#DUNMORE

[ancientsstudies]

Dunmore Pineapple by deartally.

[unteriors]

N Irving Avenue, Dunmore, Pennsylvania.

[pershing100]

Dunmore Pineapple, Stirlingshire

[meienescocia]

[iso3200net]

Dunmore Pineapple

The Dunmore Pineapple is a folly in Dunmore Park, near Airth in Stirlingshire, Scotland. It was ranked "as the most bizarre building in Scotland".

The intricately carved stone pineapple, which is situated between the two bothies, forms an elaborate cupola atop an octagonal pavilion, with sash windows topped with Gothic ogee arches on seven sides and a door, topped with an ogee transom, on the eighth. The pineapple is around 14 metres (46 ft) high and constitutes a stunning example of the stonemason's craft, being a remarkably accurate depiction of a pineapple. Each of the curving stone leaves is separately drained to prevent frost damage, and the "stiff serrated edges of the lowest and topmost leaves and the plum berry-like fruits are all cunningly graded so that water cannot accumulate anywhere, ensuring that frozen trapped water cannot damage the delicate stonework."

Read more about this curiosity on Wikipedia.

Taken with Pentax MZ‍-‍S film camera and smc Pentax‍-‍FA 50mm F1.4 lens, on Kodak Ektar 100 film. 1/250 exposure, ƒ/5.6, 100ASA. Scanned with Plustek OpticFilm 8100, with VueScan x64 9.5.

[dlyarchitecture]

[derangedrhythms]

It is winter, my season.

Helen Dunmore, from ‘A Spell of Winter’

[ariadnethedragon]

THE GENTLEMAN’S GAMBIT by EVIE DUNMORE

“We broke your spectacles, too … I shall fix them for you.”

The Arabic language offered many romantic possibilities, at least eleven different words for love to precisely capture the various stages of the emotion, and perhaps, secretly, she had expected more elaborate verbal wooing from him. Yet here he was, making her swoon with a plain I shall fix them for you.

[darkworkcourier]

Hi yes I've been enchanted and ensnared by @cyber-nya's Monster 141 AU, so I rolled around in that sandbox like a heathen.

---

Dr. Adler's easy to figure out. Price picks up on it the second he walks into the infirmary on his weekly blood pack acquisition mission. Rather than the usual overly-sterile, Clorox smell, he's hit with a scent wave that screams herb garden. It makes him blink hard, reeling back, covering his nose with his wrist.

Once he recovers a little, he sees stacks of cardboard boxes, all marked up in German—Zauberbücher, Kristalle, Tränke (Zerbrechlich!), among many, many others. Adler stands in the middle of her cardboard castle, holding up two little vials up to the light. She frowns, taps on one, and tilts her head when it... changes color, turning a deep mauve.

Price wavers on whether to leave her to whatever it is she's doing, or interrupt her. He decides on the latter, mostly because he's starving, and they still have another week and a half before he can get anything fresh.

"Doc?" he tries.

"I heard you come in, Captain Price," she says, not bothering to turn her head. The vial in her left hand changes color again to a fetching chartreuse. "One moment. These are very volatile."

"Like exploding kind of volatile, or...?"

"Volatile as in prone to either reverse the order of your internal organs, or potentially cure a hangover." She pauses, squints. "I can't remember which one does what."

That seems incredibly important. Price presses himself against the wall by the door, all too happy to make a break for it if it means his small intestine won't come out his nose. Not that he uses his small intestine for much these days, but he'd rather not experience that.

In the end, she seems to decide which potion does what, setting the chartreuse vial down on her desk, and tucking the other vial (deceptively clear) in a cast iron chest that looks like it was probably made in the medieval period. She locks it twice.

Once that's done, she sighs and turns to face him. "Sorry about that, Captain. What can I do for you?"

"Just swung by to pick up, uh, supplements."

Dr. Adler raises one dark brow. "The blood packs, you mean."

He didn't remember telling her about his status, but seeing her turn their formerly boring infirmary into a witchy apothecary makes him think that it wouldn't matter if he told her or not. "Yeah," he says, rather lamely.

She nods, dusting her hands off on her lab coat, before walking over to the mini-fridge. "Do you have a preference?" she asks.

"No," he replies. "Learned not to be picky."

At that, she suddenly stands up, abandoning the fridge empty-handed. Price watches her with suspicion as she approaches her fortress of boxes with the expression of a woman on a mission. Her hands hover in front of her, going over the boxes like a human metal detector, before finally landing on one of the boxes marked Tränke. She carefully moves it to her desk, rifling through its contents (which sound alarmingly fragile) before lifting a squat, rotund little glass full of wine-dark liquid. As soon as she pops the cork, the smell hits Price like a bus.

Fae blood. Fucking hell, he'd know that stuff anywhere.

Adler winds through her labyrinth of boxes toward him, and it takes a hell of a lot of self control not to rip the bottle out of her hand. Instead, she politely hands it to him before returning her hands to her coat pockets.

"Try that," she says. "It's not completely fresh, and I won't be able to refill all my stock for at least a few weeks, but it should help."

She doesn't need to tell him twice. Price drinks the bottle's contents in one go, only vaguely thinking that maybe he should have asked how much he could drink. Dr. Adler's expression doesn't change, even when the bottle's completely dry, so he assumes it's fine. And it's good. Fae blood is sweet on his tongue, a shimmery white wine to a human's dark claret. It fills him up, gets his head clear, saturates all the colors in the room, and makes his peripheral vision glow. In short, it's fucking awesome.

"Oh," he says. "That's..."

"Stop by when you need more," she cuts in with a shrug. "I have a few other varieties. Some are harder to come by than others, so I'll have to be a bit frugal with those. Give it a couple weeks and I should have better stock."

"Thanks, Doc," Price replies, a little in awe. He hands her the bottle, knowing if he keeps it any longer, he's going to break it open and lick up the remainder.

"Gern geschehen," Dr. Adler replies. She replaces the cork, then turns on heel and goes back to her boxes.

Price decides it's better to leave her be for now. But as he leaves, he gets why she came so highly recommended.

---

As easy as it is to figure out that Dr. Adler is their resident witch-on-call, it's stupid hard to identify what ever Carrion is.

When she leaves a room, the arguments get heated. Gaz swears up and down she's another kind of witch. Maybe a... flight one, if that's a thing. She's good at piloting, having, quoth he, "A weird relationship with gravity." That has to be a witch trait.

No, argues Soap. He smelled something on her, but it wasn't the same as the strange herb-earth-magic scent that follows in Dr. Adler's footsteps. No doubt she's not human, but it irks him with the same sensation of having a word on the tip of his tongue. He knows this. Shapeshifter, maybe? Some kind of weird changeling? But neither of those seem right.

"You sniffed her?" Gaz asks, incredulous.

"Not on purpose!" Soap retorts. "I just so happened to smell her when she walked by!"

"Creep," Gaz sagely confirms.

Soap responds by tackling Gaz with a decidedly dog-like growl.

For the next four weeks, the 141 puzzles over their pilot. She seems blissfully unaware of the way they stare at her, happily in her own little world. She sings to herself, preens when they compliment her after a flight, hops away in little dance steps after every mission.

Then a mission goes wrong.

They're across enemy lines, helo half-drowned in a river, a storm battering the landscape, desperation making monsters of all of them. Soap was the first to lapse, literally tearing through hostiles with otherworldly howls and snarls. Price rips open throats, pupils blown, jaw dripping with blood. Gaz pierces soft body after body with an impossibly-sharp sword, maw burning with embers as his secondary form threatens to come loose.

And Ghost— It's hard to argue with death incarnate, especially if you're on the debating team.

Everyone's so caught up in the fight, in the desperate high-stakes bloodbath, that they don't have time to check on their pilot. She got out of the crash, confirmed she was safe, and that was all.

But then Soap's pinned by gunfire, forced to crawl under rubble just to escape the onslaught. He pauses, paws burning into the mud underneath him, thinking on the best strategy to get through a wall of human hostility. During that dull roar of a lull, something catches his eye.

The first thing he thinks is that is a fucking huge bird.

The second thing isn't so much a thought as it is shock at the sight of a talon the size of a pickax piercing a man's skull like a melon. Wings furiously beat, the sound like a snarl of thunder, and a high-pitched shriek makes Soap's sensitive ears ache.

Only then does he register that it's Carrion. Their Carrie, their happy-go-lucky beam of sunlight pilot who sings made-up songs and dances like a moron when she thinks no one's watching—that Carrie is leaving gouges in their enemy like they're nothing. Her arms are massive wings, black and white tapering to red (just like the bearded vulture on her helmet, and now Soap just feels stupid), legs now scaled and ending in those deadly talons. Her head's the same, except her hair's loose from its braid and falling around her shoulders in a windblown mess, and her mouth opens to reveal two rows of razor-sharp teeth.

She's a fucking harpy.

Soap watches in awe for a moment more before realizing she's still by herself. As badass as it is, he clips around the corner of the rubble pile to attack the group from the opposite end, meeting her in the middle. Once their enemy is just a smear in the mud, he finally looks up at her, huffing once in gratitude.

"No problem," she says, smiling with her wicked teeth. Her voice is higher, crackling like lightning. It's awesome.

Their mission wraps up quick after that, a massacre split five ways, fur and feathers truly flying.

Once they're back at base, beaten and battered but otherwise whole, Carrion slinks away to the showers. The rest of the 141 leaves her be, allows her a private moment to get herself back in order.

And Gaz sums it all up with a firm, "That was badass."

Everyone hums, growls, or hisses in agreement.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[bruiselikeviolets]

read in 2023: bringing down the duke by evie dunmore

Now she knew why girls were not allowed to feel anger—there was a reckless hope in it, and power.

[booktineus]

I’ve read some fantastic historical romance novels this year

[deathsweetblossoms]

At her core hovered a secret glow, a small ball of light where her soul kept his kiss.

The Gentleman’s Gambit by Evie Dunmore

[radiojamming]

i shouldn't be allowed to write carrie/ghost.

[pamwmsn]

The Dunmore Pineapple House in Airth Scotland.

[weirdlookindog]

Midnight Menace (1946)