for him, feed him with your love. Your body. *Everything* was for him. It was the least you could do after he brutally murdered the family who once occupied the house the two of you now shared, gifting you a much finer home than you could ever have dared to dream of. You had to be grateful.

After all, what was left for you on the Earth’s rotting carcass but the angel of death who destroyed it?

Arms folded, stony expression barely glancing at the food, Cell’s upper lip twitched in mild disgust. You gave an exasperated sigh, rolling your eyes towards the chandeliered ceiling. Never mind the fact you had never even seen the bio-android consume anything beyond whichever poor soul’s liquified innards he violently sucked up through his tail. You had wanted so badly to please him, and now the stubborn cicada was, well…he was just being himself.

“Pleeease? It’s gonna get cold…”, you tried again, taking a nibble of your own much smaller portion to show him what he was missing. Cell remained unmoved, only cocking his head slightly. Almost as if to say: You’ve got to be kidding.

“I don’t care if it’s cold or as hot as your planet’s pitiful sun, I refuse to ingest this…this human slop.”

“Please just try it…just one bite? Then I’ll leave you alone.”, you promised, fixing him with a certain pleading look, those irritating, sad-puppy eyes he’d come to detest for how horribly soft they made him. He grimaced, resisting the urge to grab you by the hair and smash your cute little face into the table…but he supposed he did like you better with recognizable features.

“Ugh, very well…”, Cell grumbled, picking up the knife and fork between slender fingers, pale as the fine china dish in front of him, “If it will shut that insufferable little mouth of yours.”

You couldn’t help the self-satisfied smirk that curled across your lips as Cell took a tentative bite of meat, a swift dilation of his pupils the only indication that he liked the taste. A tiny bit of dark juice dribbled down his chin as he chewed slowly, eyes narrowing as he instantly realized how wrong he had been.

“Tolerable.”, he reluctantly admitted, contemplating another bite even before he swallowed the first. A purple tongue flicked out to clean himself before adding a bitter: “At best.”

You knew he was lying, his programming wouldn’t let him. So you just scooted your chair closer to his, laying your cheek against the hard surface of his bicep, pleased as punch. Hungry for his approval.

“Soooo…I really did a good job then~?”

Cell huffed air through his nose, a non-committal sound that could’ve read as either dismissive…or ‘yeah, I guess.’

“Come on, then…tell me. You know how much I like when you say it.”, you prodded further, your tone almost cloyingly sweet as your hand slipped onto his thigh beneath the table.  

Granted, it hadn’t taken much for Cell to warm up to you yourself, let alone your cooking— or at least, find you entertaining enough not to immediately vaporize. He thought it rather amusing that you had trekked all the way to his reclusive arena just to bask in his greatness like some insipid fangirl, and your little ‘crush’, as you had so quaintly put it, only piqued his curiosity. Your feelings were obviously of no consequence, but the novelty of having an obedient plaything to toss about and take advantage of…it was far too tempting to simply ignore your advances.

“Really, human…did you not say you would leave me to eat in peace if I—”, he started, a slight, impatient growl creeping into the already deep rumble of his voice. He tried not to let his body react, but the way your fingers teased at the uber-sensitive violet flesh nestled in the crevice where his armored groin and thigh met…he all but jumped out of his seat. Even more delicious, the implication of Cell’s desire to continue eating his meal despite the lukewarm reception was not lost on you.

“...if you say it, sir.”, you finish his sentence, well aware how much it would annoy him.

The android’s insectile wings began to vibrate, a low, ominous buzz behind the back of his chair. A surefire sign of his growing agitation. However, the way you continued to manipulate him beneath the table told a very different story. Cell calmly (or tried to anyway) set the fork down, peering down his nose at you in disdain. (Again, the keyword there was ‘try.’) His respiration quickened as your small hand caressed the shiny armor plate protecting his genitalia, allowing you to savor the feel of the smooth, chitinous surface softening underneath your touch. He knew exactly what you wanted him to say, how much you craved his sweet praise like a drug in your veins…but he was Perfect Fucking Cell, for Kami’s sake. He wasn’t going to let some lowly vermin get off that easily- or at all, for that matter. You would serve him properly and thank him for even letting you have the privilege.

And besides- tonight, like every other night since the two of you met, was all about him. 

Faster than you could protest, he snatched your delicate wrist in a squeeze that made your fingers tingle, screeching his chair back so roughly that it was bound to scratch the floor.

“Presumptuous little fool…”, Cell hissed, his words cracking like a footbridge bearing too much weight. He probably needed this just as much as you did, judging by the way his inguinal carapace was already spread open, hot and leaking a clear, syrupy fluid. And oh, you could feel the prize that awaited you, slowly emerging, unfurling to its full, majestic length between your trembling fingers. Your mouth watered and he could practically smell your desperation.

It sickened him, how repulsive these base human desires could be.

“What makes you think you’ve earned it?”

You glanced up at the question with an innocence that made his face flush; the same shade of indigo that your numb fingers had begun to turn in his punishing grip.

“N-nothing, Mister Cell! B-but I…I can—”, you whimpered meekly, inevitably cowed by his raw, sexual aggression. It was all he needed. A cruel grin split across his gorgeous face, the only warning you would receive before being yanked clean from your chair and shoved to the floor at his feet. “Oh, no, no, my dear…” he chuckled, long legs shifting apart as he leaned back expectantly, making himself comfortable while also creating room for you to work.

“You will.”

~

How sweet you looked on your knees. 

Compliant and willing, those pretty lips wrapped around his shaft like warm velvet. Cell’s cock was milk-white and obscenely thick, tapering to a sinewy, almost tendrilled shape at the lavender hued head, a florid blush of color that would only darken like a bruise upon reaching peak arousal. His entire length was covered in its own self-lubricating mucus, slimy and vaguely sweet to taste as you licked a stripe up the underside. Relishing every throb and twitch against your tongue, each muttered praise or growl of begrudging approval, you only sought one goal: to chase his pleasure.

“Mmm…so eager now, are we?”, Cell practically purred as you peppered a trail of wet kisses further south, watching with lazy interest while you lapped at the sensitive folds that surrounded the base of his member, “Filthy woman…you’d probably lick human waste off the ground should I ever command it.” Dipping your tongue inside just to tease him, your hand fell to stroking him up and down with a sure and possessive grip.

“Ahh, y-yeah…if it pleases you, sir…”, you murmured, lifting your head to happily resume slurping away at the android’s huge, pulsating cock like it was your last meal. Saliva and mucus oozed from the suction of your mouth to drizzle onto your heaving breasts, soaking through your shirt in the process. But Cell didn’t mind the mess. You would be taking all of him soon enough, though the question of which hole had yet to be decided. For the moment, he was more than happy to indulge your appetite, greedy pet that you were.

~

“Enough.”, he clipped, finally tiring of using your mouth after a few more minutes had gone by. Playtime was over, and now he was ready for a different kind of release. “On your feet, little one. Undress for me.”

Even with virtually no hesitation to obey on your part, Cell’s impatient nature won out, eyes flickering dangerously before he lashed forward. Sharp nails hooked into the collar of the t-shirt you typically wore as pajamas, suddenly ripping it open at a downwards angle. The tattered remnants hung open uselessly, baring your fragile human form to his gaze.

It was a good thing you weren’t wearing anything underneath, lest you risk subjecting yourself to another swipe of those claws.

“Ah, look at this~”, he cooed, almost pitying as his hand snaked between your quivering thighs, “And here I was going to make you beg…but it seems your body has already told me everything I wanted to hear.”

Cell’s large palm cupped your aching heat, marveling inwardly at the embarrassingly wet and needy state he could reduce you to. So adorable. 

So pathetic.

“Come here…that’s a good girl.”

You barely registered the sound of those two little words you’d been longing for, drowned out by a cry of surprise as Cell dragged you forward with two fingers jammed up your cunt, his thumb applying torturous pressure to your clitoris. A sharp breath hissed through his teeth, feeling your snug inner walls cling to his digits like a vice, sucking him in. You grasped onto his powerful shoulders in response, attempting to steady yourself as the unexpected pleasure made your knees buckle. 

“Hah! You certainly are a peculiar one, darling. Surprisingly durable for such a weak little worm…”

He drilled his fingers deeper, uttering an attractively nasty laugh at the pained whine it earned him. Positioned on two feet like this, tenuous as that stance may have been, you stood at just about eye level with Cell. It was an intimidating view, your small frame situated between his legs with his hand buried firmly between your own. The lewd squelch and slosh of his pumping fingers did precious little to quell your rising desire for the monster who had ended the world, yet there was no shame in the hectic color that painted your cheeks…nor the lust that dripped down your thighs.

“Yes! I-I’m weak, I…Cell, you- you make me this way…”, you confessed awkwardly, dropping the formal title he never really made you call him in the first place. What need did he have for petty human honorifics when he already had one throwing herself at his mercy?

“Cute…”, he muttered under his breath, capturing your mouth in a forceful, demanding kiss. Devoid of any real affection, it was meant as a simple display of ownership- a claim on your body that he marked with his teeth, digging into your lower lip until you both tasted blood.

“Alright then, my little *weakling*…”, he said, pushing you back against the table so abruptly you knocked over his untouched wine glass, a mistake that might’ve earned you a sharp slap were it not for the more pressing matter at hand. However, with the plans he held in store for you, perhaps be could afford to show a modicum of kindness. 

Rising from his seat with a grace that belied his hulking, biomechanical frame, Cell leaned down to whisper hotly in your ear, rocking his hips against yours in a languid non-rhythm. His next words were frightening in their sheer dominance, nearly making you forget to breathe. 

“Show me how you break for me.”

Slippery fingers worked their way into your obediently-parted mouth, pressing down on the back of your tongue until you squirmed, fighting not to gag as Perfect Cell proceeded to fuck you right there on top of the dinner table. His pace was hard and unforgiving, tireless as the very machine he was birthed from. He hovered in mid-air, achieving the optimum height and angle to drive himself as deep as possible. Using you like a toy, he pounded your drenched pussy while his one free arm pushed your thighs so far back towards your chest that you feared he might accidentally snap you in half. Every thrust made him groan from how tight you still were, how inviting your contorted body remained despite the abuse it had endured.  

“Hahh…You take me so well, my dear…Always so, mmnh…accommodating.”

“I…I try my best. I’d do anything for you…Anything. Just want to…wanna be yours.” you panted softly, your small voice muffled as you suckled on his fingers like candy. He was getting close now, but far from wanting the moment to end. 

A rare, gentle peck of the lips graced your forehead, swelling your heart with joy. How could it be that the one person who understood you, the only man you ever truly loved, however brief…was no man at all? A heady cocktail of pleasure and euphoria fuzzied your thoughts as your own climax approached like an errant wave, and you found you could do little but succumb to its power, letting it wash you away. 

“Aw. That you would, kitten…That. You. WOULD.”

One powerful cant of his hips had you screaming his name as you came hard enough to see a full galaxy of stars flashing behind your eyelids, his cockhead nearly piercing the yielding softness of your womb. You thrashed beneath his weight as your body spasmed, pawing at the pointed crests of his crown in an attempt to hold on for dear life. But Cell just flipped you over onto your belly as easily as if you were no more than a doll (or a corpse) the flexibility of his member allowing him to stay fully sheathed in the process. Evidently, he wasn’t done with you.

Not yet.

~

“Now that you mention it, there is something I’ve been wanting to try for a while. Something I’ve only done, say…twice before.”, Cell mused thoughtfully, a wistful air in his tone that hardly matched the brutality with which he continued to violate you. Past the point of overstimulation, and barrelling into outright agony, your pelvis and the tops of your thighs smashed into the table so roughly that the squared, wooden edge began to bruise and cut into your flesh. “To be quite frank, I suppose I never found you all that deserving of such an honor. But you’ve really stepped up your game this evening…and proven your commitment to perfection.”

A single claw traced the delicate arch of your spine, making you shiver in anticipation of the new game your lover wanted to play. But as you turned your head to peek over one shoulder, you were horrified by the sight of Cell’s elongated tail, swaying back and forth like some kind of venomous serpent. The needle-like stinger dripped with the same lubricant that coated his length, and every muscle in your body seemed to clench at the realization.

“Wh-what…what are you going to—”

Confusion and panic began to take hold, settling into the pit of your stomach like a heavy blanket. Cell savored the change in demeanor, your tight hole milking him like the good little cockwarmer he expected you to be.

“Mmm…Not that your consent has ever been a factor, love, buuuut I should warn you~ This is probably going to feel a tad...uncomfortable.”

Suddenly, his hands snuck underneath your arms, hoisting you up so that your back was flush with his broad chest. Nuzzling his nose along your neck, he moved to lift one of your legs, ankle dangling limply in the air while he slammed into you even harder. By increasing his speed, he sought to test the limits of his own impressive stamina. After all, what he was about to do next would take some time, and patience was a muscle he seldom exercised.

“Don’t be afraid…”, he growled, the tip of his tail hovering closer, too close to your face. His free hand grasped hold of your chin, tilting it up so that you could watch it swish and undulate, the motions mesmerizing. “You expressed your desire to belong to me, did you not? Well, here’s your chance.”

Right before your very eyes, the narrow end of Cell’s stinger expanded into the shape of a funnel with an alarmingly wet, meaty-sounding stretch, casting a shadow over you both. You stared helplessly up into the dark, sticky void of your fate, unsure of his intentions.

“Woah, woah, wait! Cell, you’re not gonna, like…eat me, are you? Like those poor people in Nicky Town…a-and Ginger Town?”, you asked, trying and failing to sound like you weren't absolutely pissing your non-existent pants in terror. But the android just giggled, downright giddy to be able to share this intimate experience with you. He was holding back so much now, the urge to fill your insides with his seed becoming as intense as his mounting need to devour you whole. 

“Oh, of course not…though I’m sure you’d taste deliciousss.”, he added with a deep-throated rasp which unknowingly hearkened back to his imperfect days, “But no. I’m simply going to make sure you and I are never apart, even after I’ve finally eliminated this…nnnghh…revolting little mudball of a planet.”

“But I don’t under—”

Cell quieted your feeble complaints with a finger to your lips, his own covering your neck in uncharacteristically sloppy, fervent kisses. He couldn’t exactly say this was love, especially since he would be hard-pressed to even define such an abstract concept. But maybe the closest approximation was this hunger, this relentless compulsion to keep you near him. Always.

"Shhhh…I’m afraid you have no choice in the matter, sweetheart. Just close your eyes and accept this- my final gift to the only human worthy enough to receive it.”

Pure darkness enshrouded you in that moment, hot and suffocatingly tight. It squeezed the air from your lungs faster than you could fill them back up again, and before long, you began to fade. 

Further and further away, you were falling.

You weren’t even sure if Cell actually finished inside of you or not, because if he did, you never felt it. All you knew were the strong arms of oblivion, tenderly cradling you in its embrace until you reached the bottom. And through it all, even from deep inside that lightless, undying abyss…

You could hear his laughter, and it was the most beautiful song you’d ever heard.

~

“Nice and cozy in there?”

With no voice to respond, you could only listen. And wait.

“Good girl. Just hold on, love. We’ll be leaving this place...very soon.”

You heard everything that came after: a massive explosion, a burst of energy and heat that you could only sense the barest remnants of, given your limited faculties. Until there existed nothing beyond the silence of vast, empty space and Cell’s triumphant voice, echoing like a clarion call throughout your mind. Declaring yet another victory. 

You were impossibly small now, but so safe inside. Just where you were always meant to be.

Surely that could be counted as a victory in and of itself.

~

Having discovered your true purpose in life and death alike, sleep found you at last. Everything that you used to be was now a mere speck of debris caught in the beat of Cell’s wings as he took off for another world to conquer, perhaps a new toy to bend and break. Just as he had done with a certain little human whose naive obsession had led to her own demise. 

But that hardly mattered. Not even if you were replaced, or slowly forgotten with time. Nothing mattered anymore now that you were together. Free to follow your love into the ‘happily ever after’ you never believed in, you found your faith restored. Even as you were fully digested and absorbed by the god he’d become.

Now, you could be at peace.

Now, you were perfect.

[mothlady-garden]

Hi, I hope you are all well

So off to Chapter 2 & 3

Sure, who wants children when your whole civilization is one plant-epidemic away from collapsing, and there are whole cities eradicated from the face of the planet in a moment? (Or other things lurking in the shadows *looks aggressively at the EoM*)

It’s so light-hearted in the early chapters; I really like it in contrast to what’s to come. Also, this guy is hella flexible, lmao.

I love this paneling; it’s simple but effective and very atmospheric.

Yeah, sure let’s get a sign, someone might not have heard the screams of your people. “VASH THE STAMPEDE!?”

Look at this little mini cowboy; so cute.

(Reminds me of Nais little hand pistols vom STAMPEDE :3 )

His poor bones *crunch crack*

Interesting, so his boot design changes too; cool, I’ve never noticed that.

I do not remember him having cyborg arms and legs huh.

Look at him (poor guy doesn’t know what’s to come); he is so full of joy.

Friieee!!!

[tenjin-no-shinja]

Chapter 3: The History of a Shrine (Hie)

Hie in Ancient and Medieval Japan

Origins

His [Kageyama Haruki] emphasis on agricultural fertility rites is based on an equally modern thesis about the genesis of Japanese culture as the product of local communities of rice growers. Of course, rice culture was indeed a major factor in the political and economic life of ancient Japan, but a closer look at ancient kami cults, including that of Hie, reveals a range of other themes. In fact, the single kami that appears in the earliest source on Hie (Kojiki, 712) was not so much a generous god of rice as a threatening and violent force. Moreover, this kami's cult appears to have been based less on a changeless native culture than on a dynamic interaction between the expansionist politics of the Yamato kings on the one hand, and ritual specialists with continental skills and backgrounds on the other...Ōyamakui figures here among the many children of Ōtoshi-no-Kami ("the kami of great harvests"), on of Susanowo's numerous sons. This places the kami of Hie in the lineage of earthly deities from Izumo that ultimately culminated in Ōkuninushi, that earthly deity who "built the land" before handing it over to Ninigi, the heavenly ancestor of the imperial dynasty. Ōyamakui means "the great mountain peg," ad Yamasue-no-Ōnushi "the great lord of the mountain's end." ①

ーPages 69-70

① From the endnotes: "Here, I follow Nishimiya Kazutami 1979. The peg or pole (kui) could be a pillar on the mountain into which the deity was invitied to descend, or a phallic symbol.

Matsunoo... was the ancestral shrine of the Hata, a lineage of immigrants of Korean origin... weaving experts and managers of estates but also as skilled ritualists. The deity of this shrine features also in the founding legend of the neighboring Kamo Shrines.... a daughter of the Kamo chieftain found a red arrow inthe Kamo river... took home and kept in her bedding. Soon, she gave birth to a son... he was asked to serve sake to his real father at a drinking feast. Without hesitating the boy offered the sake to heaven, transformed himself into a kami, and disappeared, piercing the roof on his ascent. Like the red arrow that had fathered him, he turned out to be a deity of thunder.

This is but one instance of a motif that appears in many variants: deities who appear as snakes, arrows, and thunderbolts and who father semidivine children by impregnating young virgins...There is much to suggest that the Yamato court attached great importance to this type of cult... the hill of Miwa... was a major site of court kami worship. The deity enshrined there was Ōnamuchi or Ōmonushi—identified with Ōkuninushi...This deity shared many of Ōyamakui's characteristics... emerges as the protoypical earthly deity: a violent force that Yamato's heavenly dynasty struggled to control... the kami of Miwa transformed into a red arrow and impregnated a beautiful maiden while she was defecating in a ditch. The child... was chosen to become the wife of Jinmu.... Nine royal generations later, when Yamato was plagued by a mortal epidemic, the kami of Miwa appeared to Emperor Sujin in a dream... declared that the disease was his doing and demanded that his spirit be served by a certain Ōtataneko. Soon, it became clear that... was a child of the Miwa deity himself, who had entered the sleeping quarters of Ōtataneko's mother in the guise of a snake by way of the keyhole (Philippi 1969: 201-4)... later Emperor Yūryaku dispatched one of his vassals of Korean stock to seize the Miwa deity. It turned out to be a large snake that cracked thunder at the emperor, forcing him to flee (Aston 1972: I, 347).

Ōtataneko was the ancestor of the priestly lineages of both Miwa and Kamo. The priests of Hie... claimed the same ancestry as the priests of Kamo. This suggests that they were part of an extensive network of intermarrying priestly lineages who controlled a category of earthly deities that threatened the heavenly rule of the Yamato kings with the help of techniques that were, at least in part, of continental origin.

—Pages 70-71

Photos are mine do not use without permission

Hie, then, was not an archetypical indigenous cult that flourish in an apolitical, harmonious setting of rice-growing natives. Rather, it emerged in the context of the establishment of the Yamato kingdom, as one of a range of sites where the dangerous deities of the earth were subdued with the help of immigrants who possessed special knowledge of continental rites.

—Page 72

[autisticlancemcclain]

prev chapter

———

It actually takes them a moment to find everyone, once they get to the library. Clearly, any lingering doubt from the team has evaporated, and they’re all here to give their all. They find Pidge up to her ears in laptops and tablets and wires, twelve screens blinking at her at once, code running across the screen so quickly it actually makes Keith a little dizzy. Shiro is sitting on a table with a book half his size propped open on his lap. Hunk is scanning through a truly ancient looking scroll.

The Alteans are nowhere to be found.

“Maybe they doubled back to the bridge?” Lance suggests. “Allura mentioned talking to a couple people in the Coalition to see if that lead anywhere.”

No sooner are the words out of his mouth is there a flash of light, a blue so bright it’s almost white, blinding the entire library for a moment.

“Or they’re doing Star Trek amounts of space magic fuckery,” Lance mutters, and takes off immediately in the direction of the light source, dragging Keith behind him. The rest of the team, intrigued by the flash, isn’t far behind them.

At the centre of the light flash are Allura and Coran, eyes glowing white, palms pressed to a crystal carving on the wall. A crack snakes out from where their palms are placed, circling up and around to form a giant rectangle, and then the wall crumbles away.

Keith gapes. “Space fuckery indeed.”

Without another word, the team follows the Alteans down the dimly lit hallway, through a series of twisting tunnels, walls lined with carvings and paintings. They walk in silence for at least fifteen minutes, eventually forming a single file line as the tunnels get narrower, until the path finally gives way to a giant, gaping cave-like room. The ceiling goes up so high that Keith can’t see it, he just knows that it goes up. The walls are lined with shelves and shelves off books, and several more shelves are floating around the massive room. The entire room glows a faint blue.

“Welcome to the very centre of the most ancient building of Altea,” Coran says. He hardly speaks above a whisper, but his voice seems to echo. “Most of the building — the castle — is familiar to you, having been renovated to added onto the structure more recently, but this room here is one and a half billion years old.” Coran speaks quietly, reverently, moreso in a voice one might use on holy ground rather than a museum. And it feels right, too — there’s something big and powerful and ancient and suffocating about this place, like the mere air in the room enters Keith’s lungs and dissolves into his spirit. He almost feels as if he should take off his shoes, speak only in a whisper. This place feels like the beginning of everything.

Coran turns to Keith. His normally jovial expression is solemn, eyes dim and solemn. “Your situation is faintly familiar to me, my dear,” he says softly. “‘An endless living torture.’” The way he says it is almost like an incantation, like a recitation of a spell. “When I was very small, eons ago, my village was hit with an epidemic. Unusual for any village in Altea, to become panicked and weakened by a disease they could not recognise and could not heal, and that lack of security made the panic worse. The children and the elderly were the most affected, although much of the infection seemed random. Most, if not all, of the infected met their end.”

There’s a long, thick moment of silence. Every single one of them is leaned closely to Coran, likely without realizing it, eyes wide and brows creased, hands tense at their sides. Even Allura drinks up every one of Coran’s words, story completely foreign to her.

“It took too long for the alchemists to finally discover a solution,” Coran continues. “At that point, so many had died that it had seemed almost pointless. Many more bonds were ruined, after unkindness brewed from the fear of the unknown. I remember my closest friend died before I could even see her, because my parents confined me to the house, terrified I’d catch the illness from her. No one felt safe, and so no one felt compassionate. Very few, rather. Some risked their lives to care.

“The alchemists’ elixir was as hard-won as it was miraculous. In the end the illness had been a parasite, mutated by a chance string of fate. Once the problem had been identified the solution was almost easy, and quickly the sick were healed and the healthy were immunized. Great precautions spread quickly to the rest of Altea, warning other villages and the kingdom, protecting all the other people. But the damage in my village was already done.”

“Is that what I have?” Keith asks, voice coming out hoarse. His heart pounds. “A parasite? Is the rest of the team at risk?”

Coran shakes his head, and if possible the dread in his expression grows heavier. “I wish you had the parasite. It would be less foreboding, less abstract. The parasite at least is a physical illness, and one for which our MedBay is equipped to treat, for which I am easily able to identify and treat.”

The advisor sags forward, as if the energy has suddenly been sapped from him, as if someone has cut the strings that kept him upright. When he speaks again is voice is quieter than a whisper, and Keith has to strain to hear it.

“After the outbreak…the leader of the village never forgave xemself. Xe felt fully and completely responsible for the outbreak, and the guilt of the aftermath — obvious in both the many funeral pyres xe had to help burn, and the scarring left behind in those who had been healed — haunted xem everywhere xe went. No one blamed xem, of course. In fact it was the bravery of the leader that led to the discovery of the cure in the first place, as xe was one of the few people who refused to bow to the fear of infection and cared for the sick, getting samples from them also. But still xe felt the burden of fault on xis shoulders, and it was to heavy for xem to bear.

“One day the leader broke down in the square; collapsed sobbing to the ground. Xe was completely inconsolable, even to xis wife. It took hours to calm xem enough to speak. We found out —” Coran pauses for a moment, choked, as if the words are hard to even form — “we found out that long past the day the alchemists came with their solution, long past the days the final funeral pyre had been burned, the leader had been reliving the death of xis people. Again and again, xe was reliving it; in different ways every time, but the same deaths. It had never ended for xem. The days had passed normally for us, but the leader’s agony and guilt about the tragedy had warped xis quintessence, trapping xem in a purgatory of xis own making.”

Keith makes a strangled noise. In a second there are hands on him, several, big and calloused, prosthetic, ring-clad. His team is an immediate vessel of support for him, holding him carefully, pillars at his back and his sides.

A purgatory of your own making. That sounds about right. That sounds like the hell Keith is living in, day after day, and of course he’s the own root of his problems, of course he has made things more complicated for himself again.

“How do we fix it?” Pidge asks, and her voice isn’t small or scared. She sounds determined. It’s an instant calm to his heart, a balm to his fear. A quick look around to his team shows identical expressions.

Whether or not he has made this problem for himself, whether or not it’s his own guilt that is so suffocating that it’s killing him, torturing him, his team is going to help him fix it.

Lance catches his gaze and smiles, brown eyes warm and constant, familiar, and knocks their heads together gently. “We got this, Samurai.”

Lance is going to help him fix it.

“That’s why I have brought you here,” Coran answers. “I was young when this happened. I don’t remember all of it. But I remember the solution was ancient, because this curse is ancient. We had to consult the knowledge of the farthest of our Altean ancestors, when magic was at its most concentrated.” He spreads his arms wide, and the low hum of quintessence thrumming through the room pulses at his signal. He smiles slightly, a mix of wry and proud and encouraging.

“We’re going to have to search.”

———

next chapter

[battleangel]

Why I am Antinatalist

TW: mentions & descriptions of r*pe.

Absolutely fucking sickening.

Dude, its motherfucking December.

Its practically freezing temperatures outside, in the 30s.

So, tell me why the fucking humidity is 80%+?

I am 42 and I have never seen humidity levels this high during winter.

Whats the cause?

Climate change endlessly driven by capitalist excess, human greed, zero sum late stage capitalism, consumerism, overconsumption, materialism, corporatism, lobbying and profiteering.

Basically, humanity.

Humanity caused climate change.

Therefore, end humanity.

Its not complicated.

Neither is antinatalism, which is the belief that is morally unjust to create a life.

Why?

The better question is, why is society so endlessly pronatalist?

Why is pronatalism the default stance?

Why?

Because people cant get over their disgusting self-serving obsessive egotistical need to have little mini-mes running around as extensions of their pathetic self-aggrandizing selves and their disgusting myopic need to continue their respective bloodlines, add to their lineages, create their own family trees and create and propagate endless children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren and so on because individually if you (universal) have 1 to 2+ kid(s) and those kid(s) go on to have their own kid(s) -- when does it stop?

When does it ever stop?

How many ecocidal, environmentally destroying, climate change causing and contributing, landfill filling, ozone depleting, overconsuming, plastic using, oil guzzling, carbon footprint having, non biodegradable using, GMO consuming, pollutant causing, fast fashion shopping, Amazon Prime Delivery in 1 Day demanding, 1400 pounds of trash a year generating, thousands of gallons of water wasted a year just showering, electricity consuming, excessive indoor temperature control (AC/heat) energy vampire little cunts do you need to personally shit out to feel "complete" and "fulfilled"?

Pronatalism is a motherfucking joke but is the literal default in virtually all human societies.

Humanity is nothing but a self-replicating virus that has caused immeasurable harm to the planet and inexplicably to itself as a species yet still it continues to endlessly self-replicate as mindlessly as the Borg on Star Trek.

Never an independent rational emotionally detached logical reasoned out devoid of societal pressures, rewards and punishments thought, just wombs to be endlessly assimilated by the Pronatalist Borg Masculine Patriarchal Seed Collective.

How many little shits will you generate even from having "just 1 kid" because then how many kid(s) does that "only 1 kid" go on to have?

Just dont have them.

Stop your own personal lineage with yourself.

Stop adding to the human experiment.

It has failed.

Why?

I would think it would be obvious but here we are at this late stage in the game in 2023 with people allowing themselves to become impregnanted and I am endelssly pressured as a woman to immediately say, "Congratulations!"

Congratulations for fucking what?

The human experiment has failed for endless reasons:

Genocides. War crimes. Ethnic cleansings. Chemical warfare. Mass graves. Mass incarceration. Public executions. Lynchings.

Terrorism. Carpet bombings. Civilian slaughter. Bombing schools. Bombing hospitals. Hostage taking. Hostage execution.

Human experimentation. Tuskegee Airmen. Forced sterilizations (Puerto Rican women by the US government).

MK Ultra. Big agriculture. Big pharma. Military industrial complex.

Raytheon, Northrop Grumman & Lockheed Martin company stocks exponentially increasing 300%+ since 20k+ Palestinian civilians have been murdered over the past 2 months.

Endless wars. Endless profiteering. Duopoly. False agendas. Propaganda. Misinformation campaigns.

Burning innocent witches at the stake.

Forced births.

Crack epidemic in the 80s caused by Reagan flooding the Black inner cities with crack cocaine.

Endless exploitation.

Hundreds of millions killed by the death cult known as capitalism via houselessness, poverty, hunger, famine, lack of universal health care and affordable medical insurance, violence stemming from capitalist patriarchal systems held and endlessly reinforced by militarism, police states, toxic masculinity, sexual violence, misogyny, oppression of females and femmes, transphobia and homophobia, policing of women and femmes behavior, dress, mannerisms, sexuality, career choices, life decisions (marriage, motherhood) and personality and a constant demand for women and femmes to be polite, "nice", agreeable, inoffensive, pliant, and especially likeable at all times even and especially when we are being mentally/physically/emotionally/sexually/spiritually/financially abused, manipulated, gaslit, harrassed, assaulted, attacked, controlled, coerced, raped, beaten, isolated, ostracized, humiliated, silenced, repressed, suppressed, oppressed, intimidated, stalked, threatened and even killed.

As a woman and a femme, you are endlessly groomed, societally conditioned, raised, brainwashed and endlessly pressured and rewarded for constantly apologizing, shrinking yourself, making everyone else feel comfortable at the expense of yourself, endlessly justifying yourself, endlessly having to explain yourself and defend yourself, never being confident as it will be misconstrued as cocky, never being assertive because it will be misconstrued as aggressive, never speaking up for yourself because you will wrongly be called a bitch, never taking charge as you will be hated, never being logical by detaching your emotions as you will be accused of being cold and heartless, never deciding your actions and behavior through reasoning and logical deduction as you will be endlessly pilloried for not thinking with your heart instead of your head, endless pressure at all times to perform emotion and to "wear your heart on your sleeve", constant demands at a societal macro level to perform feminity, maternal care and emotional labor at work meetings & functions, holiday parties/dinners/events, performing emotional labor in all situations and environments regardless of personality (having to attend baby showers at work even if you are an antinatalist and/or childfree woman, having to excessively emote if there is a personal tragedy reported at work with no corresponding requirement for male employees -- miscarriage, hospitalization, accident, death, firing, layoff, etc.).

Rapes, sexual trafficking, sexual slavery, slavery, child sex trafficking, child molestation, child abuse, pedophilia, murders, tortures.

Pharmaceutical industrial complex, pathologizing of normal behavior by the psychiatric industrial complex, overmedicalization, misdiagnoses, overprescribing prescription medication, excessive nonsensical harmful medical interventions, extending life beyond all sense and reason to the point where the interventions are needlessly painful, harmful and completely unnecessary versus accepting death as not just a part of life but a beautiful transformation that should be embraced and not feared, contrived forced and constantly pushed and reinforced fear of death, sexual repression.

Women getting a scarlet letter for being a slut, whore, hoe; men getting an "attaboy" for being a player, stud, ladies man for the exact same sexually promiscuous behavior.

Tyranny of motherhood and demands for women to do constant endless unpaid domestic and emotional labor for their children for absolutely zero compensation and very little social reward beyond perfunctory lip service once a year on Mothers Day.

Endless materialism, endless consumption, endless consumerism, capitalist excess, corporatism, lobbying, fake news, us vs them, tribalism, political prisoners.

Child soldiers, child brides.

Famine, poverty, houselessness, lack of clean water, gun crime, gun deaths, drivebys, AK-47s, machine guns, serial killers, serial rapists, Columbines, Sandy Hooks.

False flag events, paid actors, green screens, sound stages, scripted events, rigged elections, Mandela effects, strangers in Moscow.

Gang violence, frat hazings, initiations, kidnappings, abductions.

Religious cults, priests raping altar boys, Eagle Scouts raping Cub Scouts, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hamas, IDF, US military.

Elementary schools, churches and theaters being shot up.

Police brutality, Ahmed Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Say Her Name, Hands Up Dont Shoot, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Its just a bag of Skittles officer.

13 year old boy shot dead, not by the police, but by a Stand Your Ground civilian.

Dont Tread On Me Zionist Proud Boy.

Islamophobia, racism, white supremacy, racially motivated killings, hate crimes.

Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk.

Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook.

Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel.

Roger Goodell and Vince McMahon.

She was asking for it, what was she wearing, was she drinking, why was she out so late, she went upstairs with him what did she expect.

Theres no such thing as marital rape, feminazis invented that term in the 90s.

I dont care if you have a headache.

I dont care if you dont like anal, flip over and stop complaining.

Its not my fault that youre bleeding.

Then stop tensing up and it wont hurt so much.

I bought you the anal numbing cream and youre still complaining? Its lidocaine. Shut up.

I want anal every week so were having it.

I hit you open handed no bruising. Stop complaining.

I want to cum on your face. Theres nothing wrong with facials. Stop complaining. Leave your glasses on. Now take them off. Open your eyes. Keep them open.

Im into golden showers. Stop complaining.

Im into scat. Stop complaining.

Im into spanking. I didnt hit you that hard. Stop complaining.

Im into choking during sex. Its okay to not be able to breathe. Its only for a few seconds. Stop complaining.

I like biting your nipples. Its supposed to hurt. Stop complaining.

I like slapping your cunt. Stop complaining.

I like spitting in your mouth. Stop complaining.

I like roleplaying. Youre going to be 8 years old. Im going to be your uncle. Yes, during sex. Its just a roleplay. Stop complaining.

When can I put one of our videos on stileproject? You'd be good in porn. Why cant I upload them? Why do you say no to everything?

Okay, put your forearms on the floor and your legs on the coach on either side of my waist. No, were going to have anal this way. Im tired of doggy and Im tired of you riding me and Im tired of missionary. Were going to have anal in different positions. Youre tiny and flexible. Do it. Stop complaining.

Then stop gagging and stop throwing up. Theres no reason why you shouldnt be able to deepthroat me. Then work on your gag reflex. Stop complaining.

Get in the bathroom stall. Now. We'll be done in time for the start of Revenge of the Sith. Face away from me. The wall. Stop complaining. Pull your shorts down. Hurry up. No, in the butt. I dont want to wait to get to my house. Hurry up so you can still get your popcorn shrimp. Stay still. Stop moving so I can get it in. Be quiet. Youre not bleeding that much. Stop complaining.

Take your jeans off now. Do it. Im not in the mood for your little girl shit. Take them off. Stop crying. Both pant legs. Now. Hurry up so I can take you home to your fucking father. Stop crying! Be quiet. Hurry up. Its the least you can do after you danced all night at your cousins party.

Dont lie to me. Youve had sex since the restraining order. Shut up. Dont tell me what to do. Nothing hurts. I dont believe you. Hm. It is tight. Youre not hurt. Shut up. Be quiet, let me do this. Stop moving around and stay on top of me. Stay still. Stop shaking. Youre not bruised and youre not swollen. Stop talking. I still dont believe you havent had sex since we stopped dating. Dont talk to me. Leave me alone.

Dark side of private life.

Abusive spouses, murderous spouses.

Respected couple, matriarch and patriach, pillars of the church and community, married for almost 50 years.

Golden anniversary, golden showers.

Dark secrets, dark pasts, hidden criminal pasts, hidden felonies, hidden convictions, hidden prison sentences, lies to daughters, lies to mothers, lies to wives, repressed background check reports.

Might makes right, force, violence, imposing physical will, domination, vanquishing, crushing, destroying.

Humanity has had hundreds of thousands of years to fix these issues.

But we havent.

Were still -- as a species -- murdering, killing, raping, shooting, stabbing, enslaving, ethnic cleansing, erasing, occupying, colonizing, settling, imprisoning, making thousands of animal species extinct, filling thousands of landfills, destroying thousands of acres of rainforests, destroying ecosystems, overfishing, overextracting earths resources, killing indigenous people for diamonds, emeralds, ore, minerals, etc., pillaging, causing climate change, unsustainably raising the planets temperatures, causing wars and genocides, profiting off of and creating jobs for the manufacture and sale of weapons and bombs used to kill civilians mothers daughters grandmothers babies toddlers children teens students hospital patients fathers sons grandfathers teachers doctors nurses volunteers protestors intellectuals conscientious objectors love warriors revolutionaries prophets, AI cloning metaverse social media messaging apps streaming shows endless scroll always on never off, non stop notifications Slack Teams Google Meet Citrix Trello Asana Outlook Gmail corporate slave golden handcuffs modern day plantation.

The solution to all of the above unimaginable suffering is human extinction.

The solution is stop reproducing.

Stop procreating.

Stop pronatalism.

Stop humanity.

Reject societys non-stop endless brainwashing, programming, conditioning, grooming, messaging, demands, pressures and coercion to be pronatalist and reproduce endless bodies for the capitalist Borg machine.

Stop producing workers for them!

Rockefeller invented modern day public education and school systems because he wanted a "docile and obedient" workforce.

Thats all K-12 is because its all it was designed to be -- a feeder system for corporate, nothing more nothing less.

K-12 -- and college -- works exactly the way its designed to.

It breeds endless acquiescence to authoritatian figures.

Coaches, band leaders, music conductors, dance instructors, choir leaders, school counselors, school nurses, teachers, disciplinarians, principal as God figurehead.

Organized religion is the exact same -- endless acquiescence to authoritarian figures (priests, bishops, nuns, ministers, pastors, imams, Catholic pope as ultimate authority and God figurehead).

Corporate is the exact same (supervisor, +1, VP, Officer, CEO as ultimate authority and God figurehead).

Nuclear patriarchal family is the exact same (older siblings, older cousins, aunts/uncles, grandparents, mother, father as ulimate authority and God figurehead).

Government is the exact same (local representatives, mayor, governor, Congressmen/women, Senator, Speaker of the House, Supreme Court justices, President & Commander In Chief as ultimate authority and God figurehead; provinical representatives, Prime Minister, princes & princesses, dukes & duchesses, King as ultimate authorities and God figureheads; Queen is ultimate maternal archetype - "God save the Queen!").

Law enforcement is the exact same (beat and traffic cops, detectives, officers, seargants, captains, Chief of Police as precincts ultimate authority and God figurehead).

Military is the exact same (foot soldiers cannon fodder sausage for the sausage factory, squad leaders, corporals, seargents, captains, generals (1 through 5 star), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as ultimate authority and God figurehead).

End the karmic cycle of humanitys universal suffering.

Say no to pronatalism and no to breeding.

Say no to continuing environmental destruction, ecological destruction, ecocide, rainforest destruction, landfills, environmental waste, climate change, ozone depletion, animal species going extinct, wars, genocides, ethnic cleansing, chemical warfare, civilian slaughter, carper bombings, hostage taking, executions, tortures, lynchings, slavery, sexual slavery, sex trafficking, child trafficking, rapes, molestation, abuse, child abuse, domestic violence, murders, shootings, stabbings, drivebys, fatal hazings, kidnappings, abudctions, child soldiers, child brides, political prisoners, civil wars, tribalism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, hate crimes, racialized violence, toxic masculinity, military industrial complex, police states, militarism, empire building, war machines, commodification, profiteering, capitalism, excess, materialism, overconsumption, consumerism, lobbying, duopoly, fake news, agendas, misinformation campaigns, forced births, misdiagnoses, overmedicalizations, pathologizing of normal behavior, CTE, concussions, head impacts, permanent brain damage, violence, misogynoir, terorrism, mass shootings, human experimentation, forced sterilizations, mass incarceration, prison industrial complex, military industrial complex, medical industrial complex, corporate plantation, man as machine, dehumanizations, beatings, objectifications, fetishizations, cheapening of human life, commodifications, globalism, slave labor, slave wages, exploitation, endless wars, death squads, rape rooms, comfort women, profiteering, religious cults, forced baptisms, family secrets, abusive family patriachs and matriarchs, capitalist death cult, dictatorships, cults of personality, strongmen, deceivers, manipulators, gaslighters, thieves in the night...

Stop contributing to the endless cycle of human suffering and do something to end it.

Dont reproduce. Dont procreate. Dont have children.

Abstain from sex and be celibate, masturbate, watch porn, read erotica. Or have sex and use birth control, pills, sponges, patches, injections, surgical implants, spermicide, condoms, tubes tied or lasered, withdrawal, Plan B and/or abortion. Or have sex other than vaginal sex (oral, anal, manual, intercrural, etc.).

Just dont add to the already failed and flailing on its ass 7 billion plus strong current human experiment.

[vivianbernadetteaurora]

HOLLYWEIRD

This place is crazy , so many people I've told stories about Hollywood and what it's like that you get people just shooting up on the street so smoking cracked and meth , that people are just wondering around aimously and in mental States and that it's not unusual to see bodies dead bodies scary hey, Hollywood in the last few years I believe as well as other massive homeless epidemic and a lot of people who started off out there has to have ended up in other places such as Texas Nashville or New York or many other places, you see what it does to celebrities and how it changes them so quickly people like Beyonce is a perfect example I always say who is a Christian girl supposedly who came from Texas and her dad gave up her career as a kind of Joe Jackson figure in her life and became the manager he even said how white axe got the way more Than Black acts and how it was very racist in the industry, Michael Jackson used to say this about Tommy matola and called him the devil, this is the man who is married to Mariah Carey who is like 20 years his junior at the time he met her at a party and she gave him a tape of her singing, he was responsible for her early career and was the head at Sony. But Paul moriah got work to the bitter end she wasn't allowed to wear any clothes that showed off her figure had to be a black dress down to her feet and hardly any cleavage he was a very jealous man he didn't even want her working with any male acts even though she loved hip-hop and grew up on it, in fact Mariah Carey is a white passing woman who when she talks in her book she talked about how her black side wasn't embraced as much and how her mother was an opera singer and to some degree Mariah has always been controlled, even her older sister tried to pimp her out, the sister was a heroin addict prostitute who was a lot older than Mariah along with the brother they have both been quite disloyed Mariah over the years and expected her to pay for things that she had willingly given them anyway I think supposedly now the sister has HIV or AIDS, and in the career it can literally take you and tell you apart it literally chooses the people it does this do as well, it all works on blackmail and what they can get on you so if you see a celebrity on the cover of your favourite magazine I can guarantee you they have been bribed into doing this for some sort of repayment of something or other.

Then you get young party girls and groupies and models who want to make it out there and when they make it out there they become a hooked on drugs with eating disorders and really depressed they have this distorted image of themself because they've been told such bad things, Bobby Jean Brown Tommy Lee's girlfriend when he got with Pam Anderson they don't talk about this but they were together for like 18 months before he got married to pamela on the beach a few weeks later, then because Tommy Lee had a feud with the builder at their home he came in and took their safe and release their sex tape on the internet it wasn't one of these Kim Kardashian ones where the mum was her pimp it literally was taken from their home and was their personal honeymoon video I believe, if we're going to be honest I'm sure Pam has a sex tape with Brett Michaels before she even got with Tommy, not that makes it right for this material to believe in released even if this woman was very sexually in the price it doesn't matter that's a perfect personal private business and what they do in their own time should be their personal business and their thing.

Then you have people like Drew Barrymore and Nicole Richie two girls who are very similar I believe and a Hollywood's children that start with Nicole she was at a prince concert when she was a really little girl and she was like playing with instruments backstage and with her family I think her father was in the band possibly, and the mum took these places that weren't very suitable for her soon she was in the care of Lionel Richie and his wife, and they really fell for and looked after her seeing the ended up having half a longer than they were meant to and she was adopted by them later and said how much she was loved by both of them. Then you have Drew Barrymore who is a famous Hollywood family she is from a famous Hollywood family this is the girl who was doing drugs from so young you can see pictures of studio 54 when she is like eight years old well her mom was partying she let her daughter do whatever she wanted and was getting sober at the age of 14, most people you know don't even start drugs by that age if they do but she was in this world and it was just became normal to her she's very nice person it from what we're seeing.

But Hollywood seems to be a drug on its own we've seen many times over Harvey Weinstein Jeffrey Epstein the island the Lonely to express all the scary things that you would see and roseme's baby or eyes Wide Shut I really believe that these things that happen you have seen it time and time again and people are questioning it still even when the story Remains the Same it's quite terrifying to believe that this is all true and you can even think your favorite celebrity has probably had connections to it in some way or another even if they were as touched at the Epstein flight logs it doesn't necessarily I don't think mean that they went to the island for whatever I think it just means that maybe they use the plan I'm not too sure and I don't think we will ever know that the degree that maybe we should. Then you have people like Mark latia, who has a YouTube channel called soft white underbelly where he talks to drug addicts, prostitutes, pimps, PDF files, Runaways, War veteran's and many other kinds of people most of which are on the Hollywood strip or figaroa it has been attached now to quite controversial things one of which was a girl who had been on these channel many times, she was a crack addict who'd been abused by her dad and she spoke about it many times on the channel then there is this woman called Lena who ran some kind of rehab center where you were visual devices where you are faced with your addiction in a room,. The side part of this is she was getting clean and doing alright people for and there was updates on this they even had the dad on the channel who is supposedly the one who molested her sat with this woman, and this rehab Center where she had these visual aids a woman who was mentally ill and it made her very unwell and she ended up dying when not too sure of the cause of death and let's face it we don't even get told the proper cause of death a lot of the time .

And a lot of people felt that Mark wanted someone who is the most fucked up on his channel to go to this centre with this woman to make money and make profits and make views very sad rest in peace.

Then you get people like Julia Roberts there have been in the industry for fears and have been told that they're a bitch for many many years, this is one I actually believe but a lot of the women who have been called bitches I have a lot of respectful because these are ones who protect themselves and they get called this because they have looked after their self and their power and don't just expect anything last and good good on them if a man did they would be completely different and there will be calling his praises anyway this is just a little intro until some of the ways of Hollywood, there's also a lady called Angeline who is profit of looking like a Hollywood woman what you imagined big tits curvy body blonde big hair there's even a documentary series about I haven't seen it but it looks interesting and she makes money by with her interesting car and her interesting unique looks.

[blindedbythedarkness]

My mind is so full right now. I feel more emotions than I can name thoughts, but there's just so much going on. When I was younger, my dad used to tell me that anxiety is just intolerance of uncertainty. Well, I have a hell of a lot of uncertainty right now and I get why people don't tolerate it, it's fucking uncomfortable.

At university, I have to make a decision which could mean giving up my dreams of being a doctor. Either that, or say nothing about being caused likely permanent harm by the institutions that were supposed to protect me. The real kicker is, I daren't even say more than that in case I post the wrong thing and fuck it all up both ways. Who can I even speak to about it? No one in my life has any useful advice for me because people just don't have to make massive fucking decisions like this on the regular. It all feels so heavy and maybe I'm an adult now, but I still feel like a kid with no clue what to do.

I also feel like I'm losing my parents. Both, at the same time. Though actually I think I've already lost my dad. He gave into the crowds last year and dropped all Covid precautions to "live his life". He's always been fixated on living at least to the age of his mother, which gives him 8 more years. His current lifestyle means if nothing changes, I doubt he'll make it there, at least without serious health issues. He wouldn't give a fuck if I told him though. It's all too hypothetical and he's too cynical that he doesn't want to live longer anyway. I don't think he can even conceive of how it is to live with serious chronic illness, he probably thinks he's built different and could just push through. I'm a living, breathing example of the damage Covid could do, but despite sharing half my genes, it could never happen to him. Even if it did, he'd just try harder than me.

I lie awake for hours at night, my mind involuntarily churning out essays and letters to the people in my life who's life choices are breaking my heart fragment by fragment. I beg my brain to shut up and let me rest, knowing I'll never bother to send them, but I just can't sleep again until its down on paper.

To my dad, I imagine writing him letters explaining how I know he's never prioritized me in his life, but perhaps he could reconsider. I want to tell him how he's killing me on the inside more each day with his decisions. I want to beg him to reconsider, because I want him to last long enough to see me married and meet my children; they'll already be lacking two grandparents, please don't make it one more. I want to threaten him, tell him when his brain is bursting with the fucked up proteins that mean he can't think or remember who I am anymore, all because he gave up and gave in to SARS2, it will be me who chooses his care home. Care homes which will lack even more staff, and will be even more expensive as the early onset dementia epidemic explodes a decade from now. I want to ask him if it was all for nothing, me rebuilding our relationship? Because if he carries on like this, I'll have no choice but to build walls to protect myself from the anticipatory grief. Do I really mean so little to him? He's choosing a few short years of the old-normal instead of me having a future with him in it.

I've shared similar thoughts with my mum and she seemed to understand my point of view, yet I'm still afraid she'll follow him down the same path. She says she's trying to balance being safe and living her life, and I understand no one can be perfect. But the world is growing more hostile and she's faced opposition to masking at work. She's never had as many balls as me, so I worry eventually she'll crack. She went on holiday recently, and there's not a single mask in her pictures. I know she likes to take it off for photos, but how can I know she ever wore it at all. If I question her, she scolds me for not trusting her, as if I haven't had an endless conveyor of friends and family willing to trade my life for brunch these past 4 years- of course I have trust issues. It also seems that she made a new friend on holiday, a friend that could become more. I have no issue with that, it'd be good for her. But what if they don't understand Covid? What if she caves to keep them in her life and trades safety for companionship?

I just feel so lost, and I have so many questions with answers I'm afraid to find out. But without them, I'm in some sort of emotional purgatory. I do have friends who I know would care. But one would never understand. Another is busy seeing family. Another is too new for me to drop all this on. And the one who would understand it most has her own horrors to contend with right now and I don't want to add to her stress. Meanwhile, my therapist is on holiday for a month.

Plus, and its small by comparison, I've spent the last two months in new-pet limbo. We've kept rats for the last 5 years and they've really been amazing for company, joy and amusement throughout this current dystopia. But we lost our last one two months ago and now an empty cage sits right in the middle of our living room. I've spent so much time and energy researching breeders and joining new lists, but there's been so many unanswered emails and painfully slow waits for responses. It would just be nice to know when this one nice thing will be back in my life.

How I feel right now is like no simple depression that, looking back, is what I had in my late teens. This is years of acute-on-chronic compounded trauma and discrimination and loss of even the most basic human need- safety. I'm numb and yet my whole chest hurts. I find myself wishing it would change, in either direction. I have fleeting thoughts of overdose on antidepressants or cutting myself, just to fortify the numbness or finally break through the walls around my heart. But I won't. Instead, I'll do just what I've been doing for four fucking years- enduring. Tolerating. Staying alive and not self-destructing. But inside, I'm crumbling more than ever.

Oh please, dear God, let things improve soon. There has to be a light at the end of this and I'm so desperate to live to see it.

[granvarones]

i dreamed about my mother for the first time in a long time last night. waking from those all-too-real dreams used to leave me wallowing in the quicksand of regret over the loss of control over things we had no control of. but not this time. i spent the rest of the day watching shows she loved, like “murder she wrote” and “matlock.” i listened to the music she loved, like donna summer and the pointer sisters. and then i was reminded that my taste for all things queer can be traced back to her.

my mother loved divas. dionne, diana, patti, liza, and tina turner. my mother loved all these women because of the unwavering resilient energy they radiated. beyond their musical prowess and ability to set every stage on fire with their electrifying performances, even as a young music lover, i recognized that they were all an emblem of strength and inspiration – even if i could not communicate why and how. but i knew by watching my mother scream aloud during tina turner’s now legendary 1985 grammy performance, where she so fiercely walked down a staircase that looked as if it was ascending from heaven, that tina turner was the queen of queens. a queen of rock that reigned supreme.

my love for tina officially began upon the release of her single, “we don’t need another hero.” featured in the post-apocalyptic "mad max beyond thunderdome" motion picture starring mel gibson and tina herself, "we don't need another hero," and its accompanying music video captured my imagination in ways that no other diva did before or after. her striking woman warrior presence in a dystopian world refusing to wait for a savior, coupled with the song’s somber sonic tone and powerful lyrics, resonated with me as a queer kid who was ruthlessly teased in school and teased in family circles because of my mother’s struggle with addiction. the song was a kind of rallying cry because even at such a young age, i knew that saviors and messiahs were often simply fairy tales.

out of the ruins

out from the wreckage

i can't make the same mistake this time

we are the children

the last generation

we are the ones they left behind

“mad max beyond thunderdome” and “we don’t need another hero” were released in july 1985, just as the nuclear cold war era was coming to an end. the movie’s theme of communities attempting to rebuild in the aftermath of nuclear war appealed to moviegoers during a time when the cold war era was coming to an end after years of nuclear war between the us and russia. while there was a budding hope in the air of nuclear disarmament, Black and latinx communities were left behind just as the onslaught of the AIDS crisis and crack epidemic was annihilating us. our communities were left out of the vision of a peaceful world.

looking for something

we can rely on

there's got to be something better out there

love and compassion

their day is coming

all else are castles built in the air

tina’s brilliant vocal performance encapsulates her indomitable spirit and invites the listeners to be defiant in a crumbling world. and, for me, the most powerful and compelling part of the song at its climax when she powerfully sings, “all the children say!...” and the children’s choirs beautifully sing the song’s hook:

we don't need another hero

we don't need to know the way home

all we want is life beyond the thunderdome

decades after its release, "we don't need another hero" holds significance in history, pop culture, and my personal story. the song serves as evidence of not just the worlds my mother and myself survived but the new worlds built and rebuilt by those in our communities. it is a lesson of not needing heroes as much as we need each other. maybe that’s why my mother visited me in dreams. to remind me, this is one of the reasons why tina is queen. because her voice changed how we hear, see, feel, and experience the world.

all hail the queen.

rest in power, tina.

[theoscarsproject]

Crack USA (1989). America Undercover goes to Florida's Palm Beach County in order to investigate the growing crack cocaine epidemic in the United States. It talks to police officers and follows them as they work undercover to make arrests. It also talks to drug dealers and drug users.

Enormously sensationalist and alarmist, this short documentary on crack feels like such a product of its time. There are car chases, bereaved parents, cop stings, courtroom verdicts, children talking about using and dealing, all with a voiceover from The Simpson's Fat Tony! Still, there are moments of genuine emotion here, and a lot of the kids in particular are generous and articulate about their own addictions in a way that makes for compelling and insightful viewing amidst the heavy handed and thoughtless filmmaking. 4/10.

[vapehk1]

If you’ve been following the news lately, it feels like vaping is constantly making headlines, doesn’t it? The FDA, politicians, and industry players are all locked in this ongoing tug-of-war, trying to figure out how to handle these controversial products. And honestly, it’s a bit overwhelming to keep track of it all. Recent Crackdowns: The FDA Steps Up Take the recent crackdown on unauthorized products, for instance. On October 30, the FDA went after companies selling these sneaky e-cigarettes that look like smart devices—phones, gaming gadgets, you name it. They even have flashy features like display screens and smartphone connectivity. Now, you’d think that’s tech-savvy, right? But no. The FDA is calling it what it is: a blatant ploy to attract kids. Brian King from the FDA even said, “There’s nothing smart about these products,” and honestly, I couldn’t agree more. They’re deceptive, and they’ve got to go. Then, just a few days later, on December 2, Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi turned up the heat. He announced an investigation into Chinese manufacturers flooding the U.S. market with illicit vaping products, like the popular Elf Bar. Speaking at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, he didn’t mince words about how these colorful, youth-targeted vapes are a major public health issue. What stood out to me is how he called for federal resources to tackle the problem. This isn’t just a local issue—it’s global, and we need all hands on deck. And as if that wasn’t enough, on December 5, the FDA came back swinging again. They issued warnings to 115 retailers for selling unauthorized vapes like Geek Bar. What’s wild is that data from this year’s National Youth Tobacco Survey shows how popular these brands are with kids—Geek Bar alone was used by nearly 6% of young e-cigarette users. The FDA is now teaming up with states to crack down harder on this problem. It’s like watching a chess match, with regulators making one big move after another. Looking Back: Lessons from the Trump Era But here’s the thing: this fight over vaping isn’t new. You remember the chaos back in 2019, right? That was when President Trump faced mounting pressure to address the youth vaping epidemic. Instead of banning flavored vapes outright—something many people were pushing for—he took a more calculated approach. He banned flavored pods but left open-tank systems and vape juices untouched, recognizing that vaping helps many adult smokers quit traditional cigarettes. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was pragmatic. It allowed the industry to survive without completely compromising public health efforts. Fast forward to today, and we’re facing the same tough questions, but now the stakes feel even higher. The FDA has only authorized 34 e-cigarette products to date. That’s it. Yet, shelves are flooded with unregulated, youth-friendly products. And let’s not even get started on disposable vapes and the environmental headache they’re causing. Did you hear about the UK planning to ban disposables in 2025 because of waste issues? It’s a similar conversation here in the U.S., and I’m not sure how it’ll play out. What makes this even trickier is that while regulators are tightening the noose, there’s also a need to keep adult smokers in mind. People forget that vaping started as a harm-reduction tool—a way for smokers to quit without going cold turkey. But when you see products disguised as gaming devices or candy-flavored vapes targeting kids, it’s hard not to feel like the industry brought some of this on itself. Learning from Europe: The TPD Model While the U.S. grapples with how to regulate vaping effectively, Europe’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) offers a framework worth studying. Since 2016, TPD compliance has set strict standards for e-cigarettes, ensuring products meet rigorous safety, packaging, and promotional guidelines. These measures help keep only high-quality, reliable devices on the market while protecting consumer safety. A great example of a TPD-compliant product is the ALD Combo Pack, which cleverly balances innovation with regulation. The device features a 2mL refillable pod—adhering to the TPD’s rule limiting tank sizes to 2mL—paired with an additional 10mL screw-on bottle. This combo achieves a total 12mL e-liquid capacity without violating TPD limits. This approach not only meets legal requirements but also enhances convenience for users. Adopting a similar model in the U.S. could help streamline the vaping market by filtering out unsafe and non-compliant products while still fostering innovation. With the right adaptations, the TPD’s mix of clear regulations and consumer protections could serve as a blueprint for a balanced regulatory environment in the U.S. The Path Forward: Balance and Collaboration So, where does this leave us? It seems like a delicate balancing act. The vaping industry needs to clean up its act, plain and simple. Stop targeting kids. Invest in sustainable practices. Work with regulators, not against them. At the same time, regulators need to be smart about this. Blanket bans don’t work. We’ve seen that before—they just push things underground. Instead, targeted actions, like going after illicit imports and deceptive marketing, seem like a better bet. And let’s not forget public perception. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about vaping. On one hand, you’ve got people who think it’s the devil, and on the other, people who think it’s completely harmless. The truth is somewhere in the middle, but we need clearer communication to help people make informed choices. So, yeah, it’s a mess. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching this play out, it’s that history matters. Trump’s 2019 decision showed us that balanced policies can work. If today’s leaders take that lesson to heart, maybe—just maybe—the vaping industry can weather this storm and come out stronger on the other side. But right now, it’s hard to say whether we’re on the path to progress or just stuck in an endless loop of crises. Time will tell, I guess. Read the full article